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Chapter 2, Part 5, of the 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene titled “Avoid groupthink: Command-and-control”

This is a full reprint in HTML of the fifth chapter (Chapter 5) of the second part (Part II) of the massive volume titled "The 33 Strategies of War". Written by Robert Greene (with emotional support from his cats). I read this book while in prison, and found much of what was written to be interesting, enjoyable, and pertinent to things going on in my life. I think that you will as well.

People naturally have their own agendas in the groups you lead. If you’re too authoritarian they will resent you, and if you’re too lax they will revert doing their own interests. You need a chain of command where people buy into your vision and follow your lead naturally. The overall strategic vision must come from you and you alone. But make the group feel involved in the decision making. Take their good ideas, deflect the bad ones and if necessary make minor changes to appease the most political ones.

Part II

Chapter 5 AVOID THE SNARES OF GROUPTHINK

Avoid groupthink: Command-and-control

The problem in leading any group is that people inevitably have their own agendas. If you are too authoritarian, they will resent you and rebel in silent ways. If you are too easygoing, they will revert to their natural selfishness and you will lose control. You have to create a chain of command in which people do not feel constrained by your influence yet follow your lead. Put the right people in place--people who will enact the spirit of your ideas without being automatons. 

Make your commands clear and inspiring, focusing attention on the team, not the leader. Create a sense of participation, but do not fall into Groupthink--the irrationality of collective decision making. Make yourself look like a paragon of fairness, but never relinquish unity of command.

How very different is the cohesion between that of an army rallying around one flag carried into battle at the personal command of one general and that of an allied military force extending 50 or 100 leagues, or even on different sides of the theater! In the first case, cohesion is at its strongest and unity at its closest. In the second case, the unity is very remote, often consisting of no more than a shared political intention, and therefore only scanty and imperfect, while the cohesion of the parts is mostly weak and often no more than an illusion.

ON WAR, CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ, 1780-1831

THE BROKEN CHAIN

World War I began in August 1914, and by the end of that year, all along the Western Front, the British and French were caught in a deadly stalemate with the Germans. Meanwhile, though, on the Eastern Front, Germany was badly beating the Russians, allies of Britain and France. Britain’s military leaders had to try a new strategy, and their plan, backed by First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill and others, was to stage an attack on Gallipoli, a peninsula on Turkey’s
Dardanelles Strait. Turkey was an ally of Germany’s, and the Dardanelles was the gateway to Constantinople, the Turkish capital (present-day Istanbul). If the Allies could take Gallipoli, Constantinople would follow, and Turkey would have to leave the war. In addition, using bases in Turkey and the Balkans, the Allies could attack Germany from the southeast, dividing its armies and weakening its ability to fight on the Western Front. They would also have a clear supply line to Russia. Victory at Gallipoli would change the course of the war.

The plan was approved, and in March 1915, General Sir Ian Hamilton was named to lead the campaign. Hamilton, at sixty-two, was an able strategist and an experienced commander. He and Churchill felt certain that their forces, including Australians and New Zealanders, would out-match the Turks.

Churchill’s orders were simple: take Constantinople. He left the details to the general.

Hamilton’s plan was to land at three points on the southwestern tip of the Gallipoli peninsula, secure the beaches, and sweep north. The landings took place on April 27. From the beginning almost everything went wrong: the army’s maps were inaccurate, its troops landed in the wrong places, the beaches were much narrower than expected. Worst of all, the Turks fought back unexpectedly fiercely and well. At the end of the first day, most of the Allies’ 70,000 men had landed, but they were unable to advance beyond the beaches, where the Turks would hold them pinned down for several weeks. It was another stalemate; Gallipoli had become a disaster.

All seemed lost, but in June, Churchill convinced the government to send more troops and Hamilton devised a new plan. He would land 20,000 men at Suvla Bay, some twenty miles to the north. Suvla was a vulnerable target: it had a large harbor, the terrain was low-lying and easy, and it was defended by only a handful of Turks. An invasion here would force the Turks to divide their forces,
freeing up the Allied armies to the south. The stalemate would be broken, and Gallipoli would fall.

To command the Suvla operation Hamilton was forced to accept the most senior Englishman available for the job, Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Stopford. Under him, Major General Frederick Hammersley would lead the Eleventh Division. Neither of these men was Hamilton’s first choice.

Stopford, a sixty-one-year-old military teacher, had never led troops in war and saw artillery bombardment as the only way to win a battle; he was also in poor health. Hammersley, for his part, had suffered a nervous breakdown the previous year.

In war it is not men, but the man, that counts.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, 1769-1821

Hamilton’s style was to tell his officers the purpose of an upcoming battle but leave it to them how to bring it about. He was a gentleman, never blunt or forceful. At one of their first meetings, for example, Stop-ford requested changes in the landing plans to reduce risk. Hamilton politely deferred to him.

Hamilton did have one request. Once the Turks knew of the landings at Suvla, they would rush in reinforcements. As soon as the Allies were ashore, then, Hamilton wanted them to advance immediately to a range of hills four miles inland, called Tekke Tepe, and to get there before the Turks. From Tekke Tepe the Allies would dominate the peninsula. The order was simple enough, but
Hamilton, so as not to offend his subordinate, expressed it in the most general terms. Most crucially, he specified no time frame. He was sufficiently vague that Stopford completely misinterpreted him: instead of trying to reach Tekke Tepe “as soon as possible,” Stopford thought he should advance to the hills “if possible.” That was the order he gave Hammersley. And as Hammersley, nervous about the whole campaign, passed it down to his colonels, the order became less
urgent and vaguer still.

Also, despite his deference to Stopford, Hamilton overruled the lieutenant general in one respect: he denied a request for more artillery bombardments to loosen up the Turks. Stopford’s troops would outnumber the Turks at Suvla ten to one, Hamilton replied; more artillery was superfluous.

The attack began in the early morning of August 7. Once again much turned bad: Stopford’s changes in the landing plans made a mess. As his officers came ashore, they began to argue, uncertain about their positions and objectives. They sent messengers to ask their next step: Advance? Consolidate?

Hammersley had no answers. Stopford had stayed on a boat offshore, from which to control the battlefield–but on that boat he was impossible to reach quickly enough to get prompt orders from him. Hamilton was on an island still farther away. The day was frittered away in argument and the endless relaying of messages.

The next morning Hamilton began to sense that something had gone very wrong. From reconnaissance aircraft he knew that the flat land around Suvla was essentially empty and undefended; the way to Tekke Tepe was open–the troops had only to march–but they were staying where they were. Hamilton decided to visit the front himself. Reaching Stopford’s boat late that afternoon, he found the general in a self-congratulatory mood: all 20,000 men had gotten ashore.

No, he had not yet ordered the troops to advance to the hills; without artillery he was afraid the Turks might counterattack, and he needed the day to consolidate his positions and to land supplies.

Hamilton strained to control himself: he had heard an hour earlier that Turkish reinforcements had been seen hurrying toward Suvla. The Allies would have to secure Tekke Tepe this evening, he said–but Stopford was against a night march. Too dangerous. Hamilton retained his cool and politely excused himself.

Any army is like a horse, in that it reflects the temper and the spirit of its rider. If there is an uneasiness and an uncertainty, it transmits itself through the reins, and the horse feels uneasy and uncertain.

LONE STAR PREACHER, COLONEL JOHN W. THOMASON, JR., 1941

In near panic, Hamilton decided to visit Hammersley at Suvla. Much to his dismay, he found the army lounging on the beach as if it were a bank holiday. He finally located Hammersley–he was at the far end of the bay, busily supervising the building of his temporary headquarters. Asked why he had failed to secure the hills, Hammersley replied that he had sent several brigades for the purpose,
but they had encountered Turkish artillery and his colonels had told him they could not advance without more instructions. Communications between Hammersley, Stopford, and the colonels in the field were taking forever, and when Stopford had finally been reached, he had sent the message back
to Hammersley to proceed cautiously, rest his men, and wait to advance until the next day. Hamilton could control himself no longer: a handful of Turks with a few guns were holding up an army of 20,000 men from marching a mere four miles!

Tomorrow morning would be too late; the Turkish reinforcements were on their way.

Although it was already night, Hamilton ordered Hammersley to send a brigade immediately to Tekke Tepe. It would be a race to the finish.

Hamilton returned to a boat in the harbor to monitor the situation. At sunrise the next morning, he watched the battlefield through binoculars–and saw, to his horror, the Allied troops in headlong retreat to Suvla. A large Turkish force had arrived at Tekke Tepe thirty minutes before them.

In the next few days, the Turks managed to regain the flats around Suvla and to pin Hamilton’s army on the beach. Some four months later, the Allies gave up their attack on Gallipoli and evacuated their troops.

Interpretation

In planning the invasion at Suvla, Hamilton thought of everything. He understood the need for surprise, deceiving the Turks about the landing site. He mastered the logistical details of a complex amphibious assault. Locating the key point–Tekke Tepe–from which the Allies could break the stalemate in Gallipoli, he crafted an excellent strategy to get there.

He even tried to prepare for the kind of unexpected contingencies that can always happen in battle. But he ignored the one thing closest to him: the chain of command, and the circuit of communications by which orders, information, and decisions would circulate back and forth. He was dependent on that circuit to give him control of the situation and allow him to execute his strategy.

The first links in the chain of command were Stopford and Hammersley. Both men were terrified of risk, and Hamilton failed to adapt himself to their weakness: his order to reach Tekke Tepe was polite, civilized, and unforceful, and Stopford and Hammersley interpreted it according to their fears. They saw Tekke Tepe as a possible goal to aim for once the beaches were secured.

The next links in the chain were the colonels who were to lead the assault on Tekke Tepe. They had no contact with Hamilton on his island or with Stopford on his boat, and Hammersley was too overwhelmed to lead them. They themselves were terrified of acting on their own and maybe messing up a plan they had never understood; they hesitated at every step. Below the colonels were officers
and soldiers who, without leadership, were left wandering on the beach like lost ants. Vagueness at the top turned into confusion and lethargy at the bottom. Success depended on the speed with which information could pass in both directions along the chain of command, so that Hamilton could understand what was happening and adapt faster than the enemy. The chain was broken, and Gallipoli was lost.

When a failure like this happens, when a golden opportunity slips through your fingers, you naturally look for a cause.

Maybe you blame your incompetent officers, your faulty technology, your flawed intelligence. But that is to look at the world backward; it ensures more failure.

The truth is that everything starts from the top.

What determines your failure or success is your style of leadership and the chain of command that you design. If your orders are vague and halfhearted, by the time they reach the field they will be meaningless. Let people work unsupervised and they will revert to their natural selfishness: they will see in your orders what they want to see, and their behavior will promote their own interests.

Unless you adapt your leadership style to the weaknesses of the people in your group, you will almost certainly end up with a break in the chain of command. Information in the field will reach you too slowly. A proper chain of command, and the control it brings you, is not an accident; it is your creation, a work of art that requires constant attention and care. Ignore it at your peril.

For what the leaders are, that, as a rule, will the men below them be.

--Xenophon (430?-355? B.C.)

REMOTE CONTROL

In the late 1930s, U.S. Brigadier General George C. Marshall (1880-1958) preached the need for major military reform. The army had too few soldiers, they were badly trained, current doctrine was ill suited to modern technology–the list of problems went on.

In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to select his next army chief of staff. The appointment was critical: World War II had begun in Europe, and Roosevelt believed that the United States was sure to get involved. He understood the need for military reform, so he bypassed generals with more seniority and experience and chose Marshall for the job.

The appointment was a curse in disguise, for the War Department was hopelessly dysfunctional.

Many of its generals had monstrous egos and the power to impose their way of doing things. Senior officers, instead of retiring, took jobs in the department, amassing power bases and fiefdoms that they did everything they could to protect. A place of feuds, waste, communication breakdowns, and
overlapping jobs, the department was a mess. How could Marshall revamp the army for global war if he could not control it? How could he create order and efficiency?

What must be the result of an operation which is but partially understood by the commander, since it is not his own conception? I have undergone a pitiable experience as prompter at head- quarters, and no one has a better appreciation of the value of such services than myself; and it is particularly in a council of war that such a part is absurd. The greater the number and the higher the rank of the military officers who compose the council, the more difficult will it be to accomplish the triumph of truth and reason, however small be the amount of dissent. What would have been the action of a council of war to which Napoleon proposed the movement of Arcola, the crossing of the Saint-Bernard, the maneuver at Ulm, or that at Gera and Jena? The timid would have regarded them as rash, even to madness, others would have seen a thousand difficulties of execution, and all would have concurred in rejecting them; and if, on the contrary, they had been adopted, and had been executed by any one but Napoleon, would they not certainly have proved failures?

BARON ANTOINE-HENRI DE JOMINI, 1779-1869

Some ten years earlier, Marshall had served as the assistant commander of the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he had trained many officers.

Throughout his time there, he had kept a notebook in which he recorded the names of promising young men.

Soon after becoming chief of staff, Marshall began to retire the older officers in the War Department and replace them with these younger men whom he had personally trained. These officers were ambitious, they shared his desire for reform, and he encouraged them to speak their minds and show initiative.

They included men like Omar Bradley and Mark Clark, who would be crucial in World War II, but no one was more important than the protege Marshall spent the most time on: Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The relationship began a few days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when Marshall asked Eisenhower, then a colonel, to prepare a report on what should be done in the Far East. The report showed Marshall that Eisenhower shared his ideas on how to run the war.

For the next few months, he kept Eisenhower in the War Plans Division and watched him closely: the two men met every day, and in that time Eisenhower soaked up Marshall’s style of leadership, his way of getting things done.

Marshall tested Eisenhower’s patience by indicating that he planned to keep him in Washington instead of giving him the field assignment that he desperately wanted.

The colonel passed the test.

Much like Marshall himself, he got along well with other officers yet was quietly forceful. In July 1942, as the Americans prepared to enter the war by fighting alongside the British in North Africa, Marshall surprised one and all by naming Eisenhower commander in the European Theater of Operations.

Eisenhower was by this time a lieutenant general but was still relatively unknown, and in his first few months in the job, as the Americans fared poorly in North Africa, the British clamored for a replacement. But Marshall stood by his man, offering him advice and encouragement.

One key suggestion was for Eisenhower to develop a protege, much as Marshall had with him–a kind of roving deputy who thought the way he did and would act as his go-between with subordinates.

Marshall’s suggestion for the post was Major General Bradley, a man he knew well; Eisenhower accepted the idea, essentially duplicating the staff structure that Marshall had created in the War Department.

With Bradley in place, Marshall left Eisenhower alone.

Marshall positioned his proteges throughout the War Department, where they quietly spread his way of doing things. To make the task easier, he cut the waste in the department with utter ruthlessness, reducing from sixty to six the number of deputies who reported to him.

Marshall hated excess; his reports to Roosevelt made him famous for his ability to summarize a complex situation in a few pages.

The six men who reported to him found that any report that lasted a page too long simply went unread. He would listen to their oral presentations with rapt attention, but the minute they wandered from the topic or said something not thought through, he would look away, bored, uninterested.

It was an expression they dreaded: without saying a word, he had made it known that they had displeased him and it was time for them to leave.

Marshall’s six deputies began to think like him and to demand from those who reported to them the efficiency and streamlined communications style he demanded of them. The speed of the information flow up and down the line was now quadrupled.

"Do you think every Greek here can be a king? It's no good having a carload of commanders. We need One commander, one king, the one to whom Zeus, Son of Cronus the crooked, has given the staff And the right to make decisions for his people." And so Odysseus mastered the army. The men all Streamed back from their ships and huts and assembled With a roar.

THE ILIAD, HOMER, CIRCA NINTH CENTURY B.C.

Marshall exuded authority but never yelled and never challenged men frontally. He had a knack for communicating his wishes indirectly–a skill that was all the more effective since it made his officers think about what he meant.

Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, the military director of the project to develop the atom bomb, once came to Marshall’s office to get him to sign off on $100 million in expenditures. Finding the chief of staff engrossed in paperwork, he waited while Marshall diligently compared documents and made notes.

Finally Marshall put down his pen, examined the $100 million request, signed it, and returned it to Groves without a word. The general thanked him and was turning to leave when Marshall finally spoke: “It may interest you to know what I was doing: I was writing the check for $3.52 for grass seed for my lawn.”

The thousands who worked under Marshall, whether in the War Department or abroad in the field, did not have to see him personally to feel his presence.

They felt it in the terse but insightful reports that reached them from his deputies, in the speed of the responses to their questions and requests, in the department’s efficiency and team spirit. They felt it in the leadership style of men like Eisenhower, who had absorbed Marshall’s diplomatic yet forceful way of doing things. In a few short years, Marshall transformed the War Department and the U.S. Army.

Few really understood how he had done it.

Interpretation

When Marshall became chief of staff, he knew that he would have to hold himself back. The temptation was to do combat with everyone in every problem area: the recalcitrance of the generals, the political feuds, the layers of waste. But Marshall was too smart to give in to that temptation.

First, there were too many battles to fight, and they would exhaust him. He’d get frustrated, lose time, and probably give himself a heart attack. Second, by trying to micromanage the department, he would become embroiled in petty entanglements and lose sight of the larger picture. And finally he would come across as a bully. The only way to slay this many-headed monster, Marshall knew, was to step back.

He had to rule indirectly through others, controlling with such a light touch that no one would realize how thoroughly he dominated.

Reports gathered and presented by the General Staff, on the one hand, and by the Statistical Bureau, on the other, thus constituted the most important sources of information at Napoleon's disposal. 

Climbing through the chain of command, however, such reports tend to become less and less specific; the more numerous the stages through which they pass and the more standardized the form in which they are presented, the greater the danger that they will become so heavily profiled (and possibly sugar-coated or merely distorted by the many summaries) as to become almost meaningless. 

To guard against this danger and to keep subordinates on their toes, a commander needs to have in addition a kind of directed telescope--the metaphor is an apt one--which he can direct, at will, at any part of the enemy's forces, the terrain, or his own army in order to bring in information that is not only less structured than that passed on by the normal channels but also tailored to meet his momentary (and specific) needs. Ideally, the regular reporting system should tell the commander which questions to ask, and the directed telescope should enable him to answer those questions. 

It was the two systems together, cutting across each other and wielded by Napoleon's masterful hand, which made the revolution in command possible.

COMMAND IN WAR, MARTIN VAN CREVELD, 1985

The key to Marshall’s strategy was his selection, grooming, and placement of his proteges. He metaphorically cloned himself in these men, who enacted the spirit of his reforms on his behalf, saving him time and making him appear not as a manipulator but as a delegator.

His cutting of waste was heavy-handed at first, but once he put his stamp on the department, it began to run efficiently on its own–fewer people to deal with, fewer irrelevant reports to read, less wasted time on every level.

This streamlining achieved, Marshall could guide the machine with a lighter touch. The political types who were clogging the chain of command were either retired or joined in the team spirit he infused.

His indirect style of communicating amused some of his staff, but it was actually a highly effective way of asserting his authority. An officer might go home chuckling about finding Marshall fussing over a gardening bill, but it would slowly dawn on him that if he wasted a penny, his boss would know.

Like the War Department that Marshall inherited, today’s world is complex and chaotic. It is harder than ever to exercise control through a chain of command. You cannot supervise everything yourself; you cannot keep your eye on everyone.

Being seen as a dictator will do you harm, but if you submit to complexity and let go of the chain of command, chaos will consume you.

The solution is to do as Marshall did: operate through a kind of remote control. Hire deputies who share your vision but can think on their own, acting as you would in their place.

Instead of wasting time negotiating with every difficult person, work on spreading a spirit of camaraderie and efficiency that becomes self-policing.

Streamline the organization, cutting out waste–in staff, in the irrelevant reports on your desk, in pointless meetings. The less attention you spend on petty details, the more time you will have for the larger picture, for asserting your authority generally and indirectly. People will follow your lead without feeling bullied. That is the ultimate in control.

Madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups.

--Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

KEYS TO WARFARE

Now more than ever, effective leadership requires a deft and subtle touch.

The reason is simple: we have grown more distrustful of authority. At the same time, almost all of us imagine ourselves as authorities in our own right–officers, not foot soldiers.

Feeling the need to assert themselves, people today put their own interests before the team.

Group unity is fragile and can easily crack.

These trends affect leaders in ways they barely know. The tendency is to give more power to the group: wanting to seem democratic, leaders poll the whole staff for opinions, let the group make decisions, give subordinates input into the crafting of an overall strategy.

Without realizing it, these leaders are letting the politics of the day seduce them into violating one of the most important rules of warfare and leadership: unity of command. Before it is too late, learn the lessons of war: divided leadership is a recipe for disaster, the cause of the greatest military defeats in history.

Among the foremost of these defeats was the Battle of Cannae, in 216 B.C., between the Romans and the Carthaginians led by Hannibal. The Romans outnumbered the Carthaginians two to one but were virtually annihilated in a perfectly executed strategic envelopment.

Hannibal, of course, was a military genius, but the Romans take much of the blame for their own defeat: they had a faulty command system, with two tribunes sharing leadership of the army.

Disagreeing over how to fight Hannibal, these men fought each other as much as they fought him, and they made a mess of things.

Nearly two thousand years later, Frederick the Great, king of Prussia and leader of its army, outfought and outlasted the five great powers aligned against him in the Seven Years’ War partly because he made decisions so much faster than the alliance generals, who had to consult each other in every move they made.

In World War II, General Marshall was well aware of the dangers of divided
leadership and insisted that one supreme commander should lead the Allied armies.

Without his victory in this battle, Eisenhower could not have succeeded in Europe. In the Vietnam War, the unity of command enjoyed by the North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap gave him a tremendous advantage over the Americans, whose strategy was crafted by a crowd of politicians and generals.

Divided leadership is dangerous because people in groups often think and act in ways that are illogical and ineffective–call it Groupthink.

People in groups are political: they say and do things that they think will help their image within the group. They aim to please others, to promote themselves, rather than to see things dispassionately. Where an individual can be bold and creative, a group is often afraid of risk. The need to find a compromise among all the different egos kills creativity. The group has a mind of its own, and that mind is cautious, slow to decide, unimaginative, and sometimes downright irrational.

This is the game you must play: Do whatever you can to preserve unity of command.

Keep the strings to be pulled in your hands; the over-arching strategic vision must come from you and you alone.

At the same time, hide your tracks.

Work behind the scenes; make the group feel involved in your decisions. Seek their advice, incorporating their good ideas, politely deflecting their bad ones.

If necessary, make minor, cosmetic strategy changes to assuage the insecure political animals in the group, but ultimately trust your own vision. Remember the dangers of group decision making. The first rule of effective leadership is never to relinquish your unity of command.

Tomorrow at dawn you depart [from St. Cloud] and travel to Worms, cross the Rhine there, and make sure that all preparations for the crossing of the river by my guard are being made there.

You will then proceed to Kassel and make sure that the place is being put in a state of defense and provisioned. Taking due security precautions, you will visit the fortress of Hanau. Can it be secured by a coup de main?

If necessary, you will visit the citadel of Marburg too. You will then travel on to Kassel and report to me by way of my charge d'affaires at that place, making sure that he is in fact there.

The voyage from Frankfurt to Kassel is not to take place by night, for you are to observe anything that might interest me. From Kassel you are to travel, also by day, by the shortest way to Koln. The land between Wesel, Mainz, Kassel, and Koln is to be reconnoitered.

What roads and good communications exist there? Gather information about communications between Kassel and Paderborn. What is the significance of Kassel? Is the place armed and capable of resistance?

Evaluate the forces of the Prince Elector in regard to their present state, their artillery, militia, strong places. From Koln you will travel to meet me at Mainz; you are to keep to the right bank on the Rhine and submit a short appreciation of the country around Dusseldorf, Wesel, and Kassel.

I shall be at Mainz on the 29th in order to receive your report.

You can see for yourself how important it is for the beginning of the campaign and its progress that you should have the country well imprinted on your memory.

NAPOLEON'S WRITTEN INSTRUCTIONS TO FIELD GENERAL, QUOTED IN COMMAND IN WAR, MARTIN VAN CREVELD, 1985

Control is an elusive phenomenon. Often, the harder you tug at people, the less control you have over them. Leadership is more than just barking out orders; it takes subtlety.

Early in his career, the great Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman was often overwhelmed with frustration.

He had visions of the films he wanted to make, but the work of being a director was so taxing and the pressure so immense that he would lash out at his cast and crew, shouting orders and attacking them for not giving him what he wanted. Some would stew with resentment at his dictatorial ways, others became obedient automatons.

With almost every new film, Bergman would have to start again with a new cast and crew, which only made things worse.

But eventually he put together a team of the finest cinematographers, editors, art directors, and actors in Sweden, people who shared his high standards and whom he trusted.

That let him loosen the reins of command; with actors like Max von Sydow, he could just suggest what he had in mind and watch as the great actor brought his ideas to life. Greater control could now come from letting go.

A critical step in creating an efficient chain of command is assembling a skilled team that shares your goals and values.

That team gives you many advantages: spirited, motivated people who can think on their own; an image as a delegator, a fair and democratic leader; and a saving in your own valuable energy, which you can redirect toward the larger picture.

In creating this team, you are looking for people who make up for your deficiencies, who have the skills you lack.

In the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln had a strategy for defeating the South, but he had no military background and was disdained by his generals. What good was a strategy if he could not realize it? But Lincoln soon found his teammate in General Ulysses S. Grant, who shared his belief in offensive warfare and who did not have an oversize ego.

Once Lincoln discovered Grant, he latched on to him, put him in command, and let him run the war as he saw fit.

Be careful in assembling this team that you are not seduced by expertise and intelligence. Character, the ability to work under you and with the rest of the team, and the capacity to accept responsibility and think independently are equally key. That is why Marshall tested Eisenhower for so long. You may not have as much time to spare, but never choose a man merely by his glittering
resume. Look beyond his skills to his psychological makeup.

Rely on the team you have assembled, but do not be its prisoner or give it undue influence.Franklin D. Roosevelt had his infamous “brain trust,” the advisers and cabinet members on whom he depended for their ideas and opinions, but he never let them in on the actual decision making, and he kept them from building up their own power base within the administration.

He saw them simply as tools, extending his own abilities and saving him valuable time. He understood unity of command and was never seduced into violating it.

A key function of any chain of command is to supply information rapidly from the trenches, letting you adapt fast to circumstances. The shorter and more streamlined the chain of command, the better for the flow of information. Even so, information is often diluted as it passes up the chain: the telling details that reveal so much become standardized and general as they are filtered through formal channels.

Some on the chain, too, will interpret the information for you, filtering what you hear. To get more direct knowledge, you might occasionally want to visit the field yourself.

Marshall would sometimes drop in on an army base incognito to see with his own eyes how his reforms were taking effect; he would also read letters from soldiers. But in these days of increasing complexity, this can consume far too much of your time.

What you need is what the military historian Martin van Creveld calls “a directed telescope”: people in various parts of the chain, and elsewhere, to give you instant information from the battlefield.

These people–an informal network of friends, allies, and spies–let you bypass the slow- moving chain. The master of this game was Napoleon, who created a kind of shadow brigade of younger officers in all areas of the military, men chosen for their loyalty, energy, and intelligence.

At a moment’s notice, he would send one of these men to a far-off front or garrison, or even to enemy headquarters (ostensibly as a diplomatic envoy), with secret instructions to gather the kind of information he could not get fast enough through normal channels. In general, it is important to cultivate these directed telescopes and plant them throughout the group.

They give you flexibility in the chain, room to maneuver in a generally rigid environment. The single greatest risk to your chain of command comes from the political animals in the group.

People like this are inescapable; they spring up like weeds in any organization.

Not only are they out for themselves, but they build factions to further their own agendas and fracture the cohesion you have built. Interpreting your commands for their own purposes, finding loopholes in any ambiguity, they create invisible breaks in the chain.

Try to weed them out before they arrive. In hiring your team, look at the candidates’ histories: Are they restless? Do they often move from place to place? That is a sign of the kind of ambition that will keep them from fitting in. When people seem to share your ideas exactly, be wary: they are probably mirroring them to charm you.

The court of Queen Elizabeth I of England was full of political types.

Elizabeth’s solution was to keep her opinions quiet; on any issue, no one outside
her inner circle knew where she stood. That made it hard for people to mirror her, to disguise their intentions behind a front of perfect agreement. Hers was a wise strategy.

Another solution is to isolate the political moles–to give them no room to maneuver within the organization. Marshall accomplished this by infusing the group with his spirit of efficiency; disrupters of that spirit stood out and could quickly be isolated. In any event, do not be naive.

Once you identify the moles in the group, you must act fast to stop them from building a power base from which to destroy your authority.

Finally, pay attention to the orders themselves–their form as well as their substance. Vague orders are worthless. As they pass from person to person, they are hopelessly altered, and your staff comes to see them as symbolizing uncertainty and indecision.

It is critical that you yourself be clear about what you want before issuing your orders. On the other hand, if your commands are too specific and too narrow, you will encourage people to behave like automatons and stop thinking for themselves–which they must do when the situation requires it. Erring in neither direction is an art.

Here, as in so much else, Napoleon was the master. His orders were full of juicy details, which gave his officers a feel for how his mind worked while also allowing them interpretive leeway.

He would often spell out possible contingencies, suggesting ways the officer could adapt his instructions if necessary. Most important, he made his orders inspiring. His language communicated the spirit of his desires.

A beautifully worded order has extra power; instead of feeling like a minion, there only to execute the wishes of a distant emperor, the recipient becomes a participant in a great cause. Bland, bureaucratic orders filter down into listless activity and imprecise execution.

Clear, concise, inspiring orders make officers feel in control and fill troops with fighting spirit.

Authority: Better one bad general than two good ones.
--Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

REVERSAL

No good can ever come of divided leadership. If you are ever offered a position in which you will have to share command, turn it down, for the enterprise will fail and you will be held responsible.

Better to take a lower position and let the other person have the job.

It is always wise, however, to take advantage of your opponent’s faulty command structure. Never be intimidated by an alliance of forces against you: if they share leadership, if they are ruled by committee, your advantage is more than enough. In fact, do as Napoleon did and seek out enemies with that kind of command structure. You cannot fail to win.

Conclusion

There’s some great advice in this chapter for the manager and supervisor. When you are in a role, you must show leadership, no matter what style you possess. And make sure that everyone is following your lead in what ever actions you take.

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Chapter 1, Part 4, of the 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene titled “Create a sense of urgency and desperation; The Death Ground Strategy”

This is a full reprint in HTML of the fourth chapter (Chapter 4) of the first part (Part I) of the massive volume titled "The 33 Strategies of War". Written by Robert Greene (with emotional support from his cats). I read this book while in prison, and found much of what was written to be interesting, enjoyable, and pertinent to things going on in my life. I think that you will as well.

You are your own worst enemy. You waste precious time dreaming of the future instead of engaging in the present. Cut your ties to the past; enter unknown territory. Place yourself on “death ground,” where your back is against the wall and you have to fight like hell to get out alive.

Part I

Chapter 4 Create a sense of urgency and desperation; The Death Ground Strategy

You are your own worst enemy. You waste precious time dreaming of the future instead of engaging in the present. Since nothing seems urgent to you, you are only half involved in what you do. The only way to change is through action and outside pressure. Put yourself in situations where you have too much at stake to waste time or resources–if you cannot afford to lose, you won’t. Cut your ties to the past; enter unknown territory where you must depend on your wits and energy to see you through. Place yourself on “death ground,” where your back is against the wall and you have to fight like hell to get out alive.

Cortes ran all that aground with the ten ships. Cuba, to be sure, was still there, in the blue sea, with its farms, its cows and its tame Indians; but the way to Cuba was no longer through sunny blue waves, rocked in soft idleness, oblivious of danger and endeavor; it was through Motecucuma's court, which had to be conquered by ruse, by force, or by both; through a sea of warlike Indians who ate their prisoners and donned their skins as trophies; at the stroke of their chief's masterly hand, the five hundred men had lost that flow of vital memories and hopes which linked up their souls with their mother-island; at one stroke, their backs had been withered and had lost all sense of life. Henceforward, for them, all life was ahead, towards those forbidding peaks which rose gigantically on the horizon as if to bar all access to what was now not merely their ambition, but their only possible aim--Mexico, mysterious and powerful behind the conflicting tribes. 

- HERNAN CORTES: CONQUEROR OF MEXICO, SALVADOR DE MADARIAGA, 1942

THE NO-RETURN TACTIC

In 1504 an ambitious nineteen-year-old Spaniard named Hernan Cortes gave up his studies in law and sailed for his country’s colonies in the New World. Stopping first in Santo Domingo (the island today comprising Haiti and the Dominican Republic), then in Cuba, he soon heard about a land to the west called Mexico–an empire teeming with gold and dominated by the Aztecs, with their magnificent highland capital of Tenochtitlan. From then on, Cortes had just one thought: someday he would conquer and settle the land of Mexico.

Over the next ten years, Cortes slowly rose through the ranks, eventually becoming secretary to the Spanish governor of Cuba and then the king’s treasurer for the island. In his own mind, though, he was merely biding his time. He waited patiently while Spain sent other men to Mexico, many of them never to return.

Finally, in 1518, the governor of Cuba, Diego de Velazquez, made Cortes the leader of an expedition to discover what had happened to these earlier explorers, find gold, and lay the groundwork for the country’s conquest. Velazquez wanted to make that future conquest himself, however, so for this expedition he wanted a man he could control, and he soon developed doubts about Cortes–the man was clever, perhaps too much so. Word reached Cortes that the governor was having second thoughts about sending him to Mexico. Deciding to give Velazquez no time to nurse his misgivings, he managed to slip out of Cuba in the middle of the night with eleven ships. He would explain himself to the governor later.

The expedition landed on Mexico’s east coast in March 1519. Over the next few months, Cortes put his plans to work–founding the town of Veracruz, forging alliances with local tribes who hated the Aztecs, and making initial contact with the Aztec emperor, whose capital lay some 250 miles to the west. But one problem plagued the conquistador: among the 500 soldiers who had sailed with him from Cuba were a handful who had been placed there by Velazquez to act as spies and make trouble for him if he exceeded his authority. These Velazquez loyalists accused Cortes of mismanaging the gold that he was collecting, and when it became clear that he intended to conquer Mexico, they spread rumors that he was insane–an all-too-convincing accusation to make about a man planning to lead 500 men against half a million Aztecs, fierce warriors known to eat their prisoners’ flesh and wear the skins as trophies. A rational man would take the gold they had, return to Cuba, and come back later with an army. Why stay in this forbidding land, with its diseases and its lack of creature comforts, when they were so heavily outnumbered? Why not sail for Cuba, back home where their farms, their wives, and the good life awaited them?

Cortes did what he could with these troublemakers, bribing some, keeping a close eye on others. Meanwhile he worked to build a strong enough rapport with the rest of his men that the grumblers could do no harm. All seemed well until the night of July 30, when Cortes was awoken by a Spanish sailor who, begging for mercy, confessed that he had joined in a plot to steal a ship and return that very evening to Cuba, where the conspirators would tell Velazquez about Cortes’s goal of conquering Mexico on his own.

Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one's body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, bring struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one's master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead. 

- HAGAKURE: THE BOOK OF THE SAMURAI, YAMAMOTO TSUNETOMO, 1659-1720

Cortes sensed that this was the decisive moment of the expedition. He could easily squash the conspiracy, but there would be others. His men were a rough lot, and their minds were on gold, Cuba, their families–anything but fighting the Aztecs. He could not conquer an empire with men so divided and untrustworthy, but how to fill them with the energy and focus for the immense task he faced?Thinking this through, he decided to take swift action. He seized the conspirators and had the two ringleaders hanged. Next, he bribed his pilots to bore holes in all of the ships and then announce that worms had eaten through the boards of the vessels, making them unseaworthy.

Pretending to be upset at the news, Cortes ordered what was salvageable from the ships to be taken ashore and then the hulls to be sunk. The pilots complied, but not enough holes had been bored, and only five of the ships went down. The story of the worms was plausible enough, and the soldiers accepted the news of the five ships with equanimity. But when a few days later more ships were run aground and only one was left afloat, it was clear to them that Cortes had arranged the whole thing. When he called a meeting, their mood was mutinous and murderous.

This was no time for subtlety. Cortes addressed his men: he was responsible for the disaster, he admitted; he had ordered it done, but now there was no turning back. They could hang him, but they were surrounded by hostile Indians and had no ships; divided and leaderless, they would perish. The only alternative was to follow him to Tenochtitlan. Only by conquering the Aztecs, by becoming lords of Mexico, could they get back to Cuba alive. To reach Tenochtitlan they would have to fight with utter intensity. They would have to be unified; any dissension would lead to defeat and a terrible death. The situation was desperate, but if the men fought desperately in turn, Cortes guaranteed that he would lead them to victory. Since the army was so small in number, the glory and riches would be all the greater. Any cowards not up to the challenge could sail the one remaining ship home.

There is something in war that drives so deeply into you that death ceases to be the enemy, merely another participant in a game you don't wish to end. 

- PHANTOM OVER VIETNAM, JOHN TROTTI, USMC, 1984

No one accepted the offer, and the last ship was run aground. Over the next months, Cortes kept his army away from Veracruz and the coast. Their attention was focused on Tenochtitlan, the heart of the Aztec empire. The grumbling, the self-interest, and the greed all disappeared. Understanding the danger of their situation, the conquistadors fought ruthlessly. Some two years after the destruction of the Spanish ships, and with the help of their Indian allies, Cortes’s army laid siege to Tenochtitlan and conquered the Aztec empire.

You don't have time for this display, you fool," he said in a severe tone. "This, whatever you're doing now, may be your last act on earth. It may very well be your last battle. There is no power which could guarantee that you are going to live one more minute...." "...Acts have power," he said, "Especially when the person acting knows that those acts are his last battle. There is a strange consuming happiness in acting with the full knowledge that whatever one is doing may very well be one's last act on earth. I recommend that you reconsider your life and bring your acts into that light.... Focus your attention on the link between you and your death, without remorse or sadness or worrying. Focus your attention on the fact you don't have time and let your acts flow accordingly. Let each of your acts be your last battle on earth. Only under those conditions will your acts have their rightful power. Otherwise they will be, for as long as you live, the acts of a timid man." "Is it so terrible to be a timid man?" "No. It isn't if you are going to be immortal, but if you are going to die there is not time for timidity, simply because timidity makes you cling to something that exists only in your thoughts. It soothes you while everything is at a lull, but then the awesome, mysterious world will open its mouth for you, as it will open for every one of us, and then you will realize that your sure ways were not sure at all. Being timid prevents us from examining and exploiting our lot as men."

-JOURNEY TO IXTLAN: THE LESSONS OF DON JUAN, CARLOS CASTANEDA, 1972

Interpretation

On the night of the conspiracy, Cortes had to think fast. What was the root of the problem he faced? It was not Velazquez’s spies, or the hostile Aztecs, or the incredible odds against him. The root of the problem was his own men and the ships in the harbor. His soldiers were divided in heart and mind. They were thinking about the wrong things–their wives, their dreams of gold, their plans for the future. And in the backs of their minds there was always an escape route: if this conquest business went badly, they could go home. Those ships in the harbor were more than just transportation; they represented Cuba, the freedom to leave, the ability to send for reinforcements–so many possibilities.

For the soldiers the ships were a crutch, something to fall back on if things got ugly. Once Cortes had identified the problem, the solution was simple: destroy the ships. By putting his men in a desperate place, he would make them fight with utmost intensity.

A sense of urgency comes from a powerful connection to the present. Instead of dreaming of rescue or hoping for a better future, you have to face the issue at hand. Fail and you perish. People who involve themselves completely in the immediate problem are intimidating; because they are focusing so intensely, they seem more powerful than they are. Their sense of urgency multiplies their strength and gives them momentum. Instead of five hundred men, Cortes suddenly had the weight of a much larger army at his back.

Like Cortes you must locate the root of your problem. It is not the people around you; it is yourself, and the spirit with which you face the world. In the back of your mind, you keep an escape route, a crutch, something to turn to if things go bad. Maybe it is some wealthy relative you can count on to buy your way out; maybe it is some grand opportunity on the horizon, the endless vistas of time that seem to be before you; maybe it is a familiar job or a comfortable relationship that is always there if you fail. Just as Cortes’s men saw their ships as insurance, you may see this fallback as a blessing–but in fact it is a curse. It divides you. Because you think you have options, you never involve yourself deeply enough in one thing to do it thoroughly, and you never quite get what you want. Sometimes you need to run your ships aground, burn them, and leave yourself just one option: succeed or go down. Make the burning of your ships as real as possible–get rid of your safety net. Sometimes you have to become a little desperate to get anywhere.

The ancient commanders of armies, who well knew the powerful influence of necessity, and how it inspired the soldiers with the most desperate courage, neglected nothing to subject their men to such a pressure. 

- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)

THE DEATH-AT-YOUR-HEELS TACTIC

In 1845 the writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, then twenty-four, shook the Russian literary world with the publication of his first novel, Poor Folk. He became the toast of St. Petersburg society. But something about his early fame seemed empty to him. He drifted into the fringes of left-wing politics, attending meetings of various socialist and radical groups. One of these groups centered on the charismatic Mikhail Petrashevsky.

Three years later, in 1848, revolution broke out all across Europe. Inspired by what was happening in the West, Russian radical groups like Petrashevsky’s talked of following suit. But agents of Czar Nicholas I had infiltrated many of these groups, and reports were written about the wild things being discussed at Petrashevsky’s house, including talk of inciting peasant revolts. Dostoyevsky was fervent about freeing the serfs, and on April 23, 1849, he and twenty-three other members of the Petrashevsky group were arrested.

After eight months of languishing in jail, the prisoners were awakened one cold morning and told that today they would finally hear their sentences. A few months’ exile was the usual punishment for their crime; soon, they thought, their ordeal would be over.

They were bundled into carriages and driven through the icy streets of St. Petersburg. Emerging from the carriages into Semyonovsky Square, they were greeted by a priest; behind him they could see rows of soldiers and, behind the soldiers, thousands of spectators. They were led toward a scaffold covered in black cloth at the center of the square. In front of the scaffold were three posts, and to the side was a line of carts laden with coffins.

Lord Naoshige said, "The Way of the Samurai is in desperateness. Ten men or more cannot kill such a man. Common sense will not accomplish great things. Simply become insane and desperate." 

- HAGAKURE: THE BOOK OF THE SAMURAI, YAMAMOTO TSUNETOMO, 1659-1720

Dostoyevsky could not believe what he saw. “It’s not possible that they mean to execute us,” he whispered to his neighbor. They were marched to the scaffold and placed in two lines. It was an unbelievably cold day, and the prisoners were wearing the light clothes they’d been arrested in back in April. A drumroll sounded. An officer came forward to read their sentences: “All of the accused are guilty as charged of intending to overthrow the national order, and are therefore condemned to death before a firing squad.” The prisoners were too stunned to speak.

As the officer read out the individual charges and sentences, Dostoyevsky found himself staring at the golden spire of a nearby church and at the sunlight bouncing off it. The gleams of light disappeared as a cloud passed overhead, and the thought occurred to him that he was about to pass into darkness just as quickly, and forever. Suddenly he had another thought: If I do not die, if I am not killed, my life will suddenly seem endless, a whole eternity, each minute a century. I will take account of everything that passes–I will not waste a second of life again.

The prisoners were given hooded shirts. The priest came forward to read them their last rites and hear their confessions. They said good-bye to one another. The first three to be shot were tied to the posts, and the hoods were pulled over their faces. Dostoyevsky stood in the front, in the next group to go. The soldiers raised their rifles, took aim–and suddenly a carriage came galloping into the square. A man got out with an envelope. At the last second, the czar had commuted their death sentences.

It had long been known, of course, that a man who, through disciplined training, had relinquished any desire or hope for survival and had only one goal--the destruction of his enemy--could be a redoubtable opponent and a truly formidable fighter who neither asked nor offered any quarter once his weapon had been unsheathed. In this way, a seemingly ordinary man who, by the force of circumstances rather than by profession, had been placed in the position of having to make a desperate choice, could prove dangerous, even to a skilled fencing master. One famous episode, for example, concerns a teacher of swordsmanship who was asked by a superior to surrender a servant guilty of an offense punishable by death. This teacher, wishing to test a theory of his concerning the power of that condition we would call "desperation," challenged the doomed man to a duel. Knowing full well the irrevocability of his sentence, the servant was beyond caring one way or the other, and the ensuing duel proved that even a skilled fencer and teacher of the art could find himself in great difficulty when confronted by a man who, because of his acceptance of imminent death, could go to the limit (and even beyond) in his strategy, without a single hesitation or distracting consideration. The servant, in fact, fought like a man possessed, forcing his master to retreat until his back was almost to the wall. At last the teacher had to cut him down in a final effort, wherein the master's own desperation brought about the fullest coordination of his courage, skill, and determination. 

- SECRETS OF THE SAMURAI, OSCAR RATTI AND ADELE WESTBROOK, 1973

Later that morning, Dostoyevsky was told his new sentence: four years hard labor in Siberia, to be followed by a stint in the army. Barely affected, he wrote that day to his brother, “When I look back at the past and think of all the time I squandered in error and idleness,…then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift…every minute could have been an eternity of happiness! If youth only knew! Now my life will change; now I will be reborn.”

A few days later, ten-pound shackles were put on Dostoyevsky’s arms and legs–they would stay there for the length of his prison term–and he was carted off to Siberia. For the next four years, he endured the most abysmal prison conditions. Granted no writing privileges, he wrote novels in his head, memorized them. Finally, in 1857, still serving the army period of his sentence, he was allowed to start publishing his work. Where before he would torture himself over a page, spend half a day idling it away in thought, now he wrote and wrote. Friends would see him walking the streets of St. Petersburg mumbling bits of dialogue to himself, lost in his characters and plots. His new motto was “Try to get as much done as possible in the shortest time.”

Some pitied Dostoyevsky his time in prison. That made him angry; he was grateful for the experience and felt no bitterness. But for that December day in 1849, he felt, he would have wasted his life. Right up until his death, in 1881, he continued writing at a frantic pace, churning out novel after novel–Crime and Punishment, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov–as if each one were his last.

Interpretation

Czar Nicholas had decided to sentence the Petrashevsky radicals to hard labor soon after their arrest. But he wanted to teach them a harsher lesson as well, so he dreamed up the cruel theater of the death sentence, with its careful details–the priest, the hoods, the coffins, the last-second pardon. This, he thought, would really humble and humiliate them. In fact, some of the prisoners were driven insane by the events of that day. But the effect on Dostoyevsky was different: he had been afflicted for years with a sense of wandering, of feeling lost, of not knowing what to do with his time. An extremely sensitive man, that day he literally felt his own death deep in his bones. And he experienced his “pardon” as a rebirth.

The effect was permanent. For the rest of his life, Dostoyevsky would consciously bring himself back to that day, remembering his pledge never to waste another moment. Or, if he felt he had grown too comfortable and complacent, he would go to a casino and gamble away all his money. Poverty and debt were for him a kind of symbolic death, throwing him back on the possible nothingness of his life. In either case he would have to write, and not the way other novelists wrote–as if it were a pleasant little artistic career, with all its attendant delights of salons, lectures, and other frills. Dostoyevsky wrote as if his life were at stake, with an intense feeling of urgency and seriousness.

Death is impossible for us to fathom: it is so immense, so frightening, that we will do almost anything to avoid thinking about it. Society is organized to make death invisible, to keep it several steps removed. That distance may seem necessary for our comfort, but it comes with a terrible price: the illusion of limitless time, and a consequent lack of seriousness about daily life. We are running away from the one reality that faces us all.

As a warrior in life, you must turn this dynamic around: make the thought of death something not to escape but to embrace. Your days are numbered. Will you pass them half awake and halfhearted or will you live with a sense of urgency? Cruel theaters staged by a czar are unnecessary; death will come to you without them. Imagine it pressing in on you, leaving you no escape–for there is no escape. Feeling death at your heels will make all your actions more certain, more forceful. This could be your last throw of the dice: make it count.

While knowing that we will die someday, we think that all the others will die before us and that we will be the last to go. Death seems a long way off. Is this not shallow thinking? It is worthless and is only a joke within a dream.... In sofar as death is always at one's door, one should make sufficient effort and act quickly.

--Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai, Yamamoto Tsunetomo (1659-1720)

KEYS TO WARFARE

Quite often we feel somewhat lost in our actions. We could do this or that–we have many options, but none of them seem quite necessary. Our freedom is a burden–what do we do today, where do we go?Our daily patterns and routines help us to avoid feeling directionless, but there is always the niggling thought that we could accomplish so much more. We waste so much time. Upon occasion all of us have felt a sense of urgency. Most often it is imposed from outside: we fall behind in our work, we inadvertently take on more than we can handle, responsibility for something is thrust into our hands. Now everything changes; no more freedom. We have to do this, we have to fix that. The surprise is always how much more spirited and more alive this makes us feel; now everything we do seems necessary. But eventually we go back to our normal patterns. And when that sense of urgency goes, we really do not know how to get it back.

Leaders of armies have thought about this subject since armies existed: how can soldiers be motivated, be made more aggressive, more desperate? Some generals have relied on fiery oratory, and those particularly good at it have had some success. But over two thousand years ago, the Chinese strategist Sun-tzu came to believe that listening to speeches, no matter how rousing, was too passive an experience to have an enduring effect. Instead Sun-tzu talked of a “death ground”–a place where an army is backed up against some geographical feature like a mountain, a river, or a forest and has no escape route. Without a way to retreat, Sun-tzu argued, an army fights with double or triple the spirit it would have on open terrain, because death is viscerally present. Sun-tzu advocated deliberately stationing soldiers on death ground to give them the desperate edge that makes men fight like the devil. That is what Cortes did in Mexico, and it is the only sure way to create a real fire in the belly. The world is ruled by necessity: People change their behavior only if they have to. They will feel urgency only if their lives depend on it.

Taking advantage of the opportunity, they began to question Han Hsin. "According to The Art of War , when one fights he should keep the hills to his right or rear, and bodies of water in front of him or to the left," they said. "Yet today you ordered us on the contrary to draw up ranks with our backs to the river, saying 'We shall defeat Chao and feast together!' We were opposed to the idea, and yet it has ended in victory. What sort of strategy is this?" "This is in The Art of War too," replied Han Hsin. "It is just that you have failed to notice it! Does it not say in The Art of War : 'Drive them into a fatal position and they will come out alive; place them in a hopeless spot and they will survive'? Moreover, I did not have at my disposal troops that I had trained and led from past times, but was forced, as the saying goes, to round up men from the market place and use them to fight with. Under such circumstances, if I had not placed them in a desperate situation where each man was obliged to fight for his own life, but had allowed them to remain in a safe place, they would have all run away. Then what good would they have been to me?" "Indeed!" his generals exclaimed in admiration. "We would never have thought of that." 

-RECORDS OF THE HISTORIAN, SZUMA CHIEN, CIRCA 145 B.C.-CIRCA 86 B.C.

Death ground is a psychological phenomenon that goes well beyond the battlefield: it is any set of circumstances in which you feel enclosed and without options. There is very real pressure at your back, and you cannot retreat. Time is running out. Failure–a form of psychic death–is staring you in the face. You must act or suffer the consequences.

Understand: we are creatures who are intimately tied to our environment–we respond viscerally to our circumstances and to the people around us. If our situation is easy and relaxed, if people are friendly and warm, our natural tension unwinds. We may even grow bored and tired; our environment is failing to challenge us, although we may not realize it. But put yourself in a high-stakes situation–a psychological death ground–and the dynamic changes. Your body responds to danger with a surge of energy; your mind focuses. Urgency is forced on you; you are compelled to waste no more time.

The trick is to use this effect deliberately from time to time, to practice it on yourself as a kind of wake-up call. The following five actions are designed to put you on a psychological death ground. Reading and thinking about them won’t work; you must put them into effect. They are forms of pressure to apply to yourself. Depending on whether you want a low-intensity jolt for regular use or a real shock, you can turn the level up or down. The scale is up to you.

Stake everything on a single throw. In 1937 the twenty-eight-year-old Lyndon B. Johnson–at the time the Texas director of the National Youth Administration–faced a dilemma. The Texas congressman James Buchanan had suddenly died. Since loyal Texan voters tended to return incumbents to office, a Texan congressional seat generally came available only every ten or twenty years–and Johnson wanted to be in Congress by the time he was thirty; he did not have ten years to wait. But he was very young and was virtually unknown in Buchanan’s old district, the tenth. He would be facing political heavyweights whom voters would heavily favor. Why try something that seemed doomed to failure? Not only would the race be a waste of money, but the humiliation, if Johnson lost badly, could derail his long-term ambitions.

Unlimited possibilities are not suited to man; if they existed, his life would only dissolve in the boundless. To become strong, a man's life needs the limitations ordained by duty and voluntarily accepted. The individual attains significance as a free spirit only by surrounding himself with these limitations and by determining for himself what his duty is. 

-THE I CHING, CHINA, CIRCA EIGHTH CENTURY B.C.

Johnson considered all this–then decided to run. Over the next few weeks, he campaigned intensely, visiting the district’s every backwater village and town, shaking the poorest farmer’s hand, sitting in drugstores to meet people who had never come close to talking to a candidate before. He pulled every trick in the book–old-style rallies and barbecues, newfangled radio ads. He worked night and day–and hard. By the time the race was over, Johnson was in a hospital, being treated for exhaustion and appendicitis. But, in one of the great upsets in American political history, he had won.

By staking his future on one throw, Johnson put himself in a death-ground situation. His body and spirit responded with the energy he needed. Often we try too many things at one time, thinking that one of them will bring us success–but in these situations our minds are diffused, our efforts halfhearted. It is better to take on one daunting challenge, even one that others think foolish. Our future is at stake; we cannot afford to lose. So we don’t.

Act before you are ready. In 49 B.C. a group of Roman senators, allied with Pompey and fearing the growing power of Julius Caesar, ordered the great general to disband his army or be considered a traitor to the Republic. When Caesar received this decree, he was in southern Gaul (modern-day France) with only five thousand men; the rest of his legions were far to the north, where he had been campaigning. He had no intention of obeying the decree–that would have been suicide–but it would be weeks before the bulk of his army could join him. Unwilling to wait, Caesar told his captains, “Let the die be cast,” and he and his five thousand men crossed the Rubicon, the river marking the border between Gaul and Italy. Leading troops onto Italian soil meant war with Rome. Now there was no turning back; it was fight or die. Caesar was compelled to concentrate his forces, to not waste a single man, to act with speed, and to be as creative as possible. He marched on Rome. By seizing the initiative, he frightened the senators, forcing Pompey to flee.

Death is nothing, but to live defeated is to die every day 

-NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, 1769-1821

When danger is greatest.--It is rare to break one's leg when in the course of life one is toiling upwards--it happens much more often when one starts to take things easy and to choose the easy paths. 

-FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, 1844-1900

We often wait too long to act, particularly when we face no outside pressure. It is sometimes better to act before you think you are ready–to force the issue and cross the Rubicon. Not only will you take your opponents by surprise, you will also have to make the most of your resources. You have committed yourself and cannot turn back. Under pressure your creativity will flourish. Do this often and you will develop your ability to think and act fast.

Enter new waters. The Hollywood studio MGM had been good to Joan Crawford: it had discovered her, made her a star, crafted her image. By the early 1940s, though, Crawford had had enough. It was all too comfortable; MGM kept casting her in the same kinds of roles, none of them a challenge. So, in 1943, Crawford did the unthinkable and asked out of her contract.

Be absolute for death; either death or life Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life: If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art, Servile to all the skyey influences, That dost this habituation, where thou keep'st, Hourly afflict: merely, thou art death's fool; For him thou labour'st by thy flight to shun And yet runn'st toward him still. Thou art not noble; For all the accommodations that thou bear'st Are nursed by baseness. Thou'rt by no means valiant; For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork Of a poor worm. Thy best of rest is sleep, And that thou oft provokest; yet grossly fear'st Thy death, which is no more. 

-MEASURE FOR MEASURE, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 1564-1616

The consequences for Crawford could have been terrible; to challenge the studio system was considered highly unwise. Indeed, when she then signed up with Warner Brothers, predictably enough she was offered the same mediocre sorts of scripts. She turned them down. On the verge of being fired, she finally found the part she had been looking for: the title role in Mildred Pierce, which, however, she was not offered. Setting to work on the director, Michael Curtiz, she managed to change his mind and land the role. She gave the performance of her life, won her only Best Actress Oscar, and resurrected her career.

In leaving MGM, Crawford was taking a big chance. If she failed to succeed at Warner Brothers, and quickly, her career would be over. But Crawford thrived on risk. When she was challenged, when she felt on edge, she burst with energy and was at her best. Like Crawford, you sometimes have to force yourself onto death ground–leaving stale relationships and comfortable situations behind, cutting your ties to the past. If you give yourself no way out, you will have to make your new endeavor work. Leaving the past for unknown terrain is like a death–and feeling this finality will snap you back to life.

Make it “you against the world.” Compared to sports like football, baseball is slow and has few outlets for aggression. This was a problem for the hitter Ted Williams, who played best when he was angry–when he felt that it was him against the world. Creating this mood on the field was difficult for Williams, but early on, he discovered a secret weapon: the press. He got into the habit of insulting sportswriters, whether just by refusing to cooperate with them or by verbally abusing them. The reporters returned the favor, writing scathing articles on his character, questioning his talent, trumpeting the slightest drop in his batting average. It was when Williams was hammered by the press, though, that he played best. He would go on a hitting tear, as if to prove them wrong. In 1957, when he carried on a yearlong feud with the papers, he played perhaps his greatest season and won the batting title at what for a baseball player is the advanced age of forty. As one journalist wrote, “Hate seems to activate his reflexes like adrenaline stimulates the heart. Animosity is his fuel!”

For Williams the animosity of the press and, with the press, of the public, was a kind of constant pressure that he could read, hear, and feel. They hated him, they doubted him, they wanted to see him fail; he would show them. And he did. A fighting spirit needs a little edge, some anger and hatred to fuel it. So do not sit back and wait for people to get aggressive; irritate and infuriate them deliberately. Feeling cornered by a multitude of people who dislike you, you will fight like hell. Hatred is a powerful emotion. Remember: in any battle you are putting your name and reputation on the line; your enemies will relish your failure. Use that pressure to make yourself fight harder.

Keep yourself restless and unsatisfied. Napoleon had many qualities that made him perhaps history’s greatest general, but the one that raised him to the heights and kept him there was his boundless energy. During campaigns he worked eighteen to twenty-hour days. If necessary, he would go without sleep for several days, yet sleeplessness rarely reduced his capacities. He would work in the bath, at the theater, during a dinner party. Keeping his eye on every detail of the war, he would ride endless miles on horseback without tiring or complaining.

O gentlemen, the time of life is short! To spend that shortness basely were too long, If life did ride upon a dial's point, Still ending at the arrival of an hour. An if we live, we live to tread on kings; If die, brave death, when princes die with us! 

-KING HENRY IV, PART I, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 1564-1616

Certainly Napoleon had extraordinary endurance, but there was more to it than that: he never let himself rest, was never satisfied. In 1796, in his first real position of command, he led the French to a remarkable victory in Italy, then immediately went on another campaign, this time in Egypt. There, unhappy with the way the war was going and with a lack of political power that he felt was cutting into his control over military affairs, he returned to France and conspired to become first consul. This achieved, he immediately set out on his second Italian campaign. And on he went, immersing himself in new wars, new challenges, that required him to call on his limitless energy. If he did not meet the crisis, he would perish.

When we are tired, it is often because we are bored. When no real challenge faces us, a mental and physical lethargy sets in. “Sometimes death only comes from a lack of energy,” Napoleon once said, and lack of energy comes from a lack of challenges, comes when we have taken on less than we are capable of. Take a risk and your body and mind will respond with a rush of energy. Make risk a constant practice; never let yourself settle down. Soon living on death ground will become a kind of addiction–you won’t be able to do without it. When soldiers survive a brush with death, they often feel an exhilaration that they want to have again. Life has more meaning in the face of death. The risks you keep taking, the challenges you keep overcoming, are like symbolic deaths that sharpen your appreciation of life.

Authority: When you will survive if you fight quickly and perish if you do not, this is called [death] ground.... Put them in a spot where they have no place to go, and they will die before fleeing. If they are to die there, what can they not do? Warriors exert their full strength. When warriors are in great danger, then they have no fear. When there is nowhere to go, they are firm, when they are deeply involved, they stick to it. If they have no choice, they will fight. 

-The Art of War, Sun-tzu (fourth century B.C.)

REVERSAL

If the feeling of having nothing to lose can propel you forward, it can do the same for others. You must avoid any conflict with people in this position. Maybe they are living in terrible conditions or, for whatever reason, are suicidal; in any case they are desperate, and desperate people will risk everything in a fight. This gives them a huge advantage. Already defeated by circumstances, they have nothing to lose. You do. Leave them alone.

Conversely, attacking enemies when their morale is low gives you the advantage. Maybe they are fighting for a cause they know is unjust or for a leader they do not respect. Find a way to lower their spirits even further. Troops with low morale are discouraged by the slightest setback. A show of force will crush their fighting spirit.

Always try to lower the other side’s sense of urgency. Make your enemies think they have all the time in the world; when you suddenly appear at their border, they are in a slumbering state, and you will easily overrun them. While you are sharpening your fighting spirit, always do what you can to blunt theirs.

Conclusion

The world is in the midst of World War III right now. It is being fought with things that are strange and unusual, and it is not being reported. In fact, the “news” is instead sending everyone off on “wild goose chases” down “rabbit holes”. No one actually knows what is going on.

It is critically important that you secure yourself and your family, and maintain a calm head through all of this. Let those around you make rash, foolish decisions, panic, and worry. That is not for you.

Recognize who you are, and where you are. Then, steely and calmly conduct your affirmation campaigns to wrest control of the reality that surrounds you and bend it to your will. You have this ability. Make it so.

Do you want more?

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Chapter 1, Part 3, of the 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene titled “Do not lose your presence of mind”

This is a full reprint in HTML of the third chapter (Chapter 3) of the first part (Part I) of the massive volume titled "The 33 Strategies of War". Written by Robert Greene (with emotional support from his cats). I read this book while in prison, and found much of what was written to be interesting, enjoyable, and pertinent to things going on in my life. I think that you will as well.

AMIDST THE TURMOIL OF EVENTS, DO NOT LOSE YOUR PRESENCE OF MIND

THE COUNTERBALANCE STRATEGY

In the heat of battle, the mind tends to lose its balance. Too many things confront you at the same time—unexpected setbacks, doubts and criticisms from your own allies. There’s a danger of responding emotionally, with fear, depression, or frustration.

It is vital to keep your presence of mind, maintaining your mental powers whatever the circumstances.

You must actively resist the emotional pull of the moment—staying decisive, confident, and aggressive no matter what hits you. Make the mind tougher by exposing it to adversity. Learn to detach yourself from the chaos of the battlefield. Let others lose their heads; your presence of mind will steer you clear of their influence and keep you on course.

[Presence of mind] must play a great role in war, the domain of the unexpected, since it is nothing but an increased capacity of dealing with the unexpected. We admire presence of mind in an apt repartee, as we admire  quick thinking in the  face of danger.... The  expression "presence of mind" precisely conveys the speed and immediacy of the help provided by the intellect.

ON WAR, CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ, 1780-1831

THE HYPERAGGRESSIVE TACTIC

Vice Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson (1758-1805) had been through it all. He had lost his right eye in the siege of Calvi and his right arm in the Battle of Tenerife. He had defeated the Spanish at Cape St. Vincent in 1797 and had thwarted Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign by defeating his navy at the Battle of the Nile the following year. But none of his tribulations and triumphs prepared him for the problems he faced from his own colleagues in the British navy as they prepared to go to war against Denmark in February 1801.

Nelson, England’s most glorious war hero, was the obvious choice to lead the fleet. Instead the Admiralty chose Sir Hyde Parker, with Nelson his second-in-command. This war was a delicate business; it was intended to force the disobedient Danes to comply with a British-led embargo on the shipping of military goods to France. The fiery Nelson was prone to lose his cool. He hated Napoleon, and if he went too far against the Danes, he would produce a diplomatic fiasco. Sir Hyde was an older, more stable, even-tempered man who would do the job and nothing more.

Nelson swallowed his pride and took the assignment, but he saw trouble ahead. He knew that time was of the essence: the faster the navy sailed, the less chance the Danes would have to build up their defenses. The ships were ready to sail, but Parker’s motto was “Everything in good order.” It wasn’t his style to hurry. Nelson hated his casualness and burned for action: he reviewed intelligence reports, studied maps, and came up with a detailed plan for fighting the Danes. He wrote to Parker urging him to seize the initiative. Parker ignored him.

More life may trickle out of men through thought than through a gaping wound.

THOMAS HARDY, 1840-1928

At last, on March 11, the British fleet set sail. Instead of heading for Copenhagen, however, Parker anchored well to the north of the city’s harbor and called a meeting of his captains. According to intelligence reports, he explained, the Danes had prepared elaborate defenses for Copenhagen. Boats anchored in the harbor, forts to the north and south, and mobile artillery batteries could blast the British out of the water. How to fight this artillery without terrible losses? Also, pilots who knew the waters around Copenhagen reported that they were treacherous, places of sandbars and tricky winds. Navigating these dangers under bombardment would be harrowing. With all of these difficulties, perhaps it was best to wait for the Danes to leave harbor and then fight them in open sea.

Nelson struggled to control himself. Finally he let loose, pacing the room, the stub of his lost arm jerking as he spoke. No war, he said, had ever been won by waiting. The Danish defenses looked formidable “to those who are children at war,” but he had worked out a strategy weeks earlier: he would attack from the south, the easier approach, while Parker and a reserve force would stay to the city’s north. Nelson would use his mobility to take out the Danish guns. He had studied the maps: sandbars were no threat. As for the wind, aggressive action was more important than fretting over wind.

Nelson’s speech energized Parker’s captains. He was by far their most successful leader, and his confidence was catching. Even Sir Hyde was impressed, and the plan was approved.

So Grant was alone; his most trusted subordinates besought him to change his plans, while his superiors were astounded at his temerity and strove to interfere. 

Soldiers of reputation and civilians in high places condemned, in advance, a campaign that seemed to them as hopeless as it was unprecedented. 

If he failed, the country would concur with the Government and the Generals. 

Grant knew all this, and appreciated his danger, but was as invulnerable to the apprehensions of ambition as to the entreaties of friendship, or the anxieties even of patriotism. 

That quiet confidence in himself which never forsook him, and which amounted indeed almost to a feeling of fate, was uninterrupted. Having once determined in a matter that required irreversible decision, he never reversed, nor even misgave, but was steadily loyal to himself and his plans. 

This absolute and implicit faith was, however, as far as possible from conceit or enthusiasm; it was simply a consciousness or conviction, rather, which brought the  very strength it believed in; which was itself strength, and which inspired others with a trust in him, because he was able thus to trust himself.

MILITARY HISTORY OF ULYSSES S. GRANT, ADAM BADEAU, 1868

The next morning Nelson’s line of ships advanced on Copenhagen, and the battle began. The Danish guns, firing on the British at close range, took a fierce toll. Nelson paced the deck of his flagship, HMS Elephant, urging his men on. He was in an excited, almost ecstatic state. A shot through the mainmast nearly hit him: “It is warm work, and this day may be the last to any of us at any moment,” he told a colonel, a little shaken up by the blast, “but mark you, I would not be elsewhere for thousands.”

Parker followed the battle from his position to the north. He now regretted agreeing to Nelson’s plan; he was responsible for the campaign, and a defeat here could ruin his career. After four hours of back-and-forth bombardment, he had seen enough: the fleet had taken a beating and had gained no advantage. Nelson never knew when to quit. Parker decided it was time to hoist signal flag 39, the order to withdraw. The first ships to see it were to acknowledge it and pass the signal on down the line. Once acknowledged there was nothing else to do but retreat.

The battle was over.

On board the Elephant, a lieutenant told Nelson about the signal. The vice-admiral ignored it. Continuing to pound the Danish defenses, he eventually called to an officer, “Is number sixteen still hoisted?” Number 16 was his own flag; it meant “Engage the enemy more closely.” The officer confirmed that the flag was still flying. “Mind you keep it so,” Nelson told him.

A few minutes later, Parker’s signal still flapping in the breeze, Nelson turned to his flag captain: “You know, Foley, I have only one eye–I have a right to be blind sometimes.” And raising his telescope to his blind eye, he calmly remarked, “I really do not see the signal.”

Torn between obeying Parker and obeying Nelson, the fleet captains chose Nelson. They would risk their careers along with his. But soon the Danish defenses started to crack; some of the ships anchored in the harbor surrendered, and the firing of the guns began to slow. Less than an hour after Parker’s signal to stop the battle, the Danes surrendered.

The next day Parker perfunctorily congratulated Nelson on the victory. He did not mention his subordinate’s disobedience. He was hoping the whole affair, including his own lack of courage, would be quietly forgotten.

Interpretation

When the Admiralty put its faith in Sir Hyde, it made a classical military error: it entrusted the waging of a war to a man who was careful and methodical. Such men may seem calm, even strong, in times of peace, but their self-control often hides weakness: the reason they think things through so carefully is that they are terrified of making a mistake and of what that might mean for them and their career.

This doesn’t come out until they are tested in battle: suddenly they cannot make a decision. They see problems everywhere and defeat in the smallest setback. They hang back not out of patience but out of fear. Often these moments of hesitation spell their doom.

There was once a man who may be called the "generalissimo" of robbers and who went by the name of Hakamadare.

He had a strong mind and a powerful build. He was swift of foot, quick with his hands, wise in thinking and plotting. Altogether there was no one who could compare with him.

His business was to rob people of their possessions when they were off guard.

Once, around the tenth month of a year, he needed clothing and decided to get hold of some.

He went to prospective spots and walked about, looking.

About midnight when people had gone to sleep and were quiet, under a somewhat blurry moon he saw a man dressed in abundant clothes sauntering about on a boulevard. The man, with his trouser-skirt tucked up with strings perhaps and in a formal hunting robe which gently covered his body, was playing the flute, alone, apparently in no hurry to go to any particular place.

Wow, here's a fellow who's shown up just to give me his clothes, Hakamadare thought.

Normally he would have gleefully run up and beaten his quarry down and robbed him of his clothes. But this time, unaccountably, he felt something fearsome about the man, so he followed him for a couple of hundred yards.

The man himself didn't seem to think, Somebody's following me. On the contrary, he continued to play the flute with what appeared to be greater calm.

Give him a try, Hakamadare said to himself, and ran up close to the man, making as much clatter as he could with his feet.

The man, however, looked not the least disturbed. He simply turned to look, still playing the flute. It wasn't possible to jump on him. Hakamadare ran off.

Hakamadare tried similar approaches a number of times, but the man remained utterly unperturbed. Hakamadare realized he was dealing with an unusual fellow. When they had covered about a thousand yards, though, Hakamadare decided he couldn't continue like this, drew his sword, and ran up to him.

This time the man stopped playing the flute and, turning, said, "What in the world are you doing?" Hakamadare couldn't have been struck with greater fear even if a demon or a god had run up to attack him when he was walking alone.

For some unaccountable reason he lost both heart and courage.

Overcome with deathly fear and despite himself, he fell on his knees and hands. "What are you doing?" the man repeated.

Hakamadare felt he couldn't escape even if he tried. "I'm trying to rob you," he blurted out. "My name is Hakamadare." "

I've heard there's a man about with that name, yes. A dangerous, unusual fellow, I'm told," the man said.

Then he simply said to Hakamadare, "Come with me," and continued on his way, playing the flute again.

Terrified that he was dealing with no ordinary human being, and as if possessed by a demon or a god, Hakamadare followed the man, completely mystified. Eventually the man walked into a gate behind which was a large house.

He stepped inside from the verandah after removing his shoes. While Hakamadare was thinking, He must be the master of the house, the man came back and summoned him.

As he gave him a robe made of thick cotton cloth, he said, "If you need something like this in the future, just come and tell me. If you jump on somebody who doesn't know your intentions, you may get hurt."

Afterward it occurred to Hakamadare that the house belonged to Governor of Settsu Fujiwara no Yasumasa.

Later, when he was arrested, he is known to have observed, "He was such an unusually weird, terrifying man!"

Yasumasa was not a warrior by family tradition because he was a son of Munetada. Yet he was not the least inferior to anyone who was a warrior by family tradition.

He had a strong mind, was quick with his hands, and had tremendous strength.

He was also subtle in thinking and plotting. So even the imperial court did not feel insecure in employing him in the way of the warrior. As a result, the whole world greatly feared him and was intimidated by him.

LEGENDS OF THE SAMURAI, HIROAKI SATO, 1995

Lord Nelson operated according to the opposite principle. Slight of build, with a delicate constitution, he compensated for his physical weakness with fierce determination. He forced himself to be more resolute than anyone around him. The moment he entered battle, he ratcheted up his aggressive impulses.

Where other sea lords worried about casualties, the wind, changes in the enemy’s formation, he concentrated on his plan. Before battle no one strategized or studied his opponent more thoroughly. (That knowledge helped Nelson to sense when the enemy was ready to crumble.) But once the engagement began, hesitation and carefulness were dropped.

Presence of mind is a kind of counterbalance to mental weakness, to our tendency to get emotional and lose perspective in the heat of battle.

Our greatest weakness is losing heart, doubting ourselves, becoming unnecessarily cautious.

Being more careful is not what we need; that is just a screen for our fear of conflict and of making a mistake. What we need is double the resolve–an intensification of confidence. That will serve as a counterbalance.

In moments of turmoil and trouble, you must force yourself to be more determined. Call up the aggressive energy you need to overcome caution and inertia. Any mistakes you make, you can rectify with more energetic action still. Save your carefulness for the hours of preparation, but once the fighting begins, empty your mind of doubts. Ignore those who quail at any setback and call for retreat. Find joy in attack mode. Momentum will carry you through.

The senses make a more vivid impression on the mind than systematic thought.... Even the man who planned the operation and now sees it being carried out may well lose confidence in his earlier judgment.... War has a way of masking the stage with scenery crudely daubed with fearsome apparitions. Once this is cleared away, and the horizon becomes unobstructed, developments will confirm his earlier convictions--this is one of the great chasms between planning and execution.

--Carl von Clausewitz, ON WAR (1780-1831)

THE DETACHED-BUDDHA TACTIC

Watching the movie director Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) at work on a film set was often quite a surprise to those seeing it for the first time. Most filmmakers are wound-up balls of energy, yelling at the crew and barking out orders, but Hitchcock would sit in his chair, sometimes dozing, or at least with his eyes half closed.

On the set of Strangers on a Train, made in 1951, the actor Farley Granger thought Hitchcock’s behavior meant he was angry or upset and asked him if anything was wrong. “Oh,” Hitchcock replied sleepily, “I’m so bored.” The crew’s complaints, an actor’s tantrums–nothing fazed him; he would just yawn, shift in his chair, and ignore the problem. “Hitchcock…didn’t seem to direct us at all,” said the actress Margaret Lockwood. “He was a dozing, nodding Buddha with an enigmatic smile on his face.”

It was hard for Hitchcock’s colleagues to understand how a man doing such stressful work could stay so calm and detached. Some thought it was part of his character–that there was something inherently cold-blooded about him. Others thought it a gimmick, a put-on.

Few suspected the truth: before the filmmaking had even begun, Hitchcock would have prepared for it with such intense attention to detail that nothing could go wrong.

He was completely in control; no temperamental actress, no panicky art director, no meddling producer could upset him or interfere with his plans. Feeling such absolute security in what he had set up, he could afford to lie back and fall asleep.

Hitchcock’s process began with a story-line, whether from a novel or an idea of his own. As if he had a movie projector in his head, he would begin to visualize the film. Next, he would start meeting with a writer, who would soon realize that this job was unlike any other. Instead of taking some producer’s half-baked idea and turning it into a screenplay, the writer was simply there to put on paper the dream trapped in Hitchcock’s mind.

He or she would add flesh and bones to the characters and would of course write the dialog, but not much else.

When Hitchcock sat down with the writer Samuel Taylor for the first script meeting on the movie Vertigo (1958), his descriptions of several scenes were so vivid, so intense, that the experiences seemed almost to have been real, or maybe something he had dreamed. This completeness of vision foreclosed creative conflict. As Taylor soon realized, although he was writing the script, it would remain a Hitchcock creation.

Once the screenplay was finished, Hitchcock would transform it into an elaborate shooting script.

Blocking, camera positions, lighting, and set dimensions were spelled out in detailed notes. Most directors leave themselves some latitude, shooting scenes from several angles, for example, to give the film editor options to work with later on. Not Hitchcock: he essentially edited the entire film in the shooting script. He knew exactly what he wanted and wrote it down. If a producer or actor tried to add or change a scene, Hitchcock was outwardly pleasant–he could afford to pretend to listen–but inside he was totally unmoved.

Nothing was left to chance. For the building of the sets (quite elaborate in a movie like Rear Window), Hitchcock would present the production designer with precise blueprints, floor plans, incredibly detailed lists of props. He supervised every aspect of set construction.

He was particularly attentive to the clothes of his leading actresses: according to Edith Head, costumer on many Hitchcock movies, including Dial M for Murder in 1954, “There was a reason for every color, every style, and he was absolutely certain about everything he settled on. For one scene he saw [Grace Kelly] in pale green, for another in white chiffon, for another in gold. He was really putting a dream together in the studio.” When the actress Kim Novak refused to wear a gray suit in Vertigo because she felt it made her look washed out, Hitchcock told her he wanted her to look like a woman of mystery who had just stepped out of the San Francisco fog. How could she argue with that?

She wore the suit.

Hitchcock’s actors found working with him strange yet pleasant. Some of Hollywood’s best– Joseph Cotten, Grace Kelly, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman–said that he was the easiest director to work for: his nonchalance was catching, and since his films were so carefully staged as not to depend on the actor’s performance in any particular scene, they could relax.

Everything went like clockwork.

As James Stewart told the cast of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), “We’re in the hands of an expert here. You can lean on him. Just do everything he tells you and the whole thing will be okay.”

As Hitchcock sat calmly on the set, apparently half asleep, the cast and crew could see only the small part each one played. They had no idea how everything fit into his vision. When Taylor saw Vertigo for the first time, it was like seeing another man’s dream. The film neatly duplicated the vision Hitchcock had expressed to him many months before.

Interpretation

The first film Hitchcock directed was The Pleasure Garden, a silent he made in 1925. The production went wrong in every conceivable way.

Hitchcock hated chaos and disorder; unexpected events, panicky crew members, and any loss of control made him miserable.

From that point on, he decided, he would treat filmmaking like a military operation.

He would give his producers, actors, and crew no room to mess up what he wanted to create. He taught himself every aspect of film production: set design, lighting, the technicalities of cameras and lenses, editing, sound. He ran every stage of the film’s making. No shadow could fall between the planning and the execution.

Establishing control in advance the way Hitchcock did might not seem like presence of mind, but it actually takes that quality to its zenith. It means entering battle (in Hitchcock’s case a film shoot) feeling calm and ready.

Setbacks may come, but you will have foreseen them and thought of alternatives, and you are ready to respond.

Your mind will never go blank when it is that well prepared. When your colleagues barrage you with doubts, anxious questions, and slipshod ideas, you may nod and pretend to listen, but really you’re ignoring them–you’ve out-thought them in advance. And your relaxed manner will prove contagious to other people, making them easier to manage in turn.

It is easy to be overwhelmed by everything that faces you in battle, where so many people are asking or telling you what to do. So many vital matters press in on you that you can lose sight of your goals and plans; suddenly you can’t see the forest for the trees.

Understand: presence of mind is the ability to detach yourself from all that, to see the whole battlefield, the whole picture, with clarity. All great generals have this quality. And what gives you that mental distance is preparation, mastering the details beforehand. Let people think your Buddha-like detachment comes from some mysterious source. The less they understand you the better.

For the love of God, pull yourself together and do not look at things so darkly: the first step backward makes a poor impression in the army, the second step is dangerous, and the third becomes fatal.

--Frederick the Great (1712-86), letter to a general

KEYS TO WARFARE

We humans like to see ourselves as rational creatures. We imagine that what separates us from animals is the ability to think and reason. But that is only partly true: what distinguishes us from animals just as much is our capacity to laugh, to cry, to feel a range of emotions. We are in fact emotional creatures as well as rational ones, and although we like to think we govern our actions through reason and thought, what most often dictates our behavior is the emotion we feel in the moment.

We maintain the illusion that we are rational through the routine of our daily affairs, which helps us to keep things calm and apparently controlled. Our minds seem rather strong when we’re following our routines. But place any of us in an adverse situation and our rationality vanishes; we react to pressure by growing fearful, impatient, confused. Such moments reveal us for the emotional creatures we are: under attack, whether by a known enemy or unpredictably by a colleague, our response is dominated by feelings of anger, sadness, betrayal. Only with great effort can we reason our way through these periods and respond rationally–and our rationality rarely lasts past the next attack.

Understand: your mind is weaker than your emotions. But you become aware of this weakness only in moments of adversity–precisely the time when you need strength. What best equips you to cope with the heat of battle is neither more knowledge nor more intellect. What makes your mind stronger, and more able to control your emotions, is internal discipline and toughness.

No one can teach you this skill; you cannot learn it by reading about it. Like any discipline, it can come only through practice, experience, even a little suffering. The first step in building up presence of mind is to see the need for it–to want it badly enough to be willing to work for it. Historical figures who stand out for their presence of mind–Alexander the Great, Ulysses S. Grant, Winston Churchill–acquired it through adversity, through trial and error. They were in positions of responsibility in which they had to develop this quality or sink. Although these men may have been blessed with an unusual amount of personal fortitude, they had to work hard to strengthen this into presence of mind.

The first quality of a General-in-Chief is to have a cool head which receives exact impressions of things, which never gets heated, which never allows itself to be dazzled, or intoxicated, by good or bad news. 

The successive simultaneous sensations which he receives in the course of a day must be classified, and must occupy the correct places they merit to fill, because common sense and reason are the results of the comparison of a number of sensations each equally well considered. 

There are certain men who, on account of their moral and physical constitution, paint mental pictures out of everything: however exalted be their reason, their will, their courage, and whatever good qualities they may possess, nature has not fitted them to command armies, nor to direct great operations of war.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, 1769-1821

The ideas that follow are based on their experience and hard-won victories. Think of these ideas as exercises, ways to toughen your mind, each a kind of counterbalance to emotion’s overpowering pull.

Expose yourself to conflict. George S. Patton came from one of America’s most distinguished military families–his ancestors included generals and colonels who had fought and died in the American Revolution and the Civil War. Raised on stories of their heroism, he followed in their footsteps and chose a career in the military. But Patton was also a sensitive young man, and he had one deep fear: that in battle he would turn coward and disgrace the family name.

Patton had his first real taste of battle in 1918, at the age of thirty-two, during the Allied offensive on the Argonne during World War I. He commanded a tank division. At one point during the battle, Patton managed to lead some American infantrymen to a position on a hilltop overlooking a key strategic town, but German fire forced them to take cover. Soon it became clear that they were trapped: if they retreated, they would come under fire from positions on the sides of the hill; if they advanced, they would run right into a battery of German machine guns. If they were all to die, as it seemed to Patton, better to die advancing. At the moment he was to lead the troops in the charge, however, Patton was stricken by intense fear. His body trembled, and his legs turned to jelly. In a confirmation of his deepest fears, he had lost his nerve.

At that instant, looking into the clouds beyond the German batteries, Patton had a vision: he saw his illustrious military ancestors, all in their uniforms, staring sternly down at him. They seemed to be inviting him to join their company–the company of dead war heroes. Paradoxically, the sight of these men had a calming effect on the young Patton: calling for volunteers to follow him, he yelled, “It is time for another Patton to die!” The strength had returned to his legs; he stood up and charged toward the German guns. Seconds later he fell, hit in the thigh. But he survived the battle.

From that moment on, even after he became a general, Patton made a point of visiting the front lines, exposing himself needlessly to danger. He tested himself again and again. His vision of his ancestors remained a constant stimulus–a challenge to his honor. Each time it became easier to face down his fears. It seemed to his fellow generals, and to his own men, that no one had more presence of mind than Patton. They did not know how much of his strength was an effort of will.

The story of Patton teaches us two things. First, it is better to confront your fears, let them come to the surface, than to ignore them or tamp them down. Fear is the most destructive emotion for presence of mind, but it thrives on the unknown, which lets our imaginations run wild. By deliberately putting yourself in situations where you have to face fear, you familiarize yourself with it and your anxiety grows less acute. The sensation of overcoming a deep-rooted fear in turn gives you confidence and presence of mind. The more conflicts and difficult situations you put yourself through, the more battle-tested your mind will be.

There was a fox who had never seen a lion. But one day he happened to meet one of these beasts face to face. On this first occasion he was so terrified that he felt he would die of fear. He encountered him again, and this time he was also frightened, but not so much as the first time. But on the third occasion when he saw him, he actually plucked up the courage to approach him and began to chat. This fable shows that familiarity soothes our fears.

FABLES, AESOP, SIXTH CENTURY B.C.

Second, Patton’s experience demonstrates the motivating power of a sense of honor and dignity. In giving in to fear, in losing your presence of mind, you disgrace not only yourself, your self-image, and your reputation but your company, your family, your group. You bring down the communal spirit. Being a leader of even the smallest group gives you something to live up to: people are watching you, judging you, depending on you. To lose your composure would make it hard for you to live with yourself.

Be self-reliant. There is nothing worse than feeling dependent on other people. Dependency makes you vulnerable to all kinds of emotions–betrayal, disappointment, frustration–that play havoc with your mental balance.

Early in the American Civil War, General Ulysses S. Grant, eventual commander in chief of the Northern armies, felt his authority slipping. His subordinates would pass along inaccurate information on the terrain he was marching through; his captains would fail to follow through on his orders; his generals were criticizing his plans. Grant was stoical by nature, but his diminished control over his troops led to a diminished control over himself and drove him to drink.

In the words of the ancients, one should make his decisions within the space of seven breaths. Lord Takanobu said, "If discrimination is long, it will spoil." Lord Naoshige said, "When matters are done leisurely, seven out of ten will turn out badly. 

A warrior is a person who does things quickly." When your mind is going hither and thither, discrimination will never be brought to a conclusion. With an intense, fresh and unde-laying spirit, one will make his judgments within the space of seven breaths. It is a matter of being determined and having the spirit to break right through to the other side.

HAGAKURE: THE BOOK OF THE SAMURAI, YAMAMOTO TSUNETOMO, 1659-1720

Grant had learned his lesson by the time of the Vicksburg campaign, in 1862-63. He rode the terrain himself, studying it firsthand. He reviewed intelligence reports himself. He honed the precision of his orders, making it harder for his captains to flout them. And once he had made a decision, he would ignore his fellow generals’ doubts and trust his convictions. To get things done, he came to rely on himself. His feelings of helplessness dissolved, and with them all of the attendant emotions that had ruined his presence of mind.

Being self-reliant is critical. To make yourself less dependent on others and so-called experts, you need to expand your repertoire of skills. And you need to feel more confident in your own judgment. Understand: we tend to overestimate other people’s abilities–after all, they’re trying hard to make it look as if they knew what they were doing–and we tend to underestimate our own. You must compensate for this by trusting yourself more and others less.

It is important to remember, though, that being self-reliant does not mean burdening yourself with petty details. You must be able to distinguish between small matters that are best left to others and larger issues that require your attention and care.

Suffer fools gladly. John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, is one of history’s most successful generals. A genius of tactics and strategy, he had tremendous presence of mind. In the early eighteenth century, Churchill was often the leader of an alliance of English, Dutch, and German armies against the mighty forces of France. His fellow generals were timid, indecisive, narrow-minded men. They balked at the duke’s bold plans, saw dangers everywhere, were discouraged at the slightest setback, and promoted their own country’s interests at the expense of the alliance. They had no vision, no patience: they were fools.

On a famous occasion during the civil war, Caesar tripped when disembarking from a ship on the shores of Africa and fell flat on his face. With his talent for improvisation, he spread out his arms and embraced the earth as a symbol of conquest. By quick thinking he turned a terrible omen of failure into one of victory.

CICERO: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ROME'S GREATEST POLITICIAN, ANTHONY EVERITT, 2001

The duke, an experienced and subtle courtier, never confronted his colleagues directly; he did not force his opinions on them. Instead he treated them like children, indulging them in their fears while cutting them out of his plans.

Occasionally he threw them a bone, doing some minor thing they had suggested or pretending to worry about a danger they had imagined.

But he never let himself get angry or frustrated; that would have ruined his presence of mind, undermining his ability to lead the campaign. He forced himself to stay patient and cheerful. He knew how to suffer fools gladly.

We mean the ability to keep one's head at times of exceptional stress and violent emotion.... But it might be closer to the truth to assume that the faculty known as self-control--the gift of keeping calm even under the greatest stress--is rooted in temperament. 

It is itself an emotion which serves to balance the passionate feelings in strong characters without destroying them, and it is this balance alone that assures the dominance of the intellect. 

The counter-weight we mean is simply the sense of human dignity, the noblest pride and deepest need of all: the urge to act rationally at all times. Therefore we would argue that a strong character is one that will not be unbalanced by the most powerful emotions.

ON WAR, CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ, 1780-1831

Understand: you cannot be everywhere or fight everyone. Your time and energy are limited, and you must learn how to preserve them. Exhaustion and frustration can ruin your presence of mind. The world is full of fools–people who cannot wait to get results, who change with the wind, who can’t see past their noses. You encounter them everywhere: the indecisive boss, the rash colleague, the hysterical subordinate. When working alongside fools, do not fight them. Instead think of them the way you think of children, or pets, not important enough to affect your mental balance. Detach yourself emotionally. And while you’re inwardly laughing at their foolishness, indulge them in one of their more harmless ideas. The ability to stay cheerful in the face of fools is an important skill.

Crowd out feelings of panic by focusing on simple tasks. Lord Yamanouchi, an aristocrat of eighteenth-century Japan, once asked his tea master to accompany him on a visit to Edo (later Tokyo), where he was to stay for a while. He wanted to show off to his fellow courtiers his retainer’s skill in the rituals of the tea ceremony. Now, the tea master knew everything there was to know about the tea ceremony, but little else; he was a peaceful man. He dressed, however, like a samurai, as his high position required.

One day, as the tea master was walking in the big city, he was accosted by a samurai who challenged him to a duel. The tea master was not a swordsman and tried to explain this to the samurai, but the man refused to listen. To turn the challenge down would disgrace both the tea master’s family and Lord Yamanouchi. He had to accept, though that meant certain death. And accept he did, requesting only that the duel be put off to the next day. His wish was granted.

In panic, the tea master hurried to the nearest fencing school. If he were to die, he wanted to learn how to die honorably. To see the fencing master ordinarily required letters of introduction, but the tea master was so insistent, and so clearly terrified, that at last he was given an interview. The fencing master listened to his story.

However, he perceived now that it did not greatly matter what kind of soldiers he was going to fight, so long as they fought, which fact no one disputed. There was a more serious problem.

He lay in his bunk pondering upon it.

He tried to mathematically prove to himself that he would not run from a battle.... A little panic-fear grew in his mind. As his imagination went forward to a fight, he saw hideous possibilities.

He contemplated the lurking menaces of the future, and failed in an effort to see himself standing stoutly in the midst of them. He recalled his visions of broken-bladed glory, but in the shadow of the impending tumult he suspected them to be impossible pictures.

He sprang from the bunk and began to pace nervously to and fro. "Good Lord, what's th' matter with me?" he said aloud.

He felt that in this crisis his laws of life were useless. Whatever he had learned of himself was here of no avail. He was an unknown quantity. He saw that he would again be obliged to experiment as he had in early youth. He must accumulate information of himself, and meanwhile he resolved to remain close upon his guard lest those qualities of which he knew nothing should everlastingly disgrace him.

"Good Lord!" he repeated in dismay.... For days he made ceaseless calculations, but they were all wondrously unsatisfactory. He found that he could establish nothing.

He finally concluded that the only way to prove himself was to go into the blaze, and then figuratively to watch his legs to discover their merits and faults. He reluctantly admitted that he could not sit still and with a mental slate and pencil derive an answer. To gain it, he must have blaze, blood, and danger, even as a chemist requires this, that, and the other. So he fretted for an opportunity.

THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, STEPHEN CRANE, 1871-1900

The swordsman was sympathetic: he would teach the poor visitor the art of dying, but first he wanted to be served some tea. The tea master proceeded to perform the ritual, his manner calm, his concentration perfect.

Finally the fencing master yelled out in excitement, “No need for you to learn the art of death! The state of mind you’re in now is enough for you to face any samurai. When you see your challenger, imagine you’re about to serve tea to a guest. Take off your coat, fold it up carefully, and lay your fan on it just as you do at work.” This ritual completed, the tea master was to raise his sword in the same alert spirit. Then he would be ready to die.

The tea master agreed to do as his teacher said. The next day he went to meet the samurai, who could not help but notice the completely calm and dignified expression on his opponent’s face as he took off his coat. Perhaps, the samurai thought, this fumbling tea master is actually a skilled swordsman. He bowed, begged pardon for his behavior the day before, and hurried away.

When circumstances scare us, our imagination tends to take over, filling our minds with endless anxieties.

You need to gain control of your imagination, something easier said than done. Often the best way to calm down and give yourself such control is to force the mind to concentrate on something relatively simple–a calming ritual, a repetitive task that you are good at. You are creating the kind of composure you naturally have when your mind is absorbed in a problem. A focused mind has no room for anxiety or for the effects of an overactive imagination. Once you have regained your mental balance, you can then face the problem at hand. At the first sign of any kind of fear, practice this technique until it becomes a habit. Being able to control your imagination at intense moments is a crucial skill.

Unintimidate yourself. Intimidation will always threaten your presence of mind. And it is a hard feeling to combat.

During World War II, the composer Dmitry Shostakovich and several of his colleagues were called into a meeting with the Russian ruler Joseph Stalin, who had commissioned them to write a new national anthem. Meetings with Stalin were terrifying; one misstep could lead you into a very dark alley. He would stare you down until you felt your throat tighten. And, as meetings with Stalin often did, this one took a bad turn: the ruler began to criticize one of the composers for his poor arrangement of his anthem. Scared silly, the man admitted he had used an arranger who had done a bad job. Here he was digging several graves: Clearly the poor arranger could be called to task. The composer was responsible for the hire, and he, too, could pay for the mistake. And what of the other composers, including Shostakovich? Stalin could be relentless once he smelled fear.

Shostakovich had heard enough: it was foolish, he said, to blame the arranger, who was mostly following orders. He then subtly redirected the conversation to a different subject–whether a composer should do his own orchestrations. What did Stalin think on the matter? Always eager to prove his expertise, Stalin swallowed the bait. The dangerous moment passed.

Shostakovich maintained his presence of mind in several ways. First, instead of letting Stalin intimidate him, he forced himself to see the man as he was: short, fat, ugly, unimaginative. The dictator’s famous piercing gaze was just a trick, a sign of his own insecurity. Second, Shostakovich faced up to Stalin, talking to him normally and straightforwardly. By his actions and tone of voice, the composer showed that he was not intimidated. Stalin fed off fear. If, without being aggressive or brazen, you showed no fear, he would generally leave you alone.

The key to staying unintimidated is to convince yourself that the person you’re facing is a mere mortal, no different from you–which is in fact the truth. See the person, not the myth. Imagine him or her as a child, as someone riddled with insecurities. Cutting the other person down to size will help you to keep your mental balance.

Develop your Fingerspitzengefuhl (fingertip feel). Presence of mind depends not only on your mind’s ability to come to your aid in difficult situations but also on the speed with which this happens. Waiting until the next day to think of the right action to take does you no good at all. “Speed” here means responding to circumstances with rapidity and making lightning-quick decisions. This power is often read as a kind of intuition, what the Germans call “Fingerspitzengefuhl” (fingertip feel).

Erwin Rommel, who led the German tank campaign in North Africa during World War II, had great fingertip feel. He could sense when the Allies would attack and from what direction. In choosing a line of advance, he had an uncanny feel for his enemy’s weakness; at the start of a battle, he could intuit his enemy’s strategy before it unfolded.

To Rommel’s men their general seemed to have a genius for war, and he did possess a quicker mind than most. But Rommel also did things to enhance his quickness, things that reinforced his feel for battle.

First, he devoured information about the enemy–from details about its weaponry to the psychological traits of the opposing general.

Second, he made himself an expert in tank technology, so that he could get the most out of his equipment.

Third, he not only memorized maps of the North African desert but would fly over it, at great risk, to get a bird’s-eye view of the battlefield.

Finally, he personalized his relationship with his men. He always had a sense of their morale and knew exactly what he could expect from them.

Rommel didn’t just study his men, his tanks, the terrain, and the enemy–he got inside their skin, understood the spirit that animated them, what made them tick. Having felt his way into these things, in battle he entered a state of mind in which he did not have to think consciously of the situation. The totality of what was going on was in his blood, at his fingertips.

He had Fingerspitzengefuhl.

Whether or not you have the mind of a Rommel, there are things you can do to help you respond faster and bring out that intuitive feel that all animals possess. Deep knowledge of the terrain will let you process information faster than your enemy, a tremendous advantage. Getting a feel for the spirit of men and material, thinking your way into them instead of looking at them from outside, will help to put you in a different frame of mind, less conscious and forced, more unconscious and intuitive. Get your mind into the habit of making lightning-quick decisions, trusting your fingertip feel. Your mind will advance in a kind of mental blitzkrieg, moving past your opponents before they realize what has hit them.

Finally, do not think of presence of mind as a quality useful only in periods of adversity, something to switch on and off as you need it. Cultivate it as an everyday condition. Confidence, fearlessness, and self-reliance are as crucial in times of peace as in times of war. Franklin Delano Roosevelt showed his tremendous mental toughness and grace under pressure not only during the crises of the Depression and World War II but in everyday situations–in his dealings with his family, his cabinet, his own polio-racked body. The better you get at the game of war, the more your warrior frame of mind will do for you in daily life. When a crisis does come, your mind will already be calm and prepared. Once presence of mind becomes a habit, it will never abandon you.

The man with centre has calm, unprejudiced judgment. He knows what is important, what unimportant. He meets realilty serenely and with detachment keeping his sense of proportion. The Hara no aru hito [man with centre] faces life calmly, is tranquil, ready for anything.... Nothing upsets him.

If suddenly fire breaks out and people begin to shout in wild confusion [he] does the right thing immediately and quietly, he ascertains the direction of the wind, rescues what is most important, fetches water, and behaves unhesitatingly in the way the emergency demands.

The Hara no nai hito is the opposite of all this.

The Hara no nai hito applies to the man without calm judgment. He lacks the measure which should be second nature. Therefore he reacts haphazardly and subectively, arbitrarily and capriciously. He cannot distinguish between important and unimportant, essential and unessential.

His judgment is not based upon facts but on temporary conditions and rests on subjective foundations, such as moods, whims, "nerves."

The Hara no nai hito is easily startled, is nervous, not because he is particularly sensitive but because he lacks that inner axis which would prevent his being thrown off centre and which would enable him to deal with situations realistically....

Hara [centre, belly] is only in slight measure innate. It is above all the result of persistent self-training and discipline, in fact the fruit of responsible, individual development.

That is what the Japanese means when he speaks of the Hara no dekita hito , the man who has accomplished or finished his belly, that is, himself: for he is mature. If this development does not take place, we have the Hara no dekita inai hito, someone who has not developed, who has remained immature, who is too young in the psychological sense. The Japanese also say Hara no dekita inai hito wa hito no ue ni tatsu koto ga dekinai: the man who has not finished his belly cannot stand above others (is not fit for leadership).

HARA: THE VITAL CENTRE, KARLFRIED GRAF VON DURCKHEIM, 1962

Authority: A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82)

REVERSAL

It is never good to lose your presence of mind, but you can use those moments when it is under threat to know how to act in the future. You must find a way to put yourself in the thick of battle, then watch yourself in action. Look for your own weaknesses, and think about how to compensate for them. People who have never lost their presence of mind are actually in danger: someday they will be taken by surprise, and the fall will be harsh. All great generals, from Julius Caesar to Patton, have at some point lost their nerve and then have been the stronger for winning it back. The more you have lost your balance, the more you will know about how to right yourself.

You do not want to lose your presence of mind in key situations, but it is a wise course to find a way to make your enemies lose theirs. Take what throws you off balance and impose it on them. Make them act before they are ready. Surprise them–nothing is more unsettling than the unexpected need to act. Find their weakness, what makes them emotional, and give them a double dose of it. The more emotional you can make them, the farther you will push them off course.

Conclusion

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Chapter 1, Part 2, of the 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene titled “Do not fight the last war: Embrace Change”

This is a full reprint in HTML of the second chapter (Chapter 2) of the first part (Part I) of the massive volume titled "The 33 Strategies of War". Written by Robert Greene (with emotional support from his cats). I read this book while in prison, and found much of what was written to be interesting, enjoyable, and pertinent to things going on in my life. I think that you will as well.

PART I

2. DO NOT FIGHT THE LAST WAR

THE GUERRILLA-WAR-OF-THE-MIND STRATEGY

What most often weighs you down and brings you misery is the past, in the form of unnecessary attachments, repetitions of tired formulas, and the memory of old victories and defeats. You must consciously wage war against the past and force yourself to react to the present moment. Be ruthless on yourself; do not repeat the same tired methods. Sometimes you must force yourself to strike out in new directions, even if they involve risk. What you may lose in comfort and security, you will gain in surprise, making it harder for your enemies to tell what you will do. Wage guerrilla war on your mind, allowing no static lines of defense, no exposed citadels—make everything fluid and mobile.

Theory cannot equip the mind with formulas for solving problems, nor can it mark the narrow path on which the sole solution is supposed to lie by planting a hedge of principles on either side. But it can give the mind insight into the great mass of phenomena and of their relationships, then leave it free to rise into the higher realms of action. There the mind can use its innate talents to capacity, combining them all so as to seize on what is right and true as though this were a single idea formed by their concentrated pressure--as though it were a response to the immediate challenge rather than a product of thought.

ON WAR, CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ, 1780-1831

THE LAST WAR

No one has risen to power faster than Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821). In 1793 he went from captain in the French revolutionary army to brigadier general. In 1796 he became the leader of the French force in Italy fighting the Austrians, whom he crushed that year and again three years later. He became first consul of France in 1801, emperor in 1804. In 1805 he humiliated the Austrian and Russian armies at the Battle of Austerlitz.

For many, Napoleon was more than a great general; he was a genius, a god of war. Not everyone was impressed, though: there were Prussian generals who thought he had merely been lucky. Where Napoleon was rash and aggressive, they believed, his opponents had been timid and weak. If he ever faced the Prussians, he would be revealed as a great fake.

Among these Prussian generals was Friedrich Ludwig, prince of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen (1746- 1818). Hohenlohe came from one of Germany’s oldest aristocratic families, one with an illustrious military record. He had begun his career young, serving under Frederick the Great (1712-86) himself, the man who had single-handedly made Prussia a great power. Hohenlohe had risen through the ranks, becoming a general at fifty–young by Prussian standards.

To Hohenlohe success in war depended on organization, discipline, and the use of superior strategies developed by trained military minds. The Prussians exemplified all of these virtues. Prussian soldiers drilled relentlessly until they could perform elaborate maneuvers as precisely as a machine. Prussian generals intensely studied the victories of Frederick the Great; war for them was a mathematical affair, the application of timeless principles. To the generals Napoleon was a Corsican hothead leading an unruly citizens’ army. Superior in knowledge and skill, they would out-strategize him. The French would panic and crumble in the face of the disciplined Prussians; the Napoleonic myth would lie in ruins, and Europe could return to its old ways.

In August 1806, Hohenlohe and his fellow generals finally got what they wanted: King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, tired of Napoleon’s broken promises, decided to declare war on him in six weeks. In the meantime he asked his generals to come up with a plan to crush the French.

Hohenlohe was ecstatic.

This campaign would be the climax of his career. He had been thinking for years about how to beat Napoleon, and he presented his plan at the generals’ first strategy session: precise marches would place the army at the perfect angle from which to attack the French as they advanced through southern Prussia. An attack in oblique formation–Frederick the Great’s favorite tactic–would deliver a devastating blow. The other generals, all in their sixties and seventies, presented their own plans, but these too were merely variants on the tactics of Frederick the Great. Discussion turned into argument; several weeks went by. Finally the king had to step in and create a compromise strategy that would satisfy all of his generals.

He [Baron Antoine-Henri de Jomini] --often quite arbitrarily--presses [the deeds of Napoleon] into a system which he foists on Napoleon, and, in doing so, completely fails to see what, above all, really constitutes the greatness of this captain--namely, the reckless boldness of his operations, where, scoffing at all theory, he always tried to do what suited each occasion best.

FRIEDRICH VON BERNHARDI, 1849-1930

A feeling of exuberance swept the country, which would soon relive the glory years of Frederick the Great. The generals realized that Napoleon knew about their plans–he had excellent spies–but the Prussians had a head start, and once their war machine started to move, nothing could stop it.

On October 5, a few days before the king was to declare war, disturbing news reached the generals.

A reconnaissance mission revealed that divisions of Napoleon’s army, which they had believed was dispersed, had marched east, merged, and was massing deep in southern Prussia. The captain who had led the scouting mission reported that the French soldiers were marching with packs on their backs: where the Prussians used slow-moving wagons to provision their troops, the French carried their own supplies and moved with astonishing speed and mobility.

Before the generals had time to adjust their plans, Napoleon’s army suddenly wheeled north, heading straight for Berlin, the heart of Prussia. The generals argued and dithered, moving their troops here and there, trying to decide where to attack. A mood of panic set in. Finally the king ordered a retreat: the troops would reassemble to the north and attack Napoleon’s flank as he advanced toward Berlin. Hohenlohe was in charge of the rear guard, protecting the Prussians’ retreat.

On October 14, near the town of Jena, Napoleon caught up with Hohenlohe, who finally faced the battle he had wanted so desperately. The numbers on both sides were equal, but while the French were an unruly force, fighting pell-mell and on the run, Hohenlohe kept his troops in tight order, orchestrating them like a corps de ballet. The fighting went back and forth until finally the French captured the village of Vierzehnheiligen.

Hohenlohe ordered his troops to retake the village. In a ritual dating back to Frederick the Great, a drum major beat out a cadence and the Prussian soldiers, their colors flying, re-formed their positions in perfect parade order, preparing to advance. They were in an open plain, though, and Napoleon’s men were behind garden walls and on the house roofs. The Prussians fell like ninepins to the French marksmen. Confused, Hohenlohe ordered his soldiers to halt and change formation. The drums beat again, the Prussians marched with magnificent precision, always a sight to behold–but the French kept shooting, decimating the Prussian line.

Never had Hohenlohe seen such an army. The French soldiers were like demons. Unlike his disciplined soldiers, they moved on their own, yet there was method to their madness. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, they rushed forward on both sides, threatening to surround the Prussians. The prince ordered a retreat. The Battle of Jena was over.

Like a house of cards, the Prussians quickly crumbled, one fortress falling after another. The king fled east. In a matter of days, virtually nothing remained of the once mighty Prussian army.

THE BAT AND THE HOUSE-FERRETS

A bat fell to the ground and was caught by a house-ferret. Realizing that she was on the point of being killed, she begged for her life. The house-ferret said to her that she couldn't let her go, for ferrets were supposed to be natural enemies to all birds. The bat replied that she herself was not a bird, but a mouse. She managed to extricate herself from her danger by this means. Eventually, falling a second time, the bat was caught by another house-ferret. Again she pleaded to the ferret not to eat her. The second ferret declared that she absolutely detested all mice. But the bat positively affirmed that she was not a mouse but a bat. And so she was released again. And that was how she saved herself from death twice by a mere change of name. This fable shows that it is not always necessary to confine ourselves to the same tactics. But, on the contrary, if we are adaptable to circumstances we can better escape danger.

FABLES, AESOP, SIXTH CENTURY B.C.

Interpretation

The reality facing the Prussians in 1806 was simple: they had fallen fifty years behind the times. Their generals were old, and instead of responding to present circumstances, they were repeating formulas that had worked in the past.

Their army moved slowly, and their soldiers were automatons on parade. The Prussian generals had many signs to warn them of disaster: their army had not performed well in its recent engagements, a number of Prussian officers had preached reform, and, last but not least, they had had ten years to study Napoleon–his innovative strategies and the speed and fluidity with which his armies converged on the enemy. Reality was staring them in the face, yet they chose to ignore it. Indeed, they told themselves that Napoleon was the one who was doomed.

You might find the Prussian army just an interesting historical example, but in fact you are likely marching in the same direction yourself. What limits individuals as well as nations is the inability to confront reality, to see things for what they are. As we grow older, we become more rooted in the past. Habit takes over. Something that has worked for us before becomes a doctrine, a shell to protect us from reality. Repetition replaces creativity. We rarely realize we’re doing this, because it is almost impossible for us to see it happening in our own minds. Then suddenly a young Napoleon crosses our path, a person who does not respect tradition, who fights in a new way. Only then do we see that our ways of thinking and responding have fallen behind the times.

Never take it for granted that your past successes will continue into the future. Actually, your past successes are your biggest obstacle: every battle, every war, is different, and you cannot assume that what worked before will work today. You must cut yourself loose from the past and open your eyes to the present. Your tendency to fight the last war may lead to your final war.

When in 1806 the Prussian generals...plunged into the open jaws of disaster by using Frederick the Great's oblique order of battle, it was not just a case of a style that had outlived its usefulness but the most extreme poverty of the imagination to which routine has ever led. The result was that the Prussian army under Hohenlohe was ruined more completely than any army has ever been ruined on the battlefield.

--Carl von Clausewitz, ON WAR (1780-1831)

THE PRESENT WAR

In 1605, Miyamoto Musashi, a samurai who had made a name for himself as a swordsman at the young age of twenty-one, was challenged to a duel. The challenger, a young man named Matashichiro, came from the Yoshioka family, a clan itself renowned for swordsmanship. Earlier that year Musashi had defeated Matashichiro’s father, Genzaemon, in a duel. Days later he had killed Genzaemon’s younger brother in another duel. The Yoshioka family wanted revenge.

I never read any treatises on strategy.... When we fight, we do not take any books with us.

MAO TSE-TUNG, 1893-1976

Musashi’s friends smelled a trap in Matashichiro’s challenge and offered to accompany him to the duel, but Musashi went alone. In his earlier fights with the Yoshiokas, he had angered them by showing up hours late; this time, though, he came early and hid in the trees. Matashichiro arrived with a small army.

Musashi would “arrive way behind schedule as usual,” one of them said, “but that trick won’t work with us anymore!” Confident in their ambush, Matashichiro’s men lay down and hid in the grass. Suddenly Musashi leaped out from behind his tree and shouted, “I’ve been waiting long enough. Draw your sword!”

In one swift stroke, he killed Matashichiro, then took a position at an angle to the other men. All of them jumped to their feet, but they were caught off guard and startled, and instead of surrounding him, they stood in a broken line. Musashi simply ran down the line, killing the dazed men one after another in a matter of seconds.

Musashi’s victory sealed his reputation as one of Japan’s greatest swordsmen. He now roamed the country looking for suitable challenges. In one town he heard of an undefeated warrior named Baiken whose weapons were a sickle and a long chain with a steel ball at the end of it. Musashi wanted to see these weapons in action, but Baiken refused: the only way he could see them work, Baiken said, was by fighting a duel.

REFRESHING THE MIND When you and your opponent are engaged in combat which is dragging on with no end in sight, it is crucial that you should come up with a completely different technique. By refreshing your mind and techniques as you continue to fight your opponent, you will find an appropriate rhythm-timing with which to defeat him. Whenever you and your opponent become stagnant, you must immediately employ a different method of dealing with him in order to overcome him.

THE BOOK OF FIVE RINGS, MIYAMOTO MUSASHI, 1584-1645

Once again Musashi’s friends chose the safe route: they urged him to walk away. No one had come close to defeating Baiken, whose weapons were unbeatable: swinging his ball in the air to build up momentum, he would force his victim backward with a relentless charge, then hurl the ball at the man’s face. His opponent would have to fend off the ball and chain, and while his sword arm was occupied, in that brief instant Baiken would slash him with the sickle across his neck.

Ignoring the warnings of his friends, Musashi challenged Baiken and showed up at the man’s tent with two swords, one long, one short. Baiken had never seen someone fight with two swords. Also, instead of letting Baiken charge him, Musashi charged first, pushing his foe back on his heels. Baiken hesitated to throw the ball, for Musashi could parry it with one sword and strike him with the other. As he looked for an opening, Musashi suddenly knocked him off balance with a blow of the short sword and then, in a split second, followed with a thrust of the long one, stabbing him through and killing the once undefeated master Baiken.

A few years later, Musashi heard about a great samurai named Sasaki Ganryu, who fought with a very long sword–a startlingly beautiful weapon, which seemed possessed of some warlike spirit. This fight would be Musashi’s ultimate test. Ganryu accepted his challenge; the duel would take place on a little island near the samurai’s home.

It is a disease to be obsessed by the thought of winning. It is also a disease to be obsessed by the thought of employing your swordsmanship. So it is to be obsessed by the thought of using everything you have learned, and to be obsessed by the thought of attacking. It is also a disease to be obsessed and stuck with the thought of ridding yourself of any of these diseases. A disease here is an obsessed mind that dwells on one thing. Because all these diseases are in your mind, you must get rid of them to put your mind in order.

TAKUAN, JAPAN, 1573-1645

On the morning of the duel, the island was packed. A fight between such warriors was unprecedented. Ganryu arrived on time, but Musashi was late, very late. An hour went by, then two; Ganryu was furious.

Finally a boat was spotted approaching the island. Its passenger was lying down, half asleep, it seemed, whittling at a long wooden oar. It was Musashi. He seemed lost in thought, staring into the clouds. When the boat came to shore, he tied a dirty towel around his head and jumped out of the boat, brandishing the long oar–longer than Ganryu’s famous sword. This strange man had come to the biggest fight of his life with an oar for a sword and a towel for a headband.

Ganryu called out angrily, “Are you so frightened of me that you have broken your promise to be here by eight?” Musashi said nothing but stepped closer. Ganryu drew his magnificent sword and threw the sheath onto the sand. Musashi smiled: “Sasaki, you have just sealed your doom.” “Me? Defeated? Impossible!” “What victor on earth,” replied Musashi, “would abandon his sheath to the sea?” This enigmatic remark only made Ganryu angrier.

Then Musashi charged, aiming his sharpened oar straight for his enemy’s eyes. Ganryu quickly raised his sword and struck at Musashi’s head but missed, only cutting the towel headband in two. He had never missed before. In almost the same instant, Musashi brought down his wooden sword, knocking Ganryu off his feet. The spectators gasped. As Ganryu struggled up, Musashi killed him with a blow to the head. Then, after bowing politely to the men officiating over the duel, he got back into the boat and left as calmly as he had arrived.

From that moment on, Musashi was considered a swordsman without peer.

Anyone can plan a campaign, but few are capable of waging war, because only a true military genius can handle the developments and circumstances.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, 1769-1821

Interpretation

Miyamoto Musashi, author of The Book of Five Rings, won all his duels for one reason: in each instance he adapted his strategy to his opponent and to the circumstances of the moment.

With Matashichiro he decided it was time to arrive early, which he hadn’t done in his previous fights. Victory against superior numbers depended on surprise, so he leaped up when his opponents lay down; then, once he had killed their leader, he set himself at an angle that invited them to charge at him instead of surrounding him, which would have been much more dangerous for him.

With Baiken it was simply a matter of using two swords and then crowding his space, giving him no time to react intelligently to this novelty.

With Ganryu he set out to infuriate and humiliate his haughty opponent– the wooden sword, the nonchalant attitude, the dirty-towel headband, the enigmatic remark, the charge at the eyes.

Musashi’s opponents depended on brilliant technique, flashy swords, and unorthodox weapons. That is the same as fighting the last war: instead of responding to the moment, they relied on training, technology, and what had worked before.

Musashi, who had grasped the essence of strategy when he was still very young, turned their rigidity into their downfall. His first thought was of the gambit that would take this particular opponent most by surprise. Then he would anchor himself in the moment: having set his opponent off balance with something unexpected, he would watch carefully, then respond with another action, usually improvised, that would turn mere disequilibrium into defeat and death.

Thunder and wind: the image of DURATION. Thus the superior man stands firm And does not change his direction. Thunder rolls, and the wind blows; both are examples of extreme mobility and so are seemingly the very opposite of duration, but the laws governing their appearance and subsidence, their coming and going, endure. In the same way the independence of the superior man is not based on rigidity and immobility of character. He always keeps abreast of the time and changes with it. What endures is the unswerving directive, the inner law of his being, which determines all his actions.

THE I CHING, CHINA, CIRCA EIGHTH CENTURY B.C.

In preparing yourself for war, you must rid yourself of myths and misconceptions. Strategy is not a question of learning a series of moves or ideas to follow like a recipe; victory has no magic formula. Ideas are merely nutrients for the soil: they lie in your brain as possibilities, so that in the heat of the moment they can inspire a direction, an appropriate and creative response. Let go of all fetishes–books, techniques, formulas, flashy weapons–and learn to become your own strategist.

Thus one's victories in battle cannot be repeated--they take their form in response to inexhaustibly changing circumstances.

--Sun-tzu (fourth century B.C.)

KEYS TO WARFARE

In looking back on an unpleasant or disagreeable experience, the thought inevitably occurs to us: if only we had said or done x instead of y, if only we could do it over.

Many a general has lost his head in the heat of battle and then, looking back, has thought of the one tactic, the one maneuver, that would have changed it all.

Even Prince Hohenlohe, years later, could see how he had botched the retaking of Vierzehnheiligen.

The problem, though, is not that we think of the solution only when it is too late. The problem is that we imagine that knowledge is what was lacking: if only we had known more, if only we had thought it through more thoroughly.

That is precisely the wrong approach.

What makes us go astray in the first place is that we are unattuned to the present moment, insensitive to the circumstances. We are listening to our own thoughts, reacting to things that happened in the past, applying theories and ideas that we digested long ago but that have nothing to do with our predicament in the present. More books, theories, and thinking only make the problem worse.

My policy is to have no policy.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 1809-1865

Understand: the greatest generals, the most creative strategists, stand out not because they have more knowledge but because they are able, when necessary, to drop their preconceived notions and focus intensely on the present moment. That is how creativity is sparked and opportunities are seized. Knowledge, experience, and theory have limitations: no amount of thinking in advance can prepare you for the chaos of life, for the infinite possibilities of the moment. The great philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz called this “friction”: the difference between our plans and what actually happens. Since friction is inevitable, our minds have to be capable of keeping up with change and adapting to the unexpected. The better we can adapt our thoughts to changing circumstances, the more realistic our responses to them will be. The more we lose ourselves in predigested theories and past experiences, the more inappropriate and delusional our response.

It can be valuable to analyze what went wrong in the past, but it is far more important to develop the capacity to think in the moment. In that way you will make far fewer mistakes to analyze.

If you put an empty gourd on the water and touch it, it will slip to one side. No matter how you try, it won't stay in one spot. The mind of someone who has reached the ultimate state does not stay with anything, even for a second. It is like an empty gourd on the water that is pushed around.

TAKUAN, JAPAN, 1573-1645

Think of the mind as a river: the faster it flows, the better it keeps up with the present and responds to change. The faster it flows, also the more it refreshes itself and the greater its energy. Obsessional thoughts, past experiences (whether traumas or successes), and preconceived notions are like boulders or mud in this river, settling and hardening there and damming it up. The river stops moving; stagnation sets in. You must wage constant war on this tendency in the mind.

The first step is simply to be aware of the process and of the need to fight it. The second is to adopt a few tactics that might help you to restore the mind’s natural flow.

Reexamine all your cherished beliefs and principles. When Napoleon was asked what principles of war he followed, he replied that he followed none. His genius was his ability to respond to circumstances, to make the most of what he was given–he was the supreme opportunist. Your only principle, similarly, should be to have no principles. To believe that strategy has inexorable laws or timeless rules is to take up a rigid, static position that will be your undoing. Of course the study of history and theory can broaden your vision of the world, but you have to combat theory’s tendency to harden into dogma. Be brutal with the past, with tradition, with the old ways of doing things. Declare war on sacred cows and voices of convention in your own head.

Our education is often a problem. During World War II, the British fighting the Germans in the deserts of North Africa were well trained in tank warfare; you might say they were indoctrinated with theories about it. Later in the campaign, they were joined by American troops who were much less educated in these tactics. Soon, though, the Americans began to fight in a way that was equal if not superior to the British style; they adapted to the mobility of this new kind of desert combat. According to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel himself, the leader of the German army in North Africa,

"The Americans...profited far more than the British from their experience in Africa, thus confirming the axiom that education is easier than reeducation."

What Rommel meant was that education tends to burn precepts into the mind that are hard to shake. In the midst of combat, the trained mind may fall a step behind–focusing more on learned rules than on the changing circumstances of battle.

When you are faced with a new situation, it is often best to imagine that you know nothing and that you need to start learning all over again. Clearing your head of everything you thought you knew, even your most cherished ideas, will give you the mental space to be educated by your present experience–the best school of all. You will develop your own strategic muscles instead of depending on other people’s theories and books.

Erase the memory of the last war. The last war you fought is a danger, even if you won it. It is fresh in your mind. If you were victorious, you will tend to repeat the strategies you just used, for success makes us lazy and complacent; if you lost, you may be skittish and indecisive.

Do not think about the last war; you do not have the distance or the detachment. Instead do whatever you can to blot it from your mind. During the Vietnam War, the great North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap had a simple rule of thumb: after a successful campaign, he would convince himself that it had actually been a failure. As a result he never got drunk on his success, and he never repeated the same strategy in the next battle. Rather he had to think through each situation anew.

Ted Williams, perhaps baseball’s greatest pure hitter, made a point of always trying to forget his last at-bat. Whether he’d gotten a home run or a strikeout, he put it behind him. No two at-bats are the same, even against the same pitcher, and Williams wanted an open mind. He would not wait for the next at-bat to start forgetting: the minute he got back to the dugout, he started focusing on what was happening in the game taking place. Attention to the details of the present is by far the best way to crowd out the past and forget the last war.

Keep the mind moving. When we were children, our minds never stopped. We were open to new experiences and absorbed as much of them as possible. We learned fast, because the world around us excited us. When we felt frustrated or upset, we would find some creative way to get what we wanted and then quickly forget the problem as something new crossed our path.

All the greatest strategists–Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Musashi–were childlike in this respect. Sometimes, in fact, they even acted like children.

The reason is simple: superior strategists see things as they are. They are highly sensitive to dangers and opportunities. Nothing stays the same in life, and keeping up with circumstances as they change requires a great deal of mental fluidity. Great strategists do not act according to preconceived ideas; they respond to the moment, like children. Their minds are always moving, and they are always excited and curious. They quickly forget the past–the present is much too interesting.

Defeat is bitter. Bitter to the common soldier, but trebly bitter to his general. The soldier may comfort himself with the thought that, whatever the result, he has done his duty faithfully and steadfastly, but the commander has failed in his duty if he has not won victory--for that is his duty. 

He has no other comparable to it. He will go over in his mind the events of the campaign. "Here," he will think, "I went wrong; here I took counsel of my fears when I should have been bold; there I should have waited to gather strength, not struck piecemeal; at such a moment I failed to grasp opportunity when it was presented to me." He will remember the soldiers whom he sent into the attack that failed and who did not come back. 

He will recall the look in the eyes of men who trusted him. "I have failed them," he will say to himself, "and failed my country!" He will see himself for what he is--a defeated general. 

In a dark hour he will turn in upon himself and question the very foundations of his leadership and manhood. And then he must stop! For if he is ever to command in battle again, he must shake off these regrets, and stamp on them, as they claw at his will and his self-confidence. He must beat off these attacks he delivers against himself, and cast out the doubts born of failure. 

Forget them, and remember only the lessons to be learned from defeat--they are more than from victory.

DEFEAT INTO VICTORY, WILLIAM SLIM, 1897-1970

The Greek thinker Aristotle thought that life was defined by movement. What does not move is dead. What has speed and mobility has more possibilities, more life. We all start off with the mobile mind of a Napoleon, but as we get older, we tend to become more like the Prussians. You may think that what you’d like to recapture from your youth is your looks, your physical fitness, your simple pleasures, but what you really need is the fluidity of mind you once possessed.

Whenever you find your thoughts revolving around a particular subject or idea–an obsession, a resentment–force them past it. Distract yourself with something else. Like a child, find something new to be absorbed by, something worthy of concentrated attention. Do not waste time on things you cannot change or influence. Just keep moving.

Absorb the spirit of the times. Throughout the history of warfare, there have been classic battles in which the past has confronted the future in a hopeless mismatch. It happened in the seventh century, when the Persians and Byzantines confronted the invincible armies of Islam, with their new form of desert fighting; or in the first half of the thirteenth century, when the Mongols used relentless mobility to overwhelm the heavy armies of the Russians and Europeans; or in 1806, when Napoleon crushed the Prussians at Jena.

In each case the conquering army developed a way of fighting that maximized a new form of technology or a new social order.

You can reproduce this effect on a smaller scale by attuning yourself to the spirit of the times. Developing antennae for the trends that have yet to crest takes work and study, as well as the flexibility to adapt to those trends.

As you get older, it is best to periodically alter your style.

In the golden age of Hollywood, most actresses had very short careers. But Joan Crawford fought the studio system and managed to have a remarkably long career by constantly changing her style, going from siren to noir heroine to cult queen.

Instead of staying sentimentally attached to some fashion of days gone by, she was able to sense a rising trend and go with it. By constantly adapting and changing your style, you will avoid the pitfalls of your previous wars. Just when people feel they know you, you will change.

Reverse course. The great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky suffered from epilepsy. Just before a seizure, he would experience a moment of intense ecstasy, which he described as a feeling of being suddenly flooded with reality, a momentary vision of the world exactly as it is.

Later he would find himself getting depressed, as this vision was crowded out by the habits and routines of daily life. During these depressions, wanting to feel that closeness to reality again, he would go to the nearest casino and gamble away all his money.

There reality would overwhelm him; comfort and routine would be gone, stale patterns broken. Having to rethink everything, he would get his creative energy back. This was the closest he could deliberately come to the sense of ecstasy he got through epilepsy.

Dostoyevsky’s method was a little extreme, but sometimes you have to shake yourself up, break free from the hold of the past.

This can take the form of reversing your course, doing the opposite of what you would normally do in any given situation, putting yourself in some unusual circumstance, or literally starting over. In those situations the mind has to deal with a new reality, and it snaps to life. The change may be alarming, but it is also refreshing–even exhilarating.

To know that one is in a certain condition, in a certain state, is already a process of liberation; but a man who is not aware of his condition, of his struggle, tries to be something other than he is, which brings about habit. So, then, let us keep in mind that we want to examine what is, to observe and be aware of exactly what is the actual, without giving it any slant, without giving it an interpretation. It needs an extraordinarily astute mind, an extraordinarily pliable heart, to be aware of and to follow what is; because what is is constantly moving, constantly undergoing a transformation, and if the mind is tethered to belief, to knowledge, it ceases to pursue, it ceases to follow the swift movement of what is. What is is not static, surely--it is constantly moving, as you will see if you observe it very closely. To follow it, you need a very swift mind and a pliable heart--which are denied when the mind is static, fixed in a belief, in a prejudice, in an identification; and a mind and heart that are dry cannot follow easily, swiftly, that which is.

JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI, 1895-1986

Relationships often develop a certain tiresome predictability. You do what you usually do, other people respond the way they usually do, and around it goes. If you reverse course, act in a novel manner, you alter the entire dynamic. Do this every so often to break up the relationship’s stale patterns and open it to new possibilities.

Think of your mind as an army.

Armies must adapt to the complexity and chaos of modern war by becoming more fluid and maneuverable. The ultimate extension of this evolution is guerrilla warfare, which exploits chaos by making disorder and unpredictability a strategy.

The guerrilla army never stops to defend a particular place or town; it wins by always moving, staying one step ahead. By following no set pattern, it gives the enemy no target.

The guerrilla army never repeats the same tactic. It responds to the situation, the moment, the terrain where it happens to find itself. There is no front, no concrete line of communication or supply, no slow-moving wagon.

The guerrilla army is pure mobility.

That is the model for your new way of thinking. Apply no tactic rigidly; do not let your mind settle into static positions, defending any particular place or idea, repeating the same lifeless maneuvers. Attack problems from new angles, adapting to the landscape and to what you’re given. By staying in constant motion you show your enemies no target to aim at. You exploit the chaos of the world instead of succumbing to it.

REVERSAL

There is never any value in fighting the last war. But while you’re eliminating that pernicious tendency, you must imagine that your enemy is trying to do the same–trying to learn from and adapt to the present.

Some of history’s worst military disasters have come not out of fighting the last war but out of assuming that that’s what your opponent will do.

When Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, he thought the United States had yet to recover from “Vietnam syndrome”–the fear of casualties and loss that had been so traumatic during the Vietnam period–and that it would either avoid war altogether or would fight in the same way it had, trying to win the fight from the air instead of on the ground.

He did not realize that the American military was ready for a new kind of war.

Remember: the loser in any battle may be too traumatized to fight again but may also learn from the experience and move on. Err on the side of caution; be ready. Never let your enemy surprise you in war.

Conclusion

My latest article (prior to this one) underlines this entire strategy. Which is WHY all the American Generals and Admirals are telling the politicians and neocons in Washington DC to “Stand Down”. They, those on K-street in Washington DC want to fight against China or Russia. But the generals strongly advise against it.

You can read about it here…

Pentagon Leaders are starting to shout-down the neocon war-hawks on K-street in Washington DC

Personally, the United States is in need of a shake-up, and maybe it’s time for a serious “house cleaning” in Washington DC as well. Maybe it would be a good thing to see Washington DC erased from the map. I am sure that the world would be a much calmer and nicer world.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my 33 Strategies of War index here..

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Chapter 1, Part I, of the 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene titled “Self-directed Warfare”

This is a full reprint in HTML of the first chapter (Chapter 1) of the first part (Part I) of the massive volume titled "The 33 Strategies of War". Written by Robert Greene (with emotional support from his cats). I read this book while in prison, and found much of what was written to be interesting, enjoyable, and pertinent to things going on in my life. I think that you will as well.

PART I

SELF-DIRECTED WARFARE

War, or any kind of conflict, is waged and won through strategy. Think of strategy as a series of lines and arrows aimed at a goal: at getting you to a certain point in the world, at helping you to attack a problem in your path, at figuring out how to encircle and destroy your enemy. Before directing these arrows at your enemies, however, you must first direct them at yourself.

Your mind is the starting point of all war and all strategy. A mind that is easily overwhelmed by emotion, that is rooted in the past instead of the present, that cannot see the world with clarity and urgency, will create strategies that will always miss the mark.

To become a true strategist, you must take three steps.

First, become aware of the weakness and illness that can take hold of the mind, warping its strategic powers. Second, declare a kind of war on yourself to make yourself move forward. Third, wage ruthless and continual battle on the enemies within you by applying certain strategies.

The following four chapters are designed to make you aware of the disorders that are probably flourishing in your mind right now and to arm you with specific strategies for eliminating them.

These chapters are arrows to aim at yourself. Once you have absorbed them through thought and practice, they will serve as a self-corrective device in all your future battles, freeing the grand strategist within you.

DECLARE WAR ON YOUR ENEMIES

THE POLARITY STRATEGY

Life is endless battle and conflict, and you cannot fight effectively unless you can identify your enemies. People are subtle and evasive, disguising their intentions, pretending to be on your side.

You need clarity. Learn to smoke out your enemies, to spot them by the signs and patterns that reveal hostility. Then, once you have them in your sights, inwardly declare war. As the opposite poles of a magnet create motion, your enemies–your opposites–can fill you with purpose and direction. As people who stand in your way, who represent what you loathe, people to react against, they are a source of energy. Do not be naive: with some enemies there can be no compromise, no
middle ground.

Then [Xenophon] got up, and first called together the under-officers of Proxenos.

When they were collected he said:

"Gentlemen, I cannot sleep and I don't think you can; and I can't lie here when I see what a plight we are in.

It is clear that the enemy did not show us open war until they thought they had everything well prepared; and no-one among us takes the pains to make the best possible resistance.

"Yet if we give way, and fall into the king's power, what do we expect our fate will be?

When his own half-brother was dead, the man cut off his head and cut off his hand and stuck them up on a pole.

We have no-one to plead for us, and we marched here to make the king a slave or to kill him if we could, and what do you think our fate will be?

Would he not go to all extremes of torture to make the whole world afraid of making war on him?

Why, we must do anything to keep out of his power!

While the truce lasted, I never ceased pitying ourselves, I never ceased congratulating the king and his army.

What a vast country I saw, how large, what endless provisions, what crowds of servants, how many cattle and sheep, what gold, what raiment!

But when I thought of these our soldiers--we had no share in all these good things unless we bought them, and few had anything left to buy with; and to procure anything without buying was debarred by our oaths.

While I reasoned like this, I sometimes feared the truce more than the war now.

"However, now they have broken the truce, there is an end both to their insolence and to our suspicion.

There lie all these good things before us, prizes for whichever side prove the better men; the gods are the judges of the contest, and they will be with us, naturally.... "

When you have appointed as many commanders as are wanted, assemble all the other soldiers and encourage them; that will be just what they want now.

Perhaps you have noticed yourselves how crestfallen they were when they came into camp, how crestfallen they went on guard; in such a state I don't know what you could do with them....

But if someone could turn their minds from wondering what will happen to them, and make them wonder what they could do, they will be much more cheerful.

You know, I am sure, that not numbers or strength brings victory in war; but whichever army goes into battle stronger in soul, their enemies generally cannot withstand them."

-ANABASIS: THE MARCH UP COUNTRY, XENOPHON, 430?-355? B.C.

THE INNER ENEMY

In the spring of 401 B.C., Xenophon, a thirty-year-old country gentleman who lived outside Athens, received an intriguing invitation: a friend was recruiting Greek soldiers to fight as mercenaries for Cyrus, brother of the Persian king Ataxerxes, and asked him to go along.

The request was somewhat unusual: the Greeks and the Persians had long been bitter enemies. Some eighty years earlier, in fact, Persia had tried to conquer Greece.

But the Greeks, renowned fighters, had begun to offer their services to the highest bidder, and within the Persian Empire there were rebellious
cities that Cyrus wanted to punish.

Greek mercenaries would be the perfect reinforcements in his large army.

Xenophon was not a soldier. In fact, he had led a coddled life, raising dogs and horses, traveling into Athens to talk philosophy with his good friend Socrates, living off his inheritance.

He wanted adventure, though, and here he had a chance to meet the great Cyrus, learn war, see Persia. Perhaps when it was all over, he would write a book. He would go not as a mercenary (he was too wealthy for that) but as a philosopher and historian.

After consulting the oracle at Delphi, he accepted the invitation.

Some 10,000 Greek soldiers joined Cyrus’s punitive expedition. The mercenaries were a motley crew from all over Greece, there for the money and the adventure.

They had a good time of it for a while, but a few months into the job, after leading them deep into Persia, Cyrus admitted his true purpose: he was marching on Babylon, mounting a civil war to unseat his brother and make himself
king.

Unhappy to be deceived, the Greeks argued and complained, but Cyrus offered them more money, and that quieted them.

The armies of Cyrus and Ataxerxes met on the plains of Cunaxa, not far from Babylon. Early in the battle, Cyrus was killed, putting a quick end to the war.

Now the Greeks’ position was suddenly precarious: having fought on the wrong side of a civil war, they were far from home and surrounded by hostile Persians.

They were soon told, however, that Ataxerxes had no quarrel with them.

His only desire was that they leave Persia as quickly as possible. He even sent them an envoy, the Persian commander Tissaphernes, to provision them and escort them back to Greece.

And so, guided by Tissaphernes and the Persian army, the mercenaries began the long trek home–some fifteen hundred miles.

A few days into the march, the Greeks had new fears: their supplies from the Persians were insufficient, and the route that Tissaphernes had chosen for them was problematic.

Could they trust these Persians?

They started to argue among themselves.

The Greek commander Clearchus expressed his soldiers’ concerns to Tissaphernes, who was sympathetic: Clearchus should bring his captains to a meeting at a neutral site, the Greeks would voice their grievances, and the two sides would come to an understanding.

Clearchus agreed and appeared the next day with his officers at the appointed time and place–where, however, a large contingent of Persians surrounded and arrested them.

They were beheaded that same day.

One man managed to escape and warn the Greeks of the Persian treachery.

That evening the Greek camp was a desolate place. Some men argued and accused; others slumped drunk to the ground. A few considered flight, but with their leaders dead, they felt doomed.

That night Xenophon, who had stayed mostly on the sidelines during the expedition, had a dream: a lightning bolt from Zeus set fire to his father’s house.

He woke up in a sweat.

It suddenly struck him: death was staring the Greeks in the face, yet they lay around moaning, despairing, arguing.

The problem was in their heads.

Fighting for money rather than for a purpose or cause, unable to distinguish between friend and foe, they had gotten lost.

The barrier between them and home was not rivers or mountains or the Persian army but their own muddled state of mind.

Xenophon didn’t want to die in this disgraceful way.

He was no military man, but he knew philosophy and the way men think, and he believed that if the Greeks concentrated on the enemies who wanted to kill them, they would become alert and creative.

If they focused on the vile treachery of the Persians, they would grow angry, and their anger would motivate them.

They had to stop being confused mercenaries and go back to being Greeks, the polar opposite of the faithless Persians.

What they needed was clarity and direction.

Xenophon decided to be Zeus’s lightning bolt, waking the men up and illuminating their way. He called a meeting of all the surviving officers and stated his plan:

We will declare war without parley on the Persians–no more thoughts of bargaining or debate.

We will waste no more time on argument or accusation among ourselves; every ounce of our energy will be spent on the Persians.

We will be as inventive and inspired as our ancestors at Marathon, who fought off a vastly larger Persian army.

We will burn our wagons, live off the land, move fast. We will not for one second lay down our arms or forget the dangers around us.

It is us or them, life or death, good or evil.

Should any man try to confuse us with clever talk or with vague ideas of appeasement, we will declare him too stupid and cowardly to be on our side and we will drive him away.

Let the Persians make us merciless.

We must be consumed with one idea: getting home alive.

The officers knew that Xenophon was right.

The next day a Persian officer came to see them, offering to act as an ambassador between them and Ataxerxes; following Xenophon’s counsel, he was quickly and rudely driven away.

It was now war and nothing else.

Roused to action, the Greeks elected leaders, Xenophon among them, and began the march home.

Forced to depend on their wits, they quickly learned to adapt to the terrain, to avoid battle, to move at night.

They successfully eluded the Persians, beating them to a key mountain pass and moving through it before they could be caught.

Although many enemy tribes still lay between them and Greece, the dreaded Persian army was now behind them.

It took several years, but almost all of them returned to Greece alive.

Political thought and political instinct prove themselves theoretically and practically in the ability to distinguish friend and enemy. The high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.

CARL SCHMITT, 1888-1985

Interpretation

Life is battle and struggle, and you will constantly find yourself facing bad situations, destructive relationships, dangerous engagements.

How you confront these difficulties will determine your fate.

As Xenophon said, your obstacles are not rivers or mountains or other people;
your obstacle is yourself.

If you feel lost and confused, if you lose your sense of direction, if you cannot tell the difference between friend and foe, you have only yourself to blame.

Think of yourself as always about to go into battle. Everything depends on your frame of mind and on how you look at the world.

A shift of perspective can transform you from a passive and confused mercenary into a motivated and creative fighter.

We are defined by our relationship to other people.

As children we develop an identity by differentiating ourselves from others, even to the point of pushing them away, rejecting them, rebelling.

The more clearly you recognize who you do not want to be, then, the clearer your sense of identity and purpose will be.

Without a sense of that polarity, without an enemy to react against, you are as lost as the Greek mercenaries.

Duped by other people’s treachery, you hesitate at the fatal moment and descend into whining and argument.

Focus on an enemy.

It can be someone who blocks your path or sabotages you, whether subtly or
obviously;

It can be someone who has hurt you or someone who has fought you unfairly;

It can be a value or an idea that you loathe and that you see in an individual or group.

It can be an abstraction: stupidity, smugness, vulgar materialism.

Do not listen to people who say that the distinction between friend and enemy is primitive and passe.

They are just disguising their fear of conflict behind a front of false warmth.

They are trying to push you off course, to infect you with the vagueness that inflicts them.

Once you feel clear and motivated, you will have space for true friendship and true compromise.

Your enemy is the polar star that guides you.

Given that direction, you can enter battle.

He that is not with me is against me.

--Luke 11:23

THE OUTER ENEMY

In the early 1970s, the British political system had settled into a comfortable pattern: the Labour Party would win an election, and then, the next time around, the Conservatives would win.

Back and forth the power went, all fairly genteel and civilized.

In fact, the two parties had come to resemble one another.

But when the Conservatives lost in 1974, some of them had had enough. Wanting
to shake things up, they proposed Margaret Thatcher as their leader. The party was divided that year, and Thatcher took advantage of the split and won the nomination.

I am by nature warlike.

To attack is among my instincts.

To be able to be an enemy, to be an enemy--that presupposes a strong nature, it is in any event a condition of every strong nature.

It needs resistances, consequently it seeks resistances....

The strength of one who attacks has in the opposition he needs a kind of gauge; every growth reveals itself in the seeking out of a powerful opponent--or problem: for a philosopher who is warlike also challenges problems to a duel.

The undertaking is to master, not any resistances that happen to present themselves, but those against which one has to bring all one's strength, suppleness and mastery of weapons--to master equal opponents.

-FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, 1844-1900

No one had ever seen a politician quite like Thatcher.

A woman in a world run by men, she was also proudly middle class–the daughter of a grocer–in the traditional party of the aristocracy.

Her clothes were prim, more like a housewife’s than a politician’s.

She had not been a player in the Conservative Party; in fact, she was on its right-wing fringes.

Most striking of all was her style: where other politicians were smooth and conciliatory, she confronted her opponents, attacking them directly. She had an appetite for battle.

Most politicians saw Thatcher’s election as a fluke and didn’t expect her to last. And in her first few years leading the party, when Labour was in power, she did little to change their opinion.

She railed against the socialist system, which in her mind had choked all initiative and was largely responsible for the decline of the British economy.

She criticized the Soviet Union at a time of detente.

Then, in the winter of 1978-79, several public-sector unions decided to strike.

Thatcher went on the warpath, linking the strikes to the Labour Party and Prime Minister James Callaghan.

This was bold, divisive talk, good for making the evening news–but not for winning elections.

You had to be gentle with the voters, reassure them, not frighten them. At least that was the conventional wisdom.

In 1979 the Labour Party called a general election.

Thatcher kept on the attack, categorizing the election as a crusade against socialism and as Great Britain’s last chance to modernize.

Callaghan was the epitome of the genteel politician, but Thatcher got under his skin.

He had nothing but disdain for this housewife-turned-politician, and he returned her fire: he agreed that the election was a watershed, for if Thatcher won, she would send the economy into shock.

The strategy seemed partly to work; Thatcher scared many voters, and the polls that tracked personal popularity showed that her numbers had fallen well below Callaghan’s.

At the same time, though, her rhetoric, and Callaghan’s response to it, polarized the electorate, which could finally see a sharp difference between the parties.

Dividing the public into left and right, she charged into the breach, sucking
in attention and attracting the undecided. She won a sizable victory.

Thatcher had bowled over the voters, but now, as prime minister, she would have to moderate her tone, heal the wounds–according to the polls, at any rate, that was what the public wanted.

But Thatcher as usual did the opposite, enacting budget cuts that went even deeper than she had proposed during the campaign.

As her policies played out, the economy did indeed go into shock, as
Callaghan had said it would, and unemployment soared.

Men in her own party, many of whom had by that point been resenting her treatment of them for years, began publicly to question her
abilities.

These men, whom she called the “wets,” were the most respected members of the
Conservative Party, and they were in a panic: she was leading the country into an economic disaster that they were afraid they would pay for with their careers.

Thatcher’s response was to purge them from her cabinet.

She seemed bent on pushing everyone away; her legion of enemies was growing, her poll numbers slipping still lower.

Surely the next election would be her last.

[Salvador Dali] had no time for those who did not agree with his principles, and took the war into the enemy camp by writing insulting letters to many of the friends he had made in the Residencia, calling them pigs. 

He happily compared himself to a clever bull avoiding the cowboys and generally had a great deal of fun stirring up and scandalizing almost every Catalan intellectual worthy of the name. Dali was beginning to burn his bridges with the zeal of an arsonist.... 

"We [Dali and the filmmaker Luis Bunuel] had resolved to send a poison pen letter to one of the great celebrities of Spain," 

Dali later told his biographer Alain Bosquet. 

"Our goal was pure subversion.... Both of us were strongly influenced by Nietzsche.... 

We hit upon two names: Manuel de Falla, the composer, and Juan Ramon Jimenez, the poet. We drew straws and Jimenez won.... 

So we composed a frenzied and nasty letter of incomparable violence and addressed it to Juan Ramon Jimenez. 

It read: 'Our Distinguished Friend: We believe it is our duty to inform you--disinterestedly--that your work is deeply repugnant to us because of its immorality, its hysteria, its arbitrary quality....' It caused Jimenez great pain...."

THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY: A BIOGRAPHY OF DALI, MEREDITH ETHERINGTON- SMITH, 1992

Then, in 1982, on the other side of the Atlantic, the military junta that ruled Argentina, needing a cause to distract the country from its many problems, invaded the Falkland Islands, a British possession to which, however, Argentina had a historical claim.

The officers of the junta felt certain that the British would abandon these islands, barren and remote.

But Thatcher did not hesitate: despite the distance–eight thousand miles–she sent a naval task force to the Falklands.

Labour leaders attacked her for this pointless and costly war.

Many in her own party were terrified; if the attempt to retake the islands failed, the party would be ruined.

Thatcher was more alone than ever.

But much of the public now saw her qualities, which had seemed so irritating, in a new light: her obstinacy became courage, nobility.

Compared to the dithering, pantywaisted, careerist men around her, Thatcher seemed resolute and confident.

The British successfully won back the Falklands, and Thatcher stood taller than ever. Suddenly the country’s economic and social problems were forgotten.

Thatcher now dominated the scene, and in the next two elections she crushed Labour.

Interpretation

Margaret Thatcher came to power as an outsider: a middle-class woman, a right-wing radical. The first instinct of most outsiders who attain power is to become insiders–life on the outside is hard–but in doing so they lose their identity, their difference, the thing that makes them stand out in the public eye.

If Thatcher had become like the men around her, she would simply have been
replaced by yet another man.

Her instinct was to stay an outsider.

In fact, she pushed being an outsider as far as it could go: she set herself up as one woman against an army of men.

At every step of the way, to give her the contrast she needed, Thatcher marked out an opponent: the socialists, the wets, the Argentineans.

These enemies helped to define her image as determined, powerful, self-sacrificing.

Thatcher was not seduced by popularity, which is ephemeral and superficial.

Pundits might obsess over popularity numbers, but in the mind of the voter–which, for a politician, is the field of battle–a dominating presence has more pull than does likability. Let some of the public hate you; you cannot please everyone.

Your enemies, those you stand sharply against, will help you to forge a support base that will not desert you.

Do not crowd into the center, where everyone else is; there is no room to fight in a crowd.

Polarize people, drive some of them away, and create a space for battle.

Everything in life conspires to push you into the center, and not just politically.

The center is the realm of compromise.

Getting along with other people is an important skill to have, but it comes with a danger: by always seeking the path of least resistance, the path of conciliation, you forget who you are, and you sink into the center with everyone else. Instead see yourself as a fighter, an outsider surrounded by enemies.

Constant battle will keep you strong and alert. It will help to define what you believe in, both for yourself and for others.

Do not worry about antagonizing people; without antagonism there is no battle, and without battle, there is no chance of victory.

Do not be lured by the need to be liked: better to be respected, even feared.

Victory over your enemies will bring you a more lasting popularity.

The opposition of a member to an associate is no purely negative social factor, if only because such opposition is often the only means for making life with actually unbearable people at least possible.

If we did not even have the power and the right to rebel against tyranny, arbitrariness, moodiness, tactlessness, we could not bear to have any relation to people from whose characters we thus suffer.

We would feel pushed to take desperate steps–and these, indeed, would end the
relation but do not, perhaps, constitute “conflict.”

Not only because of the fact that…oppression usually increases if it is suffered calmly and without protest, but also because opposition gives us inner satisfaction, distraction, relief…

Our opposition makes us feel that we are not completely victims of the circumstances.

GEORG SIMMEL, 1858-1918

Don't depend on the enemy not coming; depend rather on being ready for him.

--Sun-tzu, The Art of War (fourth century B.C.)

KEYS TO WARFARE

We live in an era in which people are seldom directly hostile.

The rules of engagement–social, political, military–have changed, and so must your notion of the enemy.

An up-front enemy is rare now and is actually a blessing.

People hardly ever attack you openly anymore, showing their intentions, their desire to destroy you; instead they are political and indirect.

Although the world is more competitive than ever, outward aggression is discouraged, so people have learned to go underground, to attack unpredictably and craftily.

Many use friendship as a way to mask aggressive desires: they come close to you to do more harm. (A friend knows best how to hurt you.)

Or, without actually being friends, they offer assistance and alliance: they may seem supportive, but in the end they’re advancing their own interests at your expense.

Then there are those who master moral warfare, playing the victim, making you feel guilty for something unspecified you’ve done.

The battlefield is full of these warriors, slippery, evasive, and clever.

Understand: the word “enemy”–from the Latin inimicus, “not a friend”–has been demonized and politicized.

Your first task as a strategist is to widen your concept of the enemy, to include in
that group those who are working against you, thwarting you, even in subtle ways.

(Sometimes indifference and neglect are better weapons than aggression, because you can’t see the hostility they hide.)

Without getting paranoid, you need to realize that there are people who wish you ill and operate indirectly.

Identify them and you’ll suddenly have room to maneuver.

You can stand back and wait and see or you can take action, whether aggressive or just evasive, to avoid the worst.

You can even work to turn this enemy into a friend.

But whatever you do, do not be the naive victim.

Do not find yourself constantly retreating, reacting to your enemies’ maneuvers.

Arm yourself with prudence, and never completely lay down your arms, not even for friends.

As one travels up any one of the large rivers [of Borneo], one meets with tribes that are successively more warlike. 

In the coast regions are peaceful communities which never fight save in self-defense, and then with but poor success, whereas in the central regions, where the rivers take their rise, are a number of extremely warlike tribes whose raids have been a constant source of terror to the communities settled in the lower reaches of the rivers.... 

It might be supposed that the peaceful coast people would be found to be superior in moral qualities to their more warlike neighbors, but the contrary is the case. 

In almost all respects the advantage lies with the warlike tribes. 

Their houses are better built, larger, and cleaner; their domestic morality is superior; they are physically stronger, are braver, and physically and mentally more active and in general are more trustworthy. 

But, above all, their social organization is firmer and more efficient because their respect for and obedience to their chiefs and their loyalty to their community are much greater; each man identifies himself with the whole community and accepts and loyally performs the social duties laid upon him.

WILLIAM MCDOUGALL, 1871-1938

People are usually good at hiding their hostility, but often they unconsciously give off signals showing that all is not what it seems.

One of the closest friends and advisers of the Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Tse-tung was Lin Biao, a high-ranking member of the Politburo and possible successor to the chairman.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, though, Mao detected a change in Lin: he had become effusively friendly.

Everyone praised Mao, but Lin’s praise was embarrassingly fervent.

To Mao this meant that something was wrong.

He watched Lin closely and decided that the man was plotting a takeover, or at the very least positioning himself for the top spot.

And Mao was right: Lin was plotting busily.

The point is not to mistrust all friendly gestures but to notice them.

Register any change in the emotional temperature: unusual chumminess, a new desire to exchange confidences, excessive praise of you to third parties, the desire for an alliance that may make more sense for the other person than for you.

Trust your instincts: if someone’s behavior seems suspicious, it probably is.

It may turn out to be benign, but in the meantime it is best to be on your guard.

You can sit back and read the signs or you can actively work to uncover your enemies–beat the grass to startle the snakes, as the Chinese say.

In the Bible we read of David’s suspicion that his father-in-law, King Saul, secretly wanted him dead.

How could David find out?

He confided his suspicion to Saul’s son Jonathan, his close friend. Jonathan refused to believe it, so David suggested a test.

He was expected at court for a feast.

He would not go; Jonathan would attend and pass along David’s excuse, which would be adequate but not urgent.

Sure enough, the excuse enraged Saul, who exclaimed, “Send at once and fetch him unto me–he deserves to die!”

David’s test succeeded because it was ambiguous.

His excuse for missing the feast could be read in more than one way: if Saul meant well toward David, he would have seen his son-in-law’s absence as
no more than selfish at worst, but because he secretly hated David, he saw it as effrontery, and it pushed him over the edge.

Follow David’s example: say or do something that can be read in more than
one way, that may be superficially polite but that could also indicate a slight coolness on your part or be seen as a subtle insult. A friend may wonder but will let it pass. The secret enemy, though, will react with anger. Any strong emotion and you will know that there’s something boiling under the surface.

Often the best way to get people to reveal themselves is to provoke tension and argument.

The Hollywood producer Harry Cohn, president of Universal Pictures, frequently used this strategy to ferret out the real position of people in the studio who refused to show what side they were on: he would suddenly attack their work or take an extreme position, even an offensive one, in an argument. His provoked directors and writers would drop their usual caution and show their real beliefs.

Understand: people tend to be vague and slippery because it is safer than outwardly committing to something. If you are the boss, they will mimic your ideas. Their agreement is often pure courtiership. Get them emotional; people are usually more sincere when they argue. If you pick an argument with someone and he keeps on mimicking your ideas, you may be dealing with a chameleon, a particularly dangerous type. Beware of people who hide behind a facade of vague abstractions and impartiality: no one is impartial. A sharply worded question, an opinion designed to offend, will make them react and take sides.

Man exists only in so far as he is opposed.

GEORG HEGEL, 1770-1831

Sometimes it is better to take a less direct approach with your potential enemies–to be as subtle and conniving as they are.

In 1519, Hernan Cortes arrived in Mexico with his band of adventurers.

Among these five hundred men were some whose loyalty was dubious.

Throughout the expedition, whenever any of Cortes’s soldiers did something he saw as suspicious, he never got angry or accusatory. Instead he pretended to go along with them, accepting and approving what they had done.

Thinking Cortes weak, or thinking he was on their side, they would take another step. Now he had what he wanted: a clear sign, to himself and others, that they were traitors. Now he could isolate and destroy them.

Adopt the method of Cortes: if friends or followers whom you suspect of ulterior motives suggest something subtly hostile, or against your interests, or simply odd, avoid the temptation to react, to say no, to get angry, or even to ask questions. Go along, or seem to turn a blind eye: your enemies will soon go further, showing more of their hand. Now you have them in sight, and you can attack.

An enemy is often large and hard to pinpoint–an organization, or a person hidden behind some complicated network. What you want to do is take aim at one part of the group–a leader, a spokesman, a key member of the inner circle.

That is how the activist Saul Alinsky tackled corporations and bureaucracies.

In his 1960s campaign to desegregate Chicago’s public-school system, he focused on the superintendent of schools, knowing full well that this man would try to
shift the blame upward.

By taking repeated hits at the superintendent, he was able to publicize his
struggle, and it became impossible for the man to hide.

Eventually those behind him had to come to his aid, exposing themselves in the process.

Like Alinsky, never aim at a vague, abstract enemy.

It is hard to drum up the emotions to fight such a bloodless battle, which in any case leaves your enemy invisible.

Personalize the fight, eyeball to eyeball.

Danger is everywhere.

There are always hostile people and destructive relationships.

The only way to break out of a negative dynamic is to confront it.

Repressing your anger, avoiding the person threatening you, always looking to conciliate–these common strategies spell ruin.

Avoidance of conflict becomes a habit, and you lose the taste for battle.

Feeling guilty is pointless; it is not your fault you have enemies.

Feeling wronged or victimized is equally futile. In both cases you are looking inward, concentrating on yourself and your feelings.

Instead of internalizing a bad situation, externalize it and face your enemy.

It is the only way out.

The frequent hearing of my mistress reading the bible--for she often read aloud when her husband was absent--soon awakened my curiosity in respect to this mystery of reading, and roused in me the desire to learn. Having no fear of my kind mistress before my eyes, (she had given me no reason to
fear,) I frankly asked her to teach me to read; and without hesitation, the dear woman began the task, and very soon, by her assistance, I was master of the alphabet, and could spell words of three or four letters...Master Hugh was amazed at the simplicity of his spouse, and, probably for the first time, he unfolded to her the true philosophy of slavery, and the peculiar rules necessary to be observed by masters and mistresses, in the management of their human chattels. Mr. Auld promptly forbade the continuance of her [reading] instruction; telling her, in the first place, that the thing itself was unlawful; that it was also unsafe, and could only lead to mischief....

Mrs. Auld evidently felt the force of his remarks; and, like an obedient wife, began to shape her course in the direction indicated by her husband. The effect of his words, on me, was neither slight nor transitory. His iron sentences--cold and harsh--sunk deep into my heart, and stirred up
not only my feelings into a sort of rebellion, but awakened within me a slumbering train of vital thought. It was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery, against which my youthful understanding had struggled, and struggled in vain, to wit: the white man's power to
perpetuate the enslavement of the black man. "Very well," thought I; "knowledge unfits a child to be a slave."

I instinctively assented to the proposition; and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom. This was just what I needed; and got it at a time, and from a source, whence I least expected it.... Wise as Mr. Auld was, he evidently underrated my comprehension, and had little idea of the use to which I was capable of putting the impressive lesson he was giving to his wife.... That which he most loved I
most hated; and the very determination which he expressed to keep me in ignorance, only rendered me the more resolute in seeking intelligence.

MY BONDAGE AND MY FREEDOM, FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1818-1895

The child psychologist Jean Piaget saw conflict as a critical part of mental development. Through battles with peers and then parents, children learn to adapt to the world and develop strategies for dealing with problems. Those children who seek to avoid conflict at all cost, or those who have overprotective parents, end up handicapped socially and mentally.

The same is true of adults: it is through your battles with others that you learn what works, what doesn’t, and how to protect yourself. Instead of shrinking from the idea of having enemies, then, embrace it. Conflict is therapeutic.

Enemies bring many gifts.

For one thing, they motivate you and focus your beliefs.

The artist Salvador Dali found early on that there were many qualities he could not stand in people: conformity, romanticism, piety.

At every stage of his life, he found someone he thought embodied these anti- ideals–an enemy to vent on. First it was the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who wrote romantic poetry; then it was Andre Breton, the heavy-handed leader of the surrealist movement.

Having such enemies to rebel against made Dali feel confident and inspired.

Enemies also give you a standard by which to judge yourself, both personally and socially.

The samurai of Japan had no gauge of their excellence unless they fought the best swordsmen; it took Joe Frazier to make Muhammad Ali a truly great fighter.

A tough opponent will bring out the best in you.

And the bigger the opponent, the greater your reward, even in defeat.

It is better to lose to a worthy opponent than to squash some harmless foe.

You will gain sympathy and respect, building support for your next fight.

Being attacked is a sign that you are important enough to be a target.

You should relish the attention and the chance to prove yourself.

We all have aggressive impulses that we are forced to repress; an enemy supplies you with an outlet for these drives. At last you have someone on whom to
unleash your aggression without feeling guilty.

Leaders have always found it useful to have an enemy at their gates in times of trouble, distracting the public from their difficulties.

In using your enemies to rally your troops, polarize them as far as possible: they will fight the more fiercely when they feel a little hatred.

So exaggerate the differences between you and the enemy–draw the lines clearly.

Xenophon made no effort to be fair; he did not say that the Persians weren’t really such a bad lot and had done much to advance civilization. He called them barbarians, the antithesis of the Greeks.

He described their recent treachery and said they were an evil culture that could find no favor with the gods.

And so it is with you: victory is your goal, not fairness and balance. Use the rhetoric of war to heighten the stakes and stimulate the spirit.

What you want in warfare is room to maneuver.

Tight corners spell death.

Having enemies gives you options.

You can play them off against each other, make one a friend as a way of attacking the other, on and on.

Without enemies you will not know how or where to maneuver, and you will lose a sense of your limits, of how far you can go.

Early on, Julius Caesar identified Pompey as his enemy. Measuring his actions and calculating carefully, he did only those things that left him in a solid position in relation to Pompey.

When war finally broke out between the two men, Caesar was at his best.

But once he defeated Pompey and had no more such rivals, he lost all sense of
proportion–in fact, he fancied himself a god.

His defeat of Pompey was his own undoing.

Your enemies force on you a sense of realism and humility.

Remember: there are always people out there who are more aggressive, more devious, more ruthless than you are, and it is inevitable that some of them will cross your path.

You will have a tendency to want to conciliate and compromise with them.

The reason is that such types are often brilliant deceivers who see the strategic value in charm or in seeming to allow you plenty of space, but actually their desires have no limit, and they are simply trying to disarm you.

With some people you have to harden yourself, to recognize that there is no middle ground, no hope of conciliation.

For your opponent your desire to compromise is a weapon to use against you.

Know these dangerous enemies by their past: look for quick power grabs, sudden rises in fortune, previous acts of treachery. Once you suspect you are dealing with a Napoleon, do not lay down your arms or entrust them to someone else. You are the last line of your own defense.

Authority: If you count on safety and do not think of danger, if you do not know enough to be wary when enemies arrive, this is called a sparrow nesting on a tent, a fish swimming in a cauldron–they won’t last the day.–Chuko Liang (A.D. 181-234 )

REVERSAL

Always keep the search for and use of enemies under control. It is clarity you want, not paranoia.

It is the downfall of many tyrants to see an enemy in everyone.

They lose their grip on reality and become hopelessly embroiled in the emotions their paranoia churns up.

By keeping an eye on possible enemies, you are simply being prudent and cautious.

Keep your suspicions to yourself, so that if you’re wrong, no one will know. Also, beware of polarizing people so completely that you cannot back off.

Margaret Thatcher, usually brilliant at the polarizing game, eventually lost control of it: she created too many enemies and kept repeating the same tactic, even in situations that called for retreat. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a master polarizer, always looking to draw a line between himself and his enemies. Once he had made that line clear enough, though, he backed off, which made him look like a conciliator, a man of peace who occasionally went to war.

Even if that impression was false, it was the height of wisdom to create it.

Conclusion

Reading this, I cannot help but understand why Trump and his crew of dinosaurs were so rabidly inclined to label the biggest trading partner as an enemy. This article describes why.

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The Past Through Tomorrow (full text) by Robert A Heinlein (free)

Heinlein almost never showed up in anthologies. Sometimes editors would apologize for omitting him, admitting (with some frustration) that they just couldn’t get the rights to the Heinlein tales they wanted. The problem was that by the mid-70s Heinlein was a star, the top-selling author in the field, and his entire short fiction catalog was locked up in his own bestselling collections.

I read collections, of course. Lots of them. But the seminal Heinlein collection, the one containing virtually all of his really important short work — including classics like “The Roads Must Roll,” “Blowups Happen,” “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” “Gentlemen, Be Seated,” “The Green Hills of Earth,” “Logic of Empire,” “The Menace from Earth,” “If This Goes On —”, and the short novel Methuselah’s Children — was the massive The Past Through Tomorrow.

I picked up on The Past Through Tomorrow recently, and I was impressed all over again at just how many true SF classics are packed within its pages. I can almost forgive its length, given that it contains 21 stories, three novellas (“The Man Who Sold the Moon,” “Logic of Empire,” and “Coventry”) and a complete novel, Methuselah’s Children. The stories within were published across four decades, from 1939 to 1962, first in John W. Campbell’s Astounding and later in places like Argosy, Blue Book, The Saturday Evening Post, and Scientific American.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

Introduction by Damon Knight
“Life-Line” (Astounding Science-Fiction, August 1939)
“The Roads Must Roll” (Astounding Science-Fiction, June 1940)
“Blowups Happen” (Astounding Science-Fiction, September 1940)
“The Man Who Sold the Moon” (The Man Who Sold the Moon, 1950)
“Delilah and the Space-Rigger” (The Blue Book Magazine, December 1949)
“Space Jockey” (The Saturday Evening Post, April 26, 1947)
“Requiem” (Astounding Science-Fiction, January 1940)
“The Long Watch” (The American Legion Magazine, December 1949)
“Gentlemen, Be Seated” (Argosy Magazine, May 1948)
“The Black Pits of Luna” (The Saturday Evening Post, January 10, 1948)
“It’s Great to Be Back!” (The Saturday Evening Post, July 26, 1947)
“—We Also Walk Dogs” (Astounding Science-Fiction, July 1941)
“Searchlight” (Scientific American, August 1962)
“Ordeal in Space” (Town & Country, May 1948)
“The Green Hills of Earth” (The Saturday Evening Post, February 8, 1947)
“Logic of Empire” (Astounding Science-Fiction, March 1941)
“The Menace from Earth” (Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1957)
“If This Goes On —” (Astounding Science-Fiction, February 1940)
“Coventry” (Astounding Science-Fiction, July 1940)
“Misfit” (Astounding Science-Fiction, November 1939)
Methuselah’s Children (Astounding Science-Fiction, July-August 1941)

Robert A. Heinlein was one of Campbell’s most famous discoveries, and certainly the one that Campbell was most proud of. Alec Nevala-Lee, when discussing his groundbreaking non-fiction book Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, said, “Heinlein was the author Campbell was waiting for,” and I think that’s precisely right. Heinlein’s first published story was “Life-Line” in the August 1939 issue of Astounding; more rapidly followed and within a year Campbell was lauding Heinlein in his editorials as “a major science fiction writer.”

The Past Through Tomorrow was published in hardcover by Putnam in 1967, and reprinted in paperback by Berkley Medallion in 1975. The paperback version is 830 pages, priced at $1.50. The cover artist is uncredited.

The Book

In this instance I am providing the complete PDF. You can download it here…

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Heinlein

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Alien Interview by Lawrence Spencer

A type 1 grey extraterrestrial was acquired from the vehicle wreckage in Roswell, New Mexico. One Army nurse was able to interview it. When the nurse was in her 80’s she moved to England and got ready to die, and left behind this document that describes her encounter with this creature, and all of her interrogations with it.

I was exposed to this document on the fourth of July, 2021, and when I read the book I was astounded how much matched MAJestic knowledge and understanding, and how much matched what I was exposed to through entanglement. I would say that it’s a solid 98% match.

For me, personally, it reaffirms (from a secondary source) the validity of my experiences, purpose and writings today.

Some notes

Sometimes, when the nurse refers to "the universe", I think she actually means "our galaxy". When you look at the writings, in this light, many things come into focus.

Other times, when she refers to "the universe", she is referring to the entire "universe" as we know it to be.

Dating is confusing. Enormous dates like "trillions of years" is again meaningless as we humans are not using the same "yard stick" for comparative measurement.

The "old empire" is a service-for-self species that farms the sentience on Earth. The way it is presented is more accurate than anything that I have said.

Both MM and this document, when combined together, establishes a solid framework towards understanding our place in this universe and YOUR ultimate role in it. I am presenting it here in PDF form.

I hope that you enjoy it as much as I have. And answers the questions that I have been unable to answer for you.

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You can find many more videos in my “Extraterrestrial Species index” over here…

ET Species

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Law 1 of the 48 laws of Power by Robert Greene. Never Outshine the Master

Fearless (2006)

Fearless, as Jet Li's Fearless in the United Kingdom and in the United States, is a 2006 Chinese-Hong Kong martial arts film. It is loosely based on the life of Huo Yuanjia, a Chinese martial artist who challenged foreign fighters in highly publicised events, restoring pride and nationalism to China at a time when Western imperialism and Japanese manipulation were eroding the country in the final years of the Qing Dynasty before the birth of the Republic of China.

Lesson One.

This is one of the most important points that Robert Greene has taught us. Once a student, always a student until the day your mentor leaves. For a true master is a great ally, but an even worst foe. Be constantly on guard for your actions, and beware of your environment, least you damage something that has developed to be part of your very being.

LAW 1

NEVER OUTSHINE THE MASTER

JUDGMENT

Always make those above you feel comfortably superior. In your desire to please and impress them, do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite—inspire fear and insecurity. Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are and you will attain the heights of power.

TRANSGRESSION OF THE LAW

Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV’s finance minister in the first years of his reign, was a generous man who loved lavish parties, pretty women, and poetry. He also loved money, for he led an extravagant lifestyle.

Fouquet was clever and very much indispensable to the king, so when the prime minister, Jules Mazarin, died, in 1661, the finance minister expected to be named the successor. Instead, the king decided to abolish the position.

This and other signs made Fouquet suspect that he was falling out of favor, and so he decided to ingratiate himself with the king by staging the most spectacular party the world had ever seen. The party’s ostensible purpose would be to commemorate the completion of Fouquet’s château, Vaux-le- Vicomte, but its real function was to pay tribute to the king, the guest of honor.

The most brilliant nobility of Europe and some of the greatest minds of the time—La Fontaine, La Rochefoucauld, Madame de Sévigné attended the party. Molière wrote a play for the occasion, in which he himself was to perform at the evening’s conclusion. The party began with a lavish seven- course dinner, featuring foods from the Orient never before tasted in France, as well as new dishes created especially for the night. The meal was accompanied with music commissioned by Fouquet to honor the king.

After dinner there was a promenade through the château’s gardens. The grounds and fountains of Vaux-le-Vicomte were to be the inspiration for Versailles.

Fouquet personally accompanied the young king through the geometrically aligned arrangements of shrubbery and flower beds.

Arriving at the gardens’ canals, they witnessed a fireworks display, which was followed by the performance of Molière’s play.

The party ran well into the night and everyone agreed it was the most amazing affair they had ever attended.

The next day, Fouquet was arrested by the king’s head musketeer, D’Artagnan. Three months later he went on trial for stealing from the country’s treasury. (Actually, most of the stealing he was accused of he had done on the king’s behalf and with the king’s permission.)

Fouquet was found guilty and sent to the most isolated prison in France, high in the Pyrenees Mountains, where he spent the last twenty years of his life in solitary confinement.

Interpretation

Louis XIV, the Sun King, was a proud and arrogant man who wanted to be the center of attention at all times; he could not countenance being outdone in lavishness by anyone, and certainly not his finance minister.

To succeed Fouquet, Louis chose Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a man famous for his parsimony and for giving the dullest parties in Paris. Colbert made sure that any money liberated from the treasury went straight into Louis’s hands.

With the money, Louis built a palace even more magnificent than Fouquet’s —the glorious palace of Versailles. He used the same architects, decorators, and garden designer. And at Versailles, Louis hosted parties even more extravagant than the one that cost Fouquet his freedom.

Let us examine the situation.

The evening of the party, as Fouquet presented spectacle on spectacle to Louis, each more magnificent than the one before, he imagined the affair as demonstrating his loyalty and devotion to the king.

Not only did he think the party would put him back in the king’s favor, he thought it would show his good taste, his connections, and his popularity, making him indispensable to the king and demonstrating that he would make an excellent prime minister.

Instead, however, each new spectacle, each appreciative smile bestowed by the guests on Fouquet, made it seem to Louis that his own friends and subjects were more charmed by the finance minister than by the king himself, and that Fouquet was actually flaunting his wealth and power.

Rather than flattering Louis XIV, Fouquet’s elaborate party offended the king’s vanity.

Louis would not admit this to anyone, of course—instead, he found a convenient excuse to rid himself of a man who had inadvertently made him feel insecure.

Such is the fate, in some form or other, of all those who unbalance the master’s sense of self, poke holes in his vanity, or make him doubt his pre- eminence.

When the evening began, Fouquet was at the top of the world.

By the time it had ended, he was at the bottom.

Voltaire, 1694-1778

OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW

In the early 1600s, the Italian astronomer and mathematician Galileo found himself in a precarious position.

He depended on the generosity of great rulers to support his research, and so, like all Renaissance scientists, he would sometimes make gifts of his inventions and discoveries to the leading patrons of the time.

Once, for instance, he presented a military compass he had invented to the Duke of Gonzaga.

Then he dedicated a book explaining the use of the compass to the Medicis.

Both rulers were grateful, and through them Galileo was able to find more students to teach.

No matter how great the discovery, however, his patrons usually paid him with gifts, not cash.

This made for a life of constant insecurity and dependence. There must be an easier way, he thought.

Galileo hit on a new strategy in 1610, when he discovered the moons of Jupiter. Instead of dividing the discovery among his patrons—giving one the telescope he had used, dedicating a book to another, and so on—as he had done in the past, he decided to focus exclusively on the Medicis.

He chose the Medicis for one reason: Shortly after Cosimo I had established the Medici dynasty, in 1540, he had made Jupiter, the mightiest of the gods, the Medici symbol—a symbol of a power that went beyond politics and banking, one linked to ancient Rome and its divinities.

Galileo turned his discovery of Jupiter’s moons into a cosmic event honoring the Medicis’ greatness.

Shortly after the discovery, he announced that “the bright stars [the moons of Jupiter] offered themselves in the heavens” to his telescope at the same time as Cosimo II’s enthronement.

He said that the number of the moons—four—harmonized with the number of the Medicis (Cosimo II had three brothers) and that the moons orbited Jupiter as these four sons revolved around Cosimo I, the dynasty’s founder.

More than coincidence, this showed that the heavens themselves reflected the ascendancy of the Medici family.

After he dedicated the discovery to the Medicis, Galileo commissioned an emblem representing Jupiter sitting on a cloud with the four stars circling about him, and presented this to Cosimo II as a symbol of his link to the stars.

In 1610 Cosimo II made Galileo his official court philosopher and mathematician, with a full salary. For a scientist this was the coup of a lifetime.

The days of begging for patronage were over.

Interpretation

In one stroke, Galileo gained more with his new strategy than he had in years of begging.

The reason is simple: All masters want to appear more brilliant than other people.

They do not care about science or empirical truth or the latest invention ; they care about their name and their glory.

Galileo gave the Medicis infinitely more glory by linking their name with cosmic forces than he had by making them the patrons of some new scientific gadget or discovery.

Scientists are not spared the vagaries of court life and patronage.

They too must serve masters who hold the purse strings. And their great intellectual powers can make the master feel insecure, as if he were only there to supply the funds—an ugly, ignoble job.

The producer of a great work wants to feel he is more than just the provider of the financing. He wants to appear creative and powerful, and also more important than the work produced in his name.

Instead of insecurity you must give him glory. Galileo did not challenge the intellectual authority of the Medicis with his discovery, or make them feel inferior in any way; by literally aligning them with the stars, he made them shine brilliantly among the courts of Italy.

He did not outshine the master, he made the master outshine all others.

KEYS TO POWER

Everyone has insecurities.

When you show yourself in the world and display your talents, you naturally stir up all kinds of resentment, envy, and other manifestations of insecurity. This is to be expected.

You cannot spend your life worrying about the petty feelings of others.

With those above you, however, you must take a different approach: When it comes to power, outshining the master is perhaps the worst mistake of all.

Do not fool yourself into thinking that life has changed much since the days of Louis XIV and the Medicis.

Those who attain high standing in life are like kings and queens: They want to feel secure in their positions, and superior to those around them in intelligence, wit, and charm.

It is a deadly but common misperception to believe that by displaying and vaunting your gifts and talents, you are winning the master’s affection.

He may feign appreciation, but at his first opportunity he will replace you with someone less intelligent, less attractive, less threatening, just as Louis XIV replaced the sparkling Fouquet with the bland Colbert. And as with Louis, he will not admit the truth, but will find an excuse to rid himself of your presence.

This Law involves two rules that you must realize. First, you can inadvertently outshine a master simply by being yourself. There are masters who are more insecure than others, monstrously insecure; you may naturally outshine them by your charm and grace.

No one had more natural talents than Astorre Manfredi, prince of Faenza.

The most handsome of all the young princes of Italy, he captivated his subjects with his generosity and open spirit.

In the year 1500, Cesare Borgia laid siege to Faenza.

When the city surrendered, the citizens expected the worst from the cruel Borgia, who, however, decided to spare the town: He simply occupied its fortress, executed none of its citizens, and allowed Prince Manfredi, eighteen at the time, to remain with his court, in complete freedom.

A few weeks later, though, soldiers hauled Astorre Manfredi away to a Roman prison.

A year after that, his body was fished out of the River Tiber, a stone tied around his neck.

Borgia justified the horrible deed with some sort of trumped-up charge of treason and conspiracy, but the real problem was that he was notoriously vain and insecure.

The young man was outshining him without even trying.

Given Manfredi’s natural talents, the prince’s mere presence made Borgia seem less attractive and charismatic.

The lesson is simple: If you cannot help being charming and superior, you must learn to avoid such monsters of vanity.

Either that, or find a way to mute your good qualities when in the company of a Cesare Borgia.

Second, never imagine that because the master loves you, you can do anything you want.

Entire books could be written about favorites who fell out of favor by taking their status for granted, for daring to outshine.

In late- sixteenth-century Japan, the favorite of Emperor Hideyoshi was a man called Sen no Rikyu.

The premier artist of the tea ceremony, which had become an obsession with the nobility, he was one of Hideyoshi’s most trusted advisers, had his own apartment in the palace, and was honored throughout Japan.

Yet in 1591, Hideyoshi had him arrested and sentenced to death.

Rikyu took his own life, instead.

The cause for his sudden change of fortune was discovered later: It seems that Rikyu, former peasant and later court favorite, had had a wooden statue made of himself wearing sandals (a sign of nobility) and posing loftily. He had had this statue placed in the most important temple inside the palace gates, in clear sight of the royalty who often would pass by.

To Hideyoshi this signified that Rikyu had no sense of limits. Presuming that he had the same rights as those of the highest nobility, he had forgotten that his position depended on the emperor, and had come to believe that he had earned it on his own.

This was an unforgivable miscalculation of his own importance and he paid for it with his life.

Remember the following: Never take your position for granted and never let any favors you receive go to your head.

Knowing the dangers of outshining your master, you can turn this Law to your advantage.

First you must flatter and puff up your master.

Overt flattery can be effective but has its limits; it is too direct and obvious, and looks bad to other courtiers.

Discreet flattery is much more powerful. If you are more intelligent than your master, for example, seem the opposite: Make him appear more intelligent than you. Act naive. Make it seem that you need his expertise. Commit harmless mistakes that will not hurt you in the long run but will give you the chance to ask for his help. Masters adore such requests. A master who cannot bestow on you the gifts of his experience may direct rancor and ill will at you instead.

If your ideas are more creative than your master’s, ascribe them to him, in as public a manner as possible.

Make it clear that your advice is merely an echo of his advice.

If you surpass your master in wit, it is okay to play the role of the court jester, but do not make him appear cold and surly by comparison.

Tone down your humor if necessary, and find ways to make him seem the dispenser of amusement and good cheer.

If you are naturally more sociable and generous than your master, be careful not to be the cloud that blocks his radiance from others.

He must appear as the sun around which everyone revolves, radiating power and brilliance, the center of attention.

If you are thrust into the position of entertaining him, a display of your limited means may win you his sympathy. Any attempt to impress him with your grace and generosity can prove fatal: Learn from Fouquet or pay the price.

In all of these cases it is not a weakness to disguise your strengths if in the end they lead to power.

By letting others outshine you, you remain in control, instead of being a victim of their insecurity.

This will all come in handy the day you decide to rise above your inferior status.

If, like Galileo, you can make your master shine even more in the eyes of others, then you are a godsend and you will be instantly promoted.

Image:

The Stars in the Sky. There can be only one sun at a time. Never obscure the sunlight, or rival the sun’s brilliance; rather, fade into the sky and find ways to heighten the master star’s intensity.

Authority:

Avoid outshining the master. All superiority is odious, but the superiority of a subject over his prince is not only stupid, it is fatal. This is a lesson that the stars in the sky teach us—they may be related to the sun, and just as brilliant, but they never appear in her company. 

(Baltasar Gracián, 1601-1658)

REVERSAL

You cannot worry about upsetting every person you come across, but you must be selectively cruel.

If your superior is a falling star, there is nothing to fear from outshining him.

Do not be merciful—your master had no such scruples in his own cold-blooded climb to the top.

Gauge his strength.

If he is weak, discreetly hasten his downfall: Outdo, outcharm, outsmart him at key moments.

If he is very weak and ready to fall, let nature take its course.

Do not risk outshining a feeble superior—it might appear cruel or spiteful. But if your master is firm in his position, yet you know yourself to be the more capable, bide your time and be patient.

It is the natural course of things that power eventually fades and weakens. Your master will fall someday, and if you play it right, you will outlive and someday outshine him.

Conclusion

We are often nothing if we act alone, but we can achieve greatness if we form a bond with a group of people.

Within those people are those of great skill, knowledge, experience and ability. You can use their talents for the greater good of the group. You can also learn from them and then in tern become proficient as they.

However, when you are in a group, you must never outshine anyone. You must fit within the group and all praises o to the group, not to the individual stars. Once a group of hard-working individuals are ignored by a singular member, the negative emotions of human greet, envy, lust and others start to corrupt the group. It can harm everyone.

Be careful of what you do, and be humble in your assigned position in life.

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The tale of the three shepherds.

The following is my very own first attempt at a fictional story.

I have been told that I must be a great writer because all of my Metallicman writings are so fantastical and imaginative. I must have a great colorful and active mind to dream up such ideas. But that’s not really true. I only write what I have personally experienced, and talk about the life that I live and what I see and do.

There’s nothing fictional in this site whats so ever.

Never the less, I have tried to write fiction in the past, maybe the early 1990’s and it got no where. Maybe I could try again. Maybe I’ll be another Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke or Robert Heinlein. Who actually knows?

So with that introduction, let’s introduce my first internet published short story. And you’se guys are the first to read it. I do hope that you enjoy it.

The Three Shepherds

Once upon a time, in a rather pastoral land, were three shepherds. They were men of sheep.

All of them were tall, strong and carried about a long crooked cane. And as they went about their day to day life shepherding, doing sheep related things, and discussing sheep related current events, they would often gather together (as was their want) under this huge shady tree.

And there, under the great expanse of the mighty oaken limbs, they would discuss the latest in sheep husbandry, sheep technology, and sheep-related gossip.

The three shepherds went by the names of Tom, Dick and Harry.

Tom, the best shepherd of the trio had a massive and impressive flock of sheep. All of them were well cared for, happy and were the envy of the local village.

Dick, an average shepherd, had an average flock of sheep. There was nothing really that great about it. All of the sheep were solid “C” grade students in the local sheep academy, and it showed in their actions and behaviors.

And, Harry, well, Harry was the worst shepherd of the three. He tended to ignore his flock of sheep and left them to do their own bidding. Meanwhile he would cavort with a prized sheep or two off in the wilds behind the bushes in a most devilish manner.

And one day, on this fine and quiet pastoral land, they came to an argument.

It turns out that they were arguing just who was the best shepherd.

And the point was raised, that your actions are reflected in how the sheep behavior, and not whether or not you get ribbons at the local annual sheep parade, or are given the key to the city for the most amazing sheep.

Ai! And the argument went long and hard and well into the night. No one could decide who was the best shepherd.

By the crowing of the early bird, a cock named “amorphous weasel” on account of his propensity to steal long bananas, with (two) well rounded kiwi fruit off kitchen window sills, the group tiredly came to a conclusion.

It was decided that each shepherds would go off, one by one, and gather their flock and bring it to the tree. And there in front of everyone the sheer beauty (or maybe it’s “shear” beauty) and magnificence of the flock would be obvious to all to behold.

So Dick, the average shepherd, went off to gather his flock.

And after what seemed to be day, but was really a mere two hours, he came back. (Let it be known that he stopped for a blueberry pie, and maybe a little kiss, from the baker Lady Ms. McSmunch-a-lot in the town.) And refreshed, wiping the blueberry stains off his lips, he led his flock to the rest of the trio to observe.

And there, came the flock.

They were clean and presentable. Their hooves were all trimmed and well manicured. Their eyes were also clear, and the wool was obviously of the finest quality. They came well behaved, and presented themselves are docile, but proud sheep; they were the kind of sheep that you would introduce to your son.

And as they arrived, they sang a little sheep marching song. It went a little like this…

Baa Baaaa, Baa Baaaa,
We’re the sheep of Baaa Dick.
Baa Baaa, Baa Baaa.

And then, after a short while, the filed to the tree, and then upon the proper signal (by Dick obviously), they settled down. All the time making tiny cooing sounds…

Baaa Baaa.

Of course both of the other two shepherds were impressed. For indeed this was a fine, fine flock of sheep. It was undeniable. And nothing would make this moment more noteworthy than when a shepherd talent-scout showed up and wanted to take a picture of young shepherd Dick with his fine, well tended flock.

There were rumors that he was going to be on the cover of “Sheep News and Pastoral Report”.

And it seemed to be his destiny, for shortly afterwards a gaggle of young attractive lasses, with hair in long pony-tails, wearing short skirts with low cut bodices were asking for Dicks autograph. They all wanted a piece of Dick, and were willing to do anything to get a taste of this Dick action.

Well, as impressive as all that was, Tom decided to go off and get his flock of sheep.

Now Tom went off and it wasn’t long before the clouds in the sky opened up. And bright blue “spring time” sky appeared with two enormous sheep blowing long golden trumpets appeared. And as they blew the ground and surroundings became calm. Everything went absolutely quiet. Even the worms and the snails stopped their crocheting, and stood by a listening.

Then, brighter than day and appearing in blinding, and stunning radiance appeared the flock. It approached the stunned spectators in organized cadence. And they hummed, and sang, and their voices resonated in brilliance and within spectacular fashion.

Ba Ba. Ba Ba.
Baaaaaa!
Ba, Ba, Baaaa, Baaaa, Ba!

They approached the group in groups of three. marching to the beat, and their hooves landed ever gently upon the grass at the feet of the shepherd.

There was no question that this flock was truly exceptional. Their wool was of the finest texture, and so white and clean that it hurt the eyes of any who beheld it. The faces of the sheep were impassioned with glee, happiness and empathy. And when they finally gathered together they were polite about it.

They would say such things as “Excuse me, my fine fellow sheep, can you please pass me the Grey Poupon…. Baaahhh.”

Indeed, these sheep were exception. No one could deny it.

And when the shepherds started to talk, the sheep took the time to post insta-sheep photos for their followers, for after all, many of the sheep in this flock were famous influencers. And sheep all over the world would follow their postings. They would want to know what grass they were eating and why. They would want to see who they were hanging out with, and pictures of their latest meals, and pictorials of their latest pastoral settings.

It was absolutely clear that this flock was spectacular.

Well, the time came for Harry to show his flock. So he got up off the long he was sitting upon and ambled off to gather his flock. As he went he muttered something under his breath, but no one could make it out.

It sounded something like “truck fist” or something similar. He grumbled away saying things like “razzmatazz” and “hoodwink, and scurvy tweaky boondoggle”

Hours passed.

The sky got dark, and a wind started to blow.

Dark clouds appeared on the horizon and a cool chill started to cause everyone to gather their shawls and jackets around their shoulders.

And the ground started to rumble.

It was low at first but soon become enormously loud. It sounded like an air plane jet engine revving up, and the exploding and dying over and over as it’s internal parts bashed and clanged upon each other in the most terrible of grinding sounds. People started to cover their ears, and a light oily rain started to fall upon everyone in a brown oozy slimy mess.

And there, on the horizon were what appeared to be a herd of tiny tornadoes. These brown dusty and dirty nightmares approached the crew, the tree, and all the two flocks that were gathered there. The talent scout stopped talking and taking pictures, the Insta-sheep models stopped filming selfies, and everyone stood shaking where they stood. They remained rooted to the ground.

And as the group got close you could make out what was approaching.

For, in front of them was a small army of “Mad Max style” cobbled together quasi vehicles of all makes, models and unusual pedigrees.

Some looked like something the devil himself would weld together with nightmare steel, twisted metal, and chain link accoutrements.

Others looked like a maniac’s idea of a military vehicle if they had the budget of a used junk yard attendant.

And still others looked more like they belonged outside a meth-lab, a biker bar, or an abandoned kiddie circus prowled by nightmare clowns with chainsaws and blood lust in their eyes.

And they roared towards them.

It was like an avalanche or a tidal wave and they pulled up in front of all the startled spectators. they all revved their motorcycle and various engines for effect.

Barroom! Barroom!
Braaaaam!

And black oily smoke blew out of their exhausts. And the sheep themselves looked like Frankenstein-sheep.

Many had patches of wool missing, obviously from a diet low in vitamin “D”, or perhaps suffering from mange. Many were missing eyes, limbs, teeth. They all wore vests emblazoned with the words…

“Satan’s orphan lamb”

And many had tattoos everywhere.

Some were of names of a certain loved one, a sheep from their past, but with the name crossed out, and another one written next to it. Others were tattoos of knives, skulls, and “low brow art”.

And then…

…just then…

… a big noisy, and particularly malodorous motorcycle-like vehicular contraption pulled up. It sprayed dust and gravel everywhere, and the lone dark sheep got off the bike.

He was an ugly brute, a big blustering monstrosity, that was foul, nasty, criminally dirty, and oily…

…an onerous sheep that went by the name of Beelzebub.

He was big, and nasty. His wool was black and grey with red and purple highlights. He wore lipstick, and ear rings, with seemed to point to some kind of LGBT sheep hybrid of sorts, he wore a big leather belt with an enormous belt buckle featuring the head of one of the missing sheep-dogs that used to help the shepherd, and emblazoned upon his chest was a big garish tattoo with the words…

“My shepherd doesn’t love me”

And he scanned the people gather there with his one lone bloodshot eye. As he got off his bike and hobbled towards them, his single leg ended up hitting the dust while his wooden peg-leg went thunk, thunk, thunk….

…and he stopped in front of all the shepherds, and their flocks. No one said a sound.

A moment passed and then another.

Finally, shepherd Tom cleared his throat, and said…

“You are by far, the absolutely worst flock of sheep that I have ever seen in my life!”.

And no one moved.

…

No one.

No one said a thing.

You could hear a pin drop.

Then the leader, the biggest, the baddest, the most foul, and slimy sheep went up to him. his foul sheep breath was stinky, oily, nasty and disgusting.

And he said…

…

“We might be the ugliest, the most disgusting, the most untamed sheep that you have ever laid your eyes upon. But I will tell you one thing…”

…

And he paused for effect, and gave everyone a good harsh look with his remaining blood-shot eye…

…

“…. we’re baaaaaaad!”

The End.

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The Dragon by Ray Bradbury (Full Text)

Here's a nice short story to provide some brief moments of pleasure. I do hope that you enjoy it as much as I have. - MM

THE DRAGON
By Ray Bradbury

The night blew in the short grass on the moor; there was no other motion. It had been years since a single bird had flown by in the great blind shell of sky.

Long ago a few small stones had simulated life when they crumbled and fell into dust. Now only the night moved in the souls of the two men bent by their lonely fire in the wilderness; darkness pumped quietly in their veins and ticked silently in their temples and their wrists.

Firelight fled up and down their wild faces and welled in their eyes in orange tatters. They listened to each other’s faint, cool breathing and the lizard blink of their eyelids. At last, one man poked the fire with his sword.

“Don’t idiot; you’ll give us away!”

“No matter,” said the second man, “The dragon can smell us miles off anyway. God’s breath, it’s cold. I wish I was back at the castle.”

“It’s death, not sleep, we’re after…”

“Why? Why? The dragon never sets foot in the town!”

“Quiet, fool! He eats men traveling alone from our town to the next!”

“Let them be eaten and let us get home!”

“Wait now; listen!”

The two men froze.

They waited a long time, but there was only the shake of their horses’ nervous skin like black velvet tambourines jingling the silver stirrup buckles, softly, softly.
“Ah.” The second man sighed. “What a land of nightmares. Everything happens here. Someone blows out the sun; it’s night. And then, and then, oh, God, listen! This dragon, they say his eyes are fire. His breath a white gas; you can see him burn across the dark lands. He runs with sulfur and thunder and kindles the grass. Sheep panic and die insane. Women deliver forth monsters. The dragon’s fury is such that tower walls shake back to dust. His victims, at sunrise, are strewn hither thither on the hills. How many knights, I ask, have gone for this monster and failed, even as we shall fail?”

“Enough of that!”

“More than enough! Out here in this desolation I cannot tell what year this is!”

“Nine hundred years since the Nativity.”

“No, no,” whispered the second man, eyes shut, “On this moor is no Time, is only Forever. I feel if I ran back on the road the town would be gone, the people yet unborn, things changed, the castles unquarried from the rocks, the timbers still uncut from the forests; don’t ask how I know; the moor knows and tells me. And here we sit alone in the land of the fire dragon, God save us!”

“Be you afraid, then gird on your armor!”

“What use? The dragon runs from nowhere; we cannot guess its home. It vanishes in fog; we know not where it goes. Aye, on with our armor, we’ll die well dressed.”

Half into his silver corselet, the second man stopped again and turned his head.

Across the dim country, full of night and nothingness from the heart of the moor itself, the wind sprang full of dust from clocks that used dust for telling time. There were black suns burning in the heart of this new wind and a million burnt leaves shaken from some autumn tree be- yond the horizon. This wind melted landscapes, lengthened bones like white wax, made the blood roil and thicken to a muddy deposit in the brain. The wind was a thousand souls dying and all time confused and in transit. It was a fog inside of a mist inside of a darkness, and this place was no man’s place and there was no year or hour at all, but only these men in a faceless emptiness of sudden frost, storm and white thunder which
moved behind the great falling pane of green glass that was the lightning. A squall of rain drenched the turf; all faded away until there was unbreathing hush and the two men waiting alone with their warmth in a cool season.

“There,” whispered the first man. “Oh, there…”

Miles off, rushing with a great chant and a roar – the dragon.

In silence the men buckled on their armor and mounted their horses. The midnight wilderness was split by a monstrous gushing as the dragon roared nearer, nearer; its flashing yellow glare spurted above a hill and then, fold on fold of dark body, distantly seen, therefore indistinct, flowed over that hill and plunged vanishing into a valley.

“Quick!”

They spurred their horses forward to a small hollow.

“This is where it passes!”

They seized their lances with mailed fists and blinded their horses by flipping the visors down over their eyes.

“Lord!”

“Yes, let us use His name.”

On the instant, the dragon rounded a hill. Its monstrous amber eye fed on them, fired their armor in red glints and glitters, With a terrible wailing cry and a grinding rush it flung itself forward.

“Mercy, God!”

The lance struck under the unlidded yellow eye, buckled, tossed the man through the air. The dragon hit, spilled him over, down, ground him under. Passing, the black brunt of its shoulder smashed the remaining horse and rider a hundred feet against the side of a boulder, wailing, wailing, the dragon shrieking, the fire all about, around, under it, a pink, yellow, orange sun-fire with great soft plumes of blinding smoke.

…

“Did you see it?” cried a voice. “Just like I told you!”

“The same! The same! A knight in armor, by the Lord Harry! We hit him!”

“You goin’ to stop?”

“Did once; found nothing. Don’t like to stop on this moor. I get the willies. Got a feel, it has.”

“But we hit something!”

“Gave him plenty of whistle; chap wouldn’t budge!”

A steaming blast cut the mist aside.

“We’ll make Stokely on time. More coal, eh, Fred?”

Another whistle shook dew from the empty sky. The night train, in fire and fury, shot through a gully, up a rise, and vanished away over cold earth toward the north, leaving black smoke and steam to dissolve in the numbed air minutes after it had passed and gone forever.

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Law 2 of the 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene; Never put too much trust in friends, learn how to use enemies

Well, this book has quite a bit of controversy associated with it, but most of it stems from reviewers that believe all people are good inside and unicorns deliver their vegan low fat cappuccino with cream.

Well, most people aren’t kind, and this book prepared you for reality.

It doesn’t teach one to be self absorbed or evil or a heretic.

It teaches one to stand your ground and to protect yourself from taking unnecessary burden, unfair treatment, and manipulation from corrupt people.

LAW 2

NEVER PUT TOO MUCH TRUST IN FRIENDS, LEARN HOW TO USE ENEMIES

JUDGMENT

Be wary of friends—they will betray you more quickly, for they are easily aroused to envy. They also become spoiled and tyrannical. But hire a former enemy and he will be more loyal than a friend, because he has more to prove. In fact, you have more to fear from friends than from enemies. If you have no enemies, find a way to make them.

TRANSGRESSION OF THE LAW

In the mid-ninth century A.D., a young man named Michael III assumed the throne of the Byzantine Empire.

His mother, the Empress Theodora, had been banished to a nunnery, and her lover, Theoctistus, had been murdered ; at the head of the conspiracy to depose Theodora and enthrone Michael had been Michael’s uncle, Bardas, a man of intelligence and ambition.

Michael was now a young, inexperienced ruler, surrounded by in triguers, murderers, and profligates. In this time of peril he needed someone he could trust as his councilor, and his thoughts turned to Basilius, his best friend.

Basilius had no experience whatsoever in government and politics—in fact, he was the head of the royal stables—but he had proven his love and gratitude time and again.

To have a good enemy, choose a friend: He knows where to strike. 

-DIANF DE POITIERS. 1499-1566. MISTRESS OF HENRI II OF FRANCE

They had met a few years before, when Michael had been visiting the stables just as a wild horse got loose.

Basilius, a young groom from peasant Macedonian stock, had saved Michael’s life.

The groom’s strength and courage had impressed Michael, who immediately raised Basilius from the obscurity of being a horse trainer to the position of head of the stables.

He loaded his friend with gifts and favors and they became inseparable.

Basilius was sent to the finest school in Byzantium, and the crude peasant became a cultured and sophisticated courtier.

Every time I bestow a vacant office I make a hundred discontented persons and one ingrate.

Louis XIV, 1638-1715

Now Michael was emperor, and in need of someone loyal.

Who could he better trust with the post of chamberlain and chief councilor than a young man who owed him everything?

Basilius could be trained for the job and Michael loved him like a brother.

Ignoring the advice of those who recommended the much more qualified Bardas, Michael chose his friend.

Thus for my own part l have more than once been deceived by the person I loved most and of whose love, above everyone else’s, I have been most confident. So that I believe that u may be right to love and serve one person above all others. according to merit and worth, but never to trust so much in this tempting trap of friendship as to have cause to repent of it later on. 

BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE, 1478-1529

Basilius learned well and was soon advising the emperor on all matters of state.

The only problem seemed to be money—Basiiius never had enough.

Exposure to the splendor of Byzantine court life made him avaricious for the perks of power.

Michael doubled, then tripled his salary, ennobled him, and married him off to his own mistress, Eudoxia Ingerina.

Keeping such a trusted friend and adviser satisfied was worth any price.

But more trouble was to come.

Bardas was now head of the army, and Basilius convinced Michael that the man was hopelessly ambitious.

Under the illusion that he could control his nephew, Bardas had conspired to put him on the throne, and he could conspire again, this time to get rid of Michael and assume the crown himself.

Basilius poured poison into Michael’s ear until the emperor agreed to have his uncle murdered.

During a great horse race, Basilius closed in on Bardas in the crowd and stabbed him to death.

Soon after, Basilius asked that he replace Bardas as head of the army, where he could keep control of the realm and quell rebellion.

This was granted.

Now Basilius’s power and wealth only grew, and a few years later Michael, in financial straits from his own extravagance, asked him to pay back some of the money he had borrowed over the years.

To Michael’s shock and astonishment, Basilius refused, with a look of such impudence that the emperor suddenly realized his predicament: The former stable boy had more money, more allies in the army and senate, and in the end more power than the emperor himself.

A few weeks later, after a night of heavy drinking,

Michael awoke to find himself surrounded by soldiers.

Basilius watched as they stabbed the emperor to death.

Then, after proclaiming himself emperor, he rode his horse through the streets of Byzantium, brandishing the head of his former benefactor and best friend at the end of a long pike.

THE SNAKE. THE FARMER. AND THE HERON

A snake chased by hunters asked a farmer to save its life. 

To hide it from its pursuers, the farmer squatted and let the snake crawl into his belly. 

But when the danger had passed and the farmer asked the snake to come out, the snake refused. 

It was warm and safe inside. 

On his way home, the man saw a heron and went up to him and whispered what had happened. 

The heron told him to squat and strain to eject the snake. 

When the snake snuck its head out, the heron caught it, pulled it out, and killed it. 

The farmer was worried that the snake’s poison might still be inside him, and the heron told him that the cure for snake poison was to cook and eat six white fowl. 

“You’re a white fowl,” said the farmer. “You’ll do for a start.” 

He grabbed the heron, put it in a bag, and carried it home, where he hung it up while he told his wife what had happened. 

“I’m surprised at you, ” said the wife. “The bird does you a kindness, rids you of the evil in your belly, saves your life in fact, yet you catch it and talk of killing it."

She immediately released the heron, and it flew away. But on its way, it gouged out her eyes.

Moral: When you see water flowing uphill, it means that someone is repaying a kindness.

AFRICAN FOLK TALE

Interpretation

Michael III staked his future on the sense of gratitude he thought Basilius must feel for him.

Surely Basilius would serve him best; he owed the emperor his wealth, his education, and his position.

Then, once Basilius was in power, anything he needed it was best to give to him, strengthening the bonds between the two men.

It was only on the fateful day when the emperor saw that impudent smile on Basilius’s face that he realized his deadly mistake.

He had created a monster.

He had allowed a man to see power up close— a man who then wanted more, who asked for anything and got it, who felt encumbered by the charity he had received and simply did what many people do in such a situation: They forget the favors they have received and imagine they have earned their success by their own merits.

At Michael’s moment of realization, he could still have saved his own life, but friendship and love blind every man to their interests. Nobody believes a friend can betray.

And Michael went on disbelieving until the day his head ended up on a pike.

Lord, protect me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies.

Voltaire, 1694-1778

OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW

For several centuries after the fall of the Han Dynasty (A.D. 222), Chinese history followed the same pattern of violent and bloody coups, one after the other.

Army men would plot to kill a weak emperor, then would replace him on the Dragon Throne with a strong general.

The general would start a new dynasty and crown himself emperor; to ensure his own survival he would kill off his fellow generals.

A few years later, however, the pattern would resume: New generals would rise up and assassinate him or his sons in their turn. To be emperor of China was to be alone, surrounded by a pack of enemies—it was the least powerful, least secure position in the realm.

In A.D. 959, General Chao K’uang-yin became Emperor Sung.

He knew the odds, the probability that within a year or two he would be murdered ; how could he break the pattern?

Soon after becoming emperor, Sung ordered a banquet to celebrate the new dynasty, and invited the most powerful commanders in the army.

After they had drunk much wine, he dismissed the guards and everybody else except the generals, who now feared he would murder them in one fell swoop.

Instead, he addressed them:

“The whole day is spent in fear, and I am unhappy both at the table and in my bed. For which one of you does not dream of ascending the throne? I do not doubt your allegiance, but if by some chance your subordinates, seeking wealth and position, were to force the emperor’s yellow robe upon you in turn, how could you refuse it?”

Drunk and fearing for their lives, the generals proclaimed their innocence and their loyalty.

But Sung had other ideas:

“The best way to pass one’s days is in peaceful enjoyment of riches and honor. 

If you are willing to give up your commands, I am ready to provide you with fine estates and beautiful dwellings where you may take your pleasure with singers and girls as your companions.”

The astonished generals realized that instead of a life of anxiety and struggle Sung was offering them riches and security.

The next day, all of the generals tendered their resignations, and they retired as nobles to the estates that Sung bestowed on them.

There are manv who think therefore that a wise prince ought, when he has the chance, to foment astutely some enmity, so that by suppressing It he will augment his greatness. Princes, and especially new ones, have found more faith and more usefulness in those men, whom at the beginning of their power they regarded with suspicion, than in those they at first confided in. Pandolfo Petrucci, prince of Siena, governed his state more bv those whom he suspected than by others.

Niccoi o MACHIAVELLI, 1469-1527

In one stroke, Sung turned a pack of “friendly” wolves, who would likely have betrayed him, into a group of docile lambs, far from all power.

Over the next few years Sung continued his campaign to secure his rule.

In A.D. 971, King Liu of the Southern Han finally surrendered to him after years of rebellion.

To Liu’s astonishment, Sung gave him a rank in the imperial court and invited him to the palace to seal their newfound friendship with wine.

As King Liu took the glass that Sung offered him, he hesitated, fearing it contained poison.

“Your subject’s crimes certainly merit death,” he cried out, “but I beg Your Majesty to spare your subject’s life. Indeed I dare not drink this wine.”

Emperor Sung laughed, took the glass from Liu, and swallowed it himself. There was no poison. From then on Liu became his most trusted and loyal friend.

At the time, China had splintered into many smaller kingdoms.

When Ch‘ien Shu, the king of one of these, was defeated, Sung’s ministers advised the emperor to lock this rebel up.

They presented documents proving that he was still conspiring to kill Sung.

When Ch’ien Shu came to visit the emperor, however, instead of locking him up, Sung honored him.

He also gave him a package, which he told the former king to open when he was halfway home.

Ch’ien Shu opened the bundle on his return journey and saw that it contained all the papers documenting his conspiracy.

He realized that Sung knew of his murderous plans, yet had spared him nonetheless.

This generosity won him over, and he too became one of Sung’s most loyal vassals.

A brahman, a great expert in Veda who has become a great archer as well, offers his services to his good friend, who is now the king. 

The brahman cries out when he sees the king, “Recognize me, your friend!” 

The king answers him with contempt and then explains: “Yes, we were friends before, but our friendship was based on what power we had.... I was friends with you, good brahman, because it served my purpose. No pauper is friend to the rich, no fool to the wise, no coward to the brave. An old friend—who needs him? It is two men of equal wealth and equal birth who contract friendship and marriage, not a rich man and a pauper.... An old friend— who needs him?

THE MAHABHARATA, C. THIRD CENTURY B.C.

Interpretation

A Chinese proverb compares friends to the jaws and teeth of a dangerous animal: If you are not careful, you will find them chewing you up.

Emperor Sung knew the jaws he was passing between when he assumed the throne:

His “friends” in the army would chew him up like meat, and if he somehow survived, his “friends” in the government would have him for supper.

Emperor Sung would have no truck with “friends”—he bribed his fellow generals with splendid estates and kept them far away.

This was a much better way to emasculate them than killing them, which would only have led other generals to seek vengeance.

And Sung would have nothing to do with “friendly” ministers.

More often than not, they would end up drinking his famous cup of poisoned wine.

Instead of relying on friends, Sung used his enemies, one after the other, transforming them into far more reliable subjects.

While a friend expects more and more favors, and seethes with jealousy, these former enemies expected nothing and got everything.

A man suddenly spared the guillotine is a grateful man indeed, and will go to the ends of the earth for the man who has pardoned him.

In time, these former enemies became Sung’s most trusted friends.

Pick up a bee from kindness, and learn the limitations of kindness.

SUFI PROVERB

And Sung was finally able to break the pattern of coups, violence, and civil war—the Sung Dynasty ruled China for more than three hundred years.

In a speech Abraham Lincoln delivered at the height of the Civil War, he referred to the Southerners as fellow human beings who were in error. An elderly lady chastised him for not calling them irreconcilable enemies who must be destroyed. “Why, madam,” Lincoln replied,

“do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”

KEYS TO POWER

It is natural to want to employ your friends when you find yourself in times of need. The world is a harsh place, and your friends soften the harshness. Besides, you know them. Why depend on a stranger when you have a friend at hand?

Men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit, because gratitude is a burden and revenge a pleasure.

TACITUS, c. A.D. 55-120

The problem is that you often do not know your friends as well as you imagine.

Friends often agree on things in order to avoid an argument.

They cover up their unpleasant qualities so as to not offend each other.

They laugh extra hard at each other’s jokes.

Since honesty rarely strengthens friendship, you may never know how a friend truly feels.

Friends will say that they love your poetry, adore your music, envy your taste in clothes— maybe they mean it, often they do not.

When you decide to hire a friend, you gradually discover the qualities he or she has kept hidden.

Strangely enough, it is your act of kindness that unbalances everything.

People want to feel they deserve their good fortune.

The receipt of a favor can become oppressive: It means you have been chosen because you are a friend, not necessarily because you are deserving.

There is almost a touch of condescension in the act of hiring friends that secretly afflicts them.

The injury will come out slowly: A little more honesty, flashes of resentment and envy here and there, and before you know it your friendship fades.

The more favors and gifts you supply to revive the friendship, the less gratitude you receive.

Ingratitude has a long and deep history.

It has demonstrated its powers for so many centuries, that it is truly amazing that people continue to underestimate them.

Better to be wary.

If you never expect gratitude from a friend, you will be pleasantly surprised when they do prove grateful.

The problem with using or hiring friends is that it will inevitably limit your power.

The friend is rarely the one who is most able to help you; and in the end, skill and competence are far more important than friendly feelings. (Michael III had a man right under his nose who would have steered him right and kept him alive: That man was Bardas.)

PLUTARCH

King Hiero chanced upon a time, speaking with one of his enemies, to be told in a reproachful manner that he had stinking breath. 

Whereupon the good king, being somewhat dismayed in himself, as soon as he returned home chided his wife, “How does it happen that you never told me of this problem?” 

The woman, being a simple, chaste. and harmless dame, said, “Sir, l had thought all men breath had smelled so.” 

Thus it is plain that faults that are evident to the senses, gross and corporal, or otherwise notorious to the world, we know by our enemies sooner than by our friends and familiars.

PLUTARCH, C. A.D. 46-120

All working situations require a kind of distance between people.

You are trying to work, not make friends; friendliness (real or false) only obscures that fact.

The key to power, then, is the ability to judge who is best able to further your interests in all situations.

Keep friends for friendship, but work with the skilled and competent.

Your enemies, on the other hand, are an untapped gold mine that you must learn to exploit.

When Talleyrand, Napoleon’s foreign minister, decided in 1807 that his boss was leading France to ruin, and the time had come to turn against him, he understood the dangers of conspiring against the emperor; he needed a partner, a confederate—what friend could he trust in such a project?

He chose Joseph Fouché, head of the secret police, his most hated enemy, a man who had even tried to have him assassinated.

He knew that their former hatred would create an opportunity for an emotional reconciliation.

He knew that Fouché would expect nothing from him, and in fact would work to prove that he was worthy of Talleyrand’s choice; a person who has something to prove will move mountains for you.

Finally, he knew that his relationship with Fouché would be based on mutual self- interest, and would not be contaminated by personal feeling.

The selection proved perfect; although the conspirators did not succeed in toppling Napoleon, the union of such powerful but unlikely partners generated much interest in the cause; opposition to the emperor slowly began to spread.

And from then on, Talleyrand and Fouché had a fruitful working relationship.

Whenever you can, bury the hatchet with an enemy, and make a point of putting him in your service.

As Lincoln said, you destroy an enemy when you make a friend of him.

In 1971, during the Vietnam War, Henry Kissinger was the target of an unsuccessful kidnapping attempt, a conspiracy involving, among others, the renowned antiwar activist priests the Berrigan brothers, four more Catholic priests, and four nuns.

In private, without informing the Secret Service or the Justice Department, Kissinger arranged a Saturday-morning meeting with three of the alleged kidnappers.

Explaining to his guests that he would have most American soldiers out of Vietnam by mid-1972, he completely charmed them.

They gave him some “Kidnap Kissinger” buttons and one of them remained a friend of his for years, visiting him on several occasions.

This was not just a onetime ploy: Kissinger made a policy of working with those who disagreed with him.

Colleagues commented that he seemed to get along better with his enemies than with his friends.

Without enemies around us, we grow lazy.

An enemy at our heels sharpens our wits, keeping us focused and alert.

It is sometimes better, then, to use enemies as enemies rather than transforming them into friends or allies.

Mao Tse-tung saw conflict as key in his approach to power.

In 1937 the Japanese invaded China, interrupting the civil war between Mao’s Communists and their enemy, the Nationalists.

Fearing that the Japanese would wipe them out, some Communist leaders advocated leaving the Nationalists to fight the Japanese, and using the time to recuperate.

Mao disagreed: The Japanese could not possibly defeat and occupy a vast country like China for long.

Once they left, the Communists would have grown rusty if they had been out of combat for several years, and would be ill prepared to reopen their struggle with the Nationalists.

To fight a formidable foe like the Japanese, in fact, would be the perfect training for the Communists’ ragtag army.

Mao’s plan was adopted, and it worked: By the time the Japanese finally retreated, the Communists had gained the fighting experience that helped them defeat the Nationalists.

Years later, a Japanese visitor tried to apologize to Mao for his country’s invasion of China.

Mao interrupted, “Should I not thank you instead?” Without a worthy opponent, he explained, a man or group cannot grow stronger.

Mao’s strategy of constant conflict has several key components.

First, be certain that in the long run you will emerge victorious. Never pick a fight with someone you are not sure you can defeat, as Mao knew the Japanese would be defeated in time.

Second, if you have no apparent enemies, you must sometimes set up a convenient target, even turning a friend into an enemy. Mao used this tactic time and again in politics.

Third, use such enemies to define your cause more clearly to the public, even framing it as a struggle of good against evil. Mao actually encouraged China’s disagreements with the Soviet Union and the United States; without clear- cut enemies, he believed, his people would lose any sense of what Chinese Communism meant. A sharply defined enemy is a far stronger argument for your side than all the words you could possibly put together.

Never let the presence of enemies upset or distress you—you are far better off with a declared opponent or two than not knowing where your real enemies lie.

The man of power welcomes conflict, using enemies to enhance his reputation as a surefooted fighter who can be relied upon in times of uncertainty.

Image: The Jaws of Ingratitude. Knowing what would happen if you put a finger in the mouth of a lion, you would stay clear of it. With friends you will have no such caution, and if you hire them, they will eat you alive with ingratitude.

Authority:

Know how to use enemies for your own profit. You must learn to grab a sword not by its blade, which would cut you, but by the handle, which allows you to defend yourself. The wise man profits more from his enemies, than a fool from his friends. 

(Baltasar Gracián, 1601-1658)

REVERSAL

Although it is generally best not to mix work with friendship, there are times when a friend can be used to greater effect than an enemy.

A man of power, for example, often has dirty work that has to be done, but for the sake of appearances it is generally preferable to have other people do it for him; friends often do this the best, since their affection for him makes them willing to take chances.

Also, if your plans go awry for some reason, you can use a friend as a convenient scapegoat.

This “fall of the favorite” was a trick often used by kings and sovereigns: They would let their closest friend at court take the fall for a mistake, since the public would not believe that they would deliberately sacrifice a friend for such a purpose.

Of course, after you play that card, you have lost your friend forever.

It is best, then, to reserve the scapegoat role for someone who is close to you but not too close.

Finally, the problem about working with friends is that it confuses the boundaries and distances that working requires.

But if both partners in the arrangement understand the dangers involved, a friend often can be employed to great effect.

You must never let your guard down in such a venture, however; always be on the lookout for any signs of emotional disturbance such as envy and ingratitude.

Nothing is stable in the realm of power, and even the closest of friends can be transformed into the worst of enemies.

Conclusion

I know that I have been pumping out China and 48 Laws of Power posts all week long, but I have a backlog that has accumulated with all the historical events of the last few months. Never the less, all these laws are great reading. Perhaps if you read a law here, and a law there, you can absorb the teachings in a slow and leisurely pace and generate benefit from them at your own speed, and on your own terms.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my “48 Laws of Power” Index here…

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Law 33 – Discover each mans thumbscrew (full text) from the 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

This is the complete full text of law #33 titled “Discover each man’s thumbscrew” which is found in the book by Robert Greene titled “The 48 Laws of Power”.

LAW 33

DISCOVER EACH MAN’S THUMBSCREW

JUDGMENT

Everyone has a weakness, a gap in the castle wall. That weakness is usually an insecurity, an uncontrollable emotion or need; it can also be a small secret pleasure. Either way, once found, it is a thumbscrew you can turn to your advantage.

FINDING THE THUMBSCREW: A Strategic Plan of Action

We all have resistances. We live with a perpetual armor around ourselves to defend against change and the intrusive actions of friends and rivals. We would like nothing more than to be left to do things our own way. Constantly butting up against these resistances will cost you a lot of energy. One of the most important things to realize about people, though, is that they all have a weakness, some part of their psychological armor that will not resist, that will bend to your will if you find it and push on it. Some people wear their weaknesses openly, others disguise them. Those who disguise them are often the ones most effectively undone through that one chink in their armor.

THE LION. THE CHAMOIS. AND THE FOX

A lion was chasing a chamois along a valley.

He had all but caught it, and with longing eyes was anticipating a certain and a satisfying repast.

It seemed as if it were utterly impossible for the victim to escape; for a deep ravine appeared to bar the way for both the hunter and the hunted.

But the nimble chamois, gathering together all its strength, shot like an arrow from a bow across the chasm, and stood still on the rocky cliff on the other side.

Our lion pulled up short.

But at that moment a friend of his happened to be near at hand. That friend was the fox. “What!” said he, “with your strength and agility, is it possible that you will yield to a feeble chamois?

You have only to will, and you will be able to work wonders.

Though the abyss be deep, yet, if you are only in earnest, I am certain you will clear it.

Surely you can confide in my disinterested friendship.

I would not expose your life to danger if I were not so well aware of your strength and dexterity. ”

The lion’s blood waxed hot, and began to boil in his veins.

He flung himself with all his might into space.

But he could not clear the chasm; so down he tumbled headlong, and was killed by the fall.

Then what did his dear friend do?

He cautiously made his way down to the bottom of the ravine. and there, out in the open space and the free air, seeing that the lion wanted neither flattery nor obedience now, he set to work to pay the last sad rites to his dead friend, and in a month picked his bones clean.

FABLES, IVAN KRILOFF, 1768-1844

In planning your assault, keep these principles in mind:

Pay Attention to Gestures and Unconscious Signals. As Sigmund Freud remarked, “No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” This is a critical concept in the search for a person’s weakness—it is revealed by seemingly unimportant gestures and passing words.

The key is not only what you look for but where and how you look. Everyday conversation supplies the richest mine of weaknesses, so train yourself to listen. Start by always seeming interested—the appearance of a sympathetic ear will spur anyone to talk. A clever trick, often used by the nineteenth-century French statesman Talleyrand, is to appear to open up to the other person, to share a secret with them. It can be completely made up, or it can be real but of no great importance to you—the important thing is that it should seem to come from the heart. This will usually elicit a response that is not only as frank as yours but more genuine—a response that reveals a weakness.

If you suspect that someone has a particular soft spot, probe for it indirectly. If, for instance, you sense that a man has a need to be loved, openly flatter him. If he laps up your compliments, no matter how obvious, you are on the right track. Train your eye for details—how someone tips a waiter, what delights a person, the hidden messages in clothes. Find people’s idols, the things they worship and will do anything to get—perhaps you can be the supplier of their fantasies. Remember: Since we all try to hide our weaknesses, there is little to be learned from our conscious behavior. What oozes out in the little things outside our conscious control is what you want to know.

Find the Helpless Child. Most weaknesses begin in childhood, before the self builds up compensatory defenses. Perhaps the child was pampered or indulged in a particular area, or perhaps a certain emotional need went unfulfilled; as he or she grows older, the indulgence or the deficiency may be buried but never disappears. Knowing about a childhood need gives you a powerful key to a person’s weakness.

One sign of this weakness is that when you touch on it the person will often act like a child. Be on the lookout, then, for any behavior that should have been outgrown. If your victims or rivals went without something important, such as parental support, when they were children, supply it, or its facsimile. If they reveal a secret taste, a hidden indulgence, indulge it. In either case they will be unable to resist you.

Look for Contrasts. An overt trait often conceals its opposite. People who thump their chests are often big cowards; a prudish exterior may hide a lascivious soul; the uptight are often screaming for adventure; the shy are dying for attention. By probing beyond appearances, you will often find people’s weaknesses in the opposite of the qualities they reveal to you.

Find the Weak Link. Sometimes in your search for weaknesses it is not what but who that matters. In today’s versions of the court, there is often someone behind the scenes who has a great deal of power, a tremendous influence over the person superficially on top. These behind-the-scenes powerbrokers are the group’s weak link: Win their favor and you indirectly influence the king. Alternatively, even in a group of people acting with the appearance of one will—as when a group under attack closes ranks to resist an outsider—there is always a weak link in the chain. Find the one person who will bend under pressure.

Fill the Void. The two main emotional voids to fill are insecurity and unhappiness. The insecure are suckers for any kind of social validation; as for the chronically unhappy, look for the roots of their unhappiness. The insecure and the unhappy are the people least able to disguise their weaknesses. The ability to fill their emotional voids is a great source of power, and an indefinitely prolongable one.

Feed on Uncontrollable Emotions. The uncontrollable emotion can be a paranoid fear—a fear disproportionate to the situation—or any base motive such as lust, greed, vanity, or hatred. People in the grip of these emotions often cannot control themselves, and you can do the controlling for them.

IRING IZAR

[Hollywood super-agent] Irving Paul Lazar was once anxious to sell [studio mogul] Jack L. Warner a play. 

“I had a long meeting with him today,” Lazar explained [to screenwriter Garson Kanin], “but I didn’t mention it, I didn’t even bring it up.” 

“Why not?” I asked. 

“Because I’m going to wait until the weekend after next, when I go to Palm Springs.” 

“I don’t understand.” 

“You don’t? I go to Palm Springs every weekend, but Warner isn’t going this weekend. He’s got a preview or something. So he’s not coming down till the next weekend, so that’s when I’m going to bring it up. ” 

“Irving, I’m more and more confused.” 

“Look,” said Irving impatiently, ”I know what I’m doing. I know how to sell Warner. This is a type of material that he’s uneasy with, so I have to hit him with it hard and suddenly to get an okay.” 

”But why Palm Springs?” 

”Because in Palm Springs, every day he goes to the baths at The Spa. And that’s where I’m going to be when he’s there. Now there’s a thing about Jack: He’s eighty and he’s very vain, and he doesn’t like people to see him naked. So when I walk up to him naked at The Spa—I mean he’s naked—well, I’m naked too, but I don’t care who sees me. He does. And I walk up to him naked, and I start to talk to him about this thing, he’ll be very embarrassed.And he’ll want to get away from me, and the easiest way is to say ‘Yes,’ because he knows if he says ‘No,’ then I’m going to stick with him, and stay right on it, and not give up. So to get rid of me, he’ll probably say, ‘Yes.’” 

Two weeks later, I read of the acquisition of this particular property by Warner Brothers. I phoned Lazar and asked how it had been accomplished. 

”How do you think?” he asked. 

”In the buff, that’s how... just the way I told you it was going to work.”

HOLLYWOOD, GARSON KANIN, 1974

OBSERVANCES OF THE LAW

Observance I

In 1615 the thirty-year-old bishop of Luçon, later known as Cardinal Richelieu, gave a speech before representatives of the three estates of France—clergy, nobility, and commoners.

Richelieu had been chosen to serve as the mouthpiece for the clergy—an immense responsibility for a man still young and not particularly well known.

On all of the important issues of the day, the speech followed the Church line.

But near the end of it Richelieu did something that had nothing to do with the Church and everything to do with his career.

He turned to the throne of the fifteen-year-old King Louis XIII, and to the Queen Mother Marie de’ Médicis, who sat beside Louis, as the regent ruling France until her son reached his majority.

Everyone expected Richelieu to say the usual kind words to the young king.

Instead, however, he looked directly at and only at the queen mother.

Indeed his speech ended in long and fulsome praise of her, praise so glowing that it actually offended some in the Church.

But the smile on the queen’s face as she lapped up Richelieu’s compliments was unforgettable.

A year later the queen mother appointed Richelieu secretary of state for foreign affairs, an incredible coup for the young bishop.

He had now entered the inner circle of power, and he studied the workings of the court as if it were the machinery of a watch.

An Italian, Concino Concini, was the queen mother’s favorite, or rather her lover, a role that made him perhaps the most powerful man in France.

Concini was vain and foppish, and Richelieu played him perfectly—attending to him as if he were the king.

Within months Richelieu had become one of Concini’s favorites.

But something happened in 1617 that turned everything upside down: the young king, who up until then had shown every sign of being an idiot, had Concini murdered and his most important associates imprisoned.

In so doing Louis took command of the country with one blow, sweeping the queen mother aside.

Had Richelieu played it wrong?

He had been close to both Concini and Marie de Médicis, whose advisers and ministers were now all out of favor, some even arrested.

The queen mother herself was shut up in the Louvre, a virtual prisoner.

Richelieu wasted no time.

If everyone was deserting Marie de Médicis, he would stand by her.

He knew Louis could not get rid of her, for the king was still very young, and had in any case always been inordinately attached to her.

As Marie’s only remaining powerful friend, Richelieu filled the valuable function of liaison between the king and his mother.

In return he received her protection, and was able to survive the palace coup, even to thrive.

Over the next few years the queen mother grew still more dependent on him, and in 1622 she repaid him for his loyalty: Through the intercession of her allies in Rome, Richelieu was elevated to the powerful rank of cardinal.

By 1623 King Louis was in trouble.

He had no one he could trust to advise him, and although he was now a young man instead of a boy, he remained childish in spirit, and affairs of state came hard to him.

Now that he had taken the throne, Marie was no longer the regent and theoretically had no power, but she still had her son’s ear, and she kept telling him that Richelieu was his only possible savior.

At first Louis would have none of it—he hated the cardinal with a passion, only tolerating him out of love for Marie.

In the end, however, isolated in the court and crippled by his own indecisiveness, he yielded to his mother and made Richelieu first his chief councilor and later prime minister.

Now Richelieu no longer needed Marie de Médicis.

He stopped visiting and courting her, stopped listening to her opinions, even argued with her and opposed her wishes.

Instead he concentrated on the king, making himself indispensable to his new master.

All the previous premiers, understanding the king’s childishness, had tried to keep him out of trouble; the shrewd Richelieu played him differently, deliberately pushing him into one ambitious project after another, such as a crusade against the Huguenots and finally an extended war with Spain.

The immensity of these projects only made the king more dependent on his powerful premier, the only man able to keep order in the realm.

And so, for the next eighteen years, Richelieu, exploiting the king’s weaknesses, governed and molded France according to his own vision, unifying the country and making it a strong European power for centuries to come.

Interpretation

Richelieu saw everything as a military campaign, and no strategic move was more important to him than discovering his enemy’s weaknesses and applying pressure to them.

As early as his speech in 1615, he was looking for the weak link in the chain of power, and he saw that it was the queen mother.

Not that Marie was obviously weak—she governed both France and her son; but Richelieu saw that she was really an insecure woman who needed constant masculine attention.

He showered her with affection and respect, even toadying up to her favorite, Concini.

He knew the day would come when the king would take over, but he also recognized that Louis loved his mother dearly and would always remain a child in relation to her.

The way to control Louis, then, was not by gaining his favor, which could change overnight, but by gaining sway over his mother, for whom his affection would never change.

Once Richelieu had the position he desired—prime minister—he discarded the queen mother, moving on to the next weak link in the chain: the king’s own character.

There was a part of him that would always be a helpless child in need of higher authority.

It was on the foundation of the king’s weakness that Richelieu established his own power and fame.

Remember: When entering the court, find the weak link. The person in control is often not the king or queen; it is someone behind the scenes—the favorite, the husband or wife, even the court fool. This person may have more weaknesses than the king himself, because his power depends on all kinds of capricious factors outside his control.

Finally, when dealing with helpless children who cannot make decisions, play on their weakness and push them into bold ventures. They will have to depend on you even more, for you will become the adult figure whom they rely on to get them out of scrapes and to safety.

THE THINGS ON

As time went on I came to look for the little weaknesses....

It’s the little things that count.

On one occasion, I worked on the president of a large bank in Omaha. The [phony] deal involved the purchase of the street railway system of Omaha, including a bridge across the Mississippi River.

My principals were supposedly German and I had to negotiate with Berlin.

While awaiting word from them I introduced my fake mining-stock proposition.

Since this man was rich, I decided to play for high stakes....

Meanwhile, I played golf with the banker, visited his home, and went to the theater with him and his wife.

Though he showed some interest in my stock deal, he still wasn’t convinced.

I had built it up to the point that an investment of $1,250,000 was required.

Of this I was to put up $900,000, the banker $350,000.

But still he hesitated.

One evening when I was at his home for dinner I wore some perfume-Coty’s “April Violets.”

It was not then considered effeminate for a man to use a dash of perfume.

The banker’s wife thought it very lovely.

“Where did you get it?”

“It is a rare blend,” I told her, “especially made for me by a French perfumer. Do you like it?”

”l love it,” she replied.

The following day I went through my effects and found two empty bottles.

Both had come from France, but were empty.

I went to a downtown department store and purchased ten ounces of Coty’s ”April Violets.”

I poured this into the two French bottles, carefully sealed them, wrapped them in tissue paper.

That evening I dropped by the banker’s home and presented the two bottles to his wife.

”They were especially put up for me in Cologne,” I told her.

The next day the banker called at my hotel.

His wife was enraptured by the perfume.

She considered it the most wonderful, the most exotic fragrance she had ever used.

I did not tell the banker he could get all he wanted right in Omaha.

”She said,” the banker added, ”that I was fortunate to be associated with a man like you.”

From then on his attitude was changed, for he had complete faith in his wife’s judgment .... He parted with $350,000.

This, incidentally was my biggest [con] score.

-“YELLOW KID” WEIL, 1875-1976

Observance II

In December of 1925, guests at the swankiest hotel in Palm Beach, Florida, watched with interest as a mysterious man arrived in a Rolls-Royce driven by a Japanese chauffeur.

Over the next few days they studied this handsome man, who walked with an elegant cane, received telegrams at all hours, and only engaged in the briefest of conversations.

He was a count, they heard, Count Victor Lustig, and he came from one of the wealthiest families in Europe—but this was all they could find out.

Imagine their amazement, then, when Lustig one day walked up to one of the least distinguished guests in the hotel, a Mr. Herman Loller, head of an engineering company, and entered into conversation with him.

Loller had made his fortune only recently, and forging social connections was very important to him.

He felt honored and somewhat intimidated by this sophisticated man, who spoke perfect English with a hint of a foreign accent.

Over the days to come, the two became friends.

Loller of course did most of the talking, and one night he confessed that his business was doing poorly, with more troubles ahead.

In return, Lustig confided in his new friend that he too had serious money problems—Communists had seized his family estate and all its assets.

He was too old to learn a trade and go to work.

Luckily he had found an answer—“ a money-making machine.”

“You counterfeit?”

Loller whispered in half-shock.

No, Lustig replied, explaining that through a secret chemical process, his machine could duplicate any paper currency with complete accuracy.

Put in a dollar bill and six hours later you had two, both perfect.

He proceeded to explain how the machine had been smuggled out of Europe, how the Germans had developed it to undermine the British, how it had supported the count for several years, and on and on.

When Loller insisted on a demonstration, the two men went to Lustig’s room, where the count produced a magnificent mahogany box fitted with slots, cranks, and dials.

Loller watched as Lustig inserted a dollar bill in the box. Sure enough, early the following morning Lustig pulled out two bills, still wet from the chemicals.

Lustig gave the notes to Loller, who immediately took the bills to a local bank—which accepted them as genuine.

Now the businessman feverishly begged Lustig to sell him a machine.

The count explained that there was only one in existence, so Loller made him a high offer: $25,000, then a considerable amount (more than $400,000 in today’s terms).

Even so, Lustig seemed reluctant: He did not feel right about making his friend pay so much.

Yet finally he agreed to the sale.

After all, he said,

“I suppose it matters little what you pay me. You are, after all, going to recover the amount within a few days by duplicating your own bills.”

Making Loller swear never to reveal the machine’s existence to other people, Lustig accepted the money.

Later the same day he checked out of the hotel.

A year later, after many futile attempts at duplicating bills, Loller finally went to the police with the story of how Count Lustig had conned him with a pair of dollar bills, some chemicals, and a worthless mahogany box.

Interpretation

Count Lustig had an eagle eye for other people’s weaknesses.

He saw them in the smallest gesture.

Loller, for instance, overtipped waiters, seemed nervous in conversation with the concierge, talked loudly about his business.

His weakness, Lustig knew, was his need for social validation and for the respect that he thought his wealth had earned him.

He was also chronically insecure.

Lustig had come to the hotel to hunt for prey.

In Loller he homed in on the perfect sucker—a man hungering for someone to fill his psychic voids.

In offering Loller his friendship, then, Lustig knew he was offering him the immediate respect of the other guests.

As a count, Lustig was also offering the newly rich businessman access to the glittering world of old wealth.

And for the coup de grace, he apparently owned a machine that would rescue Loller from his worries.

It would even put him on a par with Lustig himself, who had also used the machine to maintain his status.

No wonder Loller took the bait.

Remember: When searching for suckers, always look for the dissatisfied, the unhappy, the insecure. Such people are riddled with weaknesses and have needs that you can fill. Their neediness is the groove in which you place your thumbnail and turn them at will.

Observance III

In the year 1559, the French king Henri II died in a jousting exhibition.

His son assumed the throne, becoming Francis II, but in the background stood Henri’s wife and queen, Catherine de’ Médicis, a woman who had long ago proven her skill in affairs of state.

When Francis died the next year, Catherine took control of the country as regent to her next son in line of succession, the future Charles IX, a mere ten years old at the time.

The main threats to the queen’s power were Antoine de Bourbon, king of Navarre, and his brother, Louis, the powerful prince of Condé, both of whom could claim the right to serve as regent instead of Catherine, who, after all, was Italian—a foreigner.

Catherine quickly appointed Antoine lieutenant general of the kingdom, a title that seemed to satisfy his ambition.

It also meant that he had to remain in court, where Catherine could keep an eye on him.

Her next move proved smarter still: Antoine had a notorious weakness for young women, so she assigned one of her most attractive maids of honor, Louise de Rouet, to seduce him.

Now Antoine’s intimate, Louise reported all of his actions to Catherine.

The move worked so brilliantly that Catherine assigned another of her maids to Prince Condé, and thus was formed her escadron volant—“flying squadron”—of young girls whom she used to keep the unsuspecting males in the court under her control.

In 1572 Catherine married off her daughter, Marguerite de Valois, to Henri, the son of Antoine and the new king of Navarre.

To put a family that had always struggled against her so close to power was a dangerous move, so to make sure of Henri’s loyalty she unleashed on him the loveliest member of her “flying squadron,” Charlotte de Beaune Semblançay, baroness of Sauves.

Catherine did this even though Henri was married to her daughter.

Within weeks, Marguerite de Valois wrote in her memoirs,

“Mme. de Sauves so completely ensnared my husband that we no longer slept together, nor even conversed.”

And while I am on the subject, there is another fact that deserves mention. It is this. A man shows his character just in the way in which he deals with trifles-for then he is off his guard.

This will often afford a good opportunity of observing the boundless egoism of a man’s nature, and his total lack of consideration for others; and if these defects show themselves in small things, or merely in his general demeanor, you will find that they also underlie his action in matters of importance, although he may disguise the fact.

This is an opportunity which should not be missed.

If in the little affairs of every day—the trifles of life...—a man is inconsiderate and seeks only what is advantageous or convenient to himself, to the prejudice of others’ rights; if he appropriates to himself that which belongs to all alike, you may be sure there is no justice in his heart, and that he would be a scoundrel on a wholesale scale, only that law and compulsion bind his hands.

-Arthur SCHOPENHAUER, 1788-1860

The baroness was an excellent spy and helped to keep Henri under Catherine’s thumb.

When the queen’s youngest son, the Duke of Alençon, grew so close to Henri that she feared the two might plot against her, she assigned the baroness to him as well.

This most infamous member of the flying squadron quickly seduced Alençon, and soon the two young men fought over her and their friendship quickly ended, along with any danger of a conspiracy.

Interpretation

Catherine had seen very early on the sway that a mistress has over a man of power: Her own husband, Henri II, had kept one of the most infamous mistresses of them all, Diane de Poitiers.

What Catherine learned from the experience was that a man like her husband wanted to feel he could win a woman over without having to rely on his status, which he had inherited rather than earned.

And such a need contained a huge blind spot: As long as the woman began the affair by acting as if she had been conquered, the man would fail to notice that as time passed the mistress had come to hold power over him, as Diane de Poitiers did over Henri.

It was Catherine’s strategy to turn this weakness to her advantage, using it as a way to conquer and control men.

All she had to do was unleash the loveliest women in the court, her “flying squadron,” on men whom she knew shared her husband’s vulnerability.

Remember: Always look for passions and obsessions that cannot be controlled. The stronger the passion, the more vulnerable the person.

This may seem surprising, for passionate people look strong.

In fact, however, they are simply filling the stage with their theatricality, distracting people from how weak and helpless they really are.

A man’s need to conquer women actually reveals a tremendous helplessness that has made suckers out of them for thousands of years.

Look at the part of a person that is most visible—their greed, their lust, their intense fear.

These are the emotions they cannot conceal, and over which they have the least control.

And what people cannot control, you can control for them.

THE BATTLE AT PHARSALIA

When the two armies [Julius Caesar’s and Pompey‘s] were come into Pharsalia, and both encamped there, Pompey’s thoughts ran the same way as they had done before, against fighting....

But those who were about him were greatly confident of success ...

...as if they had already conquered....

The cavalry especially were obstinate for fighting, being splendidly armed and bravely mounted, and valuing themselves upon the fine horses they kept, and upon their own handsome persons; as also upon the advantage of their numbers, for they were five thousand against one thousand of Caesar’s.

Nor were the numbers of the infantry less disproportionate, there being forty-five thousand of Pompey’s against twenty-two thousand of the enemy.

[The next day] whilst the infantry was thus sharply engaged in the main battle, on the flank Pompey’s horse rode up confidently, and opened [his cavalry’s] ranks very wide, that they might surround the right wing of Caesar.

But before they engaged, Caesar’s cohorts rushed out and attacked them, and did not dart their javelins at a distance, nor strike at the thighs and legs, as they usually did in close battle, but aimed at their faces.

For thus Caesar had instructed them, in hopes that young gentlemen, who had not known much of battles and wounds, but came wearing their hair long, in the flower of their age and height of their beauty, would be more apprehensive of such blows, and not care for hazarding both a danger at present and a blemish for the future.

And so it proved, for they were so far from bearing the stroke of the javelins, that they could not stand the sight of them, but turned about, and covered their faces to secure them.

Once in disorder, presently they turned about to fly; and so most shamefully ruined all.

For those who had beat them back at once outflanked the infantry, and falling on their rear, cut them to pieces.

Pompey, who commanded the other wing of the army, when he saw his cavalry thus broken and flying, was no longer himself, nor did he now remember that he was Pompey the Great, but, like one whom some god had deprived of his senses, retired to his tent without speaking a word, and there sat to expect the event, till the whole army was routed.

-THE LIFE OF JULIUS CAESAR. PLUIARCH, c. A.D. 46-120

Observance IV

Arabella Huntington, wife of the great late-nineteenth-century railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington, came from humble origins and always struggled for social recognition among her wealthy peers.

When she gave a party in her San Francisco mansion, few of the social elite would show up; most of them took her for a gold digger, not their kind.

Because of her husband’s fabulous wealth, art dealers courted her, but with such condescension they obviously saw her as an upstart.

Only one man of consequence treated her differently: the dealer Joseph Duveen.

For the first few years of Duveen’s relationship with Arabella, he made no effort to sell expensive art to her.

Instead he accompanied her to fine stores, chatted endlessly about queens and princesses he knew, on and on.

At last, she thought, a man who treated her as an equal, even a superior, in high society.

Meanwhile, if Duveen did not try to sell art to her, he did subtly educate her in his aesthetic ideas—namely, that the best art was the most expensive art.

And after Arabella had soaked up his way of seeing things, Duveen would act as if she always had exquisite taste, even though before she met him her aesthetics had been abysmal.

When Collis Huntington died, in 1900, Arabella came into a fortune.

She suddenly started to buy expensive paintings, by Rembrandt and Velázquez, for example—and only from Duveen.

Years later Duveen sold her Gainsborough’s Blue Boy for the highest price ever paid for a work of art at the time, an astounding purchase for a family that previously had shown little interest in collecting.

Interpretation

Joseph Duveen instantly understood Arabella Huntington and what made her tick: She wanted to feel important, at home in society.

Intensely insecure about her lower-class background, she needed confirmation of her new social status.

Duveen waited. Instead of rushing into trying to persuade her to collect art, he subtly went to work on her weaknesses.

He made her feel that she deserved his attention not because she was the wife of one of the wealthiest men in the world but because of her own special character—and this completely melted her.

Duveen never condescended to Arabella; rather than lecturing to her, he instilled his ideas in her indirectly.

The result was one of his best and most devoted clients, and also the sale of The Blue Boy.

People’s need for validation and recognition, their need to feel important, is the best kind of weakness to exploit.

First, it is almost universal; second, exploiting it is so very easy.

All you have to do is find ways to make people feel better about their taste, their social standing, their intelligence.

Once the fish are hooked, you can reel them in again and again, for years—you are filling a positive role, giving them what they cannot get on their own.

They may never suspect that you are turning them like a thumbscrew, and if they do they may not care, because you are making them feel better about themselves, and that is worth any price.

Observance V

In 1862 King William of Prussia named Otto von Bismarck premier and minister for foreign affairs.

Bismarck was known for his boldness, his ambition—and his interest in strengthening the military.

Since William was surrounded by liberals in his government and cabinet, politicians who already wanted to limit his powers, it was quite dangerous for him to put Bismarck in this sensitive position.

His wife, Queen Augusta, had tried to dissuade him, but although she usually got her way with him, this time William stuck to his guns.

Only a week after becoming prime minister, Bismarck made an impromptu speech to a few dozen ministers to convince them of the need to enlarge the army.

He ended by saying, “The great questions of the time will be decided, not by speeches and resolutions of majorities, but by iron and blood.”

His speech was immediately disseminated throughout Germany.

The queen screamed at her husband that Bismarck was a barbaric militarist who was out to usurp control of Prussia, and that William had to fire him.

The liberals in the government agreed with her.

The outcry was so vehement that William began to be afraid he would end up on a scaffold, like Louis XVI of France, if he kept Bismarck on as prime minister.

Bismarck knew he had to get to the king before it was too late.

He also knew he had blundered, and should have tempered his fiery words.

Yet as he contemplated his strategy, he decided not to apologize but to do the exact opposite.

Bismarck knew the king well.

When the two men met, William, predictably, had been worked into a tizzy by the queen.

He reiterated his fear of being guillotined.

But Bismarck only replied,

“Yes, then we shall be dead! We must die sooner or later, and could there be a more respectable way of dying? I should die fighting for the cause of my king and master. Your Majesty would die sealing with your own blood your royal rights granted by God’s grace. Whether upon the scaffold or upon the battlefield makes no difference to the glorious staking of body and life on behalf of rights granted by God’s grace!”

On he went, appealing to William’s sense of honor and the majesty of his position as head of the army.

How could the king allow people to push him around?

Wasn’t the honor of Germany more important than quibbling over words?

Not only did the prime minister convince the king to stand up to both his wife and his parliament, he persuaded him to build up the army—Bismarck’s goal all along.

Interpretation

Bismarck knew the king felt bullied by those around him.

He knew that William had a military background and a deep sense of honor, and that he felt ashamed at his cravenness before his wife and his government.

William secretly yearned to be a great and mighty king, but he dared not express this ambition because he was afraid of ending up like Louis XVI.

Where a show of courage often conceals a man’s timidity, William’s timidity concealed his need to show courage and thump his chest.

Bismarck sensed the longing for glory beneath William’s pacifist front, so he played to the king’s insecurity about his manhood, finally pushing him into three wars and the creation of a German empire.

Timidity is a potent weakness to exploit. Timid souls often yearn to be their opposite—to be Napoleons. Yet they lack the inner strength.

You, in essence, can become their Napoleon, pushing them into bold actions that serve your needs while also making them dependent on you.

Remember: Look to the opposites and never take appearances at face value.

Image: The
Thumbscrew.
Your enemy
has secrets that
he guards, thinks
thoughts he will
not reveal. But
they come out in
ways he cannot
help. It is there some
where, a groove of
weakness on his head,
at his heart, over his
belly. Once you find the
groove, put your thumb in
it and turn him at will.

Authority: Find out each man’s thumbscrew.

’Tis the art of setting their wills in action. It needs more skill than resolution. You must know where to get at anyone. Every volition has a special motive which varies according to taste. All men are idolaters, some of fame, others of self-interest, most of pleasure. Skill consists in knowing these idols in order to bring them into play. Knowing any man’s mainspring of motive you have as it were the key to his will. 

(Baltasar Gracián, 1601-1658)

REVERSAL

Playing on people’s weakness has one significant danger: You may stir up an action you cannot control.

In your games of power you always look several steps ahead and plan accordingly. And you exploit the fact that other people are more emotional and incapable of such foresight.

But when you play on their vulnerabilities, the areas over which they have least control, you can unleash emotions that will upset your plans. Push timid people into bold action and they may go too far; answer their need for attention or recognition and they may need more than you want to give them.

The helpless, childish element you are playing on can turn against you.

The more emotional the weakness, the greater the potential danger. Know the limits to this game, then, and never get carried away by your control over your victims. You are after power, not the thrill of control.

Conclusion

I just cannot help but wonder if the American neocons are playing President Biden using this Thumbscrew technique to force Biden to approve of outlandish military actions that run counter to his decades of behavior within the Untied States government. It’s something to ponder.

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Law 5 of the 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene; So much depends on reputation, guard it with your life (Full Text)

The photo above reminds me so very much of the old Doc Savage paperbacks that I used to read when I was in Middle School. This is a promo image of Dwayne Johnson in one of his Jumanji movies.

Dwayne is an interesting person, but the thing is that few people hate him. He’s a kind soul, or at least tries to portray that image. And without that image, he’s just another smuck that went from weight-lifting to movies.

It’s difficult to keep your reputation. Certainly no one knows that better than myself who now has the ugly reputation of being a nasty filthy child predator now living inside the filthy evil communist Hell-hole.

And that’s the way it works, you know.

To destroy a person completely, you need only destroy his reputation so that no one wants to associate with him, employ him, listen to him, or be friends with him. Then alone, shunned, starving, and destitute he can die inside the hole you made for him to crawl into.

This is a great chapter by Robert Greene. Read it and learn from it.

LAW 5

SO MUCH DEPENDS ON REPUTATION—GUARD IT WITH YOUR LIFE

JUDGMENT

Reputation is the cornerstone of power. Through reputation alone you can intimidate and win; once it slips, however, you are vulnerable, and will be attacked on all sides. Make your reputation unassailable. Always be alert to potential attacks and thwart them before they happen. Meanwhile, learn to destroy your enemies by opening holes in their own reputations. Then stand aside and let public opinion hang them.

OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW I

During China’s War of the Three Kingdoms (A.D. 207-265), the great general Chuko Liang, leading the forces of the Shu Kingdom, dispatched his vast army to a distant camp while he rested in a small town with a handful of soldiers.

Suddenly sentinels hurried in with the alarming news that an enemy force of over 150,000 troops under Sima Yi was approaching.

With only a hundred men to defend him, Chuko Liang’s situation was hopeless.

The enemy would finally capture this renowned leader.

Without lamenting his fate, or wasting time trying to figure out how he had been caught, Liang ordered his troops to take down their flags, throw open the city gates, and hide.

He himself then took a seat on the most visible part of the city’s wall, wearing a Taoist robe.

He lit some incense, strummed his lute, and began to chant.

Minutes later he could see the vast enemy army approaching, an endless phalanx of soldiers.

Pretending not to notice them, he continued to sing and play the lute.

Soon the army stood at the town gates.

At its head was Sima Yi, who instantly recognized the man on the wall.

Even so, as his soldiers itched to enter the unguarded town through its open gates, Sima Yi hesitated, held them back, and studied Liang on the wall.

Then, he ordered an immediate and speedy retreat.

THE ANIMALS STRICKEN WITH THE PLAGUE

A frightful epidemic sent To earth by Heaven intent to vent Its fury on a sinful world, to call It by its rightful name, the pestilence, That Acheron- filling vial of virulence Had fallen on every animal.

Not all were dead, but all lay near to dying, And none was any longer trying To find new fuel to feed life’s flickering fires.

No foods excited their desires; No more did wolves and foxes rove In search of harmless, helpless prey; And dove would not consort with dove, For love and joy had flown away.

The Lion assumed the chair to say: “Dear friends, I doubt not it’s for heaven’s high ends That on us sinners woe must fall. Let him of us who’s sinned the most Fall victim to the avenging heavenly host, And may he win salvation for us all; For history teaches us that in these crises We must make sacrifices. Undeceived and stern-eyed, let’s inspect Our conscience. As I recollect, To put my greedy appetite to sleep, I’ve banqueted on many a sheep Who’d injured me in no respect, And even in my time been known to try Shepherd pie. If need be, then. I’ll die. Yet I suspect That others also ought to own their sins. It’s only fair that all should do their best To single out the guiltiest.”

“Sire, you’re too good a king,“the Fox begins; ”Such scruples are too delicate. My word, To eat sheep, that profane and vulgar herd. That’s sin? Nay. Sire, enough for such a crew To be devoured by such as you; While of the shepherds we may say That they deserved the worst they got. Theirs being the lot that over us beasts plot A flimsy dream-begotten sway.”

Thus spake the Fox, and toady cheers rose high, While none dared cast too cold an eye On Tiger‘s, Bear’s, and other eminences Most unpardonable offences.

Each, of never mind what currish breed, Was really a saint, they all agreed.

Then came the Ass, to say: ”I do recall How once I crossed an abbey-mead Where hunger, grass in plenty, and withal, I have no doubt, some imp of greed. Assailed me, and I shaved a tongue’s-breadth wide Where frankly I’d no right to any grass.”

All forthwith fell full cry upon the Ass: A Wolf of some book-learning testified That that curst beast must suffer their despite, That gallskinned author of their piteous plight.

They judged him fit for nought but gallows-bait: How vile, another’s grass to sequestrate! His death alone could expiate A crime so heinous, as full well he learns. The court, as you’re of great or poor estate, Will paint you either white or black by turns.

THE BEST FABLES OF LA FONTAINE, JEAN DE LA FONTAINE, 1621- 1695

Interpretation

Chuko Liang was commonly known as the “Sleeping Dragon.”

His exploits in the War of the Three Kingdoms were legendary.

Once a man claiming to be a disaffected enemy lieutenant came to his camp, offering help and information. Liang instantly recognized the situation as a setup; this man was a false deserter, and should be beheaded.

At the last minute, though, as the ax was about to fall, Liang stopped the execution and offered to spare the man’s life if he agreed to become a double agent.

Grateful and terrified, the man agreed, and began supplying false information to the enemy. Liang won battle after battle.

On another occasion Liang stole a military seal and created false documents dispatching his enemy’s troops to distant locations.

Once the troops had dispersed, he was able to capture three cities, so that he controlled an entire corridor of the enemy’s kingdom.

He also once tricked the enemy into believing one of its best generals was a traitor, forcing the man to escape and join forces with Liang.

The Sleeping Dragon carefully cultivated his reputation of being the cleverest man in China, one who always had a trick up his sleeve.

As powerful as any weapon, this reputation struck fear into his enemy.

Sima Yi had fought against Chuko Liang dozens of times and knew him well.

When he came on the empty city, with Liang praying on the wall, he was stunned.

The Taoist robes, the chanting, the incense—this had to be a game of intimidation.

The man was obviously taunting him, daring him to walk into a trap.

The game was so obvious that for one moment it crossed Yi’s mind that Liang actually was alone, and desperate.

But so great was his fear of Liang that he dared not risk finding out.

Such is the power of reputation.

It can put a vast army on the defensive, even force them into retreat, without a single arrow being fired.

For, as Cicero says, even those who argue against fame still want the books they write against it to bear their name in the title and hope to become famous for despising it. Everything else is subject to barter: we will let our friends have our goods and our lives if need be; but a case of sharing our fame and making someone else the gift of our reputation is hardly to be found. 

Montaigne, 1533-1592

OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW II

In 1841 the young P. T. Barnum, trying to establish his reputation as America’s premier showman, decided to purchase the American Museum in Manhattan and turn it into a collection of curiosities that would secure his fame.

The problem was that he had no money.

The museum’s asking price was $15,000, but Barnum was able to put together a proposal that appealed to the institution’s owners even though it replaced cash up front with dozens of guarantees and references.

The owners came to a verbal agreement with Barnum, but at the last minute, the principal partner changed his mind, and the museum and its collection were sold to the directors of Peale’s Museum.

Barnum was infuriated, but the partner explained that business was business —the museum had been sold to Peale’s because Peale’s had a reputation and Barnum had none.

Barnum immediately decided that if he had no reputation to bank on, his only recourse was to ruin the reputation of Peale’s.

Accordingly he launched a letter-writing campaign in the newspapers, calling the owners a bunch of “broken-down bank directors” who had no idea how to run a museum or entertain people.

He warned the public against buying Peale’s stock, since the business’s purchase of another museum would invariably spread its resources thin.

The campaign was effective, the stock plummeted, and with no more confidence in Peale’s track record and reputation, the owners of the American Museum reneged on their deal and sold the whole thing to Barnum.

It took years for Peale’s to recover, and they never forgot what Barnum had done.

Mr. Peale himself decided to attack Barnum by building a reputation for “high-brow entertainment,” promoting his museum’s programs as more scientific than those of his vulgar competitor.

Mesmerism (hypnotism) was one of Peale’s “scientific” attractions, and for a while it drew big crowds and was quite successful. To fight back, Barnum decided to attack Peale’s reputation yet again.

Barnum organized a rival mesmeric performance in which he himself apparently put a little girl into a trance.

Once she seemed to have fallen deeply under, he tried to hypnotize members of the audience—but no matter how hard he tried, none of the spectators fell under his spell, and many of them began to laugh.

A frustrated Barnum finally announced that to prove the little girl’s trance was real, he would cut off one of her fingers without her noticing.

But as he sharpened the knife, the little girl’s eyes popped open and she ran away, to the audience’s delight.

He repeated this and other parodies for several weeks.

Soon no one could take Peale’s show seriously, and attendance went way down.

Within a few weeks, the show closed.

Over the next few years Barnum established a reputation for audacity and consummate showmanship that lasted his whole life.

Peale’s reputation, on the other hand, never recovered.

Interpretation

Barnum used two different tactics to ruin Peale’s reputation.

The first was simple: He sowed doubts about the museum’s stability and solvency. Doubt is a powerful weapon: Once you let it out of the bag with insidious rumors, your opponents are in a horrible dilemma. On the one hand they can deny the rumors, even prove that you have slandered them. But a layer of suspicion will remain: Why are they defending themselves so desperately?

Maybe the rumor has some truth to it? If, on the other hand, they take the high road and ignore you, the doubts, unrefuted, will be even stronger. If done correctly, the sowing of rumors can so infuriate and unsettle your rivals that in defending themselves they will make numerous mistakes. This is the perfect weapon for those who have no reputation of their own to work from.

Once Barnum did have a reputation of his own, he used the second, gentler tactic, the fake hypnotism demonstration: He ridiculed his rivals’ reputation.

This too was extremely successful.

Once you have a solid base of respect, ridiculing your opponent both puts him on the defensive and draws more attention to you, enhancing your own reputation.

Outright slander and insult are too strong at this point; they are ugly, and may hurt you more than help you.

But gentle barbs and mockery suggest that you have a strong enough sense of your own worth to enjoy a good laugh at your rival’s expense.

A humorous front can make you out as a harmless entertainer while poking holes in the reputation of your rival.

It is easier to cope with a bad conscience than with a bad reputation.

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900

KEYS TO POWER

The people around us, even our closest friends, will always to some extent remain mysterious and unfathomable.

Their characters have secret recesses that they never reveal.

The unknowableness of other people could prove disturbing if we thought about it long enough, since it would make it impossible for us really to judge other people.

So we prefer to ignore this fact, and to judge people on their appearances, on what is most visible to our eyes—clothes, gestures, words, actions. In the social realm, appearances are the barometer of almost all of our judgments, and you must never be mis led into believing otherwise.

One false slip, one awkward or sudden change in your appearance, can prove disastrous.

This is the reason for the supreme importance of making and maintaining a reputation that is of your own creation.

That reputation will protect you in the dangerous game of appearances, distracting the probing eyes of others from knowing what you are really like, and giving you a degree of control over how the world judges you—a powerful position to be in.

Reputation has a power like magic: With one stroke of its wand, it can double your strength.

It can also send people scurrying away from you.

Whether the exact same deeds appear brilliant or dreadful can depend entirely on the reputation of the doer.

In the ancient Chinese court of the Wei kingdom there was a man named Mi Tzu-hsia who had a reputation for supreme civility and graciousness.

He became the ruler’s favorite.

It was a law in Wei that “whoever rides secretly in the ruler’s coach shall have his feet cut off,” but when Mi Tzu-hsia’s mother fell ill, he used the royal coach to visit her, pretending that the ruler had given him permission.

When the ruler found out, he said, “How dutiful is Mi Tzu-hsia!

For his mother’s sake he even forgot that he was committing a crime making him liable to lose his feet!”

Another time the two of them took a stroll in an orchard.

Mi Tzu-hsia began eating a peach that he could not finish, and he gave the ruler the other half to eat.

The ruler remarked, “You love me so much that you would even forget your own saliva taste and let me eat the rest of the peach!”

Later, however, envious fellow courtiers, spreading word that Mi Tzu- hsia was actually devious and arrogant, succeeded in damaging his reputation; the ruler came to see his actions in a new light.

“This fellow once rode in my coach under pretense of my order,” he told the courtiers angrily, “and another time he gave me a half-eaten peach.”

For the same actions that had charmed the ruler when he was the favorite, Mi Tzu-hsia now had to suffer the penalties.

The fate of his feet depended solely on the strength of his reputation.

In the beginning, you must work to establish a reputation for one outstanding quality, whether generosity or honesty or cunning.

This quality sets you apart and gets other people to talk about you.

You then make your reputation known to as many people as possible (subtly, though; take care to build slowly, and with a firm foundation), and watch as it spreads like wildfire.

A solid reputation increases your presence and exaggerates your strengths without your having to spend much energy.

It can also create an aura around you that will instill respect, even fear. In the fighting in the North African desert during World War II, the German general Erwin Rommel had a reputation for cunning and for deceptive maneuvering that struck terror into everyone who faced him.

Even when his forces were depleted, and when British tanks outnumbered his by five to one, entire cities would be evacuated at the news of his approach.

As they say, your reputation inevitably precedes you, and if it inspires respect, a lot of your work is done for you before you arrive on the scene, or utter a single word.

Your success seems destined by your past triumphs.

Much of the success of Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy rested on his reputation for ironing out differences; no one wanted to be seen as so unreasonable that Kissinger could not sway him.

A peace treaty seemed a fait accompli as soon as Kissinger’s name became involved in the negotiations.

Make your reputation simple and base it on one sterling quality.

This single quality—efficiency, say, or seductiveness—becomes a kind of calling card that announces your presence and places others under a spell.

A reputation for honesty will allow you to practice all manner of deception.

Casanova used his reputation as a great seducer to pave the way for his future conquests; women who had heard of his powers became immensely curious, and wanted to discover for themselves what had made him so romantically successful.

Perhaps you have already stained your reputation, so that you are prevented from establishing a new one.

In such cases it is wise to associate with someone whose image counteracts your own, using their good name to whitewash and elevate yours.

It is hard, for example, to erase a reputation for dishonesty by yourself; but a paragon of honesty can help. When P. T. Barnum wanted to clean up a reputation for promoting vulgar entertainment, he brought the singer Jenny Lind over from Europe.

She had a stellar, high-class reputation, and the American tour Barnum sponsored for her greatly enhanced his own image.

Similarly the great robber barons of nineteenth-century America were long unable to rid themselves of a reputation for cruelty and mean-spiritedness.

Only when they began collecting art, so that the names of Morgan and Frick became permanently associated with those of da Vinci and Rembrandt, were they able to soften their unpleasant image.

Reputation is a treasure to be carefully collected and hoarded.

Especially when you are first establishing it, you must protect it strictly, anticipating all attacks on it.

Once it is solid, do not let yourself get angry or defensive at the slanderous comments of your enemies—that reveals insecurity, not confidence in your reputation.

Take the high road instead, and never appear desperate in your self-defense.

On the other hand, an attack on another man’s reputation is a potent weapon, particularly when you have less power than he does.

He has much more to lose in such a battle, and your own thus- far-small reputation gives him a small target when he tries to return your fire.

Barnum used such campaigns to great effect in his early career. But this tactic must be practiced with skill; you must not seem to engage in petty vengeance.

If you do not break your enemy’s reputation cleverly, you will inadvertently ruin your own.

Thomas Edison, considered the inventor who harnessed electricity, believed that a workable system would have to be based on direct current (DC).

When the Serbian scientist Nikola Tesla appeared to have succeeded in creating a system based on alternating current (AC), Edison was furious.

He determined to ruin Tesla’s reputation, by making the public believe that the AC system was inherently unsafe, and Tesla irresponsible in promoting it.

To this end he captured all kinds of household pets and electrocuted them to death with an AC current.

When this wasn’t enough, in 1890 he got New York State prison authorities to organize the world’s first execution by electrocution, using an AC current.

But Edison’s electrocution experiments had all been with small creatures; the charge was too weak, and the man was only half killed.

In perhaps the country’s cruelest state-authorized execution, the procedure had to be repeated. It was an awful spectacle.

Although, in the long run, it is Edison’s name that has survived, at the time his campaign damaged his own reputation more than Tesla’s.

He backed off.

The lesson is simple—never go too far in attacks like these, for that will draw more attention to your own vengefulness than to the person you are slandering.

When your own reputation is solid, use subtler tactics, such as satire and ridicule, to weaken your opponent while making you out as a charming rogue.

The mighty lion toys with the mouse that crosses his path—any other reaction would mar his fearsome reputation.

Image:

A Mine Full of Diamonds and Rubies.

You dug for it, you found it, and your wealth is now assured.

Guard it with your life. Robbers and thieves will appear from all sides. Never take your wealth

for granted, and constantly renew it—time will diminish the jewels’ luster,

and bury them from sight.

Authority:

Therefore I should wish our courtier to bolster up his inherent worth with skill and cunning, and ensure that whenever he has to go where he is a stranger, he is preceded by a good reputation.... For the fame which appears to rest on the opinions of many fosters a certain unshakable belief in a man’s worth which is then easily strengthened in minds already thus disposed and prepared. 

(Baldassare Castiglione, 1478-1529)

REVERSAL

There is no possible Reversal.

Reputation is critical; there are no exceptions to this law.

Perhaps, not caring what others think of you, you gain a reputation for insolence and arrogance, but that can be a valuable image in itself—Oscar Wilde used it to great advantage.

Since we must live in society and must depend on the opinions of others, there is nothing to be gained by neglecting your reputation.

By not caring how you are perceived, you let others decide this for you.

Be the master of your fate, and also of your reputation.

Conclusion

Let Dwayne Johnson tell you himself.

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Conversations with God (full text) and free

The following are the three volumes of the book(s) titled “Conversations with God” by Neale Donald Walsch. All three volumes are provided in PDF format. They are presented here free and in full PDF text for your learning, enjoyment and understanding. Just click on the link and read.

It’s that simple.

No need to enter a credit card number to prove that you are a human, or to register. You don’t need to do anything. This is a service as these books are getting harder and harder to obtain. Overseas, at least. And everyone is just trying to make a buck or two.

So relax, and enjoy.

The books

These books were brought to my attention by an influencer who recommended them to me.

I find their take a little different from mine, but many of the basic ideas are pretty much the same. Certainly the terms are different, but that is to be expected.

It’s a good read, and there are some differences in belief and understanding between these works and mine. It doesn’t mean that I am right and they are wrong or vice versa, it just means that there are different ways to interpret the same thing.

Hmmm, Ive read all 3 books. Some terrific insights, granted. But “God’s” description of the soul as firmly encased in the body–physically– doesn’t jive with Mr Man’s or my notion/sense of the soul being most definitely elsewhere and connected to the body via consciousness.

So, the author IMHO isn’t really speaking to God at all. But he’s quite the imagination. And the explanation given for the soul in these books is quite detailed. But again, unlike our understanding.
Caveat emptor, I guess. As usual.

-Ultan

Never the less, they are a good read, and I recommend them for the searcher.

About the Trilogy “Conversations with God”

“Conversations with God” is a book trilogy in which the author transcripts the dialog he had with God (the meaning of God is discussed in the book) through the process of automatic writing or channeling.

With over 7 million copies sold worldwide, this extraordinary dialog was a huge hit in the New Age bookstores due to its groundbreaking and hopeful testimonial on spirituality. Accused of blasphemy and wanting to reinvent Christianism, Neale Donald Walsch didn’t make everyone happy when publishing his books. He denies that this transcription has been built on spiritual frustration or on an attempt to get absolution from his past mistakes in his life. He was just laying down questions in his notepad and would get answers filled with wisdom directly through his writing. Friends and family then pushed him to publish his transcripts publicly t o share his experience.

Highly criticized, the author’s statements put the human experience and free will at the heart of the spiritual experience on earth. He also suggests a new definition of God, more like a best friend than a taciturn father figure whose love would come under certain conditions.

With a casual and sometimes humoristic style, these books often bring up questions that we all once asked ourselves: life, love, purpose of life, the Good, the Evil, guilt, Heaven, Hell, power, health, joy, pain, marriage, money, death …

Introduction

During Easter 1992, the Author was having a huge existential crisis. On a personal, professional and emotional standpoint, his life seemed to him like a complete failure.

Accustomed through the years to write down his frustrations in letters (that he would almost never send), he grabbed his old notepad and started pouring in there all his misfortune and decided to address this letter to his biggest bully that was causing all of his problems: God.

Filled with pain and passion, Neale Donald Walsch wrote down his questions, doubts and confusion: “What did I do to deserve this life of constant battle?”

To his surprise, while scribbling the last of his bitter questions, his pen remained floating above the note pad, like an invisible force holding it back. Suddenly, it started moving on its own and answering his questions like it was dictated. In shock but inspired, the author took advantage of the situation and started asking all the questions he had on his mind and took note of every answers given by God by thoughts or feelings, in a very clear and intelligible way…

In the first paragraph of the book, there is a cute anecdote about a Small Candle which helps us understand what is a soul and why it incarnates itself.

The Small Candle anecdote

There was a time when a soul knew it was light. As it was a new soul, it was excited to experiment. “I am the light, it said. I am the light”

But as it knew and said it was light, it wasn’t like experiencing it. In the kingdom where it appeared, there was only life. Each soul was big, each soul was beautiful and each soul was shining an intense light. So, the tiny soul was like a candle in the sun. Amongst the brightest light (from which it belonged), it couldn’t see itself, experience Who and What It Really Was.

So this soul committed to know itself more and more. So committed that one day I told her: “Do you know, little one, what you need to do to fulfil your aspiration ?”

“What, God? What ? I would do anything” said the little soul.
“You have to separate yourself from us, I answered, then you must invoke obscurity upon you”
“What is obscurity, O Almighty ?” asked the little soul.
“It is what you are not” I replied and the soul understood.

So, that is what the soul did: it separated itself from everything and went to another kingdom. In this kingdom, the soul could invoke in its experience any kind of obscurity. That’s what it did.

But amongst all this obscurity she cried out :”Father, Father, why did you abandoned me?”

(then reaching out to Neale Donald Walsch): “As you once did yourself, in your darkest hours. But i haven’t abandoned you. I am eternally faithful, ready to remind you who you truly are, ready, always ready, to bring you back where you belong”

Thus, be the light in the obscurity and don’t damn it.

And don’t forget who you are when surrounded by what you are not. Bless the Creation when you are looking to change it.

And do know that what you will do in the face of your biggest challenge might be your biggest triumph. Because the experience you create is the affirmation of who you are and you want to be.

“Conversations with God” is broken down in 3 volumes:

The first one is focused on personal topics but also on challenges and opportunities one can face in its life.
The second one talks about global matters, geopolitical and metaphysical life on this planet but also on the current challenges it has to face.
The third one deals with the universal truths of the highest order, the challenges and opportunities of the soul after its terrestrial experience.

The Downloads

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Forever War by Joe Haldeman (Full Text)

Everyone, I think that you are all going to enjoy this. It took me a while to find this classic work of 1970’s science fiction. It is a science fiction novel much like “Starship Troopers” only much better. I tried to clean up the scanning, and OCR, but there’s still errors here and ther. Never the less, it’s a great read, and it should enable you to get your minds off of… well, what ever your minds are on right now. Enjoy.

Joe Haldeman, a Vietnam veteran, wrote The Forever War in the seventies, and his novel soon became a classic of the so-called “military science fiction” genre, in keeping with (and way better than) Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. The book tells the story of an intergalactic war with an alien race, that spans well over a millennium, as seen from Private Mandella.

The Forever War

Joe Haldeman

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is the definitive version of The Forever War. There are two other versions, and my publisher has been kind enough to allow inc to clarify things here.

The one you’re holding in your hand is the book as it was originally written. But it has a pretty tortuous history.

It’s ironic, since it later won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and has won “Best Novel” awards in other countries, but The Forever War was not an easy book to sell back in the early seventies. It was rejected by eighteen publishers before St. Martin’s Press decided to take a chance on it. “Pretty good book,” was the usual reaction, “but nobody wants to read a science fiction novel about Vietnam”. ‘Seventy-Five years later, most young readers don’t even see the parallels between The Forever War and the seemingly endless one we were involved in at the time, and that’s okay. It’s about Vietnam because that’s the war the author was in. But it’s mainly about war, about soldiers, and about the reasons we think we need them.

While the book was being looked at by all those publishers, it was also being serialized piecemeal in Analog magazine. The editor, Ben Bova, was a tremendous help, not only in editing, but also for making the thing exist at all! He gave it a prominent place in the magazine, and it was also his endorsement that brought it to the attention of St. Martin’s Press, who took a chance on the hardcover, though they did not publish adult science fiction at that time.

But Ben rejected the middle section, a novella called “You Can Never Go Back.” He liked it as a piece of writing, he said, but thought that it was too downbeat for Analog’s audience. So I wrote him a more positive story and put “You Can Never Go Back” into the drawer; eventually Ted White published it in Amazing magazine, as a coda to The Forever War

At this late date, I’m not sure why I didn’t reinstate the original middle when the book was accepted. Perhaps I didn’t trust my own taste, or just didn’t want to make life more complicated. But that first book version is essentially the Analog version with “more adult language and situations”, as they say in Hollywood.

The paperback of that version stayed in print for about~ sixteen years. Then in 1991 I had the opportunity to reinstate my original version, which now appears in Britain for the first time. The dates in the book are now kind of funny; most people realize we didn’t get into an interstellar war in 1996. I originally set it in that year so it was barely possible that the officers and NCOs could be veterans of Vietnam, so we decided to leave it that way, in spite of the obvious anachronisms. Think of it as a parallel universe.

But maybe it’s the real one, and we’re in a dream.

Joe Haldeman

Cambridge, Massachusetts

THE

FOREVER WAR

PRIVATE MANDELLA

“Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.” The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn’t look five years older than me. So if he’d ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, he’d done it as an infant.

I already knew eighty ways to. kill people, but most of them were pretty noisy. I sat up straight in my chair and assumed a look of polite attention and fell asleep with my eyes open. So did most everybody else. We’d learned that they never scheduled anything important for these after-chop classes.

The projector woke me up and I sat through a short tape showing the “eight silent ways.” Some of the actors must have been brainwipes, since they were actually killed.

After the tape a girl in the front row raised her hand. The sergeant nodded at her and she rose to parade rest. Not bad looking, but kind of chunky about the neck and shoulders. Everybody gets that way after carrying a heavy pack around for a couple of months.

“Sir”-we had to call sergeants “sir” until graduation- “most of those methods, really, they looked. . . kind of silly.”

“For instance?”

“Like killing a man with a blow to the kidneys, from an entrenching tool. I mean, when would you actualiy have only an entrenching tool, and no gun or knife? And why not just bash him over the head with it?”

“He might have a helmet on,” he said reasonably.

“Besides, Taurans probably don’t even have kidneys!” He shrugged. “Probably they don’t.” This was 1997, and nobody had ever seen a Tauran; hadn’t even found any pieces of Taurans bigger than a scorched chromosome.

“But their body chemistry is similar to ours, and we have to assume they’re similarly complex creatures. They must have weaknesses, vulnerable spots. You have to find out where they are.

“That’s the important thing.” He stabbed a finger at the screen. “Those eight convicts got caulked for your benefit because you’ve got to find out how to kill Taurans, and be able to do it whether you have a megawatt laser or an emery board.”

She sat back down, not looking too convinced. “Any more questions?” Nobody raised a hand.

“OK. Tench-hut!” We staggered upright and be looked at us expectantly. “Fuck you, sir,” came the familiar tired chorus.

“Louder!”

“FUCK YOU, SIR!” One of the army’s less-inspired morale devices.

“That’s better. Don’t forget. pie-dawn maneuvers tomorrow. Chop at 0330, first formation, 0400. Anybody sacked after 0340 owes one stripe. Dismissed.”

I zipped up my coverall and went across the snow to the lounge for a cup of soya and a joint. I’d always been able to get by on five or six hours of sleep, and this was the only time I could be by myself, out of the army for a while. Looked at the newsfax for a few minutes. Another ship got caulked, out by Aldebaran sector. That was four years ago.

~ They were mounting a reprisal fleet, but it’ll take four years more for them to get out there. By then, the Taurans would have every portal planet sewed up tight.

Back at the billet, everybody else was sacked and the main lights were out. The whole company’d been dragging ever since we got back from the two-week lunar training.

I dumped my clothes in the locker, checked the roster and found out I was in bunk 31. Goddammit, right under the heater.

I slipped through the curtain as quietly as possible so as not to wake up the person next to me. Couldn’t see who it was, but I couldn’t have cared less. I slipped under the blanket.

“You’re late, Mandella,” a voice yawned. It was Rogers. “Sorry I woke you up,” I whispered.

”saliright.” She snuggled over and clasped me spoon-fashion. She was warm and reasonably soft.

I patted her hip in what I hoped was a brotherly fashion. “Night, Rogers.” “G’night, Stallion.” She returned the gesture more pointedly.

Why do you always get the tired ones when you’re ready and the randy ones when you’re tired? I bowed to the inevitable.

“Awright, let’s get some goddamn back inta that! Stringer team! Move it up-move your ass up!”

A warm front had come in about midnight and the snow had turned to sleet. The permaplast stringer weighed five hundred pounds and was a bitch to handle, even when it wasn’t covered with ice. There were four of us, two at each end, carrying the plastic girder with frozen fingertips. Rogers was my partner.

“Steel!” the guy behind me yelled, meaning that he was losing his hold. It wasn’t steel, but it was heavy enough to break your foot. Everybody let go and hopped away. It splashed slush and mud all over us.

“Goddammit, Petrov,” Rogers said, “why didn’t you go out for the Red Cross or something? This fucken thing’s not that fucken heavy.” Most of the girls were a little more circumspect in their speech. Rogers was a little butch.

“Awright, get a fucken move on, stringers-epoxy team! Dog’em! Dog’em!”

Our two epoxy people ran up, swinging their buckets. “Let’s go, Mandella. I’m freezin’ my balls off.”

“Me, too,” the girl said with more feeling than logic.

“One-two–heave!” We got the thing up again and staggered toward the bridge. It was about three-quarters completed. Looked as if the second platoon was going to beat us. I wouldn’t give a damn, but the platoon that got their bridge built first got to fly home. Four miles of muck for the rest of us, and no rest before chop.

We got the stringer in place, dropped it with a clank, and fitted the static clamps that held it to the rise-beams. The female half of the epoxy team started slopping glue on it before we even had it secured. Her partner was waiting for the stringer on the other side. The floor team was waiting at the foot of the bridge, each one holding a piece of the light, stressed permaplast over his head like an umbrella. They were dry and clean. I wondered aloud what they had done to deserve it, and Rogers suggested a couple of colorful, but unlikely, possibilities.

We were going back to stand by the next stringer when the field first (name of Dougeistein, but we called him “Awright”) blew a whistle and bellowed, “Awright, soldier boys and girls, ten minutes. Smoke’em if you got ’em.” He reached into his pocket and turned on the control that heated our coveralls.

Rogers and I sat down on our end of the stringer and I took out my weed box. I had lots of joints, but we were ordered not to smoke them until after night-chop. The only tobacco I had was a cigarro butt about three inches long. I lit it on the side of the box; it wasn’t too bad after the first couple of puffs. Rogers took a puff, just to be sociable, but made a face and gave it back.

“Were you in school when you got drafted?” she asked.

“Yeah. Just got a degree in physics. Was going after a teacher’s certificate.” She nodded soberly. “I was in biology . . .”

“Figures.” I ducked a handful of slush. “How far?”

“Six years, bachelor’s and technicaL” She slid her boot along the ground, turning up a ridge of mud and slush the consistency of freezing ice milk. “Why the fuck did this have to happen?”

I shrugged. It didn’t call for an answer, least of all the answer that the UNEF kept giving us. Intellectual and physical elite of the planet, going out to guard humanity against the Tairan menace. Soyashit It was all just a big experiment See whether we could goad the Taurans into ground

Awright blew the whistle two minutes early, as expected, but Rogers and I and the other two stringers got to sit for a minute while the epoxy and floor teams finished covering our stringer. It got cold fast, sitting there with our suits turned off, but we remained inactive on principle.

There really wasn’t any sense in having us train in the cold. Typical army half- logic. Sure, it was going to be cold where we were going, but not ice-cold or snow- cold. Almost by definition, a portal planet remained within a degree or two of absolute zero all the tune-since collapsars don’t shine-and the first chill you felt would mean that you were a dead man.

Twelve years before, when I was ten years old, they had discovered the collapsar jump. Just fling an object at a collapsar with sufficient speed, and out it pops in some other part of the galaxy. It didn’t take long to figure out the formula that predicted where it would come out: it travels along the same “line” (actually an Einsteinian geodesic) it would have followed if the collapsar hadn’t been in the way- until it reaches another collapsar field, whereupon it reappears, repelled with the same speed at which it approached the original collapsar. Travel time between the two collapsars.. . exactly zero.

It made a lot of work for mathematical physicists, who had to redefine simultaneity, then tear down general relativity and build it back up again. And it made the politicians very happy, because now they could send a shipload of colonists to Fomaihaut for less than it had once cost to put a brace of men on the moon. There were a lot of people the politicians would love to see on Fomalbaut, implementing a glorious adventure rather than stirring up trouble at home.

The ships were always accompanied by an automated probe that followed a couple of million miles behind. We knew about the portal planets, little bits of flotsam that whirled around the collapsars; the purpose of the drone was to come back and tell us in the event that a ship had smacked into a portal planet at .999 of the speed of light.

That particular catastrophe never happened, but one day a drone limped back alone. Its data were analyzed, and it turned out that the colonists’ ship had been pursued by another vessel and destroyed. This happened near Aldebaran, in the constellation Taurus, but since “Aldebaranian” is a little hard to handle, they named the enemy “Tauran.”

Colonizing vessels thenceforth went out protected by an armed guard. Often the armed guard went out alone, and finally the Colonization Group got shortened to UNEF, United Nations Exploratory Force. Emphasis on the

Then some bright lad in the General Assembly decided that we ought to field an army of footsoldiers to guard the portal planets of the nearer collapsars. This led to the Elite Conscription Act of 1996 and the most cutely conscripted army in the history of warfare.

So here we were, fifty men and fifty women, with IQs over 150 and bodies of unusual health and strength, slogging cutely through the mud and slush of central Missouri, reflecting on the usefulness of our skill in building bridges on worlds where the only fluid is an occasional standing pool of liquid helium.

About a month later, we left for our final training exercise, maneuvers on the planet Charon. Though nearing perihelion, it was still more than twice as far from the sun as Pluto.

The troopship was a converted “cattlewagon” made to carry two hundred colonists and assorted bushes and beasts. Don’t think it was roomy, though, just because there were half that many of us. Most of the excess space was taken up with extra reaction mass and ordnance.

The whole trip took three weeks, accelerating at two gees halfway, decelerating the other half. Our top speed, as we roared by the orbit of Pluto, was around one- twentieth of the speed of light-not quite enough for relativity to rear its complicated head.

Three weeks of carrying around twice as much weight as normal.. . it’s no picnic. We did some cautious exercises three times a day and remained horizontal as much as possible. Still, we got several broken bones and serious dislocations. The men had to wear special supporters to keep from littering the floor with loose organs. It was almost impossible to sleep; nightmares of choking and being crushed, rolling over periodically to prevent blood pooling and bedsores. One girl got so fatigued that she almost slept through the experience of having a rib push out into the open air.

I’d been in space several times before, so when we finally stopped decelerating and went into free fall, it was nothing but relief. But some people had never been out, except for our training on the moon, and succumbed to the sudden vertigo and disorientation. The rest of us cleaned up after them, floating through the quarters with sponges and inspirators to suck up the globules of partly-digested

“Concentrate, High-protein, Low-residue, Beef Flavor (Soya).”

We had a good view of Charon, coming down from orbit. There wasn’t much to see, though. It was just a dim, off-white sphere with a few smudges on it. We landed about two hundred meters from the base. A pressurized crawler came out and mated with the ferry, so we didn’t have to suit up. We clanked and squeaked up to the main building, a featureless box of grayish plastic.

Inside, the walls were the same drab color. The rest of the company was sitting at desks, chattering away. There was a seat next to Freeland.

“Jeff-feeling better?” He still looked a little pale.

“If the gods had meant for man to survive in free fall, they would have given him a cast iron glottis.” He sighed heavily. “A little better. Dying for a smoke.”

“You seemed to take it all right. Went up in school, didn’t you?”

“Senior thesis in vacuum welding, yeah. Three weeks in Earth orbit.” I sat back and reached for my weed box for the thousandth time. It still wasn’t there. The Life Support Unit didn’t want to handle nicotine and mc.

“Training was bad enough,” Jeff groused, “but this shit-”

“Tench-hut!” We stood up in a raggedy-ass fashion, by twos and threes. The door opened and a full major came in. I stiffened a little. He was the highest-ranking officer I’d ever seen. He had a row of ribbons stitched into his coveralls, including a purple strip meaning he’d been wounded in combat, fighting in the old American army. Must have been that Indochina thing, but it had fizzled out beforelwasborn.Hedidn’tlookthatold.

“Sit, sit.” He made a patting motion with his hand. Then he put his hands on his hips and scanned the company, a small smile on his face. “Welcome to Charon. You picked a lovely day to land, the temperature outside is a summery eight point one fIve degrees Absolute. We expect little thange for the next two centuries or so.” Some of them laughed haltbeartedly.

Joe Haldeman 12

“Best you enjoy the tropical climate here at Miami Base; enjoy it while you can. We’re on the center of sunside here, and most of your training will be on darkside. Over there, the temperature stays a chilly two point zero eight.

“You might as well regard all the training you got on Earth and the moon as just an elementary exercise, designed to give you a fair chance of surviving Charon. You’ll have to go through your whole repertory here: tools, weapons, maneuvers. And you’ll find that, at these temperatures, tools don’t work the way they should; weapons don’t want to fire. And people move v-e-r-y cautiously.”

He studied the clipboard in his hand. “Right now, you have forty-nine women and forty-eight men. Two deaths on Earth, one psychiatric release. Having read an outline of your training program, I’m frankly surprised that so many of you pulled through.

“But you might as well know that I won’t be displeased if as few as fifty of you, half, graduate from this final phase. And the only way not to graduate is to die. Here. The only way anybody gets back to Earth-including me-is after a combat tour.

“You will complete your training in one month. From here you go to Stargate collapsar, half a light year away. You will stay at the settlement on Stargate 1, the largest portal planet, until replacements arrive. Hopefully, that will be no more than a month; another group is due here as soon as you leave.

“When you leave Stargate, you will go to some strategically important collapsar, set up a military base there, and fight the enemy, if attacked. Otherwise, you will maintain the base until further orders.

“The last two weeks of your training will consist of constructing exactly that kind of a base, on darkside. There you will be totally isolated from Miami Base: no communication, no medical evacuation, no resupply. Sometime before the two weeks are up, your defense facilities will be evaluated in an attack by guided drones. They will be armed.”

They had spent all that money on us just to kill us in training? ‘[HE FOREVER WAR

“All of the permanent personnel here on Charon are combat veterans. Thus, all of us are forty to fifty years of age. Butlthinkwecankeepupwithyou. Twoofuswill be with you at all times and will accompany you at least as far as Stargate. They are Captain

Sherman Stott, your company commander, and Sergeant Octavio Corte~ your first sergeant. Gentlemen?”

Two men in the front row stood easily and turned to face us. Captain Stott was a little smaller than the major, but cut from the same mold: face hard and smooth as porcelain, cynical half-smile, a precise centimeter of beard framing a large chin, looking thirty at the most. He wore a large, gunpowder-type pistol on his hip.

Sergeant Cortez was another story, a horror story. His head was shaved and the wrong shape, flattened out on one side, where a large piece of skull had obviously been taken out. His face was very dark and seamed with wrinkles and scars. Half his left ear was missing, and his eyes were as expressive as buttons on a machine. He had a moustache-and-beard combination that looked like a skinny white caterpillar taking a lap around his mouth. On anybody else, his schoolboy smile might look pleasant, but he was about the ugliest, meanest-looking creature I’d ever seen. Still, if you didn’t look at his head and considered the lower six feet or so, he could have posed as the “after” advertisement for a body-building spa. Neither Stott nor Cortez wore any ribbons. Cortez had a small pocket-laser suspended in a magnetic rig, sideways, under his left armpit. It had wooden grips that were worn smooth.

“Now, before I turn you over to the tender mercies of these two gentlemen, let me caution you again:

“Two months ago there was not a living soul on this planet, just some leftover equipment from the expedition of 1991. A working force of forty-five men struggled for a month to erect this base. Twenty-four of them, more than half, died in the construction of it. This is the most dangerous planet men have ever tried to live on, but the places you’ll be going will be this bad and worse. Your cadre will try to keep you alive for the next month. Listen to them and follow their example; all of them have survived here much longer than you’ll have to. Captain?” The captain stood up as the major went out the door.

“Tench-hut!” The last syllable was like an explosion and we all jerked to our feet. “Now I’m only gonna say this once so you better listen,” he growled. “We are in a

combat situation here, and in a combat situation there is only one penalty for disobedience or insubordination.” He jerked the pistol from his hip and held it by the barrel, like a club. “This is an Army model 1911 automatic pistol, caliber .45, and it is a primitive but effective weapon. The Sergeant and I are authorized to use our weapons to kill to enforce discipline. Don’t make us do it because we will. We will.” He put the pistol back. The holster snap made a loud crack in the dead quiet.

“Sergeant Cortez and I between us have killed more people than are sitting in this room. Both of us fought in Vietnam on the American side and both of us joined the United Nations International Guard more than ten years ago. I took a break in grade from major for the privilege of commanding this company, and First Sergeant Cortez took a break from sub-major, because we are both combat soldiers and this is the first combat situation since 1987.

“Keep in mind what I’ve said while the First Sergeant instructs you mote specifically in what your duties will be under this command. Take over, Sergeant” He turned on his heel and strode out of the room. The expression on his face hadn’t changed one millimeter during the whole harangue.

The First Sergeant moved like a heavy machine with lots of ball bearings. When the door hissed shut, he swiveled ponderously to face us and said, “At ease, siddown,” in a surprisingly gentle voice. He sat on a table in the front of the room. It creaked, but held.

“Now the captain talks scaly and I look scary, but we both mean well. You’ll be working pretty closely with me, so you better get used to this thing I’ve got hanging in front of my brain. You probably won’t see the captain much, except on maneuvers.”

He touched the flat part of his head. “And speaking of brains, I still have Just about all of mine, in spite of Chinese efforts to the contrary. All of us old vets who mustered into UNEF had to pass the same criteria that got you drafted by the Elite Conscription Act So I suspect all of you are smart and tough-but just keep in mind that the captain and I are smart and tough and experienced.”

He flipped through the roster without really looking at it. “Now, as the captain said, there’ll be only one kind of disciplinary action on maneuvers. Capital punishment But normally we won’t have to kill you for disobeying; Charon’ll save us the trouble.

“Back in the billeting area, it’ll be another story. We don’t much care what you do inside. Grab ass all day and fuck all night, makes no difference… . But once you suit up and go outside, you’ve gotta have discipline that would shame a Centurian. There will be situations where one stupid act could kill us all.

“Anyhow, the first thing we’ve gotta do is get you fitted to your fighting suits. The armorer’s waiting at your billet; he’ll take you one at a time. Let’s go.”

“Now I know you got lectured back on Earth on what a fighting suit can do.” The armorer was a small man, partially bald, with no insignia of rank on his coveralls. Sergeant Cortez had told us to call him “sir,” since he was a lieutenant.

“But I’d like to reinforce a couple of points, maybe add some things your instructors Earthside weren’t clear about or couldn’t know. Your First Sergeant was kind enough to consent to being my visual aid. Sergeant?”

Coitez slipped out of his coveralls and came up to the little raised platform where a fighting suit was standing, popped open like a man-shaped clam. He backed into it and slipped his arms into the rigid sleeves. There was a click and the thing swung shut with a sigh. It was bright green with CORTEZ stenciled in white letters on the helmet.

“Camouflage, Sergeant.” The green faded to white, then dirty gray. “This is good camouflage for Charon and most of your portal planets,” said Cortez, as if from a deep well. “But there are several other combinations available.” The gray dappled and brightened to a combination of greens and browns: “Jungle.” Then smoothed out to a hard light ochre: “Desert.” Dark brown, darker, to a deep flat black:

“Night or space.”

“Very good, Sergeant To my knowledge, this is the only feature of the suit that was perfected after your trainin& The control is around your left wrist and is admittedly awkward. But once you find the right combination, it’s easy to lock in.

“Now, you didn’t get much in-suit training Earthside. We didn’t want you to get used to using the thing in a friendly environment. The fighting suit is the deadliest personal weapon ever built, and with no weapon is it easier for the user to kill himself through carelessness. Turn around, Sergeant.

“Case in point.” He tapped a large square protuberance between the shoulders. “Exhaust fins. As you know, the suit tries to keep you at a comfortable temperature no matter what the weather’s like outside. The material of the suit is as near to a perfect insulator as we could get, consistent with mechanical demands. Therefore, these fins get hot- especially hot, compared to darkside temperatures-as they bleed off the body’s heat.

“All you have to do is lean up against a boulder of

frozen gas; there’s lots of it around. The gas will sublime off faster than it can escape from the fins; in escaping, it will push against the surrounding ‘ice’ and fracture it… and in about one-hundredth of a second, you have the equivalent of a hand grenade going off right below your neck. You’ll never feel a thing.

“Variations on this theme have killed eleven people in the past two months. And they were just building a bunch of huts.

“I assume you know how easily the waldo capabilities can kill you or your companions. Anybody want to shake hands with the sergeant?” He paused, then stepped over and clasped his glove. “He’s had lots of practice. Until you have, be extremely careful. You might scratch an itch and wind up breaking your back. Remember, semi-logarithmic response: two pounds’ pressure exerts five pounds’ force; three pounds’ gives ten; four pounds’, twenty-three; five pounds’, forty-seven. Most of you can muster up a grip of well over a hundred pounds. Theoretically, you could rip a steel girder in two with that, amplified. Actually, you’d destroy the material of your gloves and, at least on Charon, die very quickly. It’d be a race between decompression and flash-freezing. You’d die no matter which won.

“The leg waldos are also dangerous, even though the amplification is less extreme. Until you’re really skilled, don’t try to run, or jump. You’re likely to trip, and that means you’re likely to die.”

“Charon’ s gravity is three-fourths of Earth normal, so it’s not too bad. But on a really small world, like Luna, you could take a running jump and not come down for twenty minutes, just keep sailing over the horizon. Maybe bash into a mountain at eighty meters per second. On a small asteroid, it’d be no trick at all to run up to escape velocity and be off on an informal tour of intergalactic space. It’s a slow way to travel.

“Tomorrow morning, we’ll start teaching you how to stay alive inside this infernal machine. The rest of the afternoon and evening, I’ll call you one at a time to be fitted. That’s all, Sergeant.”

Cortez went to the door and turned the stopcock that let air into the airlock. A bank of infrared lamps went on to keep air from freezing inside it. When the pressures were equalized, he shut the stopcock, unclainped the door and stepped in, clamping it shut behind him. A pump hummed for about a minute, evacuating the airlock; then he stepped out and sealed the outside door.

It was pretty much like the ones on Luna.

“First I want Private Omar Ahnizar. The rest of you can go find your bunks. I’ll call you over the squawker.”

“Alphabetical order, sir?”

“Yep. About ten minutes apiece. If your name begins with Z, you might as well get sacked.”

That was Rogers. She probably was thinking about get- ting sacked.

The sun was a hard white point directly overhead. It was a lot brighter than I had expected it to be; since we were eighty AUs out, it was only one 6400th as bright as it is on Earth. Still, it was putting out about as much light as a powerful streetlamp.

“This is considerably more light than you’ll have on a portal planet.” Captain Stott’s voice crackled in our collective ear. “Be glad that you’ll be able to watch your step.”

We were lined up, single-file, on the permaplast sidewalk that connected the billet and the supply hut. We’d practiced walking inside, all morning, and this wasn’t any different except for the exotic scenery. Though the light was rather dim, you could see all the way to the horizon quite clearly, with no atmosphere in the way. A black cliff that looked too regular to be natural stretched from one horizon to the other, passing within a kilometer of us. The ground was obsidian-black, mottled with patches of white or bluish ice. Next to the supply hut was a small mountain of snow in a bin marked oxya~ri.

The suit was fairly comfortable, but it gave you the odd feeling of simultaneously being a marionette and a puppeteer. You apply the impulse to move your leg and the suit picks it up and magnifies it and moves your leg for you.

“Today we’re only going to walk around the company area, and nobody will leave the company area.” The captain wasn’t wearing his .45-unless he carried it as a good luck charm, under his suit-but he had a laser-finger like the rest of us. And his was probably hooked up.

Keeping an interval of at least two meters between each person, we stepped off the permaplast and followed the captain over smooth rock. We walked carefully for about an hour, spiraling out, and finally stopped at the far edge of the perimeter.

“Now everybody pay close attention. I’m going out to that blue slab of ice”-it was a big one, about twenty meters away-‘ ‘and show you something that you’d better know if you want to stay alive.”

He walked out in a dozen confident steps. “First I have to heat up a rock-filters down.” I squeezed the stud under my armpit and the filter slid into place over my image converter. The captain pointed his finger at a black rock the size of a basketball, and gave it a short burst. The glare rolled a long shadow of the captain over us and beyond. The rock shattered into a pile of hazy splinters.

“It doesn’t take long for these to cool down.” He stopped and picked up a piece. “This one is probably twenty or twenty-five degrees. Watch.” He tossed the “warm” rock onto the ice slab. It skittered around in a crazy pattern and shot off the side. He tossed another one, and it did the same.

“As you know, you are not quite pe,fecrly insulated. These rocks are about the temperature of the soles of your boots. If you try to stand on a slab of hydrogen, the same thing will happen to you. Except that the rock is already dead.

“The reason for this behavior is that the rock makes a slick interface with the ice-a little puddle of liquid hydrogen-and rides a few molecules above the liquid on a cushion of hydrogen vapor. This makes the rock or you a frictionless bearing as far as the ice is concerned, and you can’t stand up without any friction under your boots.

“After you have lived in your suit for a month or so you should be able to survive falling down, but right now you just don’t know enough. Watch.”

The captain flexed and hopped up onto the slab. His feet shot out from under him and he twisted around in midair, landing on hands and knees. He slipped off and stood on the ground.

“The idea is to keep your exhaust tins from making contact with the frozen gas. Compared to the ice they are as hot as a blast furnace, and contact with any weight behind it will result in an explosion.”

After that demonstration, we walked around for another hour or so and returned to the billet. Once through the airlock~ we had to mill around for a while, letting the suits get up to something like room temperature. Somebody came up and touched helmets with me.

“William?” She had MCCOY stenciled above her faceplate. “Hi, Sean. Anything special?”

“I just wondered if you had anyone to sleep with tonight.”

That’s right; I’d forgotten. There wasn’t any sleeping roster here. Everybody chose his own partner. “Sure, I mean, uh, no. . . no, I haven’t asked anybody. Sure, if you want to. . . .”

“Thanks, William. See you later.” I watched her walk away and thought that if anybody could make a fighting suit look sexy, it’d be Sean. But even she couldn’t.

Cortez decided we were warm enough and led us to the suit room, where we backed the things into place and hooked them up to the charging plates. (Each suit had a little chunk of plutonium that would power it for several years, but we were supposed to run on fuel cells as much as possible.) After a lot of shuffling around, everybody finally got plugged in and we were allowed to unsuit- ninety-seven naked chickens squirming out of bright green eggs. It was cold-the air, the floor and especially the suits-and we made a pretty disorderly exit toward the lockers.

I slipped on tunic, trousers and sandals and was still cold. I took my cup and joined the line for soya. Everybody was jumping up and down to keep warm.

“How c-cold, do you think, it is, M-Mandella?” That was McCoy.

“I don’t, even want, to think, about it.” I stopped jumping and rubbed myself as briskly as possible, while holding a cup in one hand. “At least as cold as MiSSOUrI was.”

“Ung.. . wish they’d, get some, fucken, h~ai in, this place.” It always affects the small women more than any-body else. McCoy was the littlest one in the company, a waspwaist doll barely five feet high.

“They’ve got the airco going. It can’t be long now.”

“I wish I, was a big, slab of, meat like, you.” I was glad she wasn’t. 6

We had our first casualty on the third day, learning how to dig holes.

With such large amounts of energy stored in a soldier’s weapons, it wouldn’t be practical for him to hack out a hole in the frozen ground with the conventional pick and

shovel. Still, you can launch grenades all day and get nothing but shallow depressions-so the usual method is to bore a hole in the ground with the hand laser, drop a timed charge in after it’s cooled down and, ideally, fill the hole with stuff. Of course, there’s not much loose rock on Charon, unless you’ve already blown a hole nearby.

The only difficult thing about the procedure is in getting away. To be safe, we were told, you’ve got to either be behind something really solid, or be at least a hundred meters away. You’ve got about three minutes after setting the charge, but you can’t just sprint away. Not safely, not on Charon.

The accident happened when we were making a really deep hole, the kind you want for a large underground bunker. For this, we had to blow a hole, then climb down to the bottom of the crater and repeat the procedure again and again until the hole was deep enough. Inside the crater we used charges with a five-minute delay, but it hardly seemed enough time-you really had to go it slow, picking your way up the crater’s edge.

Just about everybody had blown a double hole; everybody but me and three others. I guess we were the only ones paying really close attention when Bovanovitch got into trouble. All of us were a good two hundred meters away. With my image converter turned up to about foily power, I watched her disappear over the rim of the crater. After that, I could only listen in on her conversation with Cortez.

joe narneman

“I’m on the bottom, Sergeant.” Normal radio procedure was suspended for maneuvers like this; nobody but the trainee and Cortez was allowed to broadcast

“Okay, move to the center and clear out the rubble. Take your time. No rush until you pull the pin.”

“Sure, Sergeant.” We could hear small echoes of rocks clattering, sound conduction through her boots. She didn’t say anything for several minutes.

“Found bottom.” She sounded a little out of breath. “Ice or rock?”

“Oh, it’s rock, Sergeant The greenish stuff.”

“Use a low setting, then. One point two, dispersion four.” “God dam it, Sergeant, that’ll take forever.”

“Yeah, but that stuff’s got hydrated crystals in it-heat it up too fast and you might make it fracture. And we’d Just have to leave you there, girl. Dead and bloody.”

“Okay, one point two dee four.” The inside edge of the crater flickered red with reflected laser light.

“When you get about half a meter deep, squeeze it up to dee two.”

“Roger.” It took her exactly seventeen minutes, three of them at dispersion two. I could imagine how tired her shooting arm was.

“Now rest for a few minutes. When the bottom of the hole stops glowing, arm the charge and drop it in. Then walk out, understand? You’ll have plenty of time.”

“I understand, Sergeant. Walk out.” She sounded nervous. Well, you don’t often have to tiptoe away from a twenty-microton tachyon bomb. We listened to her reathing for a few minutes.

“Here goes.” Faint slithering sound, the bomb sliding ~Iown. “Slow and easy now. You’ve got five minutes.”

“Y-yeah. Five.” Her footsteps started out slow and regLilar. Then, after she started climbing the side, the sounds were less regular, maybe a little frantic. And with four minutes to go- “Shit” A loud scraping noise, then clatters and bumps.

“What’s wrong, private?” “Oh, shit.” Silence. “Shit!”

“Private, you don’t wanna get shot, you tell me what’s wrong!”

“I. . . shit, I’m stuck. Fucken rockslide. . . shit. . . . DO SOMETHiNG! I can’t move, shit I can’t move I, I-”

“Shut up! How deep?”

“Can’t move my, shit, my fucken legs. HELP ME-”

“Then goddainmit use your arms-push! You can move a ton with each hand.” Three minutes.

She stopped cussing and started to mumble, in Russian, I guess, a low monotone. She was panting, and you could hear rocks tumbling away.

“I’m free.” Two minutes.

“Go as fast as you can.” Cortez’s voice was fiat, emotionless. At ninety seconds she appeared, crawling over the rim. “Run, girl. . . . You better run.” She ran five or six steps and fell, skidded a few meters and got back up, running; fell again, got up again- It looked as though she was going pretty fast, but she had only covered about thirty meters when Cortez said, “All tight, Bovanovitch, get down on your stomach and lie still.” Ten seconds, but she didn’t hear or she wanted to get just a little more distance, and she kept running, careless leaping strides, and at the high point of one leap there was a flash and a rumble, and something big hit her below the neck, and her headless body spun off end over end through space, trailing a red-black spiral of flash-frozen blood that settled gracefully to the ground, a path of crystal powder that nobody disturbed while we gathered rocks to cover the juiceless thing at the end of it.

That night Cortez didn’t lecture us, didn’t even show up for night-chop. We were all very polite to each other and nobody was afraid to talk about it..

I sacked with Rogers-everybody sacked with a good friend-but all she wanted to do was cry, and she cried so long and so hard that she got me doing it, too.

“Fire team A-move out!” The twelve of us advanced in a ragged line toward the simulated bunker. It was about a kilometer away, across a carefully prepared obstacle course. We could move pretty fast, since all of the ice had been cleared from the field, but even with ten days’ experience we weren’t ready to do more than an easy jog.

I carried a grenade launcher loaded with tenth-microton practice grenades. Everybody had their laser-fingers set at a point oh eight dee one, not much more than a flashlight. This was a simulated attack-the bunker and its robot defender cost too much to use once and be thrown away.

“Team B, follow. Team leaders, take over.”

We approached a clump of boulders at about the halfway mark, and Potter, my team leader, said, “Stop and cover.” We clustered behind the rocks and waited for Team B.

Barely visible in their blackened suits, the dozen men find women whispered by us. As soon as they were clear, they jogged left, out of our line of sight.

“Fire!” Red circles of light danced a half-klick downrange, where the bunker was just visible. Five hundred meters was the limit for these practice grenades; but I might luck out, so I lined the launcher up on the image of the bunker, held it at a forty-five degree angle and popped off a salvo of three.

Return fire from the bunker started before my grenades even landed. Its automatic lasers were no more powerful than the ones we were using, but a direct hit would deactivate your image converter, leaving you blind. It was setting down a random field of fire, not even coming close to the boulders we were hiding behind.

Three magnesi urn-bright flashes blinked simultaneously about thirty meters Short of the bunker. “Mandella! I thought you were supposed to he good with that thing.”

“Damn it, Potter-it only throws half a klick. Once we get closer, I’ll lay ’em right on top, every time.”

“Sure you will.” I didn’t say anything. She wouldn’t be team leader forever. Besides, she hadn’t been such a bad girl before the power went to her head.

Since the grenadier is the assistant team leader, I was slaved into Potter’s radio and could hear B team talk to her.

“Potter, this is Freeman. Losses?”

“Potter here-no, looks like they were concentrating on you.”

“Yeah, we lost three. Right now we’re in a depression about eighty, a hundred meters down from you. We can give cover whenever you’re ready.”

“Okay, start.” Soft click: “A team, follow me.” She slid out from behind the rock and turned on the faint pink beacon beneath her powerpack. I turned on mine and moved out to run alongside of her, and the rest of the team fanned out in a trailing wedge. Nobody fired while A team laid down a cover for us.

All I could hear was Potter’s breathing and the soft crunch-crunch of my boots. Couldn’t see much of anything, SO I tongued the image converter up to a log two intensification. That made the image kind of blurry but adequately bright. Looked like the bunker had B team pretty well pinned down; they were getting quite a roasting. All of their return fire was laser. They must have lost their grenadier.

“Potter, this is Mandella. Shouldn’t we take some of the heat off B team?”

“Soon as I can find us good enough cover. Is that all right with you? Private?” She’d been promoted to corporal for the duration of the exercise.

We angled to the right and lay down behind a slab of rock. Most of the others found cover nearby, but a few had to hug the ground.

“Freeman, this is Potter.”

“Potter, this is Smithy. Freeman’s out; Samuels is out. We only have five men left. Give us some cover so we can get-”

“Roger, Smithy.” Click. “Open up, A team. The B’s are really hurtin’.” Joe tialdeman

I peeked out over the edge of the rock. My rangefinder said that the bunker was about three hundred fifty meters away, still pretty far. I aimed a smidgeon high and popped three, then down a couple of degrees, three more. The first ones overshot by about twenty meters; then the second salvo flared up directly in front of the bunker. I tried to hold on that angle and popped fifteen, the rest of the magazine, in the same direction.

I should have ducked down behind the rock to reload, but I wanted to see where the fifteen would land, so I kept my eyes on the bunker while I reached back to unclip another magazine- When the laser hit my image converter, there was a red glare so intense it seemed to go right through my eyes and bounce off the back of my skull. It must have been only a few milliseconds before the converter overloaded and went blind, but the bright green afterimage hurt my eyes for several minutes.

Since I was officially “dead,” my radio automatically cut off, and I had to remain where I was until the mock battle was over. With no sensory input besides the feel of my own skin (and it ached where the image converter had shone on it) and the ringing in my ears, it seemed like an awfully long time. Finally, a helmet clanked against mine.

“You okay, Mandella?” Potter’s voice.

“Sorry, I died of boredom twenty minutes ago.”

“Stand up and take my hand.” I did so and we shuffled back to the billet. It must have taken over an hour. She didn’t say anything more, all the way back-it’s a pretty awkward way to communicate-but after we’d cycled through the airlock and warmed up, she helped me undo my suit. I got ready for a mild tongue-lashing, but when the suit popped open, before I could even get my eyes adjusted to the light, she grabbed me around the neck and planted a wet kiss on my mouth.

“Nice shooting, Mandella.” “Huh?”

“Didn’t you see? Of course not.. . . The last salvo before you got hit-four direct hits. The bunker decided it was

knocked out, and all we bad todo was walk the rest of the way.”

“Great.” I scratched my face under the eyes, and some dry skin flaked off. She giggled.

“You should see yourself. You look like-”

“All personnel, report to the assembly area.” That was the captain’s voice. Bad news, usually.

She handed me a tunic and sandals. “Let’s go.” The

assembly area-chop hail was just down the corridor. There was a row of roll-call buttons at the door, I pressed the one beside my name. Four of the names were covered with black tape. That was good, only four. We hadn’t lost anybody during today’s maneuvers.

The captain was sitting on the raised dais, which at least meant we didn’t have to go through the tench-hut bulishit. The place filled up in less than a minute; a soft chime indicated the roll was complete.

Captain Stott didn’t stand up. “You did fairly well today. Nobody killed, and I expected some to be. In that respect you exceeded my expectations but in every other respect you did a poor job.

“I am glad you’re taking good care of yourselves, because each of you represents an investment of over a million dollars and one-fourth of a human life.

“But in this simulated battle against a very stupid robot enemy, thirty-seven of you managed to walk into laser fire and be killed in a simulated way, and since dead people require no food you will require no food, for the next three Jays. Each person who was a casualty in this baffle will be allowed only two liters of water and a vitamin ration each Jay.”

We knew enough not to groan or anything, but there were some pretty disgusted looks, especially on the faces that had singed eyebrows and a pink rectangle of sunburn framing their eyes.

“Mandella.” “Sir?”

“You are far and away the worst-burned casualty. Was your image converter set on normal?”

Oh, shit. “No, sir. Log two.”

~su

Joe Ilaftieman

“I see. Who was your team leader for the exercises?” “Acting Corporal Potter, sir.”

“Private Potter, did you order him to use image intensification?” “Sir, I. . . I don’t remember.”

“You don’t Well, as a memory exercise you may join the dead people. Is that satisfactory?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Dead people get one last meal tonight and go on no rations starting tomorrow. Are there any questions?” He must have been kidding. “All right Dismissed.”

I selected the meal that looked as if it had the most calories and took my tray over to sit by Potter.

“That was a quixotic damn thing to do. But thanks.”

“Nothing. I’ve been wanting to lose a few pounds anyway.” I couldn’t see where she was carrying any extra.

“I know a good exercise,” I said. She smiled without looking up from her tray. “Have anybody for tonight?”

“Kind of thought I’d ask Jeff.. . .”

“Better hurry, then. He’s lusting after Macjima.” Well, that was mostly true. Everybody did.

“I don’t know. Maybe we ought to save our strength. That third day . .

“Come on.” I scratched the back of her hand lightly with a fingernail. “We haven’t sacked since Missouri. Maybe I’ve learned something new.”

“Maybe you have.” She tilted her head up at me in a sly way. “Okay.”

Actually, she was the one with the new trick. The French corkscrew, she called it. She wouldn’t tell me who taught it to her though. I’d like to shake his hand. Once I got my strength back.

The two weeks’ training around Miami Base eventually cost us eleven lives. Twelve, if you count Dahiquist. I guess having to spend the rest of your life on Charon with a hand and both legs missing is close enough to dying.

Foster was crushed in a landslide and Freeland had a suit malfunction that froze him solid before we could carry him inside. Most of the other deaders were people I didn’t know all that well. But they all hurt. And they seemed to make us more scared rather than more cautious.

Now darkside. A flyer brought us over in groups of twenty and set us down beside a pile of building materials thoughtfully immersed in a pool of helium H.

We used grapples to haul the stuff out of the pool. It’s not safe to go wading, since the stuff crawls all over you and it’s hard to tell what’s underneath; you could walk out onto a slab of hydrogen and be out of luck.

I’d suggested that we try to boil away the pool with our lasers, but ten minutes of concentrated fire didn’t drop the helium level appreciably. It didn’t boil, either;

helium II is a “superfluid,” so what evaporation there was had to take place evenly, all over the surface. No hot spots, so no bubbling.

We weren’t supposed to use lights, to “avoid detection.” There was plenty of starlight with your image converter cranked up to log three or four, but each stage of amplification meant some loss of detail. By log four the landscape looked like a crude monochrome painting, and you couldn’t read the names on people’s helmets unless they were right in front of you.

The landscape wasn’t all that interesting, anyhow. There were half a dozen medium-sized meteor craters (all with exactly the same level of helium II in them) and the suggestion of some puny mountains just over the horizon. The

Joe Haldeman

uneven ground was the consistency of frozen spiderwebs; every time you put your foot down, you’d sink half an inch with a squeaking crunch. It could get on your nerves.

It took most of a day to pull all the stuff out of the pool. We took shifts napping, which you could do either standing ap, sitting or lying on your stomach. I didn’t do well in ~ny of those positions, so I was anxious to get the bunker built and pressurized.

We couldn’t build the thing underground—it’d just fill up with helium 11-so the first thing to do was to build an tnsulating platform, a permaplast-vacuum sandwich three layers thick.

I was an acting corporal, with a crew of ten people. We were carrying the permaplast layers to the building site- two people can carry one easily-when one of “my” men slipped and fell on his back.

“Damn it, Singer, watch your step.” We’d had a couple of deaders that way. “Sony, Corporal. I’m bushed. Just got my feet tangled up.,’

“Yeah, just watch it.” He got back up all right, and he and his partner placed the sheet and went back to get another.

I kept my eye on Singer. In a few minutes he was practically staggering, not easy to do in that suit of cybernetic armor.

“Singer! After you set the plank, I want to see you.”

“OK.” He labored through the task and mooched over. “Let me check your readout.” I opened the door on his chest to expose the medical monitor. His temperature was two degrees high; blood pressure and heart rate both elevated. Not up to the red line, though.

“You sick or something?”

“Hell, Mandella, I feel OK, just tired. Since I fell I been a little dizzy.”

I chinned the medic’s combination. “Doc, this is Man-della. You wanna come over here for a minute?”

“Sure, where are you?” I waved and he walked over from poolside. “What’s the problem?” I showed him Singer’s readout.

irir. r’.iiir.vr.n witn

He knew what all the other little dials and things meant, so it took him a while. “As far as I can tell, Mandella… he’s just hot.”

“Hell, I coulda told you that,” said Singer.

“Maybe you better have the armorer take a look at his suit.” We had two people who’d taken a crash course in suit maintenance; they were our “armorers.”

I chinned Sanchez and asked him to come over with his tool kit.

“Be a couple of minutes, Corporal. Carryin’ a plank.”

“Well, put it down and get on over here.” I was getting an uneasy feeling. Waiting for him, the medic and I looked over Singer’s suit.

“Uh-oh,” Doc Jones said. “Look at this.” I went around to the back and looked where he was pointing. Two of the fins on the heat exchanger were bent out of shape.

“What’s wrong?” Singer asked.

“You fell on your heat exchanger, right?”

“Sure, Corporal-that’s it. It must not be working right.”

“I don’t think it’s working at all,” said Doc. Sanchez came over with his diagnostic kit and we told him what had happened. He looked at the heat exchanger, then plugged a couple of jacks into it and got a digital readout from a little monitor in his kit. I didn’t know what it was measuring, but it came out zero to eight decimal places.

Heard a soft click, Sanchez chinning my private frequency. “Corporal, this guy’s a deader.”

“What? Can’t you fix the goddamn thing?”

“Maybe.. . maybe I could, if I could take it apart. But there’s no way-”

“Hey! Sanchez?” Singer was talking on the general freak. “Find out what’s wrong?” He was panting.

Click. “Keep your pants on, man, we’re working on it.” Click. “He won’t last long enough for us to get the bunker pressurized. And I can’t work on the heat exchanger from outside of the suit.”

“You’ve got a spare suit, haven’t you?” 34

Joe Haldeman

“Two of ’em, the fit-anybody kind. But there’s no place …say…”

“Right. Go get one of the suits warmed up.” I chinned the general freak. “Listen, Singer, we’ve gona get you out of that thing. Sanchez has a spare suit, but to make the switch, we’re gonna have to build a house around you. Understand?”

“Huh-uh.”

“Look, we’ll make a box with you inside, and hook it up to the life-support unit. That way you can breathe while you make the switch.”

“Soun’s pretty compis. . . compil. . . cated t’me.” “Look, just come along-”

“I’ll be all right, man, jus’ lemme res’. . .

I grabbed his arm and led him to the building site. He was really weaving. Doc took his other arm, and between us, we kept him from falling over.

“Corporal Ho, this is Corporal Mandella.” Ho was in charge of the life-support unit.

“Go away, Mandella, I’m, busy.”

“You’re going to be busier.” I outlined the problem to her. While her group hurried to adapt the LSU-for this purpose, it need only be an air hose and heater-I got my crew to bring around six slabs of permaplast, so we could build a big box around Singer and the extra suit. It would look like a huge coffin, a meter square and six meters long.

We set the suit down on the slab that would be the floor of the coffin. “OK, Singer, let’s go.”

No answer. “Singer, let’s go.”

No answer.

“Singer!” He was just standing there. Doc Jones checked his readout. “He’s out, man, unconscious.”

My mind raced. There might just be room for another person in the box. “Give me a hand here.” I took Singer’s shoulders and Doc took his feet, and we carefully laid him out at the feet of the empty suit.

Then I lay down myself, above the suit. “OK, close’er up.,,

THE FOREVER WAR 35

“Look, Mandella, if anybody goes in there, it oughta be me.”

“Fuck you, Doc. My job. My man.” That sounded all wrong. William Mandella, boy hero.

They stood a slab up on edge-it had two openings for the LSU input and exhaust- and proceeded to weld it to the bottom plank with a narrow laser beam. On Earth, we’d just use glue, but here the only fluid was helium, which has lots of interesting properties, but is definitely not sticky.

After about ten minutes we were completely walled up. I could feel the LSU humming. I switched on my suit light-the first time since we landed on darkside-and the glare made purple blotches dance in front of my eyes.

“Mandella, this is Ho. Stay in your suit at least two or three minutes. We’re putting hot air in, but it’s coming back just this side of liquid.” I watched the purple fade for a while.

“OK, it’s still cold, but you can make it.” I popped my suit. It wouldn’t open all the way, but I didn’t have too much trouble getting out. The suit was still cold enough to take some skin off my fingers and butt as I wiggled out.

I had to crawl feet-first down the coffin to get to Singer. It got darker fast, moving away from my light. When I popped his suit a rush of hot stink hit me in the face. In the dim light his skin was dark red and splotchy. His breathing was very shallow and I could see his heart palpitating.

First I unhooked the relief tubes-an unpleasant business-then the biosensors; and then I had the problem of getting his arms out of their sleeves.

It’s pretty easy to do for yourself. You twist this way and turn that way and the arm pops out. Doing it from the outside is a different matter: I had to twist his arm and then reach under and move the suit’s arm to match-it takes muscle to move a suit around from the outside.

Once I had one arm out it was pretty easy; I just crawled forward, putting my feet on the suit’s shoulders, and pulled on his free ann. He slid out of the suit like an oyster slipping out of its shell.

I popped the spare suit and after a lot of pulling and 36

Joe Haldeman

pushing, managed to get his legs in. Hooked up the biosensors and the front relief tube. He’d have to do the other one himself; it’s too complicated. For the nth time I was glad not to have been born female; they have to have two of those damned plumber’s friends, instead of just one and a simple hose.

I left his arms out of the sleeves. The suit would be useless for any kind of work, anyhow; waldos have to be tailored to the individual.

His eyelids fluttered. “Man. . . della. Where. . . the fuck..

I explained, slowly, and he seemed to get most of it. “Now I’m gonna close you up and go get into my suit. I’ll have the crew cut the epd off this thing and I’ll haul you out. Got it?”

He nodded. Strange to see that-when you nod or shrug inside a suit, it doesn’t communicate anything.

I crawled into my suit, hooked up the attachments and chinned the general freak. “Doc, I think he’s gonna be OK. Get us out of here now.”

“Will do.” Ho’s voice. The LSU hum was replaced by a chatter, then a throb. Evacuating the box to prevent an explosion.

One corner of the seam grew red, then white, and a bright crimson beam lanced through, not a foot away from my head. I scrunched back as far as I could. The beam slid up the seam and around three corners, back to where it started.

The end of the box fell away slowly, trailing filaments of melted ‘plast.

“Walt for the stuff to harden, Mandella.” “Sanchez, I’m not that stupid.”

“Here you go.” Somebody tossed a line to me. That would be smarter than dragging him out by myself. I threaded a long bight under his arms and tied it behind his neck. Then I scrambled out to help them pull, which was silly-they had a dozen people already lined up to haul.

Singer got out all right and was actually sitting up while Doc Jones checked his readout. People were asking me

THE FOREVER WAR 37

about it and congratulating me, when suddenly Ho said “Look!” and pointed toward the horizon.

It was a black ship, coming in fast. I just had time to think it wasn’t fair, they weren’t supposed to attack until the last few days, and then the ship was right on top of us.

We all flopped to the ground instinctively, but the ship didn’t attack. It blasted braking rockets and dropped to land on skids. Then it skied around to come to a iest beside the building site.

Everybody had it figured out and was standing around sheepishly when the two suited figures stepped out of the ship.

A familiar voice crackled over the general freak. “Every one of you saw us coming in and not one of you responded with laser fire. It wouldn’t have done any good but it would have indicated a certain amount of fighting spirit. You have a week or less before the real thing and since the sergeant and I will be here I will insist that you show a little more will to live. Acting Sergeant Potter.”

“Here, sir.”

“Get me a detail of twelve people to unload cargo. We brought a hundred small robot drones for target practice so that you might have at least a fighting chance when a live target comes over.

“Move now. We only have thiity minutes before the ship returns to Miami.” I checked, and it was actually more like forty minutes.

Having the captain and sergeant there didn’t really make much difference. We were still on our own; they were just observing.

Once we got the floor down, it only took one day to complete the bunker. It was a gray oblong, featureless except for the airlock blister and four windows. On top was a

swivel-mounted gigawatt laser. The operator-you couldn’t call him a “gunner”-sat in a chair holding deadman switches in both hands. The laser wouldn’t fire as long as he was holding one of those switches. If he let go, it would automatically aim for any moving aerial object and

fire at will. Primary detection and aiming was by means of a kilometer-high antenna mounted beside the bunker.

It was the only arrangement that could really be expected to work, with the horizon so close and human reflexes so slow. You couldn’t have the thing fully automatic, because in theory, friendly ships might also approach.

The aiming computer could choose among up to twelve targets appearing simultaneously (firing at the largest ones first). And it would get all twelve in the space of half a

second.

The installation was partly protected from enemy fire by an efficient ablative layer that covered everything except the human operator. But then, they were dead-man switches. One man above guarding eighty inside. The army’s good at that kind of arithmetic.

Once the bunker was finished, half of us stayed inside at all times-feeling very much like targets-taking turns operating the laser, while the other half went on maneuvers.

About four klicks from the base was a large “lake” of frozen hydrogen; one of our most important maneuvers was to learn how to get around on the treacherous stuff.

It wasn’t too difficult You couldn’t stand up on it, so you had to belly down and sled.

If you had somebody to push you from the edge, getting started was no problem. Otherwise, you had to scrabble with your hands and feet, pushing down as hard as was practical, until you started moving, in a series of little jumps. Once started, you’d keep going until you ran out of ice. You could steer a little bit by digging in, hand and foot, on the appropriate side, but you couldn’t slow to a stop that way. So it was a good idea not to go too fast and wind up positioned in such a way that your helmet didn’t absorb the shock of stopping.

We went through all the things we’d done on the Miami side: weapons practice, demolition, attack patterns. We also launched drones at irregular intervals, toward the bunker. Thus, ten or fifteen times a day, the operators got to demonstrate their skill in letting go of the handles as soon as the proximity light went on.

I had four hours of that, like everybody else. I was ner Joe tialneman

vous until the first “attack,” when I saw how little there was to it. The light went on, I let go, the gun aimed, and when the drone peeped over the horizon-zzt! Nice touch of color, the molten metal spraying through space. Otherwise not too exciting.

So none of us were worried about the upcoming “graduation exercise,” thinking it would be just more of the same.

Miami Base attacked on the thirteenth day with two Simultaneous missiles streaking over opposite sides of the horizon at some forty kilometers per second. The laser vaporized the first one with no trouble, but the second got within eight klicks of the bunker before it was hit.

We were coming back from maneuvers, about a klick away from the bunker. I wouldn’t have seen it happen if I hadn’t been looking directly at the bunker the moment of the attack.

The second missile sent a shower of molten debris straight toward the bunker. Eleven pieces hit, and, as we later reconstructed it, this is what happened:

The first casualty was Macjima. so well-loved Macjima, inside the bunker, who was hit in the back and the head and died instantly. With the drop in pressure, the LSU went into high gear. Friedman was standing in front of the main airco outlet and was blown into the opposite wall hard enough to knock him unconscious; he died of decompression before the others could get him to his suit.

Everybody else managed to stagger through the gale and get into their suits, but Garcia’s suit had been holed and didn’t do him any good.

By the time we got there, they had turned off the LSU and were welding up the holes in the wall. One man was trying to scrape up the unrecognizable mess that had been Macjima. I could hear him sobbing and retching. They had already taken Garcia and Friedman outside for burial. The captain took over the repair detail from Potter. Sergeant Cortez led the sobbing man over to a corner and came back to work on cleaning up Macjima’s remains, alone. He didn’t order anybody to help and nobody volunteered.

As a graduation exercise, we were unceremoniously stuffed

into a ship-Earth’s Hope, the same one we rode to Charon-and bundled off to Stargate at a little more than one gee.

The trip seemed endless, about six months subjective time, and boring, but not as hard on the carcass as going to Charon had been. Captain Stott made us review our training orally, day by day, and we did exercises every day until we were worn to a collective frazzle.

Stargate 1 was like Charon’s darkside, only more so. The base on Stargate 1 was smaller than Miami Base-only a little bigger than the one we constructed on darkside-and we were due to lay over a week to help expand the facilities. The crew there was very glad to see us, especially the two females, who looked a little worn around the edges.

We all crowded into the small dining hail, where Sub-major Williamson, the man in charge of Stargate 1, gave us some disconcerting news:

“Everybody get comfortable. Get off the tables, though, there’s plenty of floor.

“I have some idea of what you just went through, training on Charon. I won’t say it’s all been wasted. But where you’re headed, things will be quite different. Warmer.”

He paused to let that soak in.

“Aleph Aurigae, the first collapsar ever detected, revolves around the normal star Epsilon Aurigae in a twenty-seven year orbit. The enemy has a base of operations, not on a regular portal planet of Aleph, but on a planet in orbit around Epsilon. We don’t know much about the planet, just that it goes around Epsilon once every 745 days, is about three-fourths the size of Earth, and has an albedo of 0.8, meaning it’s probably covered with clouds. We can’t say precisely how hot it will be, but judging from its distance

from Epsilon, it’s probably rather hotter than Earth. Of course, we don’t know whether you’ll be working. . . fighting on lightside or darkside, equator or poles. It’s highly unlikely that the atmosphere will be breathable-at any rate, you’ll stay inside your suits.

“Now you know exactly as much about where you’re going as I do. Questions?” “Sir,” Stein drawled, “now we know where we’re goin’

anybody know what we’re goin’ to do when we get there?”

Williamson shrugged. “That’s up to your captain-and your sergeant, and the captain of Earth’s Hope, and Hope’s logistic computer~ We just don’t have enough data yet to project a course of action for you. It may be a long and bloody battle; it may be just a case of walking in to pick up the pieces. Conceivably, the Taurans might want to make a peace offer,’ ‘-Cortez snorted-“in which case you would simply be part of our muscle, our bargaining power.” He looked at Cortez mildly. “No one can say for sure.”

The orgy that night was amusing, but it was like trying to sleep in the middle of a raucous beach party. The only area big enough to sleep all of us was the dining hail; they draped a few bedsheets here and there for privacy, then unleashed Stargate’s eighteen sex-starved men on our women, compliant and promiscuous by military custom (and law), but desiring nothing so much as sleep on solid ground.

The eighteen men acted as if they were compelled to try as many permutations as possible, and their performance was impressive (in a strictly quantitative sense, that is). Those of us who were keeping count led a cheering section for some of the more gifted members. I think that’s the right word.

The next morning-and every other morning we were on Stargate 1-we staggered out of bed and into our suits, to go outside and work on the “new wing.” Eventually, Stargate would be tactical and logistic headquarters for the war, with thousands of permanent personnel, guarded by half-a-dozen heavy cruisers in Hope’s class. When we

started, it was two shacks and twenty people; when we left, it was four shacks and twenty people. The work was hardly work at all, compared to darkside, since we had plenty of light and got sixteen hours inside for every eight hours’

work. And no drone attack for a final exam.

When we shuttled back up to the Hope, nobody was too happy about leaving (though some of the more popular females declared it’d be good to get some rest). Stargate was the last easy, safe assignment we’d have before taking up arms against the Taurans. And as Williamson had pointed out the first day, there was no way of predicting what that would be like.

Most of us didn’t feel too enthusiastic about making a collapsar jump, either. We’d been assured that we wouldn’t even feel it happen, just free fall all the way.

I wasn’t convinced. As a physics student, I’d had the usual courses in general relativity and theories of gravitation. We only had a little direct data at that time- Stargate was discovered when I was in grade school-but the mathematical model seemed clear enough.

The collapsar Stargate was a perfect sphere about three kilometers in radius. It was suspended forever in a state of gravitational collapse that should have meant its surface was dropping toward its center at nearly the speed of light.

Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there. . . the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.
At any rate, there would be a theoretical point in space-time when one end of our ship was just above the surface of the collapsar, and the other end was a kilometer away (in our frame of reference). In any sane universe, this would set up tidal stresses and tear the ship apart, and we would be just another million kilograms of degenerate matter on the theoretical surface, rushing headlong to nowhere for the rest of eternity or dropping to the center in the next trillionth of a second. You pays your money and you takes your frame of reference.

But they were right. We blasted away from Stargate 1,

44 Joe tialdeman

made a few course corrections and then just dropped, for about an hour.

Then a bell rang and we sank into our cushions under a steady two gravities of deceleration. We were in enemy territory.

We’d been decelerating at two gravities for almost nine days when the battle began. Lying on our couches being miserable, all we felt were two soft bumps, missiles being released. Some eight hours later, the squawkbox crackled:

“Attention, all crew. This is the captain.” Quinsana, the pilot, was only a lieutenant, but was allowed to call himself captain aboard the vessel, where he outranked all of us, even Captain Stott. “You grunts in the cargo hold can listen, too.

“We just engaged the enemy with two fifty-gigaton tachyon missiles and have destroyed both the enemy vessel and another object which it had launched approximately three microseconds before.

“The enemy has been trying to overtake us for the past 179 hours, ship time. At the time of the engagement, the enemy was moving at a little over half the speed of light, relative to Aleph, and was only about thirty AU’s from Earth’s Hope. It was moving at .47c relative to us, and thus we would have been coincident in space- time”- rammed!-‘ ‘in a little more than nine hours. The missiles were launched at 0719 ship’s time, and destroyed the enemy at 1540, both tachyon bombs detonating within a thousand klicks of the enemy objects.”

The two missiles were a type whose propulsion system was itself only a barely- controlled tachyon bomb. They accelerated at a constant rate of 100 gees, and were traveling at a relativistic speed by the time the nearby mass of the enemy ship detonated them.

“We expect no further interference from enemy vessels. Our velocity with respect to Aleph will be zero in another five hours; we will then begin the journey back. The return will take twenty-seven days.” General moans and dejected cussing. Everybody knew all that already, of course; but we didn’t care to be reminded of it.

So after another month of logy calisthenics and drill, at a constant two gravities, we got our first look at the planet we were going to attack. Invaders from outer space, yes sir.

It was a blinding white crescent waiting for us two AU’s out from Epsilon. The captain had pinned down the location of the enemy base from fifty AU’s out, and we had jockeyed in on a wide arc, keeping the bulk of the planet between them and us. That didn’t mean we were sneaking up on them-quite the contrary; they launched

three abortive attacks-but it put us in a stronger defensive position. Until we had to go to the surface, that is. Then only the ship and its Star Fleet crew would be reasonably safe.

Since the planet rotated rather slowly-once every ten and one-half days-a “stationary” orbit for the ship had to be 150,000 klicks out. This made the people in the ship feel quite secure, with 6,000 miles of rock and 90,000 miles of space between them and the enemy. But it meant a whole second’s time lag in communication between us on the ground and the ship’s battle computer. A person could get awful dead while that neutrino pulse crawled up and back.

Our vague orders were to attack the base and gain control, while damaging a minimum of enemy equipment. We were to take at least one enemy alive. We were under no ~ircumstances to allow ourselves to be taken alive, however. And the decision wasn’t up to us; one special pulse from the battle computer, and that speck of plutonium in your power plant would fiss with all of .01% efficiency, md you’d be nothing but a rapidly expanding, very hot plasma.

They strapped us into six scoutships-one platoon of twelve people in each-and we blasted away from Earth’s Fiope at eight gees. Each scoutship was supposed to follow its own carefully random path to our rendezvous point, 108 klicks from the base. Fourteen drone ships were launched it the same time, to confound the enemy’s anti-spacecraft ;ystem.

The landing went off almost perfectly. One ship suffered THE FOREVER WAR

minor damage, a near miss boiling away some of the ablative material on one side of the hull, but it’d still be able to make it and return, keeping its speed down while in the atmosphere.

We zigged and zagged and wound up first ship at the rendezvous point. There was only one trouble. It was under four kilometers of water.

I could almost hear that machine, 90,000 miles away, grinding its mental gears, adding this new bit of data. We proceeded just as if we were landing on solid ground: braking rockets, falling, skids out, hit the water, skip, hit the water, skip, hit the water, sink.

It would have made sense to go ahead and land on the bottom-we were streamlined, after all, and water just another fluid-but the hull wasn’t strong enough to hold up a four kilometer column of water. Sergeant Cortez was in the scoutship with us.

“Sarge, tell that computer to do something! We’re gonna get-”

“Oh, shut up, Mandella. Trust in th’ lord.” “Lord” was definitely lower-case when Cortez said it.

There was a loud bubbly sigh, then another, and a slight increase in pressure on my back that meant the ship was rising. “Flotation bags?” Cortez didn’t deign to answer, or didn’t know.

That was it. We rose to within ten or fifteen meters of the surface and stopped, suspended there. Through the port I could see the surface above, shimmering like a mirror of hammered silver. I wondered what it would be like to be a fish and have a definite roof over your world.

I watched another ship splash in. It made a great cloud of bubbles and turbulence, then fell-slightly tail-first-for a short distance before large bags popped out under each delta wing. Then it bobbed up to about our level and stayed.

“This is Captain Stott. Now listen carefully. There is a beach some twenty-eight klicks from your present position, in the direction of the enemy. You will be proceeding to this beach by scoutship and from there will mount your assault on the Tauran position.” That was some improvement; we’d only have to walk eighty klicks.

Joe Haldeman

We deflated the bags, blasted to the surface and flew in a slow, spread-out formation to the beach. It took several minutes. As the ship scraped to a halt, I could hear pumps humming, making the cabin pressure equal to the air pressure outside. Before it had quite stopped moving, the escape slot beside my couch slid open. I rolled out onto the wing of the craft and jumped to the ground. Ten seconds to find cover-I sprinted across loose gravel to the “treeline,” a twisty bramble of tall sparse bluish-green shrubs. I dove into the briar patch and turned to watch the ships leave. The drones that were left rose slowly to about a hundred meters, then took off in all directions with a bone-jarring roar. The real scoutships slid slowly back into the water. Maybe that was a good idea.

It wasn’t a terribly attractive world but certainly would be easier to get around in than the cryogenic nightmare we were trained for. The sky was a uniform dull silver brightness that merged with the mist over the ocean so completely it was impossible to tell where water ended and air began. Small wavelets licked at the black gravel shore, much too slow and graceful in the three-quarters Earth-normal gravity. Even from fifty meters away, the rattle of billions of pebbles rolling with the tide was loud in my ears.

The air temperature was 79 degrees Centigrade, not quite hot enough for the sea to boil, even though the air pressure was low compared to Earth’s. Wisps of steam drifted quickly upward from the line where water met land. I wondered how a lone man would survive exposed here without a suit. Would the heat or the low oxygen (partial pressure one-eighth Earth normal) kill him first? Or was there some deadly microorganism that would beat them both…?

“This is Cortez. Everybody come over and assemble on me.” He was standing on the beach a little to the left of me, waving his hand in a circle over his head. I walked toward him through the shrubs. They were brittle, unsubstantial, seemed paradoxically dried-out in the steamy air.

They wouldn’t offer much in the way of cover.

“We’ll be advancing on a heading .05 radians east of north. I want Platoon One to take point. Two and Three follow about twenty meters behind, to the left and right.

mr.. rultLvLiI wi~n LW

Seven, command platoon, is in the middle, twenty meters behind Two and Three. Five and Six, bring up the rear, in a semicircular closed flank. Everybody straight?” Sure, we could do that “arrowhead” maneuver in our sleep. “OK, let’s move out.”

I was in Platoon Seven, the “command group.” Captain Stott put me there not because I was expected to give any commands, but because of my training in physics.

The command group was supposedly the safest pl~e, buffered by six platoons: people were assigned to it because there was some tactical reason for them to survive at least a little longer than the rest. Cortez was there to give orders.

Chavez was there to correct suit malfunctions. The senior medic, Doe Wilson (the only medic who actually had an M.D.), was there, and so was Theodopolis, the radio engineer, our link with the captain, who had elected to stay in orbit.

The rest of us were assigned to the command group by dint of special training or aptitude that wouldn’t normally be considered of a “tactical” nature. Facing a totally unknown enemy, there was no way of telling what might prove important. Thus I was there because I was the closest the company had to a physicist. Rogers was biology. Tate was chemistry. Ho could crank out a perfect score on the Rhine extrasensory perception test, every time. Bohrs was a polyglot, able to speak twenty- one languages fluently, idiomatically. Petrov’s talent was that he had tested out to have not one molecule of xenophobia in his psyche. Keating was a skilled acrobat. Debby Hoffister-“Lucky” Ho!lister-showed a remarkable aptitude for making money, and also had a consistently high Rhine potential.

When we first set out, we were using the “jungle” camouflage combination on our suits. But what passed for jungle in these anemic tropics was too sparse; we looked like

a band of conspicuous harlequins trooping through the

woods. Cortez had us switch to black, but that was just as bad, as the light of Epsilon came evenly from all parts of

the sky, and there were no shadows except ours. We finally settled on the dun- colored desert camouflage.

The nature of the countryside changed slowly as we walked north, away from the sea. The thorned stalks-I guess you could call them trees-came in fewer numbers but were bigger around and less brittle; at the base of each was a tangled mass of vine with the same bluegreen color, which spread out in a flattened cone some ten meters in diameter. There was a delicate green flower the size of a man’s head near the top of each tree.

Grass began to grow some five klicks from the sea. It seemed to respect the trees’ “property rights,” leaving a strip of bare earth around each cone of vine. At the edge of such a clearing, it would grow as timid bluegreen stubble, then, moving away from the tree, would get thicker and taller until it reached shoulderhigh in some places, where the separation between two trees was unusually large. The grass was a lighter, greener shade than the trees and vines. We changed the color of our suits to the bright green we had used for maximum visibility on Charon.

Keeping to the thickest part of the grass, we were fairly inconspicuous.

We covered over twenty klicks each day, buoyant after months under two gees. Until the second day, the only form of animal life we saw was a kind of black worm, fingersized, with hundreds of cilium legs like the bristles of a brush. Rogers said that there obviously had to be some

THE FOREVER WAR 51

larger creature around, or there would be no reason for the trees to have thorns. So we were doubly on guard, expecting trouble both from the Taurans and the unidentified “large creature.”

Potter’s second platoon was on point; the general freak was reserved for her, since her platoon would likely be the first to spot any trouble.

“Sarge, this is Potter,” we all heard. “Movement ahead.” “Get down, then!”

“We are. Don’t think they see us.”

“First platoon, go up to the right of point. Keep down. Fourth, get up to the left. Tell me when you get in position. Sixth platoon, stay back and guard the rear. Fifth and third, close with the command group.”

Two dozen people whispered out of the grass to join us. Cortez must have heard from the fourth platoon.

“Good. How about you, first?. . . OK, fine. How many are there?” “Eight we can see.” Potter’s voice.

“Good. When I give the word, open fire. Shoot to kill.” “Sarge,.. . they’re just animals.”

“Potter-if you’ve known all this time what a Tauran looks like, you should’ve told us. Shoot to kill.”

“But we need . . .”

“We need a prisoner, but we don’t need to escort him forty klicks to his home base and keep an eye on him while we fight. Clear?”

“Yes. Sergeant.”

“OK. Seventh, all you brains and weirds, we’re going up and watch. Fifth and third, come along to guard.”

We crawled through the meter-high grass to where the second platoon had stretched out in a firing line.

“I don’t see anything,” Cortez said. “Ahead and just to the left. Dark green.”

They were only a shade darker than the grass. But after you saw the first one, you could see them all, moving slowly around some thirty meters ahead.

“Fire!” Cortez tired tirst; then twelve streaks of crimson leaped out and the grass wilted black, disappeared, and the

Joe Haldeman

creatures convulsed and died trying to scatter.

“Hold fire, hold it!” Cortez stood up. “We want to have something left-second platoon, follow me.” He strode out toward the smoldering corpses, laser-finger pointed out front, obscene divining rod pulling him toward the carnage

I felt my gorge rising and knew that all the lurid training tapes, all the horrible deaths in training accidents, hadn’t prepared me for this sudden reality. . . that I had a magic wand that I could point at a life and make it a smoking piece of half-raw meat; I wasn’t a soldier nor ever wanted to be one nor ever would want- “OK, seventh, come on up.” While we were walking

toward them, one of the creatures moved, a tiny shudder, and Cortez flicked the beam of his laser over it with an almost negligent gesture. It made a hand-deep gash across the creature’s middle. It died, like the others, without emitting a sound.

They were not quite as tall as humans, but wider in girth. They were covered with dark green, almost black, fur- white curls where the laser had singed. They appeared to have three legs and an arm. The only ornament to their shaggy heads was a mouth, wet black orifice filled with flat black teeth. They were thoroughly repulsive, but their worst feature was not a difference from human beings, but a similarity. . . . Whenever the laser had opened a body cavity, milk-white glistening veined globes and coils of organs spilled out, and their blood was dark clotting red.

“Rogers, take a look. Taurans or not?”

Rogers knelt by one of the disemboweled creatures and opened a flat plastic box, filled with glittering dissecting tools. She selected a scalpel. “One way we might be

able to find out.” Doc Wilson watched over her shoulder as she methodically slit the membrane covering several organs.

“Here.” She held up a blackish fibrous mass between two fingers, a parody of daintiness through all that armor.

“So?”

“It’s grass, Sergeant. If the Taurans eat the grass and breathe the air, they certainly found a planet remarkably like their home.” She tossed it away. “They’re animals, Sergeant, just fucken animals.”

II1L I’URLVLD. WJiR

“I don’t know,” Doc Wilson said. “Just because they walk around on all fours, threes maybe, and eat grass. .

“Well, let’s check out the brain.” She found one that had been hit in the head and scraped the superficial black char from the wound. “Look at that.”

It was almost solid bone. She tugged and ruffled the hair all over the head of another one. “What the hell does it use for sensory organs? No eyes, or ears, or. . .” She stood up.

“Nothing in that fucken head but a mouth and ten centimeters of skull. To protect nothing, not a fucken thing.”

“If I could shrug, I’d shrug,” the doctor said. “It doesn’t prove anything-a brain doesn’t have to look like a mushy walnut and it doesn’t have to be in the head. Maybe that skull isn’t bone, maybe that’s the brain, some crystal lattice. .

“Yeah, but the fucken stomach’s in the right place, and if those aren’t intestines I’ll eat-”

“Look,” Cortez said, “this is real interesting, but all we need to know is whether that thing’s dangerous, then we’ve gotta move on; we don’t have all-”

“They aren’t dangerous,” Rogers began. “They don’t-”

“Medic! DOC!” Somebody back at the firing line was waving his arms. Dcc sprinted back to him, the rest of us following.

“What’s wrong?” He had reached back and unclipped his medical kit on the run. “It’s Ho. She’s out.”

Doc swung open the door on Ho’s biomedical monitor. He didn’t have to look far. “She’s dead.”

“Dead?” Cortez said. “What the hell-”

“Just a minute.” Doc plugged a jack into the monitor and fiddled with some dials on his kit. “Everybody’s biomed readout is stored for twelve hours. I’m running it backwards, should be able to-there!”

“What?”

“Four and a half minutes ago-must have been when you opened fire-Jesus!” “Well?”

“Massive cerebral hemorrhage. No. . .” He watched the ’54

Joe Haldeman

dials. “No. . . warning, no indication of anything out of the

ordinary; blood pressure up, pulse up, but normal under the circumstances. . . nothing to. . . indicate-” He reached down and popped her suit. Her fine oriental features were distorted in a horrible grimace, both gums showing. Sticky fluid ran from under her collapsed eyelids, and a trickle of blood still dripped from each ear. Doc Wilson closed the suit back up.

“I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s as if a bomb went off in her skull.” “Oh flick,” Rogers said, “she was Rhine-sensitive, wasn’t she.”

“That’s right,” Cortez sounded thoughtful. “All right, everybody listen up. Platoon leaders, check your platoons and see if anybody’s missing, or hurt. Anybody else in seventh?”

“I. . . I’ve got a splitting headache, Sarge,” Lucky said.

Four others had bad headaches. One of them affirmed that he was slightly Rhine- sensitive. The others didn’t know.

“Cortez, I think it’s obvious,” Doc Wilson said, “that we should give these. . . monsters wide berth, especially shouldn’t harm any more of them. Not with five people susceptible to whatever apparently killed Ho.”

“Of course, God damn it, I don’t need anybody to tell me that. We’d better get moving. I just filled the captain in on what happened; he agrees that we’d better get as far away from here as we can, before we stop for the night.

“Let’s get back in formation and continue on the same bearing. Fifth platoon, take over point; second, come back to the rear. Everybody else, same as before.”

“What about Ho?” Lucky asked.

“She’ll be taken care of. From the ship.”

After we’d gone half a klick, there was a flash and rolling thunder. Where Ho had been came a wispy luminous mushroom cloud boiling up to disappear against the gray sky.

We stopped for the “night”-actually, the sun wouldn’t set for another seventy hours-atop a slight rise some ten klicks from where we had killed the aliens. But they weren’t aliens, I bad to remind myself-we were.

Two platoons deployed in a ring around the rest of us, and we flopped down exhausted. Everybody was allowed four hours’ sleep and had two hours’ guard duty.

Potter came over and sat next to me. I chinned her frequency. “Hi, Marygay.”

“Oh, William,” her voice over the radio was hoarse and cracking. “God, it’s so horrible.”

“It’s over now-”

“I killed one of them, the first instant, I shot it right in the, in the . . .”

1 put my hand on her knee. The contact had a plastic click and I jerked it back, visions of machines embracing, copulating. “Don’t feel singled out, Marygay; whatever guilt there is, is. . . belongs evenly to all of us,. . . but a triple portion for Cor-”

“You privates quit jawin’ and get some sleep. You both pull guard in two hours.” “OK, Sarge.” Her voice was so sad and tired I couldn’t bear it. I felt if I could only

touch her, I could drain off the sadness like ground wire draining current, but we were each

trapped in our own plastic world- ”G’night, William.”

“Night.” It’s almost impossible to get sexually excited inside a suit, with the relief tube and all the silver chloride sensors poking you, but somehow this was my body’s response to the emotional impotence, maybe remembering more pleasant sleeps with Marygay, maybe feeling that in the midst of all this death, personal death could be very soon, cranking up the procreative derrick for one last try

lovely thoughts like this. I fell asleep and dreamed that I was a machine, mimicking the functions of life, creaking and clanking my clumsy way through a world, people too polite to say anything but giggling behind my back, and the little man who sat inside my head pulling the levers and clutches and watching the dials, he was hopelessly mad and was storing up hurts for the day- “Mandella-wake up, goddammit, your shift!”

I shuffled over to my place on the perimeter to watch for god knows what. . . but I was so weary I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Finally I tongued a stimtab, knowing I’d pay for it later.

For over an hour I sat there, scanning my sector left, right, near, far, the scene never changing, not even a breath of wind to stir the grass.

Then suddenly the grass parted and one of the three-legged creatures was right in front of me. I raised my finger but didn’t squeeze.

“Movement!” “Movement!”

“Jesus Chri-there’s one right-”

“HOLD YOUR FIRE! F’ shit’s sake don’t shoot!” “Movement.”

“Movement.” I looked left and right, and as far as I could see, every perimeter guard had one of the blind, dumb creatures standing right in front of him.

Maybe the drug I’d taken to stay awake made me more sensitive to whatever they did. My scalp crawled and I felt a formless thing in my mind, the feeling you get when somebody has said something and you didn’t quite hear it, want to respond, but the opportunity to ask him to repeat it is gone.

The creature sat back on its haunches, leaning forward on the one front Leg. Big green bear with a withered arm. Its power threaded through my mind, spiderwebs, echo of night terrors, trying to communicate, trying to destroy me, I couldn’t know.

“All right, everybody on the perimeter, fall back, slow. THE FOREVER WAR

Don’t make any quick gestures. .. . Anybody got a headache or anything?” “Sergeant, this is Hollister.” Lucky.

“They’re trying to say something. . . I can almost… no, just.. .” “All I can get is that they think we’re, think we’re…

well, fimny. They’re not afraid.”

“You mean the one in front of you isn’t-”

“No, the feeling comes from all of them., they’re all thinking the same thing. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do.”

“Maybe they thought it was funny, what they did to Ho.” “Maybe. I don’t feel they’re dangerous. Just curious about us.” “Sergeant, this is Bohrs.”

“The Taurans’ve been here at least a year-maybe they’ve learned how to communicate with these.. . overgrown teddy bears. They might be spying on us, might be sending back-”

“I don’t think they’d show themselves if that were the case,” Lucky said. “They can obviously hide from us pretty well when they-want to.”

“Anyhow,” Cortez said, “if they’re spies, the damage has been done. Don’t think it’d be smart to take any action against them. I know you’d all like to see ’em dead for what they did to Ho, so would I, but we’d better be carefliL”

I didn’t want to see them dead, but I’d just as soon not have seen them in any condition. I was walking backwards slowly, toward the middle of camp. The creature didn’t seem disposed to follow. Maybe he just knew we were surrounded. He was pulling up grass with his arm and munching.

“OK, all of you platoon leaders, wake everybody up, get a roll count. Let me know if anybody’s been hurt. Tell your people we’re moving out in one minute.”

I don’t know what Cortez had expected, but of course the creatures followed right along. They didn’t keep us sur

Joe Haldeman

rounded; just had twenty or thirty following us all the time. Not the same ones, either. Individuals would saunter away, and new ones would join the parade. It was pretty obvious that they weren’t going to tire out.

We were each allowed one stimtab. Without it, no one could have marched an hour. A second pill would have been welcome after the edge started to wear off, but the mathematics of the situation forbade it; we were still thirty klicks from the enemy base, fifteen hours’ marching at the least. And though you could stay awake and energetic for a hundred hours on the tabs, aberrations of judgment and perception snowballed after the second one, until in extremis the most bizarre hallucinations would be taken at face value, and a person could fidget for hours deciding whether to have breakfast.

Under artificial stimulation, the company traveled with great energy for the first six hours, was slowing by the seventh, and ground to an exhausted halt after nine hours and nineteen kilometers. The teddy bears had never lost sight of us and, according to Lucky, had never stopped “broadcasting.” Cortez’s decision was that we would stop for seven hours, each platoon taking one hour of perimeter guard. I was never so glad to have been in the seventh platoon, as we stood guard the last shift and thus were able to get six hours of uninterrupted sleep.

In the few moments I lay awake after finally lying down, the thought came to me that the next time I closed my eyes could well be the last. And partly because of the drug hangover, mostly because of the past day’s horrors, I found that I really didn’t give a shit.

Our first contact with the Taurans came during my shift.

The teddy bears were still there when I woke up and replaced Doc Jones on guard. They’d gone back to their original formation, one in front of each guard position. The one who was waiting for me seemed a little larger than normal, but otherwise looked just like all the others. All the grass had been cropped where he was sitting, so he occasionally made forays to the left or right. But he always returned to sit right in front of me, you would say staring if he had had anything to stare with.

We had been facing each other for about fifteen minutes when Cortez’s voice rumbled:

“Awright everybody, wake up and get hid!”

I followed instinct and flopped to the ground and rolled into a tall stand of grass. “Enemy vessel overhead.” His voice was almost laconic.

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t really overhead, but rather passing somewhat east of us. It was moving slowly, maybe a hundred klicks per hour, and looked like a broomstick surrounded by a dirty soap bubble. The creature riding it was a little

more human-looking than the teddy bears, but still no prize. I cranked my image amplifier up to forty log two for a closer look.

He had two arms and two legs, but his waist was so small you could encompass it with both hands. Under the tiny waist was a large horseshoe-shaped pelvic structure nearly a meter wide, from which dangled two long skinny legs with no apparent knee joint. Above that waist his body swelled out again, to a chest no smaller than the huge pelvis. His arms looked surprisingly human, except that they were too long and undermuscied. There were too many fingers on his hands. Shoulderless, neckless. His head was a

Joe Haldeman

nightmarish growth that swelled like a goiter from his massive chest. Two eyes that looked like clusters of fish eggs, a bundle of tassles instead of a nose, and a rigidly open hole that might have been a mouth sitting low down where his adam’s apple should have been. Evidently the soap bubble contained an amenable environment, as he was wearing absolutely nothing except his ridged hide, that looked like skin submerged too long in hot water, then dyed a pale orange. “He” had no external genitalia, but nothing that might hint of mammary glands. So we opted for the male pronoun by default.

Obviously, he either didn’t see us or thought we were part of the herd of teddy bears. He never looked back at us, but just continued in the same direction we were headed, .05 rad east of north.

“Might as well go back to sleep now, if you can sleep after looking at that thing. We move out at 0435.” Forty minutes.

Because of the planet’s opaque cloud cover, there had been no way to tell, from space, what the enemy base looked like or how big it was. We only knew its position, the same way we knew the position the scoutships were supposed to land on. So it too could easily have been underwater, or underground.

But some of the drones were reconnaissance ships as well as decoys: and in their mock attacks on the base, one managed to get close enough to take a picture. Captain Stott beamed down a diagram of the place to Cortez-the only one with a visor in his suit-when we were five klicks from the base’s “radio” position. We stopped and he called all the platoon leaders in with the seventh platoon to confer. Two teddy bears loped in, too. We tried to ignore them.

“OK, the captain sent down some pictures of our objective. I’m going to draw a map; you platoon leaders copy.” They took pads and styli out of their leg pockets, while Cortez unrolled a large plastic mat. He gave it a shake to randomize any residual charge, and turned on his stylus.

“Now, we’re coming from this direction.” He put an arrow at the bottom of the sheet. “First thing we’ll hit is this row of huts, probably billets or bunkers, but who the

THE FOREVER WAR 61

hell knows. . . . Our initial objective is to destroy these buildings-the whole base is on a flat plain; there’s no way we could really sneak by them.”

“Potter here. Why can’t we jump over them?”

“Yeah, we could do that, and wind up completely surrounded, cut to ribbons. We take the buildings.

“After we do that. . . all I can say is that we’ll have to think on our feet. From the aerial reconnaissance, we can figure out the function of only a couple of buildings- and that stinks. We might wind up wasting a lot of time demolishing the equivalent of an enlisted-men’s bar, ignoring a huge logistic computer because it looks like. . . a garbage dump or something.”

“Mandella here,” I said. “Isn’t there a spaceport of some kind-seems to me we ought to. .

“I’ll get to that, damn it. There’s a ring of these huts all around the camp, so we’ve got to break through somewhere. This place’ll be closest, less chance of giving away our position before we attack.

“There’s nothing in the whole place that actually looks like a weapon. That doesn’t mean anything, though; you could hide a gigawatt laser in each of those huts.

“Now, about five hundred meters from the huts, in the middle of the base, we’ll come to this big flower-shaped structure.” Cortez drew a large symmetrical shape that looked like the outline of a flower with seven petals. “What the hell this is, your guess is as good as mine. There’s only one of them, though, so we don’t damage it any more than we have to. Which means.. . we blast it to splinters if I think it’s dangerous.

“Now, as far as your spaceport, Mandella, is concerned-there just isn’t one. Nothing.

“That cruiser the Hope caulked had probably been left in orbit, like ours has to be. If they have any equivalent of a scoutship, or drone missiles, they’re either not kept here or they’re well hidden.”

“Bohrs here. Then what did they attack with, while we were coming down from orbit?”

“I wish we knew, Private.

“Obviously, we don’t have any way of estimating their 62

Joe Haldeman

numbers, not directly. Recon pictures failed to show a single Tauran on the grounds of the base. Meaning nothing, because it is an alien environment. Indirectly, though… we count the number of broomsticks, those flying things.

“There are fifty-one huts, and each has at most one broomstick. Four don’t have any parked outside, but we located three at various other parts of the base. Maybe this indicates that there are fifty-one Taurans, one of whom was outside the base when the picture was taken.”

“Keating here. Or fifty-one officers.”

“That’s right-maybe fifty thousand infantrymen stacked in one of these buildings. No way to tell. Maybe ten Taurans, each with five broomsticks, to use according to his mood.

“We’ve got one thing in our favor, and that’s communications. They evidently use a frequency modulation of megahertz electromagnetic radiation.”

“Radio!”

“That’s right, whoever you are. Identify yourself when you speak. So it’s quite possible that they can’t detect our phased-neutrino communications. Also, just prior to the attack, the Hope is going to deliver a nice dirty fission bomb; detonate it in the upper atmosphere right over the base. That’ll restrict them to line-of-sight communications for some time; even those will be full of static.”

“Why don’t.. . Tate here. . . why don’t they just drop the bomb right in their laps. Save us a lot of-”

“That doesn’t even deserve an answer, Private. But the answer is, they might. And you better hope they don’t. If they caulk the base, it’ll be for the safety of the Hope. After we’ve attacked, and probably before we’re far enough away for it to make much difference.

“We keep that from happening by doing a good job. We have to reduce the base to where it can no longer function; at the same time, leave as much intact as possible. And take one prisoner.”

“Potter here. You mean, at least one prisoner.”

“I mean what I say. One only. Potter.. . you’re relieved of your platoon. Send Chavez up.”

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“All right, Sergeant.” The relief in her voice was unmistakable.

Cortez continued with his map and instructions. There was one other building whose function was pretty obvious; it had a large steerable dish antenna on top. We were to destroy it as soon as the grenadiers got in range.

The attack plan was very loose. Our signal to begin would be the flash of the fission bomb. At the same time, several drones would converge on the base, so we could see what their antispacecraft defenses were. We would try to reduce the effectiveness of those defenses without destroying them completely.

Immediately after the bomb and the drones, the grenadiers would vaporize a line of seven huts. Everybody would break through the hole into the base. . . and what would happen after that was anybody’s guess.

Ideally, we’d sweep from that end of the base to the other, destroying certain targets, caulking all but one Tauran. But that was unlikely to happen, as it depended on the Taurans’ offering very little resistance.

On the other hand, if the Taurans showed obvious superiority from the beginning, Cortez would give the order to scatter. Everybody had a different compass bearing for retreat-we’d blossom out in all directions, the survivors to rendezvous in a valley some forty klicks east of the base. Then we’d see about a return engagement, after the Hope softened the base up a bit.

“One last thing,” Cortez rasped. “Maybe some of you feel the way Potter evidently does, maybe some of your men feel that way.. . that we ought to go easy, not make this so much of a bloodbath. Mercy is a luxury, a weakness we can’t afford to indulge in at this stage of the war. All we know about the enemy is that they have killed seven hundred and ninety-eight humans. They haven’t shown any restraint in attacking our cruisers, and it’d be foolish to expect any this time, this first ground action.

“They are responsible for the lives of all of your comrades who died in training, and for Ho, and for all the others who are surely going to die today. I can’t understand any-

Joe Haldeman

body who wants to spare them. But that doesn’t make any difference. You have your orders and, what the hell, you might as well know, all of you have a post- hypnotic suggestion that I will trigger by a phrase, just before the battle. It will make your job easier.”

“Sergeant..

“Shut up. We’re short on time; get back to your platoons and brief them. We move out in five minutes.”

The platoon leaders returned to their men, leaving Cortez and ten of us-plus three teddy bears, milling around, getting in the way.

We took the last five klicks very carefully, sticking to the highest grass, running across occasional clearings. When we were 500 meters from where the base was supposed to be, Cortez took the third platoon forward to scout, while the rest of us laid low.

Cortez’s voice came over the general freak: “Looks pretty much like we expected. Advance in a file, crawling. When you get to the third platoon, follow your squad leader to the left or right.”

We did that and wound up with a string of eighty-three people in a line roughly perpendicular to the direction of attack. We were pretty well hidden, except for the dozen or so teddy bears that mooched along the line, munching grass.

There was no sign of life inside the base. All of the buildings were windowless and a uniform shiny white. The huts that were our first objective were large featureless half-buried eggs some sixty meters apart. Cortez assigned one to each grenadier.

We were broken into three fire teams: team A consisted of platoons two, four, and six; team B was one, three, and five; the command platoon was team C.

“Less than a minute now-filters down!-when I say ‘fire,’ grenadiers, take out your targets. God help you if you miss.”

There was a sound like a giant’s belch, and a stream of five or six iridescent bubbles floated up from the flower-shaped building. They rose with increasing speed until they were almost out of sight, then shot olf to the south, over our heads. The ground was suddenly bright, and for the first time in a long time, I saw my shadow, a long one pointed north. The bomb had gone off prematurely. I just had time to think that it didn’t make too much difference;

Joe Haldeman t~1)

it’d still make alphabet soup out of their communications- “Drones!” A ship came screaming in just about tree

level, and a bubble was in the air to meet it. When they contacted, the bubble popped and the drone exploded into a million tiny fragments. Another one came from the opposite side and suffered the same fate.

“FIRE!” Seven bright glares of 500-microton grenades and a sustained concussion that surely would have killed an unprotected man.

“Filters up.” Gray haze of smoke and dust. Clods of dirt falling with a sound like heavy raindrops.

“Listen up:

‘Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled; Scots, wham Bruce has aften led, Welcome to your gory bed, Or to victory!’

I hardly heard him for trying to keep track of what was going on in my skull. I knew it was just post-hypnotic suggestion, even remembered the session in Missouri when they’d implanted it, but that didn’t make it any less compelling. My mind reeled under the strong pseudo-memories:

shaggy hulks that were Taurans (not at all what we now knew they looked like) boarding a colonists’ vessel, eating babies while mothers watched in screaming terror (the colonists never took babies; they wouldn’t stand the acceleration), then

raping the women to death with huge veined purple members (ridiculous that they would feel desire for humans), holding the men down while they plucked flesh from their living bodies and gobbled it (as if they could assimilate the alien protein).. . a hundred grisly details as sharply remembered as the events of a minute ago, ridiculously overdone and logically absurd. But while my conscioUs mind was rejecting the silliness, somewhere much deeper, down in that sleeping animal where we keep our real motives and morals, something was thirsting for alien hlood, secure in the Conviction that the noblest thing a man could do would be to die killing one of those horrible monsters.

Ikth FUIthVMt WAlt b7

I knew it was all purest soyashit, and I hated the men who had taken such obscene liberties with my mind, but I could even hear my teeth grinding, feel my cheeks frozen in a spastic grin, blood-Lust. . . A teddy bear walked in front of me, looking dazed. I started to raise my laser-finger, but somebody beat me to it and the creature’s head exploded in a cloud of gray splinters and blood.

Lucky groaned, half-whining, “Dirty. .. filthy fucken bastards.” Lasers flared and crisscrossed, and all of the teddy bears fell dead.

“Watch it, goddaminit,” Cortez screamed. “Aim those fuckin things-they aren’t toys!

“Team A, move out-into the craters to cover B.”

Somebody was laughing and sobbing. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Petrov?” Strange to hear Cortez cussing.

I twisted around and saw Petrov, behind and to my left, lying in a shallow hole, digging frantically with both hands, crying and gurgling.

“Fuck,” Cortez said. “Team B! Ten meters past the craters, get down in a line. Team C-into the craters with A.”

I scrambled up and covered the hundred meters in twelve amplified strides. The craters were practically large enough to hide a scoutship, some ten meters in diameter. I jumped to the opposite side of the hole and landed next to a fellow named Chin. He didn’t even look around when I landed, just kept scanning the base for signs of life.

“Team A-ten meters, past team B, down in line.” Just as he finished, the building in front of us burped, and a salvo of the bubbles fanned out toward our lines. Most people saw it coming and got down, but Chin was just getting up to make his rush and stepped right into one.

It grazed the top of his helmet and disappeared with a faint pop. He took one step backwards and toppled over the edge of the crater, trailing an arc of blood and brains. Lifeless, spreadeagled, he slid halfway to the bottom, shoveling dirt into the perfectly symmetrical hole where the bubble had chewed indiscriminately through plastic, hair, skin, bone, and brain.

“Everybody hold it. Platoon leaders, casualty report… check.. . check, check .. . check, check, check.. . check.

Joe Haldeman

We have three deaders. Wouldn’t be any if you’d have kept low. So everybody grab dirt when you hear that thing go off. Team A, complete the rush.”

They completed the maneuver without incident. “OK. Team C, rush to where B. . . hold it! Down!”

Everybody was already hugging the ground. The bubbles slid by in a smooth arc about two meters off the ground. They went serenely over our heads and, except for one that made toothpicks out of a tree, disappeared in the distance.

“B, rush past A ten meters. C, take over B’s place. You B grenadiers, see if you can reach the Flower.”

Two grenades tore up the ground thirty or forty meters from the structure. In a good imitation of panic, it started belching out a continuous stream of bubbles-still, none coming lower than two meters off the ground. We kept hunched down and continued to advance.

Suddenly, a seam appeared in the building and widened to the size of a large door. Taurans came swarming out.

“Grenadiers, hold your fire. B team, laser fire to the left and right-keep’m bunched up. A and C, rush down the center.”

One Tauran died trying to run through a laser beam. The others stayed where they were.

In a suit, it’s pretty awkward to run and keep your head down at the same time. You have to go from side to side, like a skater getting started; otherwise you’ll be airborne. At least one person, somebody in A team, bounced too high and suffered the same fate as Chin.

I was feeling pretty fenced-in and trapped, with a wall of laser fire on each side and a low ceiling that meant death to touch. But in spite of myself, I felt happy, euphoric, finally getting the chance to kill some of those villainous baby-eaters. Knowing it was soyashit.

They weren’t fighting back, except for the rather ineffective bubbles (obviously not designed as an anti-personnel weapon), and they didn’t retreat back into the building, either. They milled around, about a hundred of them, and watched us get closer. A couple of grenades would caulk them all, but I guess Cortez was thinking about the pris

oner.

“OK, when I say ‘go,’ we’re going to flank ’em. B team will hold fire.. . Second and fourth platoons to the right, sixth and seventh to the left. B team will move forward in line to box them in.

“Go!” We peeled off to the left As soon as the lasers stopped, the Taurans bolted, running in a group on a collision course with our flank.

“A team, down and fire! Don’t shoot until you’re sure of your aim-if you miss you might hit a friendly. ~And fer Chris’ sake save me one!”

It was a horrifying sight, that herd of monsters bearing down on us. They were running in great leaps-the bubbles avoiding them-and they all looked like the one we saw earlier, riding the broomstick; naked except for an almost transparent sphere around their whole bodies, that moved along with them. The right flank started firing, picking off individuals in the rear of the pack.

Suddenly a laser flared through the Taurans from the other side, somebody missing his mark. There was a horrible scream, and I looked down the line to see someone-I think it was Perry-writhing on the ground, right hand over the smoldering stump of his arm, seared off just below the elbow. Blood sprayed through his fingers, and the suit, its camouflage circuits scrambled, flickered black-white- jungle-desert-green-gray. I don’t know how long I stared- long enough for the medic

to run over and start giving aid-but when I looked up the Taurans were almost on top of me.

My first shot was wild and high, but it grazed the top of the leading Tauran’s protective bubble. The bubble disappeared and the monster stumbled and fell to the ground, jerking spasmodically. Foam gushed out of his mouth-hole, first white, then streaked red. With one last jerk he became rigid and twisted backwards, almost to the shape of a horseshoe. His long scream, a high-pitched whistle, stopped just as his comrades trampled over him. 1 hated myself for smiling.

It was slaughter, even though our flank was outnumbered five to one. They kept coming without faltering, even when they had to climb over the drift of bodies and parts of

‘U

joe tlaiAleman

bodies that piled up high, parallel to our flank~ The ground between us was slick red with Tauran blood-all God’s children got hemoglobin-and like the teddy bears, their guts looked pretty much like guts to my untrained eye. My helmet reverberated with hysterical laughter while we slashed them to gory chunks, and I almost didn’t hear Cortez:

“Hold your fire-I said HOLD iT, goddammit! Catch a couple of the bastards, they won’t hurt you.”

I stopped shooting and eventually so did everybody else. When the next Tauran jumped over the smoking pile of meat in front of me, I dove to try to tackle him around those spindly legs.

It was like hugging a big, slippery balloon. When I tried to drag him down, he popped out of my arms and kept running.

We managed to stop one of them by the simple expedient of piling half-a-dozen people on top of him. By that time the others had run through our line and were headed for the row of large cylindrical tanks that Cortez had said were probably for storage. A little door had opened in the base of each one.

“We’ve got our prisoner,” Cortez shouted. “Kill!”

They were fifty meters away and running hard, difficult targets. Lasers slashed around them, bobbing high and low. One fell, sliced in two, but the others, about ten of them, kept going and were almost to the doors when the grenadiers started firing.

They were still loaded with 500-mike bombs, but a near miss wasn’t enough-the concussion would just send them flying, unhurt in their bubbles.

“The buildings! Get the fucken buildings!” The grenadiers raised their aim and let fly, but the bombs only seemed to scorch the white outside of the structures until, by chance, one landed in a door. That split the building just as if it had a seam; the two halves popped away and a cloud of machinery flew into the air, accompanied by a huge pale flame that rolled up and disappeared in an instant. Then the others all concentrated on the doors, except for potshots at some of the Taurans, not so much to get them as to blow

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them away before they could get inside. They seemed awfully eager.

All this time, we were trying to get the Taurans with laser fire, while they weaved and bounced around trying to get into the structures. We moved in as close to them as we could without putting ourselves in danger from the grenade blasts, yet too far away for good aim.

Still, we were getting them one by one and managed to destroy four of the seven buildings. Then, when there were only two aliens left, a nearby grenade blast flung one of them to within a few meters of a door. He dove in and several grenadiers fired salvos after him, but they all fell short or detonated harmlessly on the side. Bombs were falling all around, making an awful racket, but the sound was suddenly drowned out by a great sigh, like a giant’s intake of breath, and where the building had been was a thick cylindrical cloud of smoke, solid-looking, dwindling away into the stratosphere, straight as if laid down by a ruler. The other Tauran had been right at the base of the cylinder I could see pieces of him flying. A second later, a shock wave hit us and I rolled helplessly, pinwheeling, to smash into the pile of Tauran bodies and roll beyond.

1 picked myself up and panicked for a second when I saw there was blood all over my suit-when I realized it was only alien blood, I relaxed but felt unclean.

‘4Catch the bastard! Catch him!” In the confusion, the Tauran had gotten free and was running for the grass. One platoon was chasing after him, losing ground, but then all of B team ran over and cut him off. I jogged over to join in the fun.

There were four people on top of him, and a ring around them of about fifty people, watching the struggle.

“Spread out, dammit! There might be a thousand more of them waiting to get us in one place.” We dispersed, grumbling. By unspoken agreement we were all sure that there were no more live Taurans on the face of the planet.

Cortez was walking toward the prisoner while I backed away. Suddenly the four men collapsed in a pile on top of the creature. . . Even from my distance I could see the foam spouting from his mouth-hole. His bubble had popped. Suicide.

Joe Haldeman

“Damn!” Co,tez was right there. “Get off that bastard.” The four men got off and Cortez used his laser In slice the monster into a dozen quivering chunks. Heart- warming sight.

“That’s all right, though, we’ll find another one-everybody! Back in the arrowhead formation. Combat assault, on the Flower.”

Well, we assaulted the Flower, which had evidently run out of ammunition (it was still belching, but no bubbles), and it was empty. We scurried up ramps and through corridors, fingers at the ready, like kids playing soldier. There was nobody home.

The same lack of response at the antenna installation, the

“Salami,” and twenty other major buildings, as well as the forty-four perimeter huts still intact. So we had “captured” dozens of buildings, mostly of incomprehensible purpose, but failed in our main mission, capturing a Tauran for the xenologists to experiment with. Oh well, they could have all the bits and pieces they’d ever want. That was something.

After we’d combed every last square centimeter of the base, a scoutship came in with the real exploration ciew, the scientists. Cortez said, “All right, snap out of it,” and the hypnotic compulsion fell away.

At first it was pretty grim. Alot of the people, like Lucky and Marygay, almost went crazy with the memories of bloody murder multiplied a hundred times. Cortez ordered everybody to take a sed-tab, two for the ones most upset. I took two without being specifically ordered to do so.

Because it was murder, unadorned butchery-once we had the anti-spacecraft weapon doped out, we hadn’t been in any danger. The Taurans hadn’t seemed to

have any conception of person-to-person fighting. We had just herded them up and slaughtered them, the first encounter between mankind and another intelligent species. Maybe it was the second encounter, counting the teddy bears. What might have happened if we had sat down and tried to communicate? But they got the same treatment.

I spent a long time after that telling myself over and over THE FOREVER WAR

that it hadn’t been me who so gleefully carved up those frightened, stampeding creatures. Back in the twentieth centuly, they had established to everybody’s satisfaction that “I was just following orders” was an inadequate excuse for inhuman conduct. . . but what can you do when the orders come from deep down in that puppet master of the unconscious?

Worst of all was the feeling that perhaps my actions weren’t all that inhuman. Ancestors only a few generations back would have done the same thing, even to their fellow men, without any hypnotic conditioning.

I was disgusted with the human race, disgusted with the army and honified at the prospect of living with myself for another century or so. . . . Well, there was always brain-wipe.

A ship with a lone Tauran survivor had escaped and had gotten away clean, the bulk of the planet shielding it from Earth’s Hope while it dropped into Aleph’s collapsar field.

Escaped home, I guessed, wherever that was, to report what twenty men with hand-weapons could do to a hundred fleeing on foot, unarmed.

I suspected that the next time humans met Taurans in ground combat, we would be more evenly matched. And I was right.

SERG EANT MANDELLA 2007-2024 A.D.

I was scared enough.

Sub-major Stott was pacing back and forth behind the small podium in the assembly room/chop hall/gymnasium of the Anniversary. We had just made our final collapsar jump, from Tet-38 to Yod-4. We were decelerating at 11/2 gravities and our velocity relative to that collapsar was a respectable .9(k. We were being chased.

“I wish you people would relax for a while and just trust the ship’s computer. The Tauran vessel at any rate will not be within strike range for another two weeks. Mandella!”

He was always very careful to call me “Sergeant” Mandella in front of the company. But everybody at this particular briefing was either a sergeant or a corporal: squad leaders. “Yes, sit”

“You’re responsible for the psychological as well as the physical well-being of the men and women in your squad. Assuming that you are aware that there is a morale problem aboard this vessel, what have you done about it?”

“AS far as my squad is concerned, sir?” “Of course.”

“We talk it out, sir.”

“And have you arrived at any cogent conclusion?”

“Meaning no disrespect, sir, I think the major problem is obvious. My people have been cooped up in this ship for fourteen-”

“Ridiculous! Every one of us has been adequately conditioned against the pressures of living in close quarters and the enlisted people have the privilege of confraternity.” That was a delicate way of putting it. “Officers must remain celibate, and yet we have no morale problem.”

if he thought his officers were celibate, he should sit down and have a long talk with Lieutenant Harmony. Maybe he just meant line officers, though. That would be

Joe Haldeman

just him and Cortez. Probably 50 percent right. Cortez was awfully friendly with Corporal Kamehameha.

“Sir, perhaps it was the detoxification back at Stargate; maybe-”

“No. The therapists only worked to erase the hate conditiomng-everybody knows how I feel about that-and they may be misguided but they are skilled.

“Corporal Potter.” He always called her by her rank to remind her why she hadn’t been promoted as high as the rest of us. Too soft. “Have you ‘talked it out’ with your people, too?”

“We’ve discussed it, sir.”

The sub-major could “glare mildly” at people. He glared mildly at Marygay until she elaborated.

“I don’t believe it’s the fault of the conditioning. My

people are impatient, just tired of doing the same thing day after day.” “They’re anxious for combat, then?” No sarcasm in his voice.

“They want to get off the ship, sir.”

“They will get off the ship,” he said, allowing himself a microscopic smile. “And then they’ll probably be just as impatient to get back on.”

It went back and forth like that for a long while. Nobody wanted to come right out and say that their squad was scared: scared of the Tauran cruiser closing on us, scared of the landing on the portal planet. Sub-major Stott had a bad record of dealing with people who admitted fear.

I fingered the fresh T/Othey had given us. It looked like tills: THE FOREVER WAR

I knew most of the people from the raid on Aleph, the first face-to-face contact between humans and Taurans. The only new people in my platoon were Luthuli and Heyrovsky. In the company as a whole (excuse me, the “strike force”), we had twenty replacements for the nineteen people we lost from the Aleph raid: one amputation, four dead-era, fourteen psychotics.

I couldn’t get over the “20 Mar 2007” at the bottom of the 1/0. I’d been in the anny ten years, though it felt like less than two. Time dilation, of course; even with the collapsar jumps, traveling from star to star eats up the calendar.

After this raid, I would probably be eligible for retirement, with full pay. If I lived through the raid, and if they didn’t change the rules on us. Me a twenty-year man, and only twenty-five years old.

Stott was summing up when there was a knock on the door, a single loud rap. “Enter,” he said.

An ensign I knew vaguely walked in casually and handed Stott a slip of paper, without saying a word. He stood there while Stoit read it, slumping with just the

right degree of insolence. Technically, Stou was out of his chain of command; everybody in the navy disliked him anyhow.

Stott handed the paper back to the ensign and looked through him.

“You will alert your squads that preliminary evasive maneuvers will commence at 2010, fifty-eight minutes from now.” He hadn’t looked at his watch. “All personnel will be in acceleration shells by 2000. Tench . . . hut!”

We rose and, without enthusiasm, chorused, “Fuck you, sir.” Idiotic custom. Stott strode out of the room and the ensign followed, smirking.

I turned my ring to my assistant squad leader’s position and talked into it: “Tate, this is Mandella.” Everyone else in the mom was doing the same.

A tinny voice came out of the ring. “Tate here. What’s up?”

“Get ahold of the men and tell them we have to be in the shells by 2000. Evasive maneuvers.”

THE FOREVER WAR 81

“Crap. They told us it would be days.”

“I guess something new came up. Or maybe the Commodore has a bright idea.” “The Commodore can stuff it. You up in the lounge?”

“Bring me back a cup when you come, okay? Little sugar?” “Roger. Be down in about half an hour.”

“Thanks. I’ll get on it.”

There was a general movement toward the coffee machine. I got in line behind Corporal Potter.

“What do you think, Marygay?”

“Maybe the Commodore just wants us to try out the shells once more.” “Before the real thing.”

“Maybe.” She picked up a cup and blew into it. She looked worried. “Or maybe the Taurans had a ship way out, waiting for us. I’ve wondered why they don’t do it.

We do, at Stargate.”

“Stargate’s a different thing. It takes seven cruisers, moving all the time, to cover all the possible exit angles. We can’t afford to do it for more than one collapsar, and neither could they.”

She didn’t say anything while she filled her cup. “Maybe we’ve stumbled on their version of Stargate. Or maybe they have more ships than we do by now.”

I filled and sugared two cups, sealed one. “No way to tell.” We walked back to a table, careful with the cups in the high gravity.

“Maybe Singhe knows something,” she said. “Maybe he does. But I’d have to get him through Rogers and Cortez. Cortez would jump down my throat if I tried to bother him now.”

“Oh, I can get him directly. We. . .” She dimpled a little bit. “We’ve been friends.”

I sipped some scalding coffee and tried to sound nonchalant. “So that’s where you’ve been disappearing to.”

“You disapprove?” she said, looking innocent. “Well. . . damn it, no, of course not. But-but he’s an officer! A navy officer!”

82 Joe Haldeman

“He’s attached to us and that makes him part army.” She twisted her ring and said, “Directory.” To me: “What about you and Little Miss Harmony?”

“That’s not the same thing.” She was whispering a directory code into the ring.

“Yes, it is. You just wanted to do it with an officer. Pervert.” The ring bleated twice. Busy. “How was she?”

“Adequate.” I was recovering.

“Besides, Ensign Singhe is a perfect gentleman. And not the least bit jealous.” “Neither am I,” I said. “If he ever hurts you, tell me and I’ll break his ass.”

She looked at me across her cup. “If Lieutenant Harmony ever hurts you, tell me and I’ll break her ass.”

“It’s a deal.” We shook on it solemnly. 2

The acceleration shells were something new, installed while we rested and resupplied at Stargate. They enabled us to use the ship at closer to its theoretical efficiency, the tachyon drive boosting it to as much as 25 gravities.

Tate was waiting for me in the shell area. The rest of the squad was milling around, talking. I gave him his coffee.

“Thanks. Find out anything?”

“Afraid not. Except the swabbies don’t seem to be scared, and it’s their show. Probably just another practice run.”

He slurped some coffee. “What the hell. It’s all the same to us, anyhow. Just sit there and get squeezed half to death. God, I hate those things.”

“Maybe they’ll eventually make us obsolete, and we can go home.”

“Sure thing.” The medic came by and gave me my shot. I waited until 1950 and hollered to the squad, “Let’s go. Strip down and zip up.”

The shell is like a flexible spacesuit; at least the fittings on the inside are pretty similar. But instead of a life support package, there’s a hose going into the top of the helmet and two coming out of the heels, as well as two relief tubes per suit. They’re crammed in shoulder-to-shoulder on light acceleration couches; getting to your shell is like picking your way through a giant plate of olive drab spaghetti.

When the lights in my helmet showed that everybody was suited up, I pushed the button that flooded the room. No way to see, of course, but I could imagine the pale blue solution-ethylene glycol and something else-foaming up around and over us. The suit material, cool and dry, collapsed in to touch my skin at every point. I knew that my internal body pressure was increasing rapidly to match the increasing fluid pressure outside. That’s what the shot was

for; keep your cells from getting squished between the devil and the deep blue sea. You could still feel it, though. By the time my meter said “2” (external pressure equivalent to a column of water two nautical miles deep), I felt that I was at the same time being crushed and bloated. By 2005 it was at 2.7 and holding steady. When the maneuvers began at 2010, you couldn’t feel the difference. I thought I saw the needle fluctuate a tiny bit, though.

The major drawback to the system is that, of course, anybody caught outside of his shell when the Anniversary hit 25 G’S would be just so much strawberry jam. So the guiding and the fighting have to be done by the ship’s tactical computer-which does most of it anyway, but it’s nice to have a human overseer.

Another small problem is that if the ship gets damaged and the pressure drops, you’ll explode like a dropped melon. If it’s the internal pressure, you get crushed to death in a microsecond.

And it takes ten minutes, more or less, to get depressurized and another two or three to get untangled and dressed. So it’s not exactly something you can hop out of and come up fighting.

The accelerating was over at 2038. A green light went on and I chinned the button to depressurize.

Marygay and I were getting dressed outside.

“How’d that happen?” I pointed to an angry purple welt that ran from the bottom of her right breast to her hipbone.

“That’s the second time,” she said, mad. “The first one was on my back-I think that shell doesn’t fit right, gets creases.”

“Maybe you’ve lost weight.”

“Wise guy.” Our caloric intake had been rigorously monitored ever since we left Stargate the first time. You can’t use a fighting suit unless it fits you like a second skin.

A wall speaker drowned out the rest of her comment. “Attention all personnel. Attention. All army personnel echelon six and above and all navy personnel echelon four and above will report to the briefing room at 2130.”

It repeated the message twice. I went off to lie down for a few minutes while Marygay showed her bruise to the medic and the armorer. I didn’t feel a bit jealous.

The Commodore began the briefing. “There’s not much to tell, and what there is is not good news.

“Six days ago, the Tauran vessel that is pursuing us released a drone missile. Its initial acceleration was on the order of 80 gravities.

“After blasting for approximately a day, its acceleration suddenly jumped to 148 gravities.” Collective gasp.

“Yesterday, it jumped to 203 gravities. I shouldn’t need to remind anyone here that this is twice the accelerative capability of the enemy’s drones in our last encounter.

“We launched a salvo of drones, four of them, intersecting what the computer predicted to be the four most probable future trajectories of the enemy drone. One of them paid off, while we were doing evasive maneuvers. We contacted and destroyed the Tauran weapon about ten million kilometers from here.”

That was practically next door. “The only encouraging thing we learned from the encounter was from spectral analysis of the blast. It was no more powerful an explosion than ones we have observed in the past, so at least their progress in propulsion hasn’t been matched by progress in explosives.

“This is the first manifestation of a very important effect that has heretofore been of interest only to theorists. Tell me, soldier.” He pointed at Negulesco. “How long has it been since we first fought the Taurans, at Aleph?”

“That depends on your frame of reference, Commodore,” she answered dutifully. “To me, it’s been about eight months.”

“Exactly. You’ve lost about nine years, though, to time dilation, while we maneuvered between collapsar jumps. In an engineering sense, as we haven’t done any important research and development aboard ship.. . that enemy vessel comes from our future!” He paused to let that sink in.

“As the war progresses, this can only become more and more pronounced. The Taurans don’t have any cure for relativity, of course, so it will be to our benefit as often as to theirs.

“For the present, though, it is we who are operating with a handicap. As the Tauran pursuit vessel draws closer, this handicap will become more severe. They can simply outshoot us.

“We’re going to have to do some fancy dodging. When we get within five hundred million kilometers of the enemy ship, everybody gets in his shell and we just have to trust the logistic computer. It will put us through a rapid series of random changes in direction and velocity.

“I’ll be blunt. As long as they have one more drone than we, they can finish us off. They haven’t launched any more since that first one. Perhaps they are holding their fire… or maybe they only had one. In that case, it’s we who have them.

“At any rate, all personnel will be required to be in their shells with no more than ten minutes’ notice. When we get within a thousand million kilometers of the enemy, you are to stand by your shells. By the time we are within five hundred million kilometers, you will be in them, and all shell compounds flooded and pressurized. We cannot wait for anyone.

“That’s all I have to say. Sub-major?”

“I’ll speak to my people later, Commodore. Thank you.”

“Dismissed.” And none of this “fuck you, sir” nonsense. The navy thought that was just a little beneath their dignity. We stood at attention-all except Stott-until he had left the room. Then some other swabbie said “dismissed” again, and we left.

My squad had clean-up detail, so I told everybody who was to do what, put Tate in charge, and left. Went up to the NCO room for some company and maybe some information.

There wasn’t much happening but idle speculation, so I took Rogers and went off to bed. Marygay had disappeared again, hopefully trying to wheedle something out of Singhe.

We had our promised get-together with the sub-major the next morning, when he more or less repeated what the commodore had said, in infantry terms and in his staccato monotone. He emphasized the fact that all we knew about the Tauran ground forces was that if their naval capability was improved, it was likely they would be able to handle us better than last time.

But that brings up an interesting point. Eight months or nine years before, we’d had a tremendous advantage: they had seemed not quite to understand what was going on. As belligerent as they had been in space, we’d expected them to be real Huns on the ground. Instead, they practically lined themselves up for slaughter. One escaped and presumably described the idea of old-fashioned in-fighting to his fellows.

But that, of course, didn’t mean that the word had necessarily gotten to this particular bunch, the Taurans guarding Yod-4. The only way we know of to communicate faster than the speed of light is to physically carry a message through successive collapsar jumps. And there was no way of telling how many jumps there were between Yod4 and the Tauran home base-so these might be just as passive as the last bunch, or might have been practicing infantry tactics for most of a decade. We would find out when we got there.

The armorer and I were helping my squad pull maintenance on their fighting suits when we passed the thousand million kilometer mark and had to go up to the shells.

We had about five hours to kill before we had to get into our cocoons. I played a game of chess with Rabi and lost. Then Rogers led the platoon in some vigorous calisthenics, probably for no other reason than to get their minds off the prospect of having to lie half-crushed in the shells for at least four hours. The longest we’d gone before was half that.

Ten minutes before the five hundred million kilometer mark, we squad leaders took over and supervised buttoning everybody up. In eight minutes we were zipped and flooded and at the mercy of-or safe in the arms of-the logistic computer.

While I was lying there being squeezed, a silly thought took hold of my brain and went round and round like a charge in a superconductor: according to military formalism, the conduct of war divides neatly into two categories, tactics and logistics. Logistics has to do with moving troops and feeding them and just about everything except the actual fighting, which is tactics. And now we’re fighting, but we don’t have a tactical computer to guide us through attack and defense, just a huge, super-efficient pacifistic cybernetic grocery clerk of a logistic, mark that word, logistic computer.

The other side of my brain, perhaps not quite as pinched, would argue that it doesn’t matter what name you give to a computer, it’s a pile of memory crystals, logic banks, nuts and bolts. . . If you program it to be Ghengis Khan, it is a tactical computer, even if its usual function is to monitor the stock market or control sewage conversion.

But the other voice was obdurate and said by that kind of reasoning, a man is only a hank of hair and a piece of bone and some stringy meat; and no matter what kind of a man he is, if you teach him well, you can take a Zen monk and turn him into a slavermg bloodthirsty warrior.

Then what the hell are you, we, am I, answered the other side. A peace-loving, vacuum-welding specialist cum physics teacher snatched up by the Elite Conscription Act and reprogrammed to be a killing machine. You, I have killed and liked it.

But that was hypnotism, motivational conditioning, I argued back at myself. They don’t do that anymore.

And the only reason, I said, they don’t do it is that they think you’ll kill better without it. That’s logic.

Speaking of logic, the original question was, why do they THE FOREVER WAR 89

send a logistic computer to do a man’s job? Or something like that. . . and we were off again.

The light blinked green and I chinned the switch automatically. The pressure was down to 1.3 before I realized that it meant we were alive, we had won the first skirmish.

I was only partly right.

I was belting on my tunic when my ring tingled and I held it up to listen. It was Rogers.

“Mandella, go check squad bay 3. Something went wrong; Dalton had to depressurize it from Control.”

Bay 3-that was Marygay’s squad! I rushed down the corridor in bare feet and got there just as they opened the door from inside the pressure chamber and began straggling out.

The first out was Bergman. I grabbed his ann. “What the hell is going on, Bergman?”

“Huh?” He peered at me, still dazed, as everyone is when they come out of the chamber. “Oh, s’you. Mandella. I dunno. Whad’ya mean?”

I squinted in through the door, still holding on to him. “You were late, man, you depressurized late. What happened?”

He shook his head, trying to clear it. “Late? Whad’ late. Uh, how late?”

1 looked at my watch for the first time. “Not too-” Jesus Christ. “Uh, we zipped in at 0520, didn’t we?”

“Yeah, I think that’s it.”

Still no Marygay among the dim figures picking their way through the ranked couches and jumbled tubing. “Urn, you were only a couple of minutes late. . . but we were only supposed to be under for four hours, maybe less. It’s

1050.”

“Um.” He shook his head again. I let go of him and stood back to let Stiller and Demy through the door.

“Everybody’s late, then,” Bergman said. “So we aren’t in any trouble.” “Uh-” Non sequiturs. “Right, right-Hey, Stiller!

You seen-”

From inside: “Medic! MEDIC!”

Somebody who wasn’t Marygay was coining out. I pushed her roughly out of my way and dove through the door, landed on somebody else and clambered over to where Struve, Marygay’s assistant, was standing over a pod and talking very loud and fast into his ring.

“-and blood God yes we need-”

It was Marygay still lying in her suit she was “-got the word from Dalton-”

covered every square inch of her with a uniform bright sheen of blood “-when she didn’t come out-”

it started as an angry welt up by her collarbone and was just a welt as it traveled between her breasts until it passed the sternum’s support

“-I came over and popped the-”

and opened up into a cut that got deeper as it ran down over her belly and where it stopped

“-yeah, she’s still-”

a few centimeters above the pubis a membraned loop of gut was protruding… “-OK, left hip. Mandella-”

She was still alive, her heart palpitating, but her blood-streaked head lolled limply, eyes rolled back to white slits, bubbles of red froth appearing and popping at the corner of her mouth each time she exhaled shallowly.

“-tattooed on her left hip. Mandella! Snap out of it! Reach under her and find out what her blood-”

“TYPE 0 RH NEGATIVE GOD damn. . . it. Sony- Oh negative.” Hadn’t I seen that tattoo ten thousand times?

Struve passed this information on and I suddenly remembered the first-aid kit on my belt, snapped it off and fumbled through it.

Stop the bleeding-protect the wound-treat for shock, that’s what the book said. Forgot one, forgot one. . . clear air passages.

She was breathing, if that’s what they meant. How do you stop the bleeding or protect the wound with one measly pressure bandage when the wound is nearly a meter long? Treat for shock, that I could do. I fished out the green ampoule, laid it against her arm and pushed the button.

Then I laid the sterile side of the bandage gently on top of the exposed intestine and passed the elastic strip under the small of her back, adjusted it for nearly zero tension and fastened it.

“Anything else you can do?” Struve asked.

I stood back and felt helpless. “I don’t know. Can you think of anything?”

“I’m no more of a medic than you are.” Looking up at the door, he kneaded a fist, biceps straining. “Where the hell are they? You have morph-plex in that kit?”

“Yeah, but somebody told me not to use it for internal-” “William?”

Her eyes were open and she was trying to lift her head. I rushed over and held her. “It’ll be all right, Marygay. The medic’s coming.”

“What. . . all right? I’m thirsty. Water.”

“No, honey, you can’t have any water. Not for a while, anyhow.” Not if she was headed for surgery.

“Why is all the blood?” she said in a small voice. Her head rolled back. “Been a bad girl.”

“It must have been the suit,” I said rapidly. “Remember earlier, the creases?”

She shook her head. “Suit?” She turned suddenly paler and retched weakly. “Water. . . William, please.”

Authoritative voice behind me: “Get a sponge or a cloth soaked in water.” I looked around and saw Doe Wilson with two stretcher bearers.

“First half-liter femoral,” he said to no one in particular as he carefully peeked under the pressure bandage. “Follow that relief tube down a couple of meters and pinch it off. Find out if she’s passed any blood.”

One of the medics ran a ten-centimeter needle into Mary-gay’s thigh and started giving her whole blood from a plastic bag.

“Sorry I’m late,” Doe Wilson said tiredly. “Business is booming. What’d you say about the suit?”

“She had two minor injuries before. Suit doesn’t fit quite right, creases up under pressure.”

He nodded absently, checking her blood pressure. “You, anybody, give-” Somebody handed him a paper towel

dripping water. “Uh, give her any medication?” “One ampoule of No-shock.”

He wadded the paper towel up loosely and put it in Marygay’s hand. “What’s her name?” I told him.

“Marygay, we can’t give you a drink of water but you can suck on this. Now I’m going to shine a bright light in your eye.” While he was looking through her pupil with a metal tube, he said, “Temperature?” and one of the medics read a number from a digital readout box and withdrew a probe. “Passed blood?”

“Yes. Some.”

He put his hand lightly on the pressure bandage. “Mary-gay, can you roll over a little on your right side?”

“Yes,” she said slowly, and put her elbow down for leverage. “No,” she said and started crying.

“Now, now,” he said absently and pushed up on her hip just enough to be able to see her back. “Only the one wound,” he muttered. “Hell of a lot of blood.”

He pressed the side of his ring twice and shook it by his ear. “Anybody up in the shop?”

“Harrison, unless he’s on a call.”

A woman walked up, and at first I didn’t recognize her, pale and disheveled, bloodstained tunic. It was Estelle Harmony.

Doe Wilson looked up. “Any new customers, Doctor Harmony?”

“No,” she said dully. “The maintenance man was a double traumatic amputation. Only lived a few minutes. We’re keeping him running for transplants.”

“All those others?”

“Explosive decompression.” She sniffed. “Anything I can do here?”

“Yeah., just a minute.” He tried his ring again. “God damn it. You don’t know where Harrison is?”

“No.. . well, maybe, he might be in Surgery B if there was trouble with the cadaver maintenance. Think I set it up all right, though.”

“Yeah, well, hell you know how..

“Mark!” said the medic with the blood bag.

“One more hilf-liter femoral,” Doe Wilson said. “Estelle, you mind taking over for one of the medics here, prepare this gal for surgery?”

“No, keep me busy.”

“Good-Hopkins, go up to the shop and bring down a roller and a liter, uh, two liters isotonic fluorocarb with the primary spectrum. If they’re Merck they’ll say ‘abdominal spectrum.'” He found a part of his sleeve with no blood on it and wiped his forehead. “If you find Harrison, send him over to surgery A and have him set up the anesthetic sequence for abdominal.”

“And bring her up to A?”

“Right. If you can’t find Harrison, get somebody-” he stabbed a finger in my direction, “-this guy, to roll the patient up to A; you run ahead and start the sequence.”

He picked up his bag and looked through it. “We could start the sequence here,” he muttered. “But hell, not with paramethadone-Marygay? How do you feel?”

She was still crying. “I’m. . . hurt.”

“I know,” he said gently. He thought for a second and said to Estelle, “No way to tell really how much blood she lost. She may have been passing it under pressure.

Also there’s some pooling in the abdominal cavity. Since she’s still alive I don’t think she could’ve bled under pressure for very long. Hope no brain damage yet.”

He touched the digital readout attached to Marygay’s arm. “Monitor the blood pressure, and if you think it’s indicated, give her five cc’s vasoconstrictor. I’ve gotta go scrub down.”

He closed his bag. “You have any vasoconstrictor besides the pneumatic ampoule?”

Estelle checked her own bag. “No, just the emergency pneumatic.. . uh. . . yes, I’ve got controlled dosage on the ‘dilator, though.”

“OK, if you have to use the ‘constrictor and her pressure goes up too fast-” “I’ll give her vasodilator two cc’s at a time.”

“Check. Hell of a way to run things, but. . . well. If you’re not too tired, I’d like you to stand by me upstairs.”

“Sure.” Doe Wilson nodded and left.

Estelle began sponging Marygay’s belly with isopropyl alcohol. It smelled cold and clean. “Somebody gave her No-shock?” “Yes,” I said, “about ten minutes ago.”

“Ah. That’s why the Doe was worried-no, you did the right thing. But No-shock’s got some vasoconstrictor. Five cc’s more might run up an overdose.” She continued silently scrubbing, her eyes coming up every few seconds to check the blood pressure monitor.

“William?” It was the first time she’d shown any sign of knowing me. “This worn-, uh, Marygay, she’s your lover? Your regular lover?”

“That’s right.”

“She’s very pretty.” A remarkable observation, her body torn and caked with crusting blood, her face smeared where I had tried to wipe away the tears. I suppose a doctor or a woman or a lover can look beneath that and see beauty.

“Yes, she is.” She had stopped crying and had her eyes squeezed shut, sucking the last bit of moisture from the paper wad.

“Can she have some more water?” “OK, same as before. Not too much.”

I went out to the locker alcove and into the head for a paper towel. Now that the fumes from the pressurizing fluid had cleared, I could smell the air. It smelled wrong. Light machine oil and burnt metal, like the smell of a metalworking shop. I wondered whether they had overloaded the airco. That had happened once before, after the first time we’d used the acceleration chambers.

Marygay took the water without opening her eyes.

“Do you plan to stay together when you get back to Earth?” “Probably,” I said. “If we get back to Earth. Still one more battle.”

“There won’t be any more battles,” she said flatly. “You mean you haven’t heard?” “What?”

“Don’t you know the ship was hit?” “Hit!” Then how could any of us be alive?

“That’s right.” She went back to her scrubbing. “Four squad bays. Also the armor bay. There isn’t a fighting suit left on the ship.. . and we can’t fight in our underwear.”

“What-squad bays, what happened to the people?” “No survivors.”

Thirty people. “Who was it?”

“All of the third platoon. First squad of the second platoon.” Al-Sadat, Busia, Maxwell, Negulesco. “My God.”

“Thirty deaders, and they don’t have the slightest notion of what caused it. Don’t know but that it may happen again any minute.”

“It wasn’t a drone?”

“No, we got all of their drones. Got the enemy vessel, too. Nothing showed up on any of the sensors, just blam! and a third of We ship was torn to hell. We were lucky it wasn’t the drive or the life support system.” I was hardly hearing her. Penworth, LaBatt, Smithers. Christine and Frida. All dead. I was numb.

She took a blade-type razor and a tube of gel out of her bag. “Be a gentleman and look the other way,” she said. “Oh, here.” She soaked a square of gauze in alcohol and handed it to me. “Be useful. Do her face.”

I started and, without opening her eyes, Maiygay said, “That feels good. What are you doing?”

“Being a gentleman. And useful, too-”

“All personnel, attention, all personnel.” There wasn’t a squawk-box in the pressure chamber, but I could hear it clearly through the door to the locker alcove. “All personnel echelon 6 and above, unless directly involved in medical or maintenance emergencies, report immediately to the assembly area.”

“I’ve got to go, Marygay.”

She didn’t say anything. I didn’t know whether she bad heard the announcement. “Estelle,” I addressed her directly, gentleman be damned. “Will you-”

“Yes. I’ll let you know as soon as we can tell.” ”Well.”

“It’s going to be all right.” But her expression was grim THE FOREVER WAR 97

and worried. “Now get going,” she said, softly.

By the time I picked my way out into the corridor, the ‘box was repeating the message for the fourth time. There was a new smell in the air, that I didn’t want to identify.

Halfway to the assembly area I realized what a mess I was, and ducked into the head by the NCO lounge. Corporal Kamehameha was hurnedly brushing her hair.

“William! What happened to you?”

“Nothing.” I turned on a tap and looked at myself in the mirror. Dried blood smeared all over my face and tunic. “It was Marygay, Corporal Potter, her suit.. . well, evidently it got a crease, ub.. .”

“Dead?”

“No, just badly, uh, she’s going into surgery-” “Don’t use hot water. You’ll just set the stain.”

“Oh. Right.” I used the hot to wash my face and hand, dabbed at the tunic with cold. “Your squad’s just two bays down from Al’s isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see what happened?”

“No. Yes. Not when it happened.” For the first time I noticed that she was crying, big tears rolling down her cheeks and off her chin. Her voice was even, controlled. She pulled at her hair savagely. “It’s a mess.”

I stepped over and put my hand on her shoulder. “DON’T touch me!” she flared and knocked my hand off with the brush. “Sorry. Let’s go.”

At the door to the head she touched me lightly on the arm. “William. . .” She looked at me defiantly. “I’m just glad it wasn’t me. You understand? That’s the only way you can look at it.”

I understood, but I didn’t know that I believed her.

“I can sum it up very briefly,” the commodore said in a tight voice, “if only because we know so little.

“Some ten seconds after we destroyed the enemy vessel, two objects, very small objects, struck the Anniversary amidships. By inference, since they were not detected and we know the limits of our detection apparatus, we know that they were moving in excess of nine-tenths of the speed of light. That is to say, more precisely, their velocity vector normal to the axis of the Anniversary was greater than nine-tenths of the speed of light. They slipped in behind the repeller fields.”

When the Anniversary is moving at relativistic speeds, it is designed to generate two powerful electromagnetic fields, one centered about five thousand kilometers from the ship and the other about ten thousand klicks away, both in line with the direction of motion of the ship. These fields are maintained by a “ramjet” effect, energy picked up from interstellar gas as we mosey along.

Anything big enough to worry about hitting (that is, anything big enough to see with a strong magnifying glass) goes through the first field and comes out with a very strong negative charge all over its surface. As it enters the second field, it’s repelled away from the path of the ship. If the object is too big to be pushed around this way, we can sense it at a greater distance and maneuver out of its way.

“I shouldn’t have to emphasize ~ow formidable a weapon this is. When the Anniversary was struck, our rate of speed with respect to the enemy was such that we traveled our own length every ten-thousandth of a second. Further, we were jerking around erratically with a constantly changing and purely random lateral acceleration. Thus the objects that struck us must have been guided, not aimed.

And the guidance system was self-contained, since there were no Taurans alive at the time they struck us. All of this in a package no larger than a small pebble.

“Most of you are too young to remember the term future shock. Back in the seventies, some people felt that technological progress was so rapid that people, normal people, couldn’t cope with it; that they wouldn’t have time to get used to the present before the future was upon them. A man named Toffier coined the term future shock to describe this situation.” The commodore could get pretty academic.

“We’re caught up in a physical situation that resembles this scholarly concept. The result has been disaster. Tragedy. And, as we discussed in our last meeting, there is no way to counter it. Relativity traps us in the enemy’s past; relativity brings them from our future. We can only hope that next time, the situation will be reversed. And all we can do to help

bring that about is try to get back to Stargate, and then to Earth, where specialists may be able to deduce something, some sort of counterweapon, from the nature of the damage.

“Now we could attack the Tauran’s portal planet from space and perhaps destroy the base without using you infantry.Butlthinktherewouldbeaverygreatriskinvolved. We might be. . . shot down by whatever hit us today, and never return to Stargate with what I consider to be vital information. We could send a drone with a message detailing our assumptions about this new enemy weapon but that might be inadequate. And the Force would be that much further behind., technologically.

“Accordingly, we have set a course that will take us around Yod-4, keeping the collapsar as much as possible between us and the Tauran base. We will avoid contact with the enemy and return to Stargate as quickly as possible.”

Incredibly, the commodore sat down and kneaded his temples. “All of you are at least squad or section leaders. Most of you have good combat records. And I hope that some of you will be rejoining the Force after your two years are up. Those of you who do will probably be made lieutenants, and face your first real command.

“It is to these people I would like to speak for a few moments, not as your. . . as one of your commanders, but just as a senior officer and advisor.

“One cannot make command decisions simply by assessing the tactical situation and going ahead with whatever course of action will do the most harm to the enemy with a minimum of death and damage to your own men and materiel. Modern warfare has become very complex, especially during the last century. Wars are won not by a simple series of battles won, but by a complex interrelationship among military victory, economic pressures, logistic maneuvering, access to the enemy’s information, political postures-dozens, literally dozens of factors.”

I was hearing this, but the only thing that was getting through to my brain was that a third of our Mends’ lives had been snuffed out less than an hour before, and he was sitting up there giving us a lecture on military theory.

“So sometimes you have to throw away a battle in order to help win the war. This is exactly what we are going to do.

“This was not an easy decision. In fact, it was probably the hardest decision of my military career. Because, on the surface at least, it may. look like cowardice.

“The logistic computer calculates that we have about a 62 percent chance of success, should we attempt to destroy the enemy base. Unfortunately, we would have only a 30 percent chance of survival-as some of the scenarios leading to success involve ramming the portal planet with the Anniversary at light speed.” Jesus Christ.

“I hope none of you ever has to face such a decision.

When we get back to Stargate, I will in all probability be court-martialed for cowardice under fire. But I honestly believe that the information that may be gained from analysis of the damage to the Anniversary is more important than the destruction of this one Tauran base.” He sat up straight.

“More important than one soldier’s career.”

I had to stifle an impulse to laugh. Surely “cowardice”

had nothing to do with his decision. Surely he had nothing so primitive and unnulitary as a will to live.

The maintenance crew managed to patch up the huge rip in the side of the Anniversary and to repressurize that section. We spent the rest of the day cleaning up the area; without, of course, disturbing any of the precious evidence for which the commodore was wiffing to sacrifice his Career.

The hardest part was jettisoning the bodies. It wasn’t so bad except for the ones whose suits had burst.

I went to Estelle’s cabin the next day, as soon as she was off duty.

“It wouldn’t serve any good purpose for you to see her now.” Estelle sipped her drink, a mixture of ethyl alcohol, citric acid and water, with a drop of some ester that approximated the aroma of orange rind.

“Is she out of danger?”

“Not for a couple of weeks. Let me explain.” She set down her drink and rested her chin on interlaced fingers. “This sort of injury would be fairly routine under normal circumstances. Having replaced the lost blood, we’d simply sprinkle some magic powder into her abdominal cavity and paste her back up. Have her hobbling around in a couple of days.

“But there are complications. Nobody’s ever been injured in a pressure suit before. So far, nothing really unusual has cropped up. But we want to monitor her innards very closely for the next few days.

“Also, we were very concerned about peritonitis. You know what peritonitis is?” “Yes.” Well, vaguely.

“Because a part of her intestine had ruptured under pressure. We didn’t want to settle for normal prophylaxis be-cause a lot of the, uh, contamination had impacted on the peritoneum under pressure. To play it safe, we completely sterilized the whole shebang, the abdominal cavity and her entire digestive system from the duodenum south. Then, of course, we had to replace all of her normal intestinal flora, now dead, with a commercially prepared culture. Still standard procedure, but not normally called for unless the damage is more severe.”

“I see.” And it was making me a little queasy. Doctors don’t seem to realize that most of us are perfectly content not having to visualize ourselves as animated bags of skin filled with obscene glop.

“This in itself is enough reason not to see her for a couple of days. The changeover of intestinal flora has a pretty violent effect on the digestive system-not dangerous, since she’s under constant observation. But tiring and, well, embarrassing.

“With all of this, she would be completely out of danger if this were a normal clinical situation. But we’re decelerating at a constant l-1/2 gees, and her internal organs have gone through a lot of jumbling around. You might as well

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know that if we do any blasting, anything over about two gees, she’s going to die.” “But. . . but we’re bound to go over two on the final approach! What-”

“I know, I know. But that won’t be for a couple of weeks. Hopefully, she will have mended by then.

“William, face it. It’s a miracle she survived to get into surgery. So there’s a big chance she won’t make it back to Earth. It’s sad; she’s a special person, the special

person to you, maybe. But we’ve had so much death.. . you ought to be getting used to it, come to terms with it.”

I took a long pull at my drink, identical to hers except for the citric acid. “You’re getting pretty hard-boiled.”

“Maybe. . . no. Just realistic. I have a feeling we’re headed for a lot more death and sorrow.”

“Not me. As soon as we get to Stargate, I’m a civilian.”

“Don’t be so sure.” The old familiar argument. “Those clowns who signed us up for two years can just as easily make it four or-”

“Or six or twenty or the duration. But they won’t. It would be mutiny.”

“I don’t know. If they could condition us to kill on cue, they can condition us to do almost anything. Re-enlist.”

That was a chiller.

Later on we tried to make love, but both of us had too much to think about.

I got to see Marygay for the first time about a week later. She was wan, had lost a lot of weight and seemed very confused. Doc Wilson assured me that it was just the medication; they hadn’t seen any evidence of brain damage.

She was still in bed, still being fed through a tube. I began to get very nervous about the calendar. Every day there seemed to be some improvement, but if she was still in bed when we hit that collapsar push, she wouldn’t have a chance. I couldn’t get any encouragement from Doc Wilson or Estelle; they said it depended on Marygay’s resilience.

The day before the push, they transferred her from bed to Estelle’s acceleration couch in the infirmary. She was lucid and was taking food orally, but she still couldn’t move under her own power, not at I-1/2 gees.

I went to see her. “Heard about the course change? We have to go through Aleph- 9 to get back to Tet-38. Four more months on this damn hulk. But another six years’ combat pay when we get back to Earth.”

“That’s good.”

“Ah, just think of the great things we’ll-” “William.”

I let it trail off. Never could lie.

“Don’t try to jolly me. Tell me about vacuum welding, about your childhood, anything. Just don’t bulishit me about getting back to Earth.” She turned her face to the wall.

“I heard the doctors talking out in the corridor, one morning when they thought I was asleep. But it just confirmed what I already knew, the way everybody’d been moping around.

“So tell me, you were born in New Mexico in 1975. What then? Did you stay in New Mexico? Were you bright in school? Have any friends, or were you too bright like me? How old were you when you first got sacked?”

We talked in this vein for a while, uncomfortable. An idea came to me while we were rambling, and when I left Marygay I went straight to Dr. Wilson.

“We’re giving her a fifty-fifty chance, but that’s pretty arbitrary. None of the published data on this sort of thing really fits.”

“But it is safe to say that her chances of survival are better, the less acceleration she has to endure.”

“Certainly. For what it’s worth. The commodore’s going to take it as gently as possible, but that’ll still be four or five gees. Three might even be too much; we won’t know until it’s over.”

I nodded impatiently. “Yes, but I think there’s a way to expose her to less acceleration than the rest of us.”

“If you’ve developed an acceleration shield,” he said smiling, “you better hurry and file a patent. You could sell it for a considerable-”

“No, Doc, it wouldn’t be worth much under normal conditions; our shells work better and they evolved from the same principles.”

“Explain away.”

“We put Marygay into a shell and flood-”

“Wait, wait. Absolutely not. A poorly-fitting shell was what caused this in the first place. And this time, she’d have to use somebody else’s.”

“I know, Doc, let me explain. It doesn’t have to fit her exactly as long as the life support hookups can function.

The shell won’t be pressurized on the inside; it won’t have to be because she won’t be subjected to those thousands of kilograms-per-square-centimeter pressure from the fluid outside.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“It’s just an adaptation of-you’ve studied physics, haven’t you?” “A little bit, in medical school. My worst courses, after Latin.” “Do you remember the principle of equivalence?”

“I remember there was something by that name. Something to do with relativity, right?”

“Uh-huh. It means that.. . there’s no difference being in a gravitational field and being in an equivalent accelerated frame of-it means that when the Anniversary is blasting five gees, the effect on us is the same as if it were sitting on its tail on a big planet, on one with five gees’ surface gravity.”

“Seems obvious.”

“Maybe it is. It means that there’s no experiment you could perform on the ship that could tell you whether you were blasting or just sitting on a big planet.”

“Sure there is. You could turn off the engines, and if-”

“Or you could look outside, sure; I mean isolated, physics-lab type experiments.” “All right. I’ll accept that. So?”

“You know Archimedes’ Law?”

“Sure, the fake crown-that’s what always got me about physics, they make a big to-do about obvious things, and when it gets to the rough parts-”

“Archimedes’ Law says that when you immerse something in a fluid, it’s buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid it displaces.”

“That’s reasonable.”

“And that holds, no matter what kind of gravitation or acceleration you’re in-In a ship blasting at five gees, the water displaced, if it’s water, weighs five times as much as regular water, at one gee.”

“Sure.”

“So if you float somebody in the middle of a tank of water, so that she’s weightless, she’ll still be weightless when the ship is doing five gees.”

“Hold on, son. You had me going there, but it won’t work.”

“Why not?” I was tempted to tell him to stick to his pills and stethoscopes and let me handle the physics, but it was a good thing I didn’t.

“What happens when you drop a wrench in a submarine?” “Submarine?”

“That’s right. They work by Archimedes’-”

“Ouch! You’re right. Jesus. Hadn’t thought it through.”

“That wrench fails right to the floor just as if the submarine weren’t weightless.” He looked off into space, tapping a pencil on the desk. “What you describe is similar to the way we treat patients with severe skin damage, like burns, on Earth. But it doesn’t give any support to the internal organs, the way the acceleration shells do, so it wouldn’t do Marygay any good.. . .”

I stood up to go. “Sorry I wasted-”

“Hold on there, though, just a minute. We might be able to use your idea part- way.”

“How do you mean?”

“I wasn’t thinking it through, either. The way we normally use the shells is out of the question for Marygay, of course.” I didn’t like to think about it. Takes a lot of hypno-conditioning to lie there and have oxygenated fluorocarbon forced into every natural body orifice and one artificial one. I fingered the valve fitting imbedded above my hipbone.

THE FOREVER WAR 107

“Yeah, that’s obvious, it’d tear her-say.. . you mean, low pressure-”

“That’s right. We wouldn’t need thousands of atmospheres to protect her against five gees’ straight-line acceleration; that’s only for all the swerving and dodging-I’m going to call Maintenance. Get down to your squad bay; that’s the one we’ll use. Dalton’ll meet you there.”

Five minutes before injection into the collapsar field, and I started the flooding sequence. Marygay and I were the only ones in shells; my presence wasn’t really vital since the flooding and emptying could be done by Control. But it was safer to have redundancy in the system and besides, I wanted to be there.

It wasn’t nearly as bad as the nonnal routine; none of the crushing-bloating sensation. You were just suddenly filled with the plastic-smelling stuff (you never perceived the first moments, when it rushed in to replace the air in your lungs), and then there was a slight acceleration, and then you were breathing air again, waiting for the shell to pop; then unplugging and unzipping and climbing out- Marygay’s shell was empty. I walked over to it and saw

blood.

“She hemorrhaged.” Doc Wilson’s voice echoed sepulchrally. I turned, eyes stinging, and saw him leaning in the door to the locker alcove. He was unaccountably, horribly, smiling.

“Which was expected. Doctor Harmony’s taking care of it. She’ll be just fine.”

Marygay was walking in another week, “Confratermzing” in two, and pronounced completely healed in six.

Ten long months in space and it was army, army, army all the way. Calisthenics, meaningless work details, compulsory lectures-there was even talk that they were going to reinstate the sleeping roster we’d had in basic, but they never did, probably out of fear of mutiny. A random partner every night wouldn’t have set too well with those of us who’d established more-or-less permanent pairs.

All this crap, this insistence on military discipline, bothered me mainly because I was afraid it meant they weren’t going to let us out. Marygay said I was being paranoid; they only did it because there was no other way to maintain order for ten months.

Most of the talk, besides the usual bitching about the army, was speculation about how much Earth would have changed and what we would do when we got out. We’d be fairly rich: twenty-six years’ salary all at once. Compound interest, too; the $500 we’d been paid for our first month in the army had grown to over $1500.

We arrived at Stargate in late 2023, Greenwich date.

The base had grown astonishingly in the nearly seventeen years we had been on the Yod-4 campaign. It was one building the size of Tycho City, housing nearly ten thousand. There were seventy-eight cruisers, the size of Anniversary or larger, involved in raids on Tauran-held portal planets. Another ten guarded Stargate itself, and two were in orbit waiting for their infantry and crew to be outprocessed. One other ship, the Earth’s Hope II, had returned from fighting and had been waiting at Stargate for another cruiser to return.

They had lost two-thirds of their crew, and it was just not economical to send a cruiser back to Earth with only thirty-nine people aboard. Thirty-nine confirmed civilians.

We went planetside in two scoutships. 7

General Botsford (who had only been a full major the first time we met him, when Stargate was two huts and twenty-four graves) received us in an elegantly appointed seminar room. He was pacing back and forth at the end of the room, in front of a huge holographic operations chart.

“You know,” he said, too loud, and then, more conversationally, “you know that we could disperse you into other strike forces and send you right out again. The Elite Conscription Act has been changed now, five years’ subjective in service instead of two.

“And I don’t see why some of you don’t want to stay in! Another couple of years and compound interest would make you independently wealthy for life. Sure, you took heavy losses-but that was inevitable, you were the first. Things are going to be easier now. The fighting suits have been improved, we know more about the Taurans’ tactics, our weapons are more effective. . . there’s no need to be afraid.”

He sat down at the head of the table and looked at nobody in particular.

“My own memories of combat are over a half-century old. To me it was exhilarating, strengthening. I must be a different kind of person than all of you.”

Or have a very selective memory, I thought.

“But that’s neither here nor there. I have one alternative to offer you, one that doesn’t involve direct combat.

“We’re very short of qualified instructors. The Force will offer any one of you a lieutenancy if you will accept a training position. It can be on Earth; on the Moon at double pay; on Charon at triple pay; or here at Stargate for quadruple pay. Furthermore, you don’t have to make up your mind now. You’re all getting a free trip back to Earth-I envy you, I haven’t been back in fifteen years,

THE FOREVER WAR 111

will probably never go back-and you can get the feel of being a civilian again. If you don’t like it, just walk into any UNEF installation and you’ll walk out an officer. Your choice of assignment.

“Some of you are smiling. I think you ought to reserve judgment. Earth is not the same place you left.”

He pulled a little card out of his tunic and looked at it, smiling. “Most of you have something on the order of four hundred thousand dollars coming to you, accumulated pay and interest. But Earth is on a war footing and, of course, it is the citizens of Earth who are supporting the war. Your income puts you in a ninety-two- percent income-tax bracket: thirty-two thousand might last you about three years if you’re careful.

“Eventually you’re going to have to get a job, and this is one job for which you are uniquely trained. There are not that many jobs available. The population of Earth is nearly nine billion, with five or six billion unemployed.

“Also keep in mind that your friends and sweethearts of two years ago are now going to be twenty-one years older than you. Many of your relatives will have passed away. I think you’ll find it a very lonely world.

“But to tell you something about this world, I’m going to turn you over to Captain Sin, who just arrived from Earth. Captain?”

“Thank you, General.” It looked as if there was something wrong with his skin, his face; and then I realized he was wearing powder and lipstick. His nails were smooth white almonds.

“I don’t know where to begin.” He sucked in his upper lip and looked at us, frowning. “Things have changed so very much since I was a boy.

“I’m twenty-three, so I was still in diapers when you people left for Aleph. . . to begin with, how many of you are homosexual?” Nobody. “That doesn’t really surprise me. I am, of course. I guess about a third of everybody in Europe and America is.

“Most governments encourage homosexuality-the United Nations is neutral, leaves it up to the individual

countries-they encourage homolife mainly because it’s the one sure method of birth control.”

That seemed specious to me. Our method of birth control in the army is pretty foolproof: all men making a deposit

in the sperm bank, and then vasectomy.

“As the General said, the population of the world is nine billion. It’s more than doubled since you were drafted. And nearly two-thirds of those people get out of school only to go on relief.

“Speaking of school, how many years of public schooling did the government give you?”

He was looking at me, so I answered. “Fourteen.”

He nodded. “It’s eighteen now. More, if you don’t pass your examinations. And you’re required by law to pass your exams before you’re eligible for any job or Class One relief. And brother-boy, anything besides Class One is hard to live on. Yes?” Hofstadter had his hand up.

“Sir, is it eighteen years public school in every country? Where do they find enough schools?”

“Oh, most people take the last five or six years at home or in a community center, via holoscreen. The UN has forty or fifty information channels, giving instruction twenty-four hours a day.

“But most of you won’t have to concern yourselves with that. If you’re in the Force, you’re already too smart by half.”

He brushed hair from his eyes in a thoroughly feminine gesture, pouting a little. “Let me do some history to you.

I guess the first really important thing that happened after you left was the Ration War.

“That was 2007. A lot of things happened at once. Locust plague in North America, rice blight from Burma to the South China Sea, red tides all along the west coast of South America: suddenly there just wasn’t enough food to go around. The UN stepped in and took over food distribution. Every man, woman, and child got a ration booklet, allowing thim to consume so many calories per month. If tha went over ther monthly allotment, tha just went hungry until the first of the next month.”

Some of the new people we’d picked up after Aleph used THE FOREVER WAR

113

“tha, ther, thini” instead of “he, his, him,” for the collective pronoun. I wondered whether it had become universal

“Of course, an illegal market developed, and soon there was great inequality in the amount of food people in various strata of society consumed. A vengeance group in Ecuador, the Imparciales, systematically began to assassinate people who appeared to be well-fed. The idea caught on pretty quickly, and in a few months there was a full-scale, undeclared class war going on all over the world. The United Nations managed to get things back under control in a year or so, by which time the population was down to four billion, crops were more or less recovered, and the food crisis was over. They kept the rationing, but it’s never been really severe again.

“Incidentally, the General translated the money coming to you into dollars just for your own convenience. The world has only one currency now, calories. Your thirty- two thousand dollars comes to about three thousand million calories. Or three million K’S, kilocalories.

“Ever since the Ration War, the UN has encouraged subsistence farming wherever it’s practical. Food you grow yourself, of course, isn’t rationed… . It got people out of the cities, onto UN farming reservations, which helped alleviate some urban problems. But subsistence farming seems to encourage large families, so the population of the world has more than doubled since the Ration War.

“Also, we no longer have the abundance of electrical power I remember from boyhood. . . probably a good deal less than you remember. There are only a few places in the world where you can have power all day and night. They keep saying it’s a temporary situation, but it’s been going on for over a decade.”

He went on like that for a long time. Well, bell, it wasn’t really surprising, much of it. We’d probably spent more time in the past two years talking about what home was

going to be like than about anything else. Unfortunately, most of the bad things we’d prognosticated seemed to have come true, and not many of the good things.

The worst thing for me, I guess, was that they’d taken over most of the good parkiand and subdivided it into little

farms. If you wanted to find some wilderness, you had to go someplace where they couldn’t possibly make a plant grow.

He said that the relations between people who chose homolife and the ones he called “breeders” were quite smooth, but I wondered. I never had much trouble accepting homosexuals myself, but then I’d never had to cope with such an abundance of them.

He also said, in answer to an impolite question, that his powder and paint had nothing to do with his sexual orientation. It was just stylish. I decided I’d be an anachronism and just wear my face.

I don’t guess it should have surprised me that language had changed considerably in twenty years. My parents were always saying things were “cool,” joints were “grass,” and so on.

We had to wait several weeks before we could get a ride back to Earth. We’d be going back on the Anniversary, but first she had to be taken apart and put back together again.

Meanwhile, we were put in cozy little two-man billets and released from all military responsibilities. Most of us spent our days down at the library, trying to catch up on twenty-two years of current events. Evenings, we’d get to-.

gether at the Flowing Bowl, an NCO club. The privates, of course, weren’t supposed to be there, but we found that nobody argues with a person who has two of the fluorescent battle ribbons.

I was surprised that they served heroin fixes at the bar. The waiter said that you get a compensating shot to keep you from getting addicted to it. I got really stoned and tried one. Never again.

Sub-major Stott stayed at Stargate, where they were assembling a new Strike Force Alpha. The rest of us boarded the Anniversary and had a fairly pleasant six- month journey. Cortez didn’t insist on everything being capital-M military, so it was a lot better than the trip from Yod-4.

I hadn’t given it too much thought, but of course we were celebrities on Earth: the first vets home from the war. The Secretary General greeted us at Kennedy and we had a week-long whirl of banquets, receptions, interviews, and all that. It was enjoyable enough, and profitable-I made a million K’s from Time-Life/Fax-but we really saw little of Earth until after the novelty wore off and we were more or less allowed to go our own way.

I picked up the Washington monorail at Grand Central Station and headed home. My mother had met me at Kennedy, suddenly and sadly old, and told me my father was dead. Flyer accident. I was going to stay with her until I could get a job.

She was living in Columbia, a satellite of Washington. She had moved back into the city after the Ration War- having moved out in 1980-and then failing services and rising crime had forced her out again.

She was waiting for me at the monorail station. Beside her stood a blond giant in a heavy black vinyl unifonn, with a big gunpowder pistol on his hip and spiked brass knuckles on his right hand.

“William, this is Carl, my bodyguard and very dear friend.” Carl slipped off the knuckles long enough to shake hands with surprising gentleness. “Pleasameecha Misser Mandella.”

We got into a groundcar that had “Jefferson” written on it in bright orange letters. I thought that was an odd thing to name a car, but then found out that it was the name of the high-rise Mother and Carl lived in. The groundcar was one of several that belonged to the community, and she paid lOOK per kilometer for the use of it.

I had to admit that Columbia was rather pretty: formal gardens and lots of trees and grass. Even the high-rises,

roughly conical jumbles of granite with trees growing out at odd places, looked more like mountains than buildings.

We drove into the base of one of these mountains, down a well-lit corridor to where a number of other cars were parked. Carl carried my solitary bag to the elevator and set it down.

“Miz Mandella, if is awright witcha, I gots to go pick up Miz Freeman in like five. She over West Branch.”

“Sure, Carl, William can take care of me. He’s a soldier, you know.” That’s right, I remember learning eight silent ways to kill a man. Maybe if things got really tight, I could get a job like Carl’s.

“Righty-oh, yeah, you tol’ me. Whassit like, man?”

“Mostly boring,” I said automatically. “When you aren’t bored, you’re scared.”

He nodded wisely. “Thass what I heard. Miz Mandella, I be ‘vailable anytime after six. Riglny-oh?”

“That’s fine, Carl.”

The elevator came and a tall skinny boy stepped out, an unlit joint dangling from his lips. Carl ran his fingers over the spikes on his knuckles, and the boy walked rapidly away.

“Gots ta watch out fer them riders. T’care a yerseif, Miz Mandella.” We got on the elevator and Mother punched 47. “What’s a rider?”

“Oh, they’re just young toughs who ride up and down the elevators looking for defenseless people without bodyguards. They aren’t too much of a problem here.”

The forty-seventh floor was a huge mall filled with shops and offices. We went to a food store.

“Have you gotten your ration book yet, William?” I told her I hadn’t, but the Force had given me travel tickets worth a hundred thousand “calories” and I’d used up only half of them.

It was a little confusing, but they’d explained it to us.

When the world went on a single currency, they’d tried to coordinate it with the food rationing in some way, hoping to eventually eliminate the ration hooks, so they’d made the new currency K’S, kilocalories, because that’s the unit

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for measuring the energy equivalent of food. But a person who eats 2,000 kilocalones of steak a day obviously has to pay more than a person eating the same amount of bread.

So they instituted a sliding “ration factor,” so complicated that nobody could understand it. After a few weeks they were using the books again, but calling food kilocalories “calories” in an attempt to make things less confusing.

Seemed to me they’d save a lot of trouble all around if they’d just call money dollars again, or rubles or sisterces or whatever. . . anything but kilocalories.

Food prices were astonishing, except for grains and legumes. I insisted on splurging on some good red meat: 1500 calories worth of ground beef, costing 1730K. The same amount of fakesteak, made from soy beans, would have cost 80K.

I also got a head of lettuce for 140K and a little bottle of olive oil for 175ic Mother said she had some vinegar.

Started to buy some mushrooms but she said she had a neighbor who grew them and could trade something from her balcony garden.

At her apartment on the ninety-second floor, she apologized for the smallness of the place. It didn’t seem so little to me, but then she’d never lived on a spaceship.

Even this high up, there were bars on the windows. The door had four separate locks, one of which didn’t work because somebody had used a crowbar on it.

Mother went off to turn the ground beef into a meatloaf and I settled down with the evening ‘fax. She pulled some carrots from her little garden and called the mushroom lady, whose son came over to make the trade. He had a riot gun slung under his ann.

“Mother, where’s the rest of the Star?” I called into the kitchen. “As far as I know, it’s all there. What were you looking for?” “Well .. . I found the classified section, but no ‘Help Wanted.'”

She laughed. “Son, there hasn’t been a ‘Help Wanted’ ad in ten years. The government takes care of jobs . . . well, most of them.”

“Everybody works for the government?”

“No, that’s not it.” She came in, wiping her hands on a frayed towel. “The government, they tell us, handles the distribution of all natural resources. And there aren’t many resources more valuable than empty jobs.”

“Well, I’ll go talk to them tomorrow.”

“Don’t bother, son. How much retirement pay you say you’re getting from the Force?”

“Twenty thousand K a month. Doesn’t look like it’ll go far.”

“No, it won’t. But your father’s pension gave me less than half that, and they wouldn’t give me a job. Jobs are assigned on a basis of need. And you’ve got to be living on rice and water before the Employment Board considers you needy.”

“Well, hell, it’s a bureaucracy-there must be somebody I can pay off, slip me into a good-”

“No. Sorry, that’s one part of the UN that’s absolutely incorruptible. The whole shebang is cybernetic, untouched by human souls. You can’t-”

“But you said you had a job!”

“I was getting to that. If you want a job badly enough, you can go to a dealer and sometimes get a hand-me-down.”

“Hand-me-down? Dealer?”

“Take my job as an example, son. A woman named Halley Williams has a job in a hospital, running a machine that analyzes blood, a chromatography machine. She works six nights a week, for 12,000K a week. She gets tired of working, so she contacts a dealer and lets him know that her job is available.

“Some time before this, I’d given the dealer his initial fee of 50,000K to get on his list. He comes by and describes the job to me and I say fine, I’ll take it. He knew I

would and already has fake identification and a uniform. He distributes small bribes to the various supervisors who might know Miss Williams by sight.

“Miss Williams shows me how to run the machine and quits. She still gets the weekly 12,000K credited to her account, but she pays me half. I pay the dealer ten percent and wind up with 5400K per week. This, added to the nine grand I get monthly from your father’s pension, makes me quite comfortable.

“Then it gets complicated. Finding myself with plenty of money and too little time, I contact the dealer again, offering to sublet half my job. The next day a girl shows up who also has ‘Halley Williams’ identification. I show her how to run the machine, and she takes over Monday-Wednesday-Friday. Half of my real salary is 2700K, so she gets half that, 1350K, and pays the dealer 135.”

She got a pad an4 a stylus and did some figuring. “So the real Hailey Williams gets 6000K weekly for doing nothing. I work three days a week for 4050K. My assistant works three days for 1115K. The dealer gets 100,000K in fees and 735K per week. Lopsided, isn’t it?”

“Hmm. . . I’ll say. Quite illegal, too, I suppose.”

“For the dealer. Everybody else might lose their job and have to start over, if the Employment Board finds out. But the dealer gets brainwiped.”

“Guess I better find a dealer, while I can still afford the fifty-grand bite.” Actually, I still had over three million, but planned to run through most of it in a short time. Hell, I’d earned it.

I was getting ready to go the next morning when Mother came in with a shoebox. Inside, there was a small pistol in a clip-on holster.

“This belonged to your father,” she explained. “Better wear it if you’re planning to go downtown without a bodyguard.”

It was a gunpowder pistol with ridiculously thin bullets. I hefted it in my hand. “Did Dad ever use it?”

“Several times. . . just to scare away riders and hitters, though. He never actually shot anybody.”

“You’re probably right that I need a gun,” I said, putting it back. “But I’d have to have something with more heft to it. Can I buy one legally?”

“Sure, there’s a gun store down in the Mall. As long as you don’t have a police record, you can buy anything that suits you.” Good, I’d get a little pocket laser. I could hardly hit the wall with a gunpowder pistol.

“But.. . William, I’d feel a lot better if you’d hire a bodyguard, at least until you know your way around.” We’d gone all around that last night. Being an official Trained Killer, I thought I was tougher than any clown I might hire for the job.

“I’ll check into it, Mother. Don’t worry-I’m not even going downtown today, just into Hyattsville.”

“That’s just as bad.”

When the elevator came, it was already occupied. He looked at me blandly as I got in, a man a little older than me, clean-shaven and well dressed. He stepped back to let me at the row of buttons. I punched 47 and then, realizing his motive might not

have been politeness, turned to see him struggling to get at a metal pipe stuck in his waistband. It had been hidden by his cape.

“Come on, fella,” I said, reaching for a nonexistent weapon. “You wanna get caulked?”

He had the pipe free but let it hang loosely at his side. “Caulked?”

“Killed. Anny term.” I took one step toward him, trying to remember. Kick just under the knee, then either groin or kidney. I decided on the groin.

“No.” He put the pipe back in his waistband. “I don’t want to get ‘caulked.'” The door opened at 47 and I backed out.

The gun shop was all bright white plastic and gleamy black metal. A little bald man bobbed over to wait on me. He had a pistol in a shoulder rig.

“And a fine morning to you, sir,” he said and giggled. “What will it be today?” “Lightweight pocket laser,” I said. “Carbon dioxide.”

He looked at me quizzically and then brightened. “Coming right up, sir.” Giggle. “Special today, I throw in a handful of tachyon grenades.”

“Fine.” They’d be handy.

He looked at me expectantly. “So? What’s the popper?” “Huh?”

“The punch, man; you set me up, now knock me down. Laser.” He giggled. I was beginning to understand. “You mean I can’t buy a laser.”

“Of course not, sweetie,” he said and sobered. “You didn’t know that?” “I’ve been out of the country for a long time.”

“The world, you mean. You’ve been out Of the world a long time.” He put his left hand on a chubby hip in a gesture that incidentally made his gun easier to get. He scratched the center of his chest.

I stood very still. “That’s right. I just got out of the Force.”

His jaw dropped. “Hey, no bully-bull? You been out shootin’ ’em up, out in space?”

“That’s right.”

“Hey, all that crap about you not gettin’ older, there’s nothin’ to that, is there?” “Oh, it’s true. I was born in 1975.”

“Well, god . . . damn. You’re almost as old as I am.”

He giggled. “I thought that was just something the government made up.” “Anyhow. . . you say I can’t buy a laser-”

“Oh, no. No no no. I run a legal shop here.” “What can I buy?”

“Oh, pistol, rifle, shotgun, knife, body armor. . . just no lasers or explosives or fully automatic weapons.”

“Let me see a pistol. The biggest you have.”

“Ah, I’ve got just the thing.” He motioned me over to a display case and opened the back, taking out a huge revolver.

“Four-ten-gauge six-shooter.” He cradled it in both hands. “Dinosaur-stopper. Authentic Old West styling. Slugs or flechettes.”

“Flechettes?”

“Sure-uh, they’re like a bunch of tiny darts. You shoot and they spread out in a pattern. Hard to miss that way.”

Sounded like my speed. “Anyplace I can try it out?”

“‘Course, of course, we have a range in back. Let me get my assistant.” He rang a bell and a boy caine out to

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watch the store while we went in back. He picked up a red-and-green box of shotgun shells on the way.

The range was in two sections, a little anteroom with a plastic transparent door and a long corridor on the other side of the door with a table at one end and targets at the other. Behind the targets was a sheet of metal that evidently deflected the bullets down into a pool of water.

He loaded the pistol and set it on the table. “Please don’t pick it up until the door’s closed.” He went into the anteroom, closed the door, and picked up a microphone. “Okay. First time, you better hold on to it with both hands.” I did so, raising it up in line with the center target, a square of paper looking about the size of your thumbnail at arm’s length. Doubted I’d even come near it. I pulled the trigger and it went back easily enough, but nothing happened.

“No, no,” he said over the microphone with a tinny giggle. “Authentic Old West styling. You’ve got to pull the hammer back.”

Sure, just like in the flicks. I hauled the hammer back, lined it up again, and squeezed the trigger.

The noise was so loud it made my face sting. The gun bucked up and almost hit me on the forehead. But the three center targets were gone: just tiny tatters of paper drifting in the air.

“I’ll take it.”

He sold me a hip holster, twenty shells, a chest-and-back shield, and a dagger in a boot sheath. I felt more heavily armed than I had in a fighting suit. But no waldos to help me cart it around.

The monorail had two guards for each car. I was beginning to feel that all my heavy artillery was superfluous, until I got off at the Hyattsville station.

Everyone who got off at Hyattsville was either heavily armed or had a bodyguard. The people loitering around the station were all armed. The police carried lasers.

I pushed a “cab call” button, and the readout told me mine would be No. 3856. I asked a policeman and he told me to wait for it down on the street; it would cruise around the block twice.

THE FOREVER WAR 123

During the five minutes I waited, I twice heard staccato arguments of gunfire, both of them rather far away. I was glad I’d bought the shield.

Eventually the cab came. It swerved to the curb when I waved at it, the door sliding open as it stopped. Looked as if it worked the same way as the autocabs I remembered. The door stayed open while it checked the thumbprint to verify that I was the one who had called, then slammed shut. It was thick steel. The view through the windows was dim and distorted; probably thick bulletproof plastic. Not quite the same as I remembered.

I had to leaf through a grimy book to find the code for the address of the bar in Hyattsville where I was supposed to meet the dealer. I punched it out and sat back to watch the city go by.

This part of town was mostly residential: grayed-brick warrens built around the middle of the last century competing for space with more modern modular setups and, occasionally, individual houses behind tall brick or concrete walls with jagged

broken glass and barbed wire at the top. A few people seemed to be going somewhere, walking very quickly down the sidewalks, hands on weapons. Most of the people I saw were either sitting in doorways, smoking, or loitering around shopfronts in groups of no fewer than six. Everything was dirty and cluttered. The gutters were clotted with garbage, and shoals of waste paper drifted with the wind of the light traffic.

It was understandable, though; street-sweeping was probably a very high-risk profession.

The cab pulled up in front of Tom & Jerry’s Bar and Grill and let me out after I paid 430K. I stepped to the sidewalk with my hand on the shotgun-pistol, but there was nobody around. I hustled into the bar.

It was surprisingly clean on the inside, dimly lit and furnished in fake leather and fake pine. I went to the bar and got some fake bourbon and, presumably, real water for 120K. The water cost 20K. A waitress came over with a tray.

“Pop one, brother-boy?” The tray had a rack of oldfashioned hypodermic needles. Joe Haldeman

124

“Not today, thanks.” If I was going to “pop one,” I’d use an aerosol. The needles looked unsanitary and painful.

She set the dope down on the bar and eased onto the stool next to me. She sat with her chin cupped in her palm and stared at her reflection in the mirror behind the bar.

“God. Tuesdays.”

I mumbled something.

“You wanna go in back fer a quickie?”

I looked at her with what I hoped was a neutral expression. She was wearing only a short skirt of some gossamer material, and it plunged in a shallow V in the front, exposing her hipbones and a few bleached pubic hairs. I wondered what could possibly keep it up. She wasn’t bad looking, could have been anywhere from her late twenties to her early forties. No telling what they could do with cosmetic surgery and makeup nowadays, though. Maybe she was older than my mother.

“Thanks anyhow.” “Not today?” “That’s right.”

“I can get you a nice boy, if-” “No. No thanks.” What a world.

She pouted into the mirror, an expression that was probably older than Hoino sapiens. “You don’t like me.”

“I like you fine. That’s just not what I caine here for.”

“Well. . . different funs for different ones.” She shrugged. “Hey, Jerry. Get me a short beer.”

He brought it.

“Oh, damn, my purse is locked up. Mister, can you spare forty calories?” I had enough ration tickets to take care of a whole banquet. Tore off a fifty and gave it to the bartender.

“Jesus.” She stared. “How’d you get a full book at the end of the month?”

I told her in as few words as possible who I was and how I managed to have so many calories. There had been two months’ worth of books waiting in my mail, and I hadn’t even used up the ones the Force had given me. She offered to buy a book from me for ten grand, but I didn’t

want to get involved in more than one illegal enterprise at a time.

Two men came in, one unarmed and the other with both a pistol and a riot gun. The bodyguard sat by the door and the other came over to me.

“Mr. Mandella?” “That’s right.”

“Shall we take a booth?” He didn’t offer his name.

He had a cup of coffee, and I sipped a mug of beer. “I don’t keep any written records, but I have an excellent memory. Tell me what sort of a job you’re interested in, what your qualifications are, what salary you’ll accept, and so on.”

I told him I’d prefer to wait for a job where I could use my physics-teaching or research, even engineering. I wouldn’t need a job for two or three months, since I planned to travel and spend money for a while. Wanted at least 20,000K monthly, but how much I’d accept would depend on the nature of the job.

He didn’t say a word until I’d finished. “Righty-oh. Now, I’m afraid. . . you’d have a hard time, getting a job in physics. Teaching is out; I can’t supply jobs where the person is constantly exposed to the public. Research, well, your degree is almost a quarter of a century old. You’d have to go back to school, maybe five or six years.”

“Might do that,” I said.

“The one really marketable feature you have is your combat experience. I could probably place you in a supervisory job at a bodyguard agency for even more than twenty grand. You could make almost that much, being a bodyguard yourself.”

“Thanks, but I wouldn’t want to take chances for somebody else’s hide.”

“Righty-oh. Can’t say I blame you.” He finished his coffee in a long slurp. “Well, I’ve got to run, got a thousand things to do. I’ll keep you in mind and talk to some people.”

“Good. I’ll see you in a few months.”

“Righty-oh. Don’t need to make an appointment. I come

in here every day at eleven for coffee. Just show up.”

I finished my beer and called a cab to take me home. I wanted to walk around the city, but Mother was right. I’d get a bodyguard first.

I came home and the phone was blinking pale blue. Didn’t know what to do so I punched “Operator.”

A pretty young girl’s head materialized in the cube. “Jefferson operator,” she said. “May I help you?”

“Yes. . . what does it mean when the cube is blinking blue?” “Huh?”

“What does it mean when the phone-”

“Are you serious?” I was getting a little tired of this kind of thing. “It’s a long story. Honest, I don’t know.”

“When it blinks blue you’re supposed to call the operator.” “Okay, here I am.”

“No, not me, the real operator. Punch nine. Then punch zero.” I did that and an old harridan appeared. “Ob-a-ray-duh.”

“This is William Mandella at 301-52-574-3975. I was supposed to call you.”

“Juzza segun.” She reached outside the field of view and typed something. “You god.da call from 605-19-556-2027.”

I scribbled it down on the pad by the phone. “Where’s that?” “Juzza segun. South Dakota.”

“Thanks.” I didn’t know anybody in South Dakota.

A pleasant-looking old woman answered the phone. “Yes?” “I had a call from this number. . . uh… I’m-”

“Oh. Sergeant Mandella! Just a second.”

I watched the diagonal bar of the holding pattern for a second, then fifty or so more. Then a head came into focus.

Marygay. “William. I had a heck of a time finding you.” Lz~j

Joe Ilaldeman

“Darling, me too. What are you doing in South Dakota?”

“My parents live here, in a little commune. That’s why it took me so long to get to the phone.” She held up two grimy hands. “Digging potatoes.”

“But when I checked.. . the records said-the records in Tucson said your parents were both dead.”

“No, they’re just dropouts-you know about dropouts?- new name, new life. I got the word through a cousin.”

“Well-well, how’ve you been? Like the country life?”

“That’s one reason I’ve been wanting to get you. Willy, I’m bored. It’s all very healthy and nice, but I want to do something dissipated and wicked. Naturally I thought of you.,,

“I’m flattered. Pick you up at eight?”

She checked a clock above the phone. “No, look, let’s get a good night’s sleep. Besides, I’ve got to get in the rest of the potatoes. Meet me at. . . the Ellis Island jetport at ten tomorrow morning. Mmm. . . Trans-World information desk.”

“Okay. Make reservations for where?” She shrugged. “Pick a place.” “London used to be pretty wicked.”

“Sounds good. First class?”

“What else? I’ll get us a suite on one of the dirigibles.” “Good. Decadent. How long shall I pack for?”

“We’ll buy clothes along the way. Travel light. Just one stuffed wallet apiece.” She giggled. “Wonderful. Tomorrow at ten.”

“Fine-ub. . . Marygay, do you have a gun?” “It’s that bad?”

“Here around Washington it is.”

“Well, I’ll get one. Dad has a couple over the fireplace. Guess they’re left over from Tucson.”

“We’ll hope we won’t need them.”

“Willy, you know it’ll just be for decoration. I couldn’t even kill a Tauran.”

“Of course.” We just looked at each other for a second. “Tomorrow at ten, then.” “Right. Love you.”

”lJh . .

She giggled again and hung up.

That was just too many things to think about all at once.

I got us two round-the-world dirigible tickets; unlimited stops as long as you kept going east. It took me a little over two hours to get to Ellis by autocab and monorail. I was early, but so was Marygay.

She was talking to the girl at the desk and didn’t see me coming. Her outfit was really arresting, a tight coverall of plastic in a pattern of interlocking hands; as your angle of sight changed, various strategic hands became transparent. She had a ruddy sun-glow all over her body. I don’t know whether the feeling that rushed over me was simple honest lust or something more complicated. I hurried up behind her.

Whispering: “What are we going to do for three hours?” She turned and gave me a quick hug and thanked the girl at the desk, then grabbed my hand and pulled me along to a slidewalk.

“Um.. . where are we headed?”

“Don’t ask questions, Sergeant. Just follow me.”

We stepped onto a roundabout and transferred to an eastbound slidewalk. “Do you want something to eat or drink?” she asked innocently.

I tried to leer. “Any alternatives?”

She laughed gaily. Several people stared. “Just a second here!” We jumped off. It was a corridor marked

“Roomettes.” She handed me a key.

That damned plastic coverall was held on by static electricity. Since the roomette was nothing but a big waterbed, I almost broke my neck the first time it shocked me.

I recovered.

We were lying on our stomachs, looking through the one-way glass wall at the people rushing around down on the concourse. Marygay passed me a joint.

“William, have you used that thing yet?” “What thing?”

“That hawg-leg. The pistol.” 130

Joe Haldeman

“Only shot it once, in the store where I bought it.”

“Do you really think you could point it at someone and blow him apart?”

I took a shallow puff and passed it back. “Hadn’t given it much thought, really. Until we talked last night.”

“Well?”

“I. . . I don’t really know. The only time I’ve killed was on Aleph, under hypnotic compulsion. But I don’t think it would. . . bother me, not that much, not if the person was trying to kill me in the first place. Why should it?”

“Life,” she said plaintively, “life is. . .”

“Life is a bunch of cells walking around with a common purpose. If that common purpose is to get my ass-”

“Oh,William. You sound like old Cortez.” “Cortez kept us alive.”

“Not many of us,” she snapped.

I rolled over and studied the ceiling tiles. She traced little designs on my chest, pushing the sweat around with her fingertip. “I’m sorry, William. I guess we’re both just trying to adjust.”

“That’s okay. You’re right, anyhow.”

We talked for a long time. The only urban center Mary-gay had been to since our publicity rounds (which were very sheltered) was Sioux Falls. She had gone with her

parents and the commune bodyguard. It sounded like a scaled-down version of Washington: the same problems, but not as acute.

We ticked off the things that bothered us: violence, high cost of living, too many people everywhere. I’d have added homolife, but Marygay said I just didn’t appreciate the social dynamic that had led to it; it had been inevitable. The only thing she said she had against it was that it took so many of the prettiest men out of circulation.

And the main thing that was wrong was that everything seemed to have gotten just a little worse, or at best remained the same. You would have predicted that at least a few facets of everyday life would improve markedly in twenty-two years. Her father contended the War was behind it all: any person who showed a shred of talent was sucked

up by UNEF; the very best fell to the Elite Conscription Act and wound up being cannon fodder.

It was hard not to agree with him. Wars in the past often accelerated social reform, provided technological benefits, even sparked artistic activity. This one, however, seemed tailor-made to provide none of these positive by-products. Such improvements as had been made on late-twentieth-century technology were-like tachyon bombs and warships two kilometers long-at best, interesting developments of things that only required the synergy of money and existing engineering techniques. Social reform? The world was technically under martial law. As for art, I’m not sure I know good from bad. But artists to some extent have to reflect the temper of the times. Paintings and sculpture were full of torture and dark brooding; movies seemed static and plotless; music was dominated by nostalgic revivals of earlier forms; architecture was mainly concerned with finding someplace to put everybody; literature was damn near incomprehensible. Most people seemed to spend most of their time trying to find ways to outwit the government, trying to scrounge a few extra K’s or ration tickets without putting their lives in too much danger.

And in the past, people whose country was at war were constantly in contact with the war. The newspapers would be full of reports, veterans would return from the front sometimes the front would move right into town, invaders marching down Main Street or bombs whistling through the night air-but always the sense of either working toward victory or at least delaying defeat. The enemy was a tangible thing, a propagandist’s monster whom you could understand, whom you could hate.

But this war. . . the enemy was a curious organism only vaguely understood, more often the subject of cartoons than nightmares. The main effect of the war on the home front was economic, unemotional-more taxes but more jobs as well. After twenty-two years, only twenty-seven returned veterans; not enough to make a decent parade. The most important fact about the war to most people was that if it ended suddenly, Earth’s economy would collapse.

You approached the dirigible by means of a small propeller-driven aircraft that drifted up to match trajectories and docked alongside. A clerk took our baggage and we checked our weapons with the purser, then went outside.

Just about everybody on the flight was standing out on the promenade deck, watching Manhattan creep toward the horizon. It was an eerie sight. The day was very still, so the bottom thirty or forty stories of the buildings were buried in smog. It looked like a city built on a cloud, a thunderhead floating. We watched it for a while and then went inside to eat.

The meal was elegantly served and simple: filet of beef, two vegetables, wine. Cheese and fruit and more wine for dessert. No fiddling with ration tickets; a loophole in the rationing laws implied that they were not required for meals consumed en route, on intercontmental transport.

We spent a lazy, comfortable three days crossing the Atlantic. The dirigibles had been a new thing when we first left Earth, and now they had turned out to be one of the few successful new financial ventures of the late twentieth century.. . the company that built them had bought up a few obsolete nuclear weapons; one bomb- sized hunk of plutonium would keep the whole fleet in the air for years. And, once launched, they never did come down. Floating hotels, supplied and maintained by regular shuttles, they were one last vestige of luxury in a world where nine billion people had something to eat, and almost nobody had enough.

London was not as dismal from the air as New York City had been; the air was clean even if the Thames was poison. We packed our handbags, claimed our weapons, and landed on a VTO pad atop the London Hilton. We rented a couple of tricycles at the hotel and, maps in hand, set off for Regent Street, planning on dinner at the venerable Cafe Royal.

The tricycles were little armored vehicles, stabilized gyroscopically so they couldn’t be tipped over. Seemed overly cautious for the part of London we traveled through, but I

supposed there were probably sections as rough as Washington.

I got a dish of marinated venison and Marygay got salmon; both very good but astoundingly expensive. At first I was a bit overawed by the huge room, filled with plush and mirrors and faded gilding, very quiet even with a dozen tables occupied, and we talked in whispers until we realized that was foolish.

Over coffee I asked Marygay what the deal was with her parents.

“Oh, it happens often enough,” she said. “Dad got mixed up in some ration ticket thing. He’d gotten some black market tickets that turned out to be counterfeit. Cost him his job and he probably would have gone to jail, but while he was waiting for trial a bodysnatcher got him.”

“Bodysnatcher?”

“That’s right. All the commune organizations have them. They’ve got to get reliable farm labor, people who aren’t eligible for relief. . . people who can’t just lay down their tools and walk off when it gets rough. Almost everybody can get enough assistance to stay alive, though; everyone who isn’t on the government’s fecal roster.”

“So he skipped out before his trial came up?”

She nodded. “It was a case of choosing between commune life, which he knew wasn’t easy, and going on the dole after a few years’ working on a prison farm; exconvicts can’t get legitimate jobs. They had to forfeit their condominium, which

they’d put up for bail, but the government would’ve gotten that anyhow, once he was in jail.

“So the bodysnatcher offered him and Mother new identities, transportation to the commune, a cottage, and a plot of land. They took it.”

“Arid what did the bodysnatcher get?”

“He himself probably didn’t get anything. The commune got their ration tickets; they were allowed to keep their money, although they didn’t have very much-”

“What happens if they get caught?”

“Not a chance.” She laughed. “The communes provide over half the country’s produce-they’re really just an unofficial arm of the government. I’m sure the CBI knows

Joe Haldeman 134

exactly where they are.. . . Dad grumbles that it’s just a fancy way of being in jail anyhow.”

“What a weird setup.”

“Well, it keeps the land farmed.” She pushed her empty dessert plate a symbolic centimeter away from her. “And they’re eating better than most people, better than they ever had in the city. Mom knows a hundred ways to fix chicken and potatoes.”

After dinner we went to a musical show. The hotel had gotten us tickets to a “cultural translation” of the old rock opera Hair. The program explained that they had taken some liberties with the original choreography, because back in those days they didn’t allow actual coition on stage. The music was pleasantly old-fashioned, but neither of us was quite old enough to work up any bluriy-eyed nostalgia over

it. Still, it was much more enjoyable than the movies I’d seen, and some of the physical feats perfonned were quite inspiring. We slept late the next morning.

We dutifully watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, walked through the British Museum, ate fish and chips, ran up to Stratford-on-Avon and caught the Old Vic doing an incomprehensible play about a mad king, and didn’t get into any trouble until the day before we were to leave for Lisbon.

It was about 2 A.M. and we were tooling our tricycles down a nearly deserted thoroughfare. Turned a corner and there was a gang of boys beating the hell out of someone. I screeched to the curb and leaped out of my vehicle, firing the shotgun- pistol over their heads.

It was a girl they were attacking; it was rape. Most of them scattered, but one pulled a pistol out of his coat and I shot him. I remember trying to aim for his arm. The blast hit his shoulder and ripped off his arm and what seemed to be half of his chest; it flung him two meters to the side of a building and he must have been dead before he hit the ground.

The others ran, one of them shooting at me with a little pistol as he went. I watched him trying to kill me for the longest time before it occurred to me to shoot back. I sent

‘l’HE FOREVER WAR 135

one blast way high and he dove into an alley and disappeared.

The girl looked dazedly around, saw the mutilated body of her attacker, and staggered to her feet and ran off screaming, naked from the waist down. I knew I should

have tried to stop her, but I couldn’t find my voice and my

feet seemed nailed to the sidewalk. A tricycle door slammed and Marygay was beside me.

“What hap-” She gasped, seeing the dead man. “Whwhat was he doing?”

I just stood there stupefied. I’d certainly seen enough death these past two years, but this was a different thing

. . there was nothing noble in being crushed to death by the failure of some electronic component, or in having your suit fail and freeze you solid; or even dying in a shoot-out with the incomprehensible enemy. . . but death seemed natural in that setting. Not on a quaint little street in old-fashioned London, not for trying to steal what most people would give

Marygay was pulling my arm. “We’ve got to get out of here. They’ll brainwipe you!”

She was tight. I turned and took one step and fell to the concrete. I looked down at the leg that had betrayed me and bright red blood was pulsing out of a small hole in my calf. Marygay tore a strip of cloth from her blouse and started to bind it. I remember thinking it wasn’t a big enough wound to go into shock over, but my ears started to ring and I got lightheaded and everything went red and fuzzy. Before I went under, I heard a siren wailing in the distance.

Fortunately, the police also picked up the girl, who was wandering down the street a few blocks away. They compared her version of the thing with mine, both of us under hypnosis. They let me go with a stern admonition to leave law enforcement up to professional law enforcers.

I wanted to get out of the cities: just put a pack on my back and wander through the woods for a while, get my mind straightened out. So did Marygay. But we tried to make arrangements and found that the country was worse

than the cities. Farms were practically armed camps, the areas between ruled by nomad gangs who survived by making lightning raids into villages and farms, murdering and plundering for a few minutes, and then fading back into the forest, before help could arrive.

Still, Britishers called their island “the most civilized country in Europe.” From what we’d heard about France and Spain and Germany, especially Germany, they were probably right.

I talked it over with Marygay, and we decided to cut short our tour and go back to the States.~We could finish the tour after we’d become acclimated to the twenty-first century. It was just too much foreignness to take in one dose.

The dirigible line refunded most of our money and we took a conventional suborbital flight back home. The high altitude made my leg throb, though it was nearly healed.

They’d made great strides in the treatment of gunshot wounds, in the past twenty years. Lots of practice.

We split up at Ellis. Her description of commune life appealed to me more than the city; I made arrangements to join her after a week or so, and went back to Washington.

I rang the bell and a strange woman answered the door, opening it a couple of centimeters and peering through.

“Pardon me,” I said, “isn’t this Mrs. Mandella’s residence?”

“Oh, you must be William!” She closed the door and unfastened the chains and opened it wide. “Beth, look who’s here!”

My mother came into the living room from the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel. “Willy.. . what are you doing back so soon?”

“Well, it’s-it’s a long story.”

“Sit down, sit down,” the other woman said. “Let me get you a drink, don’t start till I get back.”

“Wait,” my mother said. “I haven’t even introduced you two. William, this is Rhonda Wilder. Rhonda, William.”

“I’ve been so looking forward to meeting you,” she said. “Beth has told me all about you-one cold beer, right?”

“Right.” She was likable enough, a trim middle-aged woman. I wondered why I hadn’t met her before. I asked my mother whether she was a neighbor.

“Uh. . . really more than that, William. She’s been my roommate for a couple of years. That’s why I had an extra room when you came home-a single person isn’t allowed two bedrooms.”

“But why-”

“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to feel that you were putting her out of her room while you stayed here. And you weren’t, actually; she has-”

“That’s right.” Rhonda came in with the beer. “I’ve got relatives in Pennsylvania, out in the country. I can stay with them any time.”

“Thanks.” I took the beer. “Actually, I won’t be here long. I’m kind of en route to South Dakota. I could find another place to flop.”

“Oh, no,” Rhonda said. “I can take the couch.” I was too old-fashioned male- chauv to allow that; we discussed it for a minute and I wound up with the couch.

I filled Rhonda in on who Marygay was and told them about our disturbing experiences in England, how we came back to get our bearings. I had expected my mother to be horrified that I had killed a man, but she accepted it without comment. Rhonda clucked a little bit about our being out in a city after midnight, especially without a bodyguard.

We talked on these and other topics until late at night, when Mother called her bodyguard and went off to work.

Something had been nagging at me all night, the way Mother and Rhonda acted toward each other. I decided to bring it out into the open, once Mother was gone.

“Rhonda-” I settled down in the chair across from her. I didn’t know exactly how to put it. “What, ub, what exactly is your relationship with my mother?”

She took a long drink. “Good friends.” She stared at me with a mixture of defiance and resignation. “Very good friends. Sometimes lovers.”

I felt very hollow and lost. My mother?

“Listen,” she continued. “You had better stop trying to live in the nineties. This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but you’re stuck with it.”

She crossed and took my hand, almost kneeling in front of me. Her voice was softer. “William. . . look, I’m only two years older than you are-that is, I was born two years before-what I mean is, I can understand how you feel. B-your mother understands too. It, our. . . relationship, wouldn’t be a secret to anybody else. It’s perfectly normal. A lot has changed, these twenty years. You’ve got to change too.”

I didn’t say anything.

She stood up and said firmly, “You think, because your mother is sixty, she’s outgrown her need for love? She needs it more than you do. Even now. Especially now.”

Accusation in her eyes. “Especially flOW with you com THE FOREVER WAR

139

ing back from the dead past. Reminding her of how old she is. How-old I am, twenty years younger.” Her voice quavered and cracked, and she ran to her room.

I wrote Mother a note saying that Marygay had called; an emergency had come up and I had to go immediately to South Dakota. I called a bodyguard and left.

A whining, ozone-leaking, battered old bus let me out at the intersection of a bad road and a worse one. It had taken me an hour to go the 2000 kilometers to Sioux Falls, two hours to get a chopper to Geddes, 150 kilometers away, and three hours waiting and jouncing on the dilapidated bus to go the last 12 kilometers to Freehold, an organization of communes where the Potters had their acreage. I wondered if the progression was going to continue and I would be four hours walking down this dirt road to the farm.

It was a half-hour before I even came to a building. My bag was getting intolerably heavy and the bulky pistol was chafing my hip. I walked up a stone path to the door of a simple plastic dome and pulled a string that caused a bell to tinkle inside. A peephole darkened.

“Who is it?” Voice muffled by thick wood. “Stranger asking directions.”

“Ask.” I couldn’t tell whether it was a woman or a child. “I’m looking for the Potters’ farm.”

“Just a second.” Footsteps went away and came back.

“Down the road one point nine klicks. Lots of potatoes and green beans on your right. You’ll probably smell the chickens.”

“Thanks.”

“If you want a drink we got a pump out back. Can’t let you in without my husband’s at home.”

“1 understand. Thank you.” The water was metallic-tasting but wonderfully cool.

I wouldn’t know a potato or green bean plant if it stood up and took a bite out of my ankle, but I knew how to walk a half-meter step. So I resolved to count to 3800 arid take a deep breath. I supposed I could tell the difference between the smell of chicken manure and the absence thereof.

At 3650 there was a rutted path leading to a complex of

plastic domes and rectangular buildings apparently made of sod. There was a pen enclosing a small population explosion of chickens. They had a smell but it wasn’t strong.

Halfway down the path, a door opened and Marygay came running out, wearing one tiny wisp of cloth. After a slippery but gratifying greeting, she asked what I was doing here so early.

“Oh, my mother had friends staying with her. I didn’t want to put them out. Suppose I should have called.”

“Indeed you should have. . . save you a long dusty walk-but we’ve got plenty of room, don’t worry about that.”

She took me inside to meet her parents, who greeted me warmly and made me feel definitely overdressed. Their faces showed their age but their bodies had no sag and few wrinkles.

Since dinner was an occasion, they let the chickens live and instead opened a can of beef, steaming it along with a cabbage and some potatoes. To my plain tastes it was equal to most of the gourmet fare we’d had on the dirigible and in London.

Over coffee and goat cheese (they apologized for not having wine; the commune would have a new vintage out in a couple of weeks), I asked what kind of work I could do.

“Will,” Mr. Potter said, “I don’t mind telling you that your coming here is a godsend. We’ve got five acres that are just sitting out there, fallow, because we don’t have enough hands to work them. You can take the plow tomorrow and start breaking up an acre at a time.”

“More potatoes, Daddy?” Marygay asked.

“No, no.. . not this season. Soybeans-cash crop and good for the soil. And Will, at night we all take turns standing guard. With four of us, we ought to be able to do a lot more sleeping.” He took a big slurp of coffee. “Now, what else. . .”

“Richard,” Mrs. Potter said, “tell him about the greenhouse.” “That’s right, yes, the greenhouse. The commune has a

two-acre greenhouse down about a click from here, by the recreation center. Mostly grapes and tomatoes. Everybody spends one morning or one afternoon a week there.

“Why don’t you children go down there tonight.. show Will the night life in fabulous Freehold? Sometimes you can get a real exciting game of checkers going.”

“Oh, Daddy. It’s not that bad.”

“Actually, it isn’t. They’ve got a fair library and a coin-op terminal to the Library of Congress. Marygay tells me you’re a reader. That’s good.”

“Sounds fascinating.” It did. “But what about guard?”

“No problem. Mrs. Potter-April-and I’ll take the first four hours-oh,” he said, standing, “let me show you the setup.”

We went out back to “the tower,” a sandbag hut on stilts. Climbed up a rope ladder through a hole in the middle of the hut.

“A little crowded in here, with two,” Richard said.

“Have a seat.” There was an old piano stool beside the hole in the floor. I sat on it. “It’s handy to be able to see all the field without getting a crick in your neck. Just don’t keep turning in the same direction all the time.”

He opened a wooden crate and uncovered a sleek rifle, wrapped in oily rags. “Recognize this?”

“Sure.” I’d had to sleep with one in basic training.

“Army standard issue T-sixteen. Semi-automatic, twelve-caliber tumblers-where the hell did you get it?”

“Commune went to a government auction. It’s an antique now, son.” He handed it to me and I snapped it apart.

Clean, too clean.

“Has it ever been used?”

“Not in almost a year. Ammo costs too much for target practice. Take a couple of practice shots, though, convince yourself that it works.”

I turned on the scope and just got a washed-out bright green. Set for nighttime. Clicked it back to log zero, set the magnification at ten, reassembled it.

“Marygay didn’t want to try it out. Said she’d had her fill of that. I didn’t press her, but a person’s got to have confidence in ther tools.”

I clicked off the safety and found a clod of dirt that the range-finder said was between 100 and 120 meters away.

Set it at 110, rested the barrel of the rifle on the sandbags, centered the clod in the crosshairs, and squeezed. The round hissed out and kicked up dirt about five centimeters low.

“Fine.” I reset it for night use and safetied it and handed it back. “What happened a year ago?”

He wrapped it up carefully, keeping the rags away from the eyepiece. “Had some jumpers come in. Fired a few rounds and scared ’em away.”

“All right, what’s a jumper?”

“Yeah, you wouldn’t know.” He shook out a tobacco cigarette and passed me the box. “I don’t know why they don’t just call ’em thieves, that’s what they ar~’Murderers, too, sometimes.

“They know that a lot of the commune members are pretty well off. If you raise cash crops you get to keep half the cash; besides, a lot of our members were prosperous when they joined.

“Anyhow, the jumpers take advantage of our relative isolation. They come out from the city and try to sneak in, usually hit one place, and run. Most of the time, they don’t get this far in, but the farms closer to the road.. . we hear gunfire every couple of weeks. Usually just scaring off kids. If it keeps up, a siren goes off and the commune goes on alert.”

“Doesn’t sound fair to the people living close to the road.”

“There’re compensations. They only have to donate half as much of their crop as the rest of us do. And they’re issued heavier weapons.”

Marygay and I took the family’s two bicycles and pedaled down to the recreation center. I only fell off twice, negotiating the bumpy road in the dark.

It was a little livelier than Richard had described it. A young nude girl was dancing sensuously to an assortment of homemade drums near the far side of the dome. Turned out she was still in school; it was a project for a “cultural relativity” class.

Most of the people there, in fact, were young and therefore still in school. They considered it a joke, though. After you had learned to read and write and could pass the Class I literacy test, you only had to take one course per year, and some of those you could pass just by signing up. So much for the “eighteen years’ compulsory education” they had startled us with at Stargate.

Other people were playing board games, reading, watching the girl gyrate, or just talking. There was a bar that served soya, coffee, or thin homemade beer. Not a ration ticket to be seen; all made by the commune or purchased outside with commune tickets.

We got into a discussion about the war, with a bunch of people who knew Marygay and I were veterans. It’s hard to describe their attitude, which was pretty

uniform. They were angry in an abstract way that it took so much tax money to support; they were convinced that the Taurans would never be any danger to Earth; but they all knew that nearly half the jobs in the world were associated with the war, and if it stopped, everything would fall apart.

I thought everything was in shambles already, but then I hadn’t grown up in this world. And they had never known “peacetime.”

We went home about midnight and Maiygay and 1 each stood two hours’ guard. By the middle of the next morning, I was wishing I had gotten a little more sleep.

The plow was a big blade on wheels with two handles for steering, atomic powered. Not very much power, though; enough to move it forward at a slow crawl if the blade was in soft earth. Needless to say, there was little soft earth in the unused five acres. The plow would go a few centimeters, get stuck, freewheel until I put some back into it, then move a few more centimeters. I finished a tenth of an acre the first day and eventually got it up to a fifth of an acre a day.

It was hard, hardening work, but pleasant. I had an ear-clip that piped music to me, old tapes from Richard’s collection, and the sun browned me all over. I was beginning to think I could live that way forever, when suddenly it was finished.

Marygay and I were reading up at the recreation center one evening when we heard faint gunfire down by the road. We decided it’d be smart to get back to the house. We were less than halfway there when firing broke out all along our left, on a line that seemed to extend from the road to far past the recreation center: a coordinated attack. We had to abandon the bikes and crawl on hands and knees in the drainage ditch by the side of the road, bullets hissing over our heads. A heavy vehicle rumbled by, shooting left and right. It took a good twenty minutes to crawl home. We passed two farmhouses that were burning brightly. I was glad ours didn’t have any wood.

I noticed there was no return fire coming from our tower, but didn’t say anything. There were two dead strangers in front of the house as we rushed inside.

April was lying on the floor, still alive but bleeding from a hundred tiny fragment wounds. The living room was rubble and dust; someone must have thrown a bomb through a door or window. I left Marygay with her mother and ran out back to the tower. The ladder was pulled up, so I had to shinny up one of the stilts.

Richard was sitting slumped over the rifle. In the pale green glow from the scope I could see a perfectly round bole above his left eye. A little blood had trickled down the bridge of his nose and dried.

I laid his body on the floor and covered his head with my shirt. I filled my pockets with clips and took the rifle back to the house.

Marygay had tried to make her mother comfortable. They were talking quietly. She was holding my shotgun-pistol and had another gun on the floor beside her. When I came in she looked up and nodded soberly, not crying.

April whispered something and Maiygay asked, “Mother wants to know whether..

. Daddy had a hard time of it She knows he’s dead.” “No. I’m sure he didn’t feel anything.”

“That’s good.”

“It’s something.” I should keep my mouth shut. “It is good, yes.” I checked the doors and windows for an effective vantage

point. I couldn’t find anyplace that wouldn’t allow a whole platoon to sneak up behind me.

“I’m going to go outside and get on top of the house.” Couldn’t go back to the tower. “Don’t you shoot unless somebody gets inside. . . maybe they’ll think the place is deserted.”

By the time I had clambered up to the sod roof, the heavy truck was coming back down the road. Through the scope I could see that there were five men on it, four in the cab and one who was on the open bed, cradling a machine gun, surrounded by loot. He was crouched between two refrigerators, but I had a clear shot at him. Held my fire, not wanting to draw attention. The truck stopped in front of the house, sat for a minute, and turned in. The window was probably bulletproof, but I sighted on the driver’s face and squeezed off a round. He jumped as it ricocheted, whining, leaving an opaque star on the plastic, and the man in back opened up. A steady stream of bullets hummed over my head; I could hear them thumping into the sandbags of the tower. He didn’t see me.

The truck wasn’t ten meters away when the shooting stopped. He was evidently reloading, hidden behind the refrigerator. I took careful aim and when he popped up to fire I shot him in the throat. The bullet being a tumbler, it exited through the top of his skull.

The driver pulled the truck around in a long arc so that, when it stopped, the door to the cab was flush with the door of the house. This protected them from the tower and also from me,though I doubted they yet knew where I was; a T-16 makes no flash and very little noise. I kicked off my shoes and stepped cautiously onto the top of the cab, hoping the driver would get out on his side. Once the door opened I could fill the cab with ricocheting bullets.

No good. The far door, hidden from me by the roof’s overhang, opened first. I waited for the driver and hoped that Marygay was well hidden. I shouldn’t have worried.

There was a deafening roar, then another and another. The heavy truck rocked with the impact of thousands of tiny fiechettes. One short scream that the second shot ended.

I jumped from the truck and ran around to the back door. Marygay had her mother’s head on her lap, and someone was crying softly. I went to them and Marygay’s cheeks were dry under my palms.

“Good work, dear.”

She didn’t say anything. There was a steady heavy dripping sound from the door and the air was acrid with smoke and the smell of fresh meat. We huddled together until dawn.

I had thought April was sleeping, but in the dim light her eyes were wide open and filmed. Her breath came in shallow rasps. Her skin was gray parchment and dried blood. She didn’t answer when we talked to her.

A vehicle was coming up the road, so I took the rifle and went outside. It was a dump truck with j white sheet draped over one side and a man standing in The back with a megaphone repeating, “Wounded. . . wounded.” I waved and the truck came in. They took April out on a makeshift litter and told us which hospital they were going to. We wanted to go along but there was simply no room; the bed of the truck was covered with people in various stages of disrepair.

Marygay didn’t want to go back inside because it was getting light enough to see the men she had killed so completely. I went back in to get some cigarettes and forced myself to look. It was messy enough, but just didn’t disturb me that much. That bothered me, to be confronted with a pile of human hamburger and mainly notice the flies and ants and smell. Death is so much neater in space.

We buried her father behind the house, and when the truck came back with April’s small body wrapped in a shroud, we buried her beside him. The commune’s sanitation truck came by a little later, and gas-masked men took care of the jumpers’ bodies.

We sat in the baking sun, and finally Marygay wept, for a long time, silently. 11

We got off the plane at Dulles and found a monorail to Columbia.

It was a pleasingly diverse jumble of various kinds of buildings, arranged around a lake, surrounded by trees. All of the buildings were connected by slidewalk to the largest place, a fullerdome with stores and schools and offices.

We could have taken the enclosed slidewalk to Mom’s place, but instead walked alongside it in the good cold air that smelled of fallen leaves. People slid by on the other side of the plastic, carefully not staring.

Mom didn’t answer her door, but she’d given me an entry card. Mom was asleep in the bedroom, so Marygay and I settled in the living room and read for a while.

We were startled suddenly by a loud fit of coughing from the bedroom. I raced over and knocked on the door.

“William? I didn’t-” coughing “-come in, I didn’t know you were…”

She was propped up in bed, the light on, surrounded by various nostrums. She looked ghastly, pale and lined.

She lit a joint and it seemed to quell the coughing. “When did you get in? I didn’t know…”

“Just a few minutes ago. .. . How long has this. . . have you been…”

“Oh, it’s just a bug I picked up after Rhonda went to see her kids. I’ll be fine in a couple of days.” She started coughing again, drank some thick red liquid from a bottle. All of her medicines seemed to be the commercial, patent variety.

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“Doctor? Heavens no, Willy. They don’t have.. . it’s not serious . . . don’t-” ”Not serious?” At eighty-four. “For Chrissake, mother.” I went to the phone in the kitchen and with some difficulty managed to get the hospital.

A plain girl in her twenties formed in the cube. “Nurse Donalson, general services.” She had a fixed smile, professional sincerity. But then everybody smiled.

“My mother needs to be looked at by a doctor. She has a-” “Name and number, please.”

“Beth Mandella.” I spelled it. “What number?” “Medical services number, of course,” she smiled.

I called into Mom and asked her what her number was. “She says she can’t remember.”

“That’s all right, sir, I’m sure I can find her records.”

She turned her smile to a keyboard beside her and punched out a code. “Beth Mandella?” she said, her smile wrning quizzical.

“You’re her son? She must be in her eighties.”

“Please. It’s a long story. She really has to see a doctor.” “Is this some kind of joke?”

“What do you mean?” Strangled coughing from the other room, the worst yet. “Really-this might be very serious, you’ve got to-”

“But sir, Mrs. Mandella got a zero priority rating way back in 2010.” “What the hell is that supposed to me”

“S-i-r…” The smile was hardening in place.

“Look. Pretend that I came from another planet. What is a ‘zero priority rating’?” “Another-oh! I know you!” She looked off to the left. “Sonya-come over here a

second. You’d never guess who…” Another face crowded the cube, a vapid blonde girl whose smile was twin to the other nurse’s. “Remember? On the stat this morning?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “One of the soldiers-hey, that’s really max, really max.” The head withdrew.

“Oh, Mr. Mandella,” she said, effusive. “No wonder you’re confused. It’s really very simple.”

“Well?”

“It’s part of the Universal Medical Security System. Everybody gets a rating on their seventieth birthday. It comes in automatically from Geneva.”

“What does it rate? What does it mean?” But the ugly truth was obvious.

“Well, it tells how important a person is and what level of treatment he’s allowed. Class three is the same as anybody else’s; class two is the same except for certain life- extending-”

“And class zero is no treatment at all.”

“That’s correct, Mr. Mandella.” And in her smile was not a glimmer of pity or understanding.

“Thank you.” I disconnected. Marygay was standing behind me, crying soundlessly with her mouth wide open.

I found mountaineer’s oxygen at a sporting goods store and even managed to get some black-market antibiotics through a character in a bar downtown in Washington. But Mom was beyond being able to respond to amateur treatment. She lived four days. The people from the crematonum had the same fixed smile.

I tried to get through to my brother, Mike, on the Moon, but the phone company wouldn’t let me place the call until I had signed a contract and posted a $25,000 bond. I had to get a credit transfer from Geneva. The paperwork took half a day.

I finally got through to him. Without preamble: “Mother’s dead.”

For a fraction of a second, the radio waves wandered up to the moon, and in another fraction, came back. He started and then nodded his head slowly. “No surprise. Every time I’ve come down to Earth the past ten years, I’ve wondered whether she’d still be there. Neither of us had enough money to keep in very close touch.” He had told us in Geneva that a letter from Luna to Earth cost $100 postage- plus $5,000 tax. It discouraged communication with what the UN considered to be a bunch of regrettably necessary anarchists.

We commiserated for a while and then Mike said,

“Willy, Earth is no place for you and Marygay; you know that by now. Come to Luna. Where you can still be an

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individual. Where we don’t throw people out the airlock on their seventieth birthday.”

“We’d have to rejoin UNEF.”

“True, but you wouldn’t have to fight. They say they need you more for training. You could study in your spare time, bring your physics up to date-maybe wind up eventually in research.”

We talked some more, a total of three minutes. I got $1000 back.

Marygay and I talked about it through the night. Maybe our decision would have been different if we hadn’t been staying there, surrounded by Mother’s life and death, but when the dawn came the proud, ambitious, careful beauty of Columbia had turned sinister and foreboding.

We packed our bags and had our money transferred to the Tycho Credit Union and took a monorail to the Cape.

“In case you’re interested, you aren’t the first combat veterans to come back.” The recruiting officer was a muscular lieutenant of indeterminate sex. I flipped a coin men-tally and it came up tails.

“Last I heard, there had been nine others,” she said in her husky tenor. “All of them opted for the moon… maybe you’ll find some of your friends there.” She slid two simple forms across the desk. “Sign these and you’re in again. Second lieutenants.”

The form was a simple request to be assigned to active duty; we had never really gotten out of the Force, since they extended the draft law, but had just been on inactive status. I scrutinized the paper.

“There’s nothing on this about the guarantees we were given at Stargate.” “That won’t be necessary. The Force will-”

“I think it is necessary, Lieutenant.” I handed back the form. So did Marygay.

“Let me check.” She left the desk and disappeared into an office. After a while we heard a printer rattle.

She brought back the same two sheets, with an addition typed under our names: GUARANTEED LOCATION OF CHOICE

[LUNA] AND ASSIGNMENT OF CHOICE [col~iaAT TRAINING SPECIALIST].

We got a thorough physical checkup and were fitted for new fighting suits, made our financial arrangements, and caught the next morning’s shuttle. We laid over at Earth-port, enjoying zero gravity for a few hours, and then caught a ride to Luna, setting down at the Grimaldi base.

On the door to the Transient Officers’ Billet, some wag had scraped “abandon hope all ye who enter.” We found our two-man cubicle and began changing for chow.

Two raps on the door. “Mail call, sirs.”

I opened the door and the sergeant standing there saluted. I just looked at him for a second and then remembered I was an officer and returned the salute. He handed me two identical faxes. I gave one to Marygay and we both gasped at the same time:

* *ORDERS* *ORDERS**ORDERS

THE FOLLOWING NAMED PERSONNEL:

Mandella, William 2LT [11 575 278] COCOMM D Co GRITRABN

AND

Potter, Marygay 2LT [17 386 907] COCOMM B Co GRITRABN ARE HEREBY REASSIGNED TO:

LT Mandella. PLCOMM 2 PL STFFHETA STARGATE Lr Potter: PLCOMM 3 PL STF~HETA STARGATE. DESCRIPTION OF DUTIES:

Command infantry platoon in Tet-2 Campaign.

THE ABOVE NAMED PERSONNEL WILL REPORT IMMEDIATELY

TO GRIMALDI TRANSPORTATION BATTALION TO BE MAN IFESTED TO STARGATE.

ISSUED STARGATE TACBD/l 298-8684-1450/20 Aug 2019 SO:

BY AUTHO STFCOM Commander.

**ORDERS* *ORDERS**ORDERS

“They didn’t waste any time, did they?” Marygay said bitterly.

“Must be a standing order. Strike Force Command’s light-weeks away; they can’t even know we’ve re-upped yet.”

“What about our. . .” She let it trail off.

“The guarantee. Well, we were given our assignment of choice. Nobody guaranteed we’d have the assignment for more than an hour.”

“It’s so dirty.”

I shrugged. “It’s so army.”

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were going home.

LIEUTENANT MANDELLA 2024-2389 A.D.

“Quick and dirty.” 1 was looking at my platoon sergeant, Santesteban, but talking to myself. And anybody else who was listening.

“Yeah,” he said. “Gotta do it in the first coupla minutes or we’re screwed tight.” He was matter-of-fact, laconic. Drugged.

Private Collins came up with Halliday. They were holding hands unself- consciously. “Lieutenant Mandella?” Her voice btoke a little. “Can we have just a minute?”

“One minute,” I said, too abruptly. “We have to leave in five, I’m sorry.”

Hard to watch those two together now. Neither one had any combat experience. But they knew what everybody did; how slim their chances were of ever being

together again. They slumped in a corner and mumbled words and traded mechanical caresses, no passion or even comfort. Collins’s eyes shone but she wasn’t weeping. Halliday just looked grim, numb. She was normally by far the prettier of the two, but the sparkle had gone out of her and left a well-formed dull shell.

I’d gotten used to open female homosex in the months since we’d left Earth. Even stopped resenting the loss of potential partners. The men together still gave me a chill, though.

I stripped and backed into the clamshelled suit. The new ones were a hell of a lot more complicated, with all the new biometrics and trauma maintenance. But well worth the trouble of hooking up, in case you got blown apart just a little bit. Go home to a comfortable pension with heroic prosthesis. They were even talking about the possibility of regeneration, at least for missing arms and legs. Better get it soon, before Heaven filled up with fractional people. Heaven was the new hospital/rest- and-recreation planet.

I finished the set-up sequence and the suit closed by itself. Gritted my teeth against the pain that never came, when the internal sensors and fluid tubes poked into your body. Conditioned neural bypass, so you felt only a slight puzzling dislocation. Rather than the death of a thousand cuts.

Collins and Halliday were getting into their suits now and the other dozen were almost set, so I stepped over to the third platoon’s staging area. Say goodbye again to Marygay.

She was suited and heading my way. We touched helmets instead of using the radio. Privacy.

“Feeling OK, honey?”

“All right,” she said. “Took my pill.”

“Yeah, happy times.” I’d taken mine too, supposed to make you feel optimistic without interfering with your sense of judgment. I knew most of us would probably die, but I didn’t feel too bad about it. “Sack with me tonight?”

“If we’re both here,” she said neutrally. “Have to take a pill for that, too.” She tried to laugh. “Sleep, I mean. How’re the new people taking it? You have ten?”

“Ten, yeah, they’re OK. Doped up, quarter-dose.” “I did that, too; try to keep them loose.”

In fact, Santesteban was the only other combat veteran in my platoon; the four corporals had been in UNEF for a while but hadn’t ever fought.

The speaker in my cheekbone crackled and Commander Cortez said, “Two minutes. Get your people lined up.”

We had our goodbye and I went back to check my flock. Everybody seemed to have gotten suited up without any problems, so I put them on line. We waited for what seemed like a long time.

“All right, load ’em up.” With the word “up,” the bay door in front of me opened- the staging area having already been bled of air-and I led my men and women through to the assault ship.

These new ships were ugly as hell. Just an open framework with clamps to hold you in place, swiveled lasers fore and aft, small tachyon powerplants below the lasers. Everything automated; the machine would land us as quickly as

possible and then zip off to harass the enemy. It was a one-use, throwaway drone. The vehicle that would come pick us up if we survived was cradled next to it, much prettier.

We clamped in and the assault ship cast off from the Sangre y Victoria with twin spurts from the yaw jets. Then the voice of the machine gave us a short countdown and we sped off at four gees’ acceleration, straight down.

The planet, which we hadn’t bothered to name, was a chunk of black rock without any normal star close enough to give it heat. At first it was visible only by the absence of stars where its bulk cut off their light, but as we dropped closer we could see subtle variations in the blackness of its surface. We were coming down on the hemisphere opposite the Taurans’ outpost.

Our recon had shown that their camp sat in the middle of a flat lava plain several hundred kilometers in diameter. It was pretty primitive compared to other Tauran bases UNEF had encountered, but there wouldn’t be any sneaking up on it. We were going to careen over the horizon some fifteen klicks from the place, four ships converging simultaneously from different directions, all of us decelerating like mad, hopefully to drop right in their laps and come up shooting. There would be nothing to hide behind.

I wasn’t worried, of course. Abstractedly, I wished I hadn’t taken the pill.

We leveled off about a kilometer from the surface and sped along much faster than the rock’s escape velocity, constantly correcting to keep from flying away. The surface rolled below us in a dark gray blur; we shed a little light from the pseudo- cerenkov glow made by our tachyon exhaust, scooting away from our reality into its own.

The ungainly contraption skimmed and jumped along for some ten minutes; then suddenly the front jet glowed and we were snapped forward inside our suits, eyeballs trying to escape from their sockets in the rapid deceleration.

“Prepare for ejection,” the machine’s female-mechanical voice said. “Five, four. . .” The ship’s lasers started firing, millisecond flashes freezing the land below in jerky stroboscopic motion. It was a twisted, pock-marked jumble of fissures and random

black

rocks, a few meters below our feet. We were dropping, slowing.

“Three-” It never got any farther. There was a too-bright flash and I saw the horizon drop away as the ship’s tail pitched down-then clipped the ground, and we were rolling, horribly, pieces of people and ship scattering. Then we slid pinwheeling to a bumpy halt, and I tried to pull free but my leg was pinned under the ship’s bulk: excruciating pain and a dry crunch as the girder crushed my leg; shrill whistle of air escaping my breached suit; then the trauma maintenance turned on snick, more pain, then no pain and I was rolling free, short stump of a leg trailing blood that froze shiny black on the dull black rock. I tasted brass and a red haze closed everything out, then deepened to the brown of river clay, then loam and I passed out, with the pill thinking this is not so bad.

The suit is set up to save as much of your body as possible. If you lose part of an arm or a leg, one of sixteen razor-sharp irises closes around your limb with the force of a hydraulic press, snipping it off neatly and sealing the suit before you can die of explosive decompression. Then “trauma maintenance” cauterizes the stump, replaces lost blood, and fills you full of happy-juice and No-shock. So you will either

die happy or, if your comrades go on to win the battle, eventually be carried back up to the ship’s aid station.

We’d won that round, while I slept swaddled in dark cotton. I woke up in the infinnary. It was crowded. I was in the middle of a long row of cots, each one holding someone who had been three-fourths (or less) saved by his suit’s trauma maintenance feature. We were being ignored by the ship’s two doctors, who stood in bright light at operating tables, absorbed in blood rituals. I watched them for a long time. Squinting into the bright light, the blood on their green tunics could have been grease, the swathed bodies, odd soft machines that they were fixing. But the machines would cry out in their sleep, and the mechanics muttered reassurances while they plied their greasy tools. I watched and slept and woke up in different places.

lrlErunEvLjt wttit I ..)~

Finally I woke up in a regular bay.I was strapped down and being fed through a tube, biosensor electrodes attached lere and there, but no medics around. The only other peron in the little room was Marygay, sleeping on the bunk next to me. Her right arm was amputated just above the elbow.

I didn’t wake her up, just looked at her for a long time and tried to sort out my feelings. Tried to filter out the effect of the mood drugs. Looking at her stump, I could feel neither empathy nor revulsion. I tried to force one reaction, and then the other, but nothing real happened. It was as if she had always been that way. Was it drugs, conditioning, love? Have to wait to see.

Her eyes opened suddenly and I knew she had been awake for some time, had been giving me time to think “Hello, broken toy,” she said.

“How-how do you feel?” Bright question.

She put a finger to her lips and kissed it, a familiar gesture, reflection. “Stupid, numb. Glad not to be a soldier anymore.” She smiled. “Did they tell you? We’re going to Heaven.”

“No. I knew it would be either there or Earth.”

“Heaven will be better.” Anything would. “I wish we were there now.” “How long?” I asked. “How long before we get there?”

She rolled over and looked at the ceiling. “No telling. You haven’t talked to anybody?”

“Just woke up.”

“There’s a new directive they didn’t bother to tell us about before. The Sangre y Victoria got orders for four missions. We have to keep on fighting until we’ve done all four. Or until we’ve sustained so many casualties that it wouldn’t be practical to go on.”

“How many is that?”

“I wonder. We lost a good third already. But we’re headed for Aleph-7. Panty raid.” New slang term for the type of operation whose main object was to gather Tauran artifacts, and prisoners if possible. I tried to find out where the term came from, but the one explanation I got was really idiotic.

One knock on the door and Dr. Foster barged in. He fluttered his hands. “Still in separate beds? Marygay, I thought you were more recovered than that.” Foster was all right A flaming mariposa, but he had an amused tolerance for heterosexuality.

He examined Marygay’s stump and then mine. He stuck thermometers in our mouths so we couldn’t talk. When he spoke, he was serious and blunt.

“I’m not going to sugarcoat anything for you. You’re both on happyjuice up to your ears, and the loss you’ve sustained isn’t going to bother you until I take you off the stuff. For my own convenience I’m keeping you drugged until you get to Heaven. I have twenty-one amputees to take care of. We can’t handle twenty-one psychiatric cases.

“Enjoy your peace of mind while you still have it. You two especially, since you’ll probably want to stay together. The prosthetics you get on Heaven will work just fine, but every time you look at his mechanical leg or you look at her arm, you’re going to think of how lucky the other one is. You’re going to constantly trigger memories of pain and loss for each other… . You may be at each other’s throats in a week. Or you may share a sullen kind of love for the rest of your lives.

“Or you may be able to transcend it. Give each other strength. Just don’t kid yourselves if it doesn’t work out.”

He checked the readout on each thermometer and made a notation in his notebook. “Doctor knows best, even if he is a little weird by your own old-fashioned standards. Keep it in mind.” He took the thermometer out of my mouth and gave me a little pat on the shoulder. Impartially, he did the same to Marygay. At the door, he said, “We’ve got collapsar insertion in about six hours. One of the nurses will take you to the tanks.”

We went into the tanks-so much more comfortable and safer than the old individual acceleration shells-and dropped into the Tet-2 collapsar field already starting the crazy fifty-gee evasive maneuvers that would protect us from enemy cruisers when we popped out by Aleph-7, a microsecond later.

Predictably, the Aleph-7 campaign was a dismal failure, and we limped away from it with a two-campaign total of fifty-four dead and thirty-nine cripples bound for Heaven. Only twelve soldiers were still able to fight, but they weren’t exactly straining at the leash.

It took three collapsar jumps to get to Heaven. No ship ever went there directly from a battle, even though the delay sometimes cost extra lives. It was the one place besides Earth that the Taurans could not be allowed to find.

Heaven was a lovely, unspoiled Earth-like world; what Earth might have been like if men had treated her with compassion instead of lust. Virgin forests, white beaches, pristine deserts. The few dozen cities there either blended perfectly with the environment (one was totally underground) or were brazen statements of human ingenuity; Oceanus, in a coral reef with six fathoms of water over its transparent roof; Boreas, perched on a sheared-off mountaintop in the polar wasteland; and the fabulous Skye, a huge resort city that floated from continent to continent on the trade winds.

We landed, as everyone does, at the jungle city, Threshold. Three-fourths hospital, it’s by far the planet’s largest city, but you couldn’t tell that from the air, flying down from orbit. The only sign of civilization was a short runway that suddenly appeared, a small white patch dwarfed to insignificance by the stately rain forest that crowded in from the east and an immense ocean that dominated the other horizon.

Once under the arboreal cover, the city was very much in evidence. Low buildings of native stone and wood rested among ten-meter-thick tree trunks. They were connected by unobtrusive stone paths, with one wide promenade meandering off to

the beach. Sunlight filtered down in patches, and the air held a mixture of forest sweetness and salt tang.

I later learned that the city sprawled out over 200 square kilometers, that you could take a subway to anyplace that was too far to walk. The ecology of Threshold was very carefully balanced and maintained so as to resemble the jungle outside, with all the dangerous and uncomfortable elements eliminated. A powerful pressor field kept out large

joe naweman

predators and such insect life as was not necessary for the health of the plants inside.

We walked, limped and rolled into the nearest building, which was the hospital’s reception area. The rest of the hospital was underneath, thirty subterranean stories. Each person was examined and assigned his own room; I tried to get a double with Marygay, but they weren’t set up for that

“Earth-year” was 2189. So I was 215 years old, God, look at that old codger. Somebody pass the hat-no, not necessary. The doctor who examined me said that my accumulated pay would be transferred from Earth to Heaven. With compound interest, I was just shy of being a billionaire. He remarked that I’d find lots of ways to spend my billion on Heaven.

They took the most severely wounded first, so it was several days before I went into surgery. Afterwards, I woke up in my room and found that they had grafted a prosthesis onto my stump, an articulated structure of shiny metal that to my untrained eye looked exactly like the skeleton of a leg and foot. It looked creepy as hell, lying there in a transparent bag of fluid, wires running out of it to a machine at the end of the bed.

An aide came in. “How you feelin’, sir?” I almost told him to forget the “sir” bullshit, I was out of the army and staying out this time. But it might be nice for the guy to keep feeling that I outranked him.

“I don’t know. Hurts a little.”

“Gonna hurt like a sonuvabitch. Wait’ll the nerves start to grow.” “Nerves?”

“Sure.” He was fiddling with the machine, reading dials on the other side. “How you gonna have a leg without nerves? It’d just sit there.”

“Nerves? Like regular nerves? You mean I can just think ‘move’ and the thing moves?”

“‘Course you can.” He looked at me quizzically, then went back to his adjustments.

What a wonder. “Prosthetics has sure come a long way.”

THE FOREVER WAR 163

“Pross-what-ics?” “You know, artificial-”

“Oh yeah, like in books. Wooden legs, hooks and stuff.” How’d he ever get a job? “Yeah, prosthetics. Like this thing on the end of my stump.”

“Look, sir.” He set down the clipboard he’d been scribbling on. “You’ve been away a long time. That’s gonna be a leg, just like the other leg except it can’t break.”

“They do it with arms, too?”

“Sure, any limb.” He went back to his writing. “Livers, kidneys, stomachs, all kinds of things. Still working on hearts and lungs, have to use mechanical substitutes.”

“Fantastic.” Marygay would be whole again, too.

He shrugged. “Guess so. They’ve been doing it since before I was born. How old are you, sir?”

I told him, and he whistled. “God damn. You musta been in it from the beginning.” His accent was very strange. All the words were right but all the sounds were wrong.

“Yeah. 1 was in the Epsilon attack. Aleph-null.” They’d started naming collapsars after letters of the Hebrew alphabet, in order of discovery, then ran out of letters when the damn things started cropping up all over the place. So they added numbers after the letters; last I heard, they were up to Yod-42.

“Wow, ancient history. What was it like back then?”

“I don’t know. Less crowded, nicer. Went back to Earth a year ago-hell, a century ago. Depends on how you look at it. It was so bad I re-enlisted, you know? Bunch of zombies. No offense.”

He shrugged. “Never been there, myself. People who come from there seem to miss it. Maybe it got better.”

“What, you were born on another planet? Heaven?” No wonder I couldn’t place his accent.

“Born, raised and drafted.” He put the pen back in his pocket and folded the clipboard up to a wallet-sized package. “Yes, sir. Third-generation angel. Best damned planet in all UNEF.” He spelled it out, didn’t say “youneff” the way I’d always heard it.

“Look, I’ve gotta run, lieutenant. Two other monitors to check, this hour.” He backed out the door. “You need anything, there’s a buzzer on the table there.”

Third-generation angel. His grandparents came from Earth, probably when I was a young punk of a hundred. I wondered how many other worlds they’d colonized while my back was turned. Lose an arm, grow a new one?

It was going to be good to settle down and live a whole year for every year that went by.

The guy wasn’t kidding about the pain. And it wasn’t just the new leg, though that hurt like boiling oil. For the new tissues to “take,” they’d had to subvert my body’s resistance to alien cells; cancer broke out in a half-dozen places and had to be treated separately, painfully.

I was feeling pretty used up, but it was still kind of fas- cinating to watch the leg grow. White threads turned into blood vessels and nerves, first hanging a little slack, then moving into place as the musculature grew up around the metal bone.

I got used to seeing it grow, so the sight never repelled me. But when Marygay came to visit, it was a jolt-she was ambulatory before the skin on her new arm had started to grow; looked like a walking anatomy demonstration. I got over the shock, though, and she eventually came in for a few hours every day to play games or trade gossip or just sit and read, her arm slowly growing inside the plastic cast.

I’d had skin for a week before they uncased the new leg and trundled the machine away. It was ugly as hell, hairless and dead white, stiff as a metal rod. But it worked, after a fashion. I could stand up and shuffle along.

They transferred me to orthopedics, for “range and motion repatterning”-a fancy name for slow torture. They strap you into a machine that bends both the old and new legs simultaneously. The new one resists.

Marygay was in a nearby section, having her arm twisted methodically. It must have been even worse on her; she looked gray and haggard every afternoon, when we met to go upstairs and sunbathe in the broken shade.

As the days went by, the therapy became less like torture and more like strenuous exercise. We both began swimming for an hour or so every clear day, in the calm, pressor

THE FOREVER WAR 165

guarded water off the beach. I still limped on land, but in the water I could get around pretty well.

The only real excitement we had on Heaven-excitement to our combat-blunted sensibilities-was in that carefully guarded water.

They have to turn off the pressor field for a split second every time a ship lands; otherwise it would just ricochet off over the ocean. Every now and then an animal slips in, but the dangerous land animals are too slow to get through. Not so in the sea.

The undisputed master of Heaven’s oceans is an ugly customer that the angels, in a fit of originality, named the “shark.” It could eat a stack of earth sharks for breakfast, though.

The one that got in was an average-sized white shark who had been bumping around the edge of the pressor field for days, tormented by all that protein splashing around inside. Fortunately, there’s a warning siren two minutes before the pressor is shut down, so nobody was in the water when he came streaking through. And streak through he did, almost beaching himself in the fury of his fruitless attack.

He was twelve meters of flexible muscle with a razor-sharp tail at one end and a collection of arm-length fangs at the other. His eyes, big yellow globes, were set on stalks more than a meter out from his head. His mouth was so wide that, open, a man could comfortably stand in it. Make an impressive photo for his heirs.

They couldn’t just turn off the pressor field and wait for the thing to swim away. So the Recreation Committee organized a hunting party.

I wasn’t too enthusiastic about offering myself up as an hors d’oeuvre to a giant fish, but Marygay had spearfished a lot as a kid growing up in Florida and was really excited by the prospect. I went along with the gag when I found out how they were doing it; seemed safe enough.

These “sharks” supposedly never attack people in boats. Two people who had more faith in fishermen’s stories than I had gone out to the edge of the pressor field in a rowboat,

armed only with a side of beef. They kicked the meat overboard and the shark was there in a flash.

This was the cue for us to step in and have our fun. There were twenty-three of us fools waiting on the beach with flippers, masks, breathers and one spear each. The spears were pretty formidable, though, jet-propelled and with high-explosive heads.

We splashed in and swam in phalanx, underwater, toward the feeding creature. When it saw us at first, it didn’t attack. It tried to hide its meal, presumably so that some of us wouldn’t be able to sneak around and munch on it while the shark was

dealing with the others. But every time he tried for the deep water, he’d bump into the pressor field. He was obviously getting pissed off.

Finally, he just let go of the beef, whipped around and charged. Great sport. He was the size of your finger one second, way down there at the other end of the field, then suddenly as big as the guy next to you and closing fast.

Maybe ten of the spears hit him-mine didn’t-and they tore him to shreds. But even after an expert, or lucky, brain shot that took off the top of his head and one eye, even with half his flesh and entrails scattered in a bloody path behind him, he slammed into our line and clamped his jaws around a woman, grinding off both of her legs before it occurred to him to die.

We carried her, barely alive, back to the beach, where an ambulance was waiting. They poured her full of blood surrogate and No-shock and rushed her to the hospital, where she survived to eventually go through the agony of growing new legs. I decided that I would leave the hunting of fish to other fish.

Most of our stay at Threshold, once the therapy became bearable, was pleasant enough. No military discipline, lots of reading and things to potter around with. But there was a pall over it, since it was obvious that we weren’t out of the army; just pieces of broken equipment that they were fixing up to throw back into the fray. Marygay and I each had another three years to serve in our lieutenancies.

But we did have six months of rest and recreation coming once our new limbs were pronounced in good working

order. Marygay was released two days before I was but waited around for me.

My back pay came to $892,746,012. Not in the form of bales of currency, fortunately; on Heaven they used an electronic credit exchange, so I carried my fortune around in a little machine with a digital readout. To buy something you punched in the vendor’s credit number and the amount of purchase; the sum was automatically shuffled from your account to his. The machine was the size of a slender wallet and coded to your thumbprint.

Heaven’s economy was governed by the continual presence of thousands of resting, recreating millionaire soldiers. A modest snack would cost a hundred bucks, a room for a night at least ten times that. Since UNEF built and owned Heaven, this runaway inflation was pretty transparently a simple way of getting our accumulated pay back into the economic mainstream.

We had fun, desperate fun. We rented a flyer and camping gear and went off for weeks, exploring the planet. There were icy rivers to swim and lush jungles to crawl through; meadows and mountains and polar wastes and deserts.

We could be totally protected from the environment by adjusting our individual pressor fields-sleep naked in a blizzard-or we could take nature straight. At Marygay’s suggestion, the last thing we did before coming back to civilization was to climb a pinnacle in the desert, fasting for several days to heighten our sensibilities (or warp our perceptions, I’m still not sure), and sit back-to-back in the searing heat, contemplating the languid flux of life.

Then off to the fleshpots. We toured every city on the planet, and each had its own particular charm, but we finally returned to Skye to spend the rest of our leave time.

The rest of the planet was bargain-basement compared to Skye. In the four weeks we were using the airborne pleasure dome as our home base, Marygay and I each went through a good half-billion dollars. We gambled-sometimes losing a million dollars or more in a night-ate and drank the finest the planet had to offer, and

sampled every service and product that wasn’t too bizarre for our admittedly archaic tastes. We each had a personal servant whose

Ion

Joe tialcieman

salary was rather more than that of a major general.

Desperate fun, as I said. Unless the war changed radically, our chances of surviving the next three years were microscopic. We were remarkably healthy victims of a terminal disease, trying to cram a lifetime of sensation into a half of a year.

We did have the consolation, not small, that however

short the remainder of our lives would be, we would at least be together. For some reason it never occurred to me that even that could be taken from us.

We were enjoying a light lunch in the transparent “first floor” of Skye, watching the ocean glide by underneath us, when a messenger bustled in and gave us two envelopes:

our orders.

Marygay had been bumped to captain, and 1 to major, on the basis of our military records and tests we had taken at Threshold. I was a company commander and she was a company’s executive officer.

But they weren’t the same company.

She was going to muster with a new company being formed right here on Heaven. I was going back to Stargate for “indoctrination and education” before taking command.

For a long time we couldn’t say anything. “I’m going to protest,” I said finally, weakly. “They can’t make me a commander. Into a commander.”

She was still struck dumb. This was not just a separation. Even if the war was over and we left for Earth only a few minutes apart, in different ships, the geometry of the collapsar jump would pile up years between us. When the second one arrived on Earth, his partner would probably be a half-century older; more probably dead.

We sat there for some time, not touching the exquisite food, ignoring the beauty around us and beneath us, only conscious of each other and the two sheets of paper that separated us with a gulf as wide and real as death.

We went back to Threshold. I protested but my arguments were shrugged off. I tried to get Marygay assigned to my company, as my exec. They said my personnel had

all been allotted. I pointed out That most of them probably hadn’t even been born yet. Nevertheless, allotted, they said.

It would be almost a century, I said, before I even get to Stargate. They replied that Strike Force Command plans in terms of centuries.

Not in terms of people.

We had a day and a night together. The less said about that, the better. It wasn’t just losing a lover. Marygay and I were each other’s only link to real life, the Earth of the

1980s and 90s. Not the perverse grotesquerie we were supposedly fighting to preserve. When her shuttle took off it

was like a casket rattling down into a grave.

I commandeered computer time and found out the orbital elements of her ship and its departure time; found out I could watch her leave from “our” desert.

I landed on the pinnacle where we had starved together and, a few hours before dawn, watched a new star appear over the western horizon, flare to brilliance and fade as it moved away, becoming just another star, then a dim star, and then nothing. I walked to the edge and looked down the sheer rock face to the dim frozen rippling of dunes half a kilometer below. I sat with my feet dangling over the edge, thinking nothing, until the sun’s oblique rays illuminated the dunes in a soft, tempting chiaroscuro of low relief. Twice I shifted my weight as if to jump. When I didn’t, it was not for fear of pain or loss. The pain would be only a bright spark and the loss would be only the army’s. And it would be their ultimate victory over me- having ruled my life for so long, to force an end to it.

That much, I owed to the enemy. MAJOR

MANDELLA 2458-3143 A.D.

What was that old experiment they told us about in high school biology? Take a flatworm and teach it how to swim through a maze. Then mash it up and feed it to a stupid flatworm, and lo! the stupid flatworm would be able to swim the maze, too.

I had a bad taste of major general in my mouth. Actually, I supposed they had refined the techniques since my high school days. With time dilation, that was about 450 years for research and development.

At Stargate, my orders said, I was to undergo “indoctrination and education” prior to taking command of my very own Strike Force. Which was what they still called a company.

For my education on Stargate, they didn’t mince up major generals and serve them to me with hollandaise. They didn’t feed me anything except glucose for three weeks.

Glucose and electricity.

They shaved every hair off my body, gave me a shot that turned me into a dishrag, attached dozens of electrodes to my head and body, immersed me in a tank of oxygenated fluorocarbon, and hooked me up to an ALSC. That’s an “accelerated life situation computer.” It kept me busy.

I guess it took the machine about ten minutes to review

everything I had learned previously about the martial (excuse the expression) arts. Then it started in on the new stuff.

I learned the best way to use every weapon from a rock to a nova bomb. Not just intellectually; that’s what all those electrodes were for. Cybernetically-controlled negative feedback kinesthesia; I felt the weapons in my hands and watched my performance with them. And did it over and over until I did it right. The illusion of reality was total. I used a spear-thrower with a band of Masai warriors on a village raid, and when I looked down at my body it was

long and black. I relearned epee from a cruel-looking man in foppish clothes, in an eighteenth-century French courtyard. I sat quietly in a tree with a Sharps rifle and

sniped at blue-uniformed men as they crawled across a muddy field toward Vicksburg. In three weeks I killed several regiments of electronic ghosts. It seemed more like a year to me, but the ALSC does strange things to your sense of time.

Learning to use useless exotic weapons was only a small part of the training. In fact, it was the relaxing part. Because when I wasn’t in kinesthesia, the machine kept my body totally inert and zapped my brain with four millennia’s worth of military facts and theories. And I couldn’t forget any of it! Not while I was in the tank.

Want to know who Scipio Aemilianus was? I don’t. Bright light of the Third Punic War. War is the province of danger and therefore courage above all things is the first quality of a warrior, von Clausewitz maintained. And I’ll never forget the poetry of “the advance party minus normally moves in a column formation with the platoon headquarters leading, followed by a laser squad, the heavy weapons squad, and the remaining laser squad; the column relies on observation for its flank security except when the terrain and visibility dictate the need for small security detachments to the flanks, in which case the advance party c~ommander will detail one platoon sergeant. . .” and so on.

That’s from Strike Force Command Small Unit Leader’s Handbook, as if you could call something a handbook when it takes up two whole microfiche cards, 2,000 pages.

If you want to become a thoroughly eclectic expert in a subject that repels you, join UNEF and sign up for officer training.

One hundred nineteen people, and I was responsible for 118 of them. Counting myself but not counting the Commodore, who could presumably take care of herself.

I hadn’t met any of my company during the two weeks of physical rehabilitation that followed the ALSC session. Before our first muster I was supposed to report to the Temporal Orientation Officer. I called for an appointment and his clerk said the Colonel would meet me at the Level Six Officers’ Club after dinner.

TABLE OF ORGANIZATION

Strike Force Gamma Sade-138 Campaign

IECHN:

MAJ Mondella

COMM Anwpol 2ECHN:

CAPT Moore

3ECHN:

ILT Hilleboe

4ECHN:

2LT Riland
2LT Rusk

2LT ALvever MD

5ECHN:

2LT Borgstedz
2LT Brill
2LT Gainor

2LT Heimoff 6ECHN:

SSgr Webster
SSgt Gillies
SSgr Abram:

SSgt Dole 7ECHN:

Sgt Dolins
Sgz Bell
Cpl Geller
Cpl Kahn
Sgt Anderson

Cpl Kalvm

Sgt Noyes
Cpl Spraggs

8ECHN:

Pvt Boas
CpJ Weiner
Pvt Lingeman
Pvt IkIe

Pvt Rosevear
Pvt Schon
Pvt Wolfe, R.
Pvt Shubik
Pvt Lin
Pvt Duhl

Pvt Simmons
Pvt Perloff
Pvt Winograd
Pvt Moynihan
Pvt Brown
Pvt Frank

Pvt Bloomquist
Pvt Graubard
Pvt Wong
Pvt Orlans

Pvt Louria
Pvt Mayr
Pvt Gross
Pvt Quarton
Pvt Asadi
Pvt Hin

Pvt Horman
Pvt Stendahi
Pvt Fox
Pvt Erikson
Pvt Born
Pvt Miller

Pvt Reisman
Pvt Coupling
Pvt Rosiow

Pvt Huntington
Pvt Dc Sola

Pvt Pool
Pvt Nepala
Pvt Schuba
Pvt Ulanov
Pvt Shelley
Pvt Lynn
Pvt Slaer
Pvt Schenk
Pvt Deelstre
Pvt Levy
Pvt Conroy
Pvt Yakata
Pvt Burns

Pvt Cohen Pvt Graham

Pvt Schoeliple Pvt Wolfe, E. Pvt Karkoshka Pvt Majer

Pvt Dioujova Pvt Armaing Pvt Baulez Pvt Johnson Pvt Oitrecht Pvt Kayibanth Pvt Tschudi

Supporting: ILT Williams (NAy), 2LTs Jarvil (MED), Laasonen (MED), Wilber (PSY), Szydlowska (MAINT), Gaptchcnko (ORD), Gedo (COMM),

Gim (COMP); 1SGTs Evans (MED), Rodriguez (MED), Kostidinov (MED), Rwabwogo (PSY), Blazynski (MAINT), Turpin (ORD); SSGTS

Carreras (MED), Kousnetzov (MED), Waruinge (MED). Rojas (MED), Botos (MAINT), Orban (CK), Mbugua (COMP); SGTs Perez (MED), Seales

(MAINT), Anghelov (01W), Vugin (COMP); CPLs Daborg (MED), Correa (MED), Kajdi (SEX), Valdez (SEX), Muranga (01W); PVTs Kottysch (MAINT), Rudkoski (CK), Minter (ORE)).

APPROVED STFCOM STARGATE 12 Mar 2458. FOR ThE COMMANDER:

Olga Torischeva BGEN STFCOM I iO

I went down to Six early, thinking to eat dinner there, but they had nothing but snacks. Sol munched on a fungus thing that vaguely resembled escargots and took the rest of my calories in the form of alcohol.

“Major Mandeila?” I’d been busily engaged in my seventh beer and hadn’t seen the Colonel approach. I started to rise but he motioned for me to stay seated and dropped heavily into the chair opposite me.

“I’m in your debt,” he said. “You saved me from at least half of a boring evening.” He offered his hand. “Jack Kynock, at your service.”

“Colonel-”

“Don’t Colonel me and I won’t Major you. We old fossits have to. – – keep our perspective. William.”

“All right with me.”

He ordered a kind of drink I’d never heard of. “Where to start? Last time you were on Earth was 2007, according to the records.”

“That’s right.”

“Didn’t like it much, did you?” “No.” Zombies, happy robots.

“Well, it got better. Then it got worse, thank you.” A private brought his drink, a bubbling concoction that was green at the bottom of the glass and lightened to chartreuse at the top. He sipped. “Then they got better again, then worse, then. . . I don’t know. Cycles.”

“What’s it like now?”

“Well – . – I’m not really sure. Stacks of reports and such, but it’s hard to filter out the propaganda. I haven’t been back in almost two hundred years; it was pretty bad then. Depending on what you like.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, let me see. There was lots of excitement. Ever hear of the Pacifist movement?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Hmn, the name’s deceptive. Actually, it was a war, a guerrilla war.”

“I thought I could give you name, rank and serial number of every war from Troy on up.” He smiled. “They must have missed one.”
“For good reason. It was run by veterans-survivors of Yod-38 and Aleph-40, I hear; they got discharged together and decided they could take on all of UNEF, Earthside. They got lots of support from the population.”

“But didn’t win.”

“We’re still here.” He swirled his drink and the colors shifted. “Actually, all I know is hearsay. Last time I got to Earth, the war was over, except for some sporadic sabotage. And it wasn’t exactly a safe topic of conversation.”

“It surprises me a little,” I said, “well, more than a little. That Earth’s population would do anything at all.. – against the government’s wishes.”

He made a noncommittal sound.

“Least of all, revolution. When we were there, you couldn’t get anybody to say a damned thing against the UNEF-or any of the local governments, for that matter. They were conditioned from ear to ear to accept things as they were.”

“Ah. That’s a cyclic thing, too.” He settled back in his chair. “It’s not a matter of technique. if they wanted to, Earth’s government could have total control over. . . every nontrivial thought and action of each citizen, from cradle to grave.

“They don’t do it because it would be fatal. Because there’s a war on. Take your own case: did you get any motivational conditioning while you were in the can?”

I thought for a moment. “if I did, I wouldn’t necessarily know about it.”

“That’s true. Partially true. But take my word for it, they left that part of your brain alone. Any change in your attitude toward UNEF or the war, or war in general, comes only from new knowledge. Nobody’s fiddled with your basic motivations. And you should know why.”

Names, dates, figures rattled down through the maze of new knowledge. “Tet-17,

Sed-2l, Aleph-14. The Lazlo

‘The Lazlo Emergency Commission Report.’ June, 2106.”

“Right. And by extension, your own experience on Aleph-l. Robots don’t make good soldiers.”

“They would,” I said. “Up to the twenty-first century. BehaViOral conditioning would have been the answer to a i to

Joe Ilauleman

general’s dream. Make up an army with all the best features of the SS, the Praetorian Guard, the Golden Horde. Mosby’s Raiders, the Green Berets.”

He laughed over his glass. “Then put that army up against a squad of men in modem fighting suits. It’d be over in a couple of minutes.”

“So long as each man in the squad kept his head about him. And just fought like hell to stay alive.” The generation of soldiers that had precipitated the Lazlo Reports

had been conditioned from birth to conform to somebody’s vision of the ideal fighting man. They worked beautifully as a team, totally bloodthirsty, placing no great importance on personal survival-and the Taurans cut them to ribbons.

The Taurans also fought with no regard for self. But they were better at it, and there were always more of them.

Kynock took a drink and watched the colors. “I’ve seen your psych profile,” he said. “Both before you got here and after your session in the can. It’s essentially the same, before and after.”

“That’s reassuring.” I signaled for another beer. “Maybe it shouldn’t be.”

“What, it says I won’t make a good officer? I told them that from the beginning. I’m no leader.”

“Right in a way, wrong in a way. Want to know what that profile says?” I shrugged. “Classified, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said. “But you’re a major now. You can pull the profile of anybody in your command.”

“I don’t suppose it has any big surprises.” But I was a little curious. What animal isn’t fascinated by a mirror?

“No. It says you’re a pacifist. A failed one at that, which gives you a mild neurosis. Which you handle by transferring the burden of guilt to the army.”

The fresh beer was so cold it hurt my teeth. “No surprises yet.”

“And as far as being a leader, you do have a certain potential. But it would be along the lines of a teacher or a minister; you would have to lead from empathy, compassion. You have the desire to impose your ideas on other people, but not your will. Which means, you’re right, you’ll make one hell of a bad officer unless you shape up.”

I had to laugh. “UNEF must have known all of this when they ordered me to officer training.”

“There are other parameters,” he said. “For instance, you’re adaptable, reasonably intelligent, analytical. And you’re one of the eleven people who’s lived through the whole war.”

“Surviving is a virtue in a private.” Couldn’t resist it. “But an officer should provide gallant example. Go down with the ship. Stride the parapet as if unafraid.”

He harrumphed at that. “Not when you’re a thousand light years from your replacement.”

“It doesn’t add up, though. Why would they haul me all the way from Heaven to take a chance on my ‘shaping up,’ when probably a third of the people here on Stargate are better officer material? God, the military mind!”

“I suspect the bureaucratic mind, at least, had something to do with it. You have an embarrassing amount of seniority to be a footsoldier.”

“That’s all time dilation. I’ve only been in three campaigns.”

“Immaterial. Besides, that’s two-and-a-half more than the average soldier survives. The propaganda boys will probably make you into some kind of a folk hero.”

“Folk hero.” I sipped at the beer. “Where is John Wayne now that we really need him?”

“John Wayne?” He shook his head. “I never went in the can, you know. I’m no expert at military history.”

“Forget it.”

Kynock finished his drink and asked the private to get him-I swear to God-a “rum Antares.”

“Well, I’m supposed to be your Temporal Orientation Officer. What do you want to know about the present? What passes for the present.”

Still on my mind: “You’ve never been in the can?”

“No, combat officers only. The computer facilities and energy you go through in three weeks would keep the Earth running for several days. Too expensive for us deskwarmers.”

“Your decorations say you’re combat.”

“Honorary. I was.” The rum Antares was a tall slender glass with a little ice floating at the top, filled with pale amber liquid. At the bottom was a bright red globule about the size of a thumbnail; crimson filaments waved up from it.

“What’s that red stuff?”

“Cinnamon. Oh, some ester with cinnamon in it. Quite good. . . want a taste?” “No, I’ll stick to beer, thanks.”

“Down at level one, the library machine has a temporal orientation file, that my staff updates every day. You can go to it for specific questions. Mainly I want to.. . prepare you for meeting your Strike Force.”

“What, they’re all cyborgs? Clones?”

He laughed. “No, it’s illegal to clone humans. The main problem is with, uh, you’re heterosexual.”

“Oh, that’s no problem. I’m tolerant.”

“Yes, your profile shows that you.. . think you’re tolerant, but that’s not the problem, exactly.”

“Oh,” I knew what he was going to say. Not the details, but the substance. “Only emotionally stable people are drafted into UNEF.

I know this is hard for you to accept, but heterosexuality is considered an emotional dysfunction. Relatively easy to cure.”

“If they think they’re going to cure me-”

“Relax, you’re too old.” He took a delicate sip. “It won’t be as hard to get along with them as you might-”

“Wait. You mean nobody.. . everybody in my company is homosexual? But me?” “William, everybody on Earth is homosexual. Except for a thousand or so;

veterans and incurables.”

“AK” What could I say? “Seems like a drastic way to solve the population problem.”

“Perhaps. It does work, though; Earth’s population is stable at just under a billion. When one person dies or goes offplanet, another is quickened.”

“Not ‘born.'”

“Born, yes, but not the old-fashioned way. Your old term for it was ‘test-tube babies,’ but of course they don’t use a test-tube.” “Well, that’s something.”

“Part of every creche is an artificial womb that takes care of a person the first eight or ten months after quickening. What you would call birth takes place over a period of days; it isn’t the sudden, drastic event that it used to be.”

O brave new world, I thought. “No birth trauma. A billion perfectly adjusted homosexuals.”

“Perfectly adjusted by present-day Earth standards. You and I might find them a little odd.”

“That’s an understatement.” I drank off the rest of my beer. “Yourself, you, uh.. . are you homosexual?”

“Oh, no,” he said. I relaxed. “Actually, though, I’m not hetero anymore, either.” He slapped his hip and it made an odd sound. “Got wounded and it turned out that I had a rare disorder of the lymphatic system, can’t regenerate. Nothing but metal and plastic from the waist down. To use your word, I’m a cyborg.”

Far out, as my mother used to say. “Oh, Private,” I called to the waiter, “bring me one of those Antares things.” Sitting here in a bar with an asexual cyborg who is probably the only other normal person on the whole goddamned planet.

“Make it a double, please.”

They looked normal enough, filing into the lecture hail where we held our first muster, the next day. Rather young and a little stiff.

Most of them had only been out of the creche for seven or eight years. The creche was a controlled, isolated environment to which only a few specialists-pediatricians and teachers, mostly-had access. When a person leaves the creche at age twelve or thirteen, he chooses a first name (his last name having been taken from the donor- parent with the higher genetic rating) and is legally a probationary adult, with schooling about equivalent to what I had after my first year of college. Most of them go on to more specialized education, but some are assigned a job and go right to work.

They’re observed very closely and anyone who shows any signs of sociopathy, such as heterosexual leanings, is sent away to a correctional facility. He’s either cured or kept there for the rest of his life.

Everyone is drafted into UNEF at the age of twenty. Most people work at a desk for five years and are discharged. A few lucky souls, about one in eight thousand, are invited to volunteer for combat training. Refusing is “sociopathic,” even though it means signing up for an extra five years. And your chance of surviving the ten years is so small as to be negligible; nobody ever had. Your best chance is to have the war end before your ten (subjective) years of service are up. Hope that time dilation puts many years between each of your battles.

Since you can figure on going into battle roughly once every subjective year, and since an average of 34 percent survive each battle, it’s easy to compute your chances of being able to fight it out for ten years. It comes to about ~wo one-thousandths of one percent. Or, to put it another way, get an old-fashioned six-shooter and play Russian Roulette with four of the six chambers loaded. If you can do it ten times in a row without decorating the opposite wall, congratulations! You’re a civilian.

There being some sixty thousand combat soldiers in UNEF, you could expect about 1.2 of them to survive for ten years. I didn’t seriously plan on being the lucky one, even though I was halfway there.

How many of these young soldiers filing into the auditorium knew they were doomed? I tried to match faces up with the dossiers I’d been scanning all morning, but it was hard. They’d all been selected through the same battery of stringent parameters, and they looked remarkably alike: tall but not too tall, muscular but not heavy, intelligent but not in a brooding way. . . and Earth was much more racially homogenous than it had been in my century. Most of them looked vaguely Polynesian. Only two of them, Kayibanda and Lin, seemed pure representatives of racial types. I wondered whether the others gave them a hard time.

Most of the women were achingly handsome, but I was in no position to be critical. I’d been celibate for over a year, ever since saying goodbye to Marygay, back on Heaven.

I wondered if one of them might have a trace of atavism, or might humor her commander’s eccentricity. It is absolately forbidden for an officer to form sexual liaison with his subordinates. Such a warm way of putting it. Violation of this regulation is punishable by attachment of all funds and reduction to the rank of private or, ~f the relationship iiue~feres with a unit’s combat efficiency, summary execution. If all of UNEF’s regulations could be broken SO Casually and consistently as that one was, it would be a very easygoing army.

But not one of the boys appealed to me. How they’d look after another year, I wasn’t sure.

“Tench-hut!” That was Lieutenant Hilleboe. It was a credit to my new reflexes that I didn’t jump to my feet. Everybody in the auditorium snapped to.

“My name is Lieutenant Hilleboe and I am your Second Field Officer.” That used to be “Field First Sergeant.” A good sign that an anny has been around too long is that it starts getting top-heavy with officers.

Hilleboe came on like a real hard-ass professional soldier. Probably shouted orders at the mirror every morning, while she was shaving. But I’d seen her profile and knew that she’d only been in action once, and only for a couple of minutes at that. Lost an arm and a leg and was commissioned, same as me, as a result of the tests they give at the regeneration clinic.

Hell, maybe she had been a very pleasant person before going through that trauma; it was bad enough just having one limb regrown.

She was giving them the usual first-sergeant peptalk, stern-but-fair: don’t waste my time with little things, use the chain of command, most problems can be solved at the fifth echelon.

It made me wish I’d had more time to talk with her earlier. Strike Force Command had really rushed us into this first muster-we were scheduled to board ship the next day-and I’d only had a few words with my officers.

Not enough, because it was becoming clear that Hilleboe and I had rather disparate philosophies about how to run a company. It was true that running it was her job; I only commanded. But she was setting up a potential “good guy-bad guy” situation, using the chain of command to so isolate herself from the men and women under her. I had planned not to be quite so aloof, setting aside an hour every other day when any soldier could come to me directly with grievances or suggestions, without permission from his superiors.

We had both been given the same information during our three weeks in the can. It was interesting that we’d arrived at such different conclusions about leadership. This Open Door policy, for instance, had shown good results in “modern” armies in Australia and America. And it seemed especially appropriate to our situation, in which everybody would be cooped up for months or even years at a time. We’d used the system on the Sangre y Victoria, the last starship to which I’d been attached, and it had seemed to keep tensions down.

She had them at ease while delivering this organizational harangue; pretty soon she’d call them to attention and introduce me. What would I talk about? I’d planned just to say a few predictable words and explain my Open Door policy, then turn them over to Commodore Antopol, who would say something about the Masaryk II. But I’d better put off my explanation until after I’d had a long talk with Hilleboe; in fact, it would be best if she were the one to introduce the policy to the men and women, so it wouldn’t look like the two of us were at loggerheads.

My executive officer, Captain Moore, saved me. He came rushing through a side door-he was always rushing, a pudgy meteor-threw a quick salute and handed me an envelope that contained our combat orders. I had a quick whispered conference with the Commodore, and she agreed that it wouldn’t do any harm to tell them where we were going, even though the rank and file technically didn’t have the “need to know.” One thing we didn’t have to worry about in this war was enemy agents. With a good coat of paint, a Tauran might be able to disguise himself as an ambulatory mushroom. Bound to raise suspicions.

Hilleboe had called them to attention and was dutifully telling them what a good commander I was going to be; that I’d been in the war from the beginning, and if they intended to survive through their enlistment they had better follow my example. She didn’t mention that I was a mediocre soldier with a talent for getting missed. Nor that I’d resigned from the army at the earliest opportunity and only got back in because conditions on Earth were so intolerable.

“Thank you, Lieutenant.” I took her place at the podium. “At ease.” I unfolded the single sheet that had our orders, and held it up. “I have some good news and some bad news.” What had been a joke five centuries before was now just a statement of fact.

“These are our combat orders for the Sade-138 campaign. The good news is that we probably won’t be fighting, not immediately. The bad news is that we’re going to be a target.”

They stirred a little bit at that, but nobody said anything Ion

or took his eyes off me. Good discipline. Or maybe just fatalism; I didn’t know how realistic a picture they had of their future. Their lack of a future, that is.

“What we are ordered to do.. . is to find the largest portal planet orbiting the Sade- 138 collapsar and build a base there. Then stay at the base until we are relieved. That will be two or three years, probably.

“During that time we will almost certainly be attacked. As most of you probably know, Strike Force Command has uncovered a pattern in the enemy’s movements from collapsar to collapsar. They hope eventually to trace this complex pattern back through tune and space and find the Taurans’ home planet. For the present, they can only send out intercepting forces, to hamper the enemy’s expansion.

“In a large perspective, this is what we’re ordered to do. We’ll be one of several dozen strike forces employed in these blocking maneuvers, on the enemy’s frontier. I won’t be able to stress often enough or hard enough how important this mission is-if UNEF can keep the enemy from expanding, we may be able to envelop him. And win the war.”

Preferably before we’re all dead meat. “One thing I want to be clear we may be attacked the day we land, or we may simply occupy the planet for ten years and come on home.” Fat chance. “Whatever happens, every one of us will stay in the best fighting trim all the time. In transit, we will maintain a regular program of calisthenics as well as a review of our training. Especially construction techniques- we have to set up the base and its defense facilities in the shortest possible time.”

God, I was beginning to sound like an officer. “Any questions?” There were none. “Then I’d like to introduce Commodore Antopol. Commodore?”

The commodore didn’t try to hide her boredom as she outlined, to this room full of ground-pounders, the characteristics and capabilities of Masaryk Ii. I had learned most of what she was saying through the can’s forcefeeding, but the last thing she said caught my attention.

“Sade-138 will be the most distant collapsar men have gone to. It isn’t even in the galaxy proper, hut rather is part

of the Large Magellanic Cloud, some 150,000 light years distant.

“Our voyage will require four collapsar jumps and will last some four months, subjective. Maneuvering into collapsar insertion will put us about three hundred years behind Stargate’s calendar by the time we reach Sade-138.”

And another seven hundred years gone, if I lived to return. Not that it would make that much difference; Marygay was as good as dead and there wasn’t another person alive who meant anything to me.

“As the major said, you mustn’t let these figures lull you into complacency. The enemy is also headed for Sade-138; we may all get there the same day. The mathematics of the situation is complicated, but take our word for it; it’s going to be a close race.

“Major, do you have anything more for them?” I started to rise. “Well. . .”

“Tench-hut!” Hilleboe shouted. Had to learn to expect that

“Only that I’d like to meet with my senior officers, echelon 4 and above, for a few minutes. Platoon sergeants, you’re responsible for getting your troops to Staging Area 67 at 0400 tomorrow morning. Your time’s your own until then. Dismissed.”

I invited the five officers up to my billet and brought out a bottle of real French brandy. It had cost two months’ pay, but what else could I do with the money? Invest it?

I passed around glasses but Alsever, the doctor, demurred. Instead she broke a little capsule under her nose and inhaled deeply. Then tried without too much success to mask her euphoric expression.

“First let’s get down to one basic personnel problem,” I said, pouring. “Do all of you know that I’m not homosexual?”

Mixed chorus of yes sirs and no sirs.

“Do you think this is going to. . . complicate my situation as commander? As far as the rank and tile?”

“Sir, I don’t-” Moore began.

“No need for honorifics,” I said, “not in this closed 100

joe naiueman

circle; I was a private four years ago, in my own time frame. When there aren’t any troops around, I’m just Man-della, or William.” I had a feeling that was a mistake even as I was saying it. “Go on.”

“Well, William,” he continued, “it might have been a problem a hundred years ago. You know how people felt then.”

“Actually, I don’t. All I know about the period from the twenty-first century to the present is military history.”

“Oh. Well, it was, uh, it was, how to say it?” His hands fluttered.

“It was a crime,” Alsever said laconically. “That was when the Eugenics Council was first getting people used to the idea of universal homosex.”

“Eugenics Council?”

“Part of UNEF. Only has authority on Earth.” She took a deep sniff at the empty capsule. “The idea was to keep people from making babies the biological way. Because, A, people showed a regrettable lack of sense in choosing their genetic partner. And B, the Council saw that racial differences had an unnecessarily divisive effect on humanity; with total control over births, they could make everybody the same race in a few generations.”

I didn’t know they had gone quite that far. But I suppose it was logical. “You approve? As a doctor.”

“As a doctor? I’m not sure.” She took another capsule from her pocket and rolled it between thumb and forefinger, staring at nothing. Or something the rest of us couldn’t see.

“In a way, it makes my job simpler. A lot of diseases simply no longer exist. But I don’t think they know as much about genetics as they think they do. It’s not an exact science; they could be doing something very wrong, and the results wouldn’t show up for centuries.”

She cracked the capsule under her nose and took two deep breaths. “As a woman, though, I’m all in favor of it.” Hilleboe and Rusk nodded vigorously.

“Not having to go through childbirth?”

“That’s part of it.” She crossed her eyes comically, looking at the capsule, gave it a final sniff. “Mostly,

though, it’s not.. . having to. . . have a man. Inside me. You understand. It’s disgusting.”

Moore laughed. “If you haven’t tried it, Diana, don’t-”

“Oh, shut up.” She threw the empty capsule at him playfully. “But it’s perfectly natural,” I protested.

“So is swinging through trees. Digging for roots with a blunt stick. Progress, my good major, progress.”

“Anyway,” Moore said, “it was only a crime for a short period. Then it was considered a, oh, curable.. .”

“Dysfunction,” Alsever said.

“Thank you. And now, well, it’s so rare. .. I doubt that any of the men and women have any strong feelings about it, one way or the other.”

“Just an eccentricity,” Diana said, magnanimously. “Not as if you ate babies.” “That’s right, Mandella,” Hilleboe said. “I don’t feel any differently toward you

because of it.”

“I-I’m glad.” That was just great. It was dawning on me that I had not the slightest idea of how to conduct myself socially. So much of my “normal” behavior was based

on a complex unspoken code of sexual etiquette. Was I suppose to treat the men like women, and vice versa? Or treat everybody like brothers and sisters? It was all very confusing.

I finished off my glass and set it down. “Well, thanks for your reassurances. That was mainly what I wanted to ask you about. . . I’m sure you all have things to do, goodbyes and such. Don’t let me hold you prisoner.”

They all wandered off except for Charlie Moore. He and

I decided to go on a monumental binge, trying to hit every bar and officer’s club in the sector. We managed twelve and probably could have hit them all, but I decided to get a few hours’ sleep before the next day’s muster.

The one time Charlie made a pass at me, he was very polite about it. I hoped my refusal was also polite-but figured I’d be getting lots of practice.

UNEF’s first starships had been possessed of a kind of spidery, delicate beauty. But with various technological improvements, structural strength became more important than conserving mass (one of the old ships would have folded up like an accordion if you’d tried a twenty-five-gee maneuver), and that was reflected in the design: stolid, heavy, functional-looking. The only decoration was the name MASARYK ii, stenciled in dull blue letters across the.

obsidian hull.

Our shuttle drifted over the name on its way to the loading bay, and there was a crew of tiny men and women doing maintenance on the hull. With them as a reference, we could see that the letters were a good hundred meters tall. The ship was over a kilometer long (1036.5 meters, my latent memory said), and about a third that wide (319.4 meters).

That didn’t mean there was going to be plenty of elbowroom. In its belly, the ship held six large tachyondrive fighters and fifty robot drones. The infantry was tucked off in a corner. War is the province of friction, Chuck von Clausewitz said; I had a feeling we were going to put him to the test.

We had about six hours before going into the acceleration tank. I dropped my kit in the tiny billet that would be my home for the next twenty months and went off to explore.

Charlie had beaten me to the lounge and to the privilege of being first to evaluate the quality of Masaryk if’s coffee.

“Rhinoceros bile,” he said.

“At least it isn’t soya,” I said, taking a first cautious sip. Decided I might be longing for soya in a week.

The officers’ lounge was a cubicle about three meters by four, metal floor and walls, with a coffee machine and a

library readout. Six hard chairs and a table with a typer on it.

“Jolly place, isn’t it?” He idly punched up a general index on the library machine. “Lots of military theory.”

“That’s good. Refresh our memories.” “Sign up for officer training?”

“Me? No. Orders.”

“At least you have an excuse.” He slapped the on-off button and watched the green spot dwindle. “I signed up. They didn’t tell me it’d feel like this.”

“Yeah.” He wasn’t talking about any subtle problem:

burden of responsibility or anything. “They say it wears off, a little at a time.” All of that information they force into you; a constant silent whispering.

“Ah, there you are.” Hileboe came through the door and exchanged greetings with us. She gave the room a quick survey, and it was obvious that the Spartan arrangements met with her approval. “Will you be wanting to address the company before we go into the acceleration tanks?”

“No, I don’t see why that would be. . . necessary.” I almost said “desirable.” The art of chastising subordinates is a delicate art. I could see that I’d have to keep reminding Hilleboe that she wasn’t in charge.

Or I could just switch insignia with her. Let her experience the joys of command. “You could, please, round up all platoon leaders and go over the immersion

sequence with them. Eventually we’ll be doing speed drills. But for now, I think the troops could use a few hours’ rest.” If they were as hungover as their commander.

“Yes, sir.” She turned and left. A little miffed, because what I’d asked her to do should properly have been a job for Riland or Rusk.

Charlie eased his pudgy self into one of the hard chairs and sighed. “Twenty months on this greasy machine. With her. Shit.”

“Well, if you’re nice to me, I won’t billet the two of you together.” “All right. I’m your slave forever. Starting, oh, next Fri

day.” He peered into his cup and decided against drinking the dregs. “Seriously, she’s going to be a problem. What are you going to do with her?”

“I don’t know.” Charlie was being insubordinate, too, of course. But he was my XO and out of the chain of command. Besides, I had to have one friend. “Maybe she’ll mellow, once we’re under weigh.”

“Sure.” Technically, we were already under weigh, crawling toward the Stargate collapsar at one gee. But that was only for the convenience of the crew; it’s hard to batten down the hatches in free fall. The trip wouldn’t really start until we were in the tanks.

The lounge was too depressing, so Charlie and I used the remaining hours of mobility to explore the ship.

The bridge looked like any other computer facility; they had dispensed with the luxury of viewscreens. We stood at a respectful distance while Antopol and her officers went through a last series of checks before climbing into the tanks and leaving our destiny to the machines.

Actually, there was a porthole, a thick plastic bubble, in the navigation room forward. Lieutenant Williams wasn’t busy, the pre-insertion part of his job being fully automated, so he was glad to show us around.

He tapped the porthole with a fingernail. “Hope we don’t have to use this, this trip.”

“How so?” Charlie said.

“We only use it if we get lost” If the insertion angle was off by a thousandth of a radian, we were liable to wind up on the other side of the galaxy. “We can get a rough idea of our position by analyzing the spectra of the brightest stars. Thumbprints. Identify three and we can triangulate.”

“Then find the nearest collapsar and get back on the rack,” I said.

“That’s the problem. Sade-l38 is the only collapsar we know of in the Magellanic Clouds. We know of it only because of captured enemy data. Even if we could find another collapsar, assuming we got lost in the cloud, we wouldn’t know how to insert.”

“That’s great.”

“It’s not as though we’d be actually lost,” he said with I’HI~ FOREVER WAR

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a rather wicked expression. “We could zip up in the tanks, aim for Earth and blast away at full power. We’d get there in about three months, ship time.”

“Sure,” I said. “But 150,000 years in the future.” At twenty-five gees, you get to nine-tenths the speed of light in less than a month. From then on, you’re in the arms of Saint Albert.

“Well, that is a drawback,” he said. “But at least we’d find out who’d won the war.” It made you wonder how many soldiers had gotten out of the war in just that way. There were forty-two strike forces lost somewhere and unaccounted for. It was possible that all of them were crawling through normal space at near-lightspeed and

would show up at Earth or Stargate one-by-one over the centuries.

A convenient way to go AWOL, since once you were out of the chain of collapsar jumps you’d be practically impossible to track down. Unfortunately, your jump sequence was pre-programmed by Strike Force Command; the human navigator only came into the picture if a miscalculation slipped you into the wrong “wormhole,” and you popped out in some random part of space.

Charlie and I went on to inspect the gym, which was big enough for about a dozen people at a time. I asked him to make up a roster so that everyone could work out for an hour each day when we were out of the tanks.

The mess area was only a little larger than the gym- even with four staggered shifts, the meals would be shoulder-to-shoulder affairs-and the enlisted men and women’s lounge was even more depressing than the officers’. I was going to have a real morale problem on my hands long before the twenty months were up.

The armorer’s bay was as large as the gym, mess hail and both lounges put together. It had to be, because of the great variety of infantry weapons that had evolved over the centuries. The basic weapon was still the fighting suit, though it was much more sophisticated than that first model I had been squeezed into, just before the Aleph-Null campaign.

Lieutenant Riland, the armory officer, was supervising

his four subordinates, one from each platoon, who were doing a last-minute check of weapons storage. Probably the most important job on the whole ship, when you contemplate what could happen to all those tons of explosives and radioactives under twenty-five gees.

I returned his perfunctory salute. “Everything going all right, Lieutenant?”

“Yessir, except for those damned swords.” For use in the stasis field. “No way we can orient them that they won’t be bent. Just hope they don’t break.”

I couldn’t begin to understand the principles behind the stasis field; the gap between present-day physics and my master’s degree in the same subject was as long as the time that separated Galileo and Einstein. But I knew the effects.

Nothing could move at greater than 16.3 meters per second inside the field, which was a hemispherical (in space, spherical) volume about fifty meters in radius. Inside, there was no such thing as electromagnetic radiation; no electricity, no magnetism, no light. From inside your suit, you could see your surroundings in ghostly monochrome- which phenomenon was glibly explained to me as being due to “phase transference of quasi-energy leaking through from an adjacent tachyon reality,” so much phlogiston to me.

The result of it, though, was to make all conventional weapons of warfare useless. Even a nova bomb was just an inert lump inside the field. And any creature, Terran or Tauran, caught inside the field without the proper insulation would die in a fraction of a second.

At first it looked as though we had come upon the ultimate weapon. There were five engagements where whole Tauran bases were wiped out without any human ground casualties. All you had to do was carry the field to the enemy (four husky soldiers could handle it in Earth-gravity) and watch them die as they slipped in through the field’s opaque wall. The people carrying the generator were invulnerable except for the short periods when they might have to turn the thing off to get their bearings.

The sixth time the field was used, though, the Taurans were ready for it. They wore protective suits and were armed with sharp spears, with which they could breach the

suits of the generator-carriers. From then on the carriers were armed.

Only three other such battles had been reported, although a dozen strike forces had gone out with the stasis field. The others were still fighting, or still en route, or had been totally defeated. There was no way to tell unless they caine back. And they weren’t encouraged to come back if Taurans were still in control of “their” real estate-supposedly that constituted “desertion under fire,” which meant execution for all officers (although rumor had it that they were simply brainwiped, imprinted and sent back into the fray).

“Will we be using the stasis field, sir?” Riland asked.

“Probably. Not at first, not unless the Taurans are already there. I don’t relish the thought of living in a suit, day in and day out.” Neither did I relish the thought of using sword, spear, throwing knife; no matter how many electronic illusions I’d sent to Valhalla with them.

Checked my watch. “Well, we’d better get on down to the tanks, Captain. Make sure everything’s squared away.” We had about two hours before the insertion sequence would start.

The room the tanks were in resembled a huge chemical factory; the floor was a good hundred meters in diameter and jammed with bulky apparatus painted a uniform, dull gray. The eight tanks were arranged almost symmetrically around the central elevator, the symmetry spoiled by the fact that one of the tanks was twice the size of the others. That would be the command tank, for all the senior officers and supporting specialists.

Sergeant Blazynski stepped out from behind one of the tanks and saluted. I didn’t return his salute.

“What the hell is that?” In all that universe of gray, there was one spot of color. “It’s a cat, sir.”

“Do tell.” A big one, too, and bright calico. It looked ridiculous, draped over the sergeant’s shoulder. “Let me rephrase the question: what the hell is a cat doing here?”

“It’s the maintenance squad’s mascot, sir.” The cat raised its head enough to hiss half-heartedly at me, then returned to its flaccid repose.

I looked at Charlie and he shrugged back. “It seems kiAd of cruel,” he said. To the sergeant: “You won’t get much use of it. After twenty-five gees, it’ll be just so much fur and guts.”

“Oh no, sir! Sirs.” He ruffed back the fur between the

creature’s shoulders. It had a fluorocarbon fitting imbedded there, just like the one above my hipbone. “We bought it at a store on Stargate, already modified. Lots of ships have them now, sir. The Commodore signed the forms for us.”

Well, that was her right; maintenance was under both of us equally. And it was her ship. “You couldn’t have gotten a dog?” God, I hated cats. Always sneaking around.

“No, sir, they don’t adapt. Can’t take free fall.”

“Did you have to make any special adaptations? In the tank?” Charlie asked.

“No sir. We had an extra couch.” Great; that meant I’d be sharing a tank with the animal. “We only had to shorten the straps.

“It takes a different kind of drug for the cell-wall strengthening, but that was included in the price.”

Charlie scratched it behind an ear. It purred softly but didn’t move. “Seems kind of stupid. The animal, I mean.”

“We drugged him ahead of time.” No wonder it was so inert; the drug slows your metabolism down to a rate barely adequate to sustain life. “Makes it easier to strap him in.”

“Guess it’s all right,” I said. Maybe good for morale. “But if it starts getting in the way, I’ll personally recycle it.”

“Yes, sir!” he said, visibly relieved, thinking that I couldn’t really do anything like that to such a cute bundle of fur. Try me, buddy.

So we had seen it all. The only thing left, this side of

the engines, was the huge hold where the fighters and drones waited, clamped in their massive cradles against the coming acceleration. Charlie and I went down to take a look, but there were no windows on our side of the airlock. I knew there’d be one on the inside, but the chamber was evacuated, and it wasn’t worth going through the fill-andwarm cycle merely to satisfy our curiosity.

I was starting to feel really supernumerary. Called Hil THE FOREVER WAR

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leboe and she said everything was under control. With an

hour to kill, we went back to the lounge and had the computer mediate a game of Kriegspieler, which was just starting to get interesting when the ten-minute warning sounded.

The acceleration tanks had a “half-life-to-failure” of five weeks; there was a fifty- fifty chance that you could stay immersed for five weeks before some valve or tube popped and you were squashed like a bug underfoot. In practice, it had to be one hell of an emergency to justify using the tanks for more than two weeks’ acceleration. We were only going under for ten days, this first leg of our journey.

Five weeks or five hours, though, it was all the same as far as the tankee was concerned. Once the pressure got up to an operational level, you had no sense of the passage of time. Your body and brain were concrete. None of your senses provided any input, and you could amuse yourself for several hours just trying to spell your own name.

So I wasn’t really surprised that no time seemed to have passed when I was suddenly dry, my body tingling with the return of sensation. The place sounded like an asthmatics’ convention in the middle of a hay field: thirty-nine people and one cat all coughing and sneezing to get rid of the last residues of fluorocarbon. While I was fumbling with my straps, the side door opened, flooding the tank with painfully bright light. The cat was the first one out, with a general scramble right behind him. For the sake of dignity, I waited until last.

Over a hundred people were milling around outside, stretching and massaging out cramps. Dignity! Surrounded by acres of young female flesh, I stared into their faces and desperately tried to solve a third-order differential equation

in my head, to circumvent the gallant reflex. A temporary expedient, but it got me to the elevator.

Hilleboe was shouting orders, getting people lined up, and as the doors closed I noticed that all of one platoon had a uniform light bruise, from head to foot. Twenty pairs of black eyes. I’d have to see both Maintenance and Medical about that.

After I got dressed. 4

We stayed at one gee for three weeks, with occasional pariods of free fall for navigation check, while the Masaiyk 11 made a long, narrow loop away from the collapsar Resh10, and back again. That period went all right, the people adjusting pretty well to ship routine. I gave them a minimum of busy-work and a maximum of training review and exercise-for their own good, though I wasn’t naive enough to think they’d see it that way.

After about a week of one gee, Private Rudkoski (the cook’s assistant) had a still, producing some eight liters a day of 95 percent ethyl alcohol. I didn’t want to stop him- life was cheerless enough; I didn’t mind as long as people showed up for duty sober-but I was damned curious both how he managed to divert the raw materials out of our sealed-tight ecology, and how the people paid for their booze. So I used the chain of conunand in reverse, asking Alsever to find out. She asked Jarvil, who asked Carreras, who sat down with Orban, the cook. Turned out that Sergeant Orban had set the whole thing up, letting Rudkoski do the dirty work, and was aching to brag about it to a trustworthy person.

If I had ever taken meals with the enlisted men and women, I might have figured out that something odd was going on. But the scheme didn’t extend up to officers’ country.

Through Rudkoski, Orban had juryrigged a ship-wide economy based on alcohol. It went like this:

Each meal was prepared with one very sugary dessert- jelly, custard or flan-which you were free to eat if you could stand the cloying taste. But if it was still on your tray when you presented it at the recycling window, Rudkoski would give you a Len-cent

chit and scrape the sugary stuff into a fermentation vat. He had two twenty-liter vats, one

“working” while the other was being filled.

The ten-cent chit was at the bottom of a system that allowed you to buy a half-liter of straight ethyl (with your choice of flavoring) for five dollars. A squad of five people who skipped all of their desserts could buy about a liter a week, enough for a party but not enough to constitute a public health problem.

When Diana brought me this information, she also brought a bottle of Rudkoski’s Worst-literally; it was a flavor that just hadn’t worked. It came up through the chain of command with only a few centimeters missing.

Its taste was a ghastly combination of strawberry and caraway seed. With a perversity not uncommon to people who rarely drink, Diana loved it. I had some ice water brought up, and she got totally blasted within an hour. For myself, I made one drink and didn’t finish it.

When she was more than halfway to oblivion, mumbling a reassuring soliloquy to her liver, she suddenly tilted her head up to stare at me with childlike directness.

“You have a real problem, Major William.”

“Not half the problem you’ll have in the morning, Lieutenant Doctor Diana.”

“Oh not really.” She waved a drunken hand in front of her face. “Some vitamins, some glu. . . cose, an eensy cc of adren. . . aline if all else fails. You.. . you. . . have… a real.. . problem.”

“Look, Diana, don’t you want me to-”

“What you need.. . is to get an appointment with that nice Corporal Valdez.” Valdez was the male sex counselor. “He has empathy. Itsiz job. He’d make you-”

“We talked about this before, remember? I want to stay the way I am.”

“Don’t we all.” She wiped away a tear that was probably one percent alcohol. “You know they call you the Old C’reer. No they don’t.”

She looked at the floor and then at the wall. “The 01′ Queer, that’s what.”

I had expected names worse than that. But not so soon. “I don’t care. The commander always gets names.”

“I know but.” She stood up suddenly and wobbled a “U’.,

little bit. “Too much t’ drink. Lie down.” She turned her back to me and stretched so hard that a joint popped. Then a seam whispered open and she shrugged off her tunic, stepped out of it and tiptoed to my bed. She sat down and patted the mattress. “Come on, William. Only chance.”

“For Christ’s sake, Diana. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“All’s fair,” she giggled. “And ‘sides, I’m a doctor. I can be cin’cal; won’t bother me a bit. Help me with this.” After five hundred years, they were still putting brassiere clasps in the back.

One kind of gentleman would have helped her get undressed and then made a quiet exit. Another kind of gentleman might have bolted for the door. Being neither kind, I closed in for the kill.

Perhaps fortunately, she passed out before we had made any headway. I admired the sight and touch of her for a long time before, feeling like a cad, I managed to gather everything up and dress her.

I lifted her out of the bed, sweet burden, and then realized that if anyone saw me canying her down to her billet, she’d be the butt of rumors for the rest of the campaign. I called up Charlie, told him we’d had some booze and Diana was rather the worse for it, and asked him whether he’d come up for a drink and help me haul the good doctor home.

By the time Charlie knocked, she was draped innocently in a chair, snoring softly.

He smiled at her. “Physician, heal thyself.” I off~red him the bottle, with a warning. He sniffed it and made a face.

“What is this, varnish?”

“Just something the cooks whipped up. Vacuum still.”

He set it down carefully, as if it might explode if jarred. “I predict a coming shortage of customers. Epidemic of death by poisoning-she actually drank that vile stuff?”

“Well, the cooks admitted it was an experiment that didn’t pan out; their other flavors are evidently potable. Yeah, she loved it.”

“Well. . .” He laughed. “Damn! What, you take her legs and I take her arms?” THE FOREVER WAR

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“No, look, we each take an arm. Maybe we can get her to do part of the walking.” She moaned a little when we lifted her out of the chair, opened one eye and said,

“Hello, Charlee.” Then she closed the eye and let us drag her down to the billet. No one saw us on the way, but her bunkmate, Laasonen, was sitting up reading.

“She really drank the stuff, eh?” She regarded her friend with wry affection. “Here, let me help.”

The three of us wrestled her into bed. Laasonen smoothed the hair Out of her eyes. “She said it was in the nature of an experiment.”

“More devotion to science than I have,” Charlie said. “A stronger stomach, too.” We all wished he hadn’t said that.

Diana sheepishly admitted that she hadn’t remembered anything after the first drink, and talking to her, I deduced that she thought Charlie had been there all along. Which was all for the best, of course. But oh! Diana, my lovely latent heterosexual, let me buy you a bottle of good scotch the next time we come into port. Seven hundred years from now.

We got back into the tanks for the hop from Resh-lO to Kaph-35. That was two weeks at twenty-five gees; then we had another four weeks of routine at one gravity.

I had announced my open door policy, but practically no one ever took advantage of it. I saw very little of the troops and those occasions were almost always negative: testing them on their training review, handing out reprimands, and occasionally lecturing classes. And they rarely spoke intelligibly, except in response to a direct question.

Most of them either had English as their native tongue or as a second language, but it had changed so drastically over 450 years that I could barely understand it, not at all if it was spoken rapidly. Fortunately, they had all been taught early twenty-first century English during their basic training; that language, or dialect, served as a temporal un -gua franca through which a twenty-fifth century soldier could communicate with someone who had been a contemporary of his nineteen-times-great-grandparents. lf there had still been such a thing as grandparents.

I thought of my first combat commander, Captain Stott- whom I had hated just as cordially as the rest of the company did-and tried to imagine how I would have felt if he had been a sexual deviate and I’d been forced to learn a new language for his convenience.

So we had discipline problems, sure. But the wonder was that we had any discipline at all. Hilleboe was responsible for that; as little as I liked her personally, I had to give her credit for keeping the troops in line.

Most of the shipboard graffiti concerned improbable sexual geometries between the Second Field Officer and her commander.

From Kapb-35 we jumped to Samk-78, from there to Ayin-129 and finally to Sade-

138. Most of the jumps were no more than a few hundred light years, but the last one was 140,000-supposedly the longest collapsar jump ever made by a manned craf

The time spent scooting down the wormhole from one collapsar to the next was always the same, independent of the distance. When I’d studied physics, they thought the duration of a collapsar jump was exactly zero. But a couple of centuries later, they did a complicated wave-guide experiment that proved the jump actually lasted some small fraction of a nanosecond. Doesn’t seem like much, but they’d had to rebuild physics from the foundation up when the collapsar jump was first discovered; they had to rear the whole damned thing down again when they found out it took time to get from A to B. Physicists were still arguing about it.

But we had more pressing problems as we flashed out of Sade-1 38’s collapsar field at three-quarters of the speed of light. There was no way to tell immediately whether the Taurans had beat us there. We launched a pre-programmed drone that would decelerate at 300 gees and take a preliminary look around. It would warn us if it detected any other ships in the system, or evidence of Tauran activity on any of the collapsar’s planets.

The drone launched, we zipped up in the tanks and the computers put us through a three-week evasive maneuver while the ship slowed down. No problems except that three weeks is a hell of a long time to stay frozen in the tank; for a couple of days afterward everybody crept around like aged cripples.

if the drone had sent back word that the Taurans were already in the system, we would immediately have stepped down to one gee and started deploying fighters and drones armed with nova bombs. Or we might not have lived that long: sometimes the Taurans could get to a ship only hours after it entered the system. Dying in the tank might not be the most pleasant way to go.

It took us a month to get back to within a couple of AUs of Sade-138, where the drone had found a planet that met our requirements.

It was an odd planet, slightly smaller than Earth but more dense. It wasn’t quite the cryogenic deepfreeze that most portal planets were, both because of heat from its core and because S Doradus, the brightest star in the cloud, was only a third of a light year away.

The strangest feature of the planet was its lack of geography. From space it looked like a slightly damaged billiard ball. Our resident physicist, Lieutenant Gim, explained its relatively pristine condition by pointing out that its anomalous, almost cometary orbit probably meant that it had spent most of its life as a “rogue planet,” drifting alone through interstellar space. The chances were good that it had never been struck by a large meteor until it wandered into Sade-138’s bailiwick and was

captured-forced to share space with all the other flotsam the collapsar dragged around with it.

We left the Masaryk Ii in orbit (it was capable of landing, but that would restrict its visibility and getaway time) and shuttled building materials down to the surface with the six fighters.

It was good to get out of the ship, even though the planet wasn’t exactly hospitable. The atmosphere was a thin cold wind of hydrogen and helium, it being too cold even at noon for any other substance to exist as a gas.

“Noon” was when S Doradus was overhead, a tiny, painfully bright spark. The temperature slowly dropped at night, going from twenty-five degrees Kelvin down to seventeen degrees-which caused problems, because just be-fore dawn the hydrogen would start to condense out of the air, making everything so slippery that it was useless to do anything other than sit down and wait it out. At dawn a faint pastel rainbow provided the only relief from the black-and-white monotony of the landscape.

The ground was treacherous, covered with little granular chunks of frozen gas that shifted slowly, incessantly in the anemic breeze. You had to walk in a slow waddle to stay on your feet; of the four people who would die during the base’s construction, three would be the victims of simple falls.

The troops weren’t happy with my decision to construct the anti-spacecraft and perimeter defenses before putting up living quarters. That was by the book, though, and they got two days of shipboard rest for every “day” planetside- which wasn’t overly generous, I admit, since ship days were 24 hours long, and a day on the planet was 38.5 hours from dawn to dawn.

The base was completed in just less than four weeks, and it was a formidable structure indeed. The perimeter, a circle one kilometer in diameter, was guarded by twenty-five gigawatt lasers that would automatically aim and fire within a thousandth of a second. They would react to the motion of any significantly large object between the perimeter and the horizon. Sometimes when the wind was right and the ground damp with hydrogen, the little ice granules would stick together into a loose snowball and begin to roll. They wouldn’t roll far.

For early protection, before the enemy came over our horizon, the base was in the center of a huge mine field. The buried mines would detonate upon sufficient distortion of their local gravitational fields: a single Tauran would set one off if he came within twenty meters of it; a small spacecraft a kilometer overhead would also detonate it. There were 2800 of them, mostly lOO-microton nuclear bombs. Fifty of them were devastatingly powerful tachyon devices.

They were all scattered at random in a ring that extended from the limit of the lasers’ effectiveness, out another five kilometers.

Inside the base, we relied on individual lasers, microton

grenades, and a tachyon-powered repeating rocket launcher that had never been tried in combat, one per platoon. As a

last resort, the stasis field was set up beside the living quarters. Inside its opaque gray dome, as well as enough paleolithic weaponry to hold off the Golden Horde, we’d stashed a small cruiser, just in case we managed to lose all our spacecraft in the process of winning a battle. Twelve people would be able to get back to Stargale.

It didn’t do to dwell on the fact that the other survivors would have to sit on their hands until relieved by reinforcements or death.

The living quarters and administration facilities were all underground, to protect them from line-of-sight weapons. It didn’t do too much for morale, though; there were waiting lists for every outside detail, no matter how strenuous or risky. I hadn’t wanted the troops to go up to the surface in their free time, both because of the danger involved and the administrative headache of constantly checking equipment in and out and keeping track of who was where.

Finally I had to relent and allow people to go up for a few hours every week. There was nothing to see except the featureless plain and the sky (which was dominated by S Doradus during the day, and the huge dim oval of the galaxy at night), but that was an improvement over staring at the melted-rock walls and ceiling.

A favorite sport was to walk out to the perimeter and throw snowballs in front of the laser; see how small a snowball you could throw and still set the weapon off. It seemed to me that the entertainment value of this pastime was about equal to watching a faucet drip, but there was no real harm in it, since the weapons would only fire outward and we had power to spare.

For five months things went pretty smoothly. Such administrative problems as we had were similar to those we’d encountered on the Masaryk II. And we were in less danger as passive troglodytes than we had been scooting from collapsar to collapsar, at least until the enemy showed up.

I looked the other way when Rudkoski reassembled his still. Anything that broke the monotony of garrison duty was welcome, and the chits not only provided booze for the troops but gave them something to gamble with. I only interfered in two ways: nobody could go outside unless they were totally sober, and nobody could sell sexual favors. Maybe that was the Puritan in me, but it was, again, by the book. The opinion of the supporting specialists was split. Lieutenant Wilber, the psychiatric officer, agreed with me; the sex counselors Kajdi and Valdez didn’t. But then, they were probably coining money, being the resident “professionals.”

Five months of comfortably boring routine, and then along came Private Graubard.

For obvious reasons, no weapons were allowed in the living quarters. The way these people were trained, even a fistfight could be a duel to the death, and tempers were short. A hundred merely normal people would probably have been at each other’s throats after a week in our caves, but these soldiers had been hand-picked for their ability to get along in close confinement.

Still there were fights. Graubard had almost killed his ex-lover Schon when that worthy made a face at him in the chow line. He had a week of solitary detention (so did Schon, for having precipitated it) and then psychiatric counseling and punitive details. Then I transferred him to the fourth platoon, so he wouldn’t be seeing Schon every day.

The first time they passed in the halls, Graubard greeted Schon with a karate kick to the throat. Diana had to build him a new trachea. Graubard got a more intensive round of detention, counseling and details-hell, I couldn’t transfer him to another company-and then he was a good boy for two weeks. I fiddled their work and chow schedules so the two would never be in the same room together. But they met in a

corridor again, and this time it came out more even: Schon got two broken ribs, but Graubard got a ruptured testicle and lost four teeth.

THE FOREVER WAR 207

If it kept up, I was going to have at least one less mouth to feed.

By the Universal Code of Military Justice I could have ordered Graubard executed, since we were technically in a state of combat. Perhaps I should have, then and there. But Charlie suggested a more humanitarian solution, and I accepted it.

We didn’t have enough room to keep Graubard in soiltaiy detention forever, which seemed to be the only humane yet practical thing to do, but they had plenty of room aboard the Masaiyk II, hovering overhead in a stationary orbit. I called Antopol and she agreed to take care of him. I gave her permission to space the bastard if he gave her any trouble.

We called a general assembly to explain things, so that the lesson of Graubard wouldn’t be lost on anybody. I was just starting to talk, standing on the rock dais with the company sitting in front of me, and the officers and Graubard behind me- when the crazy fool decided to kill me.

Like everybody else, Graubard was assigned five hours per week of training inside the stasis field. Under close supervision, the soldiers would practice using their swords and spears and whatnot on dummy Taurans. Somehow Graubard had managed to smuggle out a weapon, an Indian chakra, which is a circle of metal with a razor-keen outer edge. It’s a tricky weapon, but once you know how to use it, it can be much more effective than a regular throwing knife. (3raubard was an expert.

All in a fraction of a second, Graubard disabled the peopie on either side of him- hitting Charlie in the temple with an elbow while he broke Hilleboe’s kneecap with a kick-and slid the chakra out of his tunic and spun it toward me in one smooth action. It had covered half the distance to my throat before I reacted.

Instinctively I slapped out to deflect it and came within a centimeter of losing four fingers. The razor edge slashed open the top of my palm, but I succeeded in knocking the thing off course. And Graubard was rushing me, teeth bared in an expression I hope I never see again.

Maybe he didn’t realize that the old queer was really

only five years older than he; that the old queer had combat reflexes and three weeks of negative feedback kinesthesia training. At any rate, it was so easy I almost felt sorry for him.

His right toe was turning in; I knew he would take one more step and go into a savat~ leap. I adjusted the distance between us with a short ballestra and, just as both his feet left the ground, gave him an ungentle side-kick to the solar plexus. He was unconscious before he hit the ground. But not dead.

If I’d merely killed him in self-defense, my troubles would have been over instead of suddenly being multiplied.

A simple psychotic troublemaker a commander can lock up and forget about. But not a failed assassin. And I didn’t have to take a poll to know that executing him was not going to improve my relationship with the troops.

I realized that Diana was on her knees beside me, trying to pry open my fingers. “Check Hilleboe and Moore,” I mumbled, and to the troops: “Dismissed.”

“Don’t be an ass,” Charlie said. He was holding a damp rag to the bruise on the side of his head.

“You don’t think I have to execute him?”

“Stop twitching!” Diana was trying to get the lips of my wound to line up together so she could paint them shut. From the wrist down, the hand felt like a lump of ice.

“Not by your own hand, you don’t. You can detail someone. At random.” “Charlie’s right,” Diana said. “Have everybody draw a slip of paper out of a bowl.” I was glad Hilleboe was sound asleep on the other cot.

I didn’t need her opinion. “And if the person so chosen refuses?”

“Punish him and get another,” Charlie said. “Didn’t you learn anything in the can? You can’t abrogate your authority by publicly doing a job.. . that obviously should be detailed.”

“Any other job, sure. But for this. . . nobody in the company has ever killed. It would look like I was getting somebody else to do my moral dirty work.”

“If it’s so damned complicated,” Diana said, “why not just get up in front of the troops and tell them how complicated it is. Then have them draw straws. They aren’t children.”

There had been an army in which that sort of thing was done, a strong quasi- memory told me. The Marxist POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War, early twentieth. You obeyed an order only after it had been explained in detail; you could refuse if it didn’t make sense. Officers and men got drunk together and never saluted or used titles. They lost the war. But the other side didn’t have any fun.

“Finished.” Diana set the limp hand in my lap. “Don’t

try to use it for a half-hour. When it starts to hurt, you can use it.”

I inspected the wound closely. “The lines don’t match up. Not that I’m complaining.”

“You shouldn’t. By all rights, you ought to have just a stump. And no regeneration facilities this side of Stargate.”

“Stump ought to be at the top of your neck,” Charlie said. “I don’t see why you have any qualms. You should have killed the bastard outright.”

“I know that, goddainmid” Both Charlie and Diana jumped at my outburst. “Sorry, shit. Look, just let me do the worrying.”

“Why don’t you both talk about something else for a while.” Diana got up and checked the contents of her medical bag. “I’ve got another patient to check. Try to keep from exciting each other.”

“Graubard?” Charlie asked.

“That’s right. To make sure he can mount the scaffold without assistance.” “What if Hilleboe-”

“She’ll be out for another half-hour. I’ll send Jarvil down, just in case.” She hurried out the door.

“The scaffold.. .” I hadn’t given that any thought. “How the hell are we going to execute him? We can’t do it indoors: morale. Firing squad would be pretty grisly.”

“Chuck him out the airlock. You don’t owe him any ceremony.”

“You’re probably right. I wasn’t thinking about him.” I wondered whether Charlie had ever seen the body of a person who’d died that way. “Maybe we ought to just stuff him into the recycler. He’d wind up there eventually.”

Charlie laughed. “That’s the spirit.”

“We’d have to trim him up a little bit. Door’s not very wide.” Charlie had a few suggestions as to how to get around that. Jarvil came in and more-or-less ignored us.

Suddenly the inlmnnary door banged open. A patient on a cart; Diana rushing alongside pressing on the man’s chest, while a private pushed. Two other privates were following, but hung back at the door. “Over by the wall,” she ordered.

It was Graubard. “Tried to kill himself,” Diana said, but that was pretty obvious. “Heart stopped.” He’d made a noose out of his belt; it was still banging limply around his neck.

There were two big electrodes with rubber handles hanging on the wall. Diana snatched them with one hand while she ripped his tunic open with the other. “Get your hands off the cart!” She held the electrodes apart, kicked a switch, and pressed them down onto his chest. They made a low hum while his body trembled and flopped. Smell of burning flesh.

Diana was shaking her head. “Get ready to crack him,” she said to Jarvil. “Get Doris down here.” The body was gurgling, but it was a mechanical sound, like plumbing.

She kicked off the power and let the electrodes drop, pulled a ring off her finger and crossed to stick her arms in the sterilizer. Jarvil started to rub an evil-smelling fluid over the man’s chest.

There was a small red mark between the two electrode burns. It took me a moment to recognize what it was. Jarvil wiped it away. I stepped closer and checked Graubard’s neck.

“Get out of the way, William, you aren’t sterile.” Diana felt his collarbone, measured down a little ways and made an incision straight down to the bottom of his breastbone. Blood welled out and Jarvil handed her an instrument that looked like big chrome-plated bolt-cutters. I looked away but couldn’t help hearing the thing crunch through his ribs. She asked for retractors and sponges and so on while I wandered back to where I’d been sitting. With the corner of my eye I saw her working away inside his thorax, massaging his heart directly.

Charlie looked the way I felt. He called out weakly, “Hey, don’t knock yourself out, Diana.” She didn’t answer. Jarvil had wheeled up the artificial heart and was holding out two tubes. Diana picked up a scalpel and I looked away again.

He was still dead a half-hour later. They turned off the machine and threw a sheet over him. Diana washed the
blood off her arms and said, “Got to change. Back in a minute.” I got up and walked to her billet, next door. Had to know.

I raised my hand to knock but it was suddenly hurting like there was a line of fire drawn across it. I rapped with my left and she opened the door immediately.

“What-oh, you want something for your hand.” She was half-dressed, unseif- conscious. “Ask Jarvil.”

“No, that’s not it. What happened, Diana?”

“Oh. Well,” she pulled a tunic over her head and her voice was muffled. “It was my fault, I guess. I left him alone for a minute.”

“And he tried to hang himself.”

“That’s right.” She sat on the bed and offered me the chair. “I went off to the head and he was dead by the time I got back. I’d already sent Jarvil away because I didn’t want Hilleboe to be unsupervised for too long.”

“But, Diana. . . there’s no mark on his neck. No bruise, nothing.” She shrugged. “The hanging didn’t kill him. He had a heart attack.” “Somebody gave him a shot. Right over his heart.”

She looked at me curiously. “I did that, William. Adrenaline. Standard procedure.” You get that red dot of expressed blood if you jerk away from the projector while you’re getting a shot. Otherwise the medicine goes right through the pores, doesn’t

leave a mark. “He was dead when you gave him the shot?”

“That would be my professional opinion.” Deadpan. “No heartbeat, pulse, respiration. Very few other disorders show these symptoms.”

“Yeah. I see.”

“Is something. . . what’s the matter, William?”

Either I’d been improbably lucky or Diana was a very good actress. “Nothing. Yeah, I better get something for this hand.” I opened the door. “Saved me a lot of trouble.”

She looked straight into my eyes. “That’s true.”

Actually, I’d traded one kind of trouble for another. Despite the fact that there were several disinterested witnesses

to Graubard’s demise, there was a persistent rumor that I’d had Doc Alsever simply exterminate him-since I’d botched the job myself and didn’t want to go through a troublesome court-martial.

The fact was that, under the Universal Code of Military “Justice,” Graubard hadn’t deserved any kind of trial at all. All 1 had to do was say “You, you and you. Take this man out and kill him, please.” And woe betide the private who refused to carry out the order.

My relationship with the troops did improve, in a sense. At least outwardly, they showed more deference to me. But I suspected it was at least partly the cheap kind of respect you might offer any ruffian who had proved himself to be dangerous and volatile.

So Killer was my new name. Just when I’d gotten used to Old Queer.

The base quickly settled back into its routine of training and waiting. I was almost impatient for the Taurans to show up, just to get it over with one way or the other.

The troops had adjusted to the situation much better than I had, for obvious reasons. They had specific duties to perform and ample free time for the usual soldierly anodynes to boredom. My duties were more varied but offered little satisfaction, since the problems that percolated up to me were of the “the buck stops here” type; those with pleasing, unambiguous solutions were taken care of in the lower echelons.

I’d never cared much for sports or games, but found myself turning to them more and more as a kind of safety valve. For the first time in my life, in these tense, claustrophobic surroundings, I couldn’t escape into reading or study. So I fenced, quarterstaff and saber, with the other officers, worked myself to exhaustion on the exercise machines and even kept a jump-rope in my office. Most of the other officers played chess, but they could usually beat me-whenever I won it gave me the feeling I was being humored. Word games were difficuit because my language was an archaic

dialect that they had trouble manipulating. And I lacked the time and talent to master “modern” English.

Joe tialdeman hi’)

For a while I let Diana feed me mood-altering drugs, but the cumulative effect of them was frightening-I was getting addicted in a way that was at first too subtle to bother me-so I stopped short. Then 1 tried some systematic psychoanalysis with Lieutenant Wilber. It was impossible. Although he knew all about my problem in an academic kind of way, we didn’t speak the same cultural language; his counseling me about love and sex was like me telling a fourteenth-century serf how best to get along with his priest and landlord.

And that, after all, was the root of my problem. I was sure I could have handled the pressures and frustrations of command; of being cooped up in a cave with these people who at times seemed scarcely less alien than the enemy; even the near- certainty that it could lead only to painful death in a worthless cause-if only I could have had Mary-gay with me. And the feeling got more intense as the months crept by.

He got very stern with me at this point and accused me of romanticizing my position. He knew what love was, he said; he had been in love himself. And the sexual polarity of the couple made no difference-all right, I could accept that; that idea had been a clichй in my parents’ generation (though it had run into some predictable resistance in my own). But love, he said, love was a fragile blossom; love was a delicate crystal; love was an unstable reaction with a half-life of about eight months. Bullshit, I said, and accused him of wearing cultural blinders; thirty centuries of prewar society taught that love was one thing that could last to the grave and even beyond and if he had been born instead of hatched he would know that without being told!

Whereupon he would assume a wry, tolerant expression and reiterate that I was merely a victim of self-imposed sexual frustration and romantic delusion.

In retrospect, I guess we had a good time arguing with each other. Cure me, he didn’t.

I did have a new friend who sat in my lap all the time. It was the cat, who had the usual talent for hiding from people who like cats and cleaving unto those who have sinus trouble or just don’t like sneaky little animals. We

did have something in common, though, since to my knowledge be was the only other heterosexual male mammal within any reasonable distance, He’d been castrated, of course, but that didn’t make much difference under the circumstances.

It was exactly 400 days since the day we had begun construction. I was sitting at my desk not checking out Hilleboe’s new duty roster. The cat was on my lap, purring loudly even though I refused to pet it. Charlie was stretched out in a chair reading something on the viewer. The phone buzzed and it was the Commodore.

“They’re here.”

“I said they’re here. A Tauran ship just exited the collapsar field. Velocity .80c. Deceleration thirty gees. Give or take.”

Charlie was leaning over my desk. “What?” I dumped the cat. “How long? Before you can pursue?” I asked.

“Soon as you get off the phone.” I switched off and went over to the logistic computer, which was a twin to the one on Masaryk ii and had a direct data link to it. While I tried to get numbers out of the thing, Charlie fiddled with the visual display.

The display was a hologram about a meter square by half a meter thick and was programmed to show the positions of Sade-l38, our planet, and a few other chunks of rock in the system. There were green and red dots to show the positions of our vessels and the Taurans’.

The computer said that the minimum time it could take the Taurans to decelerate and get back to this planet would be a little over eleven days. Of course, that would be straight maximum acceleration and deceleration all the way; we could pick them off like flies on a wall. So, like us, they’d mix up their direction of flight and degree of acceleration in a random way. Based on several hundred past records of enemy behavior, the computer was able to give us a probability table:

Unless, of course, Antopol and her gang of merry pirates managed to make a kill. The chances of that I had learned in the can, were slightly less than fifty-fifty.

But whether it took 28.9554 days or two weeks, those of us on the ground had to just sit on our hands and watch.

If Antopol was successful, then we wouldn’t have to fight until the regular garrison troops replaced us here and we moved on to the next collapsar.

“Haven’t left yet.” Charlie had the display cranked down to minimum scale; the planet was a white ball the size of a large melon and Masaryk II was a green dot off to the right some eight melons away; you couldn’t get both on the screen at the same time.

While we were watching a small green dot popped out of the ship’s dot and drifted away from it. A ghostly number 2 drifted beside it, and a key projected on the display’s lower left-hand corner identified it as 2-Pursuit Drone. Other nunibers in the key identified the Masaryk II, a planetary defense fighter and fourteen planetary defense drones. Those sixteen ships were not yet far enough away from one another to have separate dots.

The cat was rubbing against my ankle; I picked it up and stroked it. “Tell Hilleboe to call a general assembly. Might as well break it to everyone at once.”

The men and women didn’t take it very well, and I couldn’t blame them. We had all expected the Taurans to

attack much sooner-and when they persisted in not coming, the feeling grew that Strike Force Command had made a mistake and that they’d never show up at all.

I wanted the company to start weapons training in earnest; they hadn’t used any high-powered weapons in almost two years. So I activated their laser-fingers and passed out the grenade and rocket launchers. We couldn’t practice inside the base for fear of damaging the external sensors and defensive laser ring. So we turned off half the circle of gigawatt lasers and went out about a klick beyond the parimeter, one platoon at a time, accompanied by either me or Charlie. Rusk kept a close watch on the early-warning screens. If anything approached, she would send up a flare, and the platoon would have to get back inside the ring before the unknown came over the horizon, at which time the defensive lasers would come on automatically. Besides knocking out the unknown, they would fry the platoon in less than .02 second.

We couldn’t spare anything from the base to use as a target, but that turned out to be no problem. The first tachyon rocket we fired scooped out a hole twenty meters long by ten wide by five deep; the rubble gave us a multitude of targets from twice- man-sized on down.

The soldiers were good, a lot better than they had been with the primitive weapons in the stasis field. The best laser practice turned out to be rather like skeetshooting: pair up the people and have one stand behind the other, throwing rocks at random intervals. The one who was shooting had to gauge the rock’s trajectory and zap it before it hit the ground. Their eye-hand coordination was impressive (maybe the Eugenics Council had done something right).

Shooting at rocks down to pebble-size, most of them could do better than nine out of ten. Old non-bioengineered me could hit maybe seven out of ten, and I’d had a good deal more practice than they had.

They were equally facile at estimating trajectories with the grenade launcher, which was a more versatile weapon than it had been in the past. Instead of shooting one-

microton bombs with a standard propulsive charge, it had four different charges and a choice of one-, two-, three- or

four-microton bombs. And for really close in-fighting, where it was dangerous to use the lasers, the barrel of the launcher would unsnap, and you could load it with a magazine of “shotgun” rounds. Each shot would send out an expanding cloud of a thousand tiny fiechettes that were instant death out to five meters and turned to hanniess vapor

at six.

The tachyon- rocket launcher required no skill whatsoever. All you had to do was to be careful no one was standing behind you when you fired it; the backwash from the

rocket was dangerous for several meters behind the launching tube. Otherwise, you just lined your target up in the crosshairs and pushed the button. You didn’t have to worry about trajectory; the rocket traveled in a straight line for all practical purposes. It reached escape velocity in less than a second.

It improved the troops’ morale to get out and chew up the landscape with their new toys. But the landscape wasn’t fighting back. No matter how physically impressive the weapons were, their effectiveness would depend on what the Taurans could throw back. A Greek phalanx must have looked pretty impressive, but it wouldn’t do too well against a single man with a flamethrower.

And as with any engagement, because of time dilation, there was no way to tell what sort of weaponry they would have. They might have never heard of the stasis field. Or they might be able to say a magic word and make us disappear.

I was out with the fourth platoon, burning rocks, when Charlie called and asked me to come back in, urgent. I left Heimoff in charge.

“Another one?” The scale of the holograph display was such that our planet was pea-sized, about five centimeters from the X that marked the position of Sade-138. There were forty-one red and green dots scattered around the field; the key identified number 41 as Tauran Cruiser (2).

“You called Antopol?”

“Yeah.” He anticipated the next question. “It’ll take

almost a day for the signal to get there and back.” “It’s never happened before,” but of course Charlie knew that

“Maybe this coliapsar is especially important to them.”

“Likely.” So it was almost certain we’d be fighting on the ground. Even if Antopol managed to get the first cruiser, she wouldn’t have a fifty-fifty chance on the second one. Low on drones and fighters. “I wouldn’t like to be Antopol now.”

“She’ll just get it earlier.”

“I don’t know. We’re in pretty good shape.”

“Save it for the troops, William.” He turned down the display’s scale to where it showed only two objects: Sade138 and the new red dot, slowly moving.

We spent the next two weeks watching dots blink out. And if you knew when and where to look, you could go outside and see the real thing happening, a hard bright speck of white light that faded in about a second.

In that second, a nova bomb had put out over a million times the power of a gigawatt laser. It made a miniature star half a klick in diameter and as hot as the interior of the sun. Anything it touched it would consume. The radiation from a near miss could botch up a ship’s electronics beyond repair-two fighters, one of ours and one of theirs, had evidently suffered that fate, silently drifting out of the system at a constant velocity, without power.

We had used more powerful nova bombs earlier in the war, but the degenerate matter used to fuel them was unstable in large quantities. The bombs had a tendency to explode while they were still inside the ship. Evidently the Taurans had the same problem-or they had copied the process from us in the first place-because they had also scaled down to nova bombs that used less than a hundred kilograms of degenerate matter. And they deployed them much the same way we did, the warhead separating into dozens of pieces as it approached the target, only one of which was the nova bomb.

They would probably have a few bombs left over after they finished off Masaryk II and her retinue of fighters and

drones. So it was likely that we were wasting time and energy in weapons practice. The thought did slip by my conscience that I could gather up eleven people and board the fighter we had hidden safe behind the stasis field. It was pre-programmed

to take us back to Stargate.

I even went to the extreme of making a mental list of the eleven, trying to think of eleven people who meant more to me than the rest. Turned out I’d be picking six at random.

I put the thought away, though. We did have a chance, maybe a damned good one, even against a fully-armed cruiser. It wouldn’t be easy to get a nova bomb close enough to include us inside its kill-radius.

Besides, they’d space me for desertion. So why bother?

Spirits rose when one of Antopol’s drones knocked out the first Tauran cruiser. Not counting the ships left behind for planetary defense, she still had eighteen drones and two fighters. They wheeled around to intercept the second cruiser, by then a few light-hours away, still being harassed by fifteen enemy drones.

One of the Tauran drones got her. Her ancillary crafts continued the attack, but it was a rout. One fighter and three drones fled the battle at maximum acceleration, looping up over the plane of the ecliptic, and were not pursued. We watched them with morbid interest while the enemy cruiser inched back to do battle with us. The fighter was headed back for Sade-l38, to escape. Nobody blamed them. In fact, we sent them a farewell-good luck message; they didn’t respond, naturally, being zipped up in the tanks. But it would be recorded.

It took the enemy five days to get back to the planet and be comfortably ensconced in a stationary orbit on the other side. We settled in for the inevitable first phase of the attack, which would be aerial and totally automated: their drones against our lasers. I put a force of fifty men and women inside the stasis field, in case one of the drones got through. An empty gesture, really; the enemy could just

Joe Haldeman

stand by and wait for them to turn off the field, fry them the second it flickered out.

Charlie had a weird idea that I almost went for. “We could boobytrap the place.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “This place is booby-trapped, out to twenty-five klicks.”

“No, not the mines and such. I mean the base itself, here, underground.” “Go on.”

“There are two nova bombs in that fighter.” He pointed at the stasis field through a couple of hundred meters of rock. “We can roll them down here, boobytrap them, then bide everybody in the stasis field and wait.”

In a way it was tempting. It would relieve me from any responsibility for decision- making, leave everything up to chance. “I don’t think it would work, Charlie.”

He seemed hurt. “Sure it would.”

“No, look. For it to work, you have to get every single Tauran inside the kill-radius before it goes off-but they wouldn’t all come charging in here once they breached our defenses. Least of all if the place seemed deserted. They’d suspect something, send in an advance party. And after the advance party set off the bombs-”

“We’d be back where we started, yeah. Minus the base.

Sorry.”

I shrugged. “It was an idea. Keep thinking, Charlie.” I turned my attention back to the display, where the lopsided space war was in progress. Logically enough, the enemy wanted to knock out that one fighter overhead before he started to work on us. About all we could do was watch the red dots crawl around the planet and try to score. So far the pilot had managed to knock out all the drones; the enemy hadn’t sent any fighters after him yet.

I’d given the pilot control over five of the lasers in our defensive ring. They couldn’t do much good, though. A gigawatt laser pumps out a billion kilowatts per second at a range of a hundred meters. A thousand klicks up, though, the beam was attenuated to ten kilowatts. Might do some damage if it hit an optical sensor. At least confuse things.

“We could use another fighter. Or six.”
“Use up the drones,” I said. We did have a fighter, of course, and a swabbie attached to us who could pilot it. It might turn out to be our only hope, if they got us cornered in the stasis field.

“How far away is the other guy?” Charlie asked, meaning the fighter pilot who had turned tail. I cranked down the scale, and the green dot appeared at the right of the display. “About six light-hours.” He had two drones left, too near to him to show as separate dots, having expended one in covering his getaway. “He’s not accelerating any more, but he’s doing point nine gee.”

“Couldn’t do us any good if he wanted to.” Need almost a month to slow down.

At that low point, the light that stood for our own defensive fighter faded out. “Shit.”

“Now the fun starts. Should I tell the troops to get ready, stand by to go topside?” “No . . . have them suit up, in case we lose air. But I expect it’ll be a little while

before we have a ground attack.” I turned the scale up again. Four red dots were already creeping around the globe toward us.

I got suited up and came back to Administration to watch the fireworks on the monitors.

The lasers worked perfectly. All four drones converged on us simultaneously; were targeted and destroyed. All but one of the nova bombs went off below our horizon (the visual horizon was about ten kilometers away, but the lasers were mounted high and could target something at twice that distance). The bomb that detonated on our horizon had melted out a semicircular chunk that glowed brilliantly white for several minutes. An hour later, it was still glowing dull orange, and the ground temperature outside had risen to fifty degrees Absolute, melting most of our snow, exposing an irregular dark gray surface.

The next attack was also over in a fraction of a second, but this time there had been eight drones, and four of them got within ten klicks. Radiation from the glowing craters raised the temperature to nearly 300 degrees. That was above the melting point of water, and I was starting to get

joe riaiaeman

worried. The fighting suits were good to over a thousand degrees, but the automatic lasers depended on low- temperature superconductors for their speed.

I asked the computer what the lasers’ temperature limit

was, and it printed out TR 398-734-009-265, “Some Aspects Concerning the Adaptability of Cryogenic Ordnance to Use in Relatively High-Temperature Environments,”

which had lots of handy advice about how we could insulate the weapons if we had access to a fully-equipped armorer’s shop. It did note that the response time of

automatic-aiming devices increased as the temperature increased, and that above some “critical temperature,” the

weapons would not aim at all. But there was no way to

predict any individual weapon’s behavior, other than to note that the highest critical temperature recorded was 790 degrees and the lowest was 420 degrees.

Charlie was watching the display. His voice was flat over the suit’s radio. “Sixteen this time.”

“Surprised?” One of the few things we knew about Tauran psychology was a certain compulsiveness about numbers, especially primes and powers of two.

“Let’s just hope they don’t have 32 left.” I queried the computer on this; all it could say was that the cruiser had thus far launched a total of 44 drones and that some cruisers had been known to carry as many as 128.

We had more than a half-hour before the drones would strike. I could evacuate everybody to the stasis field, and they would be temporarily safe if one of the nova bombs got through. Safe, but trapped. How long would it take the crater to cool down, if three or four-let alone sixteen-of the bombs made it through? You couldn’t live forever in a fighting suit, even though it recycled everything with remorseless efficiency. One week was enough to make you thoroughly miserable. Two weeks, suicidal. Nobody had ever gone three weeks, under field conditions.

Besides, as a defensive position, the stasis field could be a death-trap. The enemy has all the options since the dome is opaque; the only way you can find out what they’re up to is to stick your head out. They didn’t have to wade in with primitive weapons unless they were impatient. They

could keep the dome saturated with laser fire and wait for you to turn off the generator. Meanwhile harassing you by throwing spears, rocks, arrows into the dome-.you could return fire, but it was pretty futile.

Of course, if one man stayed inside the base, the others could wait out the next half-hour in the stasis field. If he didn’t come get them, they’d know the outside was hot. I chinned the combination that would give me a frequency available to everybody echelon 5 and above.

“This is Major Mandella.” That still sounded like a bad joke.

I outlined the situation to them and asked them to tell their troops that everyone in the company was free to move into the stasis field. I would stay behind and come retrieve them if things went well-not out of nobility, of course; I preferred taking the chance of being vaporized in a nanosecond, rather than almost certain slow death under the gray dome.

I chinned Charlie’s frequency. “You can go, too. I’ll take care of things here.” “No, thanks,” be said slowly. “I’d just as soon. . . Hey, look at this.”

The cruiser had launched another red dot, a couple of minutes behind the others. The display’s key identified it as being another drone. “That’s curious.”

“Superstitious bastards,” he said without feeling.

It turned out that only eleven people chose to join the fifty who had been ordered into the dome. That shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.

As the drones approached, Charlie and I stared at the monitors, carefully not looking at the holograph display, tacitly agreeing that it would be better not to know when they were one minute away, thirty seconds. . . And then, like the other times, it was over before we knew it had started. The screens glared white and there was a yowl of static, and we were still alive.

But this time there were fifteen new holes on the horizon-or closer!-and the temperature was rising so fast that the last digit in the readout was an amorphous blur.

j ~ ua.iti~u1WU

The number peaked in the high 800s and began to slide back down.

We had never seen any of the drones, not during that tiny fraction of a second it took the lasers to aim and fire.

But then the seventeenth one flashed over the horizon, zigzagging crazily, and stopped directly overhead. For an instant it seemed to hover, and then it began to fall. Half the lasers had detected it, and they were firing steadily, but none of them could aim; they were all stuck in their last firing position.

It glittered as it droppecLthe mirror polish of its sleek hull reflecting the white glow from the craters and the eerie flickering of the constant, impotent laser fire. I beard Charlie take one deep breath, and the drone fell so close you could see spidery Tauran numerals etched on the hull and a transparent porthole near the tip-then its engne flared and it was suddenly gone.

“What the hell?” Charlie said, quietly. The porthole. “Maybe reconnaissance.”

“I guess. So we can’t touch them, and they know it.”

“Unless the lasers recover.” Didn’t seem likely. “We better get everybody under the dome. Us, too.”

He said a word whose vowel had changed over the centuries, but whose meaning was clear. “No hurry. Let’s see what they do.”

We waited for several hours. The temperature outside stabilized at 690 degrees- just under the melting point of zinc, I remembered to no purpose-and I tried the manual controls for the lasers, but they were still frozen.

“Here they come,” Charlie said. “Eight again.” I started for the display. “Guess we’ll-”

“Wait! They aren’t drones.” The key identified all eight with the legend Troop Carrier.

“Guess they want to take the base,” he said. “Intact.” That, and maybe try out new weapons and techniques.

“It’s not much of a risk for them. They can always retreat and drop a nova bomb in our laps.”

I called Brill and had her go get everybody who was in the stasis field, set them up with the remainder of her platoon as a defensive line circling around the northeast and

northwest quadrants. I’d put the rest of the people on the other half-circle.

“I wonder,” Charlie said. “Maybe we shouldn’t put everyone topside at once. Until we know how many Taurans there are.”

That was a point. Keep a reserve, let the enemy underestimate our strength. “It’s an idea. . . There might be just 64 of them in eight carriers.” Or 128 or 256. I wished

our spy satellites had a finer sense of discrimination. But you can only cram so much into a machine the size of a grape.

I decided to let Brill’s seventy people be our first line of defense and ordered them into a ring in the ditches we had made outside the base’s perimeter. Everybody else would stay downstairs until needed.

If it turned out that the Taurans, either through numbers or new technology, could field an unstoppable force, I’d order everyone into the stasis field. There was a tunnel from the living quarters to the dome, so the people underground could go straight there in safety. The ones in the ditches would have to fall back under fire. If any of them were still alive when I gave the order.

I called in Hilleboe and had her and Charlie keep watch over the lasers. If they came unstuck, I’d call Brill and her people back. Turn on the automatic aiming system again, then sit back and watch the show. But even stuck, the lasers could be useful. Charlie marked the monitors to show where the rays would go; he and Hilleboe could fire them manually whenever something moved into a weapon’s line- of-sight.

We had about twenty minutes. Brill was walking around the perimeter with her men and women, ordering them into the ditches a squad at a time, setting up overlapping fields of fire. I broke in and asked her to setup the heavy weapons so that they could be used to channel the enemy’s advance into the path of the lasers.

There wasn’t much else to do but wait. I asked Charlie to measure the enemy’s progress and try to give us an accurate count-down, then sat at my desk and pulled out a pad, to diagram Brill’s arrangement and see whether I could improve on it.

The cat jumped up on my Lap, mewling piteously. He’d evidently been unable to tell one person from the other, suited up. But nobody else ever sat at this desk. 1 reached up to pet him and he jumped away.

The first line that I drew ripped through four sheets of paper. It had been some time since I’d done any delicate work in a suit. I remembered how in training, they’d made us practice controlling the strength-amplification circuits by passing eggs from person to person, messy business. I wondered if they still had eggs on Earth.

The diagram completed, I couldn’t see any way to add to it. All those reams of theory crammed in my brain; there was plenty of tactical advice about envelopment and encirclement, but from the wrong point of view. If you were the one who was being encircled, you didn’t have many options. Sit tight and fight. Respond quickly to enemy concentrations of force, but stay flexible so the enemy can’t employ a diversionary force to divert strength from some predictable section of your perimeter. Make full use of air and space support, always good advice. Keep your head down and your chin up and pray for the cavalry. Hold your position and don’t contemplate Dienbienphu, the Alamo, the Battle of Hastings.

“Eight more carriers out,” Charlie said. “Five minutes. Until the first eight get here.”

So they were going to attack in two waves. At least two. What would I do, in the Tauran commander’s position? That wasn’t too far-fetched; the Taurans lacked imagination in tactics and tended to copy human patterns.

The first wave could be a throwaway, a kamikaze attack to soften us up and evaluate our defenses. Then the second would come in more methodically, and finish the job. Or vice versa: the first group would have twenty minutes to get

entrenched; then the second could skip over their heads and hit us hard at one spot- breach the perimeter and overrun the base.

Or maybe they sent out two forces simply because two was a magic number. Or they could launch only eight troop carriers at a time (that would be bad, implying that the carriers were large; in different situations they had used

carriers holding as few as 4 troops or as many as 128).

“Three minutes.” I stared at the cluster of monitors that showed various sectors of the mine field. If we were lucky, they’d land out there, Out of caution. Or maybe pass over it low enough to detonate mines.

I was feeling vaguely guilty. I was safe in my hole, doodling, ready to start calling out orders. How did those seventy sacrificial lambs feel about their absentee commander?

Then I remembered how I had felt about Captain Stott that first mission, when he’d elected to stay safely in orbit while we fought on the ground. The rush of remembered hate was so strong I had to bite back nausea.

“Hilleboe, can you handle the lasers by yourself?” “I don’t see why not, sir.”

I tossed down the pen and stood up. “Charlie, you take over the unit coordination; you can do it as well as I could.

I’m going topside.”

“I wouldn’t advise that, sir.”

“Hell no, William. Don’t be an idiot.” “I’m nзt taking orders, I’m giv-”

“You wouldn’t last ten seconds up there,” Charlie said. “I’ll take the same chance as everybody else.”

“Don’t you hear what I’m saying. They’ll kill you!”

“The troops? Nonsense. I know they don’t like me especially, but-”

“You haven’t listened in on the squad frequencies?” No, they didn’t speak my brand of English when they talked among themselves. “They think you put them out on the line for punishment, for cowardice. After you’d told them anyone was free to go into the dome.”

“Didn’t you, sir?” Hilleboe said.

“To punish them? No, of course not.” Not consciously. “They were just up there when I needed. . . Hasn’t Lieutenant Brili said anything to them?”

“Not that I’ve heard,” Charlie said. “Maybe she’s been too busy to tune in.” Or she agreed with them. “I’d better get-”

“There!” Hilleboe shouted. The first enemy ship was visible in one of the mine field monitors; the others appeared in the next second. They came in from random directions and weren’t evenly distributed around the base.

Five in the northeast quadrant and only one in the southwest. I relayed the information to Bnll.

But we had predicted their logic pretty well; all of them were coming down in the ring of mines. One came close enough to one of the tachyon devices to set it off. The blast caught the rear end of the oddly streamlined craft, causing it to make a complete flip and crash nose-first. Side ports opened up and Taurans came crawling

out. Twelve of them; probably four left inside. If all the others had sixteen as well, there were only slightly more of them than of us.

In the first wave.

The other seven had landed without incident, and yes, there were sixteen each. Brill shuffled a couple of squads to conform to the enemy’s troop concentration, and she waited.

They moved fast across the mine field, striding in unison like bowlegged, top- heavy robots, not even breaking stride when one of them was blown to bits by a mine, which happened eleven times.

When they came over the horizon, the reason for their apparently random distribution was obvious: they had analyzed beforehand which approaches would give them the most natural cover, from the rubble that the drones had kicked up. They would be able to get within a couple of kilometers of the base before we got any clear line-of-sight of them. And their suits had augmentation circuits similar to ours, so they could cover a kilometer in less than a minute.

Brill had her troops open fire immediately, probably more for morale than out of any hope of actually hitting the enemy. They probably were getting a few, though it was hard to tell. At least the tachyon rockets did an impressive job of turning boulders into gravel.

The Taurans returned fire with some weapon similar to the tachyon rocket, maybe exactly the same. They rarely found a mark, though; our people were at and below ground level, and if the rocket didn’t hit something, it would keep going on forever, amen. They did score a hit on one of the gigawatt lasers, though, and the concussion that filtered

down to us was strong enough to make me wish we had burrowed a little deeper than twenty meters.

The gigawaus weren’t doing us any good. The Taurans must have figured out the lines of sight ahead of tune, and gave them wide berth. That turned out to be fortunate, because it caused Charlie to let his attention wander from the laser monitors for a moment.

“What the hell?”

“What’s that, Charlie?” I didn’t take my eyes off the monitors. Waiting for something to happen.

“The ship, the cruiser-it’s gone.” I looked at the holograph display. He was right; the only red lights were those that stood for the troop carriers.

“Where did it go?” I asked inanely.

“Let’s play it back.” He programmed the display to go back a couple of minutes and cranked out the scale to where both planet and collapsar showed on the cube. The cruiser showed up, and with it, three green dots. Our “coward,”

attacking the cruiser with only two drones.

But he had a little help from the laws of physics.

Instead of going into collapsar insertion, he had skimmed around the collapsar field in a slingshot orbit. He had come out going nine-tenths of the speed of light; the drones were going .99c, headed straight for the enemy cruiser. Our planet was about a thousand light-seconds from the collapsar, so the Tauran ship had only ten seconds to detect and stop both drones. And at that speed, it didn’t matter whether you’d been hit by a nova-bomb or a spitball.

The first drone disintegrated the cruiser, and the other one, .01 second behind, glided on down to impact on the planet. The fighter missed the planet by a couple of hundred kilometers and hurtled on into space, decelerating with the maximum twenty-five gees. He’d be back in a couple of months.

But the Taurans weren’t going to wait. They were getting close enough to our lines for both sides to start using lasers, but they were also within easy grenade range. A good-size rock could shield them from laser fire, but the grenades and rockets were slaughtering them.

At first, Brill’s troops had the overwhelming advantage; joe naiaeman

fighting from ditches, they could only be harmed by an occasional lucky shot or an extremely well-aimed grenade (which the Taurans threw by hand, with a range of several hundred meters). Brill had lost four, but it looked as if the Tauran force was down to less than half its original size.

Eventually, the landscape had been torn up enough so that the bulk of the Tauran force was able to fight from holes in the ground. The fighting slowed down to individual laser duels, punctuated occasionally by heavier weapons. But it wasn’t smart to use up a tachyon rocket against a single Tauran, not with another force of unknown size only a few minutes away.

Something had been bothering me about that holographic replay. Now, with the battle’s lull, I knew what it was.

When that second drone crashed at near-lightspeed, how much damage had it done to the planet? I stepped over to the computer and punched it up; found out how much energy had been released in the collision, and then compared it with geological information in the computer’s memory.

Twenty times as much energy as the most powerful earthquake ever recorded. On a planet three-quarters the size of Earth.

On the general frequency: “Everybody-topside! Right now!” I palmed the button that would cycle and open the airlock and tunnel that led from Administration to the surface.

“What the hell, Will-” “Earthquake!” How long? “Move!”

Hilleboc and Charlie were right behind me. The cat was sitting on my desk, licking himself unconcernedly. I had an irrational impulse to put him inside my suit, which was the way he’d been carried from the ship to the base, but knew he wouldn’t tolerate more than a few minutes of it. Then I had the more reasonable impulse to simply vaporize him with my laser-finger, but by then the door was closed and we were swarming up the ladder. All the way up, and for some time afterward, I was haunted by the image of that helpless animal, trapped under tons of rubble, dying slowly as the air hissed away.

“Safer in the ditches?” Charlie said

“I don’t know,” I said. “Never been in an earthquake.” Maybe the walls of the ditch would close up and crush us.

I was surprised at how dark it was on the surface. S Doradus had almost set; the monitors had compensated for the low light level.

An enemy laser raked across the clearing to our left, making a quick shower of sparks when it flicked by a gigawatt mounting. We hadn’t been seen yet. We all

decided yes, it would be safer in the ditches, and made it to the nearest one in three strides.

There were four men and women in the ditch, one of them badly wounded or dead. We scrambled down the ledge and I turned up my image amplifier to log two, to inspect our ditchmates. We were lucky; one was a grenadier and they also had a rocket launcher. I could just make out the names on their helmets. We were in Brill’s ditch, but she hadn’t noticed us yet. She was at the opposite end, cautiously peering over the edge, directing two squads in a flanking movement. When,they were safely in position, she ducked back down. “Is that you, Major?”

“That’s right,” I said cautiously. I wondered whether any of the people in the ditch were among the ones after my scalp.

“What’s this about an earthquake?”

She had been told about the cruiser being destroyed, but not about the other drone. I explained in as few words as possible.

“Nobody’s come out of the airlock,” she said. “Not yet. I guess they all went into the stasis field.”

“Yeah, they were just as close to one as the other.” Maybe some of them were still down below, hadn’t taken my warning seriously. I thinned the general frequency to check, and then all hell broke loose.

The ground dropped away and then flexed back up; slammed us so hard that we were airborne, tumbling out of the ditch. We flew several meters, going high enough to see the pattern of bright orange and yellow ovals, the craters where nova bombs had been stopped. I landed on my feet but the ground was shifting and slithering so much that it was impossible to stay upright.

With a basso grinding I could feel through my suit, the cleared area above our base crumbled and fell in. Part of the stasis field’s underside was exposed when the ground subsided; it settled to its new level with aloof grace.

Well, minus one cat. I hoped everybody else had time and sense enough to get under the dome.

A figure came staggering out of the ditch nearest to me and I realized with a start that it wasn’t human. At that range, my laser burned a hole straight through his helmet; he took two steps and fell over backward. Another helmet peered over the edge of the ditch. I sheared the top of it off before he could raise his weapon.

I couldn’t get my bearings. The only thing that hadn’t changed was the stasis dome, and it looked the same from any angle. The gigawatt lasers were all buried, but one of them had switched on, a brilliant flickering searchlight that illuminated a swirling cloud of vaporized rock.

Obviously, though, I was in enemy territory. I started across the trembling ground toward the dome.

I couldn’t raise any platoon leaders. All of them but Brill were probably inside the dome. I did get Hilleboe and Charlie; told Hilleboe to go inside the dome and roust everybody out. If the next wave also had 128, we were going to need everybody.

The tremors died down and I found my way into a

“friendly” ditch-the cooks’ ditch, in fact, since the only people there were Orban and Rudkoski.

“Looks like you’ll have to start from scratch again, Private.” “That’s all right, sir. Liver needed a rest.”

1 got a beep from Hilleboe and chinned her on. “Sir… there were only ten people there. The rest didn’t make it.”

“They stayed behind?” Seemed like they’d had plenty of time. “I don’t know, sir.”

“Never mind. Get me a count, how many people we have, all totalled.” I tried the platoon leaders’ frequency again and it was still silent.

The three of us watched for enemy laser fire for a couple of minutes, but there was none. Probably waiting for reinforcements. Hilleboe called back “I only get fifty-three, sir. Some may be unconscious.”

“All right. Have them sit tight until-” Then the second wave showed up, the troop carriers roaring over the horizon with their jets pointed our way, decelerating. “Get some rockers on those bastards!” Hilleboe yelled to everyone in particular. But nobody had managed to stay attached to a rocket launcher while he was being tossed around. No grenade launchers, either, and the range was too far for the band lasers to do any damage.

These carriers were four or five times the size of the ones in the first wave. One of them grounded about a kilometer in front of us, barely stopping long enough to disgorge its troops. Of which there were over 50, probably 64-times 8 made 512. No way we could hold them back.

“Everybody listen, this is Major Mandella.” I tried to keep my voice even and quiet. “We’re going to retreat back into the dome, quickly but in an orderly way. I know we’re scattered all over hell. If you belong to the second or fourth platoon, stay put for a minute and give covering fire while the first and third platoons, and support, fall back.

“First and third and support, fall back to about half your present distance from the dome, then take cover and defend the second and fourth as they come back. They’ll go to the edge of the dome and cover you while you come back the rest of the way.” I shouldn’t have said “retreat”; that word wasn’t in the book. Retrograde action.

There was a lot more retrograde than action. Eight or nine people were firing, and all the rest were in full flight.

Rudkoski and Orban had vanished. I took a few carefully aimed shots, to no great effect, then ran down to the other end of the ditch, climbed out and headed for the dome.

The Taurans started firing rockets, but most of them seemed to be going too high. I saw two of us get blown away before I got to my halfway point; found a nice big rock and hid behind it. I peeked out and decided that only two or three of the Taurans were close enough to be even remotely possible laser targets, and the better part of valor

would be in not drawing unnecessary attention to myself. I ran the rest of the way to the edge of the field and stopped to return fire. After a couple of shots, I realized that I was just making myself a target; as far as I could see there was only one other person who was still running toward the dome.

A rocket zipped by, so close I could have touched it. I flexed my knees and kicked, and entered the dome in a rather undignified posture.

Inside, I could see the rocket that had missed me drifting lazily through the gloom, rising slightly as it passed through to the other side of the dome. It would vaporize the instant it came out the other side, since all of the kinetic energy it had lost in abruptly slowing down to 16.3 meters per second would come back in the form of heat.

Nine people were lying dead, facedown just inside of the field’s edge. It wasn’t unexpected, though it wasn’t the sort of thing you were supposed to tell the troops.

Their fighting suits were intact-otherwise they wouldn’t have made it this far-but sometime during the past few minutes’ rough-and-tumble, they had damaged the coaling of special insulation that protected them from the stasis field. So as soon as they entered the field, all electrical activity in their bodies ceased, which killed them instantly. Also, since no molecule in their bodies could move faster than 16.3 meters per second, they instantly froze solid, their body temperature stabilized at a cool

0.426 degrees Absolute.

I decided not to turn any of them over to find out their names, not yet. We had to get some sort of defensive position worked out before the Taurans came through the dome. If they decided to slug it out rather than wait

With elaborate gestures, I managed to get everybody collected in the center of the field, under the fighter’s tail, where the weapons were racked.

There were plenty of weapons, since we had been prepared to outfit three times this number of people. After giving each person a shield and short-sword, I traced a question in the snow: GOOD ARCHERS? RAISE HANDS. (got five volunteers, then picked out three more so that all the bows would be in use. Twenty arrows per bow. They were the most effective long-range weapons we had; the

arrows were almost invisible in their slow ifight, heavily weighted and tipped with a deadly sliver of diamond-hard C-.

I arranged the archers in a circle around the fighter (its landing fins would give them partial protection from missiles coming in from behind) and between each pair of archers put four other people: two spear-throwers, one quarterstaff, and a person armed with battleax and a dozen throwing knives. This arrangement would theoretically take care of the enemy at any range, from the edge of the field

to hand-to-hand combat.

Actually, at some 600-to-42 odds, they could probably walk in with a rock in each hand, no shields or special weapons, and still beat the shit out of us.

Assuming they knew what the stasis field was. Their technology seemed up to date in all other respects.

For several hours nothing happened. We got about as bored as anyone could, waiting to die. No one to talk to, nothing to see but the unchanging gray dome, gray snow, gray spaceship and a few identically gray soldiers. Nothing to hear, taste or smell but yourself.

Those of us who still had any interest in the battle were keeping watch on the bottom edge of the dome, waiting for the first Taurans to come through. So it took us a second to realize what was going on when the attack did stait It came from above, a cloud of catapulted darts swarming in through the dome some thiity meters above the ground, headed straight for the center of the hemisphere.

The shields were big enough that you could hide most of your body behind them by crouching slightly; the people who saw the darts coming could protect themselves

easily. The ones who had their backs to the action, or were just asleep at the switch, had to rely on dumb luck for survival; there was no way to shout a warning, and it took only three seconds for a missile to get from the edge of the dome to its center.

We were lucky, losing only five. One of them was an archer, Shubik. I took over her bow and we waited, expecting a ground attack immediately.

It didn’t come. After a half-hour, I went around the circle and explained with gestures that the first thing you were supposed to do, if anything happened, was to touch the

person on your right. He’d do the same, and so on down the line.

That might have saved my life. The second dart attack, a couple of hours later, came from behind me. I felt the nudge, slapped the person on my tight, turned around and saw the cloud descending. I got the shield over my head, and they hit a split-second later.

I set down my bow to pluck three darts from the shield and the ground attack started.

It was a weird, impressive sight Some three hundred of them stepped into the field simultaneously, almost shoulder-to-shoulder around the perimeter of the dome. They advanced in step, each one holding a round shield barely large enough to hide his massive chest. They were throwing darts similar to the ones we had been barraged with.

I set up the shield in front of me-it had little extensions on the bottom to keep it upright-and with the first arrow I shot, I knew we had a chance. It struck one of them in the center of his shield, went straight through and penetrated his suit.

It was a one-sided massacre. The darts weren’t very effective without the element of surprise-but when one came sailing over my head from behind, it did give me a crawly feeling between the shoulder blades.

With twenty arrows I got twenty Taurans. They closed ranks every time one dropped; you didn’t even have to aim. After running out of arrows, I tried throwing their darts back at them. But their light shields were quite adequate against the small missiles.

We’d killed more than half of them with arrows and spears, long before they got into range of the hand-to-hand weapons. I drew my sword and waited. They still outnumbered us by better than three to one.

When they got within ten meters, the people with the chakram throwing knives had their own field day. Although the spinning disc was easy enough to see and took more

than a half-second to get from thrower to target, most of the Taurans reacted in the same ineffective way, raising up the shield to ward it off. The razor-sharp, tempered heavy blade cut through the light shield like a buzz-saw through cardboard.

The first hand-to-hand contact was with the quarter-staffs, which were metal rods two meters long that tapered at the ends to a double-edged, serrated knife blade. The Taurans had a cold-blooded–or valiant, if your mind works that way-method for dealing with them. They would simply grab the blade and die. While the human was trying to extricate his weapon from the frozen death-grip, a Tauran swordsman, with a scimitar over a meter long, would step in and kill him.

Besides the swords, they had a bob-like thing that was a length of elastic cord that ended with about ten centimeters of something like barbed wire, and a small weight to propel it. It was a dangerous weapon for all concerned; if they missed their target it would come snapping back unpredictably. But they hit their target pretty often, going under the shields and wrapping the thorny wire around ankles.

I stood back-to-back with Private Erikson, and with our swords we managed to stay alive for the next few minutes.

When the Taurans were down to a couple of dozen survivors, they just turned around and started marching out. We threw some darts after them, getting three, but we didn’t warn to chase after them. They might turn around and start hacking again.

There were only twenty-eight of us left standing. Nearly ten times that number of dead Taurans littered the ground, but there was no satisfaction in it.

They could do the whole thing over, with a fresh 300. And this time it would work.

We moved from body to body, pulling out arrows and spears, then took up places around the fighter again. Nobody bothered to retrieve the quarterstaffs. I counted noses:

Charlie and Diana were still alive (Hilleboe had been one of the quarterstaff victims), as well as two supporting officers. Wilber and Szydlowska. Rudkoski was still alive but Orban had taken a dart.

After a day of waiting, it looked as though the enemy

had decided on a war of attrition rather than repeating the

ground attack. Darts came in constantly, not in swarms anymore, but in twos and threes and tens. And from all different angles. We couldn’t stay alert forever; they’d get somebody every three or four hours.

We took turns sleeping, two at a time, on top of the stasis field generator. Sitting directly under the bulk of the fighter, it was the safest place in the dome.

Every now and then, a Tauran would appear at the edge of the field, evidently to see whether any of us were left.

Sometimes we’d shoot an arrow at him, for practice.

The darts stopped falling after a couple of days. I supposed it was possible that they’d simply run out of them.

Or maybe they’d decided to stop when we were down to twenty survivors.

There was a more likely possibility. I took one of the quarterstaffs down to the edge of the field and poked it through, a centimeter or so. When I drew it back, the point was melted off. When 1 showed it to Charlie, he rocked back and forth (the only way you can nod in a suit); this sort of thing had happened before, one of the first times the stasis field hadn’t worked. They simply saturated it with laser fire and waited for us to go stir-crazy and turn off the generator. They were probably sitting in their ships playing the Tauran equivalent of pinochle.

I tried to think. It was hard to keep your mind on something for any length of time in that hostile environment, sense-deprived, looking over your shoulder every few seconds. Something Charlie had said. Only yesterday. I couldn’t track it down. It wouldn’t have worked then; that was all I could remember. Then finally it came to me.

I called everyone over and wrote in the snow:

GET NOVA BOMBS FROM SHIP. CARRY TO EDGE OF FIELD.

MOVE FIELD.

Joe Ilableman

Szydlowska knew where the proper tools would be aboard ship. Luckily, we had left all of the entrances open before turning on the stasis field; they were electronic and would have been frozen shut. We got an assortment of wrenches from the engine room and climbed up to the cockpit. He knew how to remove the access plate that exposed a crawl space into the bomb-bay. I followed him in through the meter-wide tube.

Normally, I supposed, it would have been pitch-black.

But the stasis field illuminated the bomb-bay with the same dim, shadowless light that prevailed outside. The bomb-bay was too small for both of us, so I stayed at the end of the crawl space and watched.

The bomb-bay doors had a “manual override” so they were easy; Szydlowska just turned a hand-crank and we were in business. Freeing the two nova bombs from their cradles was another thing. Finally, he went back down to the engine room and brought back a crowbar. He pried one loose and I got the other, and we rolled them out the bomb-bay.

Sergeant Anghebov was already working on them by the time we climbed back down. All you had to do to arm the bomb was to unscrew the fuse on the nose of it and poke something around in the fuse socket to wreck the delay mechanism and safety restraints.

We carried them quickly to the edge, six people per bomb, and set them down next to each other. Then we waved to the four people who were standing by at the field generator’s handles. They picked it up and walked ten paces in the opposite direction. The bombs disappeared as the edge of the field slid over them.

There was no doubt that the bombs went off. For a couple of seconds it was hot as the interior of a star outside, and even the stasis field took notice of the fact: about a third of the dome glowed a dull pink for a moment, then was gray again. There was a slight acceleration, like you would feel in a slow elevator. That meant we were drifting down to the bottom of the crater. Would there be a solid bottom? Or would we sink down through molten rock to be trapped like a fly in amber-didn’t pay to even think about that. Perhaps if it happened, we could blast our way out with the fighter’s gigawatt laser. Twelve of us, anyhow.

HOW LONG? Charlie scraped in the snow at my feet.

That was a damned good question. About all I knew was the amount of energy two nova bombs released. I didn’t know how big a fireball they would make, which would determine the temperature at detonation and the size of the crater. I didn’t know the heat capacity of the surrounding rock, or its boiling point I wrote: ONE WEEK, SHRUG?

HAVE TO THINK.

The ship’s computer could have told me in a thousandth of a second, but it wasn’t talking. I started writing equations m the snow, trying to get a maximum and minimum figure for the length of time it would take for the outside to cool down to 500 degrees. Anghelov, whose physics was much more up-to-date, did his own calculations on the other side of the ship.

My answer said anywhere from six hours to six days (although for six hours, the surrounding rock would have to conduct heat like pure copper), and Anghelov got five hours to 41/2 days. I voted for six and nobody else got a vote.

We slept a lot. Charlie and Diana played chess by scraping symbols in the snow; I was never able to hold the shifting positions of the pieces in my mind. I checked my figures several times and kept coming up with six days. I checked Anghelov’s computations~ too, and they seemed all right, but I stuck to my guns. It wouldn’t hurt us to stay in the suits an extra day and a half. We argued good-naturedly in terse shorthand.

There had been nineteen of us left the day we tossed the bombs outside. There were still nineteen, six days later, when I paused with my hand over the generator’s cutoff switch. What was waiting for us out there? Surely we had killed all the Taurans within several klicks of the explosion.

But there might have been a reserve force farther away, now waiting patiently on the crater’s lip. At least you could push a quarterstaff through the field and have it come back whole.

I dispersed the people evenly around the area, so they night not get us with a single shot. Then, ready to turn it ,ack on immediately if anything went wrong, I pushed.

My radio was still tuned to the general frequency; after more than a week of silence my ears were suddenly assaulted with loud, happy babbling.

We stood in the center of a crater almost a kilometer wide and deep. Its sides were a shiny black crust shot through with red cracks, hot but no longer dangerous. The hemisphere of earth that we rested on had sunk a good forty meters into the floor of the crater, while it had still been molten, so now we stood on a kind of pedestal.

Not a Tauran in sight

We rushed to the ship, sealed it and filled it with cool air and popped our suits. I didn’t press seniority for the one shower; just sat back in an acceleration couch and took deep breaths of air that didn’t smell like recycled Mandella.

The ship was designed for a maximum crew of twelve, so we stayed outside in shifts of seven to keep from straining the life support systems. I sent a repeating message to the other fighter, which was still over six weeks away, that we were in good shape and waiting to be picked up. 1 was reasonably certain he would have seven free berths, since the normal crew for a combat mission was only three.

It was good to walk around and talk again. I officially suspended all things military for the duration of our stay on the planet. Some of the people were survivors of Brill’s mutinous bunch, but they didn’t show any hostility toward mc.

We played a kind of nostalgia game, comparing the various eras we’d experienced on Earth, wondering what it would be like in the 700-years-future we were going back to. Nobody mentioned the fact that we would at best go back to a few months’ furlough and then be assigned to another strike force, another turn of the wheel.

Wheels. One day Charlie asked me from what counhiy my name originated; it sounded weird to him. I told him it originated from the lack of a dictionary and that if it were spelled right, it would look even weirder.

I got to kill a good half-hour explaining all the peripheral details to that. Basically, though, my parents were “hippies” (a kind of subculture in the late-twentieth- century America, that rejected materialism and embraced a broad spectrum of odd ideas) who lived with a group of other hippies in a small agricultural community. When my mother got pregnant, they wouldn’t be so conventional as to get married: this entailed the woman taking the man’s name, and implied that she was his property. But they got all intoxicated and sentimental and decided they would both change their names to be the same. They rode into the nearest town, arguing all the way as to what name would be the best symbol for the love-bond between them-I narrowly missed having a much shorter name-and they settled on Mandala.

A mandala is a wheel-like design the hippies had borrowed from a foreign religion, that symbolized the cosmos, the cosmic mind, God, or whatever needed a symbol. Neither my mother nor my father knew how to spell the word, and the magistrate in town wrote it down the way it sounded to him.

They named me William in honor of a wealthy uncle, who unfortunately died penniless.

The six weeks passed rather pleasantly: talking, reading, resting. The other ship landed next to ours and did have nine free berths. We shuffled crews so that each ship had someone who could get it out of trouble if the preprogrammed jump sequence malfunctioned. I assigned myself to the other ship, in hopes it would have some new books. It didn’t.

We zipped up in the tanks and took off simultaneously.

We wound up spending a lot of time in the tanks, just to keep from Looking at the same faces all day long in the crowded ship. The added periods of acceleration got us back to Stargate in ten months, subjective. Of course, it was 340 years (minus seven months) to the hypothetical objective observer.

There were hundreds of cruisers in orbit around Stargate. Bad news: with that kind of backlog we probably wouldn’t get any furlough at all.

I supposed I was more likely to get a court-martial than a furlough, anyhow. Losing 88 percent of my company, many of them because they didn’t have enough confidence in me to obey the direct earthquake order. And we were back where we’d started on Sade-138; no Taurans there, but no base either.

We got landing instructions and went straight down, no shuttle. There was another surprise waiting at the spaceport Dozens of cruisers were standing around on the ground (they’d never done that before for fear that Stargate would be hit)-and two captured Tauran cruisers as well. We’d never managed to get one intact.

Seven centuries could have brought us a decisive advantage, of course. Maybe we were winning.

We went through an airlock under a “returnees” sign.

After the air cycled and we’d popped our suits, a beautiful young woman came in with a cartload of tunics and told us, in perfectly-accented English, to get dressed and go to the lecture hail at the end of the corridor to our left.

The tunic felt odd, light yet warm. It was the first thing I’d worn besides a fighting suit or bare skin in almost a year.

The lecture hall was about a hundred times too big for the twenty-two of us. The same woman was there and asked us to move down to the front. That was unsettling; I could have sworn she had gone down the corridor the other way-I knew she had; I’d been captivated by the sight of her clothed behind.

Hell, maybe they had matter transmitters. Or teleportation. Wanted to save herself a few steps.

We sat for a minute and a man, clothed in the same kind of unadorned tunic the woman and we were wearing, walked across the stage with a stack of thick notebooks under each arm.

The woman followed him on, also carrying notebooks.
I looked behind me and she was still standing in the aisle.

To make things even more odd, the man was virtually a twin to both of them.

The man riffled through one of the notebooks and cleared his throat. “These books are for your convenience,” he said, also with perfect accent, “and you don’t have to read them if you don’t want to. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, because.. . you’re free men and women. The war is over.”

Disbelieving silence.

“As you will read in this book, the war ended 221 years ago. Accordingly, this is the year 220. Old style, of course, it is 3138 A.D.

“You are the last group of soldiers to return. When you leave here, I will leave as well. And destroy Stargate. It exists only as a rendezvous point for returnees and as a monument to human stupidity. And shame. As you will read. Destroying it will be a cleansing.”

He stopped speaking and the woman started without a pause. “I am sorry for what you’ve been through and wish I could say that it was for good cause, but as you will read, it was not.

“Even the wealth you have accumulated, back salary and compound interest, is worthless, as I no longer use money or credit. Nor is there such a thing as an economy, in which to use these . .. things.”

“As you must have guessed by now,” the man took over, “I am, we are, clones of a single individual. Some two hundred and fifty years ago, my name was Kahn. Now it is Man.

“I had a direct ancestor in your company, a Corporal Larry Kahn. It saddens me that he didn’t come back.”

“I am over ten billion individuals but only one consciousness,” she said. “After you read, I will try to clarify this. I know that it will be difficult to understand.

“No other humans are quickened, since I am the perfect pattern. Individuals who die are replaced.

“There are some planets, however, on which humans are born in the normal, mammalian way. If my society is too alien for you, you may go to one of these planets. If you wish to take part in procreation, I will not discourage it.

Many veterans ask me to change their polarity to heterosexual so that they can more easily fit into these other societies. This I can do very easily.”

Don’t worry about that, Man, just make out my ticket.

“You will be my guest here at Stargate for ten days, after which you will be taken wherever you want to go,” he said. “Please read this book in the meantime. Feel free to ask any questions, or request any service.” They both stood and walked off the stage.

Charlie was sitting next to me. “Incredible,” he said. “They let.. . they encourage. . . men and women to do the again? Together?”

The female aisle-Man was sitting behind us, and she answered before I could frame a reasonably sympathetic, hypocritical reply. “It isn’t a judgment on your society,” she said, probably not seeing that he took it a little more personally than that. ‘1 only feel that it’s necessary as a eugenic safety device. I have no evidence that there is anything wrong with cloning only one ideal individual, but if it turns out to have been a mistake, there will be a large genetic pool with which to start again.”

She patted him on the shoulder. “Of course, you don’t have to go to these breeder planets. You can stay on one of my planets. I make no distinction between heterosexual play and homosexual.”

She went up on the stage to give a long spiel about where we were going to stay and eat and so forth while we were on Stargate, “Never been seduced by a computer before,”

Charlie muttered.

The 1143-year-long war had been begun on false pretenses and only continued because the two races were unable to communicate.

Once they could talk, the first question was “Why did you start this thing?” and the answer was “Me?”

The Taurans hadn’t known war for millennia, and toward the beginning of the twenty-first century it looked as though mankind was ready to outgrow the institution as well. But the old soldiers were still around, and many of them were in positions of power. They virtually ran the United Nations Exploratory and Colonization Group, that was taking advantage of the newly-discovered collapsar jump to explore interstellar space.

Many of the early ships met with accidents and disappeared. The ex-military men were suspicious. They armed the colonizing vessels, and the first time they met a Tauran ship, they blasted it.

They dusted off their medals and the rest was going to be history.

You couldn’t blame it all on the military, though. The evidence they presented for the Taurans’ having been responsible for the earlier casualties was laughably thin. The few people who pointed this out were ignored.

The fact was, Earth’s economy needed a war, and this one was ideal. It gave a nice hole to throw buckets of money into, but would unify humanity rather than dividing it.

The Taurans relearned war, after a fashion. They never got really good at it, and would eventually have lost.

The Taurans, the book explained, couldn’t communicate with humans because they had no concept of the individual; they had been natural clones for millions of years. Eventually, Earth’s cruisers were manned by Man, Kahn-clones, and they were for the first time able to get through to each other.

The book stated this as a bald fact. lasked a Man to explain what it meant, what was special about clone-to-clone communication, and he said that I a priori couldn’t understand it. There were no words for it. and my brain wouldn’t be able to accommodate the concepts even if there were words.

All right. It sounded a little fishy, but I was willing to accept it. I’d accept that up was down if it meant the war was over.

Man was a pretty considerate entity. Just for us twentytwo, he went to the trouble of rejuvenating a little restaurant-tavern and staffing it at all hours (I never saw a Man eat or drink-guess they’d discovered a way around it). I was sitting in there one evening, drinking beer and reading their book, when Charlie came in and sat down next to me. Without preamble, he said, “I’m going to give it a try.” “Give what a try?”

“Women. Hetero.” He shuddered. “No offense. .. it’s not really very appealing.” He patted my hand, looking distracted. “But the alternative.. . have you tried it?”

“Well. . . no, I haven’t.” Female Man was a visual treat, but only in the same sense as a painting or a piece of sculpture. I just couldn’t see them as human beings.

“Don’t.” He didn’t elaborate. “Besides, they say-he says, she says, it says-that they can change me back just as easily. If I don’t like it.”

“You’ll like it, Charlie.”

“Sure that’s what they say.” He ordered a stiff drink. “Just seems unnatural. Anyway, since, uh, I’m going to make the switch, do you mind if. . . why don’t we plan on going to the same planet?”

“Sure, Charlie, that’d be great.” I meant it. “You know where you’re going?” “Hell, I don’t care. Just away from here.”

“I wonder if Heaven’s still as nice-”

“No.” Charlie jerked a thumb at the bartender. “He lives there.” “I don’t know. I guess there’s a list.”

A man came into the tavern, pushing a cart piled high with folders. “Major Mandella? Captain Moore?”

“That’s us,” Charlie said.

“These are your military records. I hope you find them of interest. They were transferred to paper when your strike force was the only one outstanding, because it would have been impractical to keep the normal data retrieval networks running to preserve so few data.”

They always anticipated your questions, even when you didn’t have any.

My folder was easily live times as thick as Charlie’s. Probably thicker than any other, since I seemed to be the only trooper who’d made it through the whole duration. Poor Marygay. “Wonder what kind of report old Stott filed about me.” I flipped to the front of the folder.

Stapled to the front page was a small square of paper.

All the other pages were pristine white, but this one was tan with age and crumbling around the edges.

The handwriting was familiar, too familiar even after so long. The date was over 250 years old.

I winced and was blinded by sudden tears. I’d had no reason to suspect that she might be alive. But I hadn’t really known she was dead, not until I saw that date.

“William? What’s-”

“Leave me be, Charlie. Just for a minute.” I wiped my eyes and closed the folder. I shouldn’t even read the damned note. Going to a new life, I should leave the old ghosts behind.

But even a message from the grave was contact of a sort. I opened the folder again.

11 Oct 2878

William- All this is in your personnel file. But knowing you, you might just chuck it. So 1 made sure you’d get this note.

Obviously, I Live. Maybe you will, too. Join me.

I know from the records that you’re out at Sade138 and won’t be back for a couple of centuries. No problem.

I’m going to a planet they call Middle Finger, the fifth plane: out from Mizar. It’s two collapsar jumps, ten months subjective. Middle Finger is a kind of Coventry for heterosexuals. They call it a “eugenic control baseline.”

No matter. it took all of my money, and all the money of five other old-timers, but we bought a cruiser from UNEF. And we’re using it as a time machine.

So i’m on a relativistic shuttle, waiting for you. All it does is go out five light years and come back to Middle Finger, very fast. Every ten years I age about a month. So if you ‘re on schedule and still alive, I’ll only be twenty-eight when you get here. Hurry!

I never found anybody else and I don’t want anybody else. I don’t care whether you’re ninety years old or thirty. if I can’t be your lover, I’ll be your nurse.

-Marygay.

“Say, bartender.” “Yes, Major?”

“Do you know of a place called Middle Finger? Is it still there?”

“Of course it is. Where else would it be?” Reasonable question. “A very nice place. Garden planet. Some people don’t think it’s exciting enough.”

“What’s this all about?” Charlie said.

I handed the bartender my empty glass. “I just found out where we’re going.”

EPILOGUE

From The New Voice, Paxton, Middle Finger 24-6 14/2/3143

OLD-TIMER HAS FIRST BOY

Mazygay Potter-Mandella (24 Post Road, Paxton) gave birth Friday to a fine baby boy, 3.1 kilos.

Maiygay lays claim to being the seoond-“oldeet” resident of Middle Finger, having been born In 1977. She fought through most of the Forever War and then waited for her mate on the time shuttle, 261 years.

The baby, not yet iwned, was delivered at home with the help of a friend of the family, Dr. Diana Aleever-Moore.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joe Haldeman was born in the USA ifl 1943. At college he studied physics and astronomy He then served as a combat engineer in Vietnam from 1967 to 1969. He was severely wounded during the war and received a Purple Heart. Haldeman’s first SF story was ‘Out of Phase’, published in 1969. The Forever War was published in 1974 and became a huge success, winning both a Nebula award in 1975 and a Hugo in 1976. He wrote two other novels in the 1970s, Mindbridge and All My Sins Remembered, before starting the Worlds sequence in 1981. A novella version of The Hemingway Hoax (1990) won both Nebula and Hugo awards ifl ’90 and ‘9! respectively More recent titles include J’fone So Blind and 1968. Haldeman now combines his writing career with a position as adjunct professor teaching writing at MIT His latest novel, Forever Peace, won the igg8 Hugo award, and will be published in ~ by Millennium. He is presently working on a sequel to The Forever War, entitled Forever Free.

The End

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Law 4 of the 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene; Always say less than necessary (Full Text)

Here is another post from the Robert Greene book “The 48 Laws of Power”. It suggests that you say as little as possible, and use this technique to gain control over the thoughts and actions of others. It advises laconic and taciturn speech mechanisms.

LAW 4

ALWAYS SAY LESS THAN NECESSARY

JUDGMENT

When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike. Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less. The more you say, the more likely you are to say something foolish.

Video

Here’s Robert Greene when interviewed about this law. VIDEO.

TRANSGRESSION OF THE LAW

Gnaeus Marcius, also known as Coriolanus, was a great military hero of ancient Rome. In the first half of the fifth century B.C. he won many important battles, saving the city from calamity time and time again. Because he spent most of his time on the battlefield, few Romans knew him personally, making him something of a legendary figure.

In 454 B.C., Coriolanus decided it was time to exploit his reputation and enter politics. He stood for election to the high rank of consul. Candidates for this position traditionally made a public address early in the race, and when Coriolanus came before the people, he began by displaying the dozens of scars he had accumulated over seventeen years of fighting for Rome. Few in the crowd really heard the lengthy speech that followed; those scars, proof of his valor and patriotism, moved the people to tears. Coriolanus’s election seemed certain.

When the polling day arrived, however, Coriolanus made an entry into the forum escorted by the entire senate and by the city’s patricians, the aristocracy. The common people who saw this were disturbed by such a blustering show of confidence on election day.

And then Coriolanus spoke again, mostly addressing the wealthy citizens who had accompanied him. His words were arrogant and insolent. Claiming certain victory in the vote, he boasted of his battlefield exploits, made sour jokes that appealed only to the patricians, voiced angry accusations against his opponents, and speculated on the riches he would bring to Rome. This time the people listened: They had not realized that this legendary soldier was also a common braggart.

Down on his luck, [the screenwriter] Michael Arlen went to New York in 1944. To drown his sorrows he paid a visit to the famous restaurant “21.” 

In the lobby, he ran into Sam Goldwyn, who offered the somewhat impractical advice that he should buy racehorses. 

At the bar Arlen met Louis B. Mayer, an old acquaintance, who asked him what were his plans for the future. “

I was just talking to Sam Goldwyn ...” began Arlen. 

“How much did he offer you? ”interrupted Mayer. 

“Not enough,” he replied evasively. 

“Would you take fifteen thousand for thirty weeks?” asked Mayer. 

No hesitation this time. “Yes,” said Arlen.

-THE LITTLE, BROWN BOOK OF ANECDOTES, CLIFTON FADIMAN, ED., 1985

News of Coriolanus’s second speech spread quickly through Rome, and the people turned out in great numbers to make sure he was not elected. Defeated, Coriolanus returned to the battlefield, bitter and vowing revenge on the common folk who had voted against him. Some weeks later a large shipment of grain arrived in Rome. The senate was ready to distribute this food to the people, for free, but just as they were preparing to vote on the question Coriolanus appeared on the scene and took the senate floor. The distribution, he argued, would have a harmful effect on the city as a whole. Several senators appeared won over, and the vote on the distribution fell into doubt. Coriolanus did not stop there: He went on to condemn the concept of democracy itself. He advocated getting rid of the people’s representatives—the tribunes—and turning over the governing of the city to the patricians.

One oft-told tale about Kissinger... involved a report that Winston Lord had worked on for days. 

After giving it to Kissinger, he got it back with the notation, “Is this the best you can do?” 

Lord rewrote and polished and finally resubmitted it; back it came with the same curt question. 

After redrafting it one more time—and once again getting the same question from Kissinger-Lord snapped, “Damn it, yes, it’s the best I can do. ” 

To which Kissinger replied: “Fine, then I guess I’ll read it this time. ” 

-KISSINGER. WALTER ISAACSON, 1992

When word of Coriolanus’s latest speech reached the people, their anger knew no bounds. The tribunes were sent to the senate to demand that Coriolanus appear before them. He refused. Riots broke out all over the city. The senate, fearing the people’s wrath, finally voted in favor of the grain distribution. The tribunes were appeased, but the people still demanded that Coriolanus speak to them and apologize. If he repented, and agreed to keep his opinions to himself, he would be allowed to return to the battlefield.

Coriolanus did appear one last time before the people, who listened to him in rapt silence. He started slowly and softly, but as the speech went on, he became more and more blunt. Yet again he hurled insults! His tone was arrogant, his expression disdainful. The more he spoke, the angrier the people became. Finally they shouted him down and silenced him.

The tribunes conferred, condemned Coriolanus to death, and ordered the magistrates to take him at once to the top of the Tarpeian rock and throw him over. The delighted crowd seconded the decision. The patricians, however, managed to intervene, and the sentence was commuted to a lifelong banishment. When the people found out that Rome’s great military hero would never return to the city, they celebrated in the streets. In fact no one had ever seen such a celebration, not even after the defeat of a foreign enemy.

Interpretation

Before his entrance into politics, the name of Coriolanus evoked awe.

His battlefield accomplishments showed him as a man of great bravery. Since the citizens knew little about him, all kinds of legends became attached to his name. The moment he appeared before the Roman citizens, however, and spoke his mind, all that grandeur and mystery vanished. He bragged and blustered like a common soldier. He insulted and slandered people, as if he felt threatened and insecure.

Suddenly he was not at all what the people had imagined.

The discrepancy between the legend and the reality proved immensely disappointing to those who wanted to believe in their hero. The more Coriolanus said, the less powerful he appeared—a person who cannot control his words shows that he cannot control himself, and is unworthy of respect.

The King [Louis XIV] maintains the most impenetrable secrecy about affairs of State. The ministers attend council meetings, but he confides his plans to them only when he has reflected at length upon them and has come to a definite decision. 

I wish you might see the King. 

His expression is inscrutable; his eyes like those of a fox. He never discusses State affairs except with his ministers in Council. When he speaks to courtiers he refers only to their respective prerogatives or duties. 

Even the most frivolous of his utterances has the air of being the pronouncement of an oracle.  

-PRIMI VISCONTI, QUOTED IN LOUIS XIV, LOUIS BERTRAND, 1928

Had Coriolanus said less, the people would never have had cause to be offended by him, would never have known his true feelings. He would have maintained his powerful aura, would certainly have been elected consul, and would have been able to accomplish his antidemocratic goals.

But the human tongue is a beast that few can master.

It strains constantly to break out of its cage, and if it is not tamed, it will run wild and cause you grief. Power cannot accrue to those who squander their treasure of words.

Oysters open completely when the moon is full; and when the crab sees one it throws a piece of stone or seaweed into it and the oyster cannot close again so that it serves the crab for meat. Such is the fate of him who opens his mouth too much and thereby puts himself at the mercy of the listener. 

=Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519

OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW

In the court of Louis XIV, nobles and ministers would spend days and nights debating issues of state. They would confer, argue, make and break alliances, and argue again, until finally the critical moment arrived: Two of them would be chosen to represent the different sides to Louis himself, who would decide what should be done. After these persons were chosen, everyone would argue some more: How should the issues be phrased? What would appeal to Louis, what would annoy him? At what time of day should the representatives approach him, and in what part of the Versailles palace? What expression should they have on their faces?

Finally, after all this was settled, the fateful moment would finally arrive. The two men would approach Louis—always a delicate matter—and when they finally had his ear, they would talk about the issue at hand, spelling out the options in detail.

Louis would listen in silence, a most enigmatic look on his face. Finally, when each had finished his presentation and had asked for the king’s opinion, he would look at them both and say, “I shall see.” Then he would walk away.

The ministers and courtiers would never hear another word on this subject from the king—they would simply see the result, weeks later, when he would come to a decision and act. He would never bother to consult them on the matter again.

Undutiful words of a subject do often take deeper root than the memory of ill deeds.... 

The late Earl of Essex told Queen Elizabeth that her conditions were as crooked as her carcass; but it cost him his head, which his insurrection had not cost him but for that speech. 

-SIR WALTER RALEIGH. 1554-1618

Interpretation

Louis XIV was a man of very few words. His most famous remark is “L‘état, c’est moi” (“I am the state”); nothing could be more pithy yet more eloquent.

His infamous “I shall see” was one of several extremely short phrases that he would apply to all manner of requests.

Louis was not always this way; as a young man he was known for talking at length, delighting in his own eloquence. His later taciturnity was self-imposed, an act, a mask he used to keep everybody below him off-balance.

No one knew exactly where he stood, or could predict his reactions.

No one could try to deceive him by saying what they thought he wanted to hear, because no one knew what he wanted to hear.

As they talked on and on to the silent Louis, they revealed more and more about themselves, information he would later use against them to great effect.

In the end, Louis’s silence kept those around him terrified and under his thumb. It was one of the foundations of his power. As Saint-Simon wrote, “No one knew as well as he how to sell his words, his smile, even his glances. Everything in him was valuable because he created differences, and his majesty was enhanced by the sparseness of his words.”

It is even more damaging for a minister to say foolish things than to do them. 

-Cardinal de Retz, 1613-1679

KEYS TO POWER

Power is in many ways a game of appearances, and when you say less than necessary, you inevitably appear greater and more powerful than you are. Your silence will make other people uncomfortable.

Humans are machines of interpretation and explanation; they have to know what you are thinking. When you carefully control what you reveal, they cannot pierce your intentions or your meaning.

Your short answers and silences will put them on the defensive, and they will jump in, nervously filling the silence with all kinds of comments that will reveal valuable information about them and their weaknesses.

They will leave a meeting with you feeling as if they had been robbed, and they will go home and ponder your every word. This extra attention to your brief comments will only add to your power.

Saying less than necessary is not for kings and statesmen only.

In most areas of life, the less you say, the more profound and mysterious you appear.

As a young man, the artist Andy Warhol had the revelation that it was generally impossible to get people to do what you wanted them to do by talking to them. They would turn against you, subvert your wishes, disobey you out of sheer perversity. He once told a friend, “I learned that you actually have more power when you shut up.”

In his later life Warhol employed this strategy with great success.

His interviews were exercises in oracular speech: He would say something vague and ambiguous, and the interviewer would twist in circles trying to figure it out, imagining there was something profound behind his often meaningless phrases.

Warhol rarely talked about his work; he let others do the interpreting.

He claimed to have learned this technique from that master of enigma Marcel Duchamp, another twentieth-century artist who realized early on that the less he said about his work, the more people talked about it. And the more they talked, the more valuable his work became.

By saying less than necessary you create the appearance of meaning and power.

Also, the less you say, the less risk you run of saying something foolish, even dangerous. In 1825 a new czar, Nicholas I, ascended the throne of Russia. A rebellion immediately broke out, led by liberals demanding that the country modernize—that its industries and civil structures catch up with the rest of Europe.

Brutally crushing this rebellion (the Decembrist Uprising), Nicholas I sentenced one of its leaders, Kondraty Ryleyev, to death.

On the day of the execution Ryleyev stood on the gallows, the noose around his neck. The trapdoor opened—but as Ryleyev dangled, the rope broke, dashing him to the ground.

At the time, events like this were considered signs of providence or heavenly will, and a man saved from execution this way was usually pardoned. As Ryleyev got to his feet, bruised and dirtied but believing his neck had been saved, he called out to the crowd, “You see, in Russia they don’t know how to do anything properly, not even how to make rope!”

A messenger immediately went to the Winter Palace with news of the failed hanging. Vexed by this disappointing turnabout, Nicholas I nevertheless began to sign the pardon.

But then: “Did Ryleyev say anything after this miracle?” the czar asked the messenger.

“Sire,” the messenger replied, “he said that in Russia they don’t even know how to make rope.”

“In that case,” said the Czar, “let us prove the contrary,” and he tore up the pardon.

The next day Ryleyev was hanged again. This time the rope did not break.

Learn the lesson: Once the words are out, you cannot take them back. Keep them under control. Be particularly careful with sarcasm: The momentary satisfaction you gain with your biting words will be outweighed by the price you pay.

Image: The Oracle at Delphi. When visitors consulted the Oracle, the priestess would utter a few enigmatic words that seemed full of meaning and import. No one disobeyed the words of the Oracle— they held power over life and death.

Authority: Never start moving your own lips and teeth before the subordinates do. The longer I keep quiet, the sooner others move their lips and teeth. As they move their lips and teeth, I can thereby understand their real intentions…. If the sovereign is not mysterious, the ministers will find opportunity to take and take. (Han-fei-tzu, Chinese philosopher, third century B.C.)

REVERSAL

There are times when it is unwise to be silent.

Silence can arouse suspicion and even insecurity, especially in your superiors; a vague or ambiguous comment can open you up to interpretations you had not bargained for.

Silence and saying less than necessary must be practiced with caution, then, and in the right situations. It is occasionally wiser to imitate the court jester, who plays the fool but knows he is smarter than the king. He talks and talks and entertains, and no one suspects that he is more than just a fool.

Also, words can sometimes act as a kind of smoke screen for any deception you might practice. By bending your listener’s ear with talk, you can distract and mesmerize them; the more you talk, in fact, the less suspicious of you they become. The verbose are not perceived as sly and manipulative but as helpless and unsophisticated. This is the reverse of the silent policy employed by the powerful: By talking more, and making yourself appear weaker and less intelligent than your mark, you can practice deception with greater ease.

Thoughts and Conclusions

Offer no speech. Respond laconically if at all.

And that is all that I need to say about this.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my “48 Laws of Power” Index, here…

48 Laws of Power

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Gulf (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein

This is a nice little story by Robert Heinlein. It’s a fun read on a boring day. It is a very Poul Andersonish kind of story. A super-spy discovers he is a part of a super society, and perhaps a part of a race that would overcome humanity.

GULF

THE FIRST-QUARTER ROCKET from Moonbase put him down at Pied-a-Terre. The name he was traveling under began—by foresight—with the letter “A”; he was through port inspection and into the shuttle tube to the city ahead of the throng. Once in the tube car he went to the men’s washroom and locked himself in.

Quickly he buckled on the safety belt he found there, snapped its hooks to the wall fixtures, and leaned over awkwardly to remove a razor from his bag. The surge caught him in that position; despite the safety belt he bumped his head—and swore. He straightened up and plugged in the razor. His moustache vanished; he shortened his sideburns, trimmed the corners of his eyebrows, and brushed them up.

He towelled his hair vigorously to remove the oil that had sleeked it down, combed it loosely into a wavy mane. The car was now riding in a smooth, unaccelerated 300 mph; he let himself out of the safety belt without unhooking it from the walls and, working very rapidly, peeled off his moonsuit, took from his bag and put on a tweedy casual outfit suited to outdoors on Earth and quite unsuited to Moon Colony’s air-conditioned corridors.

His slippers he replaced with walking shoes from the bag; he stood up. Joel Abner, commercial traveler, had disappeared; in his place was Captain Joseph Gilead, explorer, lecturer, and writer. Of both names he was the sole user; neither was his birth name.

He slashed the moonsuit to ribbons and flushed it down the water closet, added “Joel Abner’s” identification card; then peeled a plastic skin off his travel bag and let the bits follow the rest. The bag was now pearl grey and rough, instead of dark brown and smooth. The slippers bothered him; he was afraid they might stop up the car’s plumbing. He contented himself with burying them in the waste receptacle.

The acceleration warning sounded as he was doing this; he barely had time to get back into the belt. But, as the car plunged into the solenoid field and surged to a stop, nothing remained of Joel Abner but some unmarked underclothing, very ordinary toilet articles, and nearly two dozen spools of microfilm equally appropriate—until examined—to a commercial traveler or a lecturer-writer. He planned not to let them be examined as long as he was alive.

He waited in the washroom until he was sure of being last man out of the car, then went forward into the next car, left by its exit, and headed for the lift to the ground level.

“New Age Hotel, sir,” a voice pleaded near his ear. He felt a hand fumbling at the grip of his travel bag.

He repressed a reflex to defend the bag and looked the speaker over. At first glance he seemed an under-sized adolescent in a smart uniform and a pillbox cap. Further inspection showed premature wrinkles and the features of a man at least forty. The eyes were glazed. A pituitary case, he thought to himself, and on the hop as well. “New Age Hotel,” the runner repeated. “Best mechanos in town, chief. There’s a discount if you’re just down from the moon.”

Captain Gilead, when in town as Captain Gilead, always stayed at the old Savoy. But the notion of going to the New Age appealed to him; in that incredibly huge, busy, and ultramodern hostelry he might remain unnoticed until he had had time to do what had to be done.

He disliked mightily the idea of letting go his bag. Nevertheless it would be out of character not to let the runner carry the bag; it would call attention to himself—and the bag. He decided that this unhealthy runt could not outrun him even if he himself were on crutches; it would suffice to keep an eye on the bag.

“Lead on, comrade,” he answered heartily, surrendering the bag. There had been no hesitation at all; he had let go the bag even as the hotel runner reached for it.

“Okay, chief.” The runner was first man into an empty lift; he went to the back of the car and set the bag down beside him. Gilead placed himself so that his foot rested firmly against his bag and faced forward as other travelers crowded in. The car started.

The lift was jammed; Gilead was subjected to body pressures on every side—but he noticed an additional, unusual, and uncalled-for pressure behind him.

His right hand moved suddenly and clamped down on a skinny wrist and a hand clutching something. Gilead made no further movement, nor did the owner of the hand attempt to draw away or make any objection. They remained so until the car reached the surface. When the passengers had spilled out he reached behind him with his left hand, recovered his bag and dragged the wrist and its owner out of the car.

It was, of course, the runner; the object in his fist was Gilead’s wallet. “You durn near lost that, chief,” the runner announced with no show of embarrassment. “It was falling out of your pocket.”

Gilead liberated the wallet and stuffed it into an inner pocket. “Fell right through the zipper,” he answered cheerfully. “Well, let’s find a cop.”

The runt tried to pull away. “You got nothing on me!”

Gilead considered the defense. In truth, he had nothing. His wallet was already out of sight. As to witnesses, the other lift passengers were already gone—nor had they seen anything. The lift itself was automatic. He was simply a man in the odd position of detaining another citizen by the wrist. And Gilead himself did not want to talk to the police.

He let go that wrist. “On your way, comrade. We’ll call it quits.”

The runner did not move. “How about my tip?”

Gilead was beginning to like this rascal. Locating a loose half credit in his change pocket he flipped it at the runner, who grabbed it out of the air but still didn’t leave. “I’ll take your bag now. Gimme.”

“No, thanks, chum. I can find your delightful inn without further help. One side, please.”

“Oh, yeah? How about my commission? I gotta carry your bag, else how they gonna know I brung you in? Gimme.”

Gilead was delighted with the creature’s unabashed insistence. He found a two-credit piece and passed it over. “There’s your cumshaw. Now beat it, before I kick your tail up around your shoulders.”

“You and who else?”

Gilead chuckled and moved away down the concourse toward the station entrance to the New Age Hotel. His subconscious sentries informed him immediately that the runner had not gone back toward the lift as expected, but was keeping abreast him in the crowd. He considered this. The runner might very well be what he appeared to be, common city riff-raff who combined casual thievery with his overt occupation. On the other hand—

He decided to unload. He stepped suddenly off the sidewalk into the entrance of a drugstore and stopped just inside the door to buy a newspaper. While his copy was being printed, he scooped up, apparently as an afterthought, three standard pneumo mailing tubes. As he paid for them he palmed a pad of gummed address labels.

A glance at the mirrored wall showed him that his shadow had hesitated outside but was still watching him. Gilead went on back to the shop’s soda fountain and slipped into an unoccupied booth. Although the floor show was going on—a remarkably shapely ecdysiast was working down toward her last string of beads—he drew the booth’s curtain.

Shortly the call light over the booth flashed discreetly; he called, “Come in!” A pretty and very young waitress came inside the curtain. Her plastic costume covered without concealing.

She glanced around. “Lonely?”

“No, thanks, I’m tired.”

“How about a redhead, then? Real cute—”

“I really am tired. Bring me two bottles of beer, unopened, and some pretzels.”

“Suit yourself, sport.” She left.

With speed he opened the travel bag, selected nine spools of microfilm, and loaded them into the three mailing tubes, the tubes being of the common three-spool size. Gilead then took the filched pad of address labels, addressed the top one to “Raymond Calhoun, P.O. Box 1060, Chicago” and commenced to draw with great care in the rectangle reserved for electric-eye sorter. The address he shaped in arbitrary symbols intended not to be read, but to be scanned automatically. The hand-written address was merely a precaution, in case a robot sorter should reject his hand-drawn symbols as being imperfect and thereby turn the tube over to a human postal clerk for readdressing.

He worked fast, but with the care of an engraver. The waitress returned before he had finished. The call light warned him; he covered the label with his elbow and kept it covered.

She glanced at the mailing tubes as she put down the beer and a bowl of pretzels. “Want me to mail those?”

He had another instant of split-second indecision. When he had stepped out of the tube car he had been reasonably sure, first, that the persona of Joel Abner, commercial traveler, had not been penetrated, and, second, that the transition from Abner to Gilead had been accomplished without arousing suspicion. The pocket-picking episode had not alarmed him, but had caused him to reclassify those two propositions from calculated certainties to unproved variables. He had proceeded to test them at once; they were now calculated certainties again—of the opposite sort. Ever since he had spotted his erstwhile porter, the New Age runner, as standing outside this same drugstore his subconscious had been clanging like a burglar alarm.

It was clear not only that he had been spotted but that they were organized with a completeness and shrewdness he had not believed possible.

But it was mathematically probable to the point of certainty that they were not operating through this girl. They had no way of knowing that he would choose to turn aside into this particular drugstore. That she could be used by them he was sure—and she had been out of sight since his first contact with her. But she was clearly not bright enough, despite her alley-cat sophistication, to be approached, subverted, instructed and indoctrinated to the point where she could seize an unexpected opportunity, all in a space of time merely adequate to fetch two bottles of beer. No, this girl was simply after a tip. Therefore she was safe.

But her costume offered no possibility of concealing three mailing tubes, nor would she be safe crossing the concourse to the post office. He had no wish that she be found tomorrow morning dead in a ditch.

“No,” he answered immediately. “I have to pass the post office anyway. But it was a kind thought. Here.” He gave her a half credit.

“Thanks.” She waited and stared meaningfully at the beer. He fumbled again in his change pocket, found only a few bits, reached for his wallet and took out a five-pluton note.

“Take it out of this.”

She handed him back three singles and some change. He pushed the change toward her, then waited, frozen, while she picked it up and left. Only then did he hold the wallet closer to his eyes.

It was not his wallet.

He should have noticed it before, he told himself. Even though there had been only a second from the time he had taken it from the runner’s clutched fingers until he had concealed it in a front pocket, he should have known it—known it and forced the runner to disgorge, even if he had had to skin him alive.

But why was he sure that it was not his wallet? It was the proper size and shape, the proper weight and feel—real ostrich skin in these days of synthetics. There was the weathered ink stain which had resulted from carrying a leaky stylus in the same pocket. There was a V-shaped scratch on the front which had happened so long ago he did not recall the circumstances.

Yet it was not his wallet.

He opened it again. There was the proper amount of money, there were what seemed to be his Explorers’ Club card and his other identity cards, there was a dog-eared flat-photo of a mare he had once owned. Yet the more the evidence, showed that it was his, the more certain he became that it was not his. These things were forgeries; they did not feel right.

There was one way to find out. He flipped a switch provided by a thoughtful management; the booth became dark. He took out his penknife and carefully slit a seam back of the billfold pocket. He dipped a finger into a secret pocket thus disclosed and felt around; the space was empty—nor in this case had the duplication of his own wallet been quite perfect; the space should have been lined, but his fingers encountered rough leather.

He switched the light back on, put the wallet away, and resumed his interrupted drawing. The loss of the card which should have been in the concealed pocket was annoying, certainly awkward, and conceivably disastrous, but he did not judge that the information on it was jeopardized by the loss of the wallet. The card was quite featureless unless examined by black light; if exposed to visible light—by someone taking the real wallet apart, for example—it had the disconcerting quality of bursting explosively into flame.

He continued to work, his mind busy with the wider problem of why they had taken so much trouble to try to keep him from knowing that his wallet was being stolen—and the still wider and more disconcerting question of why they had bothered with his wallet. Finished, he stuffed the remainder of the pad of address labels into a crack between cushions in the booth, palmed the label he had prepared, picked up the bag and the three mailing tubes. One tube he kept separate from the others by a finger.

No attack would take place, he judged, in the drugstore. The crowded concourse between himself and the post office he would ordinarily have considered equally safe—but not today. A large crowd of people, he knew, are equal to so many trees as witnesses if the dice were loaded with any sort of a diversion.

He slanted across the bordering slidewalk and headed directly across the middle toward the post office, keeping as far from other people as he could manage. He had become aware of two men converging on him when the expected diversion took place.

It was a blinding light and a loud explosion, followed by screams and startled shouts. The source of the explosion he could imagine; the screams and shouts were doubtless furnished free by the public. Being braced, not for this, but for anything, he refrained even from turning his head.

The two men closed rapidly, as on cue.

Most creatures and almost all humans fight only when pushed. This can lose them decisive advantage. The two men made no aggressive move of any sort, other than to come close to Gilead—nor did they ever attack.

Gilead kicked the first of them in the knee cap, using the side of his foot, a much more certain stroke than with the toe. He swung with his travel bag against the other at the same time, not hurting him but bothering him, spoiling his timing. Gilead followed it with a heavy kick to the man’s stomach.

The man whose knee cap he had ruined was on the pavement, but still active—reaching for something, a gun or a knife. Gilead kicked him in the head and stepped over him, continued toward the post office.

Slow march—slow march all the way! He must not give the appearance of running away; he must be the perfect respectable citizen, going about his lawful occasions.

The post office came close, and still no tap on the shoulder, no denouncing shout, no hurrying footsteps. He reached the post office, was inside. The opposition’s diversion had worked, perfectly—but for Gilead, not for them.

There was a short queue at the addressing machine. Gilead joined it, took out his stylus and wrote addresses on the tubes while standing. A man joined the queue almost at once; Gilead made no effort to keep him from seeing what address he was writing; it was “Captain Joseph Gilead, the Explorers’ Club, New York.” When it came his turn to use the symbol printing machine he still made no effort to conceal what keys he was punching—and the symbol address matched the address he had written on each tube.

He worked somewhat awkwardly as the previously prepared gummed label was still concealed in his left palm.

He went from the addressing machine to the mailing receivers; the man who had been behind him in line followed him without pretending to address anything.

Thwonk! and the first tube was away with a muted implosion of compressed air. Thwonk! again and the second was gone—and at the same time Gilead grasped the last one in his left hand, sticking the gummed label down firmly over the address he had just printed on it. Without looking at it he made sure by touch that it was in place, all corners sealed, then thwonk! it joined its mates.

Gilead turned suddenly and trod heavily on the feet of the man crowded close behind him. “Wups! pardon me.” he said happily and turned away. He was feeling very cheerful; not only had he turned his dangerous charge over into the care of a mindless, utterly reliable, automatic machine which could not be coerced, bribed, drugged, nor subverted by any other means and in whose complexities the tube would be perfectly hidden until it reached a destination known only to Gilead, but also he had just stepped on the corns of one of the opposition.

On the steps of the post office he paused beside a policeman who was picking his teeth and staring out at a cluster of people and an ambulance in the middle of the concourse. “What’s up?” Gilead demanded.

The cop shifted his toothpick. “First some damn fool sets off fireworks,” he answered, “then two guys get in a fight and blame near ruin each other.”

“My goodness!” Gilead commented and set off diagonally toward the New Age Hotel.

He looked around for his pick-pocket friend in the lobby, did not see him. Gilead strongly doubted if the runt were on the hotel’s staff. He signed in as Captain Gilead, ordered a suite appropriate to the persona he was wearing, and let himself be conducted to the lift.

Gilead encountered the runner coming down just as he and his bellman were about to go up. “Hi, Shorty!” he called out while deciding not to eat anything in this hotel. “How’s business?”

The runt looked startled, then passed him without answering, his eyes blank. It was not likely, Gilead considered, that the runt would be used after being detected; therefore some sort of drop box, call station, or headquarters of the opposition was actually inside the hotel. Very well, that would save everybody a lot of useless commuting—and there would be fun for all!

In the meantime he wanted a bath.

In his suite he tipped the bellman who continued to linger.

“Want some company?”

“No, thanks, I’m a hermit.”

“Try this then.” The bellman inserted Gilead’s room key in the stereo panel, fiddled with the controls, the entire wall lighted up and faded away. A svelte blonde creature, backed by a chorus line, seemed about to leap into Gilead’s lap. “That’s not a tape,” the bellman went on, “that’s a live transmission direct from the Tivoli. We got the best equipment in town.”

“So you have,” Gilead agreed, and pulled out his key. The picture blanked; the music stopped. “But I want a bath, so get out—now that you’ve spent four credits of my money.”

The bellman shrugged and left. Gilead threw off his clothes and stepped into the “fresher.” Twenty minutes later, shaved from ear to toe, scrubbed, soaked, sprayed, pummeled, rubbed, scented, powdered, and feeling ten years younger, he stepped out. His clothes were gone.

His bag was still there; he looked it over. It seemed okay, itself and contents. There were the proper number of microfilm spools—not that it mattered. Only three of the spools mattered and they were already in the mail. The rest were just shrubbery, copies of his own public lectures. Nevertheless he examined one of them, unspooling a few frames.

It was one of his own lectures all right—but not one he had had with him. It was one of his published transcriptions, available in any large book store. “Pixies everywhere,” he remarked and put it back. Such attention to detail was admirable.

“Room service!”

The service panel lighted up. “Yes, sir?”

“My clothes are missing. Chase ’em up for me.”

“The valet has them, sir.”

“I didn’t order valet service. Get ’em back.”

The girl’s voice and face were replaced, after a slight delay, by those of a man. “It is not necessary to order valet service here, sir. ‘A New Age guest receives the best.’ ”

“Okay, get ’em back—chop, chop! I’ve got a date with the Queen of Sheba.”

“Very good, sir.” The image faded.

With wry humor he reviewed his situation. He had already made the possibly fatal error of underestimating his opponent through—he now knew—visualizing that opponent in the unimpressive person of “the runt.” Thus he had allowed himself to be diverted; he should have gone anywhere rather than to the New Age, even to the old Savoy, although that hotel, being a known stamping ground of Captain Gilead, was probably as thoroughly booby-trapped by now as this palatial dive.

He must not assume that he had more than a few more minutes to live. Therefore he must use those few minutes to tell his boss the destination of the three important spools of microfilm. Thereafter, if he still were alive, he must replenish his cash to give him facilities for action—the amount of money in “his” wallet, even if it were returned, was useless for any major action. Thirdly, he must report in, close the present assignment, and be assigned to his present antagonists as a case in themselves, quite aside from the matter of the microfilm.

Not that he intended to drop Runt & Company even if not assigned to them. True artists were scarce—nailing him down by such a simple device as stealing his pants! He loved them for it and wanted to see more of them, as violently as possible.

Even as the image on the room service panel faded he was punching the scrambled keys on the room’s communicator desk. It was possible—certain—that the scramble code he used would be repeated elsewhere in the hotel and the supposed privacy attained by scrambling thereby breached at once. This did not matter; he would have his boss disconnect and call back with a different scramble from the other end. To be sure, the call code of the station to which he was reporting would thereby be breached, but it was more than worthwhile to expend and discard one relay station to get this message through.

Scramble pattern set up, he coded—not New Washington, but the relay station he had selected. A girl’s face showed on the screen. “New Age service, sir. Were you scrambling?”

“Yes.”

“I am ve-ree sor-ree, sir. The scrambling circuits are being repaired. I can scramble for you from the main board.”

“No, thanks, I’ll call in clear.”

“I yam ve-ree sor-ree, sir.”

There was one clear-code he could use—to be used only for crash priority. This was crash priority. Very well—

He punched the keys again without scrambling and waited. The same girl’s face appeared presently. “I am verree sorree, sir; that code does not reply. May I help you?”

“You might send up a carrier pigeon.” He cleared the board.

The cold breath on the back of his neck was stronger now; he decided to do what he could to make it awkward to kill him just yet. He reached back into his mind and coded in clear the Star-Times.

No answer.

He tried the Clarion—again no answer.

No point in beating his head against it; they did not intend to let him talk outside to anyone. He rang for a bellman, sat down in an easy chair, switched it to “shallow massage”, and luxuriated happily in the chair’s tender embrace. No doubt about it; the New Age did have the best mechanos in town—his bath had been wonderful; this chair was superb. Both the recent austerities of Moon Colony and the probability that this would be his last massage added to his pleasure.

The door dilated and a bellman came in—about his own size, Gilead noted. The man’s eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch on seeing Gilead’s oyster-naked condition. “You want company?”

Gilead stood up and moved toward him. “No, dearie,” he said grinning, “I want you”—at which he sank three stiffened fingers in the man’s solar plexus.

As the man grunted and went down Gilead chopped him in the side of the neck with the edge of his hand.

The shoulders of the jacket were too narrow and the shoes too large; nevertheless two minutes later “Captain Gilead” had followed “Joel Abner” to oblivion and Joe, temporary and free-lance bellman, let himself out of the room. He regretted not being able to leave a tip with his predecessor.

He sauntered past the passengers lifts, firmly misdirected a guest who had stopped him, and found the service elevator. By it was a door to the “quick drop.” He opened it, reached out and grasped a waiting pulley belt, and, without stopping to belt himself into it, contenting himself with hanging on, he stepped off the edge. In less time than it would have taken him to parachute the drop he was picking himself up off the cushions in the hotel basement and reflecting that lunar gravitation surely played hob with a man’s leg muscles.

He left the drop room and started out in an arbitrary direction, but walking as if he were on business and belonged where he was—any exit would do and he would find one eventually.

He wandered in and out of the enormous pantry, then found the freight door through which the pantry was supplied.

When he was thirty feet from it, it closed and an alarm sounded. He turned back.

He encountered two policemen in one of the many corridors under the giant hotel and attempted to brush on past them. One of them stared at him, then caught his arm. “Captain Gilead—”

Gilead tried to squirm away, but without showing any skill in the attempt. “What’s the idea?”

“You are Captain Gilead.”

“And you’re my Aunt Sadie. Let go of my arm, copper.”

The policeman fumbled in his pocket with his other hand, pulled out a notebook. Gilead noted that the other officer had moved a safe ten feet away and had a Markheim gun trained on him.

“You, Captain Gilead,” the first officer droned, “are charged on a sworn complaint with uttering a counterfeit five-pluton note at or about thirteen hours this date at the Grand Concourse drugstore in this city. You are cautioned to come peacefully and are advised that you need not speak at this time. Come along.”

The charge might or might not have something to it, thought Gilead; he had not examined closely the money in the substituted wallet. He did not mind being booked, now that the microfilm was out of his possession; to be in an ordinary police station with nothing more sinister to cope with than crooked cops and dumb desk sergeants would be easy street compared with Runt & Company searching for him.

On the other hand the situation was too pat, unless the police had arrived close on his heels and found the stripped bellman, gotten his story and started searching.

The second policeman kept his distance and did not lower the Markheim gun. That made other consideration academic. “Okay, I’ll go,” he protested. “You don’t have to twist my arm that way.”

They went up to the weather level and out to the street—and not once did the second cop drop his guard. Gilead relaxed and waited. A police car was balanced at the curb. Gilead stopped. “I’ll walk,” he said. “The nearest station is just around the corner. I want to be booked in my own precinct.”

He felt a teeth-chattering chill as the blast from the Markheim hit him; he pitched forward on his face.

He was coming to, but still could not coordinate, as they lifted him out of the car. By the time he found himself being half-carried, half-marched down a long corridor he was almost himself again, but with a gap in his memory. He was shoved through a door which clanged behind him. He steadied himself and looked around.

“Greetings, friend,” a resonant voice called out “Drag up a chair by the fire.”

Gilead blinked, deliberately slowed himself down, and breathed deeply. His healthy body was fighting off the effects of the Markheim bolt; he was almost himself.

The room was a cell, old-fashioned, almost primitive. The front of the cell and the door were steel bars; the walls were concrete. Its only furniture, a long wooden bench, was occupied by the man who had spoken. He was fiftyish, of ponderous frame, heavy features set in a shrewd, good-natured expression. He was lying back on the bench, head pillowed on his hands, in animal ease. Gilead had seen him before. “Hello, Dr. Baldwin.”

The man sat up with a flowing economy of motion that moved his bulk as little as possible. “I’m not Dr. Baldwin—I’m not Doctor anything, though my name is Baldwin.” He stared at Gilead. “But I know you—seen some of your lectures.”

Gilead cocked an eyebrow. “A man would seem naked around the Association of Theoretical physicists without a doctor’s degree—and you were at their last meeting.”

Baldwin chuckled boomingly. “That accounts for it—that has to be my cousin on my father’s side, Hartley M.—Stuffy citizen Hartley. I’ll have to try to take the curse off the family name, now that I’ve met you, Captain.” He stuck out a huge hand. “Gregory Baldwin, ‘Kettle Belly’ to my friends. New and used helicopters is as close as I come to theoretical physics. ‘Kettle Belly Baldwin, King of the Kopters’—you must have seen my advertising.”

“Now that you mention it, I have.”

Baldwin pulled out a card. “Here. If you ever need one, I’ll give you a ten percent off for knowing old Hartley. Matter of fact, I can do right well by you in a year-old Curtiss, a family car without a mark on it.”

Gilead accepted the card and sat down. “Not at the moment, thanks. You seem to have an odd sort of office, Mr. Baldwin.”

Baldwin chuckled again. “In the course of a long life these things happen, Captain. I won’t ask you why you are here or what you are doing in that monkey suit. Call me Kettle Belly.”

“Okay.” Gilead got up and went to the door. Opposite the cell was a blank wall; there was no one in sight. He whistled and shouted—no answer.

“What’s itching you, Captain?” Baldwin asked gently.

Gilead turned. His cellmate had dealt a solitaire hand on the bench and was calmly playing.

“I’ve got to raise the turnkey and send for a lawyer.”

“Don’t fret about it. Let’s play some cards.” He reached in a pocket. “I’ve got a second deck; how about some Russian bank?”

“No, thanks. I’ve got to get out of here.” He shouted again—still no answer.

“Don’t waste your lung power, Captain,” Baldwin advised him. “They’ll come when it suits them and not a second before. I know. Come play with me; it passes the time.” Baldwin appeared to be shuffling the two decks; Gilead could see that he was actually stacking the cards. The deception amused him; he decided to play—since the truth of Baldwin’s advice was so evident.

“If you don’t like Russian bank,” Kettle Belly went on, “here is a game I learned as a kid.” He paused and stared into Gilead’s eyes. “It’s instructive as well as entertaining, yet it’s simple, once you catch on to it.” He started dealing out the cards. “It makes a better game with two decks, because the black cards don’t mean anything. Just the twenty-six red cards in each deck count—with the heart suit coming first. Each card scores according to its position in that sequence. The ace of hearts is one and the king of hearts counts thirteen; the ace of diamonds is next at fourteen and so on. Savvy?”

“Yes.”

“And the blacks don’t count. They’re blanks . . . spaces. Ready to play?”

“What are the rules?”

“We’ll deal out one hand for free; you’ll learn faster as you see it. Then, when you’ve caught on, I’ll play you for a half interest in the atomics trust—or ten bits in cash.” He resumed dealing, laying the cards out rapidly in columns, five to a row. He paused, finished. “It’s my deal, so it’s your count. See what you get.”

It was evident that Baldwin’s stacking had brought the red cards into groups, yet there was no evident advantage to it, nor was the count especially high—nor low. Gilead stared at it, trying to figure out the man’s game. The cheating, as cheating seemed too bold to be probable.

Suddenly the cards jumped at him, arranged themselves in a meaningful array. He read:

XTHXY

CANXX

XXXSE

HEARX

XUSXX

The fact that there were only two fives-of-hearts available had affected the spelling but the meaning was clear. Gilead reached for the cards. “I’ll try one. I can beat that score.” He dipped into the tips belonging to the suit’s owner. “Ten bits it is.”

Baldwin covered it. Gilead shuffled, making even less attempt to cover up than had Baldwin. He dealt:

WHATS

XXXXX

XYOUR

GAMEX

XXXXX

Baldwin shoved the money toward him and anted again. “Okay, my turn for revenge.” He laid out:

XXIMX

XONXX

YOURX

XXXXX

XSIDE

“I win again,” Gilead announced gleefully. “Ante up.” He grabbed the cards and manipulated them:

YEAHX

XXXXX

PROVE

XXITX

XXXXX

Baldwin counted and said, “You’re too smart for me. Gimme the cards.” He produced another ten-bit piece and dealt again:

XXILX

HELPX

XXYOU

XGETX

OUTXX

“I should have cut the cards,” Gilead complained, pushing the money over. “Let’s double the bets.” Baldwin grunted and Gilead dealt again:

XNUTS

IMXXX

SAFER

XXINX

XGAOL

“I broke your luck,” Baldwin gloated. “We’ll double it again?”

XUXRX

XNUTS

THISX

NOXXX

XJAIL

The deal shifted:

KEEPX

XTALK

INGXX

XXXXX

XBUDX

Baldwin answered:

THISX

XXXXX

XXNEW

AGEXX

XHOTL

As he stacked the cards again Gilead considered these new factors. He was prepared to believe that he was hidden somewhere in the New Age Hotel; in fact the counterproposition that his opponents had permitted two ordinary cops to take him away to a normal city jail was most unlikely—unless they had the jail as fully under control as they quite evidently had the hotel. Nevertheless the point was not proven. As for Baldwin, he might be on Gilead’s side; more probably he was planted as an agent provocateur—or he might be working for himself.

The permutations added up to six situations, only one of which made it desirable to accept Baldwin’s offer for help in a jail break—said situation being the least likely of the six.

Nevertheless, though he considered Baldwin a liar, net, he tentatively decided to accept. A static situation brought him no advantage; a dynamic situation—any dynamic situation—he might turn to his advantage. But more data were needed. “These cards are sticky as candy,” he complained. “You letting your money ride?”

“Suits.” Gilead dealt again:

XXXXX

WHYXX

AMXXX

XXXXI

XHERE

“You have the damnedest luck,” Baldwin commented:

FILMS

ESCAP

BFORE

XUXXX

KRACK

Gilead swept up the cards, was about to “shuffle,” when Baldwin said, “Oh oh, school’s out.” Footsteps could be heard in the passage. “Good luck, boy,” Baldwin added.

Baldwin knew about the films, but had not used any of the dozen ways to identify himself as part of Gilead’s own organization. Therefore he was planted by the opposition, or he was a third factor.

More important, the fact that Baldwin knew about the films proved his assertion that this was not a jail. It followed with bitter certainty that he, Gilead, stood no computable chance of getting out alive. The footsteps approaching the cell could be ticking off the last seconds of his life.

He knew now that he should have found means to report the destination of the films before going to the New Age. But Humpty Dumpty was off the wall, entropy always increases—but the films must be delivered.

The footsteps were quite close.

Baldwin might get out alive.

But who was Baldwin?

All the while he was “shuffling” the cards. The action was not final; he had only to give them one true shuffle to destroy the message being set up in them. A spider settled from the ceiling, landed on the other man’s hand. Baldwin, instead of knocking it off and crushing it, most carefully reached his arm out toward the wall and encouraged it to lower itself to the floor. “Better stay out of the way, shorty,” he said gently, “or one of the big boys is likely to step on you.”

The incident, small as it was, determined Gilead’s decision—and with it, the fate of a planet. He stood up and handed the stacked deck to Baldwin. “I owe you exactly ten-sixty,” he said carefully. “Be sure to remember it—I’ll see who our visitors are.”

The footsteps had stopped outside the cell door.

There were two of them, dressed neither as police nor as guards; the masquerade was over. One stood well back, covering the maneuver with a Markheim, the other unlocked the door. “Back against the wall, Fatso,” he ordered. “Gilead, out you come. And take it easy, or, after we freeze you, I’ll knock out your teeth just for fun.”

Baldwin shuffled back against the wall; Gilead came out slowly. He watched for any opening but the leader backed away from him without once getting between him and the man with the Markheim. “Ahead of us and take it slow,” he was ordered. He complied, helpless under the precautions, unable to run, unable to fight.

Baldwin went back to the bench when they had gone. He dealt out the cards as if playing solitaire, swept them up again, and continued to deal himself solitaire hands. Presently he “shuffled” the cards back to the exact order Gilead had left them in and pocketed them.

The message had read: XTELLXFBSXPOBOXDEBT XXXCHI.

His two guards marched Gilead into a room and locked the door behind him, leaving themselves outside. He found himself in a large window overlooking the city and a reach of the river; balancing it on the left hung a solid portraying a lunar landscape in convincing color and depth. In front of him was a rich but not ostentatious executive desk.

The lower part of his mind took in these details; his attention could be centered only on the person who sat at that desk. She was old but not senile, frail but not helpless. Her eyes were very much alive, her expression serene. Her translucent, well-groomed hands were busy with a frame of embroidery.

On the desk in front of her were two pneumo mailing tubes, a pair of slippers, and some tattered, soiled remnants of cloth and plastic.

She looked up. “How do you do, Captain Gilead?” she said in a thin, sweet soprano suitable for singing hymns.

Gilead bowed. “Well, thank you—and you, Mrs. Keithley?”

“You know me, I see.”

“Madame would be famous if only for her charities.”

“You are kind. Captain, I will not waste your time. I had hoped that we could release you without fuss, but—” She indicated the two tubes in front of her “—you can see for yourself that we must deal with you further.”

“So?”

“Come, now, Captain. You mailed three tubes. These two are only dummies, and the third did not reach its apparent destination. It is possible that it was badly addressed and has been rejected by the sorting machines. If so, we shall have it in due course. But it seems much more likely that you found some way to change its address—likely to the point of pragmatic certainty.”

“Or possibly I corrupted your servant.”

She shook her head slightly. “We examined him quite thoroughly before—”

“Before he died?”

“Please, Captain, let’s not change the subject. I must know where you sent that other tube. You cannot be hypnotized by ordinary means; you have an acquired immunity to hypnotic drugs. Your tolerance for pain extends beyond the threshold of unconsciousness. All of these things have already been proved, else you would not be in the job you are in; I shall not put either of us to the inconvenience of proving them again. Yet I must have that tube. What is your price?”

“You assume that I have a price.”

She smiled. “If the old saw has any exceptions, history does not record them. Be reasonable, Captain. Despite your admitted immunity to ordinary forms of examination, there are ways of breaking down—of changing—a man’s character so that he becomes really quite pliant under examination . . . ways that we learned from the commissars. But those ways take time and a woman my age has no time to waste.”

Gilead lied convincingly. “It’s not your age, ma’am; it is the fact that you know that you must obtain that tube at once or you will never get it.” He was hoping—more than that, he was willing—that Baldwin would have sense enough to examine the cards for one last message . . . and act on it. If Baldwin failed and he, Gilead, died, the tube would eventually come to rest in a dead-letter office and would in time be destroyed.

“You are probably right. Nevertheless, Captain, I will go ahead with the Mindszenty technique if you insist upon it. What do you say to ten million plutonium credits?”

Gilead believed her first statement. He reviewed in his mind the means by which a man bound hand and foot, or worse, could kill himself unassisted. “Ten million plutons and a knife in my back?” he answered. “Let’s be practical.”

“Convincing assurance would be given before you need talk.”

“Even so, it is not my price. After all, you are worth at least five hundred million plutons.”

She leaned forward. “I like you, Captain. You are a man of strength. I am an old woman, without heirs. Suppose you became my partner—and my successor?”

“Pie in the sky.”

“No, no! I mean it. My age and sex do not permit me actively to serve myself; I must rely on others. Captain, I am very tired of inefficient tools, of men who can let things be spirited away right from under their noses. Imagine! She made a little gesture of exasperation, clutching her hand into a claw. “You and I could go far, Captain. I need you.”

“But I do not need you, madame. And I won’t have you.”

She made no answer, but touched a control on her desk. A door on the left dilated; two men and a girl came in. The girl Gilead recognized as the waitress from the Grand Concourse Drug Store. They had stripped her bare, which seemed to him an unnecessary indignity since her working uniform could not possibly have concealed a weapon.

The girl, once inside, promptly blew her top, protesting, screaming, using language unusual to her age and sex—a hysterical, thalmic outburst of volcanic proportions.

“Quiet, child!”

The girl stopped in midstream, looked with surprise at Mrs. Keithley, and shut up. Nor did she start again, but stood there, looking even younger than she was and somewhat aware of and put off stride by her nakedness. She was covered now with goose flesh, one tear cut a white line down her dust-smeared face, stopped at her lip. She licked at it and sniffled.

“You were out of observation once, Captain,” Mrs. Keithley went on, “during which time this person saw you twice. Therefore we will examine her.”

Gilead shook his head. “She knows no more than a goldfish. But go ahead—five minutes of hypno will convince you.”

“Oh, no, Captain! Hypno is sometimes fallible; if she is a member of your bureau, it is certain to be fallible.” She signaled to one of the men attending the girl; he went to a cupboard and opened it. “I am old-fashioned,” the old woman went on. “I trust simple mechanical means much more than I do the cleverest of clinical procedures.”

Gilead saw the implements that the man was removing from cupboard and started forward. “Stop that!” he commanded. “You can’t do that—”

He bumped his nose quite hard.

The man paid him no attention. Mrs. Keithley said, “Forgive me, Captain. I should have told you that this room is not one room, but two. The partition is merely glass, but very special glass—I use the room for difficult interviews. There is no need to hurt yourself by trying to reach us.”

“Just a moment!”

“Yes, Captain?”

“Your time is already running out. Let the girl and me go free now. You are aware that there are several hundred men searching this city for me even now—and that they will not stop until they have taken it apart panel by panel.”

“I think not. A man answering your description to the last factor caught the South Africa rocket twenty minutes after you registered at the New Age Hotel. He was carrying your very own identifications. He will not reach South Africa, but the manner of his disappearance will point to desertion rather than accident or suicide.”

Gilead dropped the matter. “What do you plan to gain by abusing this child? You have all she knows; certainly you do not believe that we could afford to trust in such as she?”

Mrs. Keithley pursed her lips. “Frankly, I do not expect to learn anything from her. I may learn something from you.”

“I see.”

The leader of the two men looked questioning at his mistress; she motioned him to go ahead. The girl stared blankly at him, plainly unaware of the uses of the equipment he had gotten out. He and his partner got busy.

Shortly the girl screamed, continued to scream for a few moments in a high adulation. Then it stopped as she fainted.

They roused her and stood her up again. She stood, swaying and staring stupidly at her poor hands, forever damaged even for the futile purposes to which she had been capable of putting them. Blood spread down her wrists and dripped on a plastic tarpaulin, placed there earlier by the second of the two men.

Gilead did nothing and said nothing. Knowing as he did that the tube he was protecting contained matters measured in millions of lives, the problem of the girl, as a problem, did not even arise. It disturbed a deep and very ancient part of his brain, but almost automatically he cut that part off and lived for the time in his forebrain.

Consciously he memorized the faces, skulls, and figures of the two men and filed the data under “personal.” Thereafter he unobtrusively gave his attention to the scene out the window He had been noting it all through the interview but he wanted to give it explicit thought. He recast what he saw in terms of what it would look like had he been able to look squarely out the window and decided that he was on the ninety-first floor of the New Age Hotel and approximately one hundred and thirty meters from the north end. He filed this under “professional.”

When the girl died, Mrs. Keithley left the room without speaking to him. The men gathered up what was left in the tarpaulin and followed her. Presently the two guards returned and, using the same foolproof methods, took him back to his cell.

As soon as the guards had gone and Kettle Belly was free to leave his position against the wall he came forward and pounded Gilead on the shoulders. “Hi, boy! I’m sure glad to see you—I was scared I would never lay eyes on you again. How was it? Pretty rough?”

“No, they didn’t hurt me; they just asked some questions.”

“You’re lucky. Some of those crazy damn cops play mean when they get you alone in a back room. Did they let you call your lawyer?”

“No.”

“Then they ain’t through with you. You want to watch it, kid.”

Gilead sat down on the bench. “The hell with them. Want to play some more cards?”

“Don’t mind if I do. I feel lucky.” Baldwin pulled out the double deck, riffled through it. Gilead took them and did the same. Good! they were in the order he had left them in. He ran his thumb across the edges again—yes, even the black nulls were unchanged in sequence; apparently Kettle Belly had simply stuck them in his pocket without examining them, without suspecting that a last message had been written in to them. He felt sure that Baldwin would not have left the message set up if he had read it. Since he found himself still alive, he was much relieved to think this.

He gave the cards one true shuffle, then started stacking them. His first lay-out read:

XXXXX

ESCAP

XXATX

XXXXX

XONCE

“Gotcha that time!” Baldwin crowed. “Ante up:”

DIDXX

XYOUX

XXXXX

CRACK

“Let it ride,” announced Gilead and took the deal:

XXNOX

BUTXX

XXXXX

XLETS

XXGOX

“You’re too derned lucky to live,” complained Baldwin. “Look—we’ll leave the bets doubled and double the lay-out. I want a fair chance to get my money back.”

His next lay-out read:

XXXXX

XTHXN

XXXXX

THXYX

NEEDX

XXXUX

ALIVX

XXXXX

PLAYX

XXXUP

“Didn’t do you much good, did it?” Gilead commented, took the cards and started arranging them,

“There’s something mighty funny about a man that wins all the time,” Baldwin grumbled. He watched Gilead narrowly. Suddenly his hand shot out, grabbed Gilead’s wrist. “I thought so;” he yelled. “A goddam card sharp—” Gilead shook his hand off. “Why, you obscene fat slug!”

“Caught you! Caught you!” Kettle Belly reclaimed his hold, grabbed the other wrist as well. They struggled and rolled to the floor.

Gilead discovered two things: this awkward, bulky man was an artist at every form of dirty fighting and he could simulate it convincingly without damaging his partner. His nerve holds were an inch off the nerve; his kneeings were to thigh muscle rather than to the crotch.

Baldwin tried for a chancery strangle; Gilead let him take it. The big man settled the flat of his forearm against the point of Gilead’s chin rather than against his Adam’s apple and proceeded to “strangle” him.

There were running footsteps in the corridor. Gilead caught a glimpse of the guards as they reached the door. They stopped momentarily; the bell of the Markheim was too big to use through the steel grating, the charge would be screened and grounded. Apparently they did not have pacifier bombs with them, for they hesitated. Then the leader quickly unlocked the door, while the man with the Markheim dropped back to the cover position.

Baldwin ignored them, while continuing his stream of profanity and abuse at Gilead. He let the first man almost reach them before he suddenly said in Gilead’s ear, “Close your eyes!” At which he broke just as suddenly.

Gilead sensed an incredibly dazzling flash of light even through his eyelids. Almost on top of it he heard a muffled crack; he opened his eyes and saw that the first man was down, his head twisted at a grotesque angle.

The man with the Markheim was shaking his head; the muzzle of his weapon weaved around. Baldwin was charging him in a waddle, back and knees bent until he was hardly three feet tall. The blinded guard could hear him, let fly a charge in the direction of the noise; it passed over Baldwin.

Baldwin was on him; the two went down. There was another cracking noise of ruptured bone and another dead man. Baldwin stood up, grasping the Markheim, keeping it pointed down the corridor. “How are your eyes, kid?” he called out anxiously.

“They’re all right.”

“Then come take this chiller.” Gilead moved up, took the Markheim. Baldwin ran to the dead end of the corridor where a window looked out over the city. The window did not open; there was no “copter step” beyond it. It was merely a straight drop. He came running back.

Gilead was shuffling possibilities in his mind. Events had moved by Baldwin’s plan, not by his. As a result of his visit to Mrs. Keithley’s “interview room” he was oriented in space. The corridor ahead and a turn to the left should bring him to the quick-drop shaft. Once in the basement and armed with a Markheim, he felt sure that he could fight his way out—with Baldwin in trail if the man would follow. If not—well, there was too much at stake.

Baldwin was into the cell and out again almost at once. “Come along!” Gilead snapped. A head showed at the bend in the corridor; he let fly at it and the owner of the head passed out on the floor.

“Out of my way, kid!” Baldwin answered. He was carrying the heavy bench on which they had “played” cards. He started up the corridor with it, toward the sealed window, gaining speed remarkably as he went.

His makeshift battering ram struck the window heavily. The plastic bulged, ruptured, and snapped like a soap bubble. The bench went on through, disappeared from sight, while Baldwin teetered on hands and knees, a thousand feet of nothingness under his chin.

“Kid!” he yelled. “Close in! Fall back!”

Gilead backed towards him, firing twice more as he did so. He still did not see how Baldwin planned to get out, but the big man had demonstrated that he had resourcefulness—and resources.

Baldwin was whistling through his fingers and waving. In violation of all city traffic rules a helicopter separated itself from the late afternoon throng, cut through a lane, and approached the window. It hovered just far enough away to keep from fouling its blades. The driver opened the door, a line snaked across and Kettle Belly caught it. With great speed he made it fast to the window’s polarizer knob, then grabbed the Markheim. “You first,” he snapped. “Hurry!”

Gilead dropped to his knees and grasped the line; the driver immediately increased his tip speed and tilted his rotor; the line tautened. Gilead let it take his weight, then swarmed across it. The driver gave him a hand up while controlling his craft like a high school horse with his other hand.

The ’copter bucked; Gilead turned and saw Baldwin coming across, a fat spider on a web. As he himself helped the big man in, the driver reached down and cut the line. The ship bucked again and slid away.

There were already men standing in the broken window. “Get lost, Steve!” Baldwin ordered. The driver gave his tip jets another notch and tilted the rotor still more; the ’copter swooped away. He eased it into the traffic stream and inquired, “Where to?”

“Set her for home—and tell the other boys to go home, too. No—you’ve got your hands full; I’ll tell them!” Baldwin crowded up into the other pilot’s seat, slipped on phones and settled a quiet-mike over his mouth. The driver adjusted his car to the traffic, set up a combination on his pilot, then settled back and opened a picture magazine.

Shortly Baldwin took off the phones and came back to the passenger compartment. “Takes a lot of ’copters to be sure you have one cruising by when you need it,” he said conversationally. “Fortunately, I’ve got a lot of ’em. Oh, by the way, this is Steve Halliday. Steve, meet Joe—Joe, what is your last name?”

“Greene,” answered Gilead.

“Howdy,” said the driver and let his eyes go back to his magazine.

Gilead considered the situation. He was not sure that it had been improved. Kettle Belly, whatever he was, was more than a used ’copter dealer—and he knew about the films. This boy Steve looked like a harmless young extrovert but, then, Kettle Belly himself looked like a lunk. He considered trying to overpower both of them, remembered Kettle Belly’s virtuosity in rough-and-tumble fighting, and decided against it. Perhaps Kettle Belly really was on his side, completely and utterly. He heard rumors that the Department used more than one echelon of operatives and he had no way of being sure that he himself was at the top level.

“Kettle Belly,” he went on, “could you set me down at the airport first? I’m in one hell of a hurry.”

Baldwin looked him over. “Sure, if you say so. But I thought you would want to swap those duds? You’re as conspicuous as a preacher at a stag party. And how are you fixed for cash?”

With his fingers Gilead counted the change that had come with the suit. A man without cash had one arm in a sling. “How long would it take?”

“Ten minutes extra, maybe.”

Gilead thought again about Kettle Belly’s fighting ability and decided that there was no way for a fish in water to get any wetter. “Okay.” He settled back and relaxed completely.

Presently he turned again to Baldwin. “By the way, how did you manage to sneak in that dazzle bomb?”

Kettle Belly chuckled. “I’m a large man, Joe; there’s an awful lot of me to search.” He laughed again. “You’d be amazed at where I had that hidden.”

Gilead changed the subject. “How did you happen to be there in the first place?”

Baldwin sobered. “That’s a long and complicated story. Come back some day when you’re not in such a rush and I’ll tell you all about it.”

“I’ll do that—soon.”

“Good. Maybe I can sell you that used Curtiss at the same time.”

The pilot alarm sounded; the driver put down his magazine and settled the craft on the roof of Baldwin’s establishment.

Baldwin was as good as his word. He took Gilead to his office, sent for clothes—which showed up with great speed—and handed Gilead a wad of bills suitable to stuff a pillow. “You can mail it back,” he said.

“I’ll bring it back in person,” promised Gilead.

“Good. Be careful out on the street. Some of our friends are sure to be around.”

“I’ll be careful.” He left, as casually as if he had called there on business, but feeling less sure of himself than usual. Baldwin himself remained a mystery and, in his business, Gilead could not afford mysteries.

There was a public phone booth in the lobby of Baldwin’s building. Gilead went in, scrambled, then coded a different relay station from the one he had attempted to use before. He gave his booth’s code and instructed the operator to scramble back. In a matter of minutes he was talking to his chief in New Washington.

“Joe! Where the hell have you been?”

“Later, boss—get this.” In departmental oral code as an added precaution, he told his chief that the films were in post office box ten-sixty, Chicago, and insisted that they be picked up by a major force at once.

His chief turned away from the view plate, then returned, “Okay, it’s done. Now what happened to you?”

“Later, boss, later. I think I’ve got some friends outside who are anxious to rassle with me. Keep me here and I may get a hole in my head.”

“Okay—but head right back here, I want a full report; I’ll wait here for you.”

“Right.” He switched off.

He left the booth light-heartedly, with the feeling of satisfaction that comes from a hard job successfully finished. He rather hoped that some of his “friends” would show up; he felt like kicking somebody who needed kicking.

But they disappointed him. He boarded the transcontinental rocket without alarms and slept all the way to New Washington.

He reached the Federal Bureau of Security by one of many concealed routes and went to his boss’s office. After scan and voice check he was let in. Bonn looked up and scowled.

Gilead ignored the expression; Bonn usually scowled. “Agent Joseph Briggs, three-four-oh-nine-seven-two, reporting back from assignment, sir,” he said evenly.

Bonn switched a desk control to “recording” and another to “covert.”

“You are, eh? Why, thumb-fingered idiot! How do you dare to show your face around here?”

“Easy now, boss—what’s the trouble?”

Bonn fumed incoherently for a time, then said, “Briggs, twelve star men covered that pick up—and the box was empty. Post office box ten-sixty, Chicago, indeed! Where are those films? Was it a cover up? Have you got them with you?”

Gilead-Briggs restrained his surprise. “No. I mailed them at the Grand Concourse post office to the address you just named.” He added, “The machine may have kicked them out; I was forced to letter by hand the machine symbols.”

Bonn looked suddenly hopeful. He touched another control and said, “Carruthers! On that Briggs matter: Check the rejection stations for that routing.” He thought and then added, “Then try a rejection sequence on the assumption that the first symbol was acceptable to the machine but mistaken. Also for each of the other symbols; run them simultaneously—crash priority for all agents and staff. After that try combinations of symbols taken two at a time, then three at a time, and so on.” He switched off.

“The total of that series you just set up is every postal address in the continent,” Briggs suggested mildly. “It can’t be done.”

“It’s got to be done! Man, have you any idea of the importance of those films you were guarding?”

“Yes. The director at Moon Base told me what I was carrying.”

“You don’t act as if you did. You’ve lost the most valuable thing this or any other government can possess—the absolute weapon. Yet you stand there blinking at me as if you had mislaid a pack of cigarets.”

“Weapon?” objected Briggs. “I wouldn’t call the nova effect that, unless you class suicide as a weapon. And I don’t concede that I’ve lost it. As an agent acting alone and charged primarily with keeping it out of the hands of others, I used the best means available in an emergency to protect it. That is well within the limits of my authority. I was spotted, by some means—”

“You shouldn’t have been spotted!”

“Granted. But I was. I was unsupported and my estimate of the situation did not include a probability of staying alive. Therefore I had to protect my charge by some means which did not depend on my staying alive.”

“But you did stay alive—you’re here.”

“Not my doing nor yours, I assure you. I should have been covered. It was your order, you will remember, that I act alone.”

Bonn looked sullen. “That was necessary.”

“So? In any case, I don’t see what all the shooting is about. Either the films show up, or they are lost and will be destroyed as unclaimed mail. So I go back to the Moon and get another set of prints.”

Bonn chewed his lip. “You can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

Bonn hesitated a long time. “There were just two sets. You had the originals, which were to be placed in a vault in the Archives—and the others were to be destroyed at once when the originals were known to be secure.”

“Yes? What’s the hitch?”

“You don’t see the importance of the procedure. Every working paper, every file, every record was destroyed when these films were made. Every technician, every assistant, received hypno. The intention was not only to protect the results of the research but to wipe out the very fact that the research had taken place. There aren’t a dozen people in the system who even know of the existence of the nova effect.”

Briggs had his own opinions on this point, based on recent experience, but he kept still about them. Bonn went on, “The Secretary has been after me steadily to let him know when the originals were secured. He has been quite insistent, quite critical. When you called in, I told him that the films were safe and that he would have them in a few minutes.”

“Well?”

“Don’t you see, you fool—he gave the order at once to destroy the other copies.”

Briggs whistled. “Jumped the gun, didn’t he?”

“That’s not the way he’ll figure it—mind you, the President was pressuring him. He’ll say that I jumped the gun.”

“And so you did.”

“No, you jumped the gun. You told me the films were in that box.”

“Hardly. I said I had sent them there.”

“No, you didn’t”

“Get out the tape and play it back.”

“There is no tape—by the President’s own order no records are kept on this operation.”

“So? Then why are you recording now?”

“Because,” Bonn answered sharply, “someone is going to pay for this and it is not going to be me.”

“Meaning,” Briggs said slowly, “that it is going to be me.”

“I didn’t say that. It might be the Secretary.”

“If his head rolls, so will yours. No, both of you are figuring on using me. Before you plan on that, hadn’t you better hear my report? It might affect your plans. I’ve got news for you, boss.”

Bonn drummed the desk. “Go ahead. It had better be good.”

In a passionless monotone Briggs recited all events as recorded by sharp memory from receipt of the films on the Moon to the present moment. Bonn listened impatiently.

Finished, Briggs waited. Bonn got up and strode around the room. Finally he stopped and said, “Briggs, I never heard such a fantastic pack of lies in my life. A fat man who plays cards! A wallet that wasn’t your wallet—your clothes stolen! And Mrs. Keithley—Mrs. Keithley! Don’t you know that she is one of the strongest supporters of the Administration?”

Briggs said nothing. Bonn went on, “Now I’ll tell you what actually did happen. Up to the time you grounded at Pied-a-Terre your report is correct, but—”

“How do you know?”

“Because you were covered, naturally. You don’t think I would trust this to one man, do you?”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I could have hollered for help and saved all this.”

Bonn brushed it aside. “You engaged a runner, dismissed him, went in that drugstore, came out and went to the post office. There was no fight in the concourse for the simple reason that no one was following you. At the post office you mailed three tubes, one of which may or may not have contained the films. You went from there to the New Age Hotel, left it twenty minutes later and caught the transrocket for Cape Town. You—”

“Just a moment,” objected Briggs. “How could I have done that and still be here now?”

“Eh?” For a moment Bonn seemed stumped. “That’s just a detail; you were positively identified. For that matter, it would have been a far, far better thing for you if you had stayed on that rocket. In fact—” the bureau chief got a far-away look in his eyes, “—you’ll be better off for the time being if we assume officially that you did stay on that rocket. You are in a bad spot, Briggs, a very bad spot. You did not muff this assignment—you sold out!”

Briggs looked at him levelly. “You are preferring charges?”

“Not just now. That is why it is best to assume that you stayed on that rocket—until matters settle down, clarify.”

Briggs did not need a graph to show him what solution would come out when “matters clarified.” He took from a pocket a memo pad, scribbled on it briefly, and handed it to Bonn.

It read: “I resign my appointment effective immediately.” He had added signature, thumbprint, date, and hour.

“So long, boss,” he added. He turned slightly, as if to go.

Bonn yelled, “Stop! Briggs, you are under arrest.” He reached toward his desk.

Briggs cuffed him in the windpipe, added one to the pit of Bonn’s stomach. He slowed down then and carefully made sure that Bonn would remain out for a satisfactory period. Examination of Bonn’s desk produced a knockout kit; he added a two-hour hypodermic, placing it inconspicuously beside a mole near the man’s backbone. He wiped the needle, restored everything to its proper place, removed the current record from the desk and wiped the tape of all mention of himself, including door check. He left the desk set to “covert” and “do not disturb” and left by another of the concealed routes to the Bureau.

He went to the rocket port, bought a ticket, unreserved, for the first ship to Chicago. There was twenty minutes to wait; he made a couple of minor purchases from clerks rather than from machines, letting his face be seen. When the Chicago ship was called he crowded forward with the rest.

At the inner gate, just short of the weighing-in platform, he became part of the crowd present to see passengers off, rather than a passenger himself. He waved at someone in the line leaving the weighing station beyond the gate, smiled, called out a good-bye, and let the crowd carry him back from the gate as it closed. He peeled off from the crowd at the men’s washroom. When he came out there were several hasty but effective changes in his appearance.

More important, his manner was different.

A short, illicit transaction in a saloon near a hiring hall provided the work card he needed; fifty-five minutes later he was headed across country as Jack Gillespie, loader and helper-driver on a diesel freighter.

Could his addressing of the pneumo tube have been bad enough to cause the automatic postal machines to reject it? He let the picture of the label, as it had been when he had completed it, build in his mind until it was as sharp as the countryside flowing past him. No, his lettering of the symbols had been perfect and correct; the machines would accept it

Could the machine have kicked out the tube for another cause, say a turned-up edge of the gummed label? Yes, but the written label was sufficient to enable a postal clerk to get it back in the groove. One such delay did not exceed ten minutes, even during the rush hour. Even with five such delays the tube would have reached Chicago more than one hour before he reported to Bonn by phone.

Suppose the gummed label had peeled off entirely; in such case the tube would have gone to the same destination as the two cover-up tubes.

In which case Mrs. Keithley would have gotten it, since she had been able to intercept or receive the other two.

Therefore the tube had reached the Chicago post office box.

Therefore Kettle Belly had read the message in the stacked cards, had given instructions to someone in Chicago, had done so while at the helicopter’s radio. After an event, “possible” and “true” are equivalent ideas, whereas “probable” becomes a measure of one’s ignorance. To call a conclusion “improbable” after the event was self-confusing amphigory.

Therefore Kettle Belly Baldwin had the films—a conclusion he had reached in Bonn’s office.

Two hundred miles from New Washington he worked up an argument with the top driver and got himself fired. From a local booth in the town where he dropped he scrambled through to Baldwin’s business office. “Tell him I’m a man who owes him money.”

Shortly the big man’s face built up on the screen. “Hi, kid! How’s tricks?”

“I’m fired.”

“I thought you would be.”

“Worse than that—I’m wanted.”

“Naturally.”

“I’d like to talk with you.”

“Swell. Where are you?”

Gilead told him.

“You’re clean?”

“For a few hours, at least.”

“Go to the local airport. Steve will pick you up.”

Steve did so, nodded a greeting, jumped his craft into the air, set his pilot, and went back to his reading. When the ship settled down on course, Gilead noted it and asked, “Where are we going?”

“The boss’s ranch. Didn’t he tell you?”

“No.” Gilead knew it was possible that he was being taken for a one-way ride. True, Baldwin had enabled him to escape an otherwise pragmatically certain death—it was certain that Mrs. Keithley had not intended to let him stay alive longer that suited her uses, else she would not have had the girl killed in his presence. Until he had arrived at Bonn’s office, he had assumed that Baldwin had saved him because he knew something that Baldwin most urgently wanted to know—whereas now it looked as if Baldwin had saved him for altruistic reasons.

Gilead conceded the existence in this world of altruistic reasons, but was inclined not to treat them as “least hypothesis” until all other possible hypotheses had been eliminated; Baldwin might have had his own reasons for wishing him to live long enough to report to New Washington and nevertheless be pleased to wipe him out now that he was a wanted man whose demise would cause no comment.

Baldwin might even be a partner in these dark matters of Mrs. Keithley. In some ways that was the simplest explanation though it left other factors unexplained. In any case Baldwin was a key actor—and he had the films. The risk was necessary.

Gilead did not worry about it. The factors known to him were chalked up on the blackboard of his mind, there to remain until enough variables become constants to permit a solution by logic. The ride was very pleasant.

Steve put him down on the lawn of a large rambling ranch house, introduced him to a motherly old party named Mrs. Garver, and took off. “Make yourself at home, Joe,” she told him. “Your room is the last one in the east wing—shower across from it. Supper in ten minutes.”

He thanked her and took the suggestion, getting back to the living room with a minute or two to spare. Several others, a dozen or more of both sexes, were there. The place seemed to be a sort of a dude ranch—not entirely dude, as he had seen Herefords on the spread as Steve and he were landing.

The other guests seemed to take his arrival as a matter of course. No one asked why he was there. One of the women introduced herself as Thalia Wagner and then took him around the group. Ma Garver came in swinging a dinner bell as this was going on and they all filed into a long, low dining room. Gilead could not remember when he had had so good a meal in such amusing company.

After eleven hours of sleep, his first real rest in several days, he came fully, suddenly awake at a group of sounds his subconscious could not immediately classify and refused to discount. He opened his eyes, swept the room with them, and was at once out of bed, crouching on the side away from the door.

There were hurrying footsteps moving past his bedroom door. There were two voices, one male, one female, outside the door; the female was Thalia Wagner, the man he could not place.

Male: “tsʉmaeq?”

Female: “nø!”

Male: “zulntsɨ.”

Female: “ɨpbit’ New Jersey.”

These are not precisely the sounds that Gilead heard, first because of the limitations of phonetic symbols, and second because his ears were not used to the sounds. Hearing is a function of the brain, not of the ear; his brain, sophisticated as it was, nevertheless insisted on forcing the sounds that reached his ears into familiar pockets rather than stop to create new ones.

Thalia Wagner identified, he relaxed and stood up. Thalia was part of the unknown situation he accepted in coming here; a stranger known to her he must accept also. The new unknowns, including the odd language, he filed under “pending” and put aside.

The clothes he had had were gone, but his money—Baldwin’s money, rather—was where his clothes had been and with it his work card as Jack Gillespie and his few personal articles. By them someone had laid out a fresh pair of walking shorts and new sneakers, in his size.

He noted, with almost shocking surprise, that someone had been able to serve him thus without waking him.

He put on his shorts and shoes and went out. Thalia and her companion had left while he dressed. No one was about and he found the dining room empty, but three places were set, including his own of supper, and hot dishes and facilities were on the sideboard. He selected baked ham and hot rolls, fried four eggs, poured coffee. Twenty minutes later, warmly replenished and still alone, he stepped out on the veranda.

It was a beautiful day. He was drinking it in and eyeing with friendly interest a desert lark when a young woman came around the side of the house. She was dressed much as he was, allowing for difference in sex, and she was comely, though not annoyingly so. “Good morning,” he said.

She stopped, put her hands on her hips, and looked him up and down. “Well!” she said. “Why doesn’t somebody tell me these things?”

Then she added, “Are you married?”

“No.”

“I’m shopping around. Object: matrimony. Let’s get acquainted.”

“I’m a hard man to marry. I’ve been avoiding it for years.”

“They’re all hard to marry,” she said bitterly. “There’s a new colt down at the corral. Come on.”

They went. The colt’s name was War Conqueror of Baldwin; hers was Gail. After proper protocol with mare and son they left. “Unless you have pressing engagements,” said Gail, “now is a salubrious time to go swimming.”

“If salubrious means what I think it does, yes.”

The spot was shaded by cottonwoods, the bottom was sandy; for a while he felt like a boy again, with all such matters as lies and nova effects and death and violence away in some improbable, remote dimension. After a long while he pulled himself up on the bank and said, “Gail, what does ‘tsʉmaeq’ mean?”

“Come again?” she answered. “I had water in my ear.”

He repeated all of the conversation he had heard. She looked incredulous, then laughed. “You didn’t hear that, Joe, you just didn’t.” She added, “You got the ‘New Jersey’ part right.”

“But I did.”

“Say it again.”

He did so, more carefully, and giving a fair imitation of the speakers’ accents.

Gail chortled. “I got the gist of it that time. That Thalia; someday some strong man is going to wring her neck.”

“But what does it mean?”

Gail gave him a long, sidewise look. “If you ever find out, I really will marry you, in spite of your protests.”

Someone was whistling from the hill top. “Joe! Joe Greene—the boss wants you.”

“Gotta go,” he said to Gail. “G’bye.”

“See you later,” she corrected him.

Baldwin was waiting in a study as comfortable as himself. “Hi, Joe,” he greeted him. “Grab a seatful of chair. They been treating you right?”

“Yes, indeed. Do you always set as good a table as I’ve enjoyed so far?”

Baldwin patted his middle. “How do you think I came by my nickname?”

“Kettle Belly, I’d like a lot of explanations.”

“Joe, I’m right sorry you lost your job. If I’d had my druthers, it wouldn’t have been the way it was.”

“Are you working with Mrs. Keithley?”

“No. I’m against her.”

“I’d like to believe that, but I’ve no reason to—yet. What were you doing where I found you?”

“They had grabbed me—Mrs. Keithley and her boys.”

“They just happened to grab you—and just happened to stuff you in the same cell with me—and you just happened to know about the films I was supposed to be guarding—and you just happened to have a double deck of cards in your pocket? Now, really!”

“If I hadn’t had the cards, we would have found some other way to talk,” Kettle Belly said mildly. “Wouldn’t we, now?”

“Yes. Granted.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest that the set up was an accident. We had you covered from Moon Base; when you were grabbed—or rather as soon as you let them suck you into the New Age, I saw to it that they grabbed me too; I figured I might have a chance to lend you a hand, once I was inside.” He added, “I kinda let them think that I was an FBS man, too.”

“I see. Then it was just luck that they locked us up together.”

“Not luck,” Kettle Belly objected. “Luck is a bonus that follows careful planning—it’s never free. There was a computable probability that they would put us together in hopes of finding out what they wanted to know. We hit the jackpot because we paid for the chance. If we hadn’t, I would have had to crush out of that cell and look for you—but I had to be inside to do it.”

“Who is Mrs. Keithley?”

“Other than what she is publicly, I take it. She is the queen bee—or the black widow—of a gang. ‘Gang’ is a poor word—power group, maybe. One of several such groups, more or less tied together where their interests don’t cross. Between them they divvy up the country for whatever they want like two cats splitting a gopher.”

Gilead nodded; he knew what Baldwin meant, though he had not known that the enormously respected Mrs. Keithley was in such matters—not until his nose had been rubbed in the fact. “And what are you, Kettle Belly?”

“Now, Joe—I like you and I’m truly sorry you’re in a jam. You led wrong a couple of times and I was obliged to trump, as the stakes were high. See here, I feel that I owe you something; what do you say to this: we’ll fix you up with a brand-new personality, vacuum tight—even new fingerprints if you want them. Pick any spot on the globe you like and any occupation; we’ll supply all the money you need to start over—or money enough to retire and play with the cuties the rest of your life. What do you say?”

“No.” There was no hesitation.

“You’ve no close relatives, no intimate friends. Think about it. I can’t put you back in your job; this is the best I can do.”

“I’ve thought about it. The devil with the job, I want to finish my case! You’re the key to it.”

“Reconsider, Joe. This is your chance to get out of affairs of state and lead a normal, happy life.”

“‘Happy,’ he says!”

“Well, safe, anyhow. If you insist on going further your life expectancy becomes extremely problematical.”

“I don’t recall ever having tried to play safe.”

“You’re the doctor. Joe. In that case—” A speaker on Baldwin’s desk uttered: “œnIe r nøg rylp.”

Baldwin answered, “nu,” and sauntered quickly to the fireplace. An early-morning fire still smouldered in it. He grasped the mantel piece, pulled it toward him. The entire masonry assembly, hearth, mantel, and grate, came toward him, leaving an arch in the wall. “Duck down stairs, Joe,” he said. “It’s a raid.”

“A real priest’s hole!”

“Yeah, corny, ain’t it? This joint has more bolt holes than a rabbit’s nest—and booby-trapped, too. Too many gadgets, if you ask me.” He went back to his desk, opened a drawer, removed three film spools and dropped them in a pocket.

Gilead was about to go down the staircase; seeing the spools, he stopped. “Go ahead, Joe,” Baldwin said urgently. “You’re covered and outnumbered. With this raid showing up we wouldn’t have time to fiddle; we’ud just have to kill you.”

They stopped in a room well underground, another study much like the one above, though lacking sunlight and view. Baldwin said something in the odd language to the mike on the desk, was answered. Gilead experimented with the idea that the lingo might be reversed English, discarded the notion.

“As I was saying,” Baldwin went on, “if you are dead set on knowing all the answers—”

“Just a moment. What about this raid?”

“Just the government boys. They won’t be rough and not too thorough. Ma Garver can handle them. We won’t have to hurt anybody as long as they don’t use penetration radar.”

Gilead smiled wryly at the disparagement of his own former service. “And if they do?”

“That gimmick over there squeals like a pig, if it’s touched by penetration frequencies. Even then we’re safe against anything short of an A-bomb. They won’t do that; they want the films, not a hole in the ground. Which reminds me—here, catch.”

Gilead found himself suddenly in possession of the films which were at the root of the matter. He unspooled a few frames and made certain that they were indeed the right films. He sat still and considered how he might get off this limb and back to the ground without dropping the eggs. The speaker again uttered something; Baldwin did not answer it but said, “We won’t be down here long.”

“Bonn seems to have decided to check my report.” Some of his—former—comrades were upstairs. If he did Baldwin in, could he locate the inside control for the door?

“Bonn is a poor sort. He’ll check me—but not too thoroughly; I’m rich. He won’t check Mrs. Keithley at all; she’s too rich. He thinks with his political ambitions instead of his head. His late predecessor was a better man—he was one of us.”

Gilead’s tentative plans underwent an abrupt reversal. His oath had been to a government; his personal loyalty had been given to his former boss. “Prove that last remark and I shall be much interested.”

“No, you’ll come to learn that it’s true—if you still insist on knowing the answers. Through checking those films, Joe? Toss ’em back.”

Gilead did not do so. “I suppose you have made copies in any case?”

“Wasn’t necessary; I looked at them. Don’t get ideas, Joe; you’re washed up with the FBS, even if you brought the films and my head back on a platter. You slugged your boss—remember?”

Gilead remembered that he had not told Baldwin so. He began to believe that Baldwin did have men inside the FBS, whether his late bureau chief had been one of them or not.

“I would at least be allowed to resign with a clear record. I know Bonn—officially he would be happy to forget it.” He was simply stalling for time, waiting for Baldwin to offer an opening.

“Chuck them back, Joe. I don’t want to rassle. One of us might get killed—both of us, if you won the first round. You can’t prove your case, because I can prove I was home teasing the cat. I sold ’copters to two very respectable citizens at the exact time you would claim I was somewhere else.” He listened again to the speaker, answered it in the same gibberish.

Gilead’s mind evaluated his own tactical situation to the same answer that Baldwin had expressed. Not being given to wishful thinking he at once tossed the films to Baldwin.

“Thanks, Joe.” He went to a small oubliette set in the wall, switched it to full power, put the films in the hopper, waited a few seconds, and switched it off. “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

Gilead permitted his eyebrows to climb. “Kettle Belly, you’ve managed to surprise me.”

“How?”

“I thought you wanted to keep the nova effect as a means to power.”

“Nuts! Scalping a man is a hell of a poor way to cure him of dandruff. Joe, how much do you know about the nova effect?”

“Not much. I know it’s a sort of atom bomb powerful enough to scare the pants off anybody who gets to thinking about it.”

“It’s not a bomb. It’s not a weapon. It’s a means of destroying a planet and everything on it completely—by turning that planet into a nova. If that’s a weapon, military or political, then I’m Samson and you’re Delilah.

“But I’m not Samson,” he went on, “and I don’t propose to pull down the Temple—nor let anybody else do so. There are moral lice around who would do just that, if anybody tried to keep them from having their own way. Mrs. Keithley is one such. Your boyfriend Bonn is another such, if only he had the guts and the savvy—which he ain’t. I’m bent on frustrating such people. What do you know about ballistics, Joe?”

“Grammar school stuff.”

“Inexcusable ignorance.” The speaker sounded again; he answered it without breaking his flow. “The problem of three bodies still lacks a neat general solution, but there are several special solutions—the asteroids that chase Jupiter in Jupiter’s own orbit at the sixty degree position, for example. And there’s the straight-line solution—you’ve heard of the asteroid ‘Earth-Anti’?”

“That’s the chunk of rock that is always on the other side of the Sun, where we never see it.”

“That’s right—only it ain’t there anymore. It’s been novaed.”

Gilead, normally immune to surprise, had been subjected to one too many. “Huh? I thought this nova effect was theory?”

“Nope. If you had had time to scan through the films you would have seen pictures of it. It’s a plutonium, lithium, and heavy water deal, with some flourishes we won’t discuss. It adds up to the match that can set afire a world. It did—a little world flared up and was gone.

“Nobody saw it happen. No one on Earth could see it, for it was behind the Sun. It couldn’t have been seen from Moon Colony; the Sun still blanked it off from there—visualize the geometry. All that ever saw it were a battery of cameras in a robot ship. All who knew about it were the scientists who rigged it—and all of them were with us, except the director. If he had been, too, you would never have been in this mix up.”

“Dr. Finnley?”

“Yep. A nice guy, but a mind like a pretzel. A ‘political’ scientist, second-rate ability. He doesn’t matter; our boys will ride herd on him until he’s pensioned off. But we couldn’t keep him from reporting and sending the films down. So I had to grab ’em and destroy them.”

“Why didn’t you simply save them? All other considerations aside, they are unique in science.”

“The human race doesn’t need that bit of science, not this millennium. I saved all that mattered, Joe—in my head.”

“You are your cousin Hartley, aren’t you?”

“Of course. But I’m also Kettle Belly Baldwin, and several other guys.”

“You can be Lady Godiva, for all of me.”

“As Hartley, I was entitled to those films, Joe. It was my project. I instigated it, through my boys.”

“I never credited Finnley with it. I’m not a physicist, but he obviously isn’t up to it.”

“Sure, sure. I was attempting to prove that an artificial nova could not be created; the political—the racial—importance of establishing the point is obvious. It backfired on me—so we had to go into emergency action.”

“Perhaps you should have left well enough alone.”

“No. It’s better to know the worst; now we can be alert for it, divert research away from it.” The speaker growled again; Baldwin went on, “There may be a divine destiny, Joe, unlikely as it seems, that makes really dangerous secrets too difficult to be broached until intelligence reaches the point where it can cope with them—if said intelligence has the will and the good intentions. Ma Garver says to come up now.”

They headed for the stairs. “I’m surprised that you leave it up to an old gal like Ma to take charge during an emergency.”

“She’s competent, I assure you. But I was running things—you heard me.”

“Oh.”

They settled down again in the above-surface study. “I give you one more chance to back out, Joe. It doesn’t matter that you know all about the films, since they are gone and you can’t prove anything—but beyond that—you realize that if you come in with us, are told what is going on, you will be killed deader than a duck at the first suspicious move?”

Gilead did; he knew in fact that he was already beyond the point of no return. With the destruction of the films went his last chance of rehabilitating his former main persona. This gave him no worry; the matter was done. He had become aware that from the time he had admitted that he understood the first message this man had offered him concealed in a double deck of cards he had no longer been a free actor, his moves had been constrained by moves made by Baldwin. Yet there was no help for it; his future lay here or nowhere.

“I know it; go ahead.”

“I know what your mental reservations are, Joe; you are simply accepting risk; not promising loyalty.”

“Yes—but why are you considering taking a chance on me?”

Baldwin was more serious in manner than he usually allowed himself to be. “You’re an able man, Joe. You have the savvy and the moral courage to do what is reasonable in an odd situation rather than what is conventional.”

“That’s why you want me?”

“Partly that. Partly because I like the way you catch on to a new card game.” He grinned. “And even partly because Gail likes the way you behave with a colt.”

“Gail? What’s she got to do with it?”

“She reported on you to me about five minutes ago, during the raid.”

“Hmm—go ahead.”

“You’ve been warned.” For a moment Baldwin looked almost sheepish. “I want you to take what I say next at its face value, Joe—don’t laugh.”

“Okay.”

“You asked what I was. I’m sort of the executive secretary of this branch of an organization of supermen.”

“I thought so.”

“Eh? How long have you known?”

“Things added up. The card game, your reaction time. I knew it when you destroyed the films.”

“Joe, what is a superman?”

Gilead did not answer.

“Very well, let’s chuck the term,” Baldwin went on. “It’s been overused and misused and beat up until it has mostly comic connotations. I used it for shock value and I didn’t shock you. The term ‘supermen’ has come to have a fairytale meaning, conjuring up pictures of x-ray eyes, odd sense organs, double hearts, uncuttable skin, steel muscles—an adolescent’s dream of the dragon-killing hero. Tripe, of course. Joe, what is a man? What is man that makes him more than an animal? Settle that and we’ll take a crack at defining a superman—or New Man, homo novis, who must displace homo sapiens—is displacing him—because he is better able to survive than is homo sap. I’m not trying to define myself, I’ll leave it up to my associates and the inexorable processes of time as to whether or not I am a superman, a member of the new species of man—same test to apply to you.”

“Me?”

“You. You show disturbing symptoms of being homo novis, Joe, in a sloppy, ignorant, untrained fashion. Not likely, but you just might be one of the breed. Now—what is man? What is the one thing he can do better than animals which is so strong a survival factor that it outweighs all the things that animals of one sort or another can do much better than he can?”

“He can think.”

“I fed you that answer; no prize for it. Okay, you pass yourself off a man; let’s see you do something. What is the one possible conceivable factor—or factors, if you prefer—which the hypothetical superman could have, by mutation or magic or any means, and which could be added to this advantage which man already has and which has enabled him to dominate this planet against the unceasing opposition of a million other species of fauna? Some factor that would make the domination of man by his successor, as inevitable as your domination over a hound dog? Think, Joe. What is the necessary direction of evolution to the next dominant species?”

Gilead engaged in contemplation for what was for him a long time. There were so many lovely attributes that a man might have: to be able to see both like a telescope and microscope, to see the insides of things, to see throughout the spectrum, to have hearing of the same order, to be immune to disease, to grow a new arm or leg, to fly through the air without bothering with silly gadgets like helicopters or jets, to walk unharmed the ocean bottom, to work without tiring—

Yet the eagle could fly and he was nearly extinct, even though his eyesight was better than man’s. A dog has better smell and hearing; seals swim better, balance better, and furthermore can store oxygen. Rats can survive where men would starve or die of hardship; they are smart and pesky hard to kill. Rats could—

Wait! Could tougher, smarter rats displace man? No, it just wasn’t in them; too small a brain.

“To be able to think better,” Gilead answered almost instantly.

“Hand the man a cigar! Supermen are superthinkers; anything else is a side issue. I’ll allow the possibility of super-somethings which might exterminate or dominate mankind other than by outsmarting him in his own racket—thought. But I deny that it is possible for a man to conceive in discrete terms what such a super-something would be or how this something would win out. New Man will beat out homo sap in homo sap’s own specialty—rational thought, the ability to recognize data, store them, integrate them, evaluate correctly the result, and arrive at a correct decision. That is how man got to be champion; the creature who can do it better is the coming champion. Sure, there are other survival factors, good health, good sense organs, fast reflexes, but they aren’t even comparable, as the long, rough history of mankind has proved over and over—Marat in his bath, Roosevelt in his wheelchair, Caesar with his epilepsy and his bad stomach, Nelson with one eye and one arm, blind Milton; when the chips are down it’s brain that wins, not the body’s tools.”

“Stop a moment,” said Gilead. “How about E.S.P.?”

Baldwin shrugged. “I’m not sneering at extra-sensory perception any more than I would at exceptional eyesight—E.S.P. is not in the same league with the ability to think correctly. E.S.P. is a grab-bag name for the means other than the known sense organs by which the brain may gather data—but the trick that pays off with first prize is to make use of that data, to reason about it. If you would like a telepathic hook up to Shanghai, I can arrange it; we’ve got operators at both ends—but you can get whatever data you might happen to need from Shanghai by phone with less trouble, less chance of a bad connection, and less danger of somebody listening in. Telepaths can’t pick up a radio message; it’s not the same wave band.”

“What wave band is it?”

“Later, later. You’ve got a lot to learn.”

“I wasn’t thinking especially of telepathy. I was thinking of all parapsychological phenomena.”

“Same reasoning. Apportation would be nice, if telekinetics had gotten that far—which it ain’t. But a pick-up truck moves things handily enough. Television in the hands of an intelligent man counts for more than clairvoyance in a moron. Quit wasting my time, Joe.”

“Sorry.”

“We defined thinking as integrating data and arriving at correct answers. Look around you. Most people do that stunt just well enough to get to the corner store and back without breaking a leg. If the average man thinks at all, he does silly things like generalizing from a single datum. He uses one-valued logics. If he is exceptionally bright, he may use two-valued, ‘either-or’ logic to arrive at his wrong answers. If he is hungry, hurt, or personally interested in the answer, he can’t use any sort of logic and will discard an observed fact as blithely as he will stake his life on a piece of wishful thinking. He uses the technical miracles created by superior men without wonder nor surprise, as a kitten accepts a bowl of milk. Far from aspiring to higher reasoning, he is not even aware that higher reasoning exists. He classes his own mental process as being of the same sort as the genius of an Einstein. Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.

“For explanations of a universe that confuses him he seizes onto numerology, astrology, hysterical religions, and other fancy ways to go crazy. Having accepted such glorified nonsense, facts make no impression on him, even if at the cost of his own life. Joe, one of the hardest things to believe is the abysmal depth of human stupidity.

“That is why there is always room at the top, why a man with just a leetle more on the ball can so easily become governor, millionaire, or college president—and why homo sap is sure to be displaced by New Man, because there is so much room for improvement and evolution never stops.

“Here and there among ordinary men is a rare individual who really thinks, can and does use logic in at least one field—he’s often as stupid as the rest outside his study or laboratory—but he can think, if he’s not disturbed or sick or frightened. This rare individual is responsible for all the progress made by the race; the others reluctantly adopt his results. Much as the ordinary man dislikes and distrusts and persecutes the process of thinking he is forced to accept the results occasionally, because thinking is efficient compared with his own mauderings. He may still plant his corn in the dark of the Moon but he will plant better corn developed by better men than he.

“Still rarer is the man who thinks habitually, who applies reason, rather than habit pattern, to all his activity. Unless he masques himself, his is a dangerous life; he is regarded as queer, untrustworthy, subversive of public morals; he is a pink monkey among brown monkeys—a fatal mistake. Unless the pink monkey can dye himself brown before he is caught. The brown monkey’s instinct to kill is correct; such men are dangerous to all monkey customs.

“Rarest of all is the man who can and does reason at all times, quickly, accurately, inclusively, despite hope or fear or bodily distress, without egocentric bias or thalmic disturbance, with correct memory, with clear distinction between fact, assumption, and non-fact. Such men exist, Joe; they are ‘New Man’—human in all respects, indistinguishable in appearance or under the scalpel from homo sap, yet as unlike him in action as the Sun is unlike a single candle.”

Gilead said, “Are you that sort?”

“You will continue to form your own opinions.”

“And you think I may be, too?”

“Could be. I’ll have more data in a few days.”

Gilead laughed until the tears came. “Kettle Belly, if I’m the future hope of the race, they had better send in the second team quick. Sure I’m brighter than most of the jerks I run into, but, as you say, the competition isn’t stiff. But I haven’t any sublime aspirations. I’ve got as lecherous an eye as the next man. I enjoy wasting time over a glass of beer. I just don’t feel like a superman.”

“Speaking of beer, let’s have some.” Baldwin got up and obtained two cans of the brew. “Remember that Mowgli felt like a wolf. Being a New Man does not divorce you from human sympathies and pleasures. There have been New Men all through history; I doubt if most of them suspected that their difference entitled them to call themselves a different breed. Then they went ahead and bred with the daughters of men, diffusing their talents through the racial organism, preventing them from effectuating until chance brought the genetic factors together again.”

“Then I take it that New Man is not a special mutation?”

“Huh? Who isn’t a mutation, Joe? All of us are a collection of millions of mutations. Around the globe hundreds of mutations have taken place in our human germ plasm while we have been sitting here. No, homo novis didn’t come about because great grandfather stood too close to a cyclotron; homo novis was not even a separate breed until he became aware of himself, organized, and decided to hang on to what his genes had handed him. You could mix New Man back into the race today and lose him; he’s merely a variation becoming a species. A million years from now is another matter; I venture to predict that New Man, of that year and model, won’t be able to interbreed with homo sap—no viable offspring.”

“You don’t expect present man—homo sapiens—to disappear?”

“Not necessarily. The dog adapted to man. Probably more dogs now than in umpteen B.C.—and better fed.”

“And man would be New Man’s dog.”

“Again not necessarily. Consider the cat.”

“The idea is to skim the cream of the race’s germ plasm and keep it biologically separate until the two races are permanently distinct. You chaps sound like a bunch of stinkers, Kettle Belly.”

“Monkey talk.”

“Perhaps. The new race would necessarily run things—”

“Do you expect New Man to decide grave matters by counting common man’s runny noses?”

“No, that was my point. Postulating such a new race, the result is inevitable. Kettle Belly, I confess to a monkey prejudice in favor of democracy, human dignity, and freedom. It goes beyond logic; it is the kind of a world I like. In my job I have jungled with the outcasts of society, shared their slumgullion. Stupid they may be, bad they are not—I have no wish to see them become domestic animals.”

For the first time the big man showed concern. His persona as “King of the Kopters”, master merchandiser, slipped away; he sat in brooding majesty, a lonely and unhappy figure. “I know, Joe. They are of us; their little dignities, their nobilities, are not lessened by their sorry state. Yet it must be.”

“Why? New Man will come—granted. But why hurry the process?”

“Ask yourself.” He swept a hand toward the oubliette. “Ten minutes ago you and I saved this planet, all our race. It’s the hour of the knife. Someone must be on guard if the race is to live; there is no one but us. To guard effectively we New Men must be organized, must never fumble any crisis like this—and must increase our numbers. We are few now, Joe; as the crises increase, we must increase to meet them. Eventually—and it’s a dead race with time—we must take over and make certain that baby never plays with matches.”

He stopped and brooded. “I confess to that same affection for democracy, Joe. But it’s like yearning for the Santa Claus you believed in as a child. For a hundred and fifty years or so democracy, or something like it, could flourish safely. The issues were such as to be settled without disaster by the votes of common men, befogged and ignorant as they were. But now, if the race is simply to stay alive, political decisions depend on real knowledge of such things as nuclear physics, planetary ecology, genetic theory, even system mechanics. They aren’t up to it, Joe. With goodness and more will than they possess less than one in a thousand could stay awake over one page of nuclear physics; they can’t learn what they must know.”

Gilead brushed it aside. “It’s up to us to brief them. Their hearts are all right; tell them the score—they’ll come down with the right answers.”

“No, Joe. We’ve tried it; it does not work. As you say, most of them are good, the way a dog can be noble and good. Yet there are bad ones—Mrs. Keithley and company and more like her. Reason is poor propaganda when opposed by the yammering, unceasing lies of shrewd and evil and self-serving men. The little man has no way to judge and the shoddy lies are packaged more attractively. There is no way to offer color to a colorblind man, nor is there any way for us to give the man of imperfect brain the canny skill to distinguish a lie from a truth.

“No, Joe. The gulf between us and them is narrow, but it is very deep. We cannot close it.”

“I wish,” said Gilead, “that you wouldn’t class me with your ‘New Man’; I feel more at home on the other side.”

“You will decide for yourself which side you are on, as each of us has done.”

Gilead forced a change in subject. Ordinarily immune to thalamic disturbance this issue upset him; his brain followed Baldwin’s argument and assured him that it was true; his inclinations fought it. He was confronted with the sharpest of all tragedy; two equally noble and valid rights, utterly opposed. “What do you people do, aside from stealing films?”

“Mmm—many things.” Baldwin relaxed, looked again like a jovial sharp businessman. “Where a push here and a touch there will keep things from going to pot, we apply the pressure, by many and devious means. And we scout for suitable material and bring it into the fold when we can—we’ve had our eye on you for ten years.”

“So?”

“Yep. That is a prime enterprise. Through public data we eliminate all but about one tenth of one percent; that thousandth individual we watch. And then there are our horticultural societies.” He grinned.

“Finish your joke.”

“We weed people.”

“Sorry, I’m slow today.”

“Joe, didn’t you ever feel a yen to wipe out some evil, obscene, rotten jerk who infected everything he touched, yet was immune to legal action? We treat them as cancers; we excise them from the body social. We keep a ‘Better Dead’ list; when a man is clearly morally bankrupt we close his account at the first opportunity.”

Gilead smiled. “If you were sure what you were doing, it could be fun.”

“We are always sure, though our methods would be no good in a monkey law court. Take Mrs. Keithley—is there doubt in your mind?”

“None.”

“Why don’t you have her indicted? Don’t bother to answer. For example, two weeks from tonight there will be giant pow-wow of the new, rejuvenated, bigger-and-better-than-ever Ku Klux Klan on a mountain top down Carolina way. When the fun is at its height, when they are mouthing obscenities, working each other up to the pogrom spirit, an act of God is going to wipe out the whole kit and kaboodle. Very sad.”

“Could I get in on that?”

“You aren’t even a cadet as yet.” Baldwin went on. “There is the project to increase our numbers, but that is a thousand-year program; you’d need a perpetual calendar to check it. More important is keeping matches away from baby. Joe, it’s been eighty-five years since we beheaded the last commissar: have you wondered why so little basic progress in science has been made in that time?”

“Eh? There have been a lot of changes.”

“Minor adaptations—some spectacular, almost none of them basic. Of course there was very little progress made under communism; a totalitarian political religion is incompatible with free investigation. Let me digress: the communist interregnum was responsible for the New Men getting together and organizing. Most New Men are scientists, for obvious reasons. When the commissars started ruling on natural laws by political criteria—Lysenkoism and similar nonsense—it did not sit well; a lot of us went underground.

“I’ll skip the details. It brought us together, gave us practice in underground activity, and gave a backlog of new research, carried out underground. Some of it was obviously dangerous; we decided to hang onto it for a while. Since then such secret knowledge has grown, for we never give out an item until it has been scrutinized for social hazards. Since much of it is dangerous and since very few indeed outside our organization are capable of real original thinking, basic science has been almost at a—public!—standstill.

“We hadn’t expected to have to do it that way. We helped to see to it that the new constitution was liberal and—we thought—workable. But the new Republic turned out to be an even poorer thing than the old. The evil ethic of communism had corrupted, even after the form was gone. We held off. Now we know that we must hold off until we can revise the whole society.”

“Kettle Belly,” Joe said slowly, “you speak as if you had been on the spot. How old are you?”

“I’ll tell you when you are the age I am now. A man has lived long enough when he no longer longs to live. I ain’t there yet. Joe, I must have your answer, or this must be continued in our next.”

“You had it at the beginning—but, see here, Kettle Belly, there is one job I want promised to me.”

“Which is?”

“I want to kill Mrs. Keithley.”

“Keep your pants on. When you’re trained, and if she’s still alive then, you’ll be used for that purpose—”

“Thanks!”

“—provided you are the proper tool for it.” Baldwin turned toward the mike, called out, “Gail!” and added one word in the strange tongue.

Gail showed up promptly. “Joe,” said Baldwin, “when this young lady gets through with you, you will be able to sing, whistle, chew gum, play chess, hold your breath, and fly a kite simultaneously—and all this while riding a bicycle under water. Take him, sis, he’s all yours.”

Gail rubbed her hands. “Oh, boy!”

“First we must teach you to see and to hear, then to remember, then to speak, and then to think.”

Joe looked at her. “What’s this I’m doing with my mouth at this moment?”

“It’s not talking, it’s a sort of grunting. Furthermore English is not structurally suited to thinking. Shut up and listen.”

In their underground classroom Gail had available several types of apparatus to record and manipulate light and sound. She commenced throwing groups of figures on a screen, in flashes. “What was it, Joe?”

“Nine-six-oh-seven-two—That was as far as I got.”

“It was up there a full thousandth of a second. Why did you get only the left-hand side of the group?”

“That’s all the farther I had read.”

“Look at all of it. Don’t make an effort of will; just look at it.” She flashed another number.

Joe’s memory was naturally good; his intelligence was high—just how high he did not yet know. Unconvinced that the drill was useful, he relaxed and played along. Soon he was beginning to grasp a nine-digit array as a single gestalt; Gail reduced the flash time.

“What is this magic lantern gimmick?” he inquired.

“It’s a Renshaw tachistoscope. Back to work.”

Around World War II Dr. Samuel Renshaw at the Ohio State University was proving that most people are about one-fifth efficient in using their capacities to see, hear, taste, feel and remember. His research was swallowed in the morass of communist pseudoscience that obtained after World War III, but, after his death, his findings were preserved underground. Gail did not expose Gilead to the odd language he had heard until he had been rather thoroughly Renshawed.

However, from the time of his interview with Baldwin the other persons at the ranch used it in his presence. Sometimes someone—usually Ma Garver—would translate, sometimes not. He was flattered to feel accepted, but graveled to know that it was at the lowest cadetship. He was a child among adults.

Gail started teaching him to hear by speaking to him single words from the odd language, requiring him to repeat them back. “No, Joe. Watch.” This time when she spoke the word it appeared on the screen in sound analysis, by a means basically like one long used to show the deaf-and-dumb their speech mistakes. “Now you try it.”

He did, the two arrays hung side by side. “How’s that, teacher?” he said triumphantly.

“Terrible, by several decimal places. You held the final guttural too long—” She pointed. “—the middle vowel was formed with your tongue too high and you pitched it too low and you failed to let the pitch rise. And six other things. You couldn’t possibly have been understood. I heard what you said, but it was gibberish. Try again. And don’t call me ‘teacher’.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he answered solemnly.

She shifted the controls; he tried again. This time his analysis array was laid down on top of hers; where the two matched, they cancelled. Where they did not match, his errors stood out in contrasting colors. The screen looked like a sun burst.

“Try again, Joe.” She repeated the word without letting it affect the display.

“Confound it, if you would tell me what the words mean instead of treating me the way Milton treated his daughters about Latin, I could remember them easier.”

She shrugged. “I can’t, Joe. You must learn to hear and to speak first. Speedtalk is a flexible language; the same word is not likely to recur. This practice word means: ‘The far horizons draw no nearer.’ That’s not much help, is it?”

The definition seemed improbable, but he was learning not to doubt her. He was not used to women who were always two jumps ahead of him. He ordinarily felt sorry for the poor little helpless cuddly creatures; this one he often wanted to slug. He wondered if this response were what the romancers meant by “love”; he decided that it couldn’t be.

“Try again, Joe.” Speedtalk was a structurally different speech from any the race had ever used. Long before, Ogden and Richards had shown that eight hundred and fifty words were sufficient vocabulary to express anything that could be expressed by “normal” human vocabularies, with the aid of a handful of special words—a hundred odd—for each special field, such as horse racing or ballistics. About the same time phoneticians had analyzed all human tongues into about a hundred-odd sounds, represented by the letters of a general phonetic alphabet.

On these two propositions Speedtalk was based.

To be sure, the phonetic alphabet was much less in number than the words in Basic English. But the letters representing sound in the phonetic alphabet were each capable of variation several different ways—length, stress, pitch, rising, falling. The more trained an ear was the larger the number of possible variations; there was no limit to variations, but, without much refinement of accepted phonetic practice, it was possible to establish a one-to-one relationship with Basic English so that one phonetic symbol was equivalent to an entire word in a “normal” language, one Speedtalk word was equal to an entire sentence. The language consequently was learned by letter units rather than by word units—but each word was spoken and listened to as a single structured gestalt.

But Speedtalk was not “shorthand” Basic English. “Normal” languages, having their roots in days of superstition and ignorance, have in them inherently and inescapably wrong structures of mistaken ideas about the universe. One can think logically in English only by extreme effort, so bad it is as a mental tool. For example, the verb “to be” in English has twenty-one distinct meanings, every single one of which is false-to-fact.

A symbolic structure, invented instead of accepted without question, can be made similar in structure to the real-world to which it refers. The structure of Speedtalk did not contain the hidden errors of English; it was structured as much like the real world as the New Men could make it. For example, it did not contain the unreal distinction between nouns and verbs found in most other languages. The world—the continuum known to science and including all human activity—does not contain “noun things” and “verb things”; it contains space-time events and relationships between them. The advantage for achieving truth, or something more nearly like truth, was similar to the advantage of keeping account books in Arabic numerals rather than Roman.

All other languages made scientific, multi-valued logic almost impossible to achieve; in Speedtalk it was as difficult not to be logical. Compare the pellucid Boolean logic with the obscurities of the Aristotelean logic it supplanted.

Paradoxes are verbal, do not exist in the real world—and Speedtalk did not have such built into it. Who shaves the Spanish Barber? Answer: follow him around and see. In the syntax of Speedtalk the paradox of the Spanish Barber could not even be expressed, save as a self-evident error.

But Joe Greene-Gilead-Briggs could not learn it until he had learned to hear, by learning to speak. He slaved away; the screen continued to remain lighted with his errors.

Came finally a time when Joe’s pronunciation of a sentence-word blanked out Gail’s sample; the screen turned dark. He felt more triumph over that than anything he could remember.

His delight was short. By a circuit Gail had thoughtfully added some days earlier the machine answered with a flourish of trumpets, loud applause, and then added in a cooing voice, “Mama’s good boy!”

He turned to her. “Woman, you spoke of matrimony. If you ever do manage to marry me, I’ll beat you.”

“I haven’t made up my mind about you yet,” she answered evenly. “Now try this word, Joe—”

Baldwin showed up that evening, called him aside. “Joe! C’mere. Listen, lover boy, you keep your animal nature out of your work, or I’ll have to find you a new teacher.”

“But—”

“You heard me. Take her swimming, take her riding, after hours you are on your own. Work time—strictly business. I’ve got plans for you; I want you to get smarted up.”

“She complained about me?”

“Don’t be silly. It’s my business to know what’s going on.”

“Hmm. Kettle Belly, what is this shopping-for-a-husband she kids about? Is she serious, or is it just intended to rattle me?”

“Ask her. Not that it matters, as you won’t have any choice if she means it. She has the calm persistence of the law of gravitation.”

“Ouch! I had had the impression that the ‘New Men’ did not bother with marriage and such like, as you put it, ‘monkey customs.’ ”

“Some do, some don’t. Me, I’ve been married quite a piece, but I mind a mousy little member of our lodge who had had nine kids by nine fathers—all wonderful genius-plus kids. On the other hand I can point out one with eleven kids—Thalia Wagner—who has never so much as looked at another man, Geniuses make their own rules in such matters, Joe; they always have. Here are some established statistical facts about genius, as shown by Armatoe’s work—”

He ticked them off. “Geniuses are usually long lived. They are not modest, not honestly so. They have infinite capacity for taking pains. They are emotionally indifferent to accepted codes of morals—they make their own rules. You seem to have the stigmata, by the way.”

“Thanks for nothing. Maybe I should have a new teacher, if there is anyone else available who can do it.”

“Any of us can do it, just as anybody handy teaches a baby to talk. She’s actually a biochemist, when she has time for it.”

“When she has time?”

“Be careful of that kid, son. Her real profession is the same as yours—honorable hatchet man. She’s killed upwards of three hundred people.” Kettle Belly grinned. “If you want to switch teachers, just drop me a wink.”

Gilead-Greene hastily changed the subject. “You were speaking of work for me: how about Mrs. Keithley? Is she still alive?”

“Yes, blast her.”

“Remember, I’ve got dibs on her.”

“You may have to go to the Moon to get her. She’s reported to be building a vacation home there. Old age seems to be telling on her; you had better get on with your homework if you want a crack at her.” Moon Colony even then was a center of geriatrics for the rich. The low gravity was easy on their hearts, made them feel young—and possibly extended their lives.

“Okay, I will.”

Instead of asking for a new teacher Joe took a highly polished apple to their next session. Gail ate it, leaving him very little core, and put him harder to work than ever. While perfecting his hearing and pronunciation, she started him on the basic thousand-letter vocabulary by forcing him to start to talk simple three and four-letter sentences, and by answering him in different word-sentences using the same phonetic letters. Some of the vowel and consonant sequences were very difficult to pronounce.

Master them he did. He had been used to doing most things easier than could those around him; now he was in very fast company. He stretched himself and began to achieve part of his own large latent capacity. When he began to catch some of the dinner-table conversation and to reply in simple Speedtalk—being forbidden by Gail to answer in English—she started him on the ancillary vocabularies.

An economical language cannot be limited to a thousand words; although almost every idea can be expressed somehow in a short vocabulary, higher orders of abstraction are convenient. For technical words Speedtalk employed an open expansion of sixty of the thousand-odd phonetic letters. They were the letters ordinarily used as numerals; by preceding a number with a letter used for no other purpose, the symbol was designated as having a word value.

New Men numbered to the base sixty—three times four times five, a convenient, easily factored system, most economical, i.e., the symbol “100” identified the number described in English as thirty-six hundred—yet permitting quick, in-the-head translation from common notation to Speedtalk figures and vice versa.

By using these figures, each prefaced by the indicator—a voiceless Welsh or Burmese “1”—a pool of 215,999 words (one less than the cube of sixty) were available for specialized meaning without using more than four letters including the indicator. Most of them could be pronounced as one syllable. These had not the stark simplicity of basic Speedtalk; nevertheless words such as “ichthyophagous” and “constitutionality” were thus compressed to monosyllables. Such shortcuts can best be appreciated by anyone who has heard a long speech in Cantonese translated into a short speech in English. Yet English is not the most terse of “normal” languages—and expanded Speedtalk is many times more economical than the briefest of “normal” tongues.

By adding one more letter (sixty to the fourth power) just short of thirteen million words could be added if needed—and most of them could still be pronounced as one syllable.

When Joe discovered that Gail expected him to learn a couple hundred thousand new words in a matter of days, he balked. “Damn it, Fancy Pants, I am not a superman. I’m in here by mistake.”

“Your opinion is worthless; I think you can do it. Now listen.”

“Suppose I flunk; does that put me safely off your list of possible victims?”

“If you flunk, I wouldn’t have you on toast. Instead I’d tear your head off and stuff it down your throat. But you won’t flunk; I know. However,” she added, “I’m not sure you would be a satisfactory husband; you argue too much.”

He made a brief and bitter remark in Speedtalk; she answered with one word which described his shortcomings in detail. They got to work.

Joe was mistaken; he learned the expanded vocabulary as fast as he heard it. He had a latent eidetic memory; the Renshawing process now enabled him to use it fully. And his mental processes, always fast, had become faster than he knew.

The ability to learn Speedtalk at all is proof of supernormal intelligence; the use of it by such intelligence renders that mind efficient. Even before World War II Alfred Korzybski had shown that human thought was performed, when done efficiently, only in symbols; the notion of “pure” thought, free of abstracted speech symbols, was merely fantasy. The brain was so constructed as to work without symbols only on the animal level; to speak of “reasoning” without symbols was to speak nonsense.

Speedtalk did not merely speed up communication—by its structures it made thought more logical; by its economy it made thought processes enormously faster, since it takes almost as long to think a word as it does to speak it.

Korzybski’s monumental work went fallow during the communist interregnum; Das Kapital is a childish piece of work, when analyzed by semantics, so the politburo suppressed semantics—and replaced it by ersatz under the same name, as Lysenkoism replaced the science of genetics.

Having Speedtalk to help him learn more Speedtalk, Joe learned very rapidly. The Renshawing had continued; he was now able to grasp a gestalt or configuration in many senses at once, grasp it, remember it, reason about it with great speed.

Living time is not calendar time; a man’s life is the thought that flows through his brain. Any man capable of learning Speedtalk had an association time at least three times as fast as an ordinary man. Speedtalk itself enabled him to manipulate symbols approximately seven times as fast as English symbols could be manipulated. Seven times three is twenty-one; a new man had an effective life time of at least sixteen hundred years, reckoned in flow of ideas.

They had time to become encyclopedic synthesists, something denied any ordinary man by the straitjacket of his sort of time.

When Joe had learned to talk, to read and write and cipher, Gail turned him over to others for his real education. But before she checked him out she played him several dirty tricks.

For three days she forbade him to eat. When it was evident that he could think and keep his temper despite low blood-sugar count, despite hunger reflex, she added sleeplessness and pain—intense, long, continued, and varied pain. She tried subtly to goad him into irrational action; he remained bedrock steady, his mind clicking away at any assigned task as dependably as an electronic computer.

“Who’s not a superman?” she asked at the end of their last session.

“Yes, teacher.”

“Come here, lug.” She grabbed him by the ears, kissed him soundly. “So long.” He did not see her again for many weeks.

His tutor in E.S.P. was an ineffectual-looking little man who had taken the protective coloration of the name Weems. Joe was not very good at producing E.S.P. phenomena. Clairvoyance he did not appear to have. He was better at precognition, but he did not improve with practice. He was best at telekinesis; he could have made a soft living with dice. But, as Kettle Belly had pointed out, from affecting the roll of dice to moving tons of freight was quite a gap—and one possibly not worth bridging.

“It may have other uses, however,” Weems had said softly, lapsing into English. “Consider what might be done if one could influence the probability that a neutron would reach a particular nucleus—or change the statistical probability in a mass.”

Gilead let it ride; it was an outrageous thought.

At telepathy he was erratic to exasperation. He called the Rhine cards once without a miss, then had poor scores for three weeks. More highly structured communication seemed quite beyond him, until one day without apparent cause but during an attempt to call the cards by telepathy, he found himself hooked in with Weems for all of ten seconds—time enough for a thousand words by Speedtalk standards.

—it comes out as speech!

—why not? thought is speech.

—how do we do it?

—if we knew it would not be so unreliable, as it is, some can do it by volition, some by accident, and some never seem to be able to do it. We do know this: while thought may not be of the physical world in any fashion we can now define and manipulate, it is similar to events in continuum in its quantal nature. You are now studying the extension of the quantum concept to all features of the continuum, you know the chronon, the mensum, and the viton, as quanta, as well as the action units of quanta such as the photon. The continuum has not only structure but texture in all its features. The least unit of thought we term the psychon.

—define it. Put salt on its tail.

—some day, some day. I can tell you this; the fastest possible rate of thought is one psychon per chronon; this is a basic, universal constant.

—how close do we come to that?

—less than sixty-to-the-minus-third-power of the possibility.

—! ! ! ! !

—better creatures than ourselves will follow us. We pick pebbles at a boundless ocean.

—what can we do to improve it?

—gather our pebbles with serene minds.

Gilead paused for a long split second of thought.—can psychons be destroyed?

—vitons may be transferred, psychons are—

The connection was suddenly destroyed. “As I was saying,” Weems went on quietly, “psychons are as yet beyond our comprehension in many respects. Theory indicates that they may not be destroyed, that thought, like action, is persistent Whether or not such theory, if true, means that personal identity is also persistent must remain an open question. See the daily papers—a few hundred years from now—or a few hundred thousand.” He stood up.

“I’m anxious to try tomorrow’s session, Doc,” Gilead-Greene almost bubbled. “Maybe—”

“I’m finished with you.”

“But, Doctor Weems that connection was clear as a phone hook-up. Perhaps tomorrow—”

“We have established that your talent is erratic. We have no way to train it to dependability. Time is too short to waste, mine and yours.” Lapsing suddenly into English, he added, “No.”

Gilead left.

During his training in other fields Joe was exposed to many things best described as impressive gadgets. There was an integrating pantograph, a factory-in-a-box, which the New Men planned to turn over to ordinary men as soon as the social system was no longer dominated by economic wolves. It could and did reproduce almost any prototype placed on its stage, requiring thereto only materials and power. Its power came from a little nucleonics motor the size of Joe’s thumb; its theory played hob with conventional notions of entropy. One put in “sausage”; one got out “pig.”

Latent in it was the shape of an economic system as different from the current one as the assembly-line economy differed from the family-shop system—and in such a system lay possibilities of human freedom and dignity missing for centuries, if they had ever existed.

In the meantime New Men rarely bought more than one of anything—a pattern. Or they made a pattern.

Another useful but hardly wonderful gadget was a dictaphone-typewriter-printing-press combination. The machine’s analysers recognized each of the thousand-odd phonetic symbols; there was a typebar for each sound. It produced one or many copies. Much of Gilead’s education came from pages printed by this gadget, saving the precious time of others.

The arrangement, classification, and accessibility of knowledge remain in all ages the most pressing problem. With the New Men, complete and organized memory licked most of the problem and rendered record keeping, most reading and writing—and most especially the time-destroying trouble of rereading—unnecessary. The autoscriber gadget, combined with a “librarian” machine that could “hear” that portion of Speedtalk built into it as a filing system, covered most of the rest of the problem. New Men were not cluttered with endless bits of paper. They never wrote memoranda.

The area under the ranch was crowded with technological wonders, all newer than next week. Incredibly tiny manipulators for micrurgy of all sorts, surgical, chemical, biological manipulation, oddities of cybernetics only less complex than the human brain—the list is too long to describe. Joe did not study all of them; an encyclopedic synthesist is concerned with structured shapes of knowledge; he cannot, even with Speed-talk, study details in every field.

Early in his education, when it was clear that he had had the potential to finish the course, plastic surgery was started to give him a new identity and basic appearance. His height was reduced by three inches; his skull was somewhat changed; his complexion was permanently darkened. Gail picked the facial appearance he was given; he did not object. He rather liked it; it seemed to fit his new inner personality.

With a new face, a new brain, and a new outlook, he was almost in fact a new man. Before he had been a natural genius; now he was a trained genius.

“Joe, how about some riding?”

“Suits.”

“I want to give War Conqueror some gentle exercise. He’s responding to the saddle; I don’t want him to forget.”

“Right with you.”

Kettle Belly and Gilead-Greene rode out from the ranch buildings. Baldwin let the young horse settle to a walk and began to talk. “I figure you are about ready for work son.”

Even in Speedtalk Kettle Belly’s speech retained his own flavor.

“I suppose so, but I still have those mental reservations.”

“Not sure we are on the side of the angels?”

“I’m sure you mean to be. It’s evident that the organization selects for good will and humane intentions quite as carefully as for ability. I wasn’t sure at one time—”

“Yes?”

“That candidate who came here about six months ago, the one who broke his neck in a riding accident.”

“Oh, yes! Very sad.”

“Very opportune, you mean, Kettle Belly.”

“Damn it, Joe, if a bad apple gets in this far, we can’t let him out.” Baldwin reverted to English for swearing purposes; he maintained that it had “more juice.”

“I know it. That’s why I’m sure about the quality of our people.”

“So it’s ‘our people’ now?”

“Yes. But I’m not sure we are on the right track.”

“What’s your notion of the right track?”

“We should come out of hiding and teach the ordinary man what he can learn of what we know. He could learn a lot of it and could use it. Properly briefed and trained, he could run his affairs pretty well. He would gladly kick out the no-goods who ride on his shoulders, if only he knew how. We could show him. That would be more to the point than this business of spot assassination, now and then, here and there—mind you, I don’t object to killing any man who merits killing; I simply say it’s inefficient. No doubt we would have to continue to guard against such crises as the one that brought you and me together, but, in the main, people could run their own affairs if we would just stop pretending that we are so scared we can’t mix with people, come out of our hole, and lend a hand.”

Baldwin reined up. “Don’t say that I don’t mix with the common people, Joe; I sell used ’copters for a living. You can’t get any commoner. And don’t imply that my heart is not with them. We are not like them, but we are tied to them by the strongest bond of all, for we are all, each every one, sickening with the same certainly fatal disease—we are alive.

“As for our killings, you don’t understand the principles of assassination as a political weapon. Read—” He named a Speedtalk library designation. “If I were knocked off, our organization wouldn’t even hiccup, but organizations for bad purposes are different. They are personal empires; if you pick the time and the method, you can destroy such an organization by killing one man—the parts that remain will be almost harmless until assimilated by another leader—then you kill him. It is not inefficient; it’s quite efficient, if planned with the brain and not with the emotions.

“As for keeping ourselves separate, we are about like the U-235 in U-238, not effective unless separated out. There have been potential New Men in every generation, but they were spread too thin.

“As for keeping our existence secret, it is utterly necessary if we are to survive and increase. There is nothing so dangerous as being the Chosen People—and in the minority. One group was persecuted for two thousand years merely for making the claim.”

He again shifted to English to swear. “Damn it, Joe, face up to it. This world is run the way my great aunt Susie flies a ’copter. Speedtalk or no Speedtalk, common man can’t learn to cope with modern problems. No use to talk about the unused potential of his brain, he has not got the will to learn what he would have to know. We can’t fit him out with new genes, so we have to lead him by the hand to keep him from killing himself—and us. We can give him personal liberty, we can give him autonomy in most things, we can give him a great measure of personal dignity—and we will, because we believe that individual freedom, at all levels, is the direction of evolution, of maximum survival value. But we can’t let him fiddle with issues of racial life and death; he ain’t up to it.

“No help for it. Each shape of society develops its own ethic. We are shaping this the way we are inexorably forced to, by the logic of events. We think we are shaping it toward survival.”

“Are we?” mused Greene-Gilead.

“Remains to be seen. Survivors survive. We’ll know—Wup! Meeting’s adjourned.”

The radio on Baldwin’s pommel was shrilling his personal emergency call. He listened, then spoke one sharp word in Speedtalk. “Back to the house, Joel” He wheeled and was away. Joe’s mount came of less selected stock; he was forced to follow.

Baldwin sent for Joe soon after he got back. Joe went in; Gail was already there.

Baldwin’s face was without expression. He said in English, “I’ve work for you, Joe, work you won’t have any doubt about. Mrs. Keithley.”

“Good.”

“Not good.” Baldwin shifted to Speedtalk. “We have been caught flat-footed. Either the second set of films was never destroyed, or there was a third set. We do not know; the man who could tell us is dead. But Mrs. Keithley obtained a set and has been using them.

“This is the situation. The ‘fuse’ of the nova effect has been installed in the New Age Hotel. It has been sealed off and can be triggered only by radio signal from the Moon—her signal. The ‘fuse’ has been rigged so that any attempt to break in, as long as the firing circuit is still armed, will trigger it and set it off. Even an attempt to examine it by penetration wavelengths will set it off. Speaking as a physicist, it is my considered opinion that no plan for tackling the ‘nova’ fuse bomb itself will work unless the arming circuit is first broken on the Moon and that no attempt should be made to get at fuse before then, because of extreme danger to the entire planet.

“The arming circuit and the radio relay to the Earthside trigger are located on the Moon in a building inside her private dome. The triggering control she keeps with her. From the same control she can disarm the arming circuit temporarily; it is a combination dead-man switch and time-clock arrangement. It can be set to disarm for a maximum of twelve hours, to let her sleep, or possibly to permit her to order rearrangements. Unless it is switched off any attempt to enter the building in which the arming circuit is housed will also trigger the ‘Nova’ bomb circuit. While it is disarmed, the housing on the Moon may be broached by force but this will set off alarms which will warn her to rearm and then to trigger at once. The set up is such that the following sequence of events must take place:

“First, she must be killed, and the circuit disarmed.

“Second, the building housing the arming circuit and radio relay to the trigger must be broken open and the circuits destroyed before the time clock can rearm and trigger. This must be done with speed, not only because of guards, but because her surviving lieutenants will attempt to seize power by possessing themselves of the controls.

“Third, as soon as word is received on Earth that the arming circuit is destroyed, the New Age will be attacked in force and the ‘Nova’ bomb destroyed.

“Fourth, as soon as the bomb is destroyed, a general round up must be made of all persons technically capable of setting up the ‘Nova’ effect from plans. This alert must be maintained until it is certain that no plans remain in existence, including the third set of films, and further established by hypno that no competent person possesses sufficient knowledge to set it up without plans. This alert may compromise our secret status; the risk must be taken.

“Any questions?”

“Kettle Belly,” said Joe, “Doesn’t she know that if the Earth becomes a Nova, the Moon will be swallowed up in the disaster?”

“Crater walls shield her dome from line-of-sight with Earth; apparently she believes she is safe. Evil is essentially stupid, Joe; despite her brilliance, she believes what she wishes to believe. Or it may be that she is willing to risk her own death against the tempting prize of absolute power. Her plan is to proclaim power with some pious nonsense about being high priestess of peace—a euphemism for Empress of Earth. It is a typical paranoid deviation; the proof of the craziness lies in the fact that the physical arrangements make it certain—if we do not intervene—that Earth will be destroyed automatically a few hours after her death; a thing that could happen any time—and a compelling reason for all speed. No one has ever quite managed to conquer all of Earth, not even the commissars. Apparently she wishes not only to conquer it, but wants to destroy it after she is gone, lest anyone else ever manage to do so again. Any more questions?”

He went on, “The plan is this:

“You two will go to the Moon to become domestic servants to Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Copley, a rich, elderly couple living at the Elysian Rest Homes, Moon Colony. They are of us. Shortly they will decide to return to Earth; you two will decide to remain, you like it. You will advertise, offering to work for anyone who will post your return bond. About this time Mrs. Keithley will have lost through circumstances that will be arranged, two or more of her servants; she will probably hire you, since domestic service is the scarcest commodity on the Moon. If not, a variation will be arranged for you.

“When you are inside her dome, you’ll maneuver yourselves into positions to carry out your assignments. When both of you are so placed, you will carry out procedures one and two with speed.

“A person named McGinty, already inside her dome, will help you in communication. He is not one of us but is our agent, a telepath. His ability does not extend past that. Your communication hook up will probably be, Gail to McGinty by telepathy, McGinty to Joe by concealed radio.”

Joe glanced at Gail; it was the first that he had known that she was a telepath. Baldwin went on, “Gail will kill Mrs. Keithley; Joe will break into the housing and destroy the circuits. Are you ready to go?”

Joe was about to suggest swapping the assignments when Gail answered, “Ready”; he echoed her.

“Good. Joe, you will carry your assumed I.Q. at about 85, Gail at 95; she will appear to be the dominant member of a married couple—” Gail grinned at Joe. “—but you, Joe, will be in charge. Your personalities and histories are now being made up and will be ready with your identifications. Let me say again that the greatest of speed is necessary; government security forces here may attempt a fool-hardy attack on the New Age Hotel. We shall prevent or delay such efforts, but act with speed. Good luck.”

Operation Black Widow, first phase, went off as planned.

Eleven days later Joe and Gail were inside Mrs. Keithley’s dome on the moon and sharing a room in the servants’ quarters. Gail glanced around when first they entered it and said in Speedtalk, “Now you’ll have to marry me; I’m compromised.”

“Shut that up, idiot! Someone might hear you.”

“Pooh! They’d just think I had asthma. Don’t you think it’s noble of me, Joe, to sacrifice my girlish reputation for home and country?”

“What reputation?”

“Come closer so I can slug you.”

Even the servants’ quarters were luxurious. The dome was a sybarite’s dream. The floor of it was gardened in real beauty save where Mrs. Keithley’s mansion stood. Opposite it, across a little lake—certainly the only lake on the Moon—was the building housing the circuits; it was disguised as a little Doric Grecian shrine.

The dome itself was edge-lighted fifteen hours out of each twenty-four, shutting out the black sky and the harsh stars. At “night” the lighting was gradually withdrawn.

McGinty was a gardener and obviously enjoyed his work. Gail established contact with him, got out of him what little he knew. Joe left him alone save for contacts in character.

There was a staff of over two hundred, having its own social hierarchy, from engineers for dome and equipment, Mrs. Keithley’s private pilot, and so on down to gardeners’ helpers. Joe and Gail were midway, being inside servants. Gail made herself popular as the harmlessly flirtatious but always helpful and sympathetic wife of a meek and older husband. She had been a beauty parlor operator, so it seemed, before she “married” and had great skill in massaging aching backs and stiff necks, relieving headaches and inducing sleep. She was always ready to demonstrate.

Her duties as a maid had not yet brought her into close contact with their employer. Joe, however, had acquired the job of removing all potted plants to the “outdoors” during “night”; Mrs. Keithley, according to Mr. James, the butler, believed that plants should be outdoors at “night.” Joe was thus in a position to get outside the house when the dome was dark; he had already reached the point where the night guard at the Grecian temple would sometimes get Joe to “jigger” for him while the guard snatched a forbidden cigaret.

McGinty had been able to supply one more important fact: in addition to the guard at the temple building, and the locks and armor plate of the building itself, the arming circuit was booby-trapped. Even if it were inoperative as an arming circuit for the ‘Nova’ bomb on Earth, it itself would blow up if tampered with. Gail and Joe discussed it in their room, Gail sitting on his lap like an affectionate wife, her lips close to his left ear. “Perhaps you could wreck it from the door, without exposing yourself.”

“I’ve got to be sure. There is certainly some way of switching that gimmick off. She has to provide for possible repairs or replacements.”

“Where would it be?”

“Just one place that matches the pattern of the rest of her planning. Right under her hand, along with the disarming switch and the trigger switch.” He rubbed his other ear; it contained his short-range radio hook-up to McGinty and itched almost constantly.

“Hmm—then there’s just one thing to be done; I’ll have to wring it out of her before I kill her.”

“We’ll see.”

Just before dinner the following “evening” she found him in their room. “It worked, Joe, it worked!”

“What worked?”

“She fell for the bait. She heard from her secretary about my skill as a masseuse; I was ordered up for a demonstration this afternoon. Now I am under strict instructions to come to her tonight and rub her to sleep.”

“It’s tonight, then.”

McGinty waited in his room, behind a locked door. Joe stalled in the back hall, spinning out endlessly a dull tale to Mr. James.

A voice in his ear said, “She’s in her room now.”

“—and that’s how my brother got married to two women at once,” Joe concluded. “Sheer bad luck. I better get these plants outside before the missus happens to ask about ’em.”

“I suppose you had. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Mr. James.” He picked up two of the pots and waddled out.

He put them down outside and heard, “She says she’s started to massage. She’s spotted the radio switching unit; it’s on the belt that the old gal keeps at her bedside table when she’s not wearing it.”

“Tell her to kill her and grab it.”

“She says she wants to make her tell how to unswitch the booby-trap gimmick first.”

“Tell her not to delay.”

Suddenly, inside his head, clear and sweet as a bell as if they were her own spoken tones, he heard her. —Joe, I can hear you. Can you hear me?

—yes, yes! Aloud he added, “Stand by the phones anyhow, Mac”

—I won’t be long. I have her in intense pain; she’ll crack soon.

—hurt her plenty! He began to run toward the temple building—Gail, are you still shopping for a husband?

—I’ve found him.

—marry me and I’ll beat you every Saturday night.

—the man who can beat me hasn’t been born.

—I’d like to try. He slowed down before he came near the guard’s station. “Hi, Jim!”

—it’s a deal.

“Well, if it taint Joey boy! Got a match?”

“Here.” He reached out a hand—then, as the guard fell, he eased him to the ground and made sure that he would stay out.—Gail! It’s got to be now!

The voice in his head came back in great consternation:—Joe! She was too tough, she wouldn’t crack. She’s dead!

—good! Get that belt, break the arming circuit, then see what else you find. I’m going to break in.

He went toward the door of the temple.

—it’s disarmed, Joe. I could spot it; it has a time set on it. I can’t tell about the others; they aren’t marked and they all look alike.

He took from his pocket a small item provided by Baldwin’s careful planning.—twist them all from where they are to the other way. You’ll probably hit it.

—oh, Joe, I hope so!

He had placed the item against the lock; the metal around it turned red and now was melting away. An alarm clanged somewhere.

Gail’s voice came again in his head; there was urgency in it but no fear:—Joe! They’re beating on the door. I’m trapped.

—McGinty! Be our witness! He went on:—I, Joseph, take thee, Gail, to be my lawfully wedded wife—

He was answered in tranquil rhythm:—I, Gail, take thee, Joseph, to be my lawfully wedded husband—

—to have and to hold, he went on.

—to have and to hold, my beloved!

—for better, for worse—

Her voice in his head was singing.—till death do us part. I’ve got it open, darling; I am going in.

—till death do us part! They are breaking down the bedroom door, Joseph my dearest.

—hang on! I’m almost through here.

—they have broken it down, Joe. They are coming toward me. Good-bye my darling! I am very happy. Abruptly her “voice” stopped.

He was facing the box that housed the disarming circuit, alarms clanging in his ears; he took from his pocket another gadget and tried it.

The blast that shattered the box caught him full in the chest. The letters on the metal marker read:

TO THE MEMORY OF

MR. AND MRS. JOSEPH GREENE

WHO, NEAR THIS SPOT,

DIED FOR ALL THEIR FELLOW MEN.

THE END

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Law 31 – Control the options get others to play the cards you deal (full text) from the 48 laws of power by Robert Greene

This is the full text of Law 31 from “The 48 Laws of Power” by Robert Greene. It is titled “Control the options to get others to play the cards that you deal. It is a wonderful addition to the laws that I have been collecting and posting herein.

I learned this at one of the first jobs that I ever had. My supervisor advised me that I should never provide more than three solutions or options on a project. When I am presenting options to upper management, I was to offer three and only three options.

All three would be an option that I would be satisfied with. So that no matter what they chose, I would be satisfied.

One option would be an obvious option for rejection. It would have some fault or problem. Maybe it would be too costly, or two time consuming or have other issues that would make it unsatisfactory.

The remaining two options would lie close together in value. They would be very similar in pricing, costs, trade-offs and timing. I would advise what I felt would be the best option, but it would be ultimately the decision of upper management.

This strategy has worked over and over over the many decades in industry. And I tech it to all the junior engineers and interns in my employ. This law 31, lies very close to this experience of mine. For in my own way, I was controlling the options and having upper management play the cards that I dealt.

LAW 31

CONTROL THE OPTIONS: GET OTHERS TO PLAY WITH THE CARDS YOU DEAL

JUDGMENT

The best deceptions are the ones that seem to give the other person a choice: Your victims feel they are in control, but are actually your puppets.

Give people options that come out in your favor whichever one they choose.

Force them to make choices between the lesser of two evils, both of which serve your purpose.

Put them on the horns of a dilemma: They are gored wherever they turn.

OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW I

From early in his reign, Ivan IV, later known as Ivan the Terrible, had to confront an unpleasant reality: The country desperately needed reform, but he lacked the power to push it through.

The greatest limit to his authority came from the boyars, the Russian princely class that dominated the country and terrorized the peasantry.

In 1553, at the age of twenty-three, Ivan fell ill.

Lying in bed, nearing death, he asked the boyars to swear allegiance to his son as the new czar.

Some hesitated, some even refused.

Then and there Ivan saw he had no power over the boyars.

He recovered from his illness, but he never forgot the lesson: The boyars were out to destroy him. And indeed in the years to come, many of the most powerful of them defected to Russia’s main enemies, Poland and Lithuania, where they plotted their return and the overthrow of the czar.

Even one of Ivan’s closest friends, Prince Andrey Kurbski, suddenly turned against him, defecting to Lithuania in 1564, and becoming the strongest of Ivan’s enemies.

When Kurbski began raising troops for an invasion, the royal dynasty seemed suddenly more precarious than ever.

With émigré nobles fomenting invasion from the west, Tartars bearing down from the east, and the boyars stirring up trouble within the country, Russia’s vast size made it a nightmare to defend.

In whatever direction Ivan struck, he would leave himself vulnerable on the other side. Only if he had absolute power could he deal with this many-headed Hydra. And he had no such power.

Ivan brooded until the morning of December 3, 1564, when the citizens of Moscow awoke to a strange sight.

Hundreds of sleds filled the square before the Kremlin, loaded with the czar’s treasures and with provisions for the entire court.

They watched in disbelief as the czar and his court boarded the sleds and left town.

Without explaining why, he established himself in a village south of Moscow.

For an entire month a kind of terror gripped the capital, for the Muscovites feared that Ivan had abandoned them to the bloodthirsty boyars.

Shops closed up and riotous mobs gathered daily.

Finally, on January 3 of 1565, a letter arrived from the czar, explaining that he could no longer bear the boyars’ betrayals and had decided to abdicate once and for all.

The German Chancellor Bismarck, enraged at the constant criticisms from Rudolf Virchow (the German pathologist and liberal politician), had his seconds call upon the scientist to challenge him to a duel. 

“As the challenged party, I have the choice of weapons,” said Virchow, “and I choose these.” 

He held aloft two large and apparently identical sausages. 

“One of these,” he went on, “is infected with deadly germs; the other is perfectly sound. 

Let His Excellency decide which one he wishes to eat, and I will eat the other.” 

Almost immediately the message came back that the chancellor had decided to cancel the duel.

-THE LITTLE. BROWN BOOK OF ANECDOTES. CLIFTON FADIMAN, FD., 1985

Read aloud in public, the letter had a startling effect: Merchants and commoners blamed the boyars for Ivan’s decision, and took to the streets, terrifying the nobility with their fury.

Soon a group of delegates representing the church, the princes, and the people made the journey to Ivan’s village, and begged the czar, in the name of the holy land of Russia, to return to the throne.

Ivan listened but would not change his mind.

After days of hearing their pleas, however, he offered his subjects a choice: Either they grant him absolute powers to govern as he pleased, with no interference from the boyars, or they find a new leader.

Faced with a choice between civil war and the acceptance of despotic power, almost every sector of Russian society “opted” for a strong czar, calling for Ivan’s return to Moscow and the restoration of law and order.

In February, with much celebration, Ivan returned to Moscow.

The Russians could no longer complain if he behaved dictatorially—they had given him this power themselves.

Interpretation

Ivan the Terrible faced a terrible dilemma: To give in to the boyars would lead to certain destruction, but civil war would bring a different kind of ruin. Even if Ivan came out of such a war on top, the country would be devastated and its divisions would be stronger than ever.

His weapon of choice in the past had been to make a bold, offensive move. Now, however, that kind of move would turn against him—the more boldly he confronted his enemies, the worse the reactions he would spark.

The main weakness of a show of force is that it stirs up resentment and eventually leads to a response that eats at your authority.

Ivan, immensely creative in the use of power, saw clearly that the only path to the kind of victory he wanted was a false withdrawal.

He would not force the country over to his position, he would give it “options”: either [1] his abdication, and certain anarchy, or [2] his accession to absolute power.

To back up his move, he made it clear that he preferred to abdicate: “Call my bluff,” he said, “and watch what happens.”

No one called his bluff.

By withdrawing for just a month, he showed the country a glimpse of the nightmares that would follow his abdication—Tartar invasions, civil war, ruin. (All of these did eventually come to pass after Ivan’s death, in the infamous “Time of the Troubles.”)

Withdrawal and disappearance are classic ways of controlling the options.

You give people a sense of how things will fall apart without you, and you offer them a “choice”: I stay away and you suffer the consequences, or I return under circumstances that I dictate.

In this method of controlling people’s options, they choose the option that gives you power because the alternative is just too unpleasant. You force their hand, but indirectly: They seem to have a choice.

Whenever people feel they have a choice, they walk into your trap that much more easily.

THE LIAR

Once upon a time there was a king of Armenia, who, being of a curious turn of mind and in need of some new diversion, sent his heralds throughout the land to make the following proclamation: “Hear this! Whatever man among you can prove himself the most outrageous liar in Armenia shall receive an apple made of pure gold from the hands of His Majesty the King!”

People began to swarm to the palace from every town and hamlet in the country, people of all ranks and conditions, princes, merchants, farmers, priests, rich and poor, tall and short, fat and thin.

There was no lack of liars in the land, and each one told his tale to the king.

A ruler, however, has heard practically every sort of lie, and none of those now told him convinced the king that he had listened to the best of them.

The king was beginning to grow tired of his new sport and was thinking of calling the whole contest off without declaring a winner, when there appeared before him a poor, ragged man, carrying a large earthenware pitcher under his arm.

“What can I do for you?” asked His Majesty.

“Sire!” said the poor man, slightly bewildered “Surely you remember? You owe me a pot of gold, and I have come to collect it.”

“You are a pet feet liar, sir!’ exclaimed the king ”I owe you no money’”

”A perfect liar, am I?” said the poor man. ”Then give me the golden apple!”

The king, realizing that the man was Irving to trick him. started to hedge. ”No. no! You are not a liar!”

”Then give me the pot of gold you owe me. sire.” said the man. The king saw the dilemma, He handed over the golden apple.

-ARMENIAN FOLKTALES AND FABLES. REIOLD BY CAHARLES DOWNING. 1993

OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW II

As a seventeenth-century French courtesan, Ninon de Lenclos found that her life had certain pleasures.

Her lovers came from royalty and aristocracy, and they paid her well, entertained her with their wit and intellect, satisfied her rather demanding sensual needs, and treated her almost as an equal.

Such a life was infinitely preferable to marriage.

In 1643, however, Ninon’s mother died suddenly, leaving her, at the age of twenty-three, totally alone in the world—no family, no dowry, nothing to fall back upon.

A kind of panic overtook her and she entered a convent, turning her back on her illustrious lovers.

A year later she left the convent and moved to Lyons.

When she finally reappeared in Paris, in 1648, lovers and suitors flocked to her door in greater numbers than ever before, for she was the wittiest and most spirited courtesan of the time and her presence had been greatly missed.

Ninon’s followers quickly discovered, however, that she had changed her old way of doing things, and had set up a new system of options.

The dukes, seigneurs, and princes who wanted to pay for her services could continue to do so, but they were no longer in control—she would sleep with them when she wanted, according to her whim.

All their money bought them was a possibility. If it was her pleasure to sleep with them only once a month, so be it.

Those who did not want to be what Ninon called a payeur could join the large and growing group of men she called her martyrs—men who visited her apartment principally for her friendship, her biting wit, her lute-playing, and the company of the most vibrant minds of the period, including Molière, La Rochefoucauld, and Saint-Évremond.

The martyrs, too, however, entertained a possibility: She would regularly select from them a favori, a man who would become her lover without having to pay, and to whom she would abandon herself completely for as long as she so desired—a week, a few months, rarely longer.

A payeur could not become a favori, but a martyr had no guarantee of becoming one, and indeed could remain disappointed for an entire lifetime. The poet Charleval, for example, never enjoyed Ninon’s favors, but never stopped coming to visit—he did not want to do without her company.

As word of this system reached polite French society, Ninon became the object of intense hostility.

Her reversal of the position of the courtesan scandalized the queen mother and her court.

Much to their horror, however, it did not discourage her male suitors—indeed it only increased their numbers and intensified their desire.

It became an honor to be a payeur, helping Ninon to maintain her lifestyle and her glittering salon, accompanying her sometimes to the theater, and sleeping with her when she chose.

Even more distinguished were the martyrs, enjoying her company without paying for it and maintaining the hope, however remote, of some day becoming her favori. That possibility spurred on many a young nobleman, as word spread that none among the courtesans could surpass Ninon in the art of love.

And so the married and the single, the old and the young, entered her web and chose one of the two options presented to them, both of which amply satisfied her.

Interpretation

The life of the courtesan entailed the possibility of a power that was denied a married woman, but it also had obvious perils.

The man who paid for the courtesan’s services in essence owned her, determining when he could possess her and when, later on, he would abandon her.

As she grew older, her options narrowed, as fewer men chose her.

To avoid a life of poverty she had to amass her fortune while she was young.

The courtesan’s legendary greed, then, reflected a practical necessity, yet also lessened her allure, since the illusion of being desired is important to men, who are often alienated if their partner is too interested in their money.

As the courtesan aged, then, she faced a most difficult fate.

Ninon de Lenclos had a horror of any kind of dependence.

She early on tasted a kind of equality with her lovers, and she would not settle into a system that left her such distasteful options. Strangely enough, the system she devised in its place seemed to satisfy her suitors as much as it did her.

The payeurs may have had to pay, but the fact that Ninon would only sleep with them when she wanted to gave them a thrill unavailable with every other courtesan: She was yielding out of her own desire.

The martyrs’ avoidance of the taint of having to pay gave them a sense of superiority; as members of Ninon’s fraternity of admirers, they also might some day experience the ultimate pleasure of being her favori.

Finally, Ninon did not force her suitors into either category.

They could “choose” which side they preferred—a freedom that left them a vestige of masculine pride.

Such is the power of giving people a choice, or rather the illusion of one, for they are playing with cards you have dealt them.

Where the alternatives set up by Ivan the Terrible involved a certain risk—one option would have led to his losing his power—Ninon created a situation in which every option redounded to her favor.

From the payeurs she received the money she needed to run her salon. And from the martyrs she gained the ultimate in power: She could surround herself with a bevy of admirers, a harem from which to choose her lovers.

The system, though, depended on one critical factor: the possibility, however remote, that a martyr could become a favori.

The illusion that riches, glory, or sensual satisfaction may someday fall into your victim’s lap is an irresistible carrot to include in your list of choices.

That hope, however slim, will make men accept the most ridiculous situations, because it leaves them the all-important option of a dream. The illusion of choice, married to the possibility of future good fortune, will lure the most stubborn sucker into your glittering web.

J. P. Morgan Sr. once told a jeweler of his acquaintance that he was interested in buying a pearl scarf-pin. 

Just a few weeks later, the jeweler happened upon a magnificent pearl. He had it mounted in an appropriate setting and sent it to Morgan, together with a bill for $5,000. 

The following day the package was returned. Morgan’s accompanying note read: “I like the pin, but I don’t like the price. 

If you will accept the enclosed check for $4,000, please send back the box with the seal unbroken.” 

The enraged jeweler refused the check and dismissed the messenger in disgust. He opened up the box to reclaim the unwanted pin, only to find that it had been removed. In its place was a check for $5,000.

-THE LITTLE, BROWN BOOK OF ANECDOTES. CLIFTON FADIMAN, ED.. 1985

KEYS TO POWER

Words like “freedom,” “options,” and “choice” evoke a power of possibility far beyond the reality of the benefits they entail.

When examined closely, the choices we have—in the marketplace, in elections, in our jobs—tend to have noticeable limitations: They are often a matter of a choice simply between A and B, with the rest of the alphabet out of the picture.

Yet as long as the faintest mirage of choice flickers on, we rarely focus on the missing options.

We “choose” to believe that the game is fair, and that we have our freedom. We prefer not to think too much about the depth of our liberty to choose.

This unwillingness to probe the smallness of our choices stems from the fact that too much freedom creates a kind of anxiety. The phrase “unlimited options” sounds infinitely promising, but unlimited options would actually paralyze us and cloud our ability to choose. Our limited range of choices comforts us.

This supplies the clever and cunning with enormous opportunities for deception. For people who are choosing between alternatives find it hard to believe they are being manipulated or deceived; they cannot see that you are allowing them a small amount of free will in exchange for a much more powerful imposition of your own will. Setting up a narrow range of choices, then, should always be a part of your deceptions.

There is a saying: If you can get the bird to walk into the cage on its own, it will sing that much more prettily.

The following are among the most common forms of “controlling the options”:

Color the Choices. This was a favored technique of Henry Kissinger. As President Richard Nixon’s secretary of state, Kissinger considered himself better informed than his boss, and believed that in most situations he could make the best decision on his own. But if he tried to determine policy, he would offend or perhaps enrage a notoriously insecure man. So Kissinger would propose three or four choices of action for each situation, and would present them in such a way that the one he preferred always seemed the best solution compared to the others. Time after time, Nixon fell for the bait, never suspecting that he was moving where Kissinger pushed him. This is an excellent device to use on the insecure master.

Force the Resister. One of the main problems faced by Dr. Milton H. Erickson, a pioneer of hypnosis therapy in the 1950s, was the relapse. His patients might seem to be recovering rapidly, but their apparent susceptibility to the therapy masked a deep resistance: They would soon relapse into old habits, blame the doctor, and stop coming to see him. To avoid this, Erickson began ordering some patients to have a relapse, to make themselves feel as bad as when they first came in—to go back to square one. Faced with this option, the patients would usually “choose” to avoid the relapse—which, of course, was what Erickson really wanted.

This is a good technique to use on children and other willful people who enjoy doing the opposite of what you ask them to: Push them to “choose” what you want them to do by appearing to advocate the opposite.

Alter the Playing Field. In the 1860s, John D. Rockefeller set out to create an oil monopoly. If he tried to buy up the smaller oil companies they would figure out what he was doing and fight back. Instead, he began secretly buying up the railway companies that transported the oil. When he then attempted to take over a particular company, and met with resistance, he reminded them of their dependence on the rails. Refusing them shipping, or simply raising their fees, could ruin their business. Rockefeller altered the playing field so that the only options the small oil producers had were the ones he gave them.

In this tactic your opponents know their hand is being forced, but it doesn’t matter. The technique is effective against those who resist at all costs.

The Shrinking Options. The late-nineteenth-century art dealer Ambroise Vollard perfected this technique.

Customers would come to Vollard’s shop to see some Cézannes. He would show three paintings, neglect to mention a price, and pretend to doze off. The visitors would have to leave without deciding. They would usually come back the next day to see the paintings again, but this time Vollard would pull out less interesting works, pretending he thought they were the same ones. The baffled customers would look at the new offerings, leave to think them over, and return yet again. Once again the same thing would happen: Vollard would show paintings of lesser quality still. Finally the buyers would realize they had better grab what he was showing them, because tomorrow they would have to settle for something worse, perhaps at even higher prices.

A variation on this technique is to raise the price every time the buyer hesitates and another day goes by. This is an excellent negotiating ploy to use on the chronically indecisive, who will fall for the idea that they are getting a better deal today than if they wait till tomorrow.

The Weak Man on the Precipice. The weak are the easiest to maneuver by controlling their options. Cardinal de Retz, the great seventeenth-century provocateur, served as an unofficial assistant to the Duke of Orléans, who was notoriously indecisive. It was a constant struggle to convince the duke to take action—he would hem and haw, weigh the options, and wait till the last moment, giving everyone around him an ulcer. But Retz discovered a way to handle him: He would describe all sorts of dangers, exaggerating them as much as possible, until the duke saw a yawning abyss in every direction except one: the one Retz was pushing him to take.

This tactic is similar to “Color the Choices,” but with the weak you have to be more aggressive. Work on their emotions—use fear and terror to propel them into action. Try reason and they will always find a way to procrastinate.

Brothers in Crime. This is a classic con-artist technique: You attract your victims to some criminal scheme, creating a bond of blood and guilt between you. They participate in your deception, commit a crime (or think they do—see the story of Sam Geezil in Law 3), and are easily manipulated. Serge Stavisky, the great French con artist of the 1920s, so entangled the government in his scams and swindles that the state did not dare to prosecute him, and “chose” to leave him alone. It is often wise to implicate in your deceptions the very person who can do you the most harm if you fail. Their involvement can be subtle—even a hint of their involvement will narrow their options and buy their silence.

The Horns of a Dilemma. This idea was demonstrated by General William Sherman’s infamous march through Georgia during the American Civil War. Although the Confederates knew what direction Sherman was heading in, they never knew if he would attack from the left or the right, for he divided his army into two wings—and if the rebels retreated from one wing they found themselves facing the other. This is a classic trial lawyer’s technique: The lawyer leads the witnesses to decide between two possible explanations of an event, both of which poke a hole in their story. They have to answer the lawyer’s questions, but whatever they say they hurt themselves. The key to this move is to strike quickly: Deny the victim the time to think of an escape. As they wriggle between the horns of the dilemma, they dig their own grave.

Understand: In your struggles with your rivals, it will often be necessary for you to hurt them. And if you are clearly the agent of their punishment, expect a counterattack—expect revenge. If, however, they seem to themselves to be the agents of their own misfortune, they will submit quietly. When Ivan left Moscow for his rural village, the citizens asking him to return agreed to his demand for absolute power. Over the years to come, they resented him less for the terror he unleashed on the country, because, after all, they had granted him his power themselves. This is why it is always good to allow your victims their choice of poison, and to cloak your involvement in providing it to them as far as possible.

Image: The Horns of the Bull. The bull backs you into the corner with its horns—not a single horn, which you might be e able to escape, but a pair of horns that trap you within their hold. Run right or run left—either way you move into their piercing ends and are gored.

Authority: For the wounds and every other evil that men inflict upon themselves spontaneously, and of their own choice, are in the long run less painful than those inflicted by others. (Niccolò Machiavelli, 1469-1527)

REVERSAL

Controlling the options has one main purpose: to disguise yourself as the agent of power and punishment.

The tactic works best, then, for those whose power is fragile, and who cannot operate too openly without incurring suspicion, resentment, and anger.

Even as a general rule, however, it is rarely wise to be seen as exerting power directly and forcefully, no matter how secure or strong you are. It is usually more elegant and more effective to give people the illusion of choice.

On the other hand, by limiting other people’s options you sometimes limit your own.

There are situations in which it is to your advantage to allow your rivals a large degree of freedom: As you watch them operate, you give yourself rich opportunities to spy, gather information, and plan your deceptions.

The nineteenth-century banker James Rothschild liked this method: He felt that if he tried to control his opponents’ movements, he lost the chance to observe their strategy and plan a more effective course.

The more freedom he allowed them in the short term, the more forcefully he could act against them in the long run.

Conclusion

I cannot help but wonder if Donald Trump in 2020 is conducting an “Ivan the Terrible” technique in order to obtain full dictatorial powers in lieu of Congressional approval. It seems like he wants people to get sick. That he wants Portland to burn. That he wants people to arm themselves. That he wants the Post office not to deliver mail.

I wonder if this is intentional so that some kind of “big event” will force the the people and Congress to grant him wide sweeping powers and control. I wonder.

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The Last Night of the World by Ray Bradbury (full text)

The short story “The Last Night of The World” by Ray Bradbury is very calmed. Perhaps because it portrays speculation and ‘what ifs?’. It gives you an indirect complement, for it does not describe what is causing the end of the world. Only that you know that it is heading towards you and will reach you very, very soon.

Enjoy.

The Last Night of the World

By Ray Bradbury

“WHAT would you do if you knew that this was the last night of the world?” “What would I do? You mean seriously?”

“Yes, seriously.”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought.”

He poured some coffee. In the background the two girls were playing blocks on the parlor rug in the light of the green hurricane lamps. There was an easy, clean aroma of the brewed coffee in the evening air.

“Well, better start thinking about it,” he said. “You don’t mean it!”

“A war?”

He shook his head.

“Not the hydrogen or atom bomb?” “No.”

“Or germ warfare?”

“None of those at all,” he said, stirring his coffee slowly. “But just, let’s say, the closing of a book.” “I don’t think I understand.”

“No, nor do I, really; it’s just a feeling. Sometimes it frightens me, sometimes I’m not frightened at all but at peace.” He glanced in at the girls and their yellow hair shining in the lamplight. “I didn’t say anything to you. It first happened about four nights ago.”

“What?”

“A dream I had. I dreamed that it was all going to be over, and a voice said it was; not any kind of voice I can remember, but a voice anyway, and it said things would stop here on Earth. I didn’t think too much about it the next day, but then I went to the office and caught Stan Willis looking out the window in the middle of the afternoon, and I said a penny for your thoughts, Stan, and he said, I had a dream last night, and before he even told me the dream I knew what it was. I could have told him, but he told me and I listened to him.”

“It was the same dream?”

“The same. I told Stan I had dreamed it too. He didn’t seem surprised. He relaxed, in fact. Then we started walking through the office, for the hell of it. It wasn’t planned. We didn’t say, ‘Let’s walk around.’ We just walked on our own, and everywhere we saw people looking at their desks or their hands or out windows. I talked to a few. So did Stan.”

“And they all had dreamed?”

“All of them. The same dream, with no difference.” “Do you believe in it?”

“Yes. I’ve never been more certain.”

“And when will it stop? The world, I mean.”

“Sometime during the night for us, and then as the night goes on around the world, that’ll go too. It’ll take twenty-four hours for it all to go.”

They sat awhile not touching their coffee. Then they lifted it slowly and drank, looking at each other. “Do we deserve this?” she said.

“It’s not a matter of deserving; it’s just that things didn’t work out. I notice you didn’t even argue about this. Why not?”

“I guess I’ve a reason,” she said.

“The same one everyone at the office had?”

She nodded slowly. “I didn’t want to say anything. It happened last night. And the women on the block talked about it, among themselves, today. They dreamed. I thought it was only a coincidence.” She picked up the evening paper. “There’s nothing in the paper about it.”

“Everyone knows, so there’s no need.”

He sat back in his chair, watching her. “Are you afraid?” “No. I always thought I would be, but I’m not.”

“Where’s that spirit called self-preservation they talk so much about?”

“I don’t know. You don’t get too excited when you feel things are logical. This is logical. Nothing else but this could have happened from the way we’ve lived.”

“We haven’t been too bad, have we?”

“No, nor enormously good. I suppose that’s the trouble—we haven’t been very much of anything except us, while a big part of the world was busy being lots of quite awful things.”

The girls were laughing in the parlor.

“I always thought people would be screaming in the streets at a time like this.” “I guess not. You don’t scream about the real thing.”

“Do you know, I won’t miss anything but you and the girls. I never liked cities or my work or anything except you three. I won’t miss a thing except perhaps the change in the weather, and a glass of ice water when it’s hot, and I might miss sleeping. How can we sit here and talk this way?”

“Because there’s nothing else to do.”

“That’s it, of course; for if there were, we’d be doing it. I suppose this is the first time in the history of the world that everyone has known just what they were going to do during the night.”

“I wonder what everyone else will do now, this evening, for the next few hours.”

“Go to a show, listen to the radio, watch television, play cards, put the children to bed, go to bed themselves, like always.”

“In a way that’s something to be proud of—like always.”

They sat a moment and then he poured himself another coffee. “Why do you suppose it’s tonight?”

“Because.”

“Why not some other night in the last century, or five centuries ago, or ten?”

“Maybe it’s because it was never October 19, 1969, ever before in history, and now it is and that’s it; because this date means more than any other date ever meant; because it’s the year when things are as they are all over the world and that’s why it’s the end.”

“There are bombers on their schedules both ways across the ocean tonight that’ll never see land.” “That’s part of the reason why.”

“Well,” he said, getting up, “what shall it be? Wash the dishes?”

They washed the dishes and stacked them away with special neatness. At eight-thirty the girls were put to bed and kissed good night and the little lights by their beds turned on and the door left open just a trifle.

“I wonder,” said the husband, coming from the bedroom and glancing back, standing there with his pipe for a moment.

“What?”

“If the door will be shut all the way, or if it’ll be left just a little ajar so some light comes in.” “I wonder if the children know.”

“No, of course not.”

They sat and read the papers and talked and listened to some radio music and then sat together by the fireplace watching the charcoal embers as the clock struck ten-thirty and eleven and eleven-thirty. They thought of all the other people in the world who had spent their evening, each in his own special way.

“Well,” he said at last.

He kissed his wife for a long time.

“We’ve been good for each other, anyway.” “Do you want to cry?” he asked.

“I don’t think so.”

They moved through the house and turned out the lights and went into the bedroom and stood in the night cool darkness undressing and pushing back the covers. “The sheets are so clean and nice.”

“I’m tired.” “We’reall tired.”

They got into bed and lay back. “Just a moment,” she said.

He heard her get out of bed and go into the kitchen. A moment later, she returned. “I left the water running in the sink,” she said.

Something about this was so very funny that he had to laugh. She laughed with him, knowing what it was that she had done that was funny. They stopped laughing at last and lay in their cool night bed, their hands clasped, their heads together.

“Good night,” he said, after a moment. “Good night,” she said.

The End

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Law 32 (full text) Play to peoples fantasies from the 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

Or, in other words, tell people what they want to hear.

Indeed, the greatest and most effective propaganda is that which we WANT to believe.

Which pretty much explains the United States anti-China propaganda spewing forth today from the Trump / Pompeo administration…

America is great. China is a shit-hole.
America can invent. China only copies.
America has freedom. China is enslaved.
America is a shining city on a hill. China is a filthy wet market.

And when you go to another nation, if you say… “well, we do things better than you do.” And “you don’t know how to do things right“. If you constantly make fun of their laws, their food, their styles or the way they do business…

You will not be liked. You will be classified as the “Ugly American” and shunned.

But…

Politics aside, this applies everywhere.

Consider dating websites like match.com. The most popular profiles are those that do not say too much. That instead provide some areas open to interpretation, where the interested person would be able to “fill in the blanks” and make assumptions as to whom you are and what is so desirable about you.

The key is always to play upon people’s desires…

LAW 32

PLAY TO PEOPLE’S FANTASIES

JUDGMENT

The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant.

Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes from disenchantment.

Life is so harsh and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert: Everyone flocks to them.

There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses.

THE FUNERAL OF THE LIONESS

The lion having suddenly lost his queen, every one hastened to show allegiance to the monarch, by offering consolation.

These compliments, alas, served but to increase the widower’s affliction.

Due notice was given throughout the kingdom that the funeral would be performed at a certain time and place; the lion’s officers were ordered to be in attendance, to regulate the ceremony, and place the company according to their respective rank.

One may well judge no one absented himself.

The monarch gave way to his grief, and the whole cave, lions having no other temples, resounded with his cries. After his example, all the courtiers roared in their different tones.

A court is the sort of place where everyone is either sorrowful, gay, or indifferent to everything, just as the reigning prince may think fit; or if any one is not actually, he at least tries to appear so; each endeavors to mimic the master.

It is truly said that one mind animates a thousand bodies, clearly showing that human beings are mere machines.

But let us return to our subject.

The stag alone shed no tears.

How could he, forsooth?

The death of the queen avenged him; she had formerly strangled his wife and son. A courtier thought fit to inform the bereaved monarch, and even affirmed that he had seen the stag laugh.

The rage of a king, says Solomon, is terrible, and especially that of a lion-king.

“Pitiful forester!” he exclaimed, “darest thou laugh when all around are dissolved in tears? We will not soil our royal claws with thy profane blood! Do thou, brave wolf, avenge our queen, by immolating this traitor to her august manes. ”

Hereupon the stag replied:

“Sire, the time for weeping is passed; grief is here superfluous. Your revered spouse appeared to me but now, reposing on a bed of roses; I instantly recognized her. ‘Friend,’ said she to me, ‘have done with this funereal pomp, cease these useless tears. I have tasted a thousand delights in the Elysian fields, conversing with those who are saints like myself. Let the king’s despair remain for some time unchecked, it gratifies me.’”

Scarcely had he spoken, when every one shouted: “A miracle! a miracle!”

The stag, instead of being punished, received a handsome gift. Do but entertain a king with dreams, flatter him, and tell him a few pleasant fantastic lies: whatever his indignation against you may be, he will swallow the bait, and make you his dearest friend.

-FABLES, JEAN DE LA FONTAINE, 1621-1695

OBSERVANCE OF THE LAW

The city-state of Venice was prosperous for so long that its citizens felt their small republic had destiny on its side.

In the Middle Ages and High Renaissance, its virtual monopoly on trade to the east made it the wealthiest city in Europe. Under a beneficent republican government, Venetians enjoyed liberties that few other Italians had ever known.

Yet in the sixteenth century their fortunes suddenly changed. The opening of the New World transferred power to the Atlantic side of Europe—to the Spanish and Portuguese, and later the Dutch and English. Venice could not compete economically and its empire gradually dwindled. The final blow was the devastating loss of a prized Mediterranean possession, the island of Cyprus, captured from Venice by the Turks in 1570.

Now noble families went broke in Venice, and banks began to fold.

A kind of gloom and depression settled over the citizens. They had known a glittering past—had either lived through it or heard stories about it from their elders. The closeness of the glory years was humiliating.

The Venetians half believed that the goddess Fortune was only playing a joke on them, and that the old days would soon return. For the time being, though, what could they do?

In 1589 rumors began to swirl around Venice of the arrival not far away of a mysterious man called “Il Bragadino,” a master of alchemy, a man who had won incredible wealth through his ability, it was said, to multiply gold through the use of a secret substance.

The rumor spread quickly because a few years earlier, a Venetian nobleman passing through Poland had heard a learned man prophesy that Venice would recover her past glory and power if she could find a man who understood the alchemic art of manufacturing gold.

And so, as word reached Venice of the gold this Bragadino possessed—he clinked gold coins continuously in his hands, and golden objects filled his palace—some began to dream: Through him, their city would prosper again.

Members of Venice’s most important noble families accordingly went together to Brescia, where Bragadino lived.

They toured his palace and watched in awe as he demonstrated his gold-making abilities, taking a pinch of seemingly worthless minerals and transforming it into several ounces of gold dust.

The Venetian senate prepared to debate the idea of extending an official invitation to Bragadino to stay in Venice at the city’s expense, when word suddenly reached them that they were competing with the Duke of Mantua for his services.

They heard of a magnificent party in Bragadino’s palace for the duke, featuring garments with golden buttons, gold watches, gold plates, and on and on.

Worried they might lose Bragadino to Mantua, the senate voted almost unanimously to invite him to Venice, promising him the mountain of money he would need to continue living in his luxurious style—but only if he came right away.

Late that year the mysterious Bragadino arrived in Venice.

With his piercing dark eyes under thick brows, and the two enormous black mastiffs that accompanied him everywhere, he was forbidding and impressive.

He took up residence in a sumptuous palace on the island of the Giudecca, with the republic funding his banquets, his expensive clothes, and all his other whims.

A kind of alchemy fever spread through Venice.

On street corners, hawkers would sell coal, distilling apparatus, bellows, how-to books on the subject. Everyone began to practice alchemy—everyone except Bragadino.

The alchemist seemed to be in no hurry to begin manufacturing the gold that would save Venice from ruin.

Strangely enough this only increased his popularity and following; people thronged from all over Europe, even Asia, to meet this remarkable man.

Months went by, with gifts pouring in to Bragadino from all sides.

Still he gave no sign of the miracle that the Venetians confidently expected him to produce.

Eventually the citizens began to grow impatient, wondering if he would wait forever. At first the senators warned them not to hurry him—he was a capricious devil, who needed to be cajoled.

Finally, though, the nobility began to wonder too, and the senate came under pressure to show a return on the city’s ballooning investment.

Bragadino had only scorn for the doubters, but he responded to them.

He had, he said, already deposited in the city’s mint the mysterious substance with which he multiplied gold.

He could use this substance up all at once, and produce double the gold, but the more slowly the process took place, the more it would yield. If left alone for seven years, sealed in a casket, the substance would multiply the gold in the mint thirty times over.

Most of the senators agreed to wait to reap the gold mine Bragadino promised.

Others, however, were angry: seven more years of this man living royally at the public trough! And many of the common citizens of Venice echoed these sentiments.

Finally the alchemist’s enemies demanded he produce a proof of his skills: a substantial amount of gold, and soon.

Lofty, apparently devoted to his art, Bragadino responded that Venice, in its impatience, had betrayed him, and would therefore lose his services. He left town, going first to nearby Padua, then, in 1590, to Munich, at the invitation of the Duke of Bavaria, who, like the entire city of Venice, had known great wealth but had fallen into bankruptcy through his own profligacy, and hoped to regain his fortune through the famous alchemist’s services.

And so Bragadino resumed the comfortable arrangement he had known in Venice, and the same pattern repeated itself.

Interpretation

The young Cypriot Mamugna had lived in Venice for several years before reincarnating himself as the alchemist Bragadino.

He saw how gloom had settled on the city, how everyone was hoping for a redemption from some indefinite source. While other charlatans mastered everyday cons based on sleight of hand, Mamugnà mastered human nature.

With Venice as his target from the start, he traveled abroad, made some money through his alchemy scams, and then returned to Italy, setting up shop in Brescia.

There he created a reputation that he knew would spread to Venice. From a distance, in fact, his aura of power would be all the more impressive.

At first Mamugna did not use vulgar demonstrations to convince people of his alchemic skill. His sumptuous palace, his opulent garments, the clink of gold in his hands, all these provided a superior argument to anything rational.

And these established the cycle that kept him going: His obvious wealth confirmed his reputation as an alchemist, so that patrons like the Duke of Mantua gave him money, which allowed him to live in wealth, which reinforced his reputation as an alchemist, and so on.

Only once this reputation was established, and dukes and senators were fighting over him, did he resort to the trifling necessity of a demonstration.

By then, however, people were easy to deceive: They wanted to believe.

The Venetian senators who watched him multiply gold wanted to believe so badly that they failed to notice the glass pipe up his sleeve, from which he slipped gold dust into his pinches of minerals. Brilliant and capricious, he was the alchemist of their fantasies—and once he had created an aura like this, no one noticed his simple deceptions.

Such is the power of the fantasies that take root in us, especially in times of scarcity and decline.

People rarely believe that their problems arise from their own misdeeds and stupidity. Someone or something out there is to blame—the other, the world, the gods—and so salvation comes from the outside as well.

Had Bragadino arrived in Venice armed with a detailed analysis of the reasons behind the city’s economic decline, and of the hard-nosed steps that it could take to turn things around, he would have been scorned.

The reality was too ugly and the solution too painful—mostly the kind of hard work that the citizens’ ancestors had mustered to create an empire. Fantasy, on the other hand—in this case the romance of alchemy—was easy to understand and infinitely more palatable.

To gain power, you must be a source of pleasure for those around you—and pleasure comes from playing to people’s fantasies. Never promise a gradual improvement through hard work; rather, promise the moon, the great and sudden transformation, the pot of gold.

No man need despair of gaining converts to the most extravagant
hypothesis who has art enough to represent it in favorable colors.

-David Hume, 1711-1776

If you want to tell lies that will be believed, don’t tell the truth that won’t.

-EMPEROR TOKUGAWA IEYASU OF JAPAN, SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

KEYS TO POWER

Fantasy can never operate alone.

It requires the backdrop of the humdrum and the mundane. It is the oppressiveness of reality that allows fantasy to take root and bloom.

In sixteenth-century Venice, the reality was one of decline and loss of prestige. The corresponding fantasy described a sudden recovery of past glories through the miracle of alchemy.

While the reality only got worse, the Venetians inhabited a happy dream world in which their city restored its fabulous wealth and power overnight, turning dust into gold.

The person who can spin a fantasy out of an oppressive reality has access to untold power.

As you search for the fantasy that will take hold of the masses, then, keep your eye on the banal truths that weigh heavily on us all. Never be distracted by people’s glamorous portraits of themselves and their lives; search and dig for what really imprisons them. Once you find that, you have the magical key that will put great power in your hands.

Although times and people change, let us examine a few of the oppressive realities that endure, and the opportunities for power they provide:

The Reality: Change is slow and gradual. It requires hard work, a bit of luck, a fair amount of self-sacrifice, and a lot of patience.

The Fantasy: A sudden transformation will bring a total change in one’s fortunes, bypassing work, luck, self-sacrifice, and time in one fantastic stroke.

This is of course the fantasy par excellence of the charlatans who prowl among us to this day, and was the key to Bragadino’s success.

Promise a great and total change—from poor to rich, sickness to health, misery to ecstasy—and you will have followers.

How did the great sixteenth-century German quack Leonhard Thurneisser become the court physician for the Elector of Brandenburg without ever studying medicine?

Instead of offering amputations, leeches, and foul-tasting purgatives (the medicaments of the time), Thurneisser offered sweet-tasting elixirs and promised instant recovery.

Fashionable courtiers especially wanted his solution of “drinkable gold,” which cost a fortune.

If some inexplicable illness assailed you, Thurneisser would consult a horoscope and prescribe a talisman. Who could resist such a fantasy—health and well-being without sacrifice and pain!

The Reality: The social realm has hard-set codes and boundaries. We understand these limits and know that we have to move within the same familiar circles, day in and day out.

The Fantasy: We can enter a totally new world with different codes and the promise of adventure.

In the early 1700s, all London was abuzz with talk of a mysterious stranger, a young man named George Psalmanazar.

He had arrived from what was to most Englishmen a fantastical land: the island of Formosa (now Taiwan), off the coast of China.

Oxford University engaged Psalmanazar to teach the island’s language; a few years later he translated the Bible into Formosan, then wrote a book—an immediate best-seller—on Formosa’s history and geography. English royalty wined and dined the young man, and everywhere he went he entertained his hosts with wondrous stories of his homeland, and its bizarre customs.

After Psalmanazar died, however, his will revealed that he was in fact merely a Frenchman with a rich imagination.

Everything he had said about Formosa—its alphabet, its language, its literature, its entire culture—he had invented.

He had built on the English public’s ignorance of the place to concoct an elaborate story that fulfilled their desire for the exotic and strange. British culture’s rigid control of people’s dangerous dreams gave him the perfect opportunity to exploit their fantasy.

The fantasy of the exotic, of course, can also skirt the sexual.

It must not come too close, though, for the physical hinders the power of fantasy; it can be seen, grasped, and then tired of—the fate of most courtesans. The bodily charms of the mistress only whet the master’s appetite for more and different pleasures, a new beauty to adore. To bring power, fantasy must remain to some degree unrealized, literally unreal.

The dancer Mata Hari, for instance, who rose to public prominence in Paris before World War I, had quite ordinary looks. Her power came from the fantasy she created of being strange and exotic, unknowable and indecipherable. The taboo she worked with was less sex itself than the breaking of social codes.

Another form of the fantasy of the exotic is simply the hope for relief from boredom.

Con artists love to play on the oppressiveness of the working world, its lack of adventure. Their cons might involve, say, the recovery of lost Spanish treasure, with the possible participation of an alluring Mexican señorita and a connection to the president of a South American country—anything offering release from the humdrum.

The Reality: Society is fragmented and full of conflict.

The Fantasy: People can come together in a mystical union of souls.

In the 1920s the con man Oscar Hartzell made a quick fortune out of the age-old Sir Francis Drake swindle—basically promising any sucker who happened to be surnamed “Drake” a substantial share of the long-lost “Drake treasure,” to which Hartzell had access.

Thousands across the Midwest fell for the scam, which Hartzell cleverly turned into a crusade against the government and everyone else who was trying to keep the Drake fortune out of the rightful hands of its heirs.

There developed a mystical union of the oppressed Drakes, with emotional rallies and meetings.

Promise such a union and you can gain much power, but it is a dangerous power that can easily turn against you. This is a fantasy for demagogues to play on.

The Reality: Death. The dead cannot be brought back, the past cannot be changed.

The Fantasy: A sudden reversal of this intolerable fact.

This con has many variations, but requires great skill and subtlety.

The beauty and importance of the art of Vermeer have long been recognized, but his paintings are small in number, and are extremely rare.

In the 1930s, though, Vermeers began to appear on the art market.

Experts were called on to verify them, and pronounced them real.

Possession of these new Vermeers would crown a collector’s career. It was like the resurrection of Lazarus: In a strange way, Vermeer had been brought back to life. The past had been changed.

Only later did it come out that the new Vermeers were the work of a middle-aged Dutch forger named Han van Meegeren.

And he had chosen Vermeer for his scam because he understood fantasy: The paintings would seem real precisely because the public, and the experts as well, so desperately wanted to believe they were.

Remember: The key to fantasy is distance. 

The distant has allure and promise, seems simple and problem free. What you are offering, then, should be ungraspable. 

Never let it become oppressively familiar; it is the mirage in the distance, withdrawing as the sucker approaches. Never be too direct in describing the fantasy—keep it vague. As a forger of fantasies, let your victim come close enough to see and be tempted, but keep him far away enough that he stays dreaming and desiring.

Image: The
Moon. Unattainable,
always changing shape,
disappearing and reappear
ing. We look at it, imagine,
wonder, and pine—never fa
miliar, continuous provoker
of dreams. Do not offer
the obvious. Promise
the moon.

Authority: A lie is an allurement, a fabrication, that can be embellished into a fantasy. 

It can be clothed in the raiments of a mystic conception. Truth is cold, sober fact, not so comfortable to absorb. A lie is more palatable. The most detested person in the world is the one who always tells the truth, who never romances.... I found it far more interesting and profitable to romance than to tell the truth. (Joseph Weil, a.k.a. “The Yellow Kid,” 1875-1976)

REVERSAL

If there is power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses, there is also danger.

Fantasy usually contains an element of play—the public half realizes it is being duped, but it keeps the dream alive anyway, relishing the entertainment and the temporary diversion from the everyday that you are providing.

So keep it light—never come too close to the place where you are actually expected to produce results.

That place may prove extremely hazardous.

After Bragadino established himself in Munich, he found that the sober-minded Bavarians had far less faith in alchemy than the temperamental Venetians.

Only the duke really believed in it, for he needed it desperately to rescue him from the hopeless mess he was in.

As Bragadino played his familiar waiting game, accepting gifts and expecting patience, the public grew angry. Money was being spent and was yielding no results.

In 1592 the Bavarians demanded justice, and eventually Bragadino found himself swinging from the gallows.

As before, he had promised and had not delivered, but this time he had misjudged the forbearance of his hosts, and his inability to fulfill their fantasy proved fatal.

One last thing: Never make the mistake of imagining that fantasy is always fantastical. 

It certainly contrasts with reality, but reality itself is sometimes so theatrical and stylized that fantasy becomes a desire for simple things. The image Abraham Lincoln created of himself, for example, as a homespun country lawyer with a beard, made him the common man’s president.

P. T. Barnum created a successful act with Tom Thumb, a dwarf who dressed up as famous leaders of the past, such as Napoleon, and lampooned them wickedly.

The show delighted everyone, right up to Queen Victoria, by appealing to the fantasy of the time: Enough of the vainglorious rulers of history, the common man knows best. Tom Thumb reversed the familiar pattern of fantasy in which the strange and unknown becomes the ideal.

But the act still obeyed the Law, for underlying it was the fantasy that the simple man is without problems, and is happier than the powerful and the rich.

Both Lincoln and Tom Thumb played the commoner but carefully maintained their distance.

Should you play with such a fantasy, you too must carefully cultivate distance and not allow your “common” persona to become too familiar or it will not project as fantasy.

Conclusion

Today, any glimpse of the political situation in the United States can clearly illustrate this law. We see that the news is filled with lies and fantasies. All of which are designed to manipulate for personal gain.

Consider the 2021 election. Doesn’t the candidates involved appeal to their followers fantasies?

First black woman on party ticket!

I do not advise a person use this technique, but I do advise you all to be aware that it is in constant use by others.

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Law 21 – Play a Sucker to Catch a Sucker – Seem Dumber than your Mark (48 Laws of Power)

OK, I know that I have been posting too many of these kinds of posts lately, but have some patience, will ya? I’ve got a long, long, LONG list of things to post. Just let me round out my posts with some more stuff from Robert Greene. I promise that I get back to some other stuff soon.

In my queue are some more posts on [1] intention campaigns, [2] all sorts of articles on the USA disinformation techniques and [3] control of electronic media, [4] SHTF postings and the [5] death of what ever remains of liberty, some [6] great works by Heinlein, and [7] some OOPART stuff that is tied to [8] MAJestic. In particular, I have a [7a] “mysterious” aluminum pawl write up, [7b] a rectangular structure on (the surface of) a comet, and [7c] a “space station facility” near the Sun. I will get to them. I promise. My queue lists over 150 drafts pending, and a shitload in my notebook as well.

Anyways…

This little technique got me through the ADC (prison). It enabled me to survive in a “dog-eat-dog” environment. It disguised me as a dull uninspired oaf. Heck! There were potatoes more interesting than me. Now, survival in a harsh environment, especially at the notorious Brickeys (North Arkansas Regional Unit) involved many facets, this little gem of advice got me through some of the worst.

Listen to me. No one wants to pick on a boring, dull witted, uninspired oaf. There are better things to do and “fish to fry”. And as such, you would just be left alone. Which was all I wanted. I wanted to do my time, sleep as much of it off, and get the Hell out of there post-haste.

Now, please keep in mind that even when you are isolated, and alone in a very harsh place, it is your ability to forge friendships and relationships that will help you. No matter how tough the world seems or appears, if you are part of a group… YOU WILL SURVIVE. So, please everyone, remember to be good, be just and be kind to others, no matter how bad your personal situation may appear.

You will never be considered a threat if you seem to be dull and harmless. If you are able to convince others that they are much smarter than you are, then they will apt to leave you alone. For everyone dislikes feeling more foolish than their neighbors or counterparts. Therefore, it is unlikely for anyone else to consider you faking your dull-wittiness. It’s a survival strategy as well as strategy of control.

LAW 21

PLAY A SUCKER TO CATCH A SUCKER—SEEM DUMBER THAN YOUR MARK

JUDGMENT

No one likes feeling stupider than the next person. The trick, then, is to make your victims feel smart—and not just smart, but smarter than you are. Once convinced of this, they will never suspect that you may have ulterior motives.

In the winter of 1872, the U.S. financier Asbury Harpending was visiting London when he received a cable: A diamond mine had been discovered in the American West.

The cable came from a reliable source—William Ralston, owner of the Bank of California—but Harpending nevertheless took it as a practical joke, probably inspired by the recent discovery of huge diamond mines in South Africa.

True, when reports had first come in of gold being discovered in the western United States, everyone had been skeptical, and those had turned out to be true.

But a diamond mine in the West!

Harpending showed the cable to his fellow financier Baron Rothschild (one of the richest men in the world), saying it must be a joke. The baron, however, replied, “Don’t be too sure about that. America is a very large country. It has furnished the world with many surprises already. Perhaps it has others in store.”

Harpending promptly took the first ship back to the States.

Now, there is nothing of which a man is prouder than of intellectual ability, for it is this that gives him his commanding place in the animal world. It is an exceedingly rash thing to let anyone see that you are decidedly superior to him in this respect, and to let other people see it too.... hence, white rank and riches may always reckon upon deferential treatment in society, that is something which intellectual ability can never expect. 

To be ignorant is the greatest favor shown to it; And if people notice it at all, it is because they regard it us a piece of impertinence, or else as something to which its possessor has no legitimate right, and upon which he dares to pride himself; And in retaliation and revenge for his conduct, people secretly try and humiliate him in some other way; when if they wait to do this, it is only for a fitting opportunity. 

A man may be as humble as possible in his demeanor and yet hardly ever get people to overlook his crime in standing intellectually above them. In the Garden of Roses, Sadi makes the remark: “You should know that foolish people are a hundredfold more averse to meeting the wise than the wise are indisposed for the company of the foolish. ” 

On the other hand, it is a real recommendation to be stupid. For just as warmth is agreeable to the body, so it does the mind good to feel its superiority; and a man will seek company likely to give him this feeling, as instinctively as he will approach the fireplace or walk in the sun if he wants to get warm. But this means that he will be disliked on account of his superiority; and if a man is to be liked, he must really be inferior in point of intellect. 

-ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, 1788-1860

When Harpending reached San Francisco, there was an excitement in the air recalling the Gold Rush days of the late 1840s.

Two crusty prospectors named Philip Arnold and John Slack had been the ones to find the diamond mine. They had not divulged its location, in Wyoming, but had led a highly respected mining expert to it several weeks back, taking a circular route so he could not guess his whereabouts.

Once there, the expert had watched as the miners dug up diamonds.

Back in San Francisco the expert had taken the gems to various jewelers, one of whom had estimated their worth at $1.5 million.

Harpending and Ralston now asked Arnold and Slack to accompany them back to New York, where the jeweler Charles Tiffany would verify the original estimates.

The prospectors responded uneasily—they smelled a trap: How could they trust these city slickers? What if Tiffany and the financiers managed to steal the whole mine out from under them?

Ralston tried to allay their fears by giving them $100,000 and placing another $300,000 in escrow for them. If the deal went through, they would be paid an additional $300,000.

The miners agreed.

The little group traveled to New York, where a meeting was held at the mansion of Samuel L. Barlow.

The cream of the city’s aristocracy was in attendance—General George Brinton McClellan, commander of the Union forces in the Civil War; General Benjamin Butler; Horace Greeley, editor of the newspaper the New York Tribune; Harpending; Ralston; and Tiffany.

Only Slack and Arnold were missing—as tourists in the city, they had decided to go sight-seeing.

When Tiffany announced that the gems were real and worth a fortune, the financiers could barely control their excitement.

They wired Rothschild and other tycoons to tell them about the diamond mine and inviting them to share in the investment.

At the same time, they also told the prospectors that they wanted one more test: They insisted that a mining expert of their choosing accompany Slack and Arnold to the site to verify its wealth.

The prospectors reluctantly agreed.

In the meantime, they said, they had to return to San Francisco. The jewels that Tiffany had examined they left with Harpending for safekeeping.

Several weeks later, a man named Louis Janin, the best mining expert in the country, met the prospectors in San Francisco. Janin was a born skeptic who was determined to make sure that the mine was not a fraud.

Accompanying Janin were Harpending, and several other interested financiers.

As with the previous expert, the prospectors led the team through a complex series of canyons, completely confusing them as to their whereabouts.

Arriving at the site, the financiers watched in amazement as Janin dug the area up, leveling anthills, turning over boulders, and finding emeralds, rubies, sapphires, and most of all diamonds.

The dig lasted eight days, and by the end, Janin was convinced: He told the investors that they now possessed the richest field in mining history.

“With a hundred men and proper machinery,” he told them, “I would guarantee to send out one million dollars in diamonds every thirty days.”

Returning to San Francisco a few days later, Ralston, Harpending, and company acted fast to form a $10 million corporation of private investors.

First, however, they had to get rid of Arnold and Slack.

That meant hiding their excitement—they certainly did not want to reveal the field’s real value. So they played possum.

Who knows if Janin is right, they told the prospectors, the mine may not be as rich as we think.

This just made the prospectors angry.

Trying a different tactic, the financiers told the two men that if they insisted on having shares in the mine, they would end up being fleeced by the unscrupulous tycoons and investors who would run the corporation; better, they said, to take the $700,000 already offered—an enormous sum at the time—and put their greed aside.

This the prospectors seemed to understand, and they finally agreed to take the money, in return signing the rights to the site over to the financiers, and leaving maps to it.

News of the mine spread like wildfire.

Prospectors fanned out across Wyoming. Meanwhile Harpending and group began spending the millions they had collected from their investors, buying equipment, hiring the best men in the business, and furnishing luxurious offices in New York and San Francisco.

A few weeks later, on their first trip back to the site, they learned the hard truth: Not a single diamond or ruby was to be found.

It was all a fake.

They were ruined. Harpending had unwittingly lured the richest men in the world into the biggest scam of the century.

Interpretation

Arnold and Slack pulled off their stupendous con not by using a fake engineer or bribing Tiffany: All of the experts had been real. All of them honestly believed in the existence of the mine and in the value of the gems.

What had fooled them all was nothing else than Arnold and Slack themselves. The two men seemed to be such rubes, such hayseeds, so naive, that no one for an instant had believed them capable of an audacious scam.

The prospectors had simply observed the law of appearing more stupid than the mark—the deceiver’s First Commandment.

The logistics of the con were quite simple.

Months before Arnold and Slack announced the “discovery” of the diamond mine, they traveled to Europe, where they purchased some real gems for around $12,000 (part of the money they had saved from their days as gold miners).

They then salted the “mine” with these gems, which the first expert dug up and brought to San Francisco.

The jewelers who had appraised these stones, including Tiffany himself, had gotten caught up in the fever and had grossly overestimated their value.

Then Ralston gave the prospectors $100,000 as security, and immediately after their trip to New York they simply went to Amsterdam, where they bought sacks of uncut gems, before returning to San Francisco. The second time they salted the mine, there were many more jewels to be found.

The effectiveness of the scheme, however, rested not on tricks like these but on the fact that Arnold and Slack played their parts to perfection.

On their trip to New York, where they mingled with millionaires and tycoons, they played up their clodhopper image, wearing pants and coats a size or two too small and acting incredulous at everything they saw in the big city.

No one believed that these country simpletons could possibly be conning the most devious, unscrupulous financiers of the time.

And once Harpending, Ralston, and even Rothschild accepted the mine’s existence, anyone who doubted it was questioning the intelligence of the world’s most successful businessmen.

In the end, Harpending’s reputation was ruined and he never recovered;
Rothschild learned his lesson and never fell for another con;
Slack took his money and disappeared from view, never to be found.

Arnold simply went home to Kentucky. After all, his sale of his mining rights had been legitimate; the buyers had taken the best advice, and if the mine had run out of diamonds, that was their problem. Arnold used the money to greatly enlarge his farm and open up a bank of his own.

KEYS TO POWER

The feeling that someone else is more intelligent than we are is almost intolerable.

We usually try to justify it in different ways:

“He only has book knowledge, whereas I have real knowledge.”
“Her parents paid for her to get a good education. If my parents had had as much money, if I had been as privileged….”
“He’s not as smart as he thinks.”
Last but not least: “She may know her narrow little field better than I do, but beyond that she’s really not smart at all. Even Einstein was a boob outside physics.”

Given how important the idea of intelligence is to most people’s vanity, it is critical never inadvertently to insult or impugn a person’s brain power.

That is an unforgivable sin.

But if you can make this iron rule work for you, it opens up all sorts of avenues of deception. Subliminally reassure people that they are more intelligent than you are, or even that you are a bit of a moron, and you can run rings around them.

The feeling of intellectual superiority you give them will disarm their suspicion-muscles.

In 1865 the Prussian Councillor Otto von Bismarck wanted Austria to sign a certain treaty. The treaty was totally in the interests of Prussia and against the interests of Austria, and Bismarck would have to strategize to get the Austrians to agree to it.

But the Austrian negotiator, Count Blome, was an avid cardplayer. His particular game was quinze, and he often said that he could judge a man’s character by the way he played quinze.

Bismarck knew of this saying of Blome’s.

The night before the negotiations were to begin, Bismarck innocently engaged Blome in a game of quinze.

The Prussian would later write, “That was the very last time I ever played quinze. I played so recklessly that everyone was astonished. I lost several thousand talers [the currency of the time], but I succeeded in fooling [Blome], for he believed me to be more venturesome than I am and I gave way.”

Besides appearing reckless, Bismarck also played the witless fool, saying ridiculous things and bumbling about with a surplus of nervous energy.

All this made Blome feel he had gathered valuable information.

He knew that Bismarck was aggressive—the Prussian already had that reputation, and the way he played had confirmed it. And aggressive men, Blome knew, can be foolish and rash.

Accordingly, when the time came to sign the treaty, Blome thought he had the advantage.

A heedless fool like Bismarck, he thought, is incapable of cold-blooded calculation and deception, so he only glanced at the treaty before signing it—he failed to read the fine print.

As soon as the ink was dry, a joyous Bismarck exclaimed in his face, “Well, I could never have believed that I should find an Austrian diplomat willing to sign that document!”

The Chinese have a phrase, “Masquerading as a swine to kill the tiger.”

This refers to an ancient hunting technique in which the hunter clothes himself in the hide and snout of a pig, and mimics its grunting. The mighty tiger thinks a pig is coming his way, and lets it get close, savoring the prospect of an easy meal. But it is the hunter who has the last laugh.

Masquerading as a swine works wonders on those who, like tigers, are arrogant and overconfident: The easier they think it is to prey on you, the more easily you can turn the tables. This trick is also useful if you are ambitious yet find yourself low in the hierarchy: Appearing less intelligent than you are, even a bit of a fool, is the perfect disguise.

Look like a harmless pig and no one will believe you harbor dangerous ambitions.

They may even promote you since you seem so likable, and subservient.

Claudius before he became emperor of Rome, and the prince of France who later became Louis XIII, used this tactic when those above them suspected they might have designs on the throne. By playing the fool as young men, they were left alone. When the time came for them to strike, and to act with vigor and decisiveness, they caught everyone off-guard.

Perhaps, now is the time to watch the old movie "The Scarlett Pimpernel".

His tall figure and bony beak of a face serve perfectly both as the languid Sir Percy, setting off a series of immaculately-fitting ‘unmentionables’, and as the commanding, quick-thinking Pimpernel; and the scene in which he drops from one persona to the other almost in mid-sentence upon the entry of the irate Colonel Winterbottom is a joy to watch. He is absolutely convincing as the “spineless, brainless and useless” fop, and yet he can shade intelligence and feeling back into his features at the drop of a hat in unconcealed moments that never let the audience forget the man behind the mask.

Intelligence is the obvious quality to downplay, but why stop there? Taste and sophistication rank close to intelligence on the vanity scale; make people feel they are more sophisticated than you are and their guard will come down.

As Arnold and Slack knew, an air of complete naivete can work wonders.

Those fancy financiers were laughing at them behind their backs, but who laughed loudest in the end? In general, then, always make people believe they are smarter and more sophisticated than you are. They will keep you around because you make them feel better about themselves, and the longer you are around, the more opportunities you will have to deceive them.

Image:
The Opossum. In playing
dead, the opossum plays stupid.
Many a predator has therefore left it
alone. Who could believe that such an
ugly, unintelligent, nervous little creature
could be capable of such deception?

Authority: 

Know how to make use of stupidity: The wisest man plays this card at times. There are occasions when the highest wisdom consists in appearing not to know—you must not be ignorant but capable of playing it. It is not much good being wise among fools and sane among lunatics. He who poses as a fool is not a fool. 

The best way to be well received by all is to clothe yourself in the skin of the dumbest of brutes. 

-(Baltasar Gracián, 1601-1658)

REVERSAL

To reveal the true nature of your intelligence rarely pays; you should get in the habit of downplaying it at all times. If people inadvertently learn the truth—that you are actually much smarter than you look—they will admire you more for being discreet than for making your brilliance show.

At the start of your climb to the top, of course, you cannot play too stupid: You may want to let your bosses know, in a subtle way, that you are smarter than the competition around you. As you climb the ladder, however, you should to some degree try to dampen your brilliance.

There is, however, one situation where it pays to do the opposite—when you can cover up a deception with a show of intelligence. In matters of smarts as in most things, appearances are what count. If you seem to have authority and knowledge, people will believe what you say. This can be very useful in getting you out of a scrape…

The art dealer Joseph Duveen was once attending a soiree at the New York home of a tycoon to whom he had recently sold a Dürer painting for a high price.

Among the guests was a young French art critic who seemed extremely knowledgeable and confident. Wanting to impress this man, the tycoon’s daughter showed him the Dürer, which had not yet been hung.

The critic studied it for a time, then finally said, “You know, I don’t think this Dürer is right.” He followed the young woman as she hurried to tell her father what he had said, and listened as the magnate, deeply unsettled, turned to Duveen for reassurance.

Duveen just laughed. “How very amusing,” he said. “Do you realize, young man, that at least twenty other art experts here and in Europe have been taken in too, and have said that painting isn’t genuine? And now you’ve made the same mistake.”

His confident tone and air of authority intimidated the Frenchman, who apologized for his mistake.

Duveen knew that the art market was flooded with fakes, and that many paintings had been falsely ascribed to old masters. He tried his best to distinguish the real from the fake, but in his zeal to sell he often overplayed a work’s authenticity.

What mattered to him was that the buyer believed he had bought a Dürer, and that Duveen himself convinced everyone of his “expertness” through his air of irreproachable authority. Thus, it is important to be able to play the professor when necessary and never impose such an attitude for its own sake.

Conclusion

Sure you can use this method if you want to scam or manipulate others. But more useful, is to use this method to survive.

When the world seems to be falling apart, and that there are hunters out looking for prey…

…to loot, to rape, to steal from, to swindle, to seize property from…

…it’s in your best interests to be as dull, uninteresting, and non-descript as possible. Let others be the “lightening rod” that attracts the dangerous. All you want to do is survive. And survive you will, if only by playing the part of the dull, and uninteresting.

When people are out looting, they will attack the pharmacies, the department stores, the grocery stores and the homes of the wealthy. They will pretty much ignore the junk-yards, the electrical sub-stations, and the old empty barns.

Do you want more?

I have more posts along this vein in my Life and Happiness Index here…

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Robert A. Heinlein – Lazarus Long 1, Methuselahs Children (full text)

This is the full text of Robert Heinlein’s novel “Methuselahs Children”. It is the first of a series of novels that features the character of “Lazarus Long”. This is great escapist reading and as you read it, take a gander at the world around us. Check out the news. Who’s to say that the PTB aren’t some version of the elite that are described in this story…eh? Remember that this is an absolutely fictional work. Yet, we can see some interesting parallels with the super wealthy on this planet and the systems that they have co-opted for their own personal purposes.

Imagine a universe where selective breeding and carefully planned marriages (with subtle financial encouragement from a secretive group called the Howard Foundation) were carried out over the last 150 years.

Further, imagine that their selective breeding of humans have resulted in a group of humans that have the extraordinary trait of extreme longevity. Yeah. They live really, really, really long lives.

Enter Lazarus Long, the patriarch of the Family.

Lazarus, born Woodrow Wilson Smith, carries his two hundred plus years quite well! When pressed for his true age, he’s either not telling or he won’t admit that he truly doesn’t know himself!

In 2125, a series of events result in the global administration and the remainder of earth’s population discovering the Family’s existence.

A frenzy of enraged jealousy erupts as a maddened, frustrated world seeks to discover the secret fountain of youth they are convinced the Family is guarding for their own use. Hounded by the threat of murder, torture, brainwashing and ultimate extinction by their shorter lived neighbors, the Family flees earth on an untested starship.

In Methuselah’s Children, Heinlein has crafted an exciting novel, a message, a screenplay and the movie script all at once. Descriptive passages, while compelling and very cleverly written are sparse and infrequent and the plot is almost exclusively driven by razor-sharp dialogue.

Heinlein’s method of conveying the story through his characters’ mouths has got wit; it’s got dialect; it’s got humor and intelligence; it’s got sensible science; it’s got humanity and it’s got credibility.

Their expressions and manner of speaking firmly place the origins of the story in the 1940s USA but somehow Heinlein has managed to inject enough charm to leave it timeless.

Hard sci-fi runs rampant through every page …

Methuselahs Children

Methuselah’s Children

PART I

“MARYSPERLING, you’re a fool not to marry him!”

Mary Sperling added up her losses and wrote a check before answering, “There’s too much difference in age.” She passed over her credit voucher. “I shouldn’t gamble with you- sometimes I think you’re a sensitive.”

“Nonsense! You’re just trying to change the subject. You must be nearly thirty and you won’t be pretty forever.” Mary smiled wryly. “Don’t I know it!”

“Bork Vanning can’t be much over forty and he’s a plus citizen. You should jump at the chance.” “You jump at it. I must run now. Service, Ven.”

“Service,” Ven answered, then frowned at the door as it contracted after Mary Sperling. She itched to know why Mary would not marry a prime catch like the Honorable Bork Vanning and was almost as curious as to why and where Mary was going, but the custom of privacy stopped her.

Mary had no intention of letting anyone know where she was going. Outside her friend’s apartment she dropped down a bounce tube to the basement, claimed her car from the robopark, guided it up the ramp and set the controls for North Shore. The car waited for a break in the traffic, then dived into the high-speed stream and hurried north. Mary settled back for a nap.

When its setting was about to run out, the car beeped for instructions; Mary woke up and glanced out. Lake Michigan was a darker band of darkness on her right. She signaled traffic control to let her enter the local traffic lane; it sorted out her car and placed her there, then let her resume manual control. She fumbled in the glove compartment.

The license number which traffic control automatically photographed as she left the controlways was not the number the car had been wearing.

She followed a side road uncontrolled for several miles, turned into a narrow dirt road which led down to the shore, and stopped. There she waited, lights out, and listened. South of her the lights of Chicago glowed; a few hundred yards inland the controlways whined, but here there was nothing but the little timid noises of night creatures. She reached into the glove compartment, snapped a switch; the instrument panel glowed, uncovering other dials behind it. She studied these while making adjustments. Satisfied that no radar watched her and that nothing was moving near her, she snapped off the instruments, sealed the window by her and started up again.

What appeared to be a standard Camden speedster rose quietly up, moved out over the lake, skimming it-dropped into the water and sank. Mary waited until she was a quarter mile off shore in fifty feet of water, then called a station. “Answer,” said a voice.

“‘Life is short—’”

”’-but the years are long.’”

“‘Not,’” Mary responded, “‘while the evil days come not.’”

“I sometimes wonder,” the voice answered conversationally. “Okay, Mary. I’ve checked you.” “Tommy?”

“No-Cecil Hedrick. Are your controls cast loose?” “Yes. Take over.”

Seventeen minutes later the car surfaced in a pool which occupied much of an artificial cave. When the car was beached, Mary got out, said hello to the guards and went on through a tunnel into a large underground room where fifty or sixty men and women were seated. She chatted until a clock announced midnight, then she mounted a rostrum and faced them.

“I am,” she stated, “one hundred and eighty-three years old. Is there anyone here who is older?”

No one spoke. After a decent wait she went on, “Then in accordance with our customs I declare this meeting opened. Will you choose a moderator?”

Someone said, “Go ahead, Mary.” When no one else spoke up, she said, “Very well.” She seemed indifferent to the honor and the group seemed to share her casual attitude-an air of never any hurry, of freedom from the tension of modern life.

“We are met as usual,” she announced, “to discuss our welfare and that of our sisters and brothers. Does any Family representative have a message from his family? Or does anyone care to speak for himself?”

Aman caught her eye and spoke up. “Ira Weatheral, speaking for the Johnson Family. We’ve met nearly two months early. The trustees must have a reason. Let’s hear it.” She nodded and turned to a prim little man in the first row. “Justin … if you will, please.”

The prim little man stood up and bowed stiffly. Skinny legs stuck out below his badly-cut kilt. He looked and acted like an elderly, dusty civil servant, but his black hair and the firm, healthy tone of his skin said that he was a man in his prime. “Justin Foote,” he said precisely, “reporting for the trustees. It has been eleven years since the Families decided on the experiment of letting the public know that there were, living among them, persons who possessed a probable, life expectancy far in excess of that anticipated by the average man, as well as other persons who had proved the scientific truth of such expectation by having lived more than twice the normal life span of human beings.”

Although he spoke without notes he sounded as if he were reading aloud a prepared report. What he was saying they all knew but no one hurried him; his audience had none of the febrile impatience so common elsewhere. “In deciding,” he droned on, “to reverse the previous long-standing policy of silence and concealment as to the peculiar aspect in which we differ from the balance of the human race, the Families were moved by several considerations. The reason for the original adoption of the policy of concealment should be noted:

“The first offspring resulting from unions assisted by the Howard Foundation were born in 1875. They aroused no comment, for they were in no way remarkable. The Foundation was an openly-chartered non-profit corporation—”

On March 17, 1874, Ira Johnson, medical student, sat in the law offices of Deems, Wingate, Alden, & Deems and listened to an unusual proposition. At last he interrupted the senior partner. “Just a moment! Do I understand that you are trying to hire me to marry one of these women?”

The lawyer looked shocked. “Please, Mr. Johnson. Not at all” “Well, it certainly sounded like it.”

“No, no, such a contract would be void, against public policy. We are simply informing you, as administrators of a trust, that should it come about that you do marry one of the young ladies on this list it would then be our pleasant duty to endow each child of such a union according to the scale here set forth. But there would be no Contract with us involved, nor is there any ‘proposition’ being made to you-and we certainly do not urge any course of action on you. We are simply informing you of certain facts.”

Ira Johnson scowled and shuffled his feet. “What’s it all about? Why?”

“That is the business of the Foundation. One might put it that we approve of your grandparents.” “Have you discussed me with them?” Johnson said sharply.

He felt no affection for his grandparents. Atight-fisted foursome-if any one of them had had the grace to die at a reasonable age he would not now be worried about money enough to finish medical school.

“We have talked with them, yes. But not about you.”

The lawyer shut off further discussion and young Johnson accepted gracelessly a list of young women, all strangers, with the intention of tearing it up the moment he was outside the office. Instead, that night he wrote seven drafts before he found the right words in which to start cooling off the relation between himself and his girl back home. He was glad that he had

never actually popped the question to her-it would have been deucedly awkward.

When he did marry (from the list) it seemed a curious but not too remarkable coincidence that his wife as well as himself had four living, healthy, active grandparents.

“-an openly chartered non-profit corporation,” Foote continued, “and its avowed purpose of encouraging births among persons of sound American stock was consonant with the customs of that century. By the simple expedient of being closemouthed about the true purpose of the Foundation no unusual methods of concealment were necessary until late in that period during the World Wars sometimes loosely termed ‘The Crazy Years—’”

Selected headlines April to June 1969: BABYBILL BREAKS BANK

2-year toddler youngest winner $1,000,000 TVjackpot White House phones congrats

COURT ORDERS STATEHOUSE SOLD

Colorado Supreme Bench Rules State Old Age Pension Has First Lien All State Property

N.Y. YOUTH MEET DEMANDS UPPER LIMIT ON FRANCHISE “U.S. BIRTH RATE ‘TOP SECRET!’”-DEFENSE SEC CAROLINACONGRESSMAN COPS BEAUTYCROWN

“Available for draft for President” she announces while starting tour to show her qualifications

IOWARAISES VOTING AGE TO FORTY-ONE

Rioting on Des Moines Campus

EARTH-EATING FAD MOVES WEST: CHICAGO PARSON EATS CLAYSANDWICH IN PULPIT

“Back to simple things,” he advises flock.

LOS ANGELES HI-SCHOOL MOB DEFIES SCHOOL BOARD

“Higher Pay, Shorter hours, no Homework-We Demand Our Right to Elect Teachers, Coaches.”

SUICIDE RATE UP NINTH SUCCESSIVE YEAR

AEC Denies Fall-Out to Blame

”’-The Crazy Years.’ The trustees of that date decided-correctly, we now believe-that any minority during that period of semantic disorientation and mass hysteria was a probable target for persecution, discriminatory legislation, and even of mob violence. Furthermore the disturbed financial condition of the country and in particular the forced exchange of trust securities for government warrants threatened the solvency of the trust.

“Two courses of action were adopted: the assets of the Foundation were converted into real wealth and distributed widely among members of the Families to be held by them as owners-of-record; and the so-called ‘Masquerade’ was adopted as a permanent policy. Means were found to simulate the death of any member of the Families who lived to a socially embarrassing age and to provide him with a new identity in another part of the country.

“The wisdom of this later policy, though irksome to some, became evident at once during the Interregnum of the Prophets. The Families at the beginning of the reign of the First Prophet had ninety-seven per cent of their members with publicly avowed ages of less than fifty years. The close public registration enforced by the secret police of the Prophets made changes of public identity difficult, although a few were accomplished with the aid of the revolutionary Cabal.

“Thus, a combination of luck and foresight saved our Secret from public disclosure. This was well-we may be sure that things would have gone harshly at that time for any group possessing a prize beyond the power of the Prophet to confiscate.

“The Families took no part as such in the events leading up to the Second American Revolution, but many members participated and served with credit in the Cabal and in the fighting which preceded the fall of New Jerusalem. We took advantage of the period of disorganization which followed to readjust the ages of our kin who had grown conspicuously old. In this we were aided by certain members of the Families who, as members of the Cabal, held key posts in the Reconstruction.

“It was argued by many at the Families’ meeting of 2075, the year of the Covenant, that we should reveal ourselves, since civil liberty was firmly reestablished. The majority did not agree at that time … perhaps through long habits of secrecy and caution. But the renascence of culture in the ensuing fifty years, the steady growth of tolerance and good manners, the semantically sound orientation of education, the increased respect for the custom of privacy and for the dignity of the individual-all of these things led us to believe that the time had at last come when it was becoming safe to reveal ourselves and to take our rightful place as an odd but nonetheless respected minority in society.

“There were compelling reasons to do so. Increasing numbers of us were finding the ‘Masquerade’ socially intolerable in a new and better society. Not only was it upsetting to pull up roots and seek a new background every few years but also it grated to have to live a lie in a society where frank honesty and fair dealing were habitual with most people. Besides that, the Families as a group had learned many things through our researches in the bio-sciences, things which could be of great benefit to our poor shortlived brethren. We needed freedom to help them.

“These and similar reasons were subject to argument. But the resumption of the custom of positive physical identification made the ‘Masquerade’ almost untenable. Under the new orientation a sane and peaceful citizen welcomes positive identification under appropriate circumstances even though jealous of his right of privacy at all other times-so we dared not object; it would have aroused curiosity, marked us as an eccentric group, set apart, and thereby have defeated the whole purpose of the ‘Masquerade.’

“We necessarily submitted to personal identification. By the time of the meeting of 2125, eleven years ago, it had become extremely difficult to counterfeit new identities for the ever- increasing number of us holding public ages incompatible with personal appearance; we decided on the experiment of letting volunteers from this group up to ten per cent of the total membership of the Families reveal themselves for what they were and observe the consequences, while maintaining all other secrets of the Families’ organization.

“The results were regrettably different from our expectations.”

Justin Foote stopped talking. The silence had gone on for several moments when a solidly built man of medium height spoke up. His hair was slightly grizzled-unusual in that group-and his face looked space tanned. Mary Sperling had noticed him and had wondered who he was-his live face and gusty laugh had interested her. But any member was free to attend the conclaves of the Families’ council; she had thought no more of it.

He said, “Speak up, Bud. What’s your report?”

Foote made his answer to the chair. “Our senior psychometrician should give the balance of the report. My remarks were prefatory.”

“For the love o’—” the grizzled stranger exclaimed. “Bud, do you mean to stand there and admit that all you had to say were things we already knew?” “My remarks were a foundation … and my name is Justin Foote, not Bud.’”

Mary Sperling broke in firmly. “Brother,” she said to the stranger, “since you are addressing the Families, will you please name yourself? I am sorry to say that I do not recognize you.”

“Sorry, Sister. Lazarus Long, speaking for myself.”

Mary shook her head. “I still don’t place you.”

“Sorry again-that’s a ‘Masquerade’ name I took at the time of the First Prophet … it tickled me. My Family name is Smith … Woodrow Wilson Smith.” “‘Woodrow Wilson Sm—’ How old are you?”

“Eh? Why, I haven’t figured it lately. One hun … no, two hundred and-thirteen years. Yeah, that’s right, two hundred and thirteen.” There was a sudden, complete silence. Then Mary said quietly, “Did you hear me inquire for anyone older than myself?”

“Yes. But shucks, Sister, you were doing all right. I ain’t attended a meeting of the Families in over a century. Been some changes.” “I’ll ask you to carry on from here.” She started to leave the platform.

“Oh no!” he protested. But she paid no attention and found a seat. He looked around, shrugged and gave in. Sprawling one hip over a corner of the speaker’s table he announced, “All right, let’s get on with it. Who’s next?”

Ralph Schultz of the Schultz Family looked more like a banker than a psychometrician. He was neither shy nor absent-minded and he had a flat, underemphasized way of talking that carried authority. “I was part of the group that proposed ending the ‘Masquerade.’ I was wrong. I believed that the great majority of our fellow citizens, reared under modern educational methods, could evaluate any data without excessive emotional disturbance. I anticipated that a few abnormal people would dislike us, even hate us; I even predicted that most people would envy us-everybody who enjoys life would like to live a long time. But I did not anticipate any serious trouble. Modern attitudes have done away with interracial friction; any who still harbor race prejudice are ashamed to voice it. I believed that our society was so tolerant that we could live peacefully and openly with the shortlived.

“I was wrong.

“The Negro hated and envied the white man as long as the white man enjoyed privileges forbidden the Negro by reason of color. This was a sane, normal reaction. When discrimination was removed, the problem solved itself and cultural assimilation took place. There is a similar tendency on the part of the shortlived to envy the long-lived. We assumed that this expected reaction would be of no social importance in most people once it was made clear that we owe our peculiarity to our genes-no fault nor virtue of our own, just good luck in our ancestry.

“This was mere wishful thinking. By hindsight it is easy to see that correct application of mathematical analysis to the data would have given a different answer, would have spotlighted the false analogy. I do not defend the misjudgment, no defense is possible. We were led astray by our hopes.

“What actually happened was this: we showed our shortlived cousins the greatest boon it is possible for a man to imagine … then we told them it could never be theirs. This faced them with an unsolvable dilemma. They have rejected the unbearable facts, they refuse to believe us. Their envy now turns to hate, with an emotional conviction that we are depriving them of their rights … deliberately, maliciously.

“That rising hate has now swelled into a flood which threatens the welfare and even the lives of all our revealed brethren … and which is potentially as dangerous to the rest of us. The danger is very great and very pressing.” He sat down abruptly.

They took it calmly, with the unhurried habit of years. Presently a female delegate stood up. “Eve Barstow, for the Cooper Family. Ralph Schultz, I am a hundred and nineteen years old, older, I believe, than you are. I do not have your talent for mathematics or human behavior but I have known a lot of people. Human beings are inherently good and gentle and kind. Oh, they have their weaknesses but most of them are decent enough if you give them half a chance. I cannot believe that they would hate me and destroy me simply because I have lived a long time. What have you to go on? You admit one mistake-why not two?”

Schultz looked at her soberly and smoothed his kilt. “You’re right, Eve. I could easily be wrong again. That’s the trouble with psychology; it is a subject so terribly complex, so many unknowns, such involved relationships, that our best efforts sometimes look silly in the bleak light of later facts.” He stood up again, faced the others, and again spoke with flat authority. “But I am not making a long-range prediction this time; I am talking about facts, no guesses, not wishful thinking-and with those facts a prediction so short-range that it is like predicting that an egg will break when you see it already on its way to the floor. But Eve is right … as far as she went. Individuals are kind and decent … as individuals and to other individuals. Eve is in no danger from her neighbors and friends, and I am in no danger from mine. But she is in danger from my neighbors and friends -and I from hers. Mass psychology is not simply a summation of individual psychologies; that

is a prime theorem of social psychodynamics -not just my opinion; no exception has ever been found to this theorem. It is the social massaction rule, the mob-hysteria law, known and used by military, political, and religious leaders, by advertising men and prophets and propagandists, by rabble rousers and actors and gang leaders, for generations before it was formulated in mathematical symbols. It works. It is working now.

“My colleagues and I began to suspect that a mob-hysteria trend was building up against us several years ago. We did not bring our suspicions to the council for action because we could not prove anything. What we observed then could have been simply the mutterings of the crackpot minority present in even the healthiest society. The trend was at first so minor that we could not be sure it existed, for all social trends are intermixed with other social trends, snarled together like a plate of spaghetti-worse than that, for it takes an abstract topological space of many dimensions (ten or twelve are not uncommon and hardly adequate) to describe mathematically the interplay of social forces. I cannot overemphasize the complexity of the problem.

“So we waited and worried and tried statistical sampling, setting up our statistical universes with great care.

“By the time we were sure, it was almost too late. Socio-psychological trends grow or die by a ‘yeast growth’ law, a complex power law. We continued to hope that other favorable factors would reverse the trend-Nelson’s work in symbiotics, our own contributions to geriatrics, the great public interest in the opening of the Jovian satellites to immigration. Any major break- through offering longer life, and greater hope to the shortlived could end the smouldering resentment against us.

“Instead the smouldering has burst into flame, into an uncontrolled forest fire. As nearly as we can measure it, the rate has doubled in the past thirty-seven days and the rate itself is accelerated. I can’t guess how far or how fast it will go-and that’s why we asked for this emergency session. Because we can expect trouble at any moment.” He sat down hard, looking tired.

Eve did not argue with him again and no one else argued with him at all; not only was Ralph Schultz considered expert in his own field but also every one of them, each from his own viewpoint, had seen the grosser aspects of the trend building up against their revealed kin. But, while the acceptance of the problem was unanimous, there were as many opinions about what to do about it as there were people present. Lazarus let the discussion muddle along for two hours before he held up a hand. “We aren’t getting anywhere,” he stated, “and it looks like we won’t get anywhere tonight. Let’s take an overall look at it, hitting just the high spots:

“We can—” He started ticking plans off on his fingers- “do nothing, sit tight, and see what happens. “We can junk the ‘Masquerade’ entirely, reveal our full numbers, and demand our rights politically.

“We can sit tight on the surface and use our organization and money to protect our revealed brethren, maybe haul ‘em back into the ‘Masquerade.’ “We can reveal ourselves and ask for a place to colonize where we can live by ourselves.

“Or we can do something else. I suggest that you sort yourselves out according to those four major points of view-say in the corners of the room, starting clockwise in that far right hand corner-each group hammer out a plan and get it ready to submit to the Families. And those of you who don’t favor any of those four things gather in the middle of the room and start scrappin’ over just what it is you do think. Now, if I hear no objection, I am going to declare this lodge recessed until midnight tomorrow night. How about it?”

No one spoke up. Lazarus Long’s streamlined version of parliamentary procedure had them somewhat startled; they were used to long, leisurely discussions until it became evident that one point of view had become unanimous. Doing things in a hurry was slightly shocking.

But the man’s personality was powerful, his years gave him prestige, and his slightly archaic way of speaking added to his patriarchal authority; nobody argued. “Okay,” Lazarus announced, clapping his hands once. “Church is out until tomorrow night.” He stepped down from the platform.

Mary Sperling came up to him. “I would like to know you better,” she said, looking him in the eyes. “Sure, Sis. Why not?”

“Are you staying for discussion?”

“Could you come home with me?”

“Like to. I’ve no pressing business elsewhere.”

“Come then.” She led him through the tunnel to the underground pool connecting with Lake Michigan. He widened his eyes at the pseudo-Camden but said nothing until they were submerged.

“Nice little car you’ve got.” “Yes.”

“Has some unusual features.”

She smiled. “Yes. Among other things, it blows up-quite thoroughly-if anyone tries to investigate it.” “Good.” He added, “You a designing engineer, Mary?”

“Me? Heavens, no! Not this past century, at least, and I no longer try to keep up with such things. But you can order a car modified the way this one is through the Families, if you want one. Talk to-“

“Never mind, I’ve no need for one. I just like gadgets that do what they were designed to do and do it quietly and efficiently. Some good skull sweat in this one.” “Yes.” She was busy then, surfacing, making a radar check, and getting them back ashore without attracting notice.

When they reached her apartment she put tobacco and drink close to him, then went to her retiring room, threw off her street clothes and put on a soft loose robe that made her look even smaller and younger than she had looked before. When she rejoined Lazarus, he stood up, struck a cigarette for her, then paused as he handed it to her and gave a gallant and indelicate whistle.

She smiled briefly, took the cigarette, and sat down in a large chair, pulling her feet under her. “Lazarus, you reassure me.” “Don’t you own a mirror, girl?”

“Not that,” she said impatiently. “You yourself. You know that I have passed the reasonable life expectancy of our people-I’ve been expecting to die, been resigned to it, for the past ten years. Yet there you sit … years and years o1der than I am. You give me hope.”

He sat up straight. “You expecting to die? Good grief, girl-you look good for another century.”

She made a tired gesture. “Don’t try to jolly me. You know that appearance has nothing to do with it. Lazarus, I don’t want to die!” Lazarus answered soberly, “I wasn’t trying to kid you, Sis. You simply don’t look like a candidate for corpse.”

She shrugged gracefully. “Amatter of biotechniques. I’m holding my appearance at the early thirties.”

“Or less, I’d say. I guess I’m not up on the latest dodges, Mary. You heard me say that I had not attended a get-together for more than a century. As a matter of fact I’ve been completely out of touch with the Families the whole time.”

“Really? May I ask why?”

“Along story and a dull one. What it amounts to is that I got bored with them. I used to be a delegate to the annual meetings. But they got stuffy and set in their ways-or so it seemed to me. So I wandered off. I spent the Interregnum on Venus, mostly. I came back for a while after the Covenant was signed but I don’t suppose I’ve spent two years on Earth since then. I like to move around.”

Her eyes lit up. “Oh, tell me about it! I’ve never been out in-deep space. Just Luna City, once.”

“Sure,” he agreed. “Sometime. But I want to hear more about this matter of your appearance. Girl, you sure don’t look your age.”

“I suppose not. Or, rather, of course I don’t. As to how it’s done, I can’t tell you much. Hormones and symbiotics and gland therapy and some psychotherapy-things like that. What it adds up to is that, for members of the Families, senility is postponed and that senescence can be arrested at least cosmetically.” She brooded for a moment. “Once they thought they were on the track of the secret of immortality, the true Fountain of Youth. But it was a mistake. Senility is simply postponed … and shortened. About ninety days from the first clear warning-then death from old age.” She shivered. “Of course, most of our cousins don’t wait-a couple of weeks to make certain of the diagnosis, then euthanasia.”

“The hell you say! Well, I won’t go that way. When the Old Boy comes to get me, he’ll have to drag me-and I’ll be kicking and gouging eyes every step of the way!”

She smiled lopsidedly. “It does me good to hear you talk that way. Lazarus, I wouldn’t let my guards down this way with anyone younger than myself. But your example gives me courage.” “We’ll outlast the lot of ‘em, Mary, never you fear. But about the meeting tonight: I haven’t paid any attention to the news and I’ve only recently come earthside-does this chap Ralph Schultz

know what he is talking about?”

“I think he must. His grandfather was a brilliant man and so is his father.” “I take it you know Ralph.”

“Slightly. He is one of my grandchildren.” “That’s amusing. He looks older than you do.”

“Ralph found it suited him to arrest his appearance at about forty, that’s all. His father was my twenty-seventh child. Ralph must be-let me see-oh, eighty or ninety years younger than I am, at least. At that, he is older than some of my children.”

“You’ve done well by the Families, Mary.”

“I suppose so. But they’ve done well by me, too. I’ve enjoyed having children and the trust benefits for my thirty-odd come to quite a lot. I have every luxury one could want.” She shivered again. “I suppose that’s why I’m in such a funk-I enjoy life.”

“Stop it! I thought my sterling example and boyish grin had cured you of that nonsense.” “Well you’ve helped.”

“Mmm … look, Mary, why don’t you marry again and have some more squally brats? Keep you too busy to fret.” “What? At my age? Now, really, Lazarus!”

“Nothing wrong with your age. You’re younger than I am.” She studied him for a moment. “Lazarus, are you proposing a contract? If so, I wish you would speak more plainly.”

His mouth opened and he gulped. “Hey, wait a minute! Take it easy! I was speaking in general terms … I’m not the domestic type. Why, every time I’ve married my wife has grown sick of the sight of me inside of a few years. Not but what I-well, I mean you’re a very pretty girl and a man ought to-“

She shut him off by leaning forward and putting a hand over his mouth, while grinning impishly. “I didn’t mean to panic you, cousin. Or perhaps I did-men are so funny when they think they are about to be trapped.”

“Well-” he said glumly.

“Forget it, dear. Tell me, what plan do you think they will settle on?”

“That bunch tonight?’

“Yes.”

“None, of course. They won’t get anywhere. Mary, a committee is the only known form of life with a hundred bellies and no brain. But presently somebody with a mind of his own will bulldoze them into accepting his plan. I don’t know what it will be.”

“Well … what course of action do you favor?”

“Me? Why, none. Mary, if there is any one thing I have learned in the past couple of centuries, it’s this: These things pass. Wars and depressions and Prophets and Covenants-they pass. The trick is to stay alive through them.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “I think you are right.”

“Sure I’m right. It takes a hundred years or so to realize just how good life is.” He stood up and stretched. “But right now this growing boy could use some sleep.” “Me, too.”

Mary’s flat was on the top floor, with a sky view. When she had come back to the lounge she had cut the inside lighting and let the ceiling shutters fold back; they had been sitting, save for an invisible sheet of plastic, under the stars. As Lazarus raised his head in stretching, his eye had rested on his favorite constellation. “Odd,” he commented. “Orion seems to have added a fourth star to his belt.”

She looked up. “That must be the big ship for the Second Centauri Expedition. See if you can see it move.” “Couldn’t tell without instruments.”

“I suppose not,” she agreed. “Clever of them to build it out in space, isn’t it?”

“No other way to do it. It’s too big to assemble on Earth. I can doss down right here, Mary. Or do you have a spare room?”

“Your room is the second door on the right. Shout if you can’t find everything you need.” She put her face up and kissed him goodnight, a quick peck. “‘Night.” Lazarus followed her and went into his own room.

Mary Sperling woke at her usual hour the next day. She got up quietly to keep from waking Lazarus, ducked into her ‘fresher, showered and massaged, swallowed a grain of sleep surrogate to make up for the short night, followed it almost as quickly with all the breakfast she permitted her waistline, then punched for the calls she had not bothered to take the night before. The phone played back several calls which she promptly forgot, then she recognized the voice of Bork Vanning. “‘Hello,’” the instrument said. “‘Mary, this is Bork, calling at twenty- one o’clock. I’ll be by at ten o’clock tomorrow morning, for a dip in the lake and lunch somewhere. Unless I hear from you it’s a date. ‘Bye, my dear. Service.’”

“Service,” she repeated automatically. Drat the man! Couldn’t he take no for an answer? Mary Sperling, you’re slipping!-a quarter your age and yet you can’t seem to handle him. Call him and leave word that-no, too late; he’d be here any minute. Bother!

Chapter 2

WHEN LAZARUS went to bed he stepped out of his kilt and chucked it toward a wardrobe which snagged it, shook it out, and hung it up neatly. “Nice catch,” he commented, then glanced down at his hairy thighs and smiled wryly; the kilt had concealed a blaster strapped to one thigh, a knife to the other. He was aware of the present gentle custom against personal weapons, but he felt naked without them. Such customs were nonsense anyhow, foolishment from old women-there was no such thing as a “dangerous weapon,” there were only dangerous men.

When he came out of the ‘fresher, he put his weapons where he could reach them before sprawling in sleep.

He came instantly wide awake with a weapon in each hand … then remembered where he was, relaxed, and looked around to see what had wakened him.

It was a murmur of voices through the air duct. Poor soundproofing he decided, and Mary must be entertaining callers-in which case he should not be slug-a-bed. He got up, refreshed himself, strapped his best friends back on his thighs, and went looking for his hostess.

As the door to the lounge dilated noiselessly in front of him the sound of voices became loud and very interesting. The lounge was el-shaped and he was out of sight; he hung back and listened shamelessly. Eavesdropping had saved his skin on several occasions; it worried him not at all-he enjoyed it. Aman was saying, “Mary, you’re completely unreasonable! You know you’re fond of me, you admit that marriage to me would be to your advantage. So why won’t you?”

“I told you, Bork. Age difference.”

“That’s foolish. What do you expect? Adolescent romance? Oh, I admit that I’m not as young as you are … but a woman needs an older man to look up to and keep her steady. I’m not too old for you; I’m just at my prime.”

Lazarus decided that he already knew this chap well enough to dislike him. Sulky voice.

Mary did not answer. The man went on: “Anyhow, I have a surprise for you on that point. I wish I could tell you now, but … well, it’s a state secret.” “Then don’t tell me. It can’t change my mind in any case, Bork.”

“Oh, but it would! Mmm … I will tell you-I know you can be trusted.” “Now, Bork, you shouldn’t assume that-“

“It doesn’t matter; it will be public knowledge in a few days anyhow. Mary … I’ll never grow old on you!” “What do you mean?” Lazarus decided that her tone was suddenly suspicious.

“Just what I said. Mary, they’ve found the secret of eternal youth!” “What? Who? How? When?”

“Oh, so now you’re interested, eh? Well, I won’t keep you waiting. You know these old Johnnies that call themselves the Howard Families?’ “Yes … I’ve heard of them, of course,” she admitted slowly. “But what of it? They’re fakes.”

“Not at all. I know. The Administration has been quietly investigating their claims. Some of them are unquestionably more than a hundred years old-and still young!” “That’s very hard to believe.”

“Nevertheless it’s true.” “Well … how do they do it?”

“Ah! That’s the point. They claim that it is a simple matter of heredity, that they live a long time because they come from long lived stock. But that’s preposterous, scientifically incompatible with the established facts. The Administration checked most carefully and the answer is certain: they have the secret of staying young.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“Oh, come, Mary! You’re a dear girl but you’re questioning the expert opinion of the best scientific brains in the world. Never mind. Here’s the part that is confidential. We don’t have their secret yet-but we will have it shortly. Without any excitement or public notice, they are to be picked up and questioned. We’ll get the secret-and you and I will never grow old! What do you think of that? Eh?”

Mary answered very slowly, almost inaudibly, “It would be nice if everyone could live a long time.”

“Huh? Yes, I suppose it would. But in any case you and I will receive the treatment, whatever it is. Think about us, dear. Year after year after year of happy, youthful marriage. Not less than a century. Maybe even—”

“Wait a moment, Bork. This ‘secret’ It wouldn’t be for everybody?”

“Well, now … that’s a matter of high policy. Population pressure is a pretty unwieldy problem even now. In practice it might be necessary to restrict it to essential personnel-and their wives. But don’t fret your lovely head about it; you and I will have it.”

“You mean I’ll have it if I marry you.”

“Mmm … that’s a nasty way to put it, Mary. I’d do anything in the world for you that I could-because I love you. But it would be utterly simple if you were married to me. So say you will.” “Let’s let that be for the moment. How do you propose to get this ‘secret’ out of them?”

Lazarus could almost hear his wise nod. “Oh, they’ll talk!”

“Do you mean to say you’d send them to Coventry if they didn’t?”

“Coventry? Hm! You don’t understand the situation at all, Mary; this isn’t any minor social offense. This is treason-treason against the whole human race. We’ll use means! Ways that the Prophets used … if they don’t cooperate willingly.”

“Do you mean that? Why, that’s against the Covenant!”

“Covenant be damned! This is a matter of life and death-do you think we’d let a scrap of paper stand in our way? You can’t bother with petty legalities in the fundamental things: men live by-not something they will fight to the death for. And that is precisely what this is. These … these dog-in-the-manger scoundrels are trying to keep life itself from us. Do you think we’ll bow to ‘custom’ in an emergency like this?”

Mary answered in a hushed and horrified voice: “Do you really think the Council will violate the Covenant?”

“Think so? The Action-in-Council was recorded last night. We authorized the Administrator to use ‘full expediency.’” Lazarus strained his ears through a long silence. At last Mary spoke. “Bork-“

“Yes, my dear?”

“You’ve got to do something about this. You must stop it.” “Stop it? You don’t know what you’re saying. I couldn’t and I would not if I could.”

“But you must. You must convince the Council. They’re making a mistake, a tragic mistake. There is nothing to be gained by trying to coerce those poor people. There is no secret!”

“What? You’re getting excited, my dear. You’re setting your judgment up against some of the best and wisest men on the planet. Believe me, we know what we are doing. We don’t relish using harsh methods any more than you do, but it’s for the general welfare. Look, I’m sorry I ever brought it up. Naturally you are soft and gentle and warmhearted and I love you for it. Why not marry me and not bother your head about matters of public policy?”

“Marry you? Never!”

“Aw, Mary-you’re upset. Give me just one good reason why not?”

“I’ll tell you why! Because I am one of those people you want to persecute!” There was another pause. “Mary … you’re not well.”

“Not well, am I? I am as well as a person can be at my age. Listen to me, you fool! I have grandsons twice your age. I was here when the First Prophet took over the country. I was here when Harriman launched the first Moon rocket. You weren’t even a squalling brat-your grandparents hadn’t even met, when I was a woman grown and married. And you stand there and glibly propose to push around, even to torture, me and my kind. Marry you? I’d rather marry one of my own grandchildren!”

Lazarus shifted his weight and slid his right hand inside the flap of his kilt; he expected trouble at once. You can depend on a woman, he reflected, to blow her top at the wrong moment. He waited. Bork’s answer was cool; the tones of the experienced man of authority replaced those of thwarted passion. “Take it easy, Mary. Sit down, I’ll look after you. First I want you to

take a sedative. Then I’ll get the best psychotherapist in the city-in the whole country. You’ll be all right.”

“Take your hands off me!” “Now, Mary …

Lazarus stepped out into the room and pointed at Vanning with his blaster. “This monkey giving you trouble, Sis?” Vanning jerked his head around. “Who are you?” he demanded indignantly. “What are you doing here?”

Lazarus still addressed Mary. “Say the word, Sis, and I’ll cut him into pieces small enough to hide.”

“No, Lazarus,” she answered with her voice now under control. “Thanks just the same. Please put your gun away. I wouldn’t want anything like that to happen.” “Okay.” Lazarus holstered the gun but let his hand rest on the grip.

“Who are you?” repeated Vanning. “What’s the meaning of this intrusion?”

“I was just about to ask you that, Bud,” Lazarus said mildly, “but we’ll let it ride. I’m another one of those old Johnnies you’re looking for … like Mary here.”

Vanning looked at him keenly. “I wonder-” he said. He looked back at Mary. “It can’t be, it’s preposterous. Still it won’t hurt to investigate your story. I’ve plenty to detain you on, in any event, I’ve never seen a clearer case of antisocial atavism.” He moved toward the videophone.

“Better get away from that phone, Bud,” Lazarus said quickly, then added to Mary, “I won’t touch my gun, Sis. I’ll use my knife.” Vanning stopped. “Very well,” he said in annoyed tones, “put away that vibroblade. I won’t call from here.”

“Look again, it ain’t a vibroblade. It’s steel. Messy.”

Vanning turned to Mary Sperling. “I’m leaving. If you are wise, you’ll come with me.” She shook her head. He looked annoyed, shrugged, and faced Lazarus Long. “As for you, sir, your primitive manners have led you into serious trouble. You will be arrested shortly.”

Lazarus glanced up at the ceiling shutters. “Reminds me of a patron in Venusburg who wanted to have me arrested.” “Well?”

“I’ve outlived him quite a piece.”

Vanning opened his mouth to answer-then turned suddenly and left so quickly that the outer door barely had time to clear the end of his nose. As the door snapped closed Lazarus said musingly, “Hardest man to reason with I’ve met in years. I’ll bet he never used an unsterilized spoon in his life.”

Mary looked startled, then giggled. He turned toward her. “Glad to see you sounding perky, Mary. Kinda thought you were upset.” “I was. I hadn’t known you were listening. I was forced to improvise as I went along.”

“Did I queer it?”

“No. I’m glad you came in-thanks. But we’ll have to hurry now.”

“I suppose so. I think he meant it-there’ll be a proctor looking for me soon. You, too, maybe.” “That’s what I meant. So let’s get out of here.”

Mary was ready to leave in scant minutes but when they stepped out into the public hall they met a man whose brassard and hypo kit marked him as a proctor. “Service,” he said. “I’m looking for a citizen in company with Citizen Mary Sperling. Could you direct me?”

“Sure,” agreed Lazarus. “She lives right down there.” He pointed at the far end of the corridor. As the peace officer looked in that direction, Lazarus tapped him carefully on the back of the head, a little to the left, with the butt of his blaster, and caught him as be slumped.

Mary helped Lazarus wrestle the awkward mass into her apartment. He knelt over the cop, pawed through his hypo kit, took a loaded injector and gave him a shot. “There,” he said, “that’ll keep him sleepy for a few hours.” Then he blinked thoughtfully at the hypo kit, detached it from the proctor’s belt. “This might come in handy again. Anyhow, it won’t hurt to take it.” As an afterthought he removed the proctor’s peace brassard and placed it, too, in his pouch.

They left the apartment again and dropped to the parking level. Lazarus noticed as they rolled up the ramp that Mary had set the North Shore combination. “Where are we going?” he asked.

“The Families’ Seat. No place else to go where we won’t be checked on. But we’ll have to hide somewhere in the country until dark.”

Once the car was on beamed control headed north Mary asked to be excused and caught a few minutes sleep. Lazarus watched a few miles of scenery, then nodded himself.

They were awakened by the jangle of the emergency alarm and by the speedster slowing to a stop. Mary reached up and shut off the alarm. “All cars resume local control,” intoned a voice. “Proceed at speed twenty to the nearest traffic control tower for inspection. All cars resume local control. Proceed at-“

She switched that off, too. “Well, that’s us,” Lazarus said cheerfully. “Got any ideas?”

Mary did not answer. She peered out and studied their surroundings. The steel fence separating the high-speed controlway they were on from the uncontrolled local-traffic strip lay about fifty yards to their right but no changeover ramp broke the fence for at least a mile ahead-where it did, there would be, of course, the control tower where they were ordered to undergo inspection. She started the car again, operating it manually, and wove through stopped or slowly moving traffic while speeding up. As they got close to the barrier Lazarus felt himself shoved into the cushions; the car surged and lifted, clearing the barrier by inches. She set it down rolling on the far side.

Acar was approaching from the north and they were slashing across his lane. The other car was moving no more than ninety but its driver was taken by surprise-he had no reason to expect another car to appear out of nowhere against him on a clear road: Mary was forced to duck left, then right, and left again; the car slewed and reared up on its hind wheel, writhing against the steel grip of its gyros. Mary fought it back into control to the accompaniment of a teeth-shivering grind of herculene against glass as the rear wheel fought for traction.

Lazarus let his jaw muscles relax and breathed out gustily. “Whew!” he sighed. “I hope we won’t have to do that again.”

Mary glanced at him, grinning. “Women drivers make you nervous?”

“Oh, no, no, not at all! I just wish you would warn me when something like that is about to happen.”

“I didn’t know myse1f,” she admitted, then went on worriedly, “I don’t know quite what to do now. I thought we could lie quiet out of town until dark … but I had to show my hand a Little when I took that fence. By now somebody will be reporting it to the tower. Mmm.

“Why wait until dark?” he asked. “Why not just bounce over to the lake in this Dick Dare contraption of yours and let it swim us home?”

“I don’t like to,” she fretted. “I’ve attracted too much attention already. Atrimobile faked up to look like a groundster is handy, but … well, if anyone sees us taking it under water and the proctors hear of it, somebody is going to guess the answer. Then they’ll start fishing-everything from seismo to sonar and Heaven knows what else.”

“But isn’t the Seat shielded?”

“Of course. But anything that big they can find-if they know what they’re looking for and keep looking.”

“You’re right, of course,” Lazarus admitted slowly. “Well, we certainly don’t want to lead any nosy proctors to the Families’ Seat. Mary, I think we had better ditch your car and get lost.” He frowned. “Anywhere but the Seat.”

“No, it has to be the Seat,” she answered sharply. “Why? If you chase a fox, he-“

“Quiet a moment! I want to try something.” Lazarus shut up; Mary drove with one hand while she fumbled in the glove compartment. “Answer,” a voice said.

“Life is short-” Mary replied.

They completed the formula. “Listen,” Mary went on hurriedly, “I’m in trouble-get a fix on me.” “Okay.”

“Is there a sub in the pool?” “Yes.”

“Good! Lock on me and home them in.” She explained hurriedly the details of what she wanted, stopping once to ask Lazarus if he could swim. “That’s all,” she said at last, “but move! We’re short on minutes.”

“Hold it, Mary!” the voice protested. “You know I can’t send a sub out in the daytime, certainly not on a calm day. It’s too easy to-“ “Will you, or won’t you!”

Athird voice cut in. “I was listening, Mary-Ira Barstow. We’ll pick you up.” “But-” objected the first voice.

“Stow it, Tommy. Just mind your burners and home me in. See you, Mary.” “Right, Ira!”

While she had been talking to the Seat, Mary had turned off from the local-traffic strip into the unpaved road she had followed the night before, without slowing and apparently without looking. Lazarus gritted his teeth and hung on. They passed a weathered sign reading CONTAMINATED AREA-PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK and graced with the conventional purple trefoil. Lazarus blinked at it and shrugged-he could not see how, at the moment, his hazard could be increased by a neutron or so.

Mary slammed the car to a stop in a clump of stunted trees near the abandoned road. The lake lay at their feet, just beyond a low bluff. She unfastened her safety belt, struck a cigarette, and relaxed. “Now we wait. It’ll take at least half an hour for them to reach us no matter how hard Ira herds it. Lazarus, do you think we were seen turning off into here?”

“To tell the truth, Mary, I was too busy to look.”

“Well nobody ever comes here, except a few reckless boys.”

(“-and girls,” Lazarus added to himself.) Then he went on aloud, “I noted a ‘hot’ sign back there. How high is the count?”

“That? -Oh, pooh. Nothing to worry about unless you decided to build a house here. We’re the ones who are hot. If we didn’t have to stay close to the communicator, we-“ The communicator spoke. “Okay, Mary. Right in front of you.”

She looked startled. “Ira?”

“This is Ira speaking but I’m still at the Seat. Pete Hardy was available in the Evanston pen, so we homed him in on you. Quicker.” “Okay-thanks!” She was turning to speak to Lazarus when he touched her arm.

“Look behind us.”

Ahelicopter was touching down less than a hundred yards from them. Three men burst out of it. They were dressed as proctors.

Mary jerked open the door of the car and threw off her gown in one unbroken motion. She turned and called, “Come on!” as she thrust a hand back inside and tore a stud loose from the instrument panel. She ran.

Lazarus unzipped the belt of his kilt and ran out of it as he followed her to the bluff. She went dancing down it; he came after with slightly more caution, swearing at sharp stones. The blast shook them as the car exploded, but the bluff saved them.

They hit the water together.

The lock in the little submarine was barely big enough for one at a time; Lazarus shoved Mary into it first and tried to slap her when she resisted, and discovered that slapping will not work under water. Then he spent an endless time, or so it seemed, wondering whether or not he could breathe water. “What’s a fish got that I ain’t got?” he was telling himself, when the outer latch moved under his hand and he was able to wiggle in.

Eleven dragging seconds to blow the lock clear of water and he had a chance to see what damage, if any, the water had done to his blaster.

Mary was speaking urgently to the skipper. “Listen, Pete-there are three proctors back up there with a whiny. My car blew up in their faces just as we hit the water. But if they aren’t all dead or injured, there will be a smart boy who will figure out that there was only one place for us to go-under water. We’ve got to be away from here before they take to the air to look for us.”

“It’s a losing race,” Pete Hardy complained, slapping his controls as he spoke. “Even if it’s only a visual search, I’ll have to get outside and stay outside the circle of total reflection faster than he can gain altitude-and I can’t.” But the little sub lunged forward reassuringly.

Mary worried about whether or not to call the Seat from the sub. She decided not to; it would just increase the hazard both to the sub and to the Seat itself. So she calmed herself and waited, huddled small in a passenger seat too cramped for two. Peter Hardy swung wide into deep water, hugging the bottom, picking up the Muskegon-Gary bottom beacons and conned himself in blind.

By the time they surfaced in the pool inside the Seat she had decided against any physical means of communication, even the carefully shielded equipment at the Seat. Instead she hoped to find a telepathic sensitive ready and available among the Families’ dependents cared for there. Sensitives were scarce among healthy members of the Howard Families as

they were in the rest of the population, but the very inbreeding which had conserved and reinforced their abnormal longevity had also conserved and reinforced bad genes as well as good; they had an unusually high percentage of physical and mental defectives. Their board of genetic control plugged away at the problem of getting rid of bad strains while conserving the longevity strain, but for many generations they would continue to pay for their long lives with an excess of defectives.

But almost five per cent of these defectives were telepathically sensitive.

Mary went straight to the sanctuary in the Seat where some of these dependents were cared for, with Lazarus Long at her heels. She braced the matron. “Where’s Little Stephen? I need him.”

“Keep your voice down,” the matron scolded. “Rest hour-you can’t.”

“Janice, I’ve got to see him,” Mary insisted. “This won’t wait. I’ve got to get a message out to all the Families-at once.”

The matron planted her hands on her hips. “Take it to the communication office. You can’t come here disturbing my children at all hours. I won’t have it.” “Janice, please! I don’t dare use anything but telepathy. You know I wouldn’t do this unnecessarily. Now take me to Stephen.”

“It wouldn’t do you any good if I did. Little Stephen has had one of his bad spells today.”

“Then take me to the strongest sensitive who can possibly work. Quickly, Janice! The safety of every member may depend on it.” “Did the trustees send you?”

“No, no! There wasn’t time!”

The matron still looked doubtful. While Lazarus was trying to recall how long it had been since he had socked a lady, she gave in. “All right-you can see Billy, though I shouldn’t let you. Mind you, don’t tire him out.” Still bristling, she led them along a corridor past a series of cheerful rooms and into one of them. Lazarus looked at the thing on the bed and looked away.

The matron went to a cupboard and returned with a hypodermic injector. “Does he work under a hypnotic?” Lazarus asked.

“No,” the matron answered coldly, “he has to have a stimulant to be aware of us at all.” She swabbed skin on the arm of the gross figure and made the injection. “Go ahead,” she said to Mary and lapsed into grim-mouthed silence.

The figure on the bed stirred, its eyes rolled loosely, then seemed to track. It grinned. “Aunt Mary!” it said. “Oooh! Did you bring Billy Boy something?’ “No,” she said gently. “Not this time, hon. Aunt Mary was in too much of a hurry. Next time? Asurprise? Will that do?’

“All right,” it said docilely.

“That’s a good boy.” She reached out and tousled its hair; Lazarus looked away again. “Now will Billy Boy do something for Aunt Mary? Abig, big favor?” “Sure.”

“Can you hear your friends?” “Oh, sure.”

“All of them?”

“Uh huh. Mostly they don’t say anything,” it added. “Call to them.”

There was a very short silence. “They heard me.”

“Fine! Now listen carefully, Billy Boy: All the Families-urgent warning! Elder Mary Sperling speaking. Under an Action-in-Council the Administrator is about to arrest every revealed member. The Council directed him to use ‘full expedience’-and it is my sober judgment that they are determined to use any means at all, regardless of the Covenant, to try to squeeze out of us the so-called secret of our long lives. They even intend to use the tortures developed by the inquisitors of the Prophets!” Her voice broke. She stopped and pulled herself together. “Now get busy! Find them, warn them, hide them! You may have only minutes left to save them!”

Lazarus touched her arm and whispered; she nodded and went on:

“If any cousin is arrested, rescue him by any means at all! Don’t try to appeal to the Covenant, don’t waste time arguing about justice rescue him! Now move!” She stopped and then spoke in a tired, gentle voice, “Did they hear us, Billy Boy?”

“Sure.”

“Are they telling their folks?”

“Uh huh. All but Jimmie-the-Horse. He’s mad at me,” it added confidentially. “‘Jimmie-the-Horse’? Where is he?”

“Oh, where he lives.”

“In Montreal,” put in the matron. “There are two other sensitives there-your message got through. Are you finished?” “Yes …” Mary said doubtfully. “But perhaps we had better have some other Seat relay it back.”

“No!” “But, Janice-“

“I won’t permit it. I suppose you had to send it but I want to give Billy the antidote now. So get out.”

Lazarus took her arm. “Come on, kid. It either got through or it didn’t; you’ve done your best. Agood job, girl.”

Mary went on to make a full report to the Resident Secretary; Lazarus left her on business of his own. He retraced his steps, looking for a man who was not too busy to help him; the guards at the pool entrance were the first he found. “Service-” be began.

“Service to you,” one of them answered. “Looking for someone?” He glanced curiously at Long’s almost complete nakedness, glanced away again-how anybody dressed, or did not dress, was a private matter.

“Sort of,” admitted Lazarus. “Say, Bud, do you know of anyone around here who would lend me a kilt?”

“You’re looking at one,” the guard answered pleasantly. “Take over, Dick-back in a minute.” He led Lazarus to bachelors’ quarters, outfitted him, helped him to dry his pouch and contents, and made no comment about the arsenal strapped to his hairy thighs. How elders behaved was no business of his and many of them were even touchier about their privacy than most people. He had seen Aunt Mary Sperling arrive stripped for swimming but had not been surprised as he had heard Ira Barstow briefing Pete for the underwater pickup; that the elder with her chose to take a dip in the lake weighed down by the hardware did surprise him but not enough to make him forget his manners.

“Anything else you need?’ he asked. “Do those shoes fit?

“Well enough. Thanks a lot, Bud.” Lazarus smoothed the borrowed kilt. It was a little too long for him but it comforted him. Aloin strap was okay, he supposed-if you were on Venus. But he had never cared much for Venus customs. Damn it, a man liked to be dressed. “I feel better,” he admitted. “Thanks again. By the way, what’s your name?”

“Edmund Hardy, of the Foote Family.”

“That so? What’s your line?”

“Charles Hardy and Evelyn Foote. Edward Hardy-Alice Johnson and Terence Briggs-Eleanor Weatheral. Oliver-“ “That’s enough. I sorta thought so. You’re one of my great-great-grandsons.”

“Why, that’s interesting,” commented Hardy agreeably. “Gives us a sixteenth of kinship, doesn’t it-not counting convergence. May I ask your name? “Lazarus Long.”

Hardy shook his head. “Some mistake. Not in my line.”

“Try Woodrow Wilson Smith instead. It was the one I started with.” “Oh, that one! Yes, surely. But I thought you were … uh—”

“Dead? Well, I ain’t.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that at all,” Hardy protested, blushing at the blunt Anglo-Saxon monosyllable. He hastily added, “I’m glad to have run across you, Gran’ther. I’ve always wanted to hear the straight of the story about the Families’ Meeting in 2012.”

“That was before you were born, Ed,” Lazarus said gruffly, “and don’t call me ‘Gran’ther.’” “Sorry, sir-I mean ‘Sorry, Lazarus.’ Is there any other service I can do for you?”

“I shouldn’t have gotten shirty. No-yes, there is, too. Where can I swipe a bite of breakfast? I was sort of rushed this morning.”

“Certainly.” Hardy took him to the bachelors’ pantry, operated the autochef for him, drew coffee for his watch mate and himself, and left. Lazarus consumed his “bite of breakfast”-about three thousand calories of sizzling sausages, eggs, jam, hot breads, coffee with cream, and ancillary items, for he worked on the assumption of always topping off his reserve tanks because you never knew how far you might have to lift before you had another chance to refuel. In due time he sat back, belched, gathered up his dishes and shoved them in the incinerator, then went looking for a newsbox.

He found one in the bachelors’ library, off their lounge. The room was empty save for one man who seemed to be about the same age as that suggested by Lazarus’ appearance. There the resemblance stopped; the stranger was slender, mild in feature, and was topped off by finespun carroty hair quite unlike the grizzled wiry bush topping Lazarus. The stranger was bending over the news receiver with his eyes pressed to the microviewer.

Lazarus cleared his throat loudly and said, “Howdy.”

The man jerked his head up and exclaimed, “Oh! Sorry-I was startled. Do y’ a service?” “I was looking for the newsbox. Mind if we throw it on the screen?”

“Not at all.” The smaller man stood up, pressed the rewind button, and set the controls for projection. “Any particular subject?” “I wanted to see,” said Lazarus, “if there was any news about us-the Families.”

“I’ve been watching for that myself. Perhaps we had better use the sound track and let it hunt.” “Okay,” agreed Lazarus, stepping up and changing the setting to audio. “What’s the code word?’ “‘Methuselah.’”

Lazarus punched in the setting; the machine chattered and whined as it scanned and rejected the track speeding through it, then it slowed with a triumphant click. “The DAILY DATA,” it announced. “The only midwest news service subscribing to every major grid. Leased videochannel to Luna City. Tri-S correspondents throughout the System. First, Fast, and Most! Lincoln, Nebraska-Savant Denounces Oldsters! Dr. Witweli Oscarsen, President Emeritus of Bryan Lyceum, calls for official reconsideration of the status of the kin group styling themselves the ‘Howard Families.’ ‘It is proved,’ he says. ‘that these people have solved the age-old problem of extending, perhaps indefinitely, the span of human life. For that they are to be commended; it is a worthy and potentially fruitful research. But their claim that their solution is no more than hereditary predisposition defies both science and common sense. Our modern knowledge of the established laws of generics enables us to deduce with

certainty that they are withholding from the public some secret technique or techniques whereby they accomplish their results.

“‘It is contrary to our customs to permit scientific knowledge to be held as a monopoly for the few. When concealing such knowledge strikes at life itself, the action becomes treason to the race. As a citizen, I call on the Administration to act forcefully in this matter and I remind them that the situation is not one which could possibly have been foreseen by the wise men who drew up the Covenant and codified our basic customs. Any custom is man-made and is therefore a finite attempt to describe an infinity of relationships. It follows as the night from day that any custom necessarily has its exceptions. To be bound by them in the face of new—’”

Lazarus pressed the hold button. “Had enough of that guy?

“Yes, I had already heard it.” The stranger sighed. “I have rarely heard such complete lack of semantic rigor. It surprises me-Dr. Oscarsen has done sound work in the past.” “Reached his dotage,” Lazarus stated, as he told the machine to try again. “Wants what he wants when he wants it-and thinks that constitutes a natural law.”

The machine hummed and clicked and again spoke up. “The DAILYDATA, the only midwest news-“

“Can’t we scramble that commercial?” suggested Lazarus. His companion peered at the control panel. “Doesn’t seem to be equipped for it.”

“Ensenada, Baja California. Jeffers and Lucy Weatheral today asked for special proctor protection, alleging that a group of citizens had broken into their home, submitted them to personal indignity and committed other asocial acts. The Weatherals are, by their own admission, members of the notorious Howard Families and claim that the alleged incident could be traced to that supposed fact. The district provost points out that they have offered no proof and has taken the matter under advisement. Atown mass meeting has been announced for tonight which will air-“

The other man turned toward Lazarus. “Cousin, did we hear what I thought we heard? That is the first case of asocial group violence in more than twenty years … yet they reported it like a breakdown in a weather integrator.”

“Not quite,” Lazarus answered grimly. “The connotations of the words used in describing us were loaded.”

“Yes, true, but loaded cleverly. I doubt if there was a word in that dispatch with an emotional index, taken alone, higher than one point five. The newscasters are allowed two zero, you know.”

“You a psychometrician?”

“Uh, no. I should have introduced myself. I’m Andrew Jackson Libby.” “Lazarus Long.”

“I know. I was at the meeting last night.”

“‘Libby … Libby,” Lazarus mused. “Don’t seem to place it in the Families. Seems familiar, though.” “My case is a little like yours-“

“Changed it during the Interregnum, eh?”

“Yes and no. I was born after the Second Revolution. But my people had been converted to the New Crusade and had broken with the Families and changed their name. I was a grown

man before I knew I was a Member.”

“The deuce you say! That’s interesting-how did you come to be located … if you don’t mind my asking?” “Well, you see I was in the Navy and one of my superior officers-“

“Got it! Got it! I thought you were a spaceman. You’re Slipstick Libby, the Calculator.” Libby grinned sheepishly. “I have been called that.”

“Sure, sure. The last can I piloted was equipped with your paragravitic rectifier. And the control bank used your fractional differential on the steering jets. But I installed that myself-kinda borrowed your patent.”

Libby seemed undisturbed by the theft. His face lit up. “You are interested in symbolic logic?”

“Only pragmatically. But look, I put a modification on your gadget that derives from the rejected alternatives in your thirteenth equation. It helps like this: suppose you are cruising in a field of density ‘x’ with an n-order gradient normal to your course and you want to set your optimum course for a projected point of rendezvous capital ‘A’ at matching-in vector ‘rho’ using automatic selection the entire jump, then if-“

They drifted entirely away from Basic English as used by earthbound laymen. The newsbox beside them continued to hunt; three times it spoke up, each time Libby touched the rejection button without consciously hearing it.

“I see your point,” he said at last. “I had considered a somewhat similar modification but concluded that it was not commercially feasible, too expensive for anyone but enthusiasts such as yourself. But your solution is cheaper than mine.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Why, it’s obvious from the data. Your device contains sixty-two moving parts, which should require, if we assume standardized fabrication processes, a probable-” Libby hesitated momentarily as if he were programming the problem. “-a probable optimax of five thousand two hundred and eleven operation in manufacture assuming null-therblig automation, whereas mine-“

Lazarus butted in. “Andy,” he inquired solicitously, “does your head ever ache?”

Libby looked sheepish again. “There’s nothing abnormal about my talent,” he protested. “It is theoretically possible to develop it in any normal person.”

“Sure,” agreed Lazarus, “and you can teach a snake to tap dance once you get shoes on him. Never mind, I’m glad to have fallen in with you. I heard stories about you way back when you were a kid. You were in the Cosmic Construction Corps, weren’t you?”

Libby nodded. “Earth-Mars Spot Three.”

“Yeah, that was it-chap on Mars gimme the yarn. Trader at Drywater. I knew your maternal grandfather, too. Stiffnecked old coot.” “I suppose he was.”

“He was, all right. I had quite a set-to with him at the Meeting in 2012. He had a powerful vocabulary.” Lazarus frowned slightly. “Funny thing, Andy … I recall that vividly, I’ve always had a good memory-yet it seems to be getting harder for me to keep things straight. Especially this last century.”

“Inescapable mathematical necessity,” said Libby. “Huh? Why?”

“Life experience is linearly additive, but the correlation of memory impressions is an unlimited expansion. If mankind lived as long as a thousand years, it would be necessary to invent some totally different method of memory association in order to be eclectively time-binding. Aman would otherwise flounder helplessly in the wealth of his own knowledge, unable to evaluate. Insanity, or feeble-mindedness.”

“That so?” Lazarus suddenly looked worried. “Then we’d better get busy on it.” “Oh, it’s quite possible of solution.” “Let’s work on it. Let’s not get caught short.”

The newsbox again demanded attention, this time with the buzzer and flashing light of a spot bulletin: “Hearken to the DATA, flash! Nigh Council Suspends Covenant! Under the Emergency Situation clause of the Covenant an unprecedented Action-in-Council was announced today directing the Administrator to detain and question all members of the so-called Howard Families-by any means expedient! The Administrator authorized that the following statement be released by all licensed news outlets: (I quote) ‘The suspension of the Covenant’s civil guarantees applies only to the group known as the Howard Families except that government agents are empowered to act as circumstances require to apprehend speedily the persons affected by the Action-in-Council. Citizens are urged to tolerate cheerfully any minor inconvenience this may cause them; your right of privacy will be respected in every way possible; your right of free movement may be interrupted temporarily, but full economic

restitution will be made.”

“Now, Friends and Citizens, what does this mean?-to you and you and also you! The DAILYDATAbrings you now your popular commentator, Albert Reifsnider:

“Reifsnider reporting: Service, Citizens! There is no cause for alarm. To the average free citizen this emergency will be somewhat less troublesome than a low-pressure minimum too big for the weather machines. Take it easy! Relax! Help the proctors when requested and tend to your private affairs. If inconvenienced, don’t stand on custom-cooperate with Service!

“That’s what it means today. What does it mean tomorrow and the day after that? Next year? It means that your public servants have taken a forthright step to obtain for you the boon of a longer and happier life! Don’t get your hopes too high … but it looks like the dawn of a new day. Ah, indeed it does! The jealously guarded secret of a selfish few will soon—”

Long raised an eyebrow at Libby, then switched it off.

“I suppose that,” Libby said bitterly, “is an example of ‘factual detachment in news reporting.’”

Lazarus opened his pouch and struck a cigarette before replying. “Take it easy, Andy. There are bad times and good times. We’re overdue for bad times. The people are on the march again … this time at us.”

Chapter 3

THE BURROW KNOWN as the Families’ Seat became jammed as the day wore on. Members kept trickling in, arriving by tunnels from downstare and from Indiana. As soon as it was dark a traffic jam developed at the underground pool entrance-sporting subs, fake ground cars such as Mary’s, ostensible surface cruisers modified to dive, each craft loaded with refugees some half suffocated from lying in hiding on deep bottom most of the day while waiting for a chance to sneak in.

The usual meeting room was much too small to handle the crowd; the resident staff cleared the largest room, the refectory, and removed partitions separating it from the main lounge. There at midnight Lazarus climbed onto a temporary rostrum. “Okay,” he announced, “let’s pipe it down. You down in front sit on the floor so the rest can see. I was born in 1912. Anybody older?”

He paused, then added, “Nominations for chairman speak up.”

Three were proposed; before a fourth could be offered the last man nominated got to his feet. “Axel Johnson, of the Johnson Family. I want my name withdrawn and I suggest that the others do likewise. Lazarus cut through the fog last night; let him handle it. This is no time for Family politics.”

The other names were withdrawn; no more were offered. Lazarus said, “Okay if that’s the way you want it. Before we get down to arguing I want a report from the Chief Trustee. How about it, Zack? Any of our kinfolk get nabbed?’

Zaccur Barstow did not need to identify himself; he simply said, “Speaking for the Trustees: our report is not complete, but we do not as yet know that any Member has been arrested. Of the nine thousand two hundred and eighty-five revealed Members, nine thousand one hundred and six had been reported, when I left the communication office ten minutes ago, as having reached hiding, in other Family strongholds, or in the homes of unrevealed Members, or elsewhere. Mary Sperling’s warning was amazingly successful in view of how short the time was from the alarm to the public execution of the Action-in-Council-but we still have one hundred and seventy-nine revealed cousins unreported. Probably most of these will trickle in during the next few days. Others are probably safe but unable to get in touch with us.”

“Get to the point, Zack,” Lazarus insisted. “Any reasonable chance that all of them will make it home safe?” “Absolutelynone.”

“Why?”

“Because three of them are known to be in public conveyances between here and the Moon, traveling under their revealed identities. Others we don’t know about are almost certainly caught in similar predicaments.”

“Question!” Acocky little man near the front stood up and pointed his finger at the Chief Trustee. “Were all those Members now in jeopardy protected by hypnotic injunction?” “No. There was no—”

“I demand to know why not!”

“Shut up!” bellowed Lazarus. “You’re out of order. Nobody’s on trial here and we’ve got no time to waste on spilled milk. Go ahead, Zack.”

“Very well. But I will answer the question to this extent: everyone knows that a proposal to protect our secrets by hypnotic means was voted down at the Meeting which relaxed the ‘Masquerade.’ I seem to recall that the cousin now objecting helped then to vote it down.”

“That is not true! And I insist that—”

“PIPE DOWN!” Lazarus glared at the heckler, then looked him over carefully. “Bud, you strike me as a clear proof that the Foundation should ‘a’ bred for brains instead of age.” Lazarus looked around at the crowd. “Everybody will get his say, but in order as recognized by the chair. If he butts in again, I’m going to gag him with his own teeth-is my ruling sustained?”

There was a murmur of mixed shock and approval; no one objected. Zaccur Barstow went on, “On the advice of Ralph Schultz the trustees have been proceeding quietly for the past three months to persuade revealed Members to undergo hypnotic instruction. We were largely successful.” He paused.

“Make it march, Zack,” Lazarus urged. “Are we covered? Or not?”

“We are not. At least two of our cousins certain to be arrested are not so protected.”

Lazarus shrugged. “That tears it. Kinfolk, the game’s over. One shot in the arm of babble juice and the ‘Masquerade’ is over. It’s a new situation-or will be in a few hours. What do you propose to do about it?”

In the control room of the Antipodes Rocket Wallaby, South Flight, the telecom hummed, went spung! and stuck out a tab like an impudent tongue. The copilot rocked forward in his gymbals, pulled out the message and tore it off.

He read it, then reread it. “Skipper, brace yourself.” “Trouble?”

“Read it.”

The captain did so, and whistled. “Bloody! I’ve never arrested anybody. I don’t believe I’ve even seen anybody arrested. How do we start?” “I bow to your superior authority.”

“That so?” the captain said in nettled tones. “Now that you’re through bowing you can tool aft and make the arrest.” “Uh? That’s not what I meant. You’re the bloke with the authority. I’ll relieve you at the conn.”

“You didn’t read me. I’m delegating the authority. Carry out your orders.” “Just a moment, Al, I didn’t sign up for—”

“Carry out your orders!” “Aye aye, sir!”

The copilot went aft. The ship had completed its reentry, was in its long, flat, screaming approach-glide; he was able to walk-he wondered what an arrest in free-fall would be like? Snag him with a butterfly net? He located the passenger by seat check, touched his arm. “Service, sir. There’s been a clerical error. May I see your ticket?”

“Why, certainly.”

“Would you mind stepping back to the reserve stateroom? It’s quieter there and we can both sit down.” “Not at all.”

Once they were in the private compartment the chief officer asked the passenger to sit down, then looked annoyed. “Stupid of me!-I’ve left my lists in the control room.” He turned and left. As the door slid to behind him, the passenger heard an unexpected click. Suddenly suspicious, he tried the door. It was locked.

Two proctors came for him at Melbourne. As they escorted him through the skyport he could hear remarks from a curious and surprisingly unfriendly crowd: “There’s one of the laddies now!” “Him? My word, he doesn’t look old.” “What price ape glands?” “Don’t stare, Herbert.” “Why not? Not half bad enough for him.”

They took him to the office of the Chief Provost, who invited him to sit down with formal civility. “Now then, sir,” the Provost said with a slight local twang, “if you will help us by letting the orderly make a slight injection in your arm—”

“For what purpose?”

“You want to be socially cooperative, I’m sure. It won’t hurt you.”

“That’s beside the point. I insist on an explanation. I am a citizen of the United States.”

“So you are, but the Federation has concurrent jurisdiction in any member state-and I am acting under its authority. Now bare your arm, please.” “I refuse. I stand on my civil rights.”

“Grab him, lads.”

It took four men to do it. Even before the injector touched his skin, his jaw set and a look of sudden agony came into his face. He then sat quietly, listlessly, while the peace officers waited for the drug to take effect. Presently the Provost gently rolled back one of the prisoner’s eyelids and said, “I think he’s ready. He doesn’t weigh over ten stone; it has hit him rather fast. Where’s that list of questions?”

Adeputy handed it to him; he began, “Horace Foote, do you hear me?’

The man’s lips twitched, he seemed about to speak. His mouth opened and blood gushed down his chest.

The Provost bellowed and grabbed the prisoner’s head, made quick examination. “Surgeon! He’s bitten his tongue half out of his head!”

The captain of the Luna City Shuttle Moonbeam scowled at the message in his hand. “What child’s play is this?” He glared at his third officer. “Tell me that, Mister.”

The third officer studied the overhead. Fuming, the captain held the message at arm’s length, peered at it and read aloud: “-imperative that subject persons be prevented from doing themselves injury. You are directed to render them unconscious without warning them.” He shoved the flimsy away from him. “What do they think I’m running? Coventry? Who do they think they are?-telling me in my ship what I must do with my passengers! I won’t-so help me, I won’t! There’s no rule requiring me to … is there, Mister?”

The third officer went on silently studying the ship’s structure.

The captain stopped pacing. “Purser! Purser! Why is that man never around when I want him?” “I’m here, Captain.”

“About time!”

“I’ve been here all along, sir.”

“Don’t argue with me. Here-attend to this.” He handed the dispatch to the purser and left.

Ashipfitter, supervised by the purser, the hull officer, and the medical officer, made a slight change in the air-conditioning ducts to one cabin; two worried passengers sloughed off their cares under the influence of a nonlethal dose of sleeping gas.

“Another report, sir.”

“Leave it,” the Administrator said in a tired voice.

“And Councilor Bork Vanning presents his compliments and requests an interview.” “Tell him that I regret that I am too busy.”

“He insists on seeing you, sir.”

Administrator Ford answered snappishly, “Then you may tell the Honorable Mr. Vanning that be does not give orders in this office!” The aide said nothing; Administrator Ford pressed his fingertips wearily against his forehead and went on slowly, “Na, Gerry, don’t tell him that. Be diplomatic but don’t let him in.”

“Yes, sir.”

When he was alone, the Administrator picked up the report. His eye skipped over official heading, date line, and file number: “Synopsis of Interview with Conditionally Proscribed Citizen Arthur Sperling, full transcript attached. Conditions of Interview: Subject received normal dosage of neosco., having previously received unmeasured dosage of gaseous hypnotal. Antidote—”How the devil could you cure subordinates of wordiness? Was there something in the soul of a career civil servant that cherished red tape? His eye skipped on down:

“-stated that his name was Arthur Sperling of the Foote Family and gave his age as one hundred thirty-seven years. (Subject’s apparent age is forty-five plus-or-minus four: see bio report attached.) Subject admitted that he was a member of the Howard Families. He stated that the Families numbered slightly more than one hundred thousand members. He was asked to correct this and it was suggested to him that the correct number was nearer ten thousand. He persisted in his original statement.”

The Administrator stopped and reread this part.

He skipped on down, looking for the key part: “-insisted that his long life was the result of his ancestry and had no other cause. Admitted that artificial means had been used to preserve his youthful appearance but maintained firmly that his life expectancy was inherent, not acquired. It was suggested to him that his elder relatives had subjected him without his knowledge to treatment in his early youth to increase his life span. Subject admitted possibility. On being pressed for names of persons who might have performed, or might be performing, such treatments he returned to his original statement that no such treatments exist.

“He gave the names (surprise association procedure) and in some cases the addresses of nearly two hundred members of his kin group not previously identified as such in our records. (List attached) His strength ebbed under this arduous technique and he sank into full apathy from which he could not be roused by any stimuli within the limits of his estimated tolerance (see Bio Report).

“Conclusions under Expedited Analysis, Kelly-Holmes Approximation Method: Subject does not possess and does not believe in the Search Object. Does not remember experiencing Search Object but is mistaken. Knowledge of Search Object is limited to a small group, of the order of twenty. Amember of this star group will be located through not more than triple- concatenation elimination search. (Probability of unity, subject to assumptions: first, that topologic social space is continuous and is included in the physical space of the Western Federation and, second, that at least one concatenative path exists between apprehended subjects and star group. Neither assumption can be verified as of this writing, but the first assumption is strongly supported by statistical analysis of the list of names supplied by Subject of previously unsuspected members of Howard kin group, which analysis also supports Subject’s estimate of total size of group, and second assumption when taken negatively

postulates that star group holding Search Object has been able to apply it with no social-space of contact, an absurdity.)

“Estimated Time for Search: 71 hrs, plus-or-minus 20 hrs. Prediction but not time estimate vouched for by cognizant bureau. Time estimate will be re—”

Ford slapped the report on a stack cluttering his oldfashioned control desk. The dumb fools! Not to recognize a negative report when they saw one-yet they called themselves psychographers!

He buried his face in his hands in utter weariness and frustration.

Lazarus rapped on the table beside him, using the butt of his blaster as a gavel. “Don’t interrupt the speaker,” he boomed, then added, “Go ahead but cut it short.”

Bertram Hardy nodded curtly. “I say again, these mayflies we see around us have no rights that we of the Families are bound to respect. We should deal with them with stea1th, with cunning, with guile, and when we eventually consolidate our position … with force! We are no more obligated to respect their welfare than a hunter is obliged to shout a warning at his quarry. The—”

There was a catcall from the rear of the room. Lazarus again banged for order and tried to spot the source. Hardy ploughed steadily on. “The so-called human race has split in two; it is time we admitted it. On one side, Homo vivens, ourselves … on the other-Homo moriturus! With the great lizards, with the sabertooth tiger and the bison, their day is done. We would no more mix our living blood with theirs than we would attempt to breed with apes. I say temporize with them, tell them any tale, assure them that we will bathe them in the fountain of youth- gain time, so that when these two naturally antagonistic races join battle, as they inevitably must, the victory will be ours!”

There was no applause but Lazarus could see wavering uncertainty in many faces. Bertram Hardy’s ideas ran counter to thought patterns of many years of gentle living yet his words seemed to ring with destiny. Lazarus did not believe in destiny; he believed in … well, never mind-but he wondered how Brother Bertram would look with both arms broken.

Eve Barstow got up. “If that is what Bertram means by the survival of the fittest,” she said bitterly, “I’ll go live with the asocials in Coventry. However, he has offered a plan; I’ll have to offer another plan if I won’t take his. I won’t accept any plan which would have us live at the expense of our poor transient neighbors. Furthermore it is clear to me now that our mere presence, the simple fact of our rich heritage of life, is damaging to the spirit of our poor neighbor. Our longer years and richer opportunities make his best efforts seem futile to him-any effort save a hopeless struggle against an appointed death. Our mere presence saps his strength, ruins his judgment, fills him with panic fear of death.

“So I propose a plan. Let’s disclose ourselves, tell all the truth, and ask for our share of the Earth, some little corner where we may live apart. If our poor friends wish to surround it with a great barrier like that around Coventry, so be it-it is better that we never meet face to face.”

Some expressions of doubt changed to approval. Ralph Schultz stood up. “Without prejudice to Eve’s basic plan, I must advise you that it is my professional opinion that the psychological insulation she proposes cannot be accomplished that easily. As long as we’re on this planet they won’t be able to put us out of their minds. Modern communications-“

“Then we must move to another planet!” she retorted.

“Where?” demanded Bertram Hardy. “Venus? I’d rather live in a steam bath. Mars? Worn-out and worthless.” “We will rebuild it,” she insisted.

“Not in your lifetime nor mine. No, my dear Eve, your tenderheartedness sounds well but it doesn’t make sense. There is only one planet in the System fit to live on-we’re standing on it.” Something in Bertram Hardy’s words set off a response in Lazarus Long’s brain, then the thought escaped him. Something … something that he had heard of said just a day or two ago

… or was it longer than? Somehow it seemed to be associated with his first trip out into space, too, well over a century ago. Thunderation! it was maddening to have his memory play tricks on him like that—

Then he had it-the starship! The interstellar ship they were putting the finishing touches on out there between Earth and Luna. “Folks,” he drawled, “before we table this idea of moving to another planet, let’s consider all the possibilities.” He waited until he had their full attention. “Did you ever stop to think that not all the planets swing around this one Sun?”

Zaccur Barstow broke the silence. “Lazarus … are you making a serious suggestion?” “Dead serious.”

“It does not sound so. Perhaps you had better explain.”

“I will.” Lazarus faced the crowd. “There’s a spaceship hanging out there in the sky, a roomy thing, built to make the long jumps between stars. Why don’t we take it and go looking for our own piece of real estate?”

Bertram Hardy was first to recover. “I don’t know whether our chairman is lightening the gloom with another of his wisecracks or not, but, assuming that he is serious, I’ll answer. My objection to Mars applies to this wild scheme ten times over. I understand that the reckless fools who are actually intending to man that ship expect to make the jump in about a century – then maybe their grandchildren will find something, or maybe they won’t. Either way, I’m not interested. I don’t care to spend a century locked up in a steel tank, nor do I expect to live that long. I won’t buy it.”

“Hold it,” Lazarus told him. “Where’s Andy Libby?” “Here,” Libby answered! standing up.

“Come on down front. Slipstick, did you have anything to do with designing the new Centarus ship?” “No. Neither this one nor the first one.”

Lazarus spoke to the crowd. “That settles it. If that ship didn’t have Slipstick’s finger in the drive design, then she’s not as fast as she could be, not by a good big coefficient. Slipstick, better get busy on the problem, son. We’re likely to need a solution.”

“But, Lazarus, you mustn’t assume that—” “Aren’t there theoretical possibilities?” “Well, you know there are, but—”

“Then get that carrot top of yours working on it.” “Well … all right.” Libby blushed as pink as his hair.

“Just a moment, Lazarus.” It was Zaccur Barstow. “I like this proposal and I think we should discuss it at length not let ourselves be frightened off by Brother Bertram’s distaste for it. Even if Brother Libby fails to find a better means of propulsion-and frankly, I don’t think he will; I know a little something of field mechanics-even so, I shan’t let a century frighten me. By using cold-rest and manning the ship in shifts, most of us should be able to complete one hop. There is—”

“What makes you think,” demanded Bertram Hardy, “that they’ll let us man the ship anyhow?”

“Bert,” Lazarus said coldly, “address the chair when you want to sound off. You’re not even a Family delegate. Last warning.”

“As I was saying,” Barstow continued, “there is an appropriateness in the long-lived exploring the stars. Amystic might call it our true vocation.” He pondered. “As for the ship Lazarus suggested; perhaps they will not let us have that … but the Families are rich. If we need a starship-or ships-we can build them, we can pay for them. I think we had better hope that they will let us do this … for it may be that there is no way, not another way of any sort, out of our dilemma which does not include our own extermination.”

Barstow spoke these last words softly and slowly, with great sadness. They bit into the company like damp chill. To most of them the problem was so new as not yet to be real; no one had voiced the possible consequence of failing to find a solution satisfactory to the shortlived majority. For their senior trustee to speak soberly of his fear that the Families might be exterminated-hunted down and killed-stirred up in each one the ghost they never mentioned.

“Well,” Lazarus said briskly when the silence had grown painful, “before we work this idea over, let’s hear what other plan anyone has to offer. Speak up.”

Amessenger hurried in and spoke to Zaccur Barstow. He looked startled and seemed to ask to have the message repeated. He then hurried across the rostrum to Lazarus, whispered to him. Lazarus looked startled. Barstow hurried out.

Lazarus looked back at the crowd. “We’ll take a recess,” he announced. “Give you time to think about other plans and time for a stretch and a smoke.” He reached for his pouch. “What’s up?” someone called out.

Lazarus struck a cigarette, took a long drag, let it drift out. “We’ll have to wait and see,” he said. “I don’t know. But at least half a dozen of the plans put forward tonight we won’t have to bother to vote on. The situation has changed again-how much, I couldn’t say.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” Lazarus drawled, “it seems the Federation Administrator wanted to talk to Zack Barstow right away. He asked for him by name … and he called over our secret Families’ circuit.” “Huh? That’s impossible!”

“Yep. So is a baby, son.”

Chapter 4

ZACCUR BARSTOW TRIED to quiet himself down as he hurried into the phone booth.

At the other end of the same videophone circuit the Honorable Slayton Ford was doing the same thing-trying to calm his nerves. He did not underrate himself. Along and brilliant public career crowned by years as Administrator for the Council and under the Covenant of the Western Administration had made Ford aware of his own superior ability and unmatched experience; no ordinary man could possibly make him feel at a disadvantage in negotiation.

But this was different.

What would a man be like who had lived more than two ordinary lifetimes? Worse than that-a man who had had four or five times the adult experience that Ford himself had had? Slayton Ford knew that his own opinions had changed and changed again since his own boyhood; he knew that the boy he had been, or even the able young man he had been, would be no match for the mature man he had become. So what would this Barstow be like? Presumably he was the most able, the most astute, of a group all of whom had had much more experience than Ford could possibly have-how could he guess such a man’s evaluations, intentions, ways of thinking, his possible resources?

Ford was certain of only one thing: he did not intend to trade Manhattan Island for twenty-four dollars and a case of whisky, nor sell humanity’s birthright for a mess of pottage.

He studied Barstow’s face as the image appeared in his phone. Agood face and strong … it would be useless to try to bully this man. And the man looked young-why, he looked younger than Ford himself! The subconscious image of the Administrator’s own stern and implacable grandfather faded out of his mind and his tension eased off. He said quietly, “You are Citizen Zaccur Barstow?”

“Yes, Mister Administrator.”

“You are chief executive of the Howard Families?”

“I am the current speaker trustee of our Families’ Foundation. But I am responsible to my cousins rather than in authority over them.” Ford brushed it aside. “I assume that your position carries with it leadership. I can’t negotiate with a hundred thousand people.”

Barstow did not blink. He saw the power play in the sudden admission that the administration knew the true numbers of the Families and discounted it. He had already adjusted himself to the shock of learning that the Families’ secret headquarters was no longer secret and the still more upsetting fact that the Administrator knew how to tap into their private communication system; it simply proved that one or more Members had been caught and forced to talk.

So it was now almost certain that the authorities already knew every important fact about the Families.

Therefore it was useless to try to bluff-just the same, don’t volunteer any information; they might not have all the facts this soon. Barstow answered without noticeable pause. “What is it you wish to discuss with me, sir?”

“The policy of the Administration toward your kin group. The welfare of yourself and your relatives.”

Barstow shrugged. “What can we discuss? The Covenant has been tossed aside and you have been given power to do as you like with us-to squeeze a secret out of us that we don’t have. What can we do but pray for mercy?”

“Please!” The Administrator gestured his annoyance. “Why fence with me? We have a problem, you and I. Let’s discuss it openly and try to reach a solution. Yes?”

Barstow answered slowly, “I would like to … and I believe that you would like to, also. But the problem is based on a false assumption, that we, the Howard Families, know how to lengthen human life. We don’t.”

“Suppose I tell you that I know there is no such secret?”

“Mmm … I would like to believe you. But how can you reconcile that with the persecution of my people? You’ve been harrying us like rats.”

Ford made a wry face. “There is an old, old story about a theologian who was asked to reconcile the doctrine of Divine mercy with the doctrine of infant damnation. ‘The Almighty,’ he explained, ‘finds it necessary to do things in His official and public capacity which in His private and personal capacity He deplores.’”

Barstow smiled in spite of himself. “I see the analogy. Is it actually pertinent?” “I think it is.”

“So. You didn’t call me simply to make a headsman’s apology?”

“No. I hope not. You keep in touch with politics? I’m sure you must; your position would require it.” Barstow nodded; Ford explained at length:

Ford’s administration had been the longest since the signing of the Covenant; he had lasted through four Councils. Nevertheless his control was now so shaky that he could not risk forcing a vote of confidence-certainly not over the Howard Families. On that issue his nominal majority was already a minority. If he refused the present decision of the Council, forced it to a vote of confidence, Ford would be out of office and the present minority leader would take over as administrator. “You follow me? I can either stay in office and try to cope with this problem while restricted by a Council directive with which I do not agree … or I can drop out and let my successor handle it.”

“Surely you’re not asking my advice?”

“No, no! Not on that. I’ve made my decision. The Action-in-Council would have been carried out in any case, either by me or by Mr. Vanning-so I decided to do it. The question is: will I have your help, or will I not?”

Barstow hesitated, while rapidly reviewing Ford’s political career in his mind. The earlier part of Ford’s long administration had been almost a golden age of statesmanship. Awise and practical man, Ford had shaped into workable rules the principles of human freedom set forth by Novak in the language of the Covenant. It had been a period of good will, of prosperous expansion, of civilizing processes which seemed to be permanent, irreversible.

Nevertheless a setback had come and Barstow understood the reasons at least as well as Ford did. Whenever the citizens fix their attention on one issue to the exclusion of others, the situation is ripe for scalawags, demagogues, ambitious men on horseback. The Howard Families, in all innocence, had created the crisis in public morals from which they now suffered, through their own action, taken years earlier, in letting the shortlived learn of their existence. It mattered not at all that the “secret” did not exist; the corrupting effect did exist. Ford at least understood the true situation- “We’ll help,” Barstow answered suddenly. “Good. What do you suggest?”

Barstow chewed his lip. “Isn’t there some way you can stall off this drastic action, this violation of the Covenant itself?” Ford shook his head. “It’s too late.”

“Even if you went before the public and told the citizens, face to face, that you knew that-“

Ford cut him short. “I wouldn’t last in office long enough to make the speech. Nor would I be believed. Besides that-understand me clearly, Zaccur Barstow-no matter what sympathy I may have personally for you and your people, I would not do so if I could. This whole matter is a cancer eating into vitals of our society; it must be settled. I have had my hand forced, true

… but there is no turning back. It must be pressed on to a solution.”

In at least one respect Barstow was a wise man; he knew that another man could oppose him and not be a villain. Nevertheless he protested, “My people are being persecuted.”

“Your people,” Ford said forcefully, “are a fraction of a tenth of one per cent of all the people … and I must find a solution for all! I’ve called on you to find out if you have any suggestions toward a solution for everyone. Do you?”

“I’m not sure,” Barstow answered slowly. “Suppose I concede that you must go ahead with this ugly business of arresting my people, of questioning them by unlawful means-I suppose I have no choice about that-“

“You have no choice. Neither have I.” Ford frowned. “It will be carried out as humanely as I can manage it-I am not a free agent.”

“Thank you. But, even though you tell me it would be useless for you yourself to go to the people, nevertheless you have enormous propaganda means at your disposal. Would it be possible, while we stall along, to build up a campaign to convince the people of the true facts? Prove to them that there is no secret?” Ford answered, “Ask yourself: will it work?”

Barstow sighed. “Probably not.”

“Nor would I consider it a solution even if it would! The people-even my trusted assistants-are clinging to their belief in a fountain of youth because the only alternative is too bitter to think about. Do you know what it would mean to them? For them to believe the bald truth?”

“Go on?’

“Death has been tolerable to me only because Death has been the Great Democrat, treating all alike. But now Death plays favorites. Zaccur Barstow, can you understand the bitter, bitter jealousy of the ordinary man of-oh, say ‘fifty’- who looks on one of your sort? Fifty years … twenty of them he is a child, he is well past thirty before he is skilled in his profession. He is forty before he is established and respected. For not more than the last ten years of his fifty he has really amounted to something.”

Ford leaned forward in the screen and spoke with sober emphasis: “And now, when he has reached his goal, what is his prize? His eyes are failing him, his bright young strength is gone, his heart and wind are ‘not what they used to be.’ He is not senile yet … but he feels the chill of the first frost. He knows what is in store for him. He knows-he knows!

“But it was inevitable and each man learned to be resigned to it.”

“Now you come along,” Ford went on bitterly. “You shame him in his weakness, you humble him before his children. He dares not plan for the future; you blithely undertake plans that will not mature for fifty years-for a hundred. No matter what success he has achieved, what excellence he has attained, you will catch up with him, pass him-outlive him. In his weakness you are kind to him.

“Is it any wonder that he hates you?”

Barstow raised his head wearily. “Do you hate me, Slayton Ford?”

“No. No, I cannot afford to hate anyone. But I can tell you this,” Ford added suddenly, “had there been a secret, I would have it out of you if I had to tear you to pieces!”

“Yes. I understand that.” Barstow paused to think. “There is little that we of the Howard Families can do. We did not plan it this way; it was planned for us. But there is one thing we can offer.”

“Yes?”

Barstow explained.

Ford shook his head. “Medically what you suggest is feasible and I have no doubt that a half interest in your heritage would lengthen the span of human life. But even if women were willing to accept the germ plasm of your men-I do not say that they would-it would be psychic death for all other men. There would be an outbreak of frustration and hatred that would split the human race to ruin. No, no matter what we wish, our customs are what they are. We can’t breed men like animals; they won’t stand for it.”

“I know it,” agreed Barstow, “but it is all we have to offer … a share in our fortune through artificial impregnation.”

“Yes. I suppose I should thank you but I feel no thanks and I shan’t. Now let’s be practical. Individually you old ones are doubtless honorable, lovable men. But as a group you are as dangerous as carriers of plague. So you must be quarantined.”

Barstow nodded. “My cousins and I had already reached that conclusion.” Ford looked relieved. “I’m glad you’re being sensible about it.”

“We can’t help ourselves. Well? Asegregated colony? Some remote place that would be a Coventry of our own? Madagascar, perhaps? Or we might take the British Isles, build them up again and spread from there into Europe as the radioactivity died down.”

Ford shook his head. “Impossible. That would simply leave the problem for my grandchildren to solve. By that time you and yours would have grown in strength; you might defeat us. No, Zaccur Barstow, you and your kin must leave this planet entirely!”

Barstow looked bleak. “I knew it would come to that. Well where shall we go?” “Take your choice of the Solar System. Anywhere you like.”

“But where? Venus is no prize, but even if we chose it, would they accept us? The Venerians won’t take orders from Earth; that was settled in 2020. Yes, they now accept screened immigrants under the Four Planets Convention but would they accept a hundred thousand whom Earth found too dangerous to keep? I doubt it.”

“So do I. Better pick another planet.”

“What planet? In the whole system there is not another body that will support human life as it is. It would take almost superhuman effort, even with unlimited money and the best of modern engineering, to make the most promising of them fit for habitation.”

“Make the effort. We will be generous with help.”

“I am sure you would. But is that any better solution in the long run than giving us a reservation on Earth? Are you going to put a stop to space travel?”

Ford sat up suddenly. “Oh! I see your thought. I had not followed it through, but let’s face it. Why not? Would it not be better to give up space travel than to let this situation degenerate into open war? It was given up once before.”

“Yes, when the Venerians threw off their absentee landlords. But it started up again and Luna City is rebuilt and ten times more tonnage moves through the sky than ever did before. Can you stop it? If you can, will it stay stopped?”

Ford turned it over and over in his mind. He could not stop space travel, no administration could. But could an interdict be placed on whatever planet these oldsters were shipped to? And would it help? One generation, two, three … what difference would it make? Ancient Japan had tried some solution like that; the foreign devils had come sailing in anyhow. Cultures could not be kept apart forever, and when they did come in contact, the hardier displaced the weaker; that was a natural law.

Apermanent and effective quarantine was impossible. That left only one answer-an ugly one. But Ford was toughminded; he could accept what was necessary. He started making plans, Barstow’s presence in the screen forgotten. Once he gave the Chief Provost the location of the Howard Families headquarters it should be reduced in an hour, two at the most unless they had extraordinary defenses-but anywise it was just a matter of time. From those who would be arrested at their headquarters it should be possible to locate and arrest every other member of their group. With luck he would have them all in twenty-four to forty-eight hours.

The only point left undecided in his mind was whether to liquidate them all, or simply to sterilize them. Either would be a final solution and there was no third solution. But which was the more humane?

Ford knew that this would end his career. He would leave office in disgrace, perhaps be sent to Coventry, but he gave it no thought; he was so constituted as to be unable to weigh his own welfare against his concept of his public duty.

Barstow could not read Ford’s mind but he did sense that Ford had reached a decision and he surmised correctly how bad that decision must be for himself and his kin. Now was the time, he decided, to risk his one lone trump.

“Mister Administrator-“

“Eh? Oh, sorry! I was preoccupied.” That was a vast understatement; he was shockingly embarrassed to find himself still facing a man he had just condemned to death. He gathered formality about him like a robe. “Thank you, Zaccur Barstow, for talking with me. I am sorry that-“

“Mister Administrator!”

“Yes?”

“I propose that you move us entirely out of the Solar System.” “What?” Ford blinked. “Are you speaking seriously?”

Barstow spoke rapidly, persuasively, explaining Lazarus Long’s half-conceived scheme, improvising details as he went along, skipping over obstacles and emphasizing advantages.

“It might work,” Ford at last said slowly. “There are difficulties you have not mentioned, political difficulties and a terrible hazard of time. Still, it might.” He stood up. “Go back to your people. Don’t spring this on them yet. I’ll talk with you later.”

Barstow walked back slowly while wondering what he could tell the Members. They would demand a full report; technically he had no right to refuse. But he was strongly inclined to cooperate with the Administrator as long as there was any chance of a favorable outcome. Suddenly making up his mind, he turned, went to his office, and sent for Lazarus.

“Howdy, Zack,” Long said as he came in. “How’d the palaver go?”

“Good and bad,” Barstow replied. “Listen-” He gave him a brief, accurate resume. “Can you go back in there and tell them something that will hold them?” “Mmm … reckon so.”

“Then do it and hurry back here.”

They did not like the stall Lazarus gave them. They did not want to keep quiet and they did not want to adjourn the meeting. “Where is Zaccur?”-“We demand a report!”-“Why all the mystification?”

Lazarus shut them up with a roar. “Listen to me, you damned idiots! Zack’ll talk when he’s ready-don’t joggle his elbow. He knows what he’s doing.” Aman near the back stood up. “I’m going home!”

“Do that,” Lazarus urged sweetly. “Give my love to the proctors.” The man looked startled and sat down.

“Anybody else want to go home?” demanded Lazarus. “Don’t let me stop you. But it’s time you bird-brained dopes realized that you have been outlawed. The only thing that stands between you and the proctors is Zack Barstow’s ability to talk sweet to the Administrator. So do as you like the meeting’s adjourned.”

“Look, Zack,” said Lazarus a few minutes later, “let’s get this straight. Ford is going to use his extraordinary powers to help us glom onto the big ship and make a getaway. Is that right?” “He’s practically committed to it.”

“Hmmm-He’ll have to do this while pretending to the Council that everything he does is just a necessary step in squeezing the ‘secret’ out of us-he’s going to double-cross ‘em. That right?”

“I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I-“ “But that’s true, isn’t it?”

“Well … yes, it must be true.”

“Okay. Now, is our boy Ford bright enough to realize what he is letting himself in for and tough enough to go through with it?”

Barstow reviewed what he knew of Ford and added his impressions from the interview. “Yes,” he decided, “he knows and he’s strong enough to face it.” “All right. Now how about you, pal? Are you up to it, too?” Lazarus’ voice was accusing.

“Me? What do you mean?”

“You’re planning on double-crossing your crowd, too, aren’t you? Have you got the guts to go through with it when the going gets tough?” “I don’t understand you, Lazarus,” Barstow answered worriedly. “I’m not planning to deceive anyone-at least, no member of the Families.”

“Better look at your cards again,” Lazarus went on remorselessly. “Your part of the deal is to see to it that every man, woman and child takes part in this exodus. Do you expect to sell the idea to each one of them separately and get a hundred thousand people to agree? Unanimously? Shucks, you couldn’t get that many to whistle ‘Yankee Doodle’ unanimously.”

“But they will have to agree,” protested Barstow. “They have no choice. We either emigrate, or they hunt us down and kill us. I’m certain that is what Ford intends to do. And he will.” “Then why didn’t you walk into the meeting and tell ‘em that? Why did you send me in to give ‘em a stall?”

Barstow rubbed a hand across his eyes. “I don’t know.”

“I’ll tell you why,” continued Lazarus. “You think better with your hunches than most men do with the tops of their minds. You sent me in there to tell ‘em a tale because you knew damn well the truth wouldn’t serve. If you told ‘em it was get out or get killed, some would get panicky and some would get stubborn. And some old-woman-in-kilts would decide to go home and stand on his Covenant rights. Then he’d spill the scheme before it ever dawned on him that the government was playing for keeps. That’s right, isn’t it?”

Barstow shrugged and laughed unhappily. “You’re right. I didn’t have it figured out but you’re absolutely right.”

“But you did have it figured out,” Lazarus assured him. “You had the right answers. Zack, I like your hunches; that’s why I’m stringing along. All right, you and Ford are planning to pull a whizzer on every man jack on this globe-I’m asking you again: have you got the guts to see it through?”

Chapter 5

THE MEMBERS STOOD AROUND in groups, fretfully. “I can’t understand it,” the Resident Archivist was saying to a worried circle around her. “The Senior Trustee never interfered in my work before. But he came bursting into my office with that Lazarus Long behind him and ordered me out.”

“What did he say?” asked one of her listeners.

“Well, I said, ‘May I do you a service, Zaccur Barstow? and be said, ‘Yes, you may. Get out and take your girls with you.’ Not a word of ordinary courtesy!”

“Alot you’ve got to complain about,” another voice added gloomily. It was Cecil Hedrick, of the Johnson Family, chief communications engineer. “Lazarus Long paid a call on me, and he was a damned sight less polite.”

“What did he do?”

“He walks into the communication cell and tells me he is going to take over my board-Zaccur’s orders. I told him that nobody could touch my burners but me and my operators, and anyhow, where was his authority? You know what he did? You won’t believe it but he pulled a blaster on me.”

“You don’t mean it!”

“I certainly do. I tell you, that man is dangerous. He ought to go for psycho adjustment. He’s an atavism if I ever saw one.” Lazarus Long’s face stared out of the screen into that of the Administrator. “Got it all canned?” he demanded.

Ford cut the switch on the facsimulator on his desk. “Got it all,” he confirmed.

“Okay,” the image of Lazarus replied. “I’m clearing.” As the screen went blank Ford spoke into his interoffice circuit. “Have the High Chief Provost report to me at once-in corpus.”

The public safety boss showed up as ordered with an expression on his lined face in which annoyance struggled with discipline. He was having the busiest night of his career, yet the Old Man had sent orders to report in the flesh. What the devil were viewphones for, anyway, he thought angrily-and asked himself why he had ever taken up police work. He rebuked his boss by being coldly formal and saluting unnecessarily. “You sent for me, sir.”

Ford ignored it. “Yes, thank you. Here.” He pressed a stud a film spool popped out of the facsimulator. “This is a complete list of the Howard Families. Arrest them.”

“Yes, sir.” The Federation police chief stared at the spool and debated whether or not to ask how it had been obtained-it certainly hadn’t come through his office … did the Old Man have an intelligence service he didn’t even know about?

“It’s alphabetical, but keyed geographically,” the Administrator was saying. “After you put it through sorters, send the-no, bring the original back to me. You can stop the psycho interviews, too,” he added. “Just bring them in and hold them. I’ll give you more instructions later.”

The High Chief Provost decided that this was not a good time to show curiosity. “Yes, sir.” He saluted stiffly and left.

Ford turned back to his desk controls and sent word that he wanted to see the chiefs of the bureaus of land resources and of transportation control. On afterthought he added the chief of the bureau of consumption logistics.

Back in the Families’ Seat a rump session of the trustees was meeting; Barstow was absent. “I don’t like it,” Andrew Weatherall was saying. “I could understand Zaccur deciding to delay reporting to the Members but I had supposed that he simply wanted to talk to us first. I certainly did expect him to consult us. What do you make of it, Philip?”

Philip Hardy chewed his lip. “I don’t know. Zaccur’s got a head on his shoulders … but it certainly seems to me that he should have called us together and advised with us. Has he spoken with you, Justin?”

“No, he has not,” Justin Foote answered frigidly.

“Well, what should we do? We can’t very well call him in and demand an accounting unless we are prepared to oust him from office and if he refuses. I, for one, am reluctant to do that.” They were still discussing it when the proctors arrived.

Lazarus heard the commotion and correctly interpreted it-no feat, since he had information that his brethren lacked. He was aware that he should submit peacefully and conspicuously to arrest-set a good example. But old habits die hard; he postponed the inevitable by ducking into the nearest men’s ‘fresher.

It was a dead end. He glanced at the air duct-no, too small. While thinking he fumbled in his pouch for a cigarette; his hand found a strange object, he pulled it out. It was the brassard he bad “borrowed” from the proctor in Chicago.

When the proctor working point of the mop-squad covering that wing of the Seat stuck his head into that ‘fresher, he found another “proctor” already there. “Nobody in here,” announced Lazarus. “I’ve checked it.”

“How the devil did you get ahead of me?’

“Around your flank. Stoney Island Tunnel and through their air vents.” Lazarus trusted that the real cop would be unaware that there was no Stoney Island Tunnel “Got a cigarette on you?” “Huh? This is no time to catch a smoke.”

“Shucks,” said Lazarus, “my legate is a good mile away.” “Maybe so,” the proctor replied, “but mine is right behind us.”

“So? Well, skip it-I’ve got something to tell him anyhow.” Lazarus started to move past but the proctor did not get out of his way. He was glancing curiously at Lazarus’ kilt. Lazarus had turned it inside out and its blue lining made a fair imitation of a proctor’s service uniform-if not inspected closely.

“What station did you say you were from?” inquired the proctor.

“This one,” answered Lazarus and planted a short jab under the man’s breastbone. Lazarus’ coach in rough-and-tumble had explained to him that a solar plexus blow was harder to dodge than one to the jaw; the coach bad been dead since the roads strike of 1966, his skill lived on.

Lazarus felt more like a cop with a proper uniform kilt and a bandolier of paralysis bombs slung under his left arm. Besides, the proctor’s kilt was a better fit. To the right the passage outside led to the Sanctuary and a dead end; he went to the left by Hobson’s choice although he knew he would run into his unconscious benefactor’s legate. The passage gave into a hall which was crowded with Members herded into a group of proctors. Lazarus ignored his kin and sought out the harassed officer in charge. “Sir,” he reported, saluting smartly, “There’s sort of a hospital back there. You’ll need fifty or sixty stretchers.”

“Don’t bother me, tell your legate. We’ve got our hands full.”

Lazarus almost did not answer; he had caught Mary Sperling’s eye in the crowd-she stared at him and looked away. He caught himself and answered, “Can’t tell him, sir. Not available.” “Well, go on outside and tell the first-aid squad.”

“Yes, sir.” He moved away, swaggering a little, his thumbs hooked in the band of his kilt. He was far down the passage leading to the transbelt tunnel serving the Waukegan outlet when he heard shouts behind him. Two proctors were running to overtake him.

Lazarus stopped in the archway giving into the transbelt tunnel and waited for them. “What’s the trouble?’ he asked easily as they came up.

“The legate—”began one. He got no further; a paralysis bomb tinkled and popped at his feet. He looked surprised as the radiations wiped all expression from his face; his mate fell

across him.

Lazarus waited behind a shoulder of the arch, counted seconds up to fifteen: “Number one jet fire! Number two jet fire! Number three jet fire!”-added a couple to be sure the paralyzing effect had died away. He had cut it finer than he liked. He had not ducked quite fast enough and his left foot tingled from exposure.

He then checked. The two were unconscious, no one else was in sight. He mounted the transbelt. Perhaps they had not been looking for him in his proper person, perhaps no one had given him away. But he did not hang around to find out. One thing he was damn’ well certain of, he told himself, if anybody had squealed on him, it wasn’t Mary Sperling.

It took two more parabombs and a couple of hundred words of pure fiction to get him out into the open air. Once he was there and out of immediate observation the brassard and the remaining bombs went into his pouch and the bandolier ended up behind some bushes; he then looked up a clothing store in Waukegan.

He sat down in a sales booth and dialed the code for kilts. He let cloth designs flicker past in the screen while he ignored the persuasive voice of the catalogue until a pattern showed up which was distinctly unmilitary and not blue, whereupon he stopped the display and punched an order for his size. He noted the price, tore an open-credit voucher from his wallet, stuck it into the machine and pushed the switch. Then he enjoyed a smoke while the tailoring was done.

Ten minutes later he stuffed the proctor’s kilt into the refuse hopper of the sales booth and left, nattily and loudly attired. He had not been in Waukegan the past century but he found a middle-priced autel without drawing attention by asking questions, dialed its registration board for a standard suite and settled down for seven hours of sound sleep.

He breakfasted in his suite, listening with half an ear to the news box; he was interested, in a mild way, in hearing what might be reported concerning the raid on the Families. But it was a detached interest; he had already detached himself from it in his own mind. It had been a mistake, he now realized, to get back in touch with the Families-a darn good thing he was clear of it all with his present public identity totally free of any connection with the whing-ding.

Aphrase caught his attention: “-including Zaccur Barstow, alleged to be their tribal chief.

“The prisoners are being shipped to a reservation in Oklahoma, near the ruins of the Okla-Orleans road city about twenty-five miles east of Harriman Memorial Park. The Chief Provost describes it as a ‘Little Coventry,’ and has ordered all aircraft to avoid it by ten miles laterally. The Administrator could not be reached for a statement but a usually reliable source inside the administration informs us that the mass arrest was accomplished in order to speed up the investigations whereby the administration expects to obtain the ‘Secret of the Howard Families’-their techniques for indefinitely prolonging life. This forthright action in arresting and transporting every member of the outlaw group is expected to have a salutary effect in breaking down the resistance of their leaders to the legitimate demands of society. It will bring home forcibly to them that the civil rights enjoyed by decent citizens must not be used as a cloak behind which to damage society as a whole.

“The chattels and holdings of the members of this criminal conspiracy have been declared subject to the Conservator General and will be administered by his agents during the imprisonment of-“

Lazarus switched it off. “Damnation!” he thought. “Don’t fret about things you can’t help.” Of course, he had expected to be arrested himself … but he had escaped. That was that. It wouldn’t do the Families any good for him to turn himself in-and besides, he owed the Families nothing, not a tarnation thing.

Anyhow, they were better off all arrested at once and quickly placed under guard. If they had been smelled out one at a time, anything could have happened-lynchings, even pogroms. Lazarus knew from hard experience how close under the skin lay lynch law and mob violence in the most sweetly civilized; that was why he had advised Zack to rig it-that and the fact that Zack and the Administrator had to have the Families in one compact group to stand a chance of carrying out their scheme. They were well off … and no skin off his nose.

But he wondered how Zack was getting along, and what he would think of Lazarus’ disappearance. And what Mary Sperling thought-it must have been a shock to her when he turned up making a noise like a proctor. He wished he could straighten that out with her.

Not that it mattered what any of them thought. They would all either be lightyears away very soon … or dead. Aclosed book.

He turned to the phone and called the post office. “Captain Aaron Sheffield,” he announced, and gave his postal number. “Last registered with Goddard Field post office. Will you please have my mail sent to-” He leaned closer and read the code number from the suite’s mail receptacle.

“Service,” assented the voice of the clerk. “Right away, Captain.” “Thank you.”

It would take a couple of hours, he reflected, for his mail to catch up with him-a half hour in trajectory, three times that in fiddle-faddle. Might as well wait here … no doubt the search for him had lost itself in the distance but there was nothing in Waukegan he wanted. Once the mail showed up he would hire a U-push-it and scoot down to—

To where? What was he going to do now?

He turned several possibilities over in his mind and came at last to the blank realization that there was nothing, from one end of the Solar System to the other, that he really wanted to do. It scared him a little. He had once heard, and was inclined to credit, that a loss of interest in living marked the true turning point in the battle between anabolisim and catabolism-old age.

He suddenly envied normal shortlived people-at least they could go make nuisances of themselves to their children. Filial affection was not customary among Members of the Families; it

was not a feasible relationship to maintain for a century or more. And friendship, except between Members, was bound to be regarded as a passing and shallow matter. There was no

one whom Lazarus wanted to see.

Wait a minute … who was that planter on Venus? The one who knew so many folk songs and who was so funny when he was drunk? He’d go look him up. It would make a nice hop and it would be fun, much as he disliked Venus.

Then he recalled with cold shock that he had not seen the man for-how long? In any case, he was certainly dead by now.

Libby had been right, he mused glumly, when he spoke of the necessity for a new type of memory association for the long-lived. He hoped the lad would push ahead with the necessary research and come up with an answer before Lazarus was reduced to counting on his fingers. He dwelt on the notion for a minute or two before recalling that he was most unlikely ever to see Libby again.

The mail arrived and contained nothing of importance. He was not surprised; he expected no personal letters. The spools of advertising went into the refuse chute; he read only one item, a letter from Pan-Terra Docking Corp. telling him that his convertible cruiser I Spy had finished her overhaul and had been moved to a parking dock, rental to start forthwith. As instructed, they had not touched the ship’s astrogational controls-was that still the Captain’s pleasure?

He decided to pick her up later in the day and head out into space. Anything was better than sitting Earthbound and admitting that he was bored.

Paying his score and finding a jet for hire occupied less than twenty minutes. He took off and headed for Goddard Field, using the low local-traffic level to avoid entering the control pattern with a flight plan. He was not consciously avoiding the police because he had no reason to think that they could be looking for “Captain Sheffield”; it was simply habit, and it would get him to Goddard Field soon enough.

But long before he reached there, while over eastern Kansas, he decided to land and did so.

He picked the field of a town so small as to be unlikely to rate a full-time proctor and there he sought out a phone booth away from the field. Inside it, he hesitated. How did you go about calling up the head man of the entire Federation-and get him? If he simply called Novak Tower and asked for Administrator Ford, he not only would not be put through to him but his call would be switched to the Department of Public Safety for some unwelcome inquiries, sure as taxes.

Well, there was only one way to beat that, and that was to call the Department of Safety himself and, somehow, get the Chief Provost on the screen-after that he would play by ear. “Department of Civil Safety,” a voice answered. “What service, citizen?”

“Service to you,” he began in his best control-bridge voice. “I am Captain Sheffield. Give me the Chief.” He was not overbearing; his manner simply assumed obedience. Short silence— “What is it about, please?”

“I said I was Captain Sheffield.” This time Lazarus’ voice showed restrained annoyance. Another short pause— “I’ll connect you with Chief Deputy’s office,” the voice said doubtfully.

This time the screen came to life. “Yes?” asked the Chief Deputy, looking him over.

“Get me the Chief-hurry.” “What’s it about?”

“Good Lord, man-get me the Chief! I’m Captain Sheffield!”

The Chief Deputy must be excused for connecting him; he had had no sleep and more confusing things had happened in the last twenty-four hours than he had been able to assimilate. When the High Chief Provost appeared in the screen, Lazarus spoke first. “Oh, there you are! I’ve had the damnedest time cutting through your red tape. Get me the Old Man and move! Use your closed circuit.”

“What the devil do you mean? Who are you?”

“Listen, brother,” said Lazarus in tones of slow exasperation, “I would not have routed through your damned hidebound department if I hadn’t been in a jam. Cut me in to the Old Man. This is about the Howard Families.”

The police chief was instantly alert. “Make your report.”

“Look,” said Lazarus in tired tones, “I know you would like to look over the Old Man’s shoulder, but this isn’t a good time to try. If you obstruct me and force me to waste two hours by reporting in corpus, I will. But the Old Man will want to know why and you can bet your pretty parade kit, I’ll tell him.”

The Chief Provost decided to take a chance-cut this character in on a three-way; then, if the Old Man didn’t burn this joker off the screen in about three seconds, he’d know he had played safe and guessed lucky. If he did-well, you could always blame it on a cross-up in communications. He set the combo.

Administrator Ford looked flabbergasted when he recognized Lazarus in the screen. “You?’ he exclaimed. “How on Earth—Did Zaccur Barstow—” “Seal your circuit!” Lazarus cut in.

The Chief Provost blinked as his screen went dead and silent. So the Old Man did have secret agents outside the department … interesting-and not to be forgotten.

Lazarus gave Ford a quick and fairly honest account of how he happened to be at large, then added, “So you see, I could have gone to cover and escaped entirely. In fact I still can. But I want to know this: is the deal with Zaccur Barstow to let us emigrate still on?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Have you figured out how you are going to get a hundred thousand people inboard the New Frontiers without tipping your hand? You can’t trust your own people, you know that.” “I know. The present situation is a temporary expedient while we work it out.”

“And I’m the man for the job. I’ve got to be, I’m the only agent on the loose that either one of you can afford to trust. Now listen-“

Eight minutes later Ford was nodding his head slowly and saying, “It might work. It might. Anyway, you start your preparations. I’ll have a letter of credit waiting for you at Goddard.” “Can you cover your tracks on that? I can’t flash a letter of credit from the Administrator; people would wonder.”

“Credit me with some intelligence. By the time it reaches you it will appear to be a routine banking transaction.” “Sorry. Now how can I get through to you when I need to?”

“Oh, yes-note this code combination.” Ford recited it slowly. “That puts you through to my desk without relay. No, don’t write it down; memorize it.” “And how can I talk to Zack Barstow?

“Call me and I’ll hook you in. You can’t call him directly unless you can arrange a sensitive circuit.” “Even if I could, I can’t cart a sensitive around with me. Well, cheerio-I’m clearing.”

“Good luck!”

Lazarus left the phone booth with restrained haste and hurried back to reclaim his hired ship. He did not know enough about current police practice to guess whether or not the High Chief Provost had traced the call to the Administrator; he simply took it for granted because he himself would have done so in the Provosts’ shoes. Therefore the nearest available proctor was probably stepping on his heels-time to move, time to mess up the trail a little.

He took off again and headed west, staying in the local, uncontrolled low level until he reached a cloud bank that walled the western horizon. He then swung back and cut air for Kansas City, staying carefully under the speed limit and flying as low as local traffic regulations permitted. At Kansas City he turned his ship in to the local U-push-it agency and flagged a ground taxi, which carried him down the controlway to Joplin. There he boarded a local jet bus from St. Louis without buying a ticket first, thereby insuring that his flight would not be recorded until the bus’s trip records were turned in on the west coast.

Instead of worrying he spent the time making plans.

One hundred thousand people with an average mass of a hundred and fifty-no, make it a hundred and sixty pounds, Lazarus reconsidered-a hundred and sixty each made a load of sixteen million pounds, eight thousand tons. The I Spy could boost such a load against one gravity but she would be as logy as baked beans, It was out of the question anyhow; people did not stow like cargo; the I Spy could lift that dead weight-but “dead” was the word, for that was what they would be.

He needed a transport.

Buying a passenger ship big enough to ferry the Families from Earth up to where the New Frontiers hung in her construction orbit was not difficult; Four Planets Passenger Service would gladly unload such a ship at a fair price. Passenger trade competition being what it was, they were anxious to cut their losses on older ships no longer popular with tourists. But a passenger ship would not do; not only would there be unhealthy curiosity in what he intended to do with such a ship, but-and this settled it-he could not pilot it single-handed. Under the Revised Space PrecautionaryAct, passenger ships were required to be built for human control throughout on the theory that no automatic safety device could replace human judgment in an emergency.

It would have to be a freighter.

Lazarus knew the best place to find one. Despite efforts to make the Moon colony ecologically self-sufficient, Luna City still imported vastly more tonnage than she exported. On Earth this would have resulted in “empties coming back”; in space transport it was sometimes cheaper to let empties accumulate, especially on Luna where an empty freighter was worth more as metal than it had cost originally as a ship back Earthside.

He left the bus when it landed at Goddard City, went to the space field, paid his bills, and took possession of the I Spy, filed a request for earliest available departure for Luna. The slot he was assigned was two days from then, but Lazarus did not let it worry him; he simply went back to the docking company and indicated that he was willing to pay liberally for a swap, in departure time. In twenty minutes he had oral assurance that he could boost for Luna that evening.

He spent the remaining several hours in the maddening red tape of interplanetary clearance. He first picked up the letter of credit Ford had promised him and converted it into cash. Lazarus would have been quite willing to use a chunk of the cash to speed up his processing just as he had paid (quite legally) for a swap in slot with another ship. But he found himself unable to do so. Two centuries of survival had taught him that a bribe must be offered as gently and as indirectly as a gallant suggestion is made to a proud lady; in a very few minutes he came to the glum conclusion that civic virtue and public honesty could be run into the ground-the functionaries at Goddard Field seemed utterly innocent of the very notion of cumshaw, squeeze, or the lubricating effect of money in routine transactions. He admired their incorruptibility; he did not have to like it-most especially when filling out useless forms cost him the time he had intended to devote to a gourmet’s feast in

the Skygate Room.

He even let himself be vaccinated again rather than go back to the I Spy and dig out the piece of paper that showed he had been vaccinated on arrival Earthside a few weeks earlier.

Nevertheless, twenty minutes before his revised slot time, he lay at the controls of the I Spy, his pouch bulging with stamped papers and his stomach not bulging with the sandwich he had managed to grab. He had worked out the “Hohmann’s-S” trajectory he would use; the results had been fed into the autopilot. All the lights on his board were green save the one which would blink green when field control started his count down. He waited in the warm happiness that always filled him when about to boost.

Athought hit him and he raised up against his straps. Then he loosened the chest strap and sat up, reached for his copy of the current Terra Pilot and Traffic Hazards Supplement. Mmm…

New Frontiers hung in a circular orbit of exactly twenty-four hours, keeping always over meridian 106 degrees west at declination zero at a distance from Earth center of approximately twenty-six thousand miles.

Why not pay her a call, scout out the lay of the land?

The I Spy, with tanks topped off and cargo spaces empty, had many mile-seconds of reserve boost. To be sure, the field had cleared him for Luna City, not for the interstellar ship … but, with the Moon in its present phase, the deviation from his approved flight pattern would hardly show on a screen, probably would not be noticed until the film record was analyzed at some later time-at which time Lazarus would receive a traffic citation, perhaps even have his license suspended. But traffic tickets had never worried him … and it was certainly worthwhile to reconnoitre.

He was already setting up the problem in his ballistic calculator. Aside from checking the orbit elements of the New Frontiers in the Terra Pilot Lazarus could have done it in his sleep; satellite-matching maneuvers were old hat for any pilot and a doubly-tangent trajectory for a twenty-four hour orbit was one any student pilot knew by heart.

He fed the answers into his autopilot during the count down, finished with three minutes to spare, strapped himself down again and relaxed as the acceleration hit him. When the ship went into free fall, he checked his position and vector via the field’s transponder. Satisfied, he locked his board, set the alarm for rendezvous, and went to sleep.

Chapter 6

ABOUT FOUR HOURS LATER the alarm woke him. He switched it off; it continued to ring-a glance at his screen showed him why. The Gargantuan cylindrical body of the New Frontiers lay close aboard. He switched off the radar alarm circuit as well and completed matching with her by the seat of his pants, not bothering with the ballistic calculator. Before he had completed the maneuver the communications alarm started beeping. He slapped a switch; the rig hunted frequencies and the vision screen came to life. Aman looked at him. “New Frontiers calling: what ship are you?”

“Private vessel I Spy, Captain Sheffield. My compliments to your commanding officer. May I come onboard to pay a call?”

They were pleased to have visitors. The ship was completed save for inspection, trials, and acceptance; the enormous gang which had constructed her had gone to Earth and there was no one aboard but the representatives of the Jordan Foundation and a half dozen engineers employed by the corporation which had been formed to build the ship for the foundation. These few were bored with inactivity, bored with each other, anxious to quit marking time and get back to the pleasures of Earth; a visitor was a welcome diversion.

When the I Spy’s airlock had been sealed to that of the big ship, Lazarus was met by the engineer in charge-technically “captain” since the New Frontiers was a ship under way even though not under power. He introduced himself and took Lazarus on a tour of the ship. They floated through miles of corridors, visited laboratories, storerooms, libraries containing hundreds of thousands of spools, acres of hydroponic tanks for growing food and replenishing oxygen, and comfortable, spacious, even luxurious quarters for a crew colony of ten thousand people. “We believe that the Vanguard expedition was somewhat undermanned,” the skipper-engineer explained. “The socio-dynamicists calculate that this colony will be able to maintain the basics of our present level of culture.”

“Doesn’t sound like enough,” Lazarus commented. “Aren’t there more than ten thousand types of specialization?”

“Oh, certainly! But the idea is to provide experts in all basic arts and indispensable branches of knowledge. Then, as the colony expands, additional specializations can be added through the aid of the reference libraries-anything from tap-dancing to tapestry weaving. That’s the general idea though it’s out of my line. Interesting subject, no doubt, for those who like it.”

“Are you anxious to get started?” asked Lazarus.

The man looked almost shocked. “Me? D’you mean to suggest that I would go in this thing? My dear sir, I’m an engineer, not a damn’ fool.” “Sorry.”

“Oh, I don’t mind a reasonable amount of spacing when there’s a reason for it-I’ve been to Luna City more times than I can count and I’ve even been to Venus. But you don’t think the man who built the Mayflower sailed in her, do you? For my money the only thing that will keep these people who signed up for it from going crazy before they get there is that it’s a dead cinch they’re all crazy before they start.”

Lazarus changed the subject. They did not dally in the main drive space, nor in the armored cell housing the giant atomic converter, once Lazarus learned that they were unmanned, fully- automatic types. The total absence of moving parts in each of these divisions, made possible by recent developments in parastatics, made their inner workings of intellectual interest only, which could wait. What Lazarus did want to see was the control room, and there he lingered, asking endless questions until his host was plainly bored and remaining only out of politeness.

Lazarus finally shut up, not because he minded imposing on his host but because he was confident that he had learned enough about the controls to be willing to chance conning the ship.

He picked up two other important data before he left the ship: in nine Earth days the skeleton crew was planning a weekend on Earth, following which the acceptance trials would be held. But for three days the big ship would be empty, save possibly for a communications operator-Lazarus was too wary to be inquisitive on this point. But there would be no guard left in her because no need for a guard could be imagined. One might as well guard the Mississippi River.

The other thing he learned was how to enter the ship from the outside without help from the inside; he picked that datum up through watching the mail rocket arrive just as he was about to leave the ship.

At Luna City, Joseph McFee, factor for Diana Terminal Corp., subsidiary of Diana Freight Lines, welcomed Lazarus warmly. “Well! Come in, Cap’n, and pull up a chair. What’ll you drink?” He was already pouring as he talked-tax-free paint remover from his own amateur vacuum still. “Haven’t seen you in … well, too long. Where d’you raise from last and what’s the gossip there? Heard any new ones?”

“From Goddard,” Lazarus answered and told him what the skipper had said to the V.I.P. McFee answered with the one about the old maid in free fall, which Lazarus pretended not to have heard. Stories led to politics, and McFee expounded his notion of the “only possible solution” to the European questions, a solution predicated on a complicated theory of McFee’s as to why the Covenant could not be extended to any culture below a certain level of industrialization. Lazarus did not give a hoot either way but he knew better than to hurry McFee; he nodded at the right places, accepted more of the condemned rocket juice when offered, and waited for the right moment to come to the point.

“Any company ships for sale now, Joe?”

“Are there? I should hope to shout. I’ve got more steel sitting out on that plain and cluttering my inventory than I’ve had in ten years. Looking for some? I can make you a sweet price.” “Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on whether you’ve got what I want.”

“You name it, I’ve got it. Never saw such a dull market. Some days you can’t turn an honest credit.” McFee frowned. “You know what the trouble is? Well, I’ll tell you-it’s this Howard Families commotion. Nobody wants to risk any money until he knows where he stands. How can a man make plans when he doesn’t know whether to plan for ten years or a hundred? You mark my words: if the administration manages to sweat the secret loose from those babies, you’ll see the biggest boom in long-term investments ever. But if not well, long-term holdings won’t be worth a peso a dozen and there will be an eat-drink-and-be-merry craze that will make the Reconstruction look like a tea party.”

He frowned again. “What kind of metal you looking for?” “I don’t want metal, I want a ship.”

McFee’s frown disappeared, his eyebrows shot up. “So? What sort?” “Can’t say exactly. Got time to look ‘em over with me?”

They suited up and left the dome by North Tunnel, then strolled around grounded ships in the long, easy strides of low gravity. Lazarus soon saw that just two ships had both the lift and the air space needed. One was a tanker and the better buy, but a mental calculation showed him that it lacked deck space, even including the floor plates of the tanks, to accommodate eight thousand tons of passengers. The other was an older ship with cranky piston-type injection meters, but she was fitted for general merchandise and had enough deck space. Her pay load was higher than necessary for the job, since passengers weigh little for the cubage they clutter-but that would make her lively, which might be critically important.

As for the injectors, he could baby them-he had herded worse junk than this.

Lazarus haggled with McFee over terms, not because he wanted to save money but because failure to do so would have been out of character. They finally reached a complicated three- cornered deal in which McFee bought the I Spy for himself, Lazarus delivered clear title to it unmortgaged and accepted McFee’s unsecured note in payment, then purchased the freighter by endorsing McFee’s note back to him and adding cash. McFee in turn would be able to mortgage the I Spy at the Commerce Clearance Bank in Luna City, use the proceeds plus cash or credit of his own to redeem his own paper-presumably before his accounts were audited, though Lazarus did not mention that.

It was not quite a bribe. Lazarus merely made use of the fact that McFee had long wanted a ship of his own and regarded the I Spy as the ideal bachelor’s go-buggy for business or pleasure; Lazarus simply held the price down to where McFee could swing the deal. But the arrangements made certain that McFee would not gossip about the deal, at least until he had had time to redeem his note. Lazarus further confused the issue by asking McFee to keep his eyes open for a good buy in trade tobacco … which made McFee sure that Captain Sheffield’s mysterious new venture involved Venus, that being the only major market for such goods. Lazarus got the freighter ready for space in only four days through lavish bonuses and overtime payments. At last he dropped Luna City behind him, owner and master of the City of Chillicothe. He shortened the name in his mind to Chili in honor of a favorite dish he had not tasted in a long time-fat red beans, plenty of chili powder, chunks of meat . .

. real meat, not the synthetic pap these youngsters called “meat.” He thought about it and his mouth watered. He had not a care in the world.

As he approached Earth, he called traffic control and asked for a parking orbit, as he did not wish to put the Chili down; it would waste fuel and attract attention. He had no scruples about orbiting without permission but there was a chance that the Chili might be spotted, charted, and investigated as a derelict during his absence; it was safer to be legal.

They gave him an orbit; he matched in and steadied down, then set the Chili’s identification beacon to his own combination, made sure that the radar of the ship’s gig could trip it, and took the gig down to the auxiliary small-craft field at Goddard. He was careful to have all necessary papers with him this time; by letting the gig be sealed in bond he avoided customs and was cleared through the space port quickly. He had no destination in mind other than to find a public phone and check in with Zack and Ford-then, if there was time, try to find some real chili. He had not called the Administrator from space because ship-to-ground required relay, and the custom of privacy certainly would not protect them if the mixer who handled the call overheard a mention of the Howard Families.

The Administrator answered his call at once, although it was late at night in the longitude of Novak Tower. From the puffy circles under Ford’s eyes Lazarus judged that he had been living at his desk. “Hi,” said Lazarus, “better get Zack Barstow on a three-way. I’ve got things to report.”

“So it’s you,” Ford said grimly. “I thought you had run out on us. Where have you been?” “Buying a ship,” Lazarus answered. “As you knew. Let’s get Barstow.”

Ford frowned, but turned to his desk. By split screen, Barstow joined them. He seemed surprised to see Lazarus and not altogether relieved. Lazarus spoke quickly: “What’s the matter, pal? Didn’t Ford tell you what I was up to?”

“Yes, he did,” admitted Barstow, “but we didn’t know where you were or what you were doing. Time dragged on and you didn’t check in … so we decided we had seen the last of you.”

“Shucks,” complained Lazarus, “you know I wouldn’t ever do anything like that. Anyhow, here I am and here’s what I’ve done so far-” He told them of the Chili and of his reconnaissance of the New Frontiers. “Now here’s how I see it: sometime this weekend, while the New Frontiers is sitting out there with nobody inboard her, I set the Chili down in the prison reservation, we load up in a hurry, rush out to the New Frontiers, grab her, and scoot. Mr. Administrator, that calls for a lot of help from you. Your proctors will have to look the other way while I land and load. Then we need to sort of slide past the traffic patrol. After that it would be a whole lot better if no naval craft was in a position to do anything drastic about the New Frontiers-if there is a communication watch left in her, they may be able to holler for help before we can silence them.”

“Give me credit for some foresight,” Ford answered sourly. “I know you will have to have a diversion to stand any chance of getting away with it. The scheme is fantastic at the best.” “Not too fantastic,” Lazarus disagreed, “if you are willing to use your emergency powers to the limit at the last minute.”

“Possibly. But we can’t wait four days.” “Why not?’ “The situation won’t hold together that long.” “Neither will mine,” put in Barstow.

Lazarus looked from one to the other. “Huh? What’s the trouble? What’s up?” They explained:

Ford and Barstow were engaged in a preposterously improbable task, that of putting over a complex and subtle fraud; a triple fraud with a different face for the Families, for the public, and for the Federation Council. Each aspect presented unique and apparently insurmountable difficulties.

Ford had no one whom he dared take into his confidence, for even his most trusted personal staff member might be infected with the mania of the delusional Fountain of Youth … or might not be, but there was no way to know without compromising the conspiracy. Despite this, he had to convince the Council that the measures he was taking were the best for achieving the Council’s purpose.

Besides that, he had to hand out daily news releases to convince the citizens that their government was just about to gain for them the “secret” of living forever. Each day the statements had to be more detailed, the lies more tricky. The people were getting restless at the delay; they were sloughing off the coat of civilization, becoming mob.

The Council was feeling the pressure of the people. Twice Ford had been forced to a vote of confidence; the second he had won by only two votes. “I won’t win another one-we’ve got to move.”

Barstow’s troubles were different but just as sticky. He had to have confederates, because his job was to prepare all the hundred thousand members for the exodus. They had to know, before the time came to embark, if they were to leave quietly and quickly. Nevertheless he did not dare tell them the truth too soon because among so many people there were bound to be some who were stupid and stubborn … and it required just one fool to wreck the scheme by spilling it to the proctors guarding them.

Instead he was forced to try to find leaders who he could trust, convince them, and depend on them to convince others. He needed almost a thousand dependable “herdsmen” to be sure of getting his people to follow him when the time came. Yet the very number of confederates he needed was so great as to make certain that somebody would prove weak.

Worse than that, he needed other confederates for a still touchier purpose. Ford and he had agreed on a scheme, weak at best, for gaining time. They were doling out the techniques used by the Families in delaying the symptoms of senility under the pretense that the sum total of these techniques was the “secret.” To put over this fraud Barstow had to have the help of the biochemists, gland therapists, specialists in symbiotics and in metabolism, and other experts among the Families, and these in turn had to be prepared for police interrogation by the Families’ most skilled psychotechnicians … because they had to be able to put over the fraud even under the influence of babble drugs. The hypnotic false indoctrination required for this was enormously more complex than that necessary for a simple block against talking. Thus far the swindle had worked … fairly well. But the discrepancies became more hard to explain each day.

Barstow could not keep these matters juggled much longer. The great mass of the Families, necessarily kept in ignorance, were getting out of hand even faster than the public outside. They were rightfully angry at what had been done to them; they expected anyone in authority to do something about it-and do it now!

Barstow’s influence over his kin was melting away as fast as that of Ford over the Council.

“It can’t be four days,” repeated Ford. “More like twelve hours … twenty-four at the outside. The Council meets again tomorrow afternoon.” Barstow looked worried. “I’m not sure I can prepare them in so short a time. I may have trouble getting them aboard.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Ford snapped. “Why not?”

“Because,” Ford said bluntly, “any who stay behind will be dead-if they’re lucky.”

Barstow said nothing and looked away. It was the first time that either one of them had admitted explicitly that this was no relatively harmless piece of political chicanery but a desperate and nearly hopeless attempt to avoid a massacre and that Ford himself was on both sides of the fence.

“Well,” Lazarus broke in briskly, “now that you boys have settled that, let’s get on with it. I can ground the Chili in-” He stopped and estimated quickly where she would be in orbit, how long it would take him to rendezvous. “-well, by twenty-two Greenwich. Add an hour to play safe. How about seventeen o’clock Oklahoma time tomorrow afternoon? That’s today, actually.”

The other two seemed relieved. “Good enough,” agreed Barstow. “I’ll have them in the best shape I can manage.”

“All right,” agreed Ford, “if that’s the fastest it can be done.” He thought for a moment. “Barstow, I’ll withdraw at once all proctors and government personnel now inside the reservation barrier and shut you off. Once the gate contracts, you can tell them all.”

“Right. I’ll do my best.”

“Anything else before we clear?” asked Lazarus. “Oh, yes-Zack, we’d better pick a place for me to land, or I may shorten a lot of lives with my blast.” “Uh, yes. Make your approach from the west. I’ll rig a standard berth marker. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Not okay,” denied Ford. “We’ll have to give him a pilot beam to come in on.”

“Nonsense,” objected Lazarus. “I could set her down on top of the Washington Monument.” “Not this time, you couldn’t. Don’t be surprised at the weather.”

As Lazarus approached his rendezvous with the Chili he signaled from the gig; the Chili’s transponder echoed, to his relief-he had little faith in gear he had not personally overhauled and a long search for the Chili at this point would have been disastrous.

He figured the relative vector, gunned the gig, flipped, and gunned to brake-homed-in three minutes off estimate, feeling smug. He cradled the gig, hurried inside, and took her down. Entering the stratosphere and circling two-thirds of the globe took no longer than he had estimated. He used part of the hour’s leeway he had allowed himself by being very stingy in his

maneuvers in order to spare the worn, obsolescent injection meters. Then he was down in the troposphere and making his approach, with skin temperatures high but not dangerously

so. Presently he realized what Ford had meant about the weather. Oklahoma and half of Texas were covered with deep, thick clouds. Lazarus was amazed and somehow pleased; it

reminded him of other days, when weather was something experienced rather than controlled. Life had lost some flavor, in his opinion, when the weather engineers had learned how to

harness the elements. He hoped that their planet-if they found one!-would have some nice, lively weather.

Then he was down in it and too busy to meditate. In spite of her size the freighter bucked and complained. Whew! Ford must have ordered this little charivari the minute the time was set- and, at that, the integrators must have had a big low-pressure area close at hand to build on.

Somewhere a pattern controlman was shouting at him; he switched it off and gave all his attention to his approach radar and the ghostly images in the infra-red rectifier while comparing what they told him with his inertial tracker. The ship passed over a miles-wide scar on the landscape-the ruins of the Okla-Orleans Road City. When Lazarus had last seen it, it had been noisy with life. Of all the mechanical monstrosities the human race had saddled themselves with, he mused, those dinosaurs easily took first prize.

Then the thought was cut short by a squeal from his board; the ship had picked up the pilot beam.

He wheeled her in, cut his last jet as she scraped, and slapped a series of switches; the great cargo ports rumbled open and rain beat in.

Eleanor Johnson huddled into herself, half crouching against the storm, and tried to draw her cloak more tightly about the baby in the crook of her left arm. When the storm had first hit, the child had cried endlessly, stretching her nerves taut. Now it was quiet, but that seemed only new cause for alarm.

She herself had wept, although she had tried not to show it. In all her twenty-seven years she had never been exposed to weather like this; it seemed symbolic of the storm that had overturned her life, swept her away from her cherished first home of her own with its homey oldfashioned fireplace, its shiny service cell, its thermostat which she could set to the temperature she liked without consulting others-a tempest which had swept her away between two grim proctors, arrested like some poor psychotic, and landed her after terrifying indignities here in the cold sticky red clay of this Oklahoma field.

Was it true? Could it possibly be true? Or had she not yet borne her baby at all and this was another of the strange dreams she had while carrying it?

But the rain was too wetly cold, the thunder too loud; she could never have slept through such a dream. Then what the Senior Trustee had told them must be true, too-it had to be true; she had seen the ship ground with her own eyes, its blast bright against the black of the storm. She could no longer see it but the crowd around her moved slowly forward; it must in front of her. She was close to the outskirts of the crowd she would be one of the last to get aboard.

It was very necessary to board the ship-Elder Zaccur Barstow had told them with deep solemnness what lay in store for them if they failed to board. She had believed earnestness; nevertheless she wondered how it could possibly be true-could anyone be so wicked, so deeply and terribly wicked as to want to kill anyone as harmless and helpless as herself and her baby?

She was struck by panic terror-suppose there was no room left by the time she got up to the ship? She clutched her baby more tightly; the child cried again at the pressure. Awoman in the crowd moved closer and spoke to her “You must be tired. May I carry the baby for a while?”

“No. No, thank you. I’m all right.” Aflash of lightning showed the woman’s face; Eleanor Johnson recognized her Elder Mary Sperling.

But the kindness of the offer steadied her. She knew now what she must do. If they were filled up and could take no more, she must pass her baby forward, hand to hand over the heads of the crowd. They could not refuse space to anything as little as her baby.

Something brushed her in the dark. The crowd was moving forward again.

When Barstow could see that loading would be finished in a few more minutes he left his post at one of the cargo doors and ran as fast as he could through the splashing sticky mud to the communications shack. Ford had warned him to give notice just before they raised ship; it was necessary to Ford’s plan for diversion. Barstow fumbled with an awkward un-powered door, swung it open and rushed up. He set the private combination which should connect him directly to Ford’s control desk and pushed the key.

He was answered at once but it was not Ford’s face on the screen. Barstow burst out with, “Where is the Administrator? I want to talk with him,” before he recognized the face in front of him.

It was a face well known to all the public-Bork Vanning, Leader of the Minority in the Council. “You’re talking to the Administrator,” Vanning said and grinned coldly. “The new Administrator. Now who the devil are you and why are you calling?”

Barstow thanked all gods, past and present, that recognition was onesided. He cut the connection with one unaimed blow and plunged out of the building.

Two cargo ports were already closed; stragglers were moving through the other two. Barstow hurried the last of them inside with curses and followed them, slammed pell-mell to the control room. “Raise ship!” he shouted to Lazarus. “Fast!”

“What’s all the shoutin’ fer?” asked Lazarus, but he was already closing and sealing the ports. He tripped the acceleration screamer, waited a scant ten seconds … and gave her power. “Well,” he said conversationally six minutes later, “I hope everybody was lying down. If not, we’ve got some broken bones on our hands. What’s that you were saying?”

Barstow told him about his attempt to report to Ford.

Lazarus blinked and whistled a few bars of Turkey in the Straw. “It looks like we’ve run out of minutes. It does look like it.” He shut up and gave his attention to his instruments, one eye on his ballistic track, one on radar-aft.

Chapter 7

LAZARUS HAD his hands full to jockey the Chili into just the right position against the side of the New Frontiers; the overstrained meters made the smaller craft skittish as a young horse. But he did it. The magnetic anchors clanged home; the gas-tight seals slapped into place; and their ears popped as the pressure in the Chili adjusted to that in the giant ship. Lazarus dived for the drop hole in the deck of the control room, pulled himself rapidly hand over hand to the port of contact, and reached the passenger lock of the New Frontiers to find himself facing the skipper-engineer.

The man looked at him and snorted. “You again, eh? Why the deuce didn’t you answer our challenge? You can’t lock onto us without permission; this is private property. What do you mean by it?”

“It means,” said Lazarus, “that you and your boys are going back to Earth a few days early-in this ship.” “Why, that’s ridiculous!”

“Brother,” Lazarus said gently, his blaster suddenly growing out his left fist, “I’d sure hate to hurt you after you were so nice to me … but I sure will, unless you knuckle under awful quick.”

The official simply stared unbelievingly. Several of his juniors had gathered behind him; one of them sunfished in the air, started to leave. Lazarus winged him in the leg, at low power; he jerked and clutched at nothing. “Now you’ll have to take care of him,” Lazarus observed.

That settled it. The skipper called together his men from the announcing system microphone at the passenger lock; Lazarus counted them as they arrived-twenty-nine, a figure he had been careful to learn on his first visit. He assigned two men to hold each of them. Then he took a look at the man he had shot.

“You aren’t really hurt, bub,” he decided shortly and turned to the skipper-engineer. “Soon as we transfer you, get some radiation salve on that burn. The Red Cross kit’s on the after bulkhead of the control room.”

“This is piracy! You can’t get away with this.”

“Probably not,” Lazarus agreed thoughtfully. “But I sort of hope we do.” He turned his attention back to his job. “Shake it up there! Don’t take all day.”

The Chili was slowly being emptied. Only the one exit could be used but the pressure of the half hysterical mob behind them forced along those in the bottleneck of the trunk joining the two ships; they came boiling out like bees from a disturbed hive.

Most of them had never been in free fall before this trip; they burst out into the larger space of the giant ship and drifted helplessly, completely disoriented. Lazarus tried to bring order into it by grabbing anyone he could see who seemed to be able to handle himself in zero gravity, ordered him to speed things up by shoving along the helpless ones-shove them anywhere, on back into the big ship, get them out of the way, make room for the thousands more yet to come. When he had conscripted a dozen or so such herdsmen he spotted Barstow in the emerging throng, grabbed him and put him in charge. “Keep ‘em moving, just anyhow. I’ve got to get for’ard to the control room. If you spot Andy Libby, send him after me.”

Aman broke loose, from the stream and approached Barstow. “There’s a ship trying to lock onto ours. I saw it through a port.” “Where?” demanded Lazarus.

The man was handicapped by slight knowledge of ships and shipboard terms, but he managed to make himself understood. “I’ll be back,” Lazarus told Barstow. “Keep ‘em moving-and don’t let any of those babies get away-our guests there.” He holstered his blaster and fought his way back through the swirling mob in the bottleneck.

Number three port seemed to be the one the man had meant. Yes, there was something there. The port had an armor-glass bull’s-eye in it, but instead of stars beyond Lazarus saw a lighted space. Aship of some sort had locked against it.

Its occupants either had not tried to open the Chili’s port or just possibly did not know how. The port was not locked from the inside; there had been no reason to bother. It should have opened easily from either side once pressure was balanced … which the tell-tale, shining green by the latch, showed to be the case.

Lazarus was mystified.

Whether it was a traffic control vessel, a Naval craft, or something else, its presence was bad news. But why didn’t, they simply open the door and walk in? He was tempted to lock the port from the inside, hurry and lock all the others, finish loading and try to run for it.

But his monkey ancestry got the better of him; he could not leave alone something he did not understand. So he compromised by kicking the blind latch into place that would keep them from opening the port from outside, then slithered cautiously alongside the bull’s-eye and sneaked a peep with one eye.

He found himself staring at Slayton Ford.

He pulled himself to one side, kicked the blind latch open, pressed the switch to open the port. He waited there, a toe caught in a handihold, blaster in one hand, knife in the other.

One figure emerged. Lazarus saw that it was Ford, pressed the switch again to close the port, kicked the blind latch into place, while never taking his blaster off his visitor. “Now what the hell?” he demanded. “What are you doing here? And who else is here? Patrol?”

“I’m alone.”

“Huh?”

“I want to go with you … if you’ll have me.”

Lazarus looked at him and did not answer. Then he went back to the bull’s-eye and inspected all that he could see. Ford appeared to be telling the truth, for no one else was in sight. But that was not what held Lazarus’ eye.

Why the ship wasn’t a proper deep-space craft at all. It did not have an air1ock but merely a seal to let it fasten to a larger ship; Lazarus was staring right into the body of the craft. It looked like-yes, it was a “Joy-boat Junior,” a little private strato-yacht, suitable only for point-to-point trajectory, or at the most for rendezvous with a satellite provided the satellite could refuel it for the return leg.

There was no fuel for it here. Alightning pilot possibly could land that tin toy without power and still walk away from it provided he had the skill to play Skip-to-M’Lou in and out of the atmosphere while nursing his skin temperatures-but Lazarus wouldn’t want to try it. No, sir! He turned to Ford. “Suppose we turned you down. How did you figure on getting back?”

“I didn’t figure on it,” Ford answered simply.

“Mmm— Tell me about it, but make it march; we’re minus on minutes.”

Ford had burned all bridges. Turned out of office only hours earlier, he had known that, once all the facts came out, life-long imprisonment in Coventry was the best he could hope for-if he managed to avoid mob violence or mindshattering interrogation.

Arranging the diversion was the thing that finally lost him his thin margin of control. His explanations for his actions were not convincing to the Council. He had excused the storm and the withdrawing of proctors from the reservation as a drastic attempt to break the morale of the Families-a possible excuse but not too plausible. His orders to Naval craft, intended to keep them away from the New Frontiers, had apparently not been associated in anyone’s mind with the Howard Families affair; nevertheless the apparent lack of sound reason behind them had been seized on by the opposition as another weapon to bring him down. They were watching for anything to catch him out-one question asked in Council concerned certain monies from the Administrator’s discretionary fund which had been paid indirectly to one Captain Aaron Sheffield; were these monies in fact expended in the public interest?

Lazarus’ eyes widened. “You mean they were onto me?”

“Not quite. Or you wouldn’t be here. But they were close behind you. I think they must have had help from a lot of my people at the last.”

“Probably. But we made it, so let’s not fret. Come on. The minute everybody is out of this ship and into the big girl, we’ve got to boost.” Lazarus turned to leave.

“You’re going to let me go along?”

Lazarus checked his progress, twisted to face Ford. “How else?” He had intended at first to send Ford down in the Chili. It was not gratitude that changed his mind, but respect. Once he had lost office Ford had gone straight to Huxley Field north of Novak Tower, cleared for the vacation satellite Monte Carlo, and had jumped for the New Frontiers instead. Lazarus liked that. “Go for broke” took courage and character that most people didn’t have. Don’t grab a toothbrush, don’t wind the cat-just do it! “Of course you’re coming along,” he said easily: “You’re my kind of boy, Slayton.”

The Chili was more than half emptied now but the spaces near the interchange were still jammed with frantic mobs. Lazarus cuffed and shoved his way through, trying not to bruise women and children unnecessarily but not letting the possibility slow him up. He scrambled through the connecting trunk with Ford hanging onto his belt, pulled aside once they were through and paused in front of Barstow.

Barstow stared past him. “Yeah, it’s him,” Lazarus confirmed. “Don’t stare-it’s rude. He’s going with us. Have you seen Libby?”

“Here I am, Lazarus.” Libby separated himself from the throng and approached with the ease of a veteran long used to free fall. He had a small satchel strapped to one wrist. “Good. Stick around. Zack, how long till you’re all loaded?”

“God knows. I can’t count them. An hour, maybe.”

“Make it less. If you put some husky boys on each side of the hole, they can snatch them through faster than they are coming. We’ve got to shove out of here a little sooner than is humanly possible. I’m going to the control room. Phone me there the instant you have everybody in, our guests here out, and the Chili broken loose. Andy! Slayton! Let’s go.”

“Later, Andy. We’ll talk when we get there?’

Lazarus took Slayton Ford with him because he did not know what else to do with him and felt it would be better to keep him out of sight until some plausible excuse could be dreamed up for having him along. So far no one seemed to have looked at him twice, but once they quieted down, Ford’s well-known face would demand explanation.

The control room was about a half mile forward of where they had entered the ship. Lazarus knew that there was a passenger belt leading to it but he didn’t have time to look for it; he simply took the first passageway leading forward. As soon as they got away from the crowd they made good time even though Ford was not as skilled in the fishlike maneuvers of free fall as were the other two.

Once there, Lazarus spent the enforced wait in explaining to Libby the extremely ingenious but unorthodox controls of the starship. Libby was fascinated and soon was putting himself through dummy runs. Lazarus turned to Ford. “How about you, Slayton? Wouldn’t hurt to have a second relief pilot.”

Ford shook his head. “I’ve been listening but I could never learn it. I’m not a pilot” “Huh? How did you get here?”

“Oh. I do have a license, but I haven’t had time to keep in practice. My chauffeur always pilots me. I haven’t figured a trajectory in many years.” Lazarus looked him over. “And yet you plotted an orbit rendezvous? With no reserve fuel?”

“Oh, that. I had to.”

“I see. The way the cat learned to swim. Well, that’s one way.” He turned back to speak to Libby, was interrupted by Barstow’s voice over the announcing system: “Five minutes, Lazarus! Acknowledge.”

Lazarus found the microphone, covered the light under it with his hand and answered, “Okay, Zack! Five minutes.” Then he said, “Cripes, I haven’t even picked a course. What do you think, Andy? Straight out from Earth to shake the busies off our tail? Then pick a destination? How about it, Slayton? Does that fit with what you ordered Navy craft to do? “No, Lazarus, no!” protested Libby. “Huh? Why not?”

“You should head right straight down for the Sun.” “For the Sun? For Pete’s sake, why?”

“I tried to tell you when I first saw you. It’s because of the space drive you asked me to develop.” “But, Andy, we haven’t got it.”

“Yes, we have. Here.” Libby shoved the satchel he had been carrying toward Lazarus. Lazarus opened it.

Assembled from odd bits of other equipment, looking more like the product of a boy’s workshop than the output of a scientist’s laboratory, the gadget which Libby referred to as a “space drive” underwent Lazarus’ critical examination. Against the polished sophisticated perfection of the control room it looked uncouth, pathetic, ridiculously inadequate.

Lazarus poked at it tentatively. “What is it?’ he asked. “Your model?” “No, no. That’s it. That’s the space drive.”

Lazarus looked at the younger man not unsympathetically. “Son,” he asked slowly, “have you come unzipped?”

“No, no, no!” Libby sputtered. “I’m as sane as you are. This is a radically new notion. That’s why I want you to take us down near the Sun. If it works at all, it will work best where light pressure is strongest.”

“And if it doesn’t work,” inquired Lazarus, “what does that make us? Sunspots?”

“Not straight down into the Sun. But head for it now and as soon as I can work out the data, I’ll give you corrections to warp you into your proper trajectory. I want to pass the Sun in a very fiat hyperbola, well inside the orbit of Mercury, as close to the photosphere as this ship can stand. I don’t know how close that is, so I couldn’t work it out ahead of time. But the data will be here in the ship and there will be time to correlate them as we go.”

Lazarus looked again at the giddy little cat’s cradle of apparatus. “Andy … if you are sure that the gears in your head are still meshed, I’ll take a chance. Strap down, both of you.” He belted himself into the pilot’s couch and called Barstow. “How about it, Zack?” “Right now!”

“Hang on tight!” With one hand Lazarus covered a light in his leftside control panel; acceleration warning shrieked throughout the ship. With the other he covered another; the hemisphere in front of them was suddenly spangled with the starry firmament, and Ford gasped.

Lazarus studied it. Afull twenty degrees of it was blanked out by the dark circle of the nightside of Earth. “Got to duck around a corner, Andy. We’ll use a little Tennessee windage.” He started easily with a quarter gravity, just enough to shake up his passengers and make them cautious, while he started a slow operation of precessing the enormous ship to the direction he needed to shove her in order to get out of Earth’s shadow. He raised acceleration to a half gee, then to a gee.

Earth changed suddenly from a black silhouette to a slender silver crescent as the half-degree white disc of the Sun came out from behind her. “I want to clip her about a thousand miles out, Slipstick,” Lazarus said tensely, “at two gees. Gimme a temporary vector.” Libby hesitated only momentarily and gave it to him. Lazarus again sounded acceleration warning and boosted to twice Earth-normal gravity. Lazarus was tempted to raise the boost to emergency-full but he dared not do so with a shipload of groundlubbers; even two gees sustained for a long period might be too much of a strain for some of them. Any Naval pursuit craft ordered to intercept them could boost at much higher gee and their selected crews could stand it. But it was just a chance they would have to take … and anyhow, he reminded himself, a Navy ship could not maintain a high boost for long; her mile-seconds were strictly limited by her reaction-mass tanks.

The New Frontiers had no such oldfashioned limits, no tanks; her converter accepted any mass at all, turned it into pure radiant energy. Anything would serve-meteors, cosmic dust, stray atoms gathered in by her sweep field, or anything from the ship herself, such as garbage, dead bodies, deck sweepings, anything at all. Mass was energy. In dying, each tortured gram gave up nine hundred million trillion ergs of thrust. The crescent of Earth waxed and swelled and slid off toward the left edge of the hemispherical screen while the Sun remained dead

ahead. Alittle more than twenty minutes later, when they were at closest approach and the crescent, now at half phase, was sliding out of the bowl screen, the ship-to-ship circuit came to life. “New Frontiers!” a forceful voice sounded. “Maneuver to orbit and lay to! This is an official traffic control order.”

Lazarus shut it off. “Anyhow,” he said cheerfully, “if they try to catch us, they won’t like chasing us down into the Sun! Andy, it’s a clear road now and time we corrected, maybe; You want to compute it? Or will you feed me the data?”

“I’ll compute it,” Libby answered. He had already discovered that the ship’s characteristics pertinent to astrogation, including her “black body” behavior, were available at both piloting stations. Armed with this and with the running data from instruments he set out to calculate the hyperboloid by which he intended to pass the Sun. He made a half-hearted attempt to use the ship’s ballistic calculator but it baffled him; it was a design he was not used to, having no moving parts of any sort, even in the exterior controls. So he gave it up as a waste of time and fell back on the strange talent for figures lodged in his brain. His brain had no moving parts, either, but he was used to it.

Lazarus decided to check on their popularity rating. He switched on the ship-to-ship again, found that it was still angrily squawking, although a little more faintly. They knew his own name now-one of his names-which caused him to decide that the boys in the Chili must have called traffic control almost at once. He tut-tutted sadly when he learned that “Captain Sheffield’s” license to pilot had been suspended. He shut it off and tried the Naval frequencies … then shut them off also when he was able to raise nothing but code and scramble, except that the words “New Frontiers” came through once in clear.

He said something about “sticks and stones may break my bones-” and tried another line of investigation. Both by long-range radar and by paragravitic detector he could tell that there were ships in their neighborhood but this alone told him very little; there were bound to be ships this close to Earth and he had no easy way to distinguish, from these data alone, an unarmed liner or freighter about her lawful occasions from a Naval cruiser in angry pursuit.

But the New Frontiers had more resources for analyzing what was around her than had an ordinary ship; she had been specially equipped to cope unassisted with any imaginable strange conditions. The hemispherical control room in which they lay was an enormous multi-screened television receiver which could duplicate the starry heavens either in view-aft or view-forward at the selection of the pilot. But it also had other circuits, much more subtle; simultaneously or separately it could act as an enormous radar screen as well, displaying on it the blips of any body within radar range.

But that was just a starter. Its inhuman senses could apply differential analysis to doppler data and display the result in a visual analog. Lazarus studied his lefthand control bank, tried to remember everything be had been told about it, made a change in the set up.

The simulated stars and even the Sun faded to dimness; about a dozen lights shined brightly.

He ordered the board to check them for angular rate; the bright lights turned cherry red, became little comets trailing off to pink tails-all but one, which remained white and grew no tail. He studied the others for a moment, decided that their vectors were such that they would remain forever strangers, and ordered the board to check the line-of-sight doppler on the one with a steady bearing.

It faded to violet, ran halfway through the spectrum and held steady at blue-green. Lazarus thought a moment, subtracted from the inquiry their own two gees of boost; it turned white again. Satisfied he tried the same tests with view-aft.

“Lazarus-“ “Yeah, Lib?”

“Will it interfere with what you are doing if I give you the corrections now?”

“Not at all. I was just taking a look-see. If this magic lantern knows what it’s talking about, they didn’t manage to get a pursuit job on our tail in time.” “Good. Well, here are the figures …”

“Feed ‘em in yourself, will you? Take the conn for a while. I want to see about some coffee and sandwiches. How about you? Feel like some breakfast?”

Libby nodded absent-mindedly, already starting to revise the ship’s trajectory. Ford spoke up eagerly, the first word he had uttered in a long, time. “Let me get it. I’d be glad to.” He seemed pathetically anxious to be useful.

“Mmm … you might get into some kind of trouble, Slayton. No matter what sort of a selling job Zack did, your name is probably ‘Mud’ with most of the members. I’ll phone aft and raise somebody.”

“Probably nobody would recognize me under these circumstances,” Ford argued. “Anyway, it’s a legitimate errand-I can explain that.” Lazarus saw from his face that it was necessary to the man’s morale. “Okay … if you can handle yourself under two gees.”

Ford struggled heavily up out of the acceleration couch he was in. “I’ve got space legs. What kind of sandwiches?”

“I’d say corned beef, but it would probably be some damned substitute. Make mine cheese, with rye if they’ve got it, and use plenty of mustard. And a gallon of coffee. What are you having, Andy?”

“Me? Oh, anything that is convenient,”

Ford started to leave, bracing himself heavily against double weight, then he added, “Oh-it might save time if you could tell me where to go.” – “Brother,” said Lazarus, “if this ship isn’t pretty well crammed with food, we’ve all made a terrible mistake. Scout around. You’ll find some.”

Down, down, down toward the Sun, with speed increasing by sixty-four feet per second for every second elapsed. Down and still down for fifteen endless hours of double weight. During this time they traveled seventeen million miles and reached the inconceivable speed of six hundred and forty miles per second. The figures mean little-think instead of New York to Chicago, a half hour’s journey even by stratomail, done in a single heartbeat.

Barstow had a rough time during heavy weight. For all of the others it was a time to lie down, try hopelessly to sleep, breathe painfully and seek new positions in which to rest from the burdens of their own bodies. But Zaccur Barstow was driven by his sense of responsibility; he kept going though the Old Man of the Sea sat on his neck and raised his weight to three hundred and fifty pounds.

Not that he could do anything for them, except crawl wearily from one compartment to another and ask about their welfare. Nothing could be done, no organization to relieve their misery was possible, while high boost continued. They lay where they could, men, women, and children crowded together like cattle being shipped, without even room to stretch out, in spaces never intended for such extreme overcrowding.

The only good thing about it, Barstow reflected wearily, was that they were all too miserable to worry about anything but the dragging minutes. They were too beaten down to make trouble. Later on there would be doubts raised, he was sure, about the wisdom of fleeing; there would be embarrassing questions asked about Ford’s presence in the ship, about Lazarus’ peculiar and sometimes shady actions, about his own contradictory role. But not yet.

He really must, he decided reluctantly, organize a propaganda campaign before trouble could grow. If it did-and it surely would if he didn’t move to offset it, and … well, that would be the last straw. It would be.

He eyed a ladder in front of him, set his teeth, and struggled up to the next deck. Picking his way through the bodies there he almost stepped on a woman who was clutching a baby too tightly to her. Barstow noticed that the infant was wet and soiled and he thought of ordering its mother to take care of the matter, since she seemed to be awake. But he let it go-so far as he knew there was not a clean diaper in millions of miles. Or there might be ten thousand of them on the deck above … which seemed almost as far away.

He plodded on without speaking to her. Eleanor Johnson had not been aware of his concern. After the first great relief at realizing that she and her baby were safe inside the ship she had consigned all her worries to her elders and now felt nothing but the apathy of emotional reaction and of inescapable weight. Baby had cried when that awful weight had hit them, then had become quiet, too quiet. She had roused herself enough to listen for its heartbeat; then, sure that he was alive, she had sunk back into stupor.

Fifteen hours out, with the orbit of Venus only four hours away, Libby cut the boost. The ship plunged on, in free fall, her terrific speed still mounting under the steadily increasing pull of the Sun. Lazarus was awakened by no weight. He glanced at the copilot’s couch and said, “On the curve?”

“As plotted.”

Lazarus looked him over. “Okay, I’ve got it. Now get out of here and get some sleep. Boy, you look like a used towel.” “I’ll just stay here and rest.”

“You will like hell. You haven’t slept even when I had the com; if you stay here, you’ll be watching instruments and figuring. So beat it! Slayton, chuck him out.”

Libby smiled shyly and left. He found the spaces abaft the control room swarming with floating bodies but he managed to find an unused corner, passed his kilt belt through a handihold, and slept at once.

Free fall should have been as great a relief to everyone else; it was not, except to the fraction of one per cent who were salted spacemen. Free-fall nausea, likes seasickness, is a joke only to those not affected; it would take a Dante to describe a hundred thousand cases of it. There were anti-nausea drugs aboard, but they were not found at once; there were medical men among the Families, but they were sick, too. The misery went on.

Barstow, himself long since used to free flight, floated forward to the control room to pray relief for the less fortunate. “They’re in bad shape,” he told Lazarus. “Can’t you put spin on the ship and give them some let-up? It would help a lot.”

“And it would make maneuvering difficult, too. Sorry. Look, Zack, a lively ship will be more important to them in a pinch than just keeping their suppers down. Nobody dies from seasickness anyhow … they just wish they could.”

The ship plunged on down, still gaining speed as it fell toward the Sun. The few who felt able continued slowly to assist the enormous majority who were ill.

Libby continued to sleep, the luxurious return-to-the-womb sleep of those who have learned to enjoy free fall. He had had almost no sleep since the day the Families had been arrested; his overly active mind had spent all its time worrying the problem of a new space drive.

The big ship precessed around him; he stirred gently and did not awake. It steadied in a new attitude and the acceleration warning brought him instantly awake. He oriented himself, placed himself flat against the after bulkhead, and waited; weight hit him almost at once-three gees this time and he knew that something was badly wrong. He had gone almost a quarter mile aft before he found a hide-away; nevertheless he struggled to his feet and started the unlikely task of trying to climb that quarter mile-now straight up-at three times his proper weight, while blaming himself for having let Lazarus talk him into leaving the control room.

He managed only a portion of the trip … but an heroic portion, one about equal to climbing the stairs of a ten-story building while carrying a man on each shoulder … when resumption of free fall relieved him. He zipped the rest of the way like a salmon returning home and was in the control room quickly. “What happened?”

Lazarus said regretfully, “Had to vector, Andy.” Slayton Ford said nothing but looked worried.

“Yes, I know. But why?’ Libby was already strapping himself against the copilot’s couch while studying the astrogational situation. “Red lights on the screen.” Lazarus described the display, giving coordinates and relative vectors.

Libby nodded thoughtfully. “Naval craft. No commercial vessels would be in such trajectories. Aminelaying bracket.”

“That’s what I figured. I didn’t have time to consult you; I had to use enough mile-seconds to be sure they wouldn’t have boost enough to reposition on us.” “Yes, you had to.” Libby looked worried. “I thought we were free of any possible Naval interference.”

“They’re not ours,” put in Slayton Ford. “They can’t be ours no matter what orders have been given since I-uh, since I left. They must be Venerian craft.”

“Yeah,” agreed Lazarus, “they must be. Your pal, the new Administrator, hollered to Venus for help and they gave it to him-just a friendly gesture of interplanetary good will.” Libby was hardly listening. He was examining data and processing it through the calculator inside his skull. “Lazarus… this new orbit isn’t too good.”

“I know,” Lazarus agreed sadly. “I had to duck … so I ducked the only direction they left open to me-closer to the Sun.” “Too close, perhaps.”

The Sun is not a large star, nor is it very hot. But it is hot with reference to men, hot enough to strike them down dead if they are careless about tropic noonday ninety-two million miles away from it, hot enough that we who are reared under its rays nevertheless dare not look directly at it.

At a distance of two and a half million miles the Sun beats out with a flare fourteen hundred times as bright as the worst ever endured in Death Valley, the Sahara, or Aden. Such radiance would not be perceived as heat or light; it would be death more sudden than the full power of a blaster. The Sun is a hydrogen bomb, a naturally occurring one; the New Frontiers was skirting the limits of its circle of total destruction.

It was hot inside the ship. The Families were protected against instant radiant death by the armored walls but the air temperature continued to mount. They were relieved of the misery of free fall but they were doubly uncomfortable, both from heat and from the fact that the bulkheads slanted crazily; there was no level place to stand or lie, The ship was both spinning on its axis and accelerating now; it was never intended to do both at once and the addition of the two accelerations, angular and linear, met “down” the direction where outer and after bulkheads met. The ship was being spun through necessity to permit some of the impinging radiant energy to re-radiate on the “cold” side. The forward acceleration was equally from necessity, a forlorn-hope maneuver to pass the Sun as far out as possible and as fast as possible, in order to spend least time at perihelion, the point of closest approach.

It was hot in the control room. Even Lazarus had voluntarily shed his kilt and shucked down to Venus styles. Metal was hot to the touch. On the great stellarium screen an enormous circle of blackness marked where the Sun’s disc should have been; the receptors had cut out automatically at such a ridicubus demand.

Lazarus repeated Libby’s last words. “‘Thirty-seven minutes to perihelion.’ We can’t take it, Andy. The ship can’t take it.” “I know. I never intended us top this close.”

“Of course you didn’t. Maybe I shouldn’t have maneuvered. Maybe we would have missed the mines anyway. Oh, well-” Lazarus squared his shoulders and filed it with the might-have- beens. “It looks to me, son, about time to try out your gadget.” He poked a thumb at Libby’s uncouth-looking “space drive.” “You say that all you have to do is to hook up that one connection?”

“That is what is intended. Attach that one lead to any portion of the mass to be affected. Of course I don’t really know that it will work,” Libby admitted. “There is no way to test it.” “Suppose it doesn’t?’

“There are three possibilities.” Libby answered methodically. “In the first place, nothing may happen.” “In which case we fry.”

“In the second place, we and the ship may cease to exist as mattei as we know it.” “Dead, you mean. But probably a pleasanter way.”

“I suppose so. I don’t know what death is. In the third place, if my hypotheses are correct, we will recede from the Sun at a speed just under that of light.” Lazarus eyed the gadget and wiped sweat from his shoulders. “It’s getting hotter, Andy. Hook it up-and it has better be good!”

Andy hooked it up.

“Go ahead,” urged Lazarus. “Push the button, throw the switch, cut the beam. Make it march.” “I have,” Libby insisted. “Look at the Sun.”

“Huh? Oh!”

The great circle of blackness which had marked the position of the Sun on the star-speckled stellarium was shrinking rapidly. In a dozen heartbeats it lost half its diameter; twenty seconds later it had dwindled to a quarter of its original width.

“It worked,” Lazarus said softly. “Look at it, Slayton! Sign me up as a purple baboon-it worked!” “I rather thought it would,” Libby answered seriously. “It should, you know.”

“Hmm-That may be evident to you, Andy. It’s not to me. How fast are we going?” “Relative to what?”

“Uh, relative to the Sun.”

“I haven’t had opportunity to measure it, but it seems to be just under the speed of light. It can’t be greater.” “Why not? Aside from theoretical considerations.”

“We still see.” Libby pointed at the stellarium bowl.

“Yeah, so we do,” Lazarus mused. “Hey! We shouldn’t be able to. I ought to doppler out.”

Libby looked blank, then smiled. “But it dopplers right back in. Over on that side, toward the Sun, we’re seeing by short radiations stretched to visibility. On the opposite side we’re picking up something around radio wavelengths dopplered down to light.”

“And in between?”

“Quit pulling my leg, Lazarus. I’m sure you can work out relatively vector additions quite as well as I can.” “You work it out,” Lazarus said firmly. “I’m just going to sit here and admire it. Eh, Slayton?”

“Yes. Yes indeed.”

Libby smiled politely. “We might as well quit wasting mass on the main drive.” He sounded the warner, then cut the drive. “Now we can return to normal conditions.” He started to disconnect his gadget.

Lazarus said hastily, “Hold it, Andy! We aren’t even outside the orbit of Mercury yet. Why put on the brakes?” ‘Why, this won’t stop us. We have acquired velocity; we will keep it.”

Lazarus pulled at his cheek and stared. “Ordinarily I would agree with you. First Law of Motion. But with this pseudospeed I’m not so sure. We got it for nothing and we haven’t paid for it- in energy, I mean. You seem to have declared a holiday with respect to inertia; when the holiday is over, won’t all that free speed go back where it came from?”

“I don’t think so,” Libby answered. “Our velocity isn’t ‘pseudo’ anything; it’s as real as velocity can be. You are attempting to apply verbal anthropomorphic logic to a field in which it is not pertinent. You would not expect us to be transported instantaneously back to the lower gravitational potential from which we started, would you?”

“Back to where you hooked in your space drive? No, we’ve moved.”

“And we’ll keep on moving. Our newly acquired gravitational potential energy of greater height above the Sun is no more real than our present kinetic energy of velocity. They both exist.” Lazarus looked baffled. The expression did not suit him. ‘~I guess you’ve got me, Andy. No matter how I slice it, we seemed to have picked up energy from somewhere. But where? When

I went to school, they taught me to honor the Flag, vote the straight party ticket, and believe in the law of conservation of energy. Seems like you’ve violated it. How about it?”

“Don’t worry about it,” suggested Libby. “The so-called law of conservation of energy was merely a working hypothesis, unproved and unprovable, used to describe gross phenomena. Its terms apply only to the older, dynamic concept of the world. In a plenum conceived as a static grid of relationships, a ‘violation’ of that ‘law’ is nothing more startling than a discontinuous function, to be noted and described. That’s what I did. I saw a discontinuity in the mathematical model of the aspect of mass-energy called inertia. I applied it. The mathematical model turned out to be similar to the real world. That was the only hazard, really-one never knows that a mathematical model is similar to the real world until you try it.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure, you can’t tell the taste till you bite it-but, Andy, I still don’t see what caused it!” He turned toward Ford. “Do you, Slayton?” Ford shook his head. “No. I would like to know … but I doubt if I could understand it.”

“You and me both. Well, Andy?”

Now Libby looked baffled. ‘But, Lazarus, causality has nothing to do with the real plenum. A fact simply is. Causality is merely an oldfashioned-postulate of a pre-scientific philosophy.”

“I guess,” Lazarus said slowly, “I’m oldfashioned.” Libby said nothing. He disconnected his apparatus.

The disc of black continued to shrink. When it had shrunk to about one sixth its greatest diameter, it changed suddenly from black to shining white, as the ship’s distance from the Sun again was great enough to permit the receptors to manage the load.

Lazarus tried to work out in his head the kinetic energy of the ship-one half the square of the velocity of light (minus a pinch, he corrected) times the mighty tonnage of -the New Frontiers. The answer did not comfort him, whether he called it ergs or apples.

Chapter 8

“FIRST THINGS FIRST,” interrupted Barstow. “I’m as fascinated by the amazing scientific aspects of our present situation as any of you, but we’ve got work to do. We’ve got to plan a pattern for daily living at once. So let’s table mathematical physics and talk about organization.”

He was not speaking to the trustees but to his own personal lieutenants, the key people in helping him put over the complex maneuvers which had made their escape possible-Ralph Schultz, Eve Barstow, Mary Sperling, Justin Foote, Clive Johnson, about a dozen others.

Lazarus and Libby were there. Lazarus had left Slayton Ford to guard the control room, with orders to turn away all visitors and, above all, not to let anyone touch the controls. It was a make-work job, it being Lazarus’ notion of temporary occupational therapy. He bad sensed in Ford a mental condition that he did not like. Ford seemed to have withdrawn into himself. He answered when spoken to, but that was all. It worried Lazarus.

“We need an executive,” Barstow went on, “someone who, for the time being will have very broad powers to give orders and have them carried out. He’ll have to make decisions, organize us, assign duties and responsibilities, get the internal economy of the ship working. It’s a big job and I would like to have our brethren hold an election and do it democratically. That’ll have to wait; somebody has to give orders now. We’re wasting food and the ship is-well, I wish you could have seen the ***’fre$ier*** I tried to use today.”

“Zaccur … “Yes, Eve?”

“It seems to me that the thing to do is to put it up to the trustees. We haven’t any authority; we were just an emergency group for something that is finished now.”

“Ahrruniph-” It was Justin Foote, in tones as dry and formal as his face. “I differ somewhat from our sister. The trustees are not conversant with the full background; it would take time we can ill afford to put them into the picture, as it were, before they would be able to judge the matter. Furthermore, being one of the trustees myself, I am able to say without bias that the trustees, as an organized group, can have no jurisdiction because legally they no longer exist.”

Lazarus looked interested. “How do you figure that, Justin?”

“Thusly: the board of trustees were the custodians of a foundation which existed as a part of and in relation to a society. The trustees were never a government; their sole duties had to do with relations between the Families and the rest of that society. With the ending of relationship between the Families and terrestrial society, the board of trustees, ipso facto, ceases to exist. it is one with history. Now we in this ship are not yet a society, we are an anarchistic group. This present assemblage has as much-or as little-authority to initiate a society as has any part group.

Latarus cheered and clapped. “Justin,” he applauded, “that is the neatest piece of verbal juggling I’ve heard in a century. Let’s get together sometime and have a go at solipsism.” Justin Foote looked pained. “Obviously-” he began.

“Nope! Not another word! You’ve convinced me, don’t spoil it. If that’s how it is, let’s get busy and pick a bull moose. How about you, Zack? You look like the logical candidate.” Barstow shook his head. “I know my limitations. I’m an engineer, not a political executive; the Families were just a hobby with me. We need an expert in social administration.”

When Barstow had convinced them that he meant it, other names were proposed and their qualifications debated at length. In a group as large as the Families there were many who had specialized in political science, many who had served in public office with credit.

Lazarus listened; he knew four of the candidates. At last he got Eve Barstow aside and whispered with her. She looked startled, then thoughtful, finally nodded.

She asked for the floor. “I have a candidate to propose,” she began in her always gentle tones, “who might not ordinarily occur to you, but who is incomparably better fitted, by temperament, training, and experience, to do this job than is anyone as yet proposed. For civil administrator of the ship I nominate Slayton Ford.”

They were flabbergasted into silence, then everybody tried to talk at once. “Has Eve lost her mind? Ford is back on Earth!”-“No, no, he’s not. I’ve seen him-here-in the ship.”-“But it’s out of the question!”-“Him? The Families would never accept him!”-“Even so, he’s not one of us.”

Eve patiently kept the floor until they quieted. “I know my nomination sounds ridiculous and I admit the difficulties. But consider the advantages. We all know Slayton Ford by reputation and by performance. You know, every member of the Families knows, that Ford is a genius in his field. It is going to be hard enough to work out plans for living together in this badly overcrowded ship; the best talent we can draw on will be no more than enough.”

Her words impressed them because Ford was that rare thing in history, a statesman whose worth was almost universally acknowledged in his own lifetime. Contemporary historians credited him with having saved the Western Federation in at least two of its major development crises; it was his misfortune rather than his personal failure that his career was wrecked on a crisis not solvable by ordinary means.

“Eve,” said Zaccur Barstown “1 agree with your opinion of Ford and I myself would be glad to have him as our executive. But how about all of the others? To the Families-everyone except ourselves here present-Mr. Administrator Ford symbolizes the persecution they have suffered. I think that makes him an impossible candidate.”

Eve was gently stubborn. “I don’t think so. We’ve already agreed that we will have to work up a campaign to explain away a lot of embarrassing facts about the last few days. Why don’t we do it thoroughly and convince them that Ford is a martyr who sacrificed himself to save them? He is, you know.”

“Mmm … yes, he is. He didn’t sacrifice himself primarily on our account, but there is no doubt in my mind that his personal sacrifice saved us. But whether or not we can convince the others, convince them strongly enough that they will accept him and take orders from him … when he is now a sort of personal devil to them-well, I just don’t know. I think we need expert advice. How about it, Ralph? Could it be done?’

Ralph Schultz hesitated. “The truth of a proposition has little or nothing to do with its psychodynamics. The notion that ‘truth will prevail’ is merely a pious wish; history doesn’t show it. The fact that Ford really is a martyr to whom we owe gratitude is irrelevant to the purely technical question you put to me.” He stopped to think. “But the proposition per se has certain sentimentally dramatic aspects which lend it to propaganda manipulation, even in the face of the currently accepted strong counterproposition. Yes … yes, I think it could be sold.”

“How long would it take you to put it over?”

“Mmm … the social space involved is both ‘tight’ and ‘hot’ in the jargon we use; I should be able to get a high positive ‘k’ factor on the chain reaction-if it works at all. But it’s an unsurveyed field and I don’t know what spontaneous rumors are running around the ship. If you decide to do this, I’ll want to prepare some rumors before we adjourn, rumors to repair Ford’s reputation-then about twelve hours from now I can release another one that Ford is actually aboard . Because he intended from the first to throw his lot in with us.”

“Ub, I hardly think he did, Ralph.” – “Are you sure, Zaccur?”

“No, but-Well …

“You see? The truth about his original intentions is a secret between him – and his God. You don’t know and neither do I. But the dynamics of the proposition are a separate matter. Zaccur, by the time my rumor gets back to you three or four times, even you will begin to wonder.” The psychornetrician paused to stare at nothing while he consulted an intuition refined by almost a century of mathematical study of human behavior. “Yes, it will work. If you all want to do it, you will be able to make a public announcement inside of twenty-four hours.”

“I so move!” someone called out.

Afew minutes later Barstow had Lazarus fetch Ford to the meeting place. Lazarus did not explain to him why his presence was required; Ford entered the compartment like a man come to judgment, one with a bitter certainty that the outcome will be against him. His manner showed fortitude but not hope. His eyes were unhappy.

Lazarus had studied those eyes during the long hours they had been shut up together in the control room. They bore an expression Lazarus had seen many times before in his long life. The condemned man who has lost his final appeal, the fully resolved suicide, little furry things exhausted and defeated by struggle with the unrelenting steel of traps-the eyes of each of these hold a single expression, born of hopeless conviction that his time has run out.

Ford’s eyes had it.

Lazarus had seen it grow and had been puzzled by it. To be sure, they were all in a dangerous spot, but Ford no more I than the rest. Besides, awareness of danger brings a live expression; why should Ford’s eyes hold the signal of death? Lazarus finally decided that it could only be because Ford had reached the dead-end state of mind where suicide is necessary. But why? Lazarus mulled it over during the long watches in the control room and reconstructed the logic of it to his own satisfaction. Back on Earth, Ford had been important among his own kind, the shortlived. His paramount position had rendered him then almost immune to the feeling of defeated inferiority which the long-lived stirred up in normal men. But now he was the only ephemeral in a race of Methuselas.

Ford had neither the experience of the elders nor the expectations of the young; he felt inferior to them both, hopelessly outclassed. Correct or not, he felt himself to be a useless pensioner, an impotent object of charity.

To a person of Ford’s busy useful background the situation was intolerable. His very pride and strength of character were driving him to suicide. As he came into the conference room Ford’s glance sought out Zaccur Barstow. “You sent for me, sir?’

“Yes, Mr. Administrator.” Barstow explained briefly the situation and the responsibility thel wanted him to assume. “You are under no compulsion,” he concluded, “but we need your services if you are willing to serve. Will you?”

Lazarus’ heart felt light as he watched Ford’s expression change to amazement. “Do you really mean that?” Ford answered slowly. “You’re not joking with me?” “Most certainly we mean it!”

Ford did not answer at once and when he did, his answer seemed irrelevant. “May I sit down?”

Aplace was found for him; he settled heavily into the chair and covered his face with his hands. No one spoke. Presently he raised his head and said in a steady voice, “If that is your will, I will do my best to carry out your wishes.”

The ship required a captain as well as a civil administrator. Lazarus had been, up to that time, her captain in a very practical, piratical sense but he balked when Barstow proposed that it be made a formal title. “Huh uh! Not me. I may just spend this trip playing checkers. Libby’s your man. Seriousminded, conscientious, former naval officer-just the type for the job.”

Libby blushed as eyes turned toward him. “Now, really,” he protested, “while it is true that I have had to command ships in the course of my duties, it has never suited me. I am a staff officer by temperament. I don’t feel like a commanding officer.”

“Don’t see how you can duck out of it,” Lazarus persisted. “You invented the go-fast gadget and you are the only one who understands how it works. You’ve got yourself a job, boy.”

“But that does not follow at all,” pleaded Libby. “1 am perfectly willing to be astrogator, for that is consonant with my talents. But I very much prefer to serve under a commanding officer.” Lazarus was smugly pleased then to see how Slayton Ford immediately moved in and took charge; the sick man was gone, here again was the executive. “It isn’t a matter of your

personal preference, Commander Libby; we each must do what we can. I have agreed to direct social and civil organization; that is consonant with my training. But I can’t command the

ship as a ship; I’m not trained for it. You are. You must do it.”

Libby blushed pinker and stammered. “I would if I were the only one. But there are hundreds of spacemen among the Families and dozens of them certainly have more experience; and talent for command than I have. If you’ll look for him, you’ll find the right man.”

Ford said, “What do you think, Lazarus?”

“Um. Andy’s got something. Acaptain puts spine into his ship … or doesn’t, as the case may be. If Libby doesn’t hanker to command, maybe we’d better look around.”

Justin Foote had a microed roster with him but there was no scanner at hand with which to sort it. Nevertheless the memories of the dozen and more present produced many candidates. They finally settled on Captain Rufus “Ruthless” King.

Libby was explaining the consequences of his lightpressure drive to his new commanding officer. “The loci of our attainable destinations is contained in a sheaf of paraboloids having their apices tangent to our present course. This assumes that acceleration by means of the ship’s normal drive will always be applied so that the magnitude our present vector, just under the speed of light, will be held constant. This will require that the ship be slowly precessed during the entire maneuvering acceleration. But it will not be too fussy because of the enormous difference in magnitude between our present vector and the maneuvering vectors being impressed on it. One may think of it roughly as accelerating at right angles to Our course.”

“Yes, yes, I see that,” Captain King cut in, “but why do you assume that the resultant vectors must always be equal to our present vector?”

“Why, it need not be if the Captain decides otherwise,” Libby answered, looking puzzled, “but to apply a component that would reduce the resultant vector below our present speed would simply be to cause us to backtrack a little without increasing the scope of our present loci of possible destinations. The effect would only increase our flight time, to generations, even to centuries, if the resultant-“

“Certainly, certainly! I understand basic ballistics, Mister. But why do you reject the other alternative? Why not increase our speed? Why can’t I accelerate directly along my present course if I choose?”

Libby looked worried. “The Captain may, if he so orders. But it would be an attempt to exceed the speed of light. That has been assumed to be impossible-“ “That’s exactly what I was driving at: ‘Assumed.’ I’ve always wondered if that assumption was justified. Now seems like a good time to find out.”

Libby hesitated, his sense of duty struggling against the ecstatic temptations of scientific curiosity. “If this were a research ship, Captain, I would be anxious to try it. I can’t visualize what the conditions would be if we did pass the speed of light, but it seems to me that we would be cut off entirely from the electromagnetic spectrum insofar as other bodies are concerned. How could we see to astrogate?”

Libby had more than theory to worry him; they were “seeing” now only by electronic vision. To the human eye itself the hemisphere behind them along their track was a vasty black; the shortest radiations had dopplered to wavelengths too long for the eye. In the forward direction stars could still be seen but their visible “light” was made up of longest Hertzian waves crowded in by the ship’s incomprehensible speed. Dark “radio stars” shined at first magnitude; stars poor in radio wavelengths had faded to obscurity. The familiar constellations were changed beyond easy recognition. The fact that they were seeing by vision distorted by Doppler’s effect was confirmed by spectrum analysis; Fraunhofer’s lines had not merely shifted toward the violet end, they had passed beyond, out of sight, and previously unknown patterns replaced them.

“Hmm …” King replied. “I see what you mean. But I’d certainly like to try it, damn if I wouldn’t! But I admit it’s out of the question with passengers inboard. Very well, prepare for me roughed courses to type ‘0’ stars lying inside this trumpet-flower locus of yours and not too far away. Say ten lightyears for your first search.”

“Yes, sir. I have. I can’t offer anything in that range in the ‘0’ types.” “So? Lonely out here, isn’t it? Well?’

“We have Tau Ceti inside the locus at eleven lightyears.” – “A05, eh? Not too good.”

“No, sir. But we have a true Sol type, a 02-catalog ZD9817. But it’s more than twice as far away.”

Captain King chewed a knuckle. “I suppose I’ll have to put it up to the elders. How much subjective time advantage are we enjoying?” “I don’t know, sir.”

“Eh? Well work it out! Or give me the data and I will. I don’t claim to be the mathematician you are, but any cadet could solve that one. The equations are simple enough.” –

“So they are, sir. But I don’t have the data to substitute in the time-contraction equation . . -. because I have no way now to measure the ship’s speed. The violet shift is useless to use; we don’t know what the lines mean. I’m afraid we must wait until we have worked up a much longer baseline.”

King sighed. “Mister, I sometimes wonder why I got into this business. Well, are you willing to venture a best guess? Long time? Short time?”

“Uh … a long time, sir. Years.”

“So? Well, I’ve sweated it out in worse ships. Years, eh? Play any chess?”

“I have, sir.” Libby did not mention that he had given up the game long ago for lack of adequate competition. “Looks like we’d have plenty of time to play. King’s pawn;to king four.”

“King’s knight to bishop three.”

“An unorthodox player, eh? Well, I’ll answer you later. I suppose I’d better try to sell them the 02 eyen though it takes longer … and I suppose I’d better caution Ford to start some contests and things. Can’t have ‘em getting coffin fever.”

“Yes, sir. Did I mention deceleration time? It works out to just under one Earth year, subjective, at a negative one-gee, to slow us to stellar speeds.” “Eh? We’ll decelerate the same way we accelerated-with your lightpressure drive.”

Libby shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. The drawback of the lightpressure drive is that it makes no difference what your previous course and speed may be; if you go inertialess in the near neighborhood of a star, its light pressure kicks you away from it like a cork hit by a stream of water. Your previous momentum is canceled out when you cancel your inertia.”

“Well,” King conceded, “let’s assume that we will follow your schedule. I can’t argue with you yet; there are still some things about that gadget of yours that I don’t understand.” “There are lots of things about it,” Libby answered seriously, “that I don’t understand either.”

The ship had flicked by Earth’s orbit less than ten minutes after Libby cut in his space drive. Lazarus and he had discussed the esoteric physical aspects of it all the way to the orbit of Mars-less than a quarter hour. Jupiter’s path was far distant when Barstow called the organization conference. But it killed an hour to find them all in the crowded ship; by the time he called them to order they were a billion miles out beyond the orbit of Saturn-elapsed time from “Go!” less than an hour and a half.

But the blocks get longer after Saturn. Uranus found them still in discussion. Nevertheless Ford’s name was agreed on and he had accepted before the ship was as far from the Sun as is Neptune. King had been named captain, had toured his new command with Lazarus as guide, and was already in conference with his astrogator when the ship passed the orbit of Pluto nearly four billion miles deep into space, but still less than six hours after the Sun’s light had blasted them away.

Even then they were not outside the Solar System, but between them and the stars lay nothing but the winter homes of Sol’s comets and hiding places of hypothetical trans-Plutonian planets-space in which the Sun holds options but can hardly be said to own in fee simple. But even the nearest stars were still lightyears away. New Frontiers was headed for them at a pace which crowded the heels of light-weather cold, track fast.

Out, out, and still farther out … out to the lonely depths where world lines are almost straight, undistorted by gravitation. Each day, each month … each year … their headlong flight took them farther from all humanity.

PART TWO

The ship lunged on, alone in the desert of night, each lightyear as empty as the last. The Families built up a way of life in her.

The New Frontiers was approximately cylindrical. When not under acceleration, she was spun on her axis to give pseudo-weight to passengers near the outer skin of the ship; the outer or “lower” compartments were living quarters while the innermost or “upper” compartments were storerooms and so forth. Between compartments were shops, hydroponic farms and such. Along the axis, fore to aft, were the control room, the converter, and the main drive.

The design will be recognized as similar to that of the larger free-flight interplanetary ships in use today, but it is necessary to bear in mind her enormous size. She was a city, with ample room for a colony of twenty thousand, which would have allowed the planned complement of ten thousand to double their numbers during the long voyage to Proxima Centauri.

Thus, big as she was, the hundred thousand and more of the Families found themselves overcrowded fivefold.

They put up with it only long enough to rig for cold-sleep. By converting some recreation space on the lower levels to storage, room was squeezed out for the purpose. Somnolents require about one per cent the living room needed by active, functioning humans; in time the ship was roomy enough for those still awake. Volunteers for cold-sleep were not numerous at first-these people were more than commonly aware of death because of their unique heritage; cold-sleep seemed too much like the Last Sleep. But the great discomfort of extreme overcrowding combined with the equally extreme monotony of the endless voyage changed their minds rapidly enough to provide a steady supply for the little death as fast as they could be accommodated.

Those who remained awake were kept humping simply to get the work done-the ship’s houskeeping, tending the hydroponic farms and the ship’s auxiliary machinery and, most especially, caring for the somnolents themselves. Biomechanicians have worked out complex empirical formulas describing body deterioration and the measures which must be taken to offset it under various conditions of impressed acceleration, ambient temperature, the drugs used, and other factors such as metabolic age, body mass, sex, and so forth. By using the upper, low-weight compartments, deterioration caused by acceleration (that is to say, the simple weight of body tissues on themselves, the wear that leads to flat feet or bed sores) could be held to a minimum. But all the care of the somnolents had to be done by hand-turning them, massaging them, checking on blood sugar, testing the slow-motion heart actions, all the tests and services necessary to make sure that extremely reduced metabolism does not

slide over into death. Aside from a dozen stalls in the ship’s infirmary she had not been designed for cold-sleep passengers; no automatic machinery had been provided. All this tedious care of tens of thousands of somnolents had to be done by hand.

Eleanor Johnson ran across her friend, Nancy Weatheral, in Refectory 9-D—called “The Club” by its habitues, less flattering things by those who avoided it. Most of its frequenters were young and noisy. Lazarus was the only elder who ate there often. He did not mind noise, he enjoyed it.

Eleanor swooped down on her friend and kissed the back of her neck. “Nancy! So you are awake again! My, I’m glad to see you!” Nancy disentangled herself. “H’lo, b~e. Don’t spill my coffee.”

“Well! Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“Of course I am. But you forget that while it’s been a year to you, it’s only yesterday to me. And I’m still sleepy.” “How long have you been awake, Nancy?”

“Acouple of hours. How’s that kid of yours?”

“Oh, he’s fine!” Eleanor Johnson’s face brightened. “You wouldn’t know him-he’s shot up fast this past year. Almost up to my shoulder and looking more like his father every day.”

Nancy changed the subject. Eleanor’s friends made a point of keeping Eleanor’s deceased husband out of the conversation. “What have you been doing while I was snoozing? Still teaching primary?” –

“Yes. Or rather ‘No.’ I stay with the age group my Hubert is in. He’s in junior secondary now.”

“Why don’t you catch a few months’ sleep and skip some of that drudgery, Eleanor? You’ll make an old woman out of yourself if you keep it up;” – – “No,” Eleanor refused, “not until Hubert is old enough not to need me.”

“Don’t be sentimental. Half the female volunteers are women with young children. I don’t blame ‘em a bit. Look at me-from my point of view the trip so far has lasted only seven months. I could do the rest of it standing on my head.”

Eleanor looked stubborn. “No, thank you. That may be all right for you, but I am doing very nicely as I am.”

Lazarus had been sitting at the same counter doing drastic damage to a sirloin steak surrogate. “She’s afraid she’ll miss something,” he explained. “I don’t blame her. So am I.” Nancy changed her tack. “Then have another child, Eleanor. That’ll get you relieved from routine duties.”

“It takes two to arrange that,” Eleanor pointed out.

“That’s no hazard. Here’s Lazarus, for example. He’d make a Aplus father.”

Eleanor dimpled. Lazarus blushed under his permanent tan. “As a matter of fact,” Eleanor stated evenly, “I proposed to him and was turned down.” Nancy sputtered into her coffee and looked quickly from Lazarus to Eleanor. “Sorry. I didn’t know.”

“No harm,” answered Eleanor. “It’s simply because I am one of his granddaughters, four times removed.”

“But …” Nancy fought a losing fight with the custom of privacy. “Well, goodness me, that’s well within the limits of permissible consanguinity. What’s the hitch? Or should I shut up?” “You should,” Eleanor agreed.

Lazarus shifted uncomfortably. “I know I’m oldfashioned,” he admitted, “but I soaked up some of my ideas a long time ago. Genetics or no genetics, I just wouldn’t feel right marrying one of my own grandchildren.”

Nancy looked amazed. “I’ll say you’re oldfashioned!” She added, “Or maybe you’re just shy. I’m tempted to propose to you myself and find out.” Lazarus glared at her. “Go ahead and see what a surprise you get!”

Nancy looked him over coolly. “Mmn …” she meditated.

Lazarus tried to outstare her, finally dropped his eyes: “I’ll have to ask you ladies to excuse me,” he said nervously. “Work to do.” Eleanor laid a gentle hand on his arm. “Don’t go, Lazarus. Nancy is a cat and can’t help it. Tell her about the plans for landing.” “What’s that? Are we going to land? When? Where?”

Lazarus, willing to be mollified, told her. The type G2, or Sol-type star, toward which they had bent their course years earlier was now less than a lightyear away-a little over seven light- months-and it was now possible to infer by parainterferometric methods that the star (ZD9817, or simply “our” star) had planets of some sort.

In another month, when the star would be a half lightyear away, deceleration would commence. Spin would be taken off the ship and for one year she would boost backwards at one gravity, ending near the star at interplanetary rather than interstellar speed, and a search would be made for a planet fit to support human life. The search would be quick and easy as the only planets they were interested in would shine out brilliantly then, like Venus from Earth; they were not interested in elusive cold planets, like Neptune or Pluto, lurking in distant shadows, nor in scorched cinders ilke Mercury, hiding in the flaming skirts of the mother star.

If no Earthlike planet was to be had, then they must continue on down really close to the strange sun and again be kicked away by light pressure, to resume hunting for a home

elsewhere-with the difference that this time, not harassed by police, they could select a new course with care.

Lazarus explained that the New Frontiers would not actually land in either case; she was too big to land, her weight would wreck her. Instead, if they found a planet, she would be thrown into a parking orbit around her and exploring parties would be sent down in ship’s boats. – –

As soon as face permitted Lazarus left the two young women and went to the laboratory where the Families continued their researches in metabolism and gerontology. He expected to find Mary Sperling there; the brush with Nancy Weatheral had made him feel a need for her company. If he ever did marry again, he thought to himself, Mary was more his style. Not that he seriously considered it; he felt that a iiaison between Mary and himself would have a ridiculous flavor of lavender and old lace.

Mary Sperling, finding herself cooped up in the ship and not wishing to accept the symbolic death of cold-sleep, had turned her fear of death into constructive channels by volunteering to be a laboratory assistant in the continuing research into longevity. She was not a trained biologist but she had deft fingers and an agile mind; the patient years of the trip had shaped her into a valuable assistant to Dr. Gordon Hardy, chief of the research.

Lazarus found her servicing the deathless tissue of chicken heart known to the laboratory crew as “Mrs. ‘Avidus.” Mrs. ‘Avidus was older than any member of the Families save possibly Lazarus himself; she was a growing piece of the original tissue obtained by the Families from the Rockefeller Institute in the twentieth century, and the tissues had been alive since early in the twentieth century even then. Dr. Hardy and his predecessors had kept their bit of it alive for more than two centuries now, using the Carrel-Lindbergh-O’Shaug techniques and still Mrs. ‘Avidus flourished.

Gordon Hardy had insisted on taking the tissue and the apparatus which cherished it with him to the reservation when he was arrested; he had been equally stubborn about taking the living tissue along during the escape in the Chili. Now Mrs. ‘Avidus still lived and grew in the New Frontiers, fifty or sixty pounds of her-blind, deaf, and brainless, but still alive.

Mary Sperling was reducing her size. “Hello, Lazarus,” she greeted him. “Stand back. I’ve got the tank open.” He watched her slice off excess tissue. “Mary,” he mused, “what keeps that silly thing alive?”

“You’ve got the question inverted,” she answered, not looking up; “the proper form is: why should it die? Why shouldn’t it go on forever?” – “I wish to the Devil it would die!” came the voice of Dr. Hardy from behind them. “Then we could observe and find out why.” – –

“You’ll never find out why from Mrs. ‘Avidus, boss,” Mary answered, hands and eyes still busy. “The key to the matter is in the gonads-she hasn’t any.” ‘Hummph! What do you know about it?”

“Awoman’s intuition. What do you know about it?”

“Nothing, -absolutely nothing!-which puts me ahead of you and your intuition.” “Maybe. At least,” Mary added slyly, “1 knew you before you were housebroken.”

“Atypical female argument. Mary, that lump of muscle cackled and laid eggs before either one of us was born, yet it doesn’t know anything.” He scowled at it. “Lazarus, I’d gladly trade it for one pair of carp. male and female.” –

“Why carp?” asked Lazarus.

“Because carp don’t seem to die. They get killed, or eaten, or starve to death, or succumb to infection, but so far as we know they don’t die.” “Why not?”

“That’s what I was trying to find out when we were rushed off on this damned safari. They have unusual intestinal flora and it may have something to do with that. But I think it has to do with the fact that they never stop growing.”

Mary said something inaudibly. Hardy said, “What are you muttering about? Another intuition?”

“I said, ‘Amoebas don’t die.’ You said yourself that every amoeba now alive has been alive for, oh, fifty million years or so. Yet they don’t grow indefinitely larger and they certainly can’t have intestinal flora.”

“No guts,” said Lazarus and blinked.

“What a terrible pun, Lazarus. But what I said is true. They don’t die. They just twin and keep on living.”

“Guts or no guts,” Hardy said impatiently, “there may be a structural parallel. But I’m frustrated for lack of experimental subjects. Which reminds me: Lazarus, I’m glad you dropped in. I want you to do me a favor.”

“Speak up. I might be feeling mellow.”

“You’re an interesting case yourself, you know. You didn’t follow our genetic pattern; you anticipated it. I don’t want your body to go into the converter; I want to examine it.”

Lazarus snorted. “‘Sail right with me, bud. But you’d better tell your successor what to look for-you may not live that long. And I’ll bet you anything that you like that nobody’ll find it by poking around in my cadaver!”

The planet they had hoped for was there when they looked for it, green, lush, and young, and looking as much like Earth as another planet could. Not only was it Earthlike but the rest of the system duplicated roughly the pattern of the Solar System-small terrestrial planets near this sun, large Jovian planets farther out. Cosmologists had never been able to account for the Solar System; they had alternated between theories of origin which had failed to stand up and sound mathematico-physical “proofs” that such a system could never have originated in the first place. Yet here was another enough like it to suggest that its paradoxes were not unique, might even be common.

But more startling and even more stimulating and certainly more disturbing was another fact brought out by telescopic observation as they got close to the planet. The planet held life . . , intelligent life … civilized life.

Their cities could be seen. Their engineering works, strange in form and purpose, were huge enough to be seen from space just as ours can be seen.

Nevertheless, though it might mean that they must again pursue their weary hegira, the dominant race did not appear to have crowded the available living space. There might be room for their little colony on those broad continents. If a colony was welcome…

“To tell the truth,” Captain King fretted, “I hadn’t expected anything like this. Primitive aborigines perhaps, and we certainly could expect dangerous animals, but I suppose I unconsciously assumed that man was the only really civilized race. We’re going to have to be very cautious.”

King made up a scouting party headed by Lazatus; he had come to have confidence in Lazarus’ practical sense and will to survive. King wanted to head the party himself, but his concept of his duty as a ship’s captain forced him to forego it. But Slayton Ford could go; Lazarus chose him and Ralph Schultz and his lieutenants. The rest of the party were specialists- biochemist, geologist, ecologist, stereographer, several sorts of psychologists and sociologists to study the natives including one authority in McKelvy’s structural theory of communication whose task would be to find some way to talk with the natives.

No weapons.

King flatly refused to arm them. “Your scouting party is expendable, he told Lazarus bluntly; “for we can not risk offending them by any sort of fighting for any reason, even in self-defense. You are ambassadors, not soldiers. Don’t forget it.”

Lazarus returned to his stateroom, came back and gravely delivered to King one blaster. He neglected to mention the one still strapped to his leg under his kilt.

As King was about to tell them to man the boat and carry out their orders they were interrupted by Janice Schmidt, chief nurse to the Families’ congenital defectives. She pushed her way past and demanded the Captain’s attention. –

Only a nurse could have obtained it at that moment; she had professional stubbornness to match his and half a century more practice at being balky. He glared at her. “What’s the meaning of this interruption?”

“Captain, I must speak with you about one of my children.”

“Nurse, you are decidedly out of order. Get out. See me in my office-after taking it up with the Chief Surgeon.”

She put her hands on her hips. “You’ll see me now. This is the landing party, isn’t it? I’ve got something you have to hear before they leave.” King started to speak, changed his mind, merely said, “Make it brief.”

She did so. Hans Weatheral, a youth of some ninety years and still adolescent in appearance through a hyper-active thymus gland, was one of her charges. He had inferior but not moronic mentality, a chronic apathy, and a neuro-muscular deficiency which made him too weak to feed himself-and an acute sensitivity to telepaths.

He had told Janice that he knew all about the planet around which they orbited. His friends on the planet had told him about it … and they were expecting him.

The departure of the landing boat was delayed while King and Lazarus investigated. Hans was matter of fact about his information and what little they could check of what he said was correct. But he was not too helpful about his “friends.” “Oh, just people,” he said, shrugging at their stupidity. “Much like back home. Nice people. Go to work, go to school, go to church. Have kids and enjoy themselves. You’ll like them.”

But he was quite clear about one point: his friends were expecting-him; therefore he must go along.

Against his wishes and his better judgment Lazarus saw added to his party Hans Weatheral, Janice Schmidt, and a stretcher for Hans.

When the party returned three days later Lazarus made a long private report to King while the specialist reports were being analyzed and combined. “It’s amazingly like Earth, Skipper, enough to make you homesick. But it’s also different enough to give you the willies-llke looking at your own face in the mirror and having it turn out to have three eyes and no nose. Unsettling.”

“But how about the natives?”

“Let me tell it. We made a quick swing of the day side, for a bare eyes look. Nothing you haven’t seen through the ‘scopes. Then I put her down where Hans told me to, in a clearing near the center of one of their cities. I wouldn’t have picked the place myself; I would have preferred to land in the bush and reconnoitre. But you told me to play Hans’ hunches.”

“You were free to use your judgment,” King reminded

“Yes, yes. Anyhow we did it. By the time the techs had sampled the air and checked for hazards there was quite a crowd around us. They-well, you’ve seen the stereographs.” “Yes. Incredibly android.”

“Android, hell! They’re men. Not humans, but men just the same.” Lazarus looked puzzled. “I don’t like it.”

King did not argue. The pictures had shown bipeds seven to eight feet tall, bilaterally symmetric, possessed of internal skeletal framework, distinct heads, lens-and-camera eyes. Those eyes were their most human and appealing features; they were large, limpid, and tragic, like those of a Saint Bernard dog.

It was well to concentrate on the eyes; their other features were not as tolerable. King looked away from the loose, toothless mouths, the bifurcated upper lips. He decided that it might take a long, long time to learn to be fond of these creatures. “Go ahead,” he told Lazarus.

“We opened up and I stepped out alone, with my hands empty and. trying to look friendly and peaceable. Three of them stepped forward-eagerly, I would say. But they lost interest in me at once; they seemed to be waiting for somebody else to come out. So I gave orders to carry Hans out.

“Skipper, you wouldn’t believe it. They fawned over Hans like a long lost brother. No, that doesn’t describe it. More like a king returning home in triumph. They were polite enough with the rest of us, in an offhand way, but they fairly slobbered over Hans.” Lazarus hesitated. “Skipper? Do you believe in reincarnation?”

“Not exactly. I’m open-minded about it. I’ve read the report of the Frawling Committee, of course.” –

“I’ve never had any use for the notion myself. But how else could you account for the reception they gave Hans?” “I don’t account for it. Get on with your report. Do you think it is going to be possible for us to colonize here?”

“Oh,” ‘ud Lazarus, “they left no doubt on that point. You see, Hans really can talk to them, telepathically. Hans tells us that – their gods have authorized us to live here-and the natives have already made plans to receive us.”

“That’s right. They want us.” – “Well! That’s a relief.”

“Is it?”

King studied Lazarus’ glum features. “You’ve made a report favorable on every point. Why the sour look?” “I don’t know. I’d just rather we found a planet of our own. Skipper, anything this easy has a hitch in it.”

Chapter 2

THE Jockaira (or Zhacheira, as some prefer) turned an entire city over to the colonists.

Such astounding cooperation, plus the sudden discovery by almost every member of the Howard Families that he was sick for the feel of dirt under foot and free air in his lungs, greatly speeded the removal from ship to ground. It had been anticipated that at least an Earth year would be needed for such transition and that somnolents would be waked only as fast as they could be accommodated dirtside, But the limiting factor now was the scanty ability of the ship’s boats to transfer a hundred thousand people as they were roused.

The Jockaira city was not designed to fit the needs of human beings. The Jockaira were not human beings, their physical requirements were somewhat different, and their cultural needs as expressed in engineering were vastly different. But a city, any city, is a machine to accomplish certain practical ends: shelter, food supply, sanitation, communication; the internal logic of these prime requirements. as applied by diiferent creatures to different environments, will produce an unlimited number of answers. But, as applied by any race of warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing androidal creatures to a particular environment, the results, although strange, are necessarily such that Terran humans can use them. In some ways the Jockaira city looked as wild as a pararealist painting, but humans have lived in igloos, grass shacks, and even in the cybernautomated burrow under Antarctina; these humans could and did move into the Jockaira city-and of course at once set about reshaping it to suit

them better.

It was not difficult even though there was much to be done. There were buildings already standing-shelters with roofs on them, the artificial cave basic to all human shelter requirements. It did not matter what the Jockaira had used such a structure for; humans could use it for almost anything: sleeping, recreation, eating, storage, production. There were actual “caves” as well, for the Jockaira dig in more than we do. But humans easily turn troglodyte on occasion, in New York as readily as in Antarctica.

There was fresh potable water piped in for drinking and for limited washing. Amajor lack lay in plumbing; the city had no overall drainage system. The “Jocks” did not waterbathe and their personal sanitation requirements differed from ours and were taken care of differently. Amajor effort had to be made to jury-rig equivalents of shipboard refreshers and adapt them to hook in with Jockaira disposal arrangements. Minimum necessity ruled; baths would remain a rationed luxury until water supply and disposal could be increased at least tenfold. But baths are not a necessity.

But such efforts at modification were minor compared with the crash program to set up hydroponic farming, since most of the somnolents could not be waked until a food supply was assured. The do-it-now crowd wanted to tear out every bit of hydroponic equipment in the New Frontiers at once, ship it down dirtside, set it up and get going, while depending on stored supplies during the changeover; a more cautious minority wanted to move only a pilot plant while continuing to grow food in the ship; they pointed out that unsuspected fungus or virus on the strange planet could result in disaster …starvation.

The minority, strongly led by Ford and Barstow and supported by Captain King, prevailed; one of the ship’s hydroponic farms was drained and put out of service. Its machinery was broken down into parts small enough to load into ship’s boats.

But even this never reached dirtside. The planet’s native farm products turned out to be suitable for human food and the Jockaira seemed almost pantingly anxious to give them away. Instead, efforts were turned to establishing Earth crops in native soil in order to supplement Jockaira foodstuffs with sorts the humans were used to. The Jockaira moved in and almost took over that effort; they were superb “natural” farmers (they had no need for synthetics on their undepleted planet) and seemed delighted to attempt to raise anything their guests wanted.

Ford transferred his civil headquarters to the city as soon as a food supply for more than a pioneer group was assured, while King remained in the ship. Sleepers were awakened and ferried to the ground as fast as facilities were made ready for them and their services could be used. Despite assured food, shelter, and drinking water, much needed to be done to provide minimum comfort and decency. The two cultures were basicially different. The Jockaira seemed always anxious to be endlessly helpful but they were often obviously baffled at what the humans tried to do. The Jockaira culture did not seem to include the idea of privacy; the buildings of the city had no partitions in them which were not loadbearing-and few that were; they tended to use columns or posts. They could not understand why the humans would break up these lovely open spaces into cubicles and passageways; they simply could not comprehend why any individual would ever wish to be alone for any purpose whatsoever.

Apparently (this is not certain, for abstract communication with them never reached a subtle level) they decided eventually that being alone held a religious significance for Earth people. In any case they were again helpful; they provided thin sheets of material which could be shaped into partitions-with their tools and only with their tools. The stuff frustrated human engineers almost to nervous collapse. No corrosive known to our technology affected it; even the reactions that would break down the rugged fluorine plastics used in handling uranium compounds had no effect on it. Diamond saws went to pieces on it, heat did not melt it, cold did not make it brittle. It stopped light, sound, and all radiation they were equipped to try on it. Its tensile strength could not be defined because they could not break it. Yet Jockaira tools, even when handled by humans, could cut it, shape it, reweld it.

The human engineers simply had to get used to such frustrations. From the criterion of control over environment through technology the Jockaira were as civilized as humans. But their developments had been along other lines.

The important differences between the two cultures went much deeper than engineering technology. Although ubiquitously friendly and helpful the Jockaira were not human. They thought differently, they evaluated differently; their social structure and language structure reflected their unhuman quality and both were incomprehensible to human beings.

Oliver Johnson, the semantician who had charge of developing a common language, found his immediate task made absurdly easy by the channel of communication through Hans Weatheral. “Of course,” he explained to Slayton Ford and to Lazarus, “Hans isn’t exactly a genius; he just misses being a moron. That limits the words I can translate through him to ideas he can understand. But it does give me a basic vocabulary to build on.”

“Isn’t that enough?” asked Ford. “It seems to me that – I have heard that eight hundred words will do to convey any idea.”

“There’s some truth in that,” admitted Johnson. “Less than a thousand words will cover all ordinary situations. I have selected not quite seven hundred of their terms, operationals and substantives, to give us a working lingua franca. But subtle distinctions and fine discriminations will have to wait until we know them better and understand them. Ashort vocabulary cannot handle high abstractions.”

“Shucks,” said Lazarus, “seven hundred words ought to be enough. Me, I don’t intend to make love to ‘em, or try to discuss poetry.”

This opinion seemed to be justified; most of the members picked up basic Jockairan in two weeks to a month after being ferried down and chattered in it with their hosts as if they had talked it all their lives. All of the Earthmen had had the usual sound grounding in mnemonics and semantics; a short-vocabulary auxiliary language was quickly learned under the stimulus of need and the circumstance of plenty of chance to practice-except, of course, by the usual percentage of unshakable provincials who felt that it was up to “the natives” to learn English.

The Jockaira did not learn English. In the first place not one of them showed the slightest interest. Nor was it reasonable to expect their millions to learn the language of a few thousand. But in any case the split upper lip of a Jockaira could not cope with “m,” “p,” and “b,” whereas the gutturals, sibilants, dentals, and clicks they did use could be approximated by the human throat.

Lazarus was forced to revise his early bad impression of the Jockaira. It was impossible not to like them once the strangeness of their appearance had worn off. They were so hospitable, so generous, so friendly, so anxious to please. He became particularly attached to Kreei Sarloo, who acted as a sort of liaison officer between the Families and the Jockaira. Sarloo held a position among his own people which could be trans1ated roughly as “chief,” “father,” “priest,” or “leader” of the Kreel family or tribe. He invited Lazarus to visit him in the Jockaira city nearest the colony. “My people will like to see you and smell your skin,” he said. “It will be a happymaking thing. The gods will be pleased.”

Sarloo seemed almost unable to form a sentence without making reference to his gods. Lazarus did not mind; to another’s religion he was tolerantly indifferent. “I will come, Sarloo, old bean. It will be a happymaking thing for me, too.”

Sarloo took him in the common vehicle of the Jockaira, a wheelless wain shaped much like a soup bowl, which moved quietly and rapidly over the ground, skimming the surface in apparent contact. Lazarus squatted on the floor of the vessel while Sarloo caused it to speed along at a rate that made Lazarus’ eyes water.

“Sasloo,” Lazarus asked, shouting to make himself heard against the wind, “how does this thing work? What moves it?’ “The gods breathe on the-” Sarloo used a word not in their common language. “-and cause it to need to change its place.”

Lazarus started to ask for a fuller explanation, then shut up. There had been something familiar about that answer and he now placed it; he had once given a very similar answer to one of the water people of Venus when he was asked to explain the diesel engine used in an early type of swamp tractor. Lazarus had not meant to be mysterious; he had simply been

tongue-tied by inadequate common language. Well, there was a way to get around that- “Sarloo, I want to see pictures of what happens inside,” Lazarus persisted, pointing. “You have pictures?”

“Pictures are,” Sarloo acknowledged, “in the temple. You must not enter the temple.” His great eyes looked mournfully at Lazarus, giving him a strong feeling that the Jockaira chief grieved over his friend’s lack of grace. Lazarus hastily dropped the subject.

But the thought of Venerians brought another puzzler to mind. The water people, cut off from the outside world by the eternal clouds of Venus, simply did not believe in astronomy. The arrival of Earthmen had caused them to readjust their concept of the cosmos a little, but there was reason to believe that their revised explanation was no closer to the truth. Lazarus wondered what the Jackaira thought about visitors from space. They had shown no surprise—or had they? –

“Sarloo,” he asked, “do you know where my brothers and I come from?’

“I know,” Sarloo answered. “You come from a distant sun -so distant that many seasons would come and go while light traveled that long journey.” – Lazarus felt mildly astonished. “Who told you that?’

“The gods tell us. Your brother Libby spoke on it.”

Lazarus was willing to lay odds that the gods had not got around to mentioning it until after Libby explained it to Kreel Sarloo. But he held his peace. He still wanted to ask Sarloo if he had been surprised to have visitors arrive from the skies but he could think of no Jockairan term for surprise or wonder. He was still trying to phrase the question when Sarloo spoke again:

“The fathers of my people flew through the skies as you did, but that was before the coming of the gods. The gods, in their wisdom, bade us stop.”

And that, thought Lazarus, is one damn big lie, from pure panic. There was not the slightest indication that the Jockaira had ever been off the surface of their planet.

At Sarloo’s home that evening Lazarus sat through a long session of what he assumed was entertainment for the guest of honor, himself. He squatted beside Sarloo on a raised portion of the floor of the vast common room of the clan Kreel and listened to two hours of howling that might have been intended as singing. Lazarus felt that better music would result from stepping on the tails of fifty assorted dogs but he tried to take it in the spirit in which it seemed to be offered.

Libby, Lazarus recalled, insisted that this mass howling which the Jockaira were wont to indulge in was, in fact,he had to sdmit that Llbby the ***$ork*** ***$ttsr*** than he did in some ways~ Libby had been delighted to discover that the Jockaira were excellent and subtle mathematicians. In particular they had a grasp of number that ***pi 1/4$Ileled j~ own w~d- ‘ta1~,fl~r -arithmetics irene lnoredl~ pvved for ncnnal human***. Anumber, any number ***I*ip *** to them a unique entity, to be grasped in itself ***si net idIy as ft*** grouping of smaller numbers. In consequence they used any convenient positional or exponential notation with any base, rational irrational, or variable-~,***-~ st-a***. It was supreme luck, Lazarus mused, that Libby was available to act as mathematical interpreter between the Jockaira and the Families, else it would have been impossible to grasp a lot of the new technologies the Jockaira were showing them.

He wondered why the Jockaira showed no interest in learning human technologies they were offered in return?

The howling discord died away and Lazarus brought his thoughts back to the scene around him. Food was brought; the Kreel family tackled it with the same jostling enthusiasm with which Jockaira did everything. Dignity, thought Lazarus—lean idea which never caught on here. Alarge bowl, full two feet across and brimful of an amorpheous meal, was placed in front of Kreel Sarloo. Adozen Kreels crowded atound it and started grabbing~giving no precedence to their senior. But Sadoo casually slapped a few of them out of the way and plunged a hand into the dish, brought forth a gob of the ration and rapidly kneaded it into a ball in the palm of his double-thumbed hand. Done, he shoved it towards Lazarus’ mouth.

Lmarus war not squeamish-but he had to remind bimself first, that food for Jockaira was food for men, and second that he could not catch anything from them anyhow, before he could bring himself to try the proffered morsel.

He took a large bite. Mmmm… not too bad-bland and sticky, no particular flavor. Not good eithet~but could be swallowed. Grimly determined to uphold the hon of his race, he ate on, while promising himself a proper meal in the near future. When lie’ (cit that to swallow another mouthful would be to invite physical and social diaaster.

***$~ed Up sl.~Ze h**dM st~ha m~ uite$bmsndc~d IttoSssfoo ,kWasIn.pired dljdmflitey For Ike zest of the mast Lazarus fe4 Sexton, fed bun until bin anne were tired until he m~ at ha host’s ability o tuck it away**

After eating they slept and Lazarus slept with the famiy *** lIte**ly*** They slept where they had eaten, without beds, disposed as casually as leaves on a path or puppies. To his aurprise, Lazarus slept well and did not awoke until false suns in the cavern roof glowed in ***mysse,~as s~rmpath~c to-***new dawn. Sarloo was still asleep near him and giving out most humanlike snores. Lazarus found that one infant Jockaira was cuddled spoon fashion against his own stomach. He felt a movement behind his back~ a rustle at his thigh. He turned cautiously and found that another Jockaira-a six-year-old in human equivalence-had extracted his blaster from its holster and was now gazing curiously into its muzzle.

With hasty caution Lazarus removed the deadly toy from the child’s unwilling fingers, noted with relief that the safety was still on and reholstered it. Lazarus received a reproach for look; the kid seemed about to cry. “Hush,” whispered Lazarus, “you’ll wake your o1d man. Here—”- He gathered the child into his left arm, and cradled it against his side. The little Jockaira snuggled up to him, laid a soft moist mouth against his side, and promptly went to sleep.

Lazarus looked down at him. “You’re a cute little devil,” he said softly. “I-could grow right fond of you if 1 could ever get used to your smell.”

Some of the incidents between the two races would bave been funny bad they not been charged with potential trouble: for example, the case of Eleanor Johnson’s son Hubert This gangling adolescent was a confirmed sidewalk-superintendent. One day he was watching two technicians, one human and one Jockaira, adapt a Jockaira power source to the feed of Earth-type machinery. Tbe Jockaira was apparently amused by the boy and, in an obviously friendly spirit, picked him up.

Hubert began to scream.

His mother, never far from him, joined battle. She lacked strength and skill to do the utter destruction she was bent on; the big nonhuman was unhurt, but it created a nasty situation. Administrator Ford and Oliver Johnson tried very hard to explain the incident to the amazed Jockaira. Fortunately, they seemed grieved rather than vengeful.

Ford then called in Eleanor Johnson. “You have endangered the entire colony by your stupidity-“ “But I-“

“Keep quiet! If you hadn’t spoiled the boy rotten, he would have behaved himself. If you weren’t a maudlin fool. you would have kept your hands to yourself. The boy goes to the regular development classes henceforth and you are to let him alone. At the lightest sign of animosity on your part toward any of the natives, I’ll have you subjected to a few years’ cold-rest. Now get out!”

Ford was forced to use almost as strong measures on Janice Schmidt. The interest shown in Hans Weatheral by the Jockaira extended to all the telepathic defectives. The natives seemed to be reduced to a state of quivering adoration by the mere fact that these could communicate with them directly. Kreel Sarloo informed Ford that he wanted the sensitives to be housed separately from the other defectives in the evacuated temple of the Earthmen’s city and that the Jockaira wished to wait on them personally. It was more of an order than a request.

Janice Schmidt submitted ungracefully to Ford’s insistence that the Jockaira be humored in the matter in return for all that they had done, and Jockaira nurses took over under her jealous eyes.

Every sensitive of intelligence level higher than the semimoronic Hans Weatheral promptly developed spontaneous and extreme psychoses while being attended by Jockaira.

So Ford had another headache to straighten out. Janice Schmidt was more powerfully and more intelligently vindictive than was Eleanor Johnson. Ford was s-tpr~d to bind Janice over to keep the peace under the threat of retiring her completely from the care of her beloved “children.” Kreel Sarloo, distressed and apparently shaken to his core, accepted a compromise whereby Janice and her junior nurses resumed care of the poor psychotics while Jockaira continued to minister to sensitives of moron level and below.

But the greatest difficulty arose over … surnames. Jockaira each had an individual name and a surname. Surnames were limited in number, much as they were in the Families. A native’s surname referrect equally to his tribe and to the temple in which he worshipped.

Kreel Sarloo took up the matter with Ford. “High Father of the Strange Brothers,” he said, “the time has come for you and your children to choose your surnames.” (The rendition of Sarloo’s speech into English necessarily contains inherent errors.)

Ford was used to difficulties in understanding the Jockaira. “Sarloo, brother and friend,” he answered, “I hear your words but I do not understand. Speak more fully.”

Sarloo began over. “Strange brother, the seasons come and the seasons go and there is a time of ripening. The gods tell us that you, the Strange Brothers, have reached the time in your education (?) when you must select your tribe and your temple. I have come to arrange with you the preparations (ceremonies?) by which each will choose his surname. I speak for the gods in this. But let me say for myself that it would make me happy if you, my brother Ford, were to choose the temple Kreel.”

Ford stalled while he tried to understand what was implied. “I am happy that you wish me to have your surname. But my people already have their own surnames.”

Sarloo dismissed that with a flip of his lips. “Their present surnames are words and nothing more. Now they must choose their real surnames, each the name of his temple and of the god whom he will worship. Children grow up and are no longer children.”

Ford decided that he needed advice. “Must this be done at once?” “Not today, but in the near future. The gods are patient.”

Ford called in Zaccur Barstow, Oliver Johnson, Lazarus Long, and Ralph Schultz, and described the interview. Johnson played back the recording of the conversation and strained to catch the sense of the words. He prepared several possible translations but failed to throw any new light on the matter.

“It looks,” said Lazarus, “like a case of join the church or get out.”

“Yes,” agreed Zaccur Barstow, “that much seems to come through plainly. Well, I think we can afford to go through the motions. Very few of our people have religious prejudices strong enough to forbid their paying lip service to the native gods in the interests of the general welfare.”

“I imagine you are correct,” Ford said. “I, for one, have no objection to adding Kreel to my name and taking part in their genuflections if it will help us to live in peace.” He frowned. “But I would not want to see our culture submerged in theirs.”

“You can forget that,” Ralph Schultz assured him. “No matter what we have to do to please them, there is absolutely no chance of any real cultural assimilation. Our brains are not like theirs-just how different I am only beginning to guess.”

“Yeah,” said Lazarus, ” ‘just how different.’”

Ford turned to Lazarus. “What do you mean by that? What’s troubling you?” “Nothing. Only,” he added, “I never did share the general enthusiasm for this place.”

They agreed that one man should take the plunge first, then report back. Lazarus tried to grab the assignment on seniority, Schultz claimed it as a professional right; Ford overruled them and appointed himself, asserting that it was his duty as the responsible executive. –

Lazarus went with him to the doors of the temple where the induction was to take place. Ford was as bare of clothing as the Jockaira, but Lazarus, since he was not to enter the temple, was able to wear his kilt. Many of the colonists, sunstarved after years in the ship, went bare when it suited them, just as the Jockaira did. But Lazarus never did. Not only did his habits run counter to it, but a blaster is an extremely conspicuous object on a bare thigh.

Kreel Sarloo greeted them and escorted Ford inside. Lazarus called out after them, “Keep your chin up, pal!”

He waited. He struck a cigarette and smoked it. He walked up and down. He had no way to judge how long it would be; it seemed, in consequence, much longer than it was.

At last the doors slid back and natives crowded out through them. They seemed curiously worked up about something and none of them came near Lazarus. The press that still existed in the great doorway separated, formed an aisle, and a figure came running headlong through it and out into the open.

Lazarus recognized Ford.

Ford did not stop where Lazarus waited but plunged blindly on past. He tripped and fell down. Lazarus hurried to him.

Ford made no effort to get up. He lay sprawled face down, his shoulders heaving violently, his frame shaking with sobs. Lazarus knelt by him and shook him. “Slayton,” he demanded, “what’s happened? What’s wrong with you?” Ford turned wet and horror-stricken eyes to him, checking his sobs momentarily. He did not speak but he seemed to recognize Lazarus. He flung himself on Lazarus, clung to him, wept more violently than before.

Lazarus wrenched himself free and slapped Ford hard. “Snap out of it!” he ordered. “Tell me what’s the matter.”

Ford jerked his head at the slap and stopped his outcries but he said nothing. His eyes looked dazed. Ashadow fell across Lazarus’ line of sight; he spun around, covering with his blaster. Kreel Sarloo stood a few feet away and did not come closer-not because of the weapon; he had never seen one before.

“You!” said Lazarus. “For the-What did you do to him?”

He checked himself and switched to speech that Sarloo could understand. “What has happened to my brother Ford?” “Take him away,” said Sarloo, his lips twitching. “This is a bad thing. This is a very bad thing.”

“You’re telling me!” said Lazarus. He did not bother to translate.

Chapter 3

THE SAME CONFERENCE as before, minus its chairman, met as quickly as possible. Lazarus told his story, Shultz reported on Ford’s condition. “The medical staff can’t find anything wrong with him. All I can say with certainty is that the Administrator is suffering from an undiagnosed extreme psychosis. We can’t get into communication with him.”

“Won’t he talk at all?” asked Barstow.

“Aword or two, on subjects as simple as food or water. Any attempt to reach the cause of his trouble drives him into incoherent hysteria.” “No diagnosis?”

“Well, if you want an unprofessional guess in loose language, I’d say he was scared out of his wits. But,” Schultz added, “I’ve seen fear syndromes before. Never anything like this.” “I have,” Lazarus said suddenly.

“You have? Where? What were the circumstances?’

“Once,” said Lazarus, “when I was a kid, a couple of hundred years back, I caught a grown coyote and penned him up. I had a notion I could train him to be a hunting dog. It didn’t work. “Ford acts just the way that coyote did.”

An unpleasant silence followed. Schultz broke it with, “I don’t quite see what you mean. What is the parallel?’

“Well,” Lazarus answered slowly, “this is just my guess. Slayton is the only one who knows the true answer and he can’t talk. But here’s my opinion: we’ve had these Jockaira doped out all wrong from scratch. We made the mistake of thinking that because they looked like us, in a general way, and were about as civilized as we are, that they were people. But they aren’t people at all. They are … domestic animals.

“Wait a minute now!” he added. “Don’t get in a rush. There are people on this planet, right enough. Real people. They lived in the temples and the Jockaira called them gods. They are gods!”

Lazarus pushed on before anyone could interrupt. “I know what you’re thinking. Forget it. I’m not going metaphysical on you; I’m just putting it the best I can. I mean that there is something living in those temples and whatever it is, it is such heap big medicine that it can pinch-hit for gods, so you might as well call ‘em that. Whatever they are, they are the true dominant race on this planet-its people! To them, the rest of us, Jocks or us, are just animals, wild or tame. We made the mistake of assuming that a local religion was merely superstition. It ain’t.”

Barstow said slowly, “And you think this accounts for what happened to Ford?’ “I do. He met one, the one called Kreel, and it drove him crazy.”

“I take it,” said Schultz, “that it is your theory that any man exposed to this … this presence … would become psychotic?” “Not exactly,” answered Lazarus. “What scares me a damn’ sight more is the fear that I might not go crazy!”

That same day the Jockaira withdrew all contact with the Earthmen. It was well that they did so, else there would have been violence. Fear hung over the city, fear of horror worse than death, fear of some terrible nameless thing, the mere knowledge of which would turn a man into a broken mindless animal. The Jockaira no longer seemed harmless friends, rather clownish despite their scientific attainments, but puppets, decoys, bait for the unseen potent beings who lurked in the “temples.”

There was no need to vote on it; with the single-mindedness of a crowd stampeding from a burning building the Earthmen wanted to leave this terrible place. Zaccur Barstow assumed command. “Get King on the screen. Tell him to send down every boat at once. We’ll get out of here as fast as we can.” He ran his fingers worriedly through his hair. “What’s the most we can load each trip, Lazarus? How long will the evacuation take?”

Lazarus muttered. “What did you say?

“I said, ‘It ain’t a case of how long; it’s a case of will we be let.’ Those things in the temples may want more domestic animals-us!”

Lazarus was needed as a boat pilot but he was needed more urgently for his ability to manage a crowd. Zaccur Barstow was telling him to conscript a group of emergency police when Lazarus looked past Zaccur’s shoulder and exclaimed, “Oh oh! Hold it, Zack-school’s out.”

Zaccur turned his head quickly an4 saw, approaching with stately dignity across the council hail, Kreel Sarloo. No one got in his way.

They soon found out why. Zaccur moved forward to greet him, found himself stopped about ten feet from the Jockaira. No clue to the cause; just that-stopped. “I greet you, unhappy brother,” Sarloo began.

“I greet you, Krecl Sarloo.”

“The gods have spoken. Your kind can never be civilized (?).You and your brothers are to leave this world.” Lazarus let out a deep sigh of relief. –

“We are leaving, Kreel Sarloo,” Zaccur answered soberly.

“The gods require that you leave. Send your bother Libby to me.”

Zaccur sent for Libby, then turned back to Sarloo. But the Jockaira had nothing more to say to them; he seemed indifferent to their presence. They waited.

Libby arrived. Sarloo held him in a long conversation. Barstow and Lazarus were both in easy earshot and could see their lips move, but heard nothing. Lazarus found the circumstance very disquieting. Damn my eyes, he thought, I could figure several ways to pull that trick with the right equipment but I’ll bet none of ‘em is the right answer-and I don’t see any equipment.

The silent discussion ended, Sarloo stalked off without farewell. Libby turned to the others and spoke; now his voice could be heard. “Sarloo tells me,” he began, brow wrinkled in puzzlement, “that we are to go to a planet, uh, over thirtytwo lightyears from here. The gods have decided it.” He stopped and bit his lip.

“Don’t fret about it,” advised Lazarus. “Just be glad they want us to leave. My guess is that they could have squashed us flat just as easily. Once we’re out in space we’ll pick our. own destination.”

“I suppose so. But the thing that puzzles me is that he mentioned a time about three hours~away as being our departure from this system.” “Why, that’s utterly unreasonable,” protested Barstow. “Impossible. We haven’t the boats to do it.”

Lazarus said nothing. He was ceasing to have opinions.

Zaccur changed his opinion quickly. Lazarus acquired one, born of experience. While urging his cousins toward the field where embarkation was proceeding, he found himself lifted up, free of the ground. He struggled, his arms and legs met no resistance but the ground dropped away. He closed his eyes, counted ten jets, opened them again. He was at least two miles in the air.

Below him, boiling up from the city like bats from a cave, were uncountable numbers of dots and shapes, dark against the sunlit ground. Some were close enough for him to see that they were men, Earthmen, the Families.

The horizon dipped down, the planet became a sphere, the sky turned black. Yet his breathing seemed normal, his blood vessels did not burst.

They were sucked into clusters around the open ports of the New Frontiers like bees swarming around a queen. Once inside the ship Lazarus gave himself over to a case of the shakes. Whew! he sighed to himself, watch that first step-it’s a honey!

Libby sought out Captain King as soon as he was inboard and had recovered his nerve. He delivered Sarloo’s message.

King seemed undecided. “I don’t know,” he said. “You know more about the natives than I do, inasmuch as I have hardly put foot to ground. But between ourselves, Mister, the way they sent my passengers back has me talking to myself. That was the most remarkable evolution I have ever seen performed.”

“I might add that it was remarkable to experience, sir,” Libby answered unhumorously. “Personally I would prefer to take up ski jumping. I’m glad you had the ship’s access ports open.” “I didn’t,” said King tersely. “They were opened for me.”

They went to the control room with the intention of getting the ship under boost and placing a long distance between it and the planet from which they had been evicted; thereafter they would consider destination and course. “This planet that Sarloo described to you,” said King, “does it belong to a G-type star?”

“Yes,” Libby confirmed, “an Earth-type planet accompanying a Sol-type star. I have its coordinates and could. identify from the catalogues. But we can forget it; it is too far away.’ “So …” King activated the vision system for the stellarium. Then neither of them said anything for several long moments. The images of the heavenly bodies told their own story. With no orders from King, with no hands at the controls, the New Frontiers was on her long way again, headed out, as if she had a mind of her own.

“I can’t tell you much,” admitted Libby some hours later to a group consisting of King, Zaccur Barstow, and Lazarus Long. “I was able to determine, before we passed the speed of light-or appeared to-that our course then was compatible with the idea that we have been headed toward the star named by Kreel Sarloo as the destination ordered for us by his gods. We continued to accelerate and the stars faded out. I no longer have any astrogational reference points and I am unable to say where we are or where we are going,”

“Loosen up, Andy,” suggested Lazarus. “Make a guess.”

“Well … if our world line is a smooth function-if it is, and I have no data-then we may arrive in the neighborhood of star PK3722, where Kreel Sarloo said we were going.” “Rummph!” Lazarus turned to King. “Have you tried slowing down?”

“Yes,” King said shortly. “The controls are dead.” “Mmmm … Andy, when do we get there?”

Libby shrugged helplessly. “I have no frame of reference. What is time without a space reference?”

Time and space, inseparable and one-Libby thought about it long after the others had left. To be sure, he had the space framework of the ship itself and therefore there necessarily was ship’s time. Clocks in the ship ticked or hummed or simply marched; people grew hungry, fed themselves, got tired, rested. Radioactives deteriorated, physio-chemical processes moved toward states of greater entropy, his own consciousness perceived duration.

But the background of the stars, against which every timed function in the history of man had been measured, was gone. So far as his eyes or any instrument in the ship could tell him, they had become unrelated to the rest of the universe.

What universe?

There was no universe. It was gone.

Did they move? Can there be motion when there is nothing to move past?

Yet the false weight achieved by the spin of the ship persisted. Spin with reference to what? thought Libby. Could it be that space held a true, absolute, nonrelational texture of its own, like that postulated for the long-discarded “ether” thatthe classic Michelson-Morley experiments had failed to detect? No, more than that-had denied the very possibility of its existence? -had for that matter denied the possibility of speed greater than light. Had the ship actually passed the speed of light? Was it not more likely that this was a coffin, with ghosts as passengers, going nowhere at no time?

But Libby itched between his shoulder blades and was forced to scratch; his left leg had gone to sleep; his stomach was beginning to speak insistently for food-if this was death, he decided, it did not seem materially different from life.

With renewed tranquility, he left the control room and headed for his favorite refectory, while starting to grapple with the problem of inventing a new mathematics which would include all the new phenomena. The mystery of how the hypothetical gods of the Jockaira had teleported the Families from ground to ship he discarded. There had been no opportunity to obtain significant data, measured data; the best that any honest scientist could do, with epistemological rigor, was to include a note that recorded the fact and stated that it was unexplained. It was a fact; here he was who shortly before had been on the planet; even now Schultz’s assistants were overworked trying to administer depressant drugs to the thousands who had gone to pieces emotionally under the outrageous experience. But Libby could not explain it and, lacking data, felt no urge to try. What he did want to do was to deal with world lines in a plenum, the basic problem of field physics.

Aside from his penchant for mathematics Libby was a simple person. He preferred the noisy atmosphere of the “Club,” refectory 9-D, for reasons different from those of Lazarus. The company of people younger than himself reassured him; Lazarus was the only elder he felt easy with.

Food, he learned, was not immediately available at the Club; the commissary was still adjusting to the sudden change. But Lazarus was there and others whom he knew; Nancy Weatheral scrunched over and made room for him. “You’re just the man I want to see,” she said. “Lazarus is being most helpful. Where are we going this time and when do we get there?” –

Libby explained the dilemma as well as he could. Nancy wrinkled her nose. “That’s a pretty prospect, I must say! Well, I guess that means back to the grind for little Nancy.” “What do you mean?”

“Have you ever taken care of a somnolent? No, of course you haven’t. It gets tiresome. Turn them over, bend their arms, twiddle their tootsies, move their heads, close the tank and move on to the next one. I get so sick of human bodies that I’m tempted to take a vow of chastity.”

“Don’t commit yourself too far,” advised Lazarus. “Why would you care, you old false alarm?” Eleanor Johnson spoke up. “Fm glad to be in the ship again. Those slimy Jockaira-ugh!”

Nancy shrugged. “You’re prejudiced, Eleanor. The Jocks are okay, in their way. Sure, they aren’t exactly like us, but neither are dogs. You don’t dislike dogs, do you?’ “That’s what they are,” Lazarus said soberly. “Dogs.”

“Huh?”

“I don’t mean that they are anything like dogs in most ways-they aren’t even vaguely canine and they certainly are our equals and possibly our superiors in some things … but they are dogs just the same. Those things they call their ‘gods’ are simply their masters, their owners. We couldn’t be domesticated, so the owners chucked us out.”

Libby was thinking of the inexplicable telekinesis the Jockaira-or their masters-had used. “I wonder what it would have been like,” he said thoughtfully, “if they had been able to domesticate us. They could have taught us a lot of wonderful things”

“Forget it,” Lazarus said sharply. “It’s not a man’s place to be property.” “What is a man’s place?”

“It’s a man’s business to be what he is … and be it in style!” Lazarus got up. “Got to go.”

Libby started to leave also, but Nancy stopped him. “Don’t go. I want to ask you some questions. What year is it back on~ Earth?”

Libby started to answer, closed his mouth. He started to answer a second time, finally said, “I don’t know how to answer that question. It’s like saying, ‘How high is up?”

“I know I probably phrased it wrong,” admitted Nancy. ‘1 didn’t do very well in basic physics, but I did gather the idea that time is relative and simultaneity is an idea which applies only to two points close together in the same framework. But just the same, I want to know something. We’ve traveled a lot faster and farther than anyone ever did before, haven’t we? Don’t our clocks slow down, or something?”

Libby got that completely baffled look which mathematical-physicists wear whenever laymen try to talk about physics in nonmathematical language. “You’re referring to the Lorentz-2 FitzGerald contraction. But, if you’ll pardon me, anything one says about it in words is necessarily nonsense.”

“Why?” she insisted.

“Because … well, because the language is inappropriate. The formulae used to describe the effect loosely called a contraction presuppose that the observer is part of the phenomenon. But verbal language contains the implicit assumption that we can stand outside the whole business and watch what goes on. The mathematical language denies the very possibility of any such outside viewpoint. Every observer has his own world line; he can’t get outside it for a detached viewpoint.”

“But suppose he did? Suppose we could see Earth right now?”

‘~There I go again,” Libby said miserably. “I tried to talk about it in words and all I did was to add to the confusion. There is no way to measure time in any absolute sense when two events are separated in a continuum. All you can measure is interval.”

“Well, what is interval? So much space and so much time.”

“No, no, no! It isn’t that at all. Interval is … well, it’s interval. I can write down formulae about it and show you how we use it, but it can’t be defined in words. Look, Nancy, can you write the score for a full orchestration of a symphony in words?” –

“No. Well, maybe you could but it wonld take thousands of times as long.”

“And musicians still could not play it until you put it back into musical notation. That’s what I meant,” Libby went on, “when I said that the language was inappropriate. I got into a difficulty like this once before in trying to describe the lightpressure drive. I was asked why, since the drive depends on loss of inertia, we people inside the ship had felt no loss of inertia. There was no answer, in words. Inertia isn’t a word; it is a mathematical concept used in mathematically certain aspects of a plenum. I was stuck.”

Nancy looked baffled but persisted doggedly. “My question still means something, even if I didn’t phrase it right. You can’t just tell me to run along and play. Suppose we turned around and went back the way we came, all the way to Earth, exactly the same trip but in reverse-just double the ship’s time it has been so far. All right, what year would it be on Earth when we got there?’

“It would be … let me see, now-” The almost automatic processes of Libby’s brain started running off the unbelievably huge and complex problem in accelerations, intervals, difform motion. He was approaching the answer in a warm glow of mathematical revery when the problem suddenly fell to pieces on him, became indeterminate. He abruptly realized that the problem had an unlimited number of equally valid answers.

But that was impossible. In the real world, not the fantasy world of mathematics, such a situation was absurd. Nancy’s question had to have just one answer, unique and real. Could the whole beautiful structure of relativity be an absurdity? Or did it mean that it was physically impossible ever to backtrack an interstellar distance?

“I’ll have to give some thought to that one,” Libby said hastily and left before Nancy could object.

But solitude and contemplation gave him no clue to the problem. It was not a failure of his mathematical ability; he was capable, he knew, of devising a mathematical description of any group of facts, whatever they might be. His difficulty lay in having too few facts. Until some observer traversed interstellar distances at speeds approximating the speed of light and returned to the planet from which he had started there could be no answer. Mathematics alone has no content, gives no answers.

Libby found himself wondering if the hills of his native Ozarks were still green, if the smell of wood smoke still clung to the trees in the autumn, then he recalled that the question lacked any meaning by any rules he knew of. He surrendered to an attack of homesickness such as he had not experienced since he was a youth in the Cosmic Construction Corps, making his first deep-space jump.

This feeling of doubt and uncertainty, the feeling of lostness and nostalgia, spread throughout the ship. On the first leg of their journey the Families had had the incentive that had kept the covered wagons crawling across the plains. But now they were going nowhere, one day led only to the next. Their long lives were become a meaningless burden.

Ira Howard, whose fortune established the Howard Foundation, was born in 1825 and died in 1873-of old age. He sold groceries to the Forty-niners in San Francisco, became a wholesale sutler in the American War of the Secession, multiplied his fortune during the tragic Reconstruction.

Howard was deathly afraid of dying. He hired the best doctors of his time to prolong his life. Nevertheless old age plucked him when most men are still young. But his will commanded that his money be used to lengthen human life. The administrators of the trust found no way to carry out his wishes other than by seeking out persons whose family trees showed congenital predispositions toward long life and then inducing them to reproduce in kind. Their method anticipated the work of Burbank; they may or may not have known of the illuminating researches of the Monk Gregor Mendel.

Mary Sperling put down the book she had been reading when Lazarus entered her stateeoom. He picked it up. “What are you reading, Sis? ‘Ecclesiastes.’ Hmm … I didn’t know you were religious.” He read aloud:

“‘Yea, though he live a thousand years twice told, yet hath he seen no good: do not all go to one place?’

“Pretty grim stuff, Mary. Can’t you find something more cheerful? Even in The Preacher?’ His eyes skipped on down. “How about this one? ‘For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope-‘ Or … mnunm, not too many cheerful spots. Try this: ‘Therefore remove sorrow from thy heart, and put away evil from thy flesh: for childhood and youth are vanity.’ That’s more my style; I wouldn’t be young again for overtime wages.”

“I would.”

“Mary, what’s eating you? I find you sitting here, reading the most depressing book in the Bible, nothing but death and funerals. Why?” She passed a hand wearily across her eyes. “Lazarus, I’m getting old. What else is there to think about?’

“You? Why, you’re fresh as a daisy!”

She looked at him. She knew that he lied; her mirror showed her the greying hair, the relaxed skin; she felt it in her bones. Yet Lazarus was older than she … although she knew, from what she had learned of biology during the years she had assisted in the longevity research, that Lazarus should never have lived to be as old as he was now. When he was born the program had reached only the third generation, too few generations to eliminate the less durable strains-except through some wildly unlikely chance shuffling of genes.

But there he stood. “Lazarus,” she asked, “how long do you expect to live?”

“Me? Now that’s an odd question. I mind a time when I asked a chap that very same question-about me, I mean, not about him. Ever hear of Dr. Hugo Pinero?” “‘Pinero… Pinero…’ Oh, yes, ‘Pinero the Charlatan.’”

“Mary, he was no charlatan. He could do it, no foolin’. He could predict accurately when a man would die.” “But-Go ahead. What did he tell you?”

“Just a minute. I want you to realize that he was no fake. His predictions checked out right on the button-if he hadn’t died, the life insurance companies would have been ruined. That was before you were born, but I was there and I know. Anyhow, Pinero took my reading and it seemed to bother him. So he took it again. Then he returned my money.”

“What did he say?”

“Couldn’t get a word out of him. He looked at me and he looked at his machine and he just frowned and clammed up. So I can’t rightly answer your question.” “But what do you think about it, Lazarus? Surely you don’t expect just to go on forever?”

“Mary,” he said softly, “Fm not planning on dying. I’m not giving it any thought at all.”

There was silence. At last she said, “Lazarus, I don’t want to die. But what is the purpose of our long lives? We don’t seem to grow wiser as we grow older. Are we simply hanging on after our tune has passed? Loitering in the kindergarten when we should be moving on? Must we die and be born again?”

“I don’t know,” said Lazarus, “and I don’t have any way to find out… and I’m damned if I see any sense in my worrying about it. Or you either. I propose to hang onto this life as long as I can and learn as much as I can. Maybe wishing and understanding are reserved for a later existence and maybe they aren’t for us at all, ever. Either way, I’m satisfied to be living and enjoying it. Mary my sweet, carpe that old diem! It’s the only game in town.”

The ship slipped back into the same monotonous routine that had obtained during the weary years of the first jump. Most of the Members went into cold-rest; the others tended them, tended the ship, tended the hydroponds. Among the somnolents was Slayton Ford; cold-rest was a common last resort therapy for functional psychoses.

The flight to star PK3722 took seventeen months and three days, ship’s time.

The ship’s officers had as little choice about the journey’s end as about its beginning. Afew hours before their arrival star images flashed back into being in the stellarium screens and the ship rapidly decelerated to interplanetary speeds. No feeling of slowing down was experienced; whatever mysterious forces were acting on them acted on all masses alike. The New Frontiers slipped into an orbit around a live green planet some hundred million miles from its sun; shortly Libby reported to Captain King that they were in a stable parking orbit.

Cautiously King tried the controls, dead since their departure. The ship surged; their ghostly pilot had left them.

Libby decided that the simile was incorrect; this trip had undoubtedly been planned for them but it was not necessary to assume that anyone or anything had shepherded them here. Libby suspected that the “gods” of the dog-people saw the plenum as static; their deportation was an accomplished fact to them before it happened-a concept regrettably studded with unknowns-but there were no appropriate words. Inadequately and incorrectly put into words, his concept was that of a “cosmic cam,” a world line shaped for them which ran out of normal space and back into it; when the ship reached the end of its “cam” it returned to normal operation.

He tried to explain his concept to Lazarus and to the Captain, but he did not do well. He lacked data and also had not had time to refine his mathematical description into elegance; it satisfied neither him nor them.

Neither King nor Lazarus had time to give the matter much thought. Barstow’s face appeared on an interstation viewscreen. “Captain!” he called out. “Can you come aft to lock seven? We have visitors!”

Barstow had exaggerated; there was only one. The creature reminded Lazarus of a child in fancy dress, masqueraded as a rabbit. The little thing was more android than were the Jockaira, though possibly not mammalian. It was unclothed but not naked, for its childlike body was beautifully clothed in short sleek golden fur. Its eyes were bright and seemed both merry and intelligent.

But King was too bemused to note such detail. Avoice, a thought, was ringing in his head: “… so you are the group leader …” it said. “… welcome to our world … we have been expecting you … the (blank.) told us of your coming…”

Controlled telepathy. Acreature, a race, so gentle, so civilized, so free from enemies, from all danger and strife that they could afford to share their thoughts with others-to share more than their thoughts; these creatures were so gentle and so generous that they were offering the humans a homestead on their planet. This was why this messenger had come: to make that offer.

To King’s mind this seemed remarkably like the prize package that had been offered by the Jockaira; he wondered what the boobytrap might be in this proposition.

The messenger seemed to read his thought”… look into our hearts… we hold no malice toward you … we share your love of life and we love the life in you … “We thank you,” King answered formally and aloud. “We will have to confer.” He turned to speak to Barstow, glanced back. The messenger was gone.

The Captain said to Lazarus, “Where did he go?” “Huh? Don’t ask me.”

“But you were in front of the lock.”

“I was checking the tell-tales. There’s no boat sealed on outside this lock-so they show. I was wondcring if they were working right. They are. How did he get into the ship? Where’s his rig?’

“How did he leaver’ “Not past me!”

“Zaccur, he came in through this lock, didn’t he? “I don’t know.”

“But he certainly went out through it”

“Nope,” denied Lazarus. “This lock hasn’t been opened. The deep-space seals are still in place. See for yourself.” King did. “You don’t suppose,” he said slowly, “that he can pass through-“

“Don’t look at me,” said Lazarus. “I’ve got no more prejudices in the matter than the Red Queen. Where does a phone image go when you cut the circuit?” He left, whistling softly to himself. King did not recognize the tune. Its words, which Lazarus did not sing, started with:

“Last night I saw upon the stair Alittle man who wasn’t there-“

Chapter 4

THERE WAS NO CATCH to the offer. The people of the planet-they had no name since they had no spoken language and the Earthmen simply called them “The Little People”-the little creatures really did welcome them and help them. They convinced the Families of this without difficulty for there was no trouble in communication such as there had been with the Jockaira. The Little People could make even subtle thoughts kndwn directly to the Earthmen and in turn could sense correctly any thought directed at them. They appeared either to ignore or not to be able to read any thought not directed at them; communicatibn with them was as controlled as spoken speech. Nor did the Earthmen acquire any telepathic powers among themselves.

Their planet was even more like Earth than was the planet of the Jockaira. It was a little larger than Earth but had a slightly lower surface gravitation, suggesting a lower average density- the Little People made slight use of metals in their culture, which may be indicative.

The planet rode upright in its orbit; it had not the rakish tilt of Earth’s axis. Its orbit was nearly circular; aphelion differed from perihelion by less than one per cent. There were no seasons. Nor was there a great heavy moon, such as Earth has, to wrestle its oceans about and to disturb the isostatic balance of its crust. Its hills were low, its winds were gentle, its seas were placid. To Lazarus’ disappointment, their new home, had no lively weather; it hardly had weather at all; it had climate, and that of the sort that California patriots would have the rest of the Earth believe exists in their part of the globe.

But on the planet of the Little People it really exists.

They indicated to the Earth people where they were to land, a wide sandy stretch of beach running down to the sea. Back of the low break of the bank lay mile on mile of lush meadowland, broken by irregular clumps of bushes and trees. The landscape had a careless neatness, as if it were a planned park, although there was no evidence of cultivation. It was here, a messenger told the first scouting party, that they were welcome to live.

There seemed always to be one of the Little People present when his help might be useful-not with the jostling inescapable overhelpfulness of the Jockaira, but with the unobtrusive readiness to hand of a phone or a pouch knife. The one who accompanied the first party of explorers confused Lazarus and Barstow by assuming casually that he had met them before, that he had visited them in the ship. Since his fur was rich mahogany rather than golden, Barstow attributed the error to misunderstanding, with a mental reservation that these people might possibly be capable of chameleonlike changes in color. Lazarus reserved his judgment.

Barstow asked their guide whether or not his people had any preferences as to where and how the Earthmen were to erect buildings. The question had been bothering him because a preliminary survey from the ship had disclosed no cities. It seemed likely that the natives lived underground-in which case he wanted to avoid getting off on the wrong foot by starting something which the local government might regard as a slum.

He spoke aloud in words directed at their guide, they having learned already that such was the best way to insure that the natives would pick up the thought.

In the answer that the little being flashed back Barstow caught the emotion of surprise. “… must you sully the sweet countryside with interruptions? … to what purpose do you need to form buildings? . .

“We need buildings for many purposes,” Barstow explained. “We need them as daily shelter, as places to sleep at night. We need them to grow our food and prepare it for eating.” He considered trying to explain the processes of hydroponic farming, of food processing, and of cooking, then dropped it, trusting to the subtle sense of telepathy to let his “listener” understand. “We need buildings for many other uses, for workshops and laboratories, to house the machines whereby we communicate, for almost everything we do in our everyday life.”

“Be patient with me …” the thought came, since I know so little of your ways … but tell me do you prefer to sleep in such as that? …” He gestured toward the ship’s boats they had come down in, where their bulges showed above the low bank. The thought he used for the boats was too strong to be bound by a word; to Lazarus’ mind came a thought of a dead, constricted space-a jail that had once harbored him, a smelly public phone booth.

“It is our custom.”

The creature leaned down and patted the turf. “… is this not a good place to sleep? …”

Lazarus admitted to himself that it was. The ground was covered with a soft spring turf, grasslike but finer than grass, softer, more even, and set more closely together. Lazarus took off his sandals and let his bare feet enjoy it, toes spread and working. It was, he decided, more like a heavy fur rug than a lawn. –

“As for food …”” their guide went on, “… why struggle for that which the good soil gives freely? . . come with me…”

He took them across a reach of meadow to where low bushy trees hung over aT meandering brook. The “leaves” were growths the size of a man’s hand, irregular in shape, and an inch or more in thickness. The little person broke off one and nibbled at it daintily.

Lazarus plucked one and examined it. It broke easily, like a well-baked cake. The inside was creamy yellow, spongy but crisp, and had a strong pleasant odor, reminiscent of mangoes. “Lazarus, don’t, eat that!” warned Barstow. “It hasn’t been analyzed~”

“… it is harmonious with your body . .

Lazarus sniffed it again. “I’m willing to be a test case, Zack.” “Oh, well-” Barstow shrugged. “I warned you. You will anyhow.”

Lazarus did. The stuff was oddly pleasing, firm enough to suit the teeth, piquant though elusive in flavor. It settled down happily in his stomach and made itself at home.

Barstow refused to let anyone else try the fruit until its effect on Lazarus was established. Lazarus took advantage of his exposed and privileged position to make a full meal-the best, he decided, that he had had in years.

“… will you tell me what you are in the habit of eating? …” inquired their little friend. Barstow started to reply but was checked by the creature’s thought: “… all of you think about it . .” no further thought message came from him for a few moments, then he flashed, “… that is enough . . -. my wives will take care of it …”

Lazarus was not sure the image meant “wives” but some similar close relationship was implied. It had not yet been established that the Little People were bisexual-or what.

Lazarus slept that night out under the stars and let their clean impersonal light rinse from him the claustrophobia of the ship. The constellations here were distorted out of easy recognition, although he could recognize, he decided, the cool blue of Vega and the orange glow of Antares. -The one certainty was the Milky Way, spilling its cloudy arch across the sky just as at home. The Sun, he knew, could not be visible to the naked eye even if he knew where to look for it; its low absolute magnitude would not show up across the lightyears. Have to get hold of Andy, he thought sleepily, work out its coordinates and pick it out with instruments. He fell asleep before it could occur to him to wonder why he should bother.

Since no shelter was needed at night they landed everyone as fast as boats could shuttle them down. The crowds were dumped on the friendly soil and allowed to rest, picnic fashion, until the colony could be organized. At first they ate supplies brought down from the ship, but Lazarus’ continued good health caused the rule against taking chances with natural native foods to be re1axed shortly. After that they ate mostly of the boundlein rai’gesse of the plants and used ship’s food only to vary their diets.

Several days after the last of them had been landed Lazarus was exploring alone some distance from the camp. He came across one of the Little People; the native greeted him with the same assumption of earlier acquaintance which all of them seemed to show and led Lazarus to a grove of low trees still farther from base. He indicated to Lazarus that he wanted him to eat.

Lazarus was not particularly hungry but he felt compelled to humor such friendliness, so he plucked and ate. He almost choked in his astonishment. Mashed potatoes and brown gravy!

“… didn’t we get it right? – . .” came an anxious thought.

“Bub,” Lazarus said solemnly, “I don’t know what you planned to do, but this is just fine!” Awarm burst of pleasure invaded his mind. “… try the next tree . .

Lazarus did so, with cautious eagerness. Fresh brown bread and sweet butter seemed to be the combination, though a dash of ice cream seemed to have crept in from somewhere.

He was hardly surprised when the third tree gave strong evidence of having both mushrooms and charcoal-broiled steak in its ancestry. “… we used your thought images almost entirely

…” explained his companion. “… they were much stronger than those of any of your wives …”

Lazarus did not bother to explain that he was not married. The little person added, “… there has not yet been time to simulate the appearances and colors your thoughts showed does it matter much to you? .

Lazarus gravely assured him that it mattered very little.

When he returned to the base, he had considerable difficulty in convincing others of the seriousness of his report.

One who benefited greatly from the easy, lotus-land quality of their new home was Slayton Ford. He had awakened from cold rest apparently recovered from his breakdown except in one respect: he had no recollection of whatever it was he had experienced in the temple of Kreel. Ralph Schultz considered this a healthy adjustment to an intolerable experience and dismissed him as a patient.

Ford seemed younger and happier than he had appeared before his breakdown. He no longer held formal office among the Members-indeed there was little government of any sort; the Families lived in cheerful easy-going anarchy on this favored planet-but he was still addressed by his title and continued to be treated as an elder, one whose advice was sought, whose judgment was deferred to, along with Zaccur Barstow, Lazarus, Captain King, and others. The Families paid little heed to calendar ages; close friends might differ by a century. For years they had benefited from his skilled administration; now they continued to treat him as an elder statesman, even though two-thirds of them were older than was he.

The endless picnic stretched into weeks, into months. After being long shut up in the ship, sleeping or working, the temptation to take a long vacation was too strong to resist and there was nothing to forbid it. Food in abundance, ready to eat and easy to handle, grew almost everywhere; the water in the numerous streams was clean and potable. As for clothing, they had plenty if they wanted to dress but the need was esthetic rather, than utilitarian; the Elysian climate made clothing for protection as silly as suits for swimming. Those who liked clothes wore them; bracelets and beads and flowers in the hair were quite enough for most of them and not nearly so much nuisance if one chose to take a dip in the sea.

Lazarus stuck to his kilt.

The culture and degree of enlightenment of the Little People was difficult to understand all at once, because their ways were subtle. Since they lacked outward signs, in Earth terms, of high scientific attainment-no great buildings, no complex mechanical transportation machines, no throbbing power plants-it was easy to mistake them for Mother Nature’s children, living in a Garden of Eden.

Only one-eighth of an iceberg shows above water.

Their knowledge of physical science was not inferior to that of the colonists; it was incredibly superior. They toured the ship’s boats with polite interest, but confounded their guides by inquiring why things were done this way rather than that?-and the way suggested invariably proved to be simpler and more efficient than Earth technique… when the astounded human technicians managed to understand what they were driving at.

The Little Pedple understood machinery and all that machinery implies, but they simply had little use for it. They obviously did not need it for communication and had little need for it for transportation (although the full reason for that was not at once evident), and they had very little need for machinery in any of their activities. But when they had a specific need for a mechanical device they were quite capable of inventing, building it, using it once, and destroying it, performing the whole process with a smooth cooperation quite foreign to that of men.

But in biology their preeminence was the most startling. The Little People were masters in the manipulation of life forms. Developing plants in a matter of days which bore fruit duplicating not only in flavor but in nutrition values the foods humans were used to was not a miracle to them but a routine task any of their biotechnicians could handle. They did it more easily than an Earth horticulturist breeds for a certain strain of color or shape in a flower.

But their methods were different from those of any human plant breeder. Be it said for them that they did try to explain their methods, but the explanations simply did not come through. In our terms, they claimed to “think” a plant into the shape and character they desired. Whatever they meant by that, it is certainly true that they could take a dormant seedling plant and, without touching it or operating on it in any way perceptible to their human students, cause it to bloom and burgeon into maturity in the space of a few hours-with new characteristics not found in the parent line . . and which bred true thereafter.

However the Little People differed from Earthmen only in degree with respect to scientific attainments. In an utterly basic sense they differed from humans in kind. They were not individuals.

No single body of a native housed a discrete individual. Their individuals were multi-bodied; they had group “souls.” The basic unit of their society was a telepathic rapport group of many parts. The number of bodies and brains housing one individual ran as high as ninety or more and was never less than thirty-odd.

The colonists began to understand much that had been utterly puzzling about the Little People only after they learned this fact. There is much reason to believe that the Little People found the Earthmen equally puzzling, that they, too, had assumed that their pattern of existence must be mirrored in others. The eventual discovery of the true facts on each side, brought about mutual misunderstandings over identity, seemed to arouse horror in the minds of the Little People. They withdrew themselves from the neighborhood of the Families’ settlement and remained away for several days.

At length a messenger entered the camp site and sought out Barstow. “…We are sorry we shunned you … in our haste we mistook your fortune for your fault … we wish to help you … we offer to teach you that you may become like ourselves …”

Barstow pondered how to answer this generous overture. “We thank you for your wish to help us,” he said at last, “but what you call our misfortune seems to be a necessary part of our makeup. Our ways are not your ways. I do not think we could understand your ways.”

The thought that came back to him was very troubled. “We have aided the beasts of the air and of the ground to cease their strife … but if~you do not wish our help we will not thrust it on you …”

The messenger went away, leaving Zaccur Barstow troubled in his mind. Perhaps, he thought, ha had been hasty in answering without taking time to consult the elders. Telepathy was certainly not a gift to be scorned; perhaps the Little People could train them in telepathy without any loss of human individualism. But what he knew of the sensitives among the Families did not encourage such hope; there was not a one of them who was emotionally healthy, many of them were mentally deficient as well-it did not seem like a safe path for humans.

It could be discussed later, he decided; no need to hurry. “No need to hurry” was the spirit throughout the settlement. There was no need to strive, little that had to be done and rarely any rush about that little. The sun was warm and pleasant, each day was much like the next, and there was always the day after that. The Members, predisposed by their inheritance to take a long view of things, began to take an eternal view. Time no longer mattered. Even the longevity research, which had continued throughout their memories, languished. Gordon Hardy tabled his current experimentation to pursue the vastly more fruitful occupation of learning what the Little People knew of the nature of life. He was forced to take it slowly, spending long hours in digesting new knowledge. As time trickled on, he was hardly aware that his hours of contemplation were becoming longer, his bursts of active study less frequent.

One thing he did learn, and its implications opened up whole new fields of thought: the Little People had, in one sense, conquered death.

Since each of their egos was shared among many bodies, the death of one body involved no death for the ego. All memory experiences of that body remained intact, the personality associated with it was not lost, and the physical loss could be made up by letting a young native “marry” into the group. But a group ego, one of the personalities which spoke to the Earthmen, could not die, save possibly by the destruotion of every body it lived in. They simply went on, apparently forever.

Their young, up to the time of “marriage” or group assimilation, seemed to have little personality and only rudimentary or possibly instinctive mental processes. Their elders expected no more of them in the way of intelligent behavior than a human expects of a child still in the womb. There were always many such uncompleted persons attached to any ego group; they were cared for like dearly beloved pets or helpless babies, although they were often as large and as apparently mature to Earth eyes as were their elders.

Lazarus grew bored with paradise more quickly than did the majority of his cousins. “It can’t always,” he complained to Libby, who was lying near him on the fine grass, “be time for tea.” “What’s fretting you, Lazarus?”

“Nothing in particular.” Lazarus set the point of his knife on his right elbow, flipped it with his other hand, watched it bury its point in the ground. “It’s just that -this place reminds me of a well-run zoo. It’s got about as much future.” He grunted scornfully. “It’s ‘Never-Never Land.”

“But what in particular is worrying you?”

“Nothing. That’s what worries me. Honest to goodness, Andy, don’t you see anything wrong in being turned out to pasture like this?”

Libby grinned sheepishly. “I guess it’s my hillbilly blood. ‘When it don’t rain, the roof don’t leak; when it rains, I cain’t fix it nohow,” he quoted. “Seems to me we’re doing tolerably well. What irks you?”

“Well-” Lazarus’ pale-blue eyes stared far away; he paused in his idle play with his knife. “When I was a young man a long time ago, I was beached in the South Seas-“ “Hawaii?’

“No. Farther south. Damned if I know what they call it today. I got hard up, mighty hard up, and sold my sextant. Pretty soon-or maybe quite a while-I could have passed for a native. I lived like one. It didn’t seem to matter. But one day I caught a look at myself in a mirror.” Lazarus sighed gustily. “I beat my way out of that place shipmate to a cargo of green hides, which may give you some idea how. scared and desperate I was!”

Libby did not comment. “What do you do with your time, Lib?” Lazarus persisted.

“Me? Same as always. Think about mathematics. Try to figure out a dodge for a space drive like’ the one that got us here.” “Any luck on that?” Lazarus was suddenly alert.

“Not yet. Gimme time. Or I just watch the clouds integrate. There are amusing mathematical relationships everywhere if you are on the lookout for them. In the ripples on the water, or the shapes of busts-elegant fifth-order functions.”

“Huh? You mean ‘fourth order.”

“Fifth order. You omitted the time variable. I like fifth-order equations,” Libby said dreamily. “You find ‘em in fish, too.” “Huinmph!” said Lazarus, and stood up suddenly. “That may be all right for you, but it’s not my pidgin.”

“Going some place?” “Goin’ to take a walk.”

Lazarus walked north. He walked the rest of that day, slept on the ground as usual that night, and was up and moving, still to the north, at dawn. The next day was followed by another like it, and still another. The going”was easy, much like strolling in a park … too easy, in Lazarus’ opinion. For the sight of a volcano, or a really worthwhile waterfall, he felt willing to pay four bits and throw in a jackknife.

The food plants were sometimes strange, but abundant and satisfactory. He occasionally met one or more of the Little People going about their mysterious affairs: they never bothered him nor asked why he was traveling but simply greeted him with the usual assumption of previous acquaintanceship. He began to long for one who would turn out to be a stranger; he felt watched.

Presently the nights grew colder, the days less balmy, and the Little People less numerous. When at last he had not seen one for an entire day, he camped for the night, remained there the next day-took out his soul and examined it.

He had to admit that he could find no reasonable fault with the planet nor its inhabitants. But just as definitely it was not to his taste. No philosophy that he had ever heard or read gave any reasonable purpose for man’s existence, nor any rational clue to his proper conduct. Basking in the sunshine might be as good a thing to do with one’s life as any other-but it was not for him and he knew it, even if he could not define how he knew it.

The hegira of the Families had been a mistake. It would have been a more human, a mqre mature and manly thing, to have stayed and fought for their rights, even if they had died insisting on them. Instead they had fled across half a universe (Lazarus was reckless about his magnitudes) looking for a place to light. They had found one, a good one-but already occupied by beings so superior as to make them intolerable for men… yet so supremely indifferent in their superiority to men that they had not even bothered to wipe them out, but had whisked them away to this-this -over-manicured country club.

And that in itself was the unbearable humiliation. The New Frontiers was the culmination of five hundred years of human scientific research, the best that men could do-but it had been flicked across the deeps of space as casually as a man might restore a baby bird to its nest.

The Little People did not seem to want to kick them out but the Little People, in their own way, were as demoralizing to men as were the gods of the Jockaira. One at a time they might be morons – but taken as groups each rapport group was a genius that threw the best minds that men could offer into the shade. Even Andy. Human beings could not hope to compete with that type of organization any more than a backroom shop could compete with an automated cybernated factory. Yet to form any such group identities, even if they could which he doubted, would be, Lazarus felt very sure, to give up whatever it was that made them men.

He admitted that he was prejudiced in favor of men. He was a man.

The uncounted days slid past while he argued with himself over the things that bothered him-problems that had made sad the soul of his breed since the first apeman had risen to self- awareness, questions never solved by full belly nor fine machinery. And the endless quiet days did no more to give him final answers than did all the soul searchings of his ancestors. Why? What shall it profit a man? No answer came back -save one: a firm unreasoned conviction that he was not intended for, or not ready for, this timeless snug harbor of ease.

His troubled reveries were interrupted by the appearance of one of the Little People. “… greetings, old friend your wife King wishes you to return to your home … he has need of your advice …”

“What’s the trouble?” Lazarus demanded.

But the little creature either could or would not tell him. Lazarus gave his belt a hitch and headed south. “… there is no need to go slowly …” a thought came after him.

Lazarus let himself be led to a clearing beyond a clump of trees. There he found an egg-shaped object about six feet long, featureless except for a door in the side. The native went in through the door, Lazarus squeezed his larger bulk in after him; the door closed.

It opened almost at once and Lazarus saw that they were on the beach just below the human settlement. He had to admit that it was a good trick.

Lazarus hurried to the ship’s boat parked on the beach in which Captain King shared with Barstow a semblance of community headquarters. “You sent for me, Skipper. What’s up?” King’s austere face was grave. “It’s about Mary Sperling.”

Lazarus felt a sudden cold tug at his heart. “Dead?”

“No. Not exactly. She’s gone over to the Little People. ‘Married’ into one of their groups.” “What? But that’s impossible!”

Lazarus was wrong. There was no faint possibility of interbreeding between Earthmen and natives but there was no barrier, if sympathy existed, to a human merging into one of their rapport groups, drowning his personality in the ego of the many.

Mary Sperling, moved by conviction of her own impending death, saw in the deathless group egos a way out. Faced with the eternal problem of life and death, she had escaped the problem by choosing neither … selflessness. She had found a group willing to receive her, she had crossed over.

“It raises a lot of new problems,” concluded King. “Slayton and Zaccur and I all felt that you had better be here.”

“Yes, yes, sure-but where is Mary?” Lazarus demanded and then ran out of the room without waiting for an answer. He charged through the settlement ignoring both greetings and attempts to stop him. Ashort distance oustide the camp he ran across a native He skidded to a stop. “Where is Mary Sperling?”

“… I am Mary Sperling . .

“For the love of-You can’t be.”

“I am Mary Sperling and Mary Sperling is myself do you not know me, Lazarus? … I know you.

Lazarus waved his hands. “No! I want to see Mary Sperling who looks like an Earthman-Iike me!” The native hesitated.”… follow me, then …

Lazarus found her a long way from the camp; it was obvious that she had been avoiding the other colonists. “Mary!”

She answered him mind to mind: “. . I am sorry to see you troubled … Mary Sperling is gone except in that she is part of us …” “Oh, come off it, Mary! Don’t give me that stuff! Don’t you know me?”

“… of course I know you, Lazarus … it is you who do not know me … do not trouble your soul or grieve your heart with the sight of this body in front of you … I am not one of your kind … I am native to this planet.

“Mary,” he insisted, “you’ve got to undo this. You’ve got to come out of there!”

She shook her head, an oddly human gesture, for the face no longer held any trace of human expression; it was a mask of otherness. “… that is impossible …Mary Sperling is gone … the one who speaks with you is inextricably myself and not of your kind.” The creature who had been Mary Sperling turned and walked away.

“Mary!” he cried. His heart leapt across the span of centuries to the night his mother had died. He covered his face with his hands and wept the unconsolable grief of a child,

Chapter S

LAZAIWS found both King and Barstow waiting for him when he returned. King looked at his face. “I could have told you,” he said soberly, “but you wouldn’t wait.” “Forget it,” Lazatus said harshly. “What now?”

“Lazarus, there is something else you have to see before we discuss anything,” Zaccur Barstow answered. “Okay. What?”

“Just come and, see.” They led him to a compartment in the ship’s boat which was used as a headquarters. Contrary to Families’ custom it was locked; King let them in. There was a woman inside, who, when she saw the three, quietly withdrew, locking the door again as she went out.

“Take a look at that,” directed Barstow.

It was a living creature in an incubator-a child, but no such child as had ever been seen before. Lazarus stared at it, then said angrily, “What the devil is it?” “See for yourself. Pick it up. You won’t hurt it.”

Lazarus did so, gingerly at first, then without shrinking from the contact as his curiosity increased. What it was, he could not say. It was not human; it was just as certainly not offspring of the Little People. Did this planet, like the last, contain some previously unsuspected race? It was manlike, yet certainly not a man child. It lacked even the button nose of a baby, nor were there evident external ears. There were organs in the usual locations of each but flush with the skull and protected with many ridges. Its hands had too many fingers and there was an extra large one near each wrist which ended in a cluster of pink worms.

There was something odd about the torso of the infant which Lazarus could not define. But two other gross facts were evident: the legs ended not in human feet but in horny, toeless pediments-hoofs. And the creature was hermaphroditic-not in deformity but in healthy development, an androgyne.

“What is it?” he repeated, his mind filled with lively suspicion. “That,” said Zaccur, “is Marion Schmidt, born three weeks ago.” “Huh? What do you mean?”

“It means that the Little People are just as clever in manipulating us as they are in manipulating plants.” “What? But they agreed to leave us alone!”

“Don’t blame them too quickly. We let ourselves in for it. The origihal idea was simply a few improvements.” “Improvements!’ That thing’s an obscenity.”

“Yes and no. My stomach turns whenever I have to took at it … but actually-well, it’s sort of a superman. Its body architecture has been redesigned for greater efficiency, our useless simian hangovers have been left out, and its organs have been rearranged in a more sensible fashion. You can’t say it’s not human, for it is . . – an improved model. Take that extra appendage at the wrist. That’s another hand, a miniature one . . – backed up by a microscopic eye. You can see how useful that would be, once you get used to the idea.” Barstow stared at it. “But it looks horrid, to me~’

“It’d look horrid to anybody,” Lazarus stated. “It may be an improvement, but damn it, I say it ain’t humans” “In any case it creates a problem.”

“I’ll say it does!” Lazarus looked at it again. “You say it has a second set of eyes in those tiny bands? That doesn’t seem possible.”

Barstow shrugged. “I’m no biologist. But every cell in the body contains a full bundle of chromosomes. I suppose that you could grow eyes, or bones, or anything you liked anywhere, if you knew how to manipulate the genes in the chromosomes. And they know.”

“I don’t want to be manipulated!” “Neither do I.”

Lazarus stood on the bank and stared out over the broad beach at a full meeting of-the Families. “I am-” he started formally, then looked puzzled. “Come here a moment, Andy.” He whispered to Libby; Libby looked pained and whispered back. Lazarus looked exasperated and whispered again. Finally he straightened up and started over.

“I am two hundred and forty-one years old-at least,” he stated. “Is there anyone here who is older?” It was empty formality; he knew that he was the eldest; he felt twice that old. “The meeting is opened,~’ he went on, his big voice rumbling on down the beach assisted by speaker systems from the ship’s boats. “Who is your chairman?”

“Get on with it,” someone called from the crowd. “Very well,” said Lazarus. “Zaccur Barstow!”

Behind Lazarus a technician aimed a directional pickup at Barstow. “Zaccur Barstow,” his voice boomed out, “speaking for myself. Some of us have come to believe that this planet, pleasant as it is, is not the place for us. You all know about Mary Sperling, you’ve seen stereos of Marion Schmidt; there have been other things and I won’t elaborate. But emigrating again poses another question, the question of where? Lazarus Long proposes that we return to Earth. In such a-” His words were drowned by noise from the crowd.

Lazarus shouted them down. “Nobody is going to be forced to leave. But if enough of us want to leave to justify taking the ship, then we can. I say go back to Earth. Some say look for another planet. That’ll have to be decided. But first-how many of you think as I do about leaving here?”

“I do!” The shout was echoed by many others. Lazarus peered toward the first man to answer, tried to spot him, glanced over his shoulder at the tech, then pointed. “Go ahead, bud,” he ruled. “The rest of you pipe down.”

“Name of Oliver Schmidt. I’ve been waiting for months for somebody to suggest this. I thought I was the only sorehead in the Families. I haven’t any real reason for leaving-I’m not scared out by the Mary Sperling matter, nor Marion Schmidt. Anybody who likes such things is welcome to them-live and let live. But I’ve got a deep down urge to see Cincinnati again. I’m fed up with this place. I’m tired of being a lotus eater. Damn it, I want to work for my living! According to the Families’ geneticists I ought to be good for another century at least. I can’t see spending that much time lying in the inn and daydreaming.”

When he shut up, at least a thousand more tried to get the floor. “Easy! Easy!” bellowed Lazarus. “If everybody wants to talk, I’m going to have to channel it through your Family representatives. But let’s get a sample here and there.” He picked out another man, told him to sound off.

“I won’t take long,” the new speaker said, “as I agree with Oliver Schmidt I just wanted to mention my own reason. Do any of you miss the Moon? Back home I used to sit out on my balcony on warm summer nights and smoke and look at the Moon. I didn’t know it was important to me, but it is. I want a planet with a moon.”

The next speaker said only, “This case of Mary Sperling has given me a case of nerves. I get nightmares that I’ve gone over myself.”

The arguments went on and on. Somebody pointed out that they had been chased off Earth; what made anybody think that they would be allowed to return? Lazarus answered that himself. “We learned a lot from the Jockaira and now we’ve learned a lot more from the Little People-things that put us way out ahead of anything scientists back on Earth had even dreamed of. We can go back to Earth loaded for bear. We’ll be in shape to demand our rights, strong enough to defend them.”

“Lazarus Long-” came another voice. “Yes,” acknowledged Lazarus.

“You over there, go ahead.”

“I am too old to make any more jumps from star to star and much too old to fight at the end of such a jump. Whatever the rest of you do, I’m staying.”

“In that case,” said Lazarus, “there is no need to discuss it, is there?” “I am entitled to speak.” –

“All right, you’ve spoken. Now give sotheone else a chance.”

The sun set and the stars came out and still the talk went on. Lazarus knew that it would never end unless he moved to end it. “All right,” he shouted, ignoring the many who still, wanted to speak. “Maybe we’ll have to turn this back to the Family councils, but let’s take a trial vote and see where we are. Everybody who wants to go back to Earth move way over to my right. Everybody who wants to stay here move down the beach to my left. Everybody who wants to go exploring for still another planet gather right here in front of me.” He dropped back and said to the sound tech, “Give them some music to speed ‘em up.”

The tech nodded and the homesick strains of Valse Triste sighed over the beach. It was followed by The Green Hills of Earth. Zaccur Barstow turned toward Lazarus. “You picked that music.”

“Me?” Lazarus answered with bland innocence. “You know I ain’t musical, Zack.”

Even with music the separation took a long time. The last movement of the immortal Fifth had died away long before they at last had sorted themselves into three crowds.

On the left about a tenth of the total number were gathered, showing thereby their intention of staying. They were mostly the old and the tired, whose sands had run low. With them were a few youngsters who had never seen Earth, plus a bare sprinkling of other ages.

In the center was a very small group, not over three hundred, mostly men and a few younger women, who voted thereby for still newer frontiers.

But the great mass was on Lazarus’ right. He looked at them and saw new animation in their faces; it lifted his heart, for he had been bitterly afraid that he was almost alone in his wish to leave.

He looked back at the small group nearest him. “It looks like you’re outvoted,” he said to them alone, his voice unamplifled. “But never mind, there always comes another day.” He waited. Slowly the group in the middle began to break up. By ones and twos and threes they moved away. Avery few drifted over to join those who were staying; most of them merged with the

group on the right.

When this secondary division was complete Lazarus spoke to the smaller group on his left. “All right,” he said very gently, “You … you old folks might as well go back up to the meadows and get your sleep. The rest of us have things to make.”

Lazarus then gave Libby the floor and let him explain to the majority crowd that the trip home would not be the weary journey the flight from Earth had been, nor even the tedious second jump. Libby placed all of the credit where most of it belonged, with the Little People. They had straightened him out with his difficulties in dealing with the problem of speeds which appeared to exceed the speed of light. If the Little People knew what they were talking about -and Libby was sure that they did-there appeared to be no limits to what Libby chose to call “para-acceleration”-“para-” because, like Libby’s own lightpressure drive, it acted on the whole mass uniformly and could no more be perceived by the senses than can gravitation, and “para-” also because the ship would not go “through” but rather around or “beside” normal space. “it is not so much a matter of driving the ship as it is a selection of appropriate potential level in an n-dimensional hyperplenum of n-plus-one

possible-“

Lazarus firmly cut him off. “That’s your department, son, and everybody trusts you in it. We ain’t qualified to discuss the fine points.” “I was only going to add-“

“I know. But you were already out of the world when I stopped you.”

Someone from the crowd shouted one more question. “When do we get there?”

“I don’t know,” Libby admitted, thinking of the question the way Nancy Weatheral had put it to him long ago. “I can’t say what year it will be … but it will seem like about three weeks from now.”

The preparations consumed days simply because many round trips of the ship’s boats were necessary to embark them. There was a marked lack of ceremonious farewell because those remaining behind tended to avoid those who were leaving. Coolness had sprung up between the two groups; the division on the beach had split friendships, had even broken up contemporary marriages, had caused many hurt feelings, unresolvable bitterness. Perhaps the only desirable aspect of the division was that the parents of the mutant Marion Schmidt had elected to remain behind.

Lazarus was in charge of the last boat to leave. Shortly before he planned to boost he felt a touch at his elbow. “Excuse me,” a young man said. “My name’s Hubert Johnson. 1 want to go along but I’ve had to stay back with the other crowd to keep my mother from throwing fits. If I show up at the last minute, can 1 still go along?”

Lazirus looked him over. “You look old enough to decide without asking me.”

“You don’t understand. I’m an only child and my mother tags me around. I’ve got to sneak back before she misses me. How much longer-“ “I’m not holding this boat for anybody. And you’ll never break away any younger. Get into the boat”

“But…”

“Oft!” The young man did so, with one worried backward glance at the bank. There was a lot, thought Lazarus, to be said for ectogenesis. Once inboard the New Frontiers Lazarus reported to Captain King in the control room. “All inboard?” asked King.

“Yeah. Some late deciders, pro and con, and one more passenger at the last possible split second-woman named Eleanor Johnson. Let’s go!” King turned to Libby. “Let’s go, Mister.”

The stars blinked out.

They flew blind, with only Libby’s unique talent to guide them. If he had doubts as to his ability to lead them through the featureless blackness of other space he kept them to himself. On the twenty-third ship’s day of the reach and the eleventh day of para-deceleration the stars reappeared, all in their old familiar ranges-the Big Dipper, giant Orion, lopsidecL Crux, the fairy Pleiades, and dead ahead of them, blazing against the frosty backdrop of the Milky Way, was a golden light that had to be the Sun.

Lazarus had tears in his eyes for the second time in a month.

They could not simply rendezvous with Earth, set a parking orbit, and disembark; they had-to throw their hats in first. Besides that, they needed first to know what time it was.

Libby was able to establish quickly, through proper motions of nearest stars, that it was not later than about 3700 A.D.; without precise observatory instruments he refused to commit himself further. But once they were close enough to see the Solar planets he had another clock to read; the planets themselves make a clock with nine hands.

For any date there is a unique configuration of those “hands” since no planetary period is exactly commensurate with another. Pluto marks off an “hour” of a quarter of a millennium; Jupiter’s clicks a cosmic minute of twelve years; Mercury whizzes a “second” of about ninety days. The other “hands” can refine these readings-Neptune’s period is so cantankerously different from that of Pluto that the two fall into approximately repeated configuration only once in seven hundred and fifty-eight years. The great clock can be read with any desired degree of accuracy over any period-but it is not easy to read.

Libby started to read it as soon as any of the planets could be picked out. He muttered over the problem. “There’s not a chance that we’ll pick up Pluto,” he complained to Lazarus, “and I doubt if we’ll have Neptune. The inner planets give me an infinite series of approximations-you know as well as I do that “infinite” is a question-begging term. Annoying!”

“Aren’t you looking at it the hard way, son? You can get a practical answer. Or move over and I’ll get one.” –

“Of course I can get a practical answer,” Libby said petulantly, “if you’re satisfied with that But-“

“But me no ‘buts’-what year is it, man!”

“Eh? Let’s put it this way. The time rate in the ship and duration on Earth have been unrelated three times. But now they are effectively synchronous again, such that slightly over seventy- four years have passed since we 1eft.’

Lazarus heaved a sigh. “Why didn’t you say so?” He had been fretting that Earth might – not be recognizable … they might have torn down New York or something like that. “Shucks, Andy, you shouldn’t have scared me like that.”

“Mmm …” said Libby. It was one of no further interest to him. There remained only the delicious problem of inventing a mathematics which would describe elegantly two apparently irreconcilable groups of facts: the Michelson-Morley experiments and the log of the New Frontiers. He set happily about it. Mmm … what was the least number of pamdimensions indispeMably necessary to contain the augmented plenum using a sheaf of postulates affirming-It kept him contented for a considerable time-subjective time, of course.

The ship was placed in a temporary orbit half a billion miles from the Sun with a radius vector normal to the plane of the ecliptic. Parked thus at right angles to and far outside the flat pancake of the Solar System they were safe from any long chance of being discovered. Aship’s boat had been fitted with thc neo-Libby drive during the jump and a negotiating party was sent down.

Lazarus wanted to go along; King refused to let him, which sent Lazarus into sulks. King had said curtly, “This isn’t a raiding party, Lazarus; this is a diplomatic mission.” “Hell, man, I can be diplomatic when it pays!”

“No doubt But we’ll send a man who doesn’t go armed to the ‘fresher.”

Ralph Schultz headed the party, since psychodynamic factors back on Earth were of first importance, but he was aided by legal voluntary and technical specialists. If the Families were going to have to fight for living room it was necessary to know what sort of technology, what sort of weapons, they would have to meet-but it was even more necessary to find out whether or not a peaceful landing could be arranged.

Schultz had been authorized by the elders to offer a plan under which the Families would colonize the thinly settled and retrograded European continent. But it was possible, even likely, that this had already been done in their absence, in view of the radioactive half-lifes involved. Schultz would probably have to improvise some other compromise, depending on the conditions he found.

Again there was nothing to do but wait.

Lazarus endured it in nail-chewing uncertainty. He had claimed publicly that the Families had such great scientific advantage that they could meet and defeat the best that Earth could offer. Privately, he knew that this was sophistry and so did any other Member competent to judge the matter. Knowledge alone did not win wars. The ignorant fanatics of Europe’s Middle Ages had defeated the incomparably higher Islamic culture; Archimedes had been struck down by a common soldier; barbarians had sacked Rome. Libby, or some one, might devise an unbeatable, weapon from their mass of new knowledge-or might not and who knew what strides military art had made on earth in three quarters of a century?

King, trained in military art, was worried by the same thing and still more worried by the personnel he would have to work with. The Families were anything but trained legions; the prospect of trying to whip those cranky individualists into some semblance of a disciplined fighting machine ruined his sleep.

These doubts and fears King and Lazarus did not mention even to each other; each was afraid that to mention such things would be to spread a poison of fear through the ship. But they were not alone in their worries; half of the ship’s company realized the weaknesses of their position and kept silent only because a bitter resolve to go home, no matter what, made them willing to accept the dangers..

“Skipper,”. Lazarus said to King two weeks after Schultz’s party had headed Earthside, “have you wondered how they’re going to feel about the New Frontiers herself?” “Eh? What do you mean?’

“Well, we hijacked her. Piracy.”

King looked astounded. “Bless me, so we did! Do you know, it’s been so long ago that it is hard for me to realize that she was ever anything but my ship … or to recall that I first came into her through an act of piracy.” He looked thoughtful, then smiled grimly. “I wonder how conditions are in Coventry these days?”

“Pretty thin rations, I imagine,” said Lazarus. “But we’ll team up and make out. Never mind-they haven’t caught us yet.”

“Do you suppose that Slayton Ford will be connected with the matter? That would be hard lines after all he has gone through.”

“There may not be any trouble about it at all,” Lazarus answered soberly. “While the way we got this ship was kind of irregular, we have used it for the purpose for which it was built-to explore the stars. And we’re returning it intact, long before they could have expected any results, and with a slick new space drive to boot. It’s more for their money than they had any reason to expect-so they may just decide to forget it and trot out the fatted calf.”

“I hope so,” King answered doubtfully.

The scouting party was two days late. No signal was received from them until they emerged into normal spacetime, just before rendezvous, as no method had yet been devised for signalling from para-space to ortho-space. While they were maneuvering to rendezvous, King received Ralph Schultz’s face on the control-room screen. “Hello, Captain! We’ll be boarding shortly to report.”

“Give me a summary now!”

“I wouldn’t know where to start. But it’s all right-we can go home!” “Huh? How’s that? Repeat!”

“Everything’s all right. We are restored to the Covenant. You see, there isn’t any difference any more. Everybody is a member of the Families now.” “What do you mean?” King demanded.

“They’ve got it.” “Got what?”

“Got the secret of longevity.”

“Huh? Talk sense. There isn’t any secret. There never was any secret.” “We didn’t have any secret-but they thought we had. So they found it.” “Expiain yourself,” insisted Captain King.

“Captain, can’t this wait until we get back into the ship?’ Ralph Schultz protested. “I’m no biologist. We’ve brought along a government reptesentative-you can quiz him, instead?

KING RECEWED Terra’s representative in his cabin. He had notified Zaccur Barstow and Justin Foote to be present for the Families and had invited Doctor Gordon Hardy because the nature of the startling news was the biologist’s business. Libby was there as the ship’s chief officer; Slayton Ford was invited because of his unique status, although he had held no public office in the Families since his breakdown in the temple of Kreel.

Lazarus was there because Lazarus wanted to be there, in his own strictly private capacity. He had not been invited, but even Captain King was somewhat diffident about interfering with the assumed prerogatives of the eldest Member.

Ralph Schultz introduced Earth’s ambassador to the assembled company. “This is Captain King, our commanding officer and this is Miles Rodney, representing the Federation Council- minister plenipotentiary and ambassador extraordinary, I guess you would call him.”

“Hardly that,” said Rodney; “although I can agree to the ‘extraordinary’ part. This situation is quite without preccdent. it is an honor to know you, Captain.” “Glad to have you inboard, sir.”

“And this is Zaccur Barstow, representing the trustees of the Howard Families, and Justin Foote, secretary tO the trustees-“ “Service.”

“Service to you, gentlemen.”

“Andrew Jackson Libby, chief astrogational officer, Doctor Gordon Hardy, biologist in charge of our research into the causes of old age and death.”

“May I do you a service?” Hardy acknowledged formally.”Service to you, sir. So you are the chief biologist-there was a time when you could have done a service to the whole human race. Think of it, sir-think how different things could have been. But, happily, the human race was able to worry out the secret of extending life without the aid of the Howard Families.”

Hardy looked vexed. “What do you mean, sir? Do you mean to say that you are still laboring under the delusion that we had some miraculous secret to impart, if we chose?” Rodney shrugged and spread his hands. “Really, now, there is no need to keep up the pretense, is there? Your results have been duplicated, independently.”

Captain King cut in. “Just a moment-Ralph Schultz, is the Federation still under the impression that there is some ‘secret’ to our long lives? Didn’t you tell them?”

Schultz was looking bewildered. “Uh-this is ridiculous. The subject hardly came up. They themselves had achieved controlled longevity; they were no longer interested in us in that respect. It is true that there still existed a belief that our long lives derived from manipulation rather than from heredity, but I corrected that impression.”

“Apparently not very thoroughly, from what Miles Rodney has just said.”

“Apparently not. I did not spend much effort on it; it was beating a dead dog. The Howard Families add their long lives are no longer an issue on Earth. Interest, both public and official, is centered on the fact that we have accomplished a successful interstellar jump.”

“I can confirm that,” agreed Miles Rodney. “Every official, every news service, every citizen, every scientist in the system is waiting with utmost eagerness the arrival of the New Frontiers. It’s the greatest, most sensational thing that has happened since the first trip to the Moon. You are famous, gentlemen-all of you.”

Lazarus pulled Zaccur Barstow aside and whispered to him. Barstow looked perturbed, then nodded thoughtfully. “Captain-” Barstow said to King. “Yes, Zack?”

“I suggest that we ask our guest to excuse us while we receive Ralph Schultz’ report.” “Why?”

Barstow glanced at Rodney. “I think we will be better prepared to discuss matters if we are brief by our own representative.” King turned to Rodney. “Will you excuse us~~ sir?”

Lazarus broke in. “Never mind, Skipper. Zack means well but he’s too polite. Might as well let Comrade Rodney stick around and we’ll lay it on the line. Tell me this, Miles; what proof have you got that you and your pals have figured out a way to live as long as we do?’

“Proof?’ Rodney seemed dumbfounded. “Why do you ask – Whom am I addressing? Who are you, sir?”

Ralph Schultz intervened. “Sorry-I didn’t get a chance to finish the introductions. Miles Rodney, this is Lazarus Long, the Senior.” “Service. ‘The Senior’ what?’

“He just means ‘The Senior,’ period,” answered Lazarus. “I’m the-oldest Member. Otherwise I’m a private citizen.” “The oldest one of the Howard Families! Why-why, you must be the oldest man alive-think of that!”

“You think about it,” retorted Lazarus. “I quit worrying about it a couple of centuries ago. How about answering my question?’

“But I can’t help being impressed. You make me feel like an infant-and I’m not a young man myself; I’ll be a hundred and five this coming June.” “If you can prove that’s your age, you can answer my question. I’d say you were about forty. How about it?”

‘Well, – dear me, I hardly expected to be interrogated on this point. Do you wish to see my identity card?”

“Are you kidding? I’ve had fifty-odd identity cards in my time, all with phony birth dates. What else can you offer?’ “Just a minute, Lazarus,” put in Captain King. ‘What is the purpose of your question?”

Lazarus Long turned away from Rodney. “It’s like this, Skipper-we hightailed it out of the Solar System to save our necks, because the rest of the yokels thought we had invented some way to live forever and proposed to squeeze it out of us if they had to kill every one of us. Now everything is sweetness and light~-so they say. But it seems mighty funny that the bird they send up to smoke the pipe of peace with us should still be convinced that we have that so-called secret.

“It got me to wondering.

“Suppose they hadn’t figured out a way to keep from dying from old age but were still clinging to the idea that we had? What better way to keep us calmed down and unsuspicious than to tell us they had until they could get us where they wanted us in order to put the question to us again?”

Rodney snorted. “Apreposterous ideal Captain, I don’t think I’m called on to put up with this.”

Lazarus stared coldly. “It was preposterous the first time, but-but it happened. The burnt child is likely to be skittish.” “Just a moment, both of you,” ordered King. “Ralph, how about it? Could you have been taken in by a put-up job?”

Schultz thought about it, painfully. “I don’t think so.” He paused. “It’s rather difficult to say. I couldn’t tell from appearance of course, any more than our own Members could be picked out from a crowd of normal persons.”

“But you are a psychologist. Surely you could have detected indications of fraud, if there had been one.”

“I may be a psychologist, but I’m not a miracle man and I’m not telepathic. I wasn’t looking for fraud.” He grinned I sheepishly. “There was another factor. I was so excited over being home that I was not in the best emotional condition to note discrepancies, if there were any.”

“Then you aren’t sure?” -‘

“No. I am emotionally convinced that Miles Rodney is telling the truth-“ “Lam!”

“-and I believe that a few questions could clear the matter up. He claims to be one hundred and five years old. We can test that.” “I see,” agreed King. “Hmm … you put the questions, Ralph?”

“Very well. You will permit, Miles Rodney?” “Go ahead,” Rodney answered stiffly.

“You must have been about thirty years old when we left Earth, since we have been gone nearly seventy-five years, Earth time. Do you remember the event?” “Quite clearly. I was a clerk in Novak Tower at the time, I in the offices of the Administrator.”

Slayton Ford had remained in the background throughout the discussion, and had done nothing to call attention to himself. At Rodney’s answer he sat up. “Just a moment, Captain-“ “Eh? Yes?”

“Perhaps I can cut this short. You’ll pardon me, Ralph?” He turned to Terra’s representative. “Who am I?”

Rodney looked at him in some puzzlement. His expression changed from one of simple surprise at the odd question to complete and unbelieving bewilderment. “Why, you … you are Administrator Ford!”

“ONE AT ATIME! One at a time,” Captain King was saying. “Don’t everybody try to talk at once. Go on, Slayton; you have the floor. You know this man?” Ford looked Rodney over. “No, I can’t say that I do.”

“Then it is a frame up.” King turned to Rodney.”Suppose you recognized Ford from historical stereos-is that right?” –

Rodney seemed about to burst. “No! I recognized him. He’s changed but I knew him. Mr. Administrator-look at me, please! Don’t you know me? I worked for you!” “It seems fairly obvious that he doesn’t,” King said dryly.

Ford shook his head. “It doesn’t prove anything, one way or the other, Captain. There were over two thousand civil service employes in my office. Rodney might have been one of them. His face looks vaguely familiar, but so do most faces.”

“Captain-” Master Gordon Hardy was speaking. “If I can question Miles Rodney I might be able to give an opinion as to whether or not they actually have discovered anything new about the causes of old age and death.”

Rodney shook his head. “I am not a biologist. You could trip me up in no time. Captain King, I ask you to arrange my return to Earth as quickly as possible. I’ll not be subjected to any more of this. And let me add that I do not care a minim whether you and your-your pretty crew ever get back to civilization or not. I came here to help you, but I’m disgusted.” He stood up.

Slayton Ford went toward him. “Easy, Miles Rodney, please! Be patient. Put yourself in their place. You would be just as cautious if you had been through what they have been through.” Rodney hesitated. “Mr. Administrator, what are you doing here?”

“It’s a long and complicated story. I’ll tell you later.”

“You are a member of the Howard Families-you must be. That accounts for a lot of odd things.”

Ford shook his head. “No, Miles Rodney, I am not. Later, please-I’ll explain it. You -worked for me once-when?” “From 2109 until you, uh, disappeared.”

“What was your job?”

“At the time of the crisis of 2113 I was an assistant correlation clerk in the Division of Economic Statistics, Control Section.” “Who was your section chief?”

“Leslie Waldron.”

“Old Waldron, eh? What was the color of his hair?” “His hair? The Walrus was bald as an egg.”

Lazarus whispered to Zaccur Barstow, “Looks like I was off base, Zack.”

“Wait a moment,” Barstow whispered back. “It still could be thorough preparation-they may have known that Ford escaped with us.” Ford was continuing, “What was The Sacred Cow?’

“The Sacred-Chief, you weren’t even supposed to know that there was such a publication!”

“Give my intelligence staff credit for some activity, at least,” Ford said dryly. “I got my copy every week.” “But what was it?” demanded Lazarus.

Rodney answered, “An office comic and gossip sheet that was passed from hand to hand.”

“Devoted to ribbing the bosses,” Ford added, “especially me.” He put an arm around Rodney’s shoulders. “Friends, there is no doubt about it. Miles and I were fellow workers.” “I still want to find out about the new rejuvenation process,” insisted Master Hardy some time later.

“I think we all do,” agreed King. He reached out and refilled their guest’s wine glass. “Will you tell us about it, sir?’

“I’ll try,” Miles Rodney answered, “though I must ask Master Hardy to bear with me. It’s not one process, but several-one basic process and several dozen others, some of them purely cosmetic, especially for women. Nor is the basic process truly a rejuvenation process. You can arrest the progress of old age, but you can’t reverse it to any significant degree-you can’t turn a senile old man into a boy.”

“Yes, yes,” agreed Hardy. “Naturally-but what is the basic process?”

“It consists largely in replacing the entire blood tissue in an old person with new, young blood. Old age, so they tell me, is primarily a matter of the progressive accumulation of the waste poisons of metabolism. The blood is supposed to carry them away, but presently the blood gets so clogged with the poisons that the scavenging process doesn’t take place properly. Is that right, Doctor Hardy?’

“That’s an odd way of putting it, but-“ “I told you I was no biotechnician.”

“-essentially correct. It’s a matter of diffusion pressure deficit-the d.p.d. on the blood side of a cell wall must be such as to maintain a fairly sharp gradient or there will occur progressive autointoxication of the individual cells. But I must say that I feel somewhat disappointed, Miles Rodney. The basic idea of holding off death by insuring proper scavenging of waste products is not new-I have a bit of chicken heart which has been alive for two and one half centuries through equivalent techniques. As to the use of young blood-yes, that will work. I’ve kept experimental animals alive by such blood donations to about twice their normal span-” He stopped and looked troubled.

“Yes, Doctor Hardy?”

Hardy chewed his lip. “I gave up that line of research. I found it necessary to have several young donors in order to keep one beneficiary from growing any older. There was a small, but measurable, unfavorable effect on each of the donors. Racially it was self-defeating; there would never be enough donors to go around. Am I to understand, sir that this method is thereby limited to a small, select part of the population?”

“Oh, no! I did not make myself clear, Master Hardy. There are no donors.” “Huh?’

“New blood, enough for everybody, grown outside the body-the Public Health and Longevity Service can provide any amount of it, any type.”

Hardy looked startled. “To think we came so close … so that’s it.” He paused, then went on. “We tried tissue culture of bone marrow in vitro. We should have persisted.”

“Don’t feel badly about it. Billions of credits and tens of thousands of technicians engaged in this project before there were any significant results. I’m told that the mass of accumulated art in this field represents more effort than even the techniques of atomic engineering.” Rodney smiled. “You see, they had to get some results; it was politically necessary-so there was an all-out effort.” Rodney turned to Ford. ‘When the news about the escape of the Howard Families reached the public, Chief, your precious successor had to be protected from the mobs.”

Hardy persisted with questions about subsidiary techniques -tooth budding, growth inhibiting, hormone therapy, many others-until King came to Rodney’s rescue by pointing out that the

prime purpose of the visit was to arrange details of the return of the Families to Earth.

Rodney nodded. “I think we should get down to business. As I understand it, Captain, a large proportion of your people are now in reduced-temperature somnolence?” (“Why can’t he say ‘cold-rest’?” Lazarus said to Libby.)

“Yes, that is so.”

“Then it would be no hardship on them to remain in that state for a time.” “Eh? Why do you say that, sir?”

Rodney spread his hands. “The administration finds itself in a somewhat embarrassing position. To put it bluntly, there is a housing shortage. Absorbing one hundred and ten thousand displaced persons can’t be done overnight.”

Again King had to hush them. He then nodded to Zaccur Barstow, who addressed himself to Rodney. “I fail to see the problem, sir. What is the present population of the North American continent?”

“Around seven hundred million.”

“And you can’t find room to tuck away one-seventieth of one per cent of that number? It sounds preposterous.”

“You don’t understand, sir,” Rodney protested. “Population pressure has become our major problem. Coincident with it, the right to remain undisturbed in the enjoyment of one’s own homestead, or one’s apartment, has become the most jealously guarded of all civil rights. Before we can find you adequate living room we must make over some stretch of desert, or make other major arrangements.”

“I get it,” said Lazarus. “Politics. You don’t dare disturb anybody for fear they will squawk.” “That’s hardly an adequate statement of the case.”

“It’s not, eh? could be you’ve got a general election coming up, maybe?’ “As a matter of fact we have, but that has nothing to do with the case.” Lazarus snorted.

Justin Foote spoke up. “It seems to me that the administration has looked at this problem in the most superficial light. It is not as if we were homeless immigrants. Most of the Members own their own homes. As you doubtless know, the Families were well-to-do; even wealthy, and for obvious reasons we built our homes to endure. I feel sure that most of those structures are still standing.”

“No doubt,” Rodney conceded, “but you will find them occupied.”

Justin Foote shrugged. “What has that to do with us? That is a problem for the government to settle with the persons it has allowed illegally to occupy our homes. As for myself, I shall land as soon as possible, obtain an eviction rrder from the nearest court, and repossess my home.”

“It’s not that easy. You can make omelet from eggs, but not eggs from omelet. You have been legally dead for many years; the present oacupant of your house holds a good title.”

Justin Foote stood up and glared at the Federation’s envoy, looking, as Lazarus thought, “like a cornered mouse.” “Legally dead! By whose act, sir, by whose act? Mine? I was a respected solicitor, quietly and honorably pursuing my profession, harming no one, when I was arrested without cause and forced to flee for my life. Now I am blandly told that my property is confiscated and my very legal existence as a person and as a citizen has been taken from ,me beckuse of that sequence of events. What manner of justice is this? Does the Covenant still stand?”

“You misunderstand me. I-“

“I misunderstood nothing. If justice is measured out only when it is convenient, then the Covenant is not worth the parchment it is written on. I shall make of myself a test case, sir, a test case for every Member of the Families. Unless my property is returned to me in full and at once I shall bring personal suit against every obstructing official. I will make of it a cause celebre. For many years I have suffered inconvenience and indignity and peril; I shall not be put off with words. I will shout it from the housetops.” He paused for breath.

“He’s right, Miles,” Slayton Ford put in quietly. “The government had better find some adequate way to handle this-and quickly.”

Lazarus caught Libby’s eye and silently motioned toward the door. The two slipped outside. “Justin’ll keep ‘em busy for the next hour,” he said. “Let’s slide down to the Club and grab some calories.”

“Do you really think we ought to leave?’ “Relax. If the skipper wants us, he can holler.”

LAZARUS TUCKED AWAYthree sandwiches, a double order of ice cream, and some cookies while Libby contented himself with somewhat less. Lazarus would have eaten more but he was forced to respond to a barrage of questions from the other habitues of the Club.

“The commissary department ain’t really back on its feet,” he complained, as he poured his third cup of coffee. “The Little People made life too easy for them. Andy, do you like chili con carne?”

“It’s all right.”

Lazarus wiped his mouth. “There used to be a restaurant in Tijuana that served the best chili I ever tasted. I wonder if it’s still there?” “Where’s Tijuana?” demanded Margaret Weatheral.

“You don’t remember Earth, do you, Peggy? Well, darling, it’s in Lower California. You know where that is?” “Don’t you think I studied geography? It’s in Los Angeles.”

“Near enough. Maybe you’re right-by now.” The ship’s announcing system blared out: “Chief Astrogator-report to the Captain in the Control Room!”

“That’s me!” said Libby, and hurriedly got up.

The call was repeated, then was followed by, “All hands prepare for acceleration! All hands prepare for acceleration!” “Here we go again, kids.” Lazarus stood up, brushed off his kilt, and followed Libby, whistling as he went

“California, here I come,

Right back where I started from-“

The ship was underway, the stars had faded out. Captain King had left the control room, taking with him his guest, the Earth’s envoy. Miles Rodney had been much impressed; it seemed likely that he would need a drink.

Lazarus and Libby remained in the control room. There was nothing to do; for approximately four hours, ship’s time, the ship would remain in para-space, before returning to normal space near Earth.

Lazarus struck a cigaret. ‘What d’you plan to do when you get back, Andy?” “Hadn’t thought about it.”

“Better start thinking. Been some changes.”

“I’ll probably head back home for a while. I can’t imagine the Ozarks having changed very much.” “The hills will look the same, I imagine. You may find the people changed.”

“How?”

“You remember I told you that I had gotten fed up with the Families and had kinda lost touch with them for a century? By and large, they had gotten so smug and soft in their ways that I couldn’t stand them. I’m afraid we’ll find most everybody that way, now that they expect to live forever. Long term investments, be sure to wear your rubbers when it rains . . that sort of thing.”

“It didn’t aifect you that way.”

“My approach is different. I never did have any real reason to last forever-after all, as Gordon Hardy has pointed out, I’m only a third generation result of the Howard plan. I just did my living as I went along and didn’t worry my head about it. But that’s not the usual attitude. Take Miles Rodney-scared to death to tackle a new situation with both hands for fear of upsetting precedent and stepping on established privileges.”

“I was glad to see Justin stand up to him.” Libby chuckled. “I didn’t think Justin had it in him.” “Ever see a little dog tell a big dog to get the hell out of the little dog’s yard?”

“Do you think Justin will win his point?” “Sure he will, with your help.”

“Mine?” –

“Who knows anything about the para-drive, aside from what you’ve taught me?” “I’ve dictated full notes into the records.”

“But you haven’t turned those records over to Miles Rodney. Earth needs your starship drive, Andy. You heard what Rodney said about population pressure. Ralph was telling me you have to get a government permit now before you can have a baby.”

“The hell you say!”

“Fact. You can count on it that there would be tremendous emigration if there were just some decent planets to emigrate to. And that’s where your drive comes in. With it, spreading out to the stars becomes really practical. They’ll have to dicker.”

“It’s not really my drive, of course. The Little People worked it out.”

“Don’t be so modest. You’ve got it. And you want to back up Justin, don’t you?” “Oh, sure.”

‘~Then we’ll use it to bargain with. Maybe I’ll do the bargaining, personally. But that’s beside the point. Somebody is going to have to do a little exploring before any large-scale emigration starts. Let’s go into the real estate business, Andy. We’ll stake out this corner of the Galaxy and see what it has to offer.”

Libby scratched his nose and thought about it. “Sounds all right, I guess after I pay a visit home.” “There’s no rush. I’ll find a nice, clean little yacht, about ten thousand tons and we’ll refit with your drive.” “What’ll we use for money?”

“We’ll have money. I’ll set up a parent corporation, while I’m about it, with a loose enough charter to let us do anything we want to do. There will be daughter corporations for various purposes and we’ll unload the minor interest in each.. Then-“

“You make it sound like work, Lazarus. I thought it was going to be fun.”

“Shucks, we won’t fuss with that stuff. I’ll collar somebody to run the home office and worry about the books and the legal end-somebody about like Justin. Maybe Justin himself.”

“Well, all right then.”

“You and I will rampage around and see what there is to be seen. It’ll be fun, all right.” They were both silent for a long time, with no need to talk. Presently Lazarus said, “Andy-“ “Yeah?”

“Are you going to look into this new-blood-for-old caper?” “I suppose so, eventually.”

“I’ve been thinking about it. Between ourselves, I’m not as fast with my fists as I was a century back. Maybe my natural span is wearing out. I do know this: I didn’t start planning our real estate venture till I head about this new process. It gave me a new perspective. I find myself thinking about thousands of years-and I never used to worry about anything further ahead than a week from next Wednesday.”

Libby chuckled again. “Looks like you’re growing up.”

“Some would say it was about time. Seriously, Andy, I think that’s just what I have been doing. The last two and a half centuries have just been my adolescence, so to speak. Long as I’ve hung around, I don’t know any more. about the final amwers, the important answers, than Peggy Weatheral does. Men-our kind of men-Earth men-never have had enough time to tackle the important questions. Lots of capacity and not time enough to use it properly. When it came to the important questions we might as well have still been monkeys.”

“How do you propose to tackle the important questions?”

“How should I know? Ask me again in about five hundred years.” “You think that will make a difference?”

“I do. Anyhow it’ll give me time to poke around and pick up some interesting facts. Take those Jockaira gods- “ “They weren’t gods, Lazarus. You shouldn’t call them that.”

“Of course they weren’t-I think. My guess is that they are creatures who have had time enough to do a little hard thinking. Someday, about a thousand years from now, I intend to march straight into the temple of Kreel, look him in the eye, and say, ‘Howdy, Bub-what do you know that 1 don’t know?’”

“It might not be healthy.”

‘We’ll have a showdown, anyway. I’ve never been satisfied with the outcome there. There ought not to be anything in the whole universe that man can’t poke his nose into-that’s the way we’re built and I assume that there’s some reason for it.”

“Maybe there aren’t any reasons.”

“Yes, maybe it’s just one colossal big joke, with no point to it.”’ Lazarus stood up and stretched and scratched his ribs. “But I can tell you this, Andy, whatever the answers are, here’s one monkey that’s going to keep on climbing, and locking around him to see what he can see, as long as the tree holds out.”

The End

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The man who sold the moon (full text) by Robert Heinlein

The primary story is based on a character who’s goal in life is to first visit the moon (being the first human) and then setting up a colony on the moon. Harriman (the character) uses is past business successes and his business savvy to convince his friends, his company, and complete nations of children to help back his venture, which is of the goal to fulfill a childhood fantasy instead of make money.

The Man Who Sold The Moon is one of Heinlein’s best works and that alone says a lot! Having been a Heinlein fan since Jr. High, I have to replace some of my favorites over the years because I reread them quite often. This I have replaced several times because paperbacks tend to wear out when they are read repeatedly. You don’t want to miss this story, whether you’re a fan or new to Heinlein, this book is great sci-fi!

Heinlein uses his fiction to tell the reader things, not just a story, but to communicate political, social and technical ideas and to share his technological prognostications. The perspective is complex.

All of these stories have as their underlying themes the conflict between profit and social and technological progress and how morally-neutral or amoral economic interests can come into conflict with human-scale interests and a common understanding of right and wrong.

The Man Who Sold The Moon, is about a rich industrialist called D. D. Harriman. Harriman has a dream, which is to go to the Moon and found a colony there. To achieve this dream, he adopts a single-mindedness that leads him to compromise business ethics and even break the law.

Heinlein captures well here several themes about modern business, including its complexity: Harriman, as a successful industrialist of international note, must have a very expert grasp of law and corporate structures, finance and accounting, politics and international relations, and a degree of technical literacy in the enterprise itself. Heinlein also shows how there is often a thin line between a successful business and fraud, and the qualities required are virtually the same.

Harriman represents perfectly the morally-neutral capitalist who puts up or finds the money for a project and dominates and motivates those around him, even though he lacks detailed technical know-how himself. Harriman as a businessman is happy to abide by the letter of an agreement when this works in his favour, but not when it does not.

The price of success, therefore, can often be lapses of integrity and incidences of personal moral abasement. Eventually Harriman is outmanoeuvred by one of his investors, who makes clear he cannot go to the Moon until the venture is in profit and could be managed by somebody else in the event of his demise.

The Man who Sold the Moon

THE MAN WHO SOLD THE MOON

CHAPTER ONE

“YOU’VE GOT TO BE ABELIEVER!”

George Strong snorted at his partner’s declaration. “Delos, why don’t you give up? You’ve been singing this tune for years. Maybe someday men will get to the Moon, though I doubt it. In any case, you and I will never live to see it. The loss of the power satellite washes the matter up for our generation.”

D. D. Harriman grunted. “We won’t see it if we sit on our fat behinds and don’t do anything to make it happen. But we can make it happen.” “Question number one: how? Question number two: why?”

“‘Why?’ The man asks ‘why.’ George, isn’t there anything in your soul but discounts, and dividends? Didn’t you ever sit with a girl on a soft summer night and stare up at the Moon and wonder what was there?”

“Yeah, I did once. I caught a cold.”

Harriman asked the Almighty why he had been delivered into the hands of the Philistines. He then turned back to his partner. “I could tell you why, the real ‘why,’ but you wouldn’t understand me. You want to know why in terms of cash, don’t you? You want to know how Harriman & Strong and Harriman Enterprises can show a profit, don’t you?”

“Yes,” admitted Strong, “and don’t give me any guff about tourist trade and fabulous lunar jewels. I’ve had it.”

“You ask me to show figures on a brand-new type of enterprise, knowing I can’t. It’s like asking the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk to estimate how much money Curtiss-Wright Corporation would someday make out of building airplanes. I’ll put it another way, You didn’t want us to go into plastic houses, did you? If you had had your way we would still be back in Kansas City, subdividing cow pastures and showing rentals.”

Strong shrugged.

“How much has New World Homes made to date?”

Strong looked absent-minded while exercising the talent he brought to the partnership. “Uh … $172,946,004.62, after taxes, to the end of the last fiscal year. The running estimate to date is—”

“Never mind. What was our share in the take?”

“Well, uh, the partnership, exclusive of the piece you took personally and then sold to me later, has benefited from New World Homes during the same period by $1 3,010,437.20, ahead of personal taxes. Delos, this double taxation has got to stop. Penalizing thrift is a sure way to run this country straight into—”

“Forget it, forget it! How much have we made out of Skyblast Freight and Antipodes Transways?” Strong told him.

“And yet I had to threaten you with bodily harm to get you to put up a dime to buy control of the injector patent. You said rockets were a passing fad.”

“We were lucky,” objected Strong. “You had no way of knowing that there would be a big uranium strike in Australia. Without it, the Skyways group would have left us in the red. For that matter New World Homes would have failed, too, if the roadtowns hadn’t come along and given us a market out from under local building codes.”

“Nuts on both points. Fast transportation will pay; it always has. As for New World, when ten million families need new houses and we can sell ‘em cheap, they’ll buy. They won’t let building codes stop them, not permanently. We gambled on a certainty. Think back, George: what ventures have we lost money on and what ones have paid off? Everyone of my crack- brain ideas has made money, hasn’t it? And the only times we’ve lost our ante was on conservative, blue-chip investments.”

“But we’ve made money on some conservative deals, too,” protested Strong.

“Not enough to pay for your yacht. Be fair about it, George; the Andes Development Company, the integrating pantograph patent, every one of my wildcat schemes I’ve had to drag you into

—and every one of them paid.”

“I’ve had to sweat blood to make them pay,” Strong grumbled.

“That’s why we are partners. I get a wildcat by the tail; you harness him and put him to work. Now we go to the Moon—and you’ll make it pay.” “Speak for yourself. I’m not going to the Moon.”

“I am.”

“Hummph! Delos, granting that we have gotten rich by speculating on your hunches, it’s a steel-clad fact that if you keep on gambling you lose your shirt. There’s an old saw about the pitcher that went once too often to the well.”

“Damn it, George—I’m going to the Moon! If you won’t back me up, let’s liquidate and I’ll do it alone.” Strong drummed on his desk top. “Now, Delos, nobody said anything about not backing you up.” “Fish or cut bait. Now is the opportunity and my mind’s made up. I’m going to be the Man in the Moon.” “Well … let’s get going. We’ll be late to the meeting.”

As they left their joint office, Strong, always penny conscious, was careful to switch off the light. Harriman had seen him do so a thousand times; this time he commented. “George, how about a light switch that turns off automatically when you leave a room?”

“Hmm—but suppose someone were left in the room?”

“Well… hitch it to stay on only when someone was in the room—key the switch to the human body’s heat radiation, maybe.” “Too expensive and too complicated.”

“Needn’t be. I’ll turn the idea over to Ferguson to fiddle with. It should be no larger than the present light switch and cheap enough so that the power saved in a year will pay for it.” “How would it work?” asked Strong.

“How should I know? I’m no engineer; that’s for Ferguson and the other educated laddies.”

Strong objected, “It’s no good commercially. Switching off a light when you leave a room is a matter of temperament. I’ve got it; you haven’t. If a man hasn’t got it, you can’t interest him in such a switch.”

“You can if power continues to be rationed. There is a power shortage now; and there will be a bigger one.” “Just temporary. This meeting will straighten it out.”

“George, there is nothing in this world so permanent as a temporary emergency. The switch will sell.” Strong took out a notebook and stylus. “I’ll call Ferguson in about it tomorrow.”

Harriman forgot the matter, never to think of it again. They had reached the roof; he waved to a taxi, then turned to Strong. “How much could we realize if we unloaded our holdings in

Roadways and in Belt Transport Corporation—yes, and in New World Homes?”

“Huh? Have you gone crazy?”

“Probably. But I’m going to need all the cash you can shake loose for me. Roadways and Belt Transport are no good anyhow; we should have unloaded earlier.” “You are crazy! It’s the one really conservative venture you’ve sponsored.”

“But it wasn’t conservative when I sponsored it. Believe me, George, roadtowns are on their way out. They are growing moribund, just as the railroads did. In a hundred years there won’t be a one left on the continent. What’s the formula for making money, George?”

“Buy low and sell high.”

“That’s only half of it… your half. We’ve got to guess which way things are moving, give them a boost, and see that we are cut in on the ground floor. Liquidate that stuff, George; I’ll need money to operate.” The taxi landed; they got in and took off.

The taxi delivered them to the roof of the Hemisphere Power Building they went to the power syndicate’s board room, as far below ground as the landing platform was above—in those days, despite years of peace, tycoons habitually came to rest at spots relatively immune to atom bombs. The room did not seem like a bomb shelter; it appeared to be a chamber in a luxurious penthouse, for a “view window” back of the chairman’s end of the table looked out high above the city, in convincing, live stereo, relayed from the roof.

The other directors were there before them. Dixon nodded as they came in, glanced at his watch finger and said, “Well, gentlemen, our bad boy is here, we may as well begin.” He took the chairman’s seat and rapped for order.

“The minutes of the last meeting are on your pads as usual. Signal when ready.” Harriman glanced at the summary before him and at once flipped a switch on the table top; a small green light flashed on at his place. Most of the directors did the same.

“Who’s holding up the procession?” inquired Harriman, looking around. “Oh—you, George. Get a move on.”

“I like to check the figures,” his partner answered testily, then flipped his own switch. Alarger green light showed in front of Chainnan Dixon, who then pressed a button; a transparency, sticking an inch or two above the table top in front of him lit up with the word RECORDING.

“Operations report,” said Dixon and touched another switch. Afemale voice came out from nowhere. Harriman followed the report from the next sheet of paper at his place. Thirteen Curie-type power piles were now in operation, up five from the last meeting. The Susquehanna and Charleston piles had taken over the load previously borrowed from Atlantic Roadcity and the roadways of that city were now up to normal speed. It was expected that the Chicago-Angeles road could be restored to speed during the next fortnight. Power would continue to be rationed but the crisis was over.

All very interesting but of no direct interest to Harriman. The power crisis that had been caused by the explosion of the power satellite was being satisfactorily met—very good, but Harriman’s interest in it lay in the fact that the cause of interplanetary travel had thereby received a setback from which it might not recover.

When the Harper-Erickson isotopic artificial fuels had been developed three years before it had seemed that, in addition to solving the dilemma of an impossibly dangerous power source which was also utterly necessary to the economic life of the continent, an easy means had been found to achieve interplanetary travel.

The Arizona power pile had been installed in one of the largest of the Antipodes rockets, the rocket powered with isotopic fuel created in the power pile itself, and the whole thing was placed in an orbit around the Earth. Amuch smaller rocket had shuttled between satellite and Earth, carrying supplies to the staff of the power pile, bringing back synthetic radioactive fuel for the power-hungry technology of Earth.

As a director of the power syndicate Harriman had backed the power satellite—with a private ax to grind: he expected to power a Moon ship with fuel manufactured in the power satellite and thus to achieve the first trip to the Moon almost at once. He had not even attempted to stir the Department of Defense out of its sleep; he wanted no government subsidy—the job was a cinch; anybody could do it—and Harriman would do it. He had the ship; shortly he would have the fuel.

The ship had been a freighter of his own Antipodes line, her chem-fuel motors replaced, her wings removed. She still waited, ready for fuel—the recommissioned Santa Maria, nee City of Brisbane.

But the fuel was slow in coming. Fuel had to be eannarked for the shuttle rocket; the power needs of a rationed continent came next—and those needs grew faster than the power satellite could turn out fuel. Far from being ready to supply him for a “useless” Moon trip, the syndicate had seized on the safe but less efficient low temperature uranium-salts and heavy water, Curie-type power piles as a means of using uranium directly to meet the ever growing need for power, rather than build and launch more satellites.

Unfortunately the Curie piles did not provide the fierce star-interior conditions necessary to breeding the isotopic fuels needed for an atomic-powered rocket. Harriman had reluctantly come around to the notion that he would have to use political pressure to squeeze the necessary priority for the fuels he wanted for the Santa Maria.

Then the power satellite had blown up.

Harriman was stirred out of his brown study by Dixon’s voice. “The operations report seems satisfactory, gentlemen. If there is no objection, it will be recorded as accepted. You will note that in the next ninety days we will be back up to the power level which existed before we were forced to close down the Arizona pile.”

“But with no provision for future needs,” pointed out Harriman. “There have been a lot of babies born while we have been sitting here.” “Is that an objection to accepting the report, D.D.?”

“No.”

“Very well. Now the public relations report—let me call attention to the first item, gentlemen. The vice-president in charge recommends a schedule of annuities, benefits, scholarships and so forth for dependents of the staff of the power satellite and of the pilot of the Charon: see appendix ‘C’.”

Adirector across from Harriman—Phineas Morgan, chairman of the food trust, Cuisine, Incorporated—protested, “What is this, Ed? Too bad they were killed of course, but we paid them skyhigh wages and carried their insurance to boot. Why the charity?”

Harriman grunted. “Pay it—I so move. It’s peanuts. ‘Do not bind the mouths of the kine who tread the grain.’” “I wouldn’t call better than nine hundred thousand ‘peanuts,’” protested Morgan.

“Just a minute, gentlemen—” It was the vice-president in charge of public relations, himself a director. “If you’ll look at the breakdown, Mr. Morgan, you will see that eighty-five percent of the appropriation will be used to publicize the gifts.”

Morgan squinted at the figures. “Oh—why didn’t you say so? Well, I suppose the gifts can be considered unavoidable overhead, but it’s a bad precedent.” “Without them we have nothing to publicize.”

“Yes, but—”

Dixon rapped smartly. “Mr. Harriman has moved acceptance. Please signal your desires.” The tally board glowed green; even Morgan, after hesitation, okayed the allotment. “We have a related item next,” said Dixon. “AMrs.—uh, Garfield, through her attorneys, alleges that we are responsible for the congenital crippled condition of her fourth child. The putative facts are that her child was being born just as the satellite exploded and that Mrs. Garfield was then on the meridian underneath the satellite. She wants the court to award her half a million.”

Morgan looked at Harriman. “Delos, I suppose that you will say to settle out of court.” “Don’t be silly. We fight it.”

Dixon looked around, surprised. “Why, D.D.? It’s my guess we could settle for ten or fifteen thousand—and that was what I was about to recommend. I’m surprised that the legal department referred it to publicity.”

“It’s obvious why; it’s loaded with high explosive. But we should fight, regardless of bad publicity. It’s not like the last case; Mrs. Garfield and her brat are not our people. And any dumb

fool knows you can’t mark a baby by radioactivity at birth; you have to get at the germ plasm of the previous generation at least. In the third place, if we let this get by, we’ll be sued for every double-yolked egg that’s laid from now on. This calls for an open allotment for defense and not one damned cent for compromise.”

“It might be very expensive,” observed Dixon.

“It’ll be more expensive not to fight. If we have to, we should buy the judge.”

The public relations chief whispered to Dixon, then announced, “I support Mr. Harriman’s view. That’s my department’s recommendation.”

It was approved. “The next item,” Dixon went on, “is a whole sheaf of suits arising out of slowing down the roadcities to divert power during the crisis. They alleged loss of business, loss of time, loss of this and that, but they are all based on the same issue. The most touchy, perhaps, is a stockholder’s suit which claims that Roadways and this company are so interlocked that the decision to divert the power was not done in the interests of the stockholders of Roadways. Delos, this is your pidgin; want to speak on it?”

“Forget it.” “Why?”

“Those are shotgun suits. This corporation is not responsible; I saw to it that Roadways volunteered to sell the power because I anticipated this. And the directorates don’t interlock; not on paper, they don’t. That’s why dummies were born. Forget it—for every suit you’ve got there, Roadways has a dozen. We’ll beat them.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Well—” Harriman lounged back and hung a knee over the arm of his chair. “—a good many years ago I was a Western Union messenger boy. While waiting around the office I read everything I could lay hands on, including the contract on the back of the telegram forms. Remember those? They used to come in big pads of yellow paper; by writing a message on the face of the form you accepted the contract in the fine print on the backT only most people didn’t realize that. Do you know what that contract obhgated the company to do?”

“Send a telegram, I suppose.”

“It didn’t promise a durn thing. The company offered to attempt to deliver the message, by camel caravan or snail back, or some equally streamlined method, if convenient, but in event of failure, the company was not responsible. I read that fine print until I knew it by heart. It was the loveliest piece of prose I had ever seen. Since then all my contracts have been worded on the same principle. Anybody who sues Roadways will find that Roadways can’t be sued on the element of time, because time is not of the essence. In the event of complete non- performance—which hasn’t happened yet— Roadways is financially responsible only for freight charges or the price of the personal transportation tickets. So forget it.”

Morgan sat up. “D.D., suppose I decided to run up to my country place tonight, by the roadway, and there was a failure of some sort so that I didn’t get there until tomorrow? You mean to say Roadways is not liable?”

Harriman grinned. “Roadways is not liable even if you starve to death on the trip. Better use your copter.” He turned back to Dixon. “I move that we stall these suits and let Roadways carry the ball for us.”

“The regular agenda being completed,” Dixon announced later, “time is allotted for our colleague, Mr. Harriman, to speak on a subject of his own choosing. He has not listed a subject in advance, but we will listen until it is your pleasure to adjourn.”

Morgan looked sourly at Harriman. “I move we adjourn.”

Harriman grinned. “For two cents I’d second that and let you die of curiosity.” The motion failed for want of a second. Harriman stood up. “Mr. Chairman, friends—” He then looked at Morgan. “—and associates. As you know, I am interested in space travel.” Dixon looked at him sharply. “Not that again, Delos! If I weren’t in the chair, I’d move to adjourn myself.”

“‘That again’,” agreed Harriman. “Now and forever. Hear me out. Three years ago, when we were crowded into moving the Arizona power pile out into space, it looked as if we had a bonus in the shape of interplanetary travel. Some of you here joined with me in forming Spaceways, Incorporated, for experimentation, exploration—and exploitation.

“Space was conquered; rockets that could establish orbits around the globe could be modified to get to the Moon—and from there, anywhere! It was just a matter of doing it. The problems remaining were financial—and political.

“In fact, the real engineering problems of space travel have been solved since World World II. Conquering space has long been a matter of money and politics. But it did seem that the Harper-Erickson process, with its concomitant of a round-the-globe rocket and a practical economical rocket fuel, had at last made it a very present thing, so close indeed that I did not object when the early allotments of fuel from the satellite were earmarked for industrial power.”

He looked around. “I shouldn’t have kept quiet. I should have squawked and brought pressure and made a hairy nuisance of myself until you allotted fuel to get rid of me. For now we have missed our best chance. The satellite is gone; the source of fuel is gone. Even the shuttle rocket is gone. We are back where we were in 19 50. Therefore—”

He paused again. “Therefore—I propose that we build a space ship and send it to the Moon!” Dixon broke the silence. “Delos, have you come unzipped? You just said that it was no longer possible. Now you say to build one.”

“I didn’t say it was impossible; I said we had missed our best chance. The time is overripe for space travel. This globe grows more crowded every day. In spite of technical advances the daily food intake on this planet is lower than it was thirty years ago—and we get 46 new babies every minute, 6;,ooo every day, 25,ooo,ooo every year. Our race is about to burst forth to the planets; if we’ve got the initiative Cod promised an oyster we will help it along!

“Yes, we missed our best chance-but the engineering details can be solved. The real question is who’s going to foot the bill? That is why I address you gentlemen, for right here in this room is the financial capital of this planet.”

Morgan stood up. “Mr. Chairman, if all company business is finished, I ask to be excused.”

Dixon nodded. Harriman said, “So long, Phineas. Don’t let me keep you. Now, as I was saying, it’s a money problem and here is where the money is. I move we finance a trip to the Moon.”

The proposal produced no special excitement; these men knew Harriman. Presently Dixon said, “Is there a second to D.D.’s proposal?”

“Just a minute, Mr. Chairman—” It was Jack Entenza, president of Two-Continents Amusement Corporation. “I want to ask Delos some questions.” He turned to Harriman. “D.D., you know I strung along when you set up Spaceways. It seemed like a cheap venture and possibly profitable in educational and scientific values—I never did fall for space liners plying between planets; that’s fantastic. I don’t mind playing along with your dreams to a moderate extent, but how do you propose to get to the Moon? As you say, you are fresh out of fuel.”

Harriman was still grinning. “Don’t kid me, Jack, I know why you came along. You weren’t interested in science; you’ve never contributed a dime to science. You expected a monopoly on pix and television for your chain. Well, you’ll get ‘em, if you stick with me—otherwise I’ll sign up ‘Recreations, Unlimited’; they’ll pay just to have you in the eye.”

Entenza looked at him suspiciously. “What will it cost me?”

“Your other shirt, your eye teeth, and your wife’s wedding ring—unless ‘Recreations’ will pay more.” “Damn you, Delos, you’re crookeder than a dog’s hind leg.”

“From you, Jack, that’s a compliment. We’ll do business. Now as to how I’m going to get to the Moon, that’s a silly question. There’s not a man in here who can cope with anything more complicated in the way of machinery than a knife and fork. You can’t tell a left-handed monkey wrench from a reaction engine, yet you ask me for blue prints of a space ship.

“Well, I’ll tell you how I’ll get to the Moon. I’ll hire the proper brain boys, give them everything they want, see to it that they have all the money they can use, sweet talk them into long hours

—then stand back and watch them produce. I’ll run it like the Manhattan Project—most of you remember the A-bomb job; shucks, some of you can remember the Mississippi Bubble. The

chap that headed up the Manhattan Project didn’t know a neutron from Uncle George—but he got results. They solved that trick four ways. That’s why I’m not worried about fuel; we’ll get a fuel. We’ll get several fuels.”

Dixon said, “Suppose it works? Seems to me you’re asking us to bankrupt the company for an exploit with no real value, aside from pure science, and a one-shot entertainment exploitation. I’m not against you—I wouldn’t mind putting in ten, fifteen thousand to support a worthy venture—but I can’t see the thing as a business proposition.”

Harriman leaned on his fingertips and stared down the long table. “Ten or fifteen thousand gum drops! Dan, I mean to get into you for a couple of megabucks at least—and before we’re through you’ll be hollering for more stock. This is the greatest real estate venture since the Pope carved up the New World. Don’t ask me what we’ll make a profit on; I can’t itemize the assets—but I can lump them. The assets are a planet—a whole planet, Dan, that’s never been touched. And more planets beyond it. If we can’t figure out ways to swindle a few fast bucks out of a sweet set-up like that then you and I had better both go on relief. It’s like having Manhattan Island offered to you for twenty-four dollars and a case of whiskey.”

Dixon grunted. “You make it sound like the chance of a lifetime.”

“Chance of a lifetime, nuts! This is’ the greatest chance in all history. It’s raining soup; grab yourself a bucket.”

Next to Entenza sat Gaston P. Jones, director of Trans-America and half a dozen other banks, one of the richest men in the room. He carefully removed two inches of cigar ash, then said dryly, “Mr. Harriman, I will sell you all of my interest in the Moon, present and future, for fifty cents.”

Harriman looked delighted. “Sold!”

Entenza had been pulling at his lower lip and listening with a brooding expression on his face. Now he spoke up. “Just a minute, Mr. Jones—I’ll give you a dollar for it.” “Dollar fifty,” answered Harriman.

“Two dollars,” Entenza answered slowly. “Five!”

They edged each other up. At ten dollars Entenza let Harriman have it and sat back, still looking thoughtful. Harriman looked happily around. “Which one of you thieves is a lawyer?” he demanded. The remark was rhetorical; out of seventeen directors the normal percentage—eleven, to be exact—were lawyers. “Hey, Tony,” he continued, “draw me up an instrument right now that will tie down this transaction so that it couldn’t be broken before the Throne of God. All of Mr. Jones’ interests, rights, title, natural interest, future interests, interests held directly or through ownership of stock, presently held or to be acquired, and so forth and so forth. Put lots of Latin in it. The idea is that every interest in the Moon that Mr. Jones now has or may acquire is mine-for a ten spot, cash in hand paid.” Harriman slapped a bill down on the table. “That right, Mr. Jones?”

Jones smiled briefly. “That’s right, young fellow.” He pocketed the bill. “I’ll frame this for my grandchildren—to show them how easy it is to make money.” Entenza’s eyes darted from Jones to Harriman.

“Good!” said Harriman. “Gentlemen, Mr. Jones has set a market price for one human being’s interest in our satellite. With around three billion persons on this globe that sets a price on the Moon of thirty billion dollars.” He hauled out a wad of money. “Any more suckers? I’m buying every share that’s offered, ten bucks a copy.”

“I’ll pay twenty!” Entenza rapped out.

Harriman looked at him sorrowfully. “Jack—don’t do that! We’re on the same team. Let’s take the shares together, at ten.”

Dixon pounded for order. “Gentlemen, please conduct such transactions after the meeting is adjourned. Is there a second to Mr. Harriman’s motion?” Gaston Jones said, “I owe it to Mr. Harriman to second his motion, without prejudice. Let’s get on with a vote.”

No one objected; the vote was taken. It went eleven to three against Harriman—Harriman, Strong, and Entenza for; all others against. Harriman popped up before anyone could move to adjourn and said, “I expected that. My real purpose is this: since the company is no longer interested in space travel, will it do me the courtesy of selling me what I may need of patents, processes, facilities, and so forth now held by the company but relating to space travel and not relating to the production of power on this planet? Our brief honeymoon with the power satellite built up a backlog; I want to use it. Nothing formal—just a vote that it is the policy of the company to assist me in any way not inconsistent with the primary interest of the company. How about it, gentlemen? It’ll get me out of your hair.”

Jones studied his cigar again. “I see no reason why we should not accommodate him, gentlemen … and I speak as the perfect disinterested party.”

“I think we can do it, Delos,” agreed Dixon, “only we won’t sell you anything, we’ll lend it to you. Then, if you happen to hit the jackpot, the company still retains an interest. Has anyone any objection?” he said to the room at large.

There was none; the matter was recorded as company policy and the meeting was adjourned. Harriman stopped to whisper with Entenza and, finally, to make an appointment. Gaston Jones stood near the door, speaking privately with Chairman Dixon. He beckoned to Strong, Harriman’s partner. “George, may I ask a personal question?”

“I don’t guarantee to answer. Go ahead.”

“You’ve always struck me as a level-headed man. Tell me-why do you string along with Harriman? Why, the man’s mad as a hatter.”

Strong looked sheepish. “I ought to deny that, he’s my friend … but I can’t. But dawggone it! Every time Delos has a wild hunch, it turns out to be the real thing. I hate to string along—it

makes me nervous—but I’ve learned to trust his hunches rather than another man’s sworn financial report.”

Jones cocked one brow. “The Midas touch, eh?” “You could call it that.”

“Well, remember what happened to King Midas—in the long run. Good day, gentlemen.” Harriman had left Entenza; Strong joined him. Dixon stood staring at them, his face very thoughtful.

CHAPTER TWO

HARRIMAN’S HOME had been built at the time when everyone who could was decentralizing and going underground. Above ground there was a perfect little Cape Cod cottage—the clapboards of which concealed armor plate— and most delightful, skillfully landscaped grounds; below ground there was four or five times as much floorspace, immune to anything but a direct hit and possessing an independent air supply with reserves for one thousand hours. During the Crazy Years the conventional wall surrounding the grounds had been replaced by a wall which looked the same but which would stop anything short of a broaching tank—nor were the gates weak points; their gadgets were as personally loyal as a well-trained dog.

Despite its fortress-like character the house was comfortable. It was also very expensive to keep up. Harriman did not mind the expense; Charlotte liked the house and it gave her something to do. When they were first married she had lived uncomplainingly in a cramped flat over a

grocery store; if Charlotte now liked to play house in a castle, Harriman did not mind.

But he was again starting a shoe-string venture; the few thousand per month of ready cash represented by the household expenses might, at some point in the game, mean the difference between success and the sheriff’s bailiffs. That night at dinner, after the servants fetched the coffee, and port, he took up the matter.

“My dear, I’ve been wondering how you would like a few months in Florida.”

His wife stared at him. “Florida? Delos, is your mind wandering? Florida is unbearable at this time of the year.” “Switzerland, then. Pick your own spot. Take a real vacation, as long as you like.”

“Delos, you are up to something.”

Harriman sighed. Being “up to something” was the unnameable and unforgivable crime for which any American male could be indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced in one breath. He wondered how things had gotten rigged so that the male half of the race must always behave to suit feminine rules and feminine logic, like a snotty-nosed school boy in front of a stern teacher.

“In a way, perhaps. We’ve both agreed that this house is a bit of a white elephant. I was thinking of closing it, possibly even of disposing of the land— it’s worth more now than when we bought it. Then, when we get around to it, we could build something more modern and a little less like a bombproof.”

Mrs. Harriman was temporarily diverted. “Well, I have thought it might be nice to build another place, Delos—say a little chalet tucked away in the mountains, nothing ostentatious, not more than two servants, or three. But we won’t close this place until it’s built, Delos—after all, one must live somewhere.”

“I was not thinking of building right away,” he answered cautiously. “Why not? We’re not getting any younger, Delos; if we are to enjoy the good things of life we had better not make delays. You needn’t worry about it; I’ll manage everything.”

Harriman turned over in his mind the possibility of letting her build to keep her busy. If he earmarked the cash for her “little chalet,” she would live in a hotel nearby wherever she decided to build it—and he could sell this monstrosity they were sitting in. With the nearest roadcity now less than ten miles away, the land should bring more than Charlotte’s new house would cost and he would be rid of the monthly drain on his pocketbook.

“Perhaps you are right,” he agreed. “But suppose you do build at once; you won’t be living here; you’ll be supervising every detail of the new place. I say we should unload this place; it’s eating its head off in taxes, upkeep, and running expenses.”

She shook her head. “Utterly out of the question, Delos. This is my home.” He ground out an almost unsmoked cigar. “I’m sorry, Charlotte, but you can’t have it both ways. If you build, you can’t stay here. If you stay here, we’ll close these below-ground catacombs, fire about a dozen of the parasites I keep stumbling over, and live in the cottage on the surface. I’m cutting expenses.”

“Discharge the servants? Delos, if you think that I will undertake to make a home for you without a proper staff, you can just—”

“Stop it.” He stood up and threw his napkin down. “It doesn’t take a squad of servants to make a home. When we were first married you had no servants—and you washed and ironed my shirts in the bargain. But we had a home then. This place is owned by that staff you speak of. Well, we’re getting rid of them, all but the cook and a handy man.”

She did not seem to hear. “Delos! sit down and behave yourself. Now what’s all this about cutting expenses? Are you in some sort of trouble? Are you? Answer me!” He sat down wearily and answered, “Does a man have to be in trouble to want to cut out unnecessary expenses?”

“In your case, yes. Now what is it? Don’t try to evade me.”

“Now see here, Charlotte, we agreed a long time ago that I would keep business matters in the office. As for the house, we simply don’t need a house this size. It isn’t as if we had a passel of kids to fill up—”

“Oh! Blaming me for that again!”

“Now see here, Charlotte,” he wearily began again, “I never did blame you and I’m not blaming you now. All I ever did was suggest that we both see a doctor and find out what the trouble was we didn’t have any kids. And for twenty years you’ve been making me pay for that one remark. But that’s all over and done with now; I was simply making the point that two people don’t fill up twenty-two rooms. I’ll pay a reasonable price for a new house, if you want it, and give you an ample household allowance.” He started to say how much, then decided not to. “Or you can close this place and live in the cottage above. It’s just that we are going to quit squandering money—for a while.”

She grabbed the last phrase. “‘For a while.’ What’s going on, Delos? What are you going to squander money on?” When he did not answer she went on. “Very well, if you won’t tell me, I’ll call George. He will tell me.”

“Don’t do that, Charlotte. I’m warning you. I’ll—”

“You’ll what!” She studied his face. “I don’t need to talk to George; I can tell by looking at you. You’ve got the same look on your face you had when you came home and told me that you had sunk all our money in those crazy rockets.”

“Charlotte, that’s not fair. Skyways paid off. It’s made us a mint of money.”

“That’s beside the point. I know why you’re acting so strangely; you’ve got that old trip-to-the-Moon madness again. Well, I won’t stand for it, do you hear? I’ll stop you; I don’t bave to put up with it. I’m going right down in the morning and see Mr. Kamens and find out what has to be done to make you behave yourself.” The cords of her neck jerked as she spoke.

He waited, gathering his temper before going on. “Charlotte, you have no real cause for complaint. No matter what happens to me, your future is taken care of.” “Do you think I want to be a widow?”

He looked thoughtfully at her. “I wonder.”

“Why— Why, you heartless beast.” She stood up. “We’ll say no more about it; do you mind?” She left without waiting for an answer.

His “man” was waiting for him when he got to his room. Jenkins got up hastily and started drawing Harriman’s bath. “Beat it,” Harriman grunted. “I can undress myself.” “You require nothing more tonight, sir?”

“Nothing. But don’t go unless you feel like it. Sit down and pour yourself a drink. Ed, how long you been married?” “Don’t mind if I do.” The servant helped himself. “Twenty-three years, come May, sir.”

“How’s it been, if you don’t mind me asking?” –

“Not bad. Of course there have been times—”

“I know what you mean. Ed, if you weren’t working for me, what would you be doing?”

“Well, the wife and I have talked many times of opening a little restaurant, nothing pretentious, but good. Aplace where a gentleman could enjoy a quiet meal of good food.” “Stag, eh?”

“No, not entirely, sir—but there would be a parlor’ for gentlemen only. Not even waitresses, I’d tend that room myself.” “Better look around for locations, Ed. You’re practically in business.”

CHAPTER THREE

STRONG ENTERED THEIR JOINT OFFICES the next morning at a precise nine o’clock, as usual. He was startled to find Harriman there before him. For Harriman to fail to show up at all meant nothing; for him to beat the clerks in was significant.

Harriman was busy with a terrestrial globe and a book—the current Nautical Almanac, Strong observed. Harriman barely glanced up. “Morning, George. Say, who’ve we got a line to in Brazil?”

“Why?”

“I need some trained seals who speak Portuguese, that’s why. And some who speak Spanish, too. Not to mention three or four dozen scattered around in this country. I’ve come across something very, very interesting. Look here… according to these tables the Moon only swings about twentyeight, just short of twenty-nine degrees north and south of the equator.” He held a pencil against the globe and spun it. “Like that. That suggest anything?”

“No. Except that you’re getting pencil marks on a sixty dollar globe.”

“And you an old real estate operator! What does a man own when he buys a parcel of land?” “That depends on the deed. Usually mineral rights and other subsurface rights are-“

“Never mind that. Suppose he buys the works, without splitting the rights: how far down does he own? How far up does he own?”

“Well, he owns a wedge down to the center of the Earth. That was settled in the slant-drilling and off-set oil lease cases. Theoretically he used to own the space above the land, too, out

indefinitely, but that was modified by a series of cases after the commercial airlines came in—and a good thing, for us, too, or we would have to pay tolls every time one of our rockets took off for Australia.”

“No, no, no, George! you didn’t read those cases right. Right of passage was established—but ownership of the space above the land remained unchanged. And even right of passage was not absolute; you can build a thousand-foot tower on your own land right where airplanes, or rockets, or whatever, have been in the habit of passing and the ships will thereafter have to go above it, with no kick back on you. Remember how we had to lease the air south of Hughes Field to insure that our approach wasn’t built up?”

Strong looked thoughtful. “Yes. I see your point. The ancient principle of land ownership remains undisturbed—down to the center of the Earth, up to infinity. But what of it? It’s a purely theoretical matter. You’re not planning to pay tolls to operate those spaceships you’re always talking about, are you?” He grudged a smile at his own wit.

“Not on your tintype. Another matter entirely. George-who owns the Moon?” Strong’s jaw dropped, literally. “Delos, you’re joking.”

“I am not. I’ll ask you again: if basic law says that a man owns the wedge of sky above his farm out to infinity, who owns the Moon? Take a look at this globe and tell me.” Strong looked. “But it can’t mean anything, Delos. Earth laws wouldn’t apply to the Moon.”

“They apply here and that’s where I am worrying about it. The Moon stays constantly over a slice of Earth bounded by latitude twenty-nine north and the same distance south; if one man owned all that belt of Earth—it’s roughly the tropical zone-then he’d own the Moon, too, wouldn’t he? By all the theories of real property ownership that our courts pay any attention to. And, by direct derivation, according to the sort of logic that lawyers like, the various owners of that belt of land have title-good vendable title—to the Moon somehow lodged collectively in them. The fact that the distribution of the title is a little vague wouldn’t bother a lawyer; they grow fat on just such distributed titles every time a will is probated.”

“It’s fantastic!”

“George, when are you going to learn that ‘fantastic’ is a notion that doesn’t bother a lawyer?” “You’re not planning to try to buy the entire tropical zone-that’s what you would have to do.”

“No,” Harriman said slowly, “but it might not be a bad idea to buy right, title and interest in the Moon, as it may appear, from each of the sovereign countries in that belt. If I thought I could keep it quiet and not run the market up, I might try it. You can buy a thing awful cheap from a man if he thinks it’s worthless and wants to sell before you regain your senses.

“But that’s not the plan,” he went on. “George, I want corporations— local corporations—in every one of those countries. I want the legislatures of each of those countries to grant franchises to its local corporation for lunar exploration, exploitation, et cetera, and the right to claim lunar soil on behalf of the country—with fee simple, naturally, being handed on a silver platter to the patriotic corporation that thought up the idea. And I want all this done quietly, so that the bribes won’t go too high. We’ll own the corporations, of course, which is why I need a flock of trained seals. There is going to be one hell of a fight one of these days over who owns the Moon; I want the deck stacked so that we win no matter how the cards are dealt.”

“It will be ridiculously expensive, Delos. And you don’t even know that you will ever get to the Moon, much less that it will be worth anything after you get there.”

“We’ll get there! It’ll be more expensive not to establish these claims. Anyhow it need not be very expensive; the proper use of bribe money is a homoeopathic art—you use it as a catalyst. Back in the middle of the last century four men went from California to Washington with $40,000; it was all they had. Afew weeks later they were broke-but Congress had awarded them a billion dollars’ worth of railroad right of way. The trick is not to run up the market.”

Strong shook his head. “Your title wouldn’t be any good anyhow. The Moon doesn’t stay in one place; it passes over owned land certainly—but so does a migrating goose.”

“And nobody has title to a migrating bird. I get your point—but the Moon always stays over that one belt. If you move a boulder in your garden, do you lose title to it? Is it still real estate? Do

the title laws still stand? This is like that group of real estate cases involving wandering islands in the Mississippi, George—the land moved as the river cut new channels, but somebody

always owned it. In this case I plan to see to it that we are the ‘somebody.’”

Strong puckered his brow. “I seem to recall that some of those island-andriparian cases were decided one way and some another.” “We’ll pick the decisions that suit us. That’s why lawyers’ wives have mink coats. Come on, George; let’s get busy.”

“On what?” “Raising the money.”

“Oh.” Strong looked relieved. “I thought you were planning to use our money.”

“I am. But it won’t be nearly enough. We’ll use our money for the senior financing to get things moving; in the meantime we’ve got to work out ways to keep the money rolling in.” He pressed a switch at his desk; the face of Saul Kamens, their legal chief of staff, sprang out at him. “Hey, Saul, can you slide in for a p0w-wow?”

“WThatever it is, just tell them ‘no,’” answered the attorney. “I’ll fix it.”

“Good. Now come on in—they’re moving Hell and I’ve got an option on the first ten loads.”

Kamens showed up in his own good time. Some minutes later Harriman had explained his notion for claiming the Moon ahead of setting foot on it. “Besides those dummy corporations,” he went on, “we need an agency that can receive contributions without having to admit any financial interest on the part of the contributor—like the National Geographic Society.”

Kamens shook his head. “You can’t buy the National Geographic Society.” “Damn it, who said we were going to? We’ll set up our own.”

“That’s what I started to say.”

“Good. As I see it, we need at least one tax-free, non-profit corporation headed up by the right people-we’ll hang on to voting control, of course. We’ll probably need more than one; we’ll set them up as we need them. And we’ve got to have at least one new ordinary corporation, not tax-free— but it won’t show a profit until we are ready. The idea is to let the nonprofit corporations have all of the prestige and all of the publicity—and the other gets all of the profits, if and when. We swap assets around between corporations, always for perfectly valid reasons, so that the non-profit corporations pay the expenses as we go along. Come to think about it, we had better have at least two ordinary corporations, so that we can let one of them go through bankruptcy if we find it necessary to shake out the water. That’s the general sketch. Get busy and fix it up so that it’s legal, will you?”

Kamens said, “You know, Delos, it would be a lot more honest if you did it at the point of a gun.” “Alawyer talks to me of honesty! Never mind, Saul; I’m not actually going to cheat anyone-“ “Humph!”

“—and I’m just going to make a trip to the Moon. That’s what everybody will be paying for; that’s what they’ll get. Now fix it up so that it’s legal, that’s a good boy.”

“I’m reminded of something the elder Vanderbilt’s lawyer said to the old man under similar circumstances: ‘It’s beautiful the way it is; why spoil it by making it legal?’ Okeh, brother gonoph, I’ll rig your trap. Anything else?”

“Sure. Stick around, you might have some ideas. George, ask Montgomery to come in, will you?” Montgomery, Harriman’s publicity chief, had two virtues in his employer’s eyes: he was personally loyal to Harriman, and, secondly, he was quite capable of planning a campaign to convince the public that Lady Godiva wore a Caresse-brand girdle during her famous ride

or that Hercules attributed his strength to Crunchies for breakfast. He arrived with a large portfolio under his arm. “Glad you sent for me, Chief. Get a load of this—” He spread the folder open on Harriman’s desk and began displaying sketches and layouts. “Kinsky’s work—is that boy hot!” Harriman closed the portfolio. “What outfit is it for?”

“Huh? New World Homes.”

“I don’t want to see it; we’re dumping New World Homes. Wait a minute-don’t start to bawl. Have the boys go through with it; I want the price kept up while we unload. But open your ears to another matter.” He explained rapidly the new enterprise.

Presently Montgomery was nodding. “When do we start and how much do we spend?”

“Right away and spend what you need to. Don’t get chicken about expenses; this is the biggest thing we’ve ever tackled.” Strong flinched; Harriman went on, “Have insomnia over it tonight; see me tomorrow and we’ll kick it around.”

“Wait a see, Chief. How are you going to sew up all those franchises from the, uh—the Moon states, those countries the Moon passes over, while a big publicity campaign is going on about a trip to the Moon and how big a thing it is for everybody? Aren’t you about to paint yourself into a corner?”

“Do I look stupid? We’ll get the franchise before you hand out so much as a filler—you’ll get ‘em, you and Kamens. That’s your first job.” “Hmmm… .” Montgomery chewed a thumb nail. “Well, all right—I can see some angles. How soon do we have to sew it up?”

“I give you six weeks. Otherwise just mail your resignation in, written on the skin off your back.”

“I’ll write it right now, if you’ll help me by holding a mirror.”

“Damn it, Monty, I know you can’t do it in six weeks. But make it fast; we can’t take a cent in to keep the thing going until you sew up those franchises. If you dilly-dally, we’ll all starve-and we won’t get to the Moon, either.”

Strong said, “D.D., why fiddle with those trick claims from a bunch of moth-eaten tropical countries? If you are dead set on going to the Moon, let’s call Ferguson in and get on with the matter.”

“I like your direct approach, George,” Harriman said, frowning. “Mmmm back about i 84; or ‘46 an eager-beaver American army officer captured California. You know what the State Department did?”

“They made him hand it back. Seems he hadn’t touched second base, or something. So they had to go to the trouble of capturing it all over again a few months later. Now I don’t want that to happen to us. It’s not enough just to set foot on the Moon and claim it; we’ve got to validate that claim in terrestrial courts—or we’re in for a peck of trouble. Eh, Saul?”

Kamens nodded. “Remember what happened to Columbus.” “Exactly. We aren’t going to let ourselves be rooked the way Columbus was.”

Montgomery spat out some thumb nail. “But, Chief—you know damn well those banana-state claims won’t be worth two cents after I do tie them up. Why not get a franchise right from the

U.N. and settle the matter? I’d as lief tackle that as tackle two dozen cockeyed legislatures. In fact I’ve got an angle already—we work it through the Security Council and—”

“Keep working on that angle; we’ll use it later. You don’t appreciate the full mechanics of the scheme, Monty. Of course those claims are worth nothing—except nuisance value. But their nuisance value is all important. Listen: we get to the Moon, or appear about to. Every one of those countries puts up a squawk; we goose them into it through the dummy corporations they have enfranchised. Where do they squawk? To the U.N., of course. Now the big countries on this globe, the rich and important ones, are all in the northern temperate zone. They see what the claims are based on and they take a frenzied look at the globe. Sure enough, the Moon does not pass over a one of them. The biggest country of all—Russia-doesn’t own a spadeful of dirt south of twenty-nine north. So they reject all the claims.

“Or do they?” Harriman went on. “The U.S. balks. The Moon passes over Florida and the southern part of Texas. Washington is in a tizzy. Should they back up the tropical countries and support the traditional theory of land title or should they throw their weight to the idea that the Moon belongs to everyone? Or should the United States try to claim the whole thing, seeing as how it was Americans who actually got there first?

“At this point we creep out from under cover. It seems that the Moon ship was owned and the expenses paid by a non-profit corporation chartered by the U.N. itself—” “Hold it,” interrupted Strong. “I didn’t know that the U.N. could create corporations?”

“You’ll find it can,” his partner answered. “How about it, Saul?” Kamens nodded. “Anyway,” Harriman continued, “I’ve already got the corporation. I had it set up several years ago. It can do most anything of an educational or scientific nature-and brother, that covers a lot of ground! Back to the point—this corporation, the creature of the U.N., asks its parent to declare the lunar colony autonomous territory, under the protection of the U.N. We won’t ask for outright membership at first because we want to keep it simple—”

“Simple, he calls it!” said Montgomery.

“Simple. This new colony will be a de facto sovereign state, holding title to the entire Moon, and—listen closely!—capable of buying, selling, passing laws, issuing title to land, setting up monopolies, collecting tariffs, et cetera without end. And we own it.”

“The reason we get all this is because the major states in the U.N. can’t think up a claim that sounds as legal as the claim made by the tropical states, they can’t agree among themselves as to how to split up the swag if they were to attempt brute force and the other major states aren’t willing to see the United States claim the whole thing. They’ll take the easy way out of their dilemma by appearing to retain title in the U.N. itself. The real title, the title controlling all economic and legal matters, will revert to us. Now do you see my point, Monty?”

Montgomery grinned. “Damned if I know if it’s necessary, Chief, but I love it. It’s beautiful.” “Well, I don’t think so,” Strong grumbled. “Delos, I’ve seen you rig some complicated deals—some of them so devious that they turned even my stomach—but this one is the worst yet. I

think you’ve been carried away by the pleasure you get out of cooking up involved deals in which somebody gets double-crossed.”

Harriman puffed hard on his cigar before answering, “I don’t give a damn, George. Call it chicanery, call it anything you want to. I’m going to the Moon! If I have to manipulate a million people to accomplish it, I’ll do it.”

“But it’s not necessary to do it this way.” “Well, how would you do it?”

“Me? I’d set up a straightforward corporation. I’d get a resolution in Congress making my corporation the chosen instrument of the United States—” “Bribery?”

“Not necessarily. Influence and pressure ought to be enough. Then I would set about raising the money and make the trip.” “And the United States would then own the Moon?”

“Naturally,” Strong answered a little stiffly.

Harriman got up and began pacing. “You don’t see it, George, you don’t see it. The Moon was not meant to be owned by a single country, even the United States.” “It was meant to be owned by you, I suppose.”

“Well, if I own it—for a short while—I won’t misuse it and I’ll take care that others don’t. Damnation, nationalism should stop at the stratosphere. Can you see what would happen if the United States lays claim to the Moon? The other nations won’t recognize the claim. It will become a permanent bone of contention in the Security Council—just when we were beginning to get straightened out to the point where a man could do business planning without having his elbow jogged by a war every few years. The other nations—quite rightfully—will be scared to death of the United States. They will be able to look up in the sky any night and see the main atom-bomb rocket base of the United States staring down the backs of their necks. Are they going to hold still for it? No, sirree—they are going to try to clip off a piece of the Moon for their own national use. The Moon is too big to hold, all at once. There will be other bases established there and presently there will be the worst war this planet has ever seen—and we’ll be to blame.

“No, it’s got to be an arrangement that everybody will hold still for—and that’s why we’ve got to plan it, think of all the angles, and be devious about it until we are in a position to make it work.

“Anyhow, George, if we claim it in the name of the United States, do you know where we will be, as business men?” “In the driver’s seat,” answered Strong.

“In a pig’s eye! We’ll be dealt right out of the game. The Department of National Defense will say, ‘Thank you, Mr. Harriman. Thank you, Mr. Strong. We are taking over in the interests of

national security; you can go home now.’ And that’s just what we would have to do—go home and wait for the next atom war.

“I’m not going to do it, George. I’m not going to let the brass hats muscle in. I’m going to set up a lunar colony and then nurse it along until it is big enough to stand on its own feet. I’m telling you—all of you!—this is the biggest thing for the human race since the discovery of fire. Handled right, it can mean a new and braver world. Handle it wrong and it’s a one-way ticket to Armageddon. It’s coming, it’s coming soon, whether we touch it or not. But I plan to be the Man in the Moon myself—and give it my personal attention to see that it’s handled right.”

He paused. Strong said, “Through with your sermon, Delos?”

“No, I’m not,” Harriman denied testily. “You don’t see this thing the right way. Do you know what we may find up there?” He swung his arm in an arc toward the ceiling. “People!” “On the Moon?” said Kamens.

“Why not on the Moon?” whispered Montgomery to Strong.

“No, not on the Moon—at least I’d be amazed if we dug down and found anybody under that airless shell. The Moon has had its day; I was speaking of the other planets—Mars and Venus and the satellites of Jupiter. Even maybe out at the stars themselves. Suppose we do find people? Think what it will mean to us. We’ve been alone, all alone, the only intelligent race in the only world we know. We haven’t even been able to talk with dogs or apes. Any answers we got we had to think up by ourselves, like deserted orphans. But suppose we find people, intelligent people, who have done some thinking in their own way. We wouldn’t be alone any more! We could look up at the stars and never be afraid again.”

He finished, seeming a little tired and even a little ashamed of his outburst, like a man surprised in a private act. He stood facing them, searching their faces. “Gee whiz, Chief,” said Montgomery, “I can use that. How about it?”

“Think you can remember it?”

“Don’t need to—I flipped on your ‘silent steno.” “Well, damn your eyes!”

“We’ll put it on video—in a play I think.”

Harriman smiled almost boyishly. “I’ve never acted, but if you think it’ll do any good, I’m game.”

“Oh, no, not you, Chief,” Montgomery answered in horrified tones. “You’re not the type. I’ll use Basil Wilkes-Booth, I think. With his organlike voice and that beautiful archangel face, he’ll really send ‘em.”

Harriman glanced down at his paunch and said gruffly, “O.K.—back to business. Now about money. In the first place we can go after straight donations to one of the non-profit corporations, just like endowments for colleges. Hit the upper brackets, where tax deductions really matter. How much do you think we can raise that way?”

“Very little,” Strong opined. “That cow is about milked dry.”

“It’s never milked dry, as long as there are rich men around who would rather make gifts than pay taxes. How much will a man pay to have a crater on the Moon named after him?” “I thought they all had names?” remarked the lawyer.

“Lots of them don’t—and we have the whole back face that’s not touched yet. We won’t try to put down an estimate today; we’ll just list it. Monty, I want an angle to squeeze dimes out of the school kids, too. Forty million school kids ‘at a dime a head is $4,000,000.00—we can use that.”

“Why stop at a dime?” asked Monty. “If you get a kid really interested he’ll scrape together a dollar.” “Yes, but what do we offer him for it? Aside from the honor of taking part in a noble venture and so forth?”

“Mmmm… .” Montgomery used up more thumb nail. “Suppose we go after both the dimes and the dollars. For a dime he gets a card saying that he’s a member of the Moonbeam club—” “No, the ‘Junior Spacemen’.”

“O.K., the Moonbeams will be girls—and don’t forget to rope the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts into it, too. We give each kid a card; when he kicks in another dime, we punch it. When he’s punched out a dollar, we give him a certificate, suitable for framing, with his name and some process engraving, and on the back a picture of the Moon.”

“On the front,” answered Harriman. “Do it in one print job; it’s cheaper and it’ll look better. We give him something else, too, a steelclad guarantee that his name will be on the rolls of the Junior Pioneers of the Moon, which same will be placed in a monument to be erected on the Moon at the landing site of the first Moon ship—in microfilm, of course; we have to watch weight.”

“Fine!” agreed Montgomery. “Want to swap jobs, Chief? V/hen he gets up to ten dollars we give him a genuine, solid gold-plated shooting star pin ~nd he’s a senior Pioneer, with the right to vote or something or other. And his name goes outside of the monument—microengraved on a platinum strip.”

Strong looked as if he had bitten a lemon. “What happens when he reaches a hundred dollars?” he asked.

“Why, then,” Montgomery answered happily, “we give him another card and he can start over. Don’t worry about it, Mr. Strong—if any kid goes that high, he’ll have his reward. Probably we will take him on an inspection tour of the ship before it takes off and give him, absolutely free, a picture of himself standing in front of it, with the pilot’s own signature signed across the bottom by some female clerk.”

“Chiseling from kids. Bah!”

“Not at all,” answered Montgomery in hurt tones. “Intangibles are the most honest merchandise anyone can sell. They are always worth whatever you are willing to pay for them and they never wear out. You can take them to your grave untarnished.”

“Hmmmph!”

Harriman listened to this, smiling and saying nothing. Kamens cleared his throat. “If you two ghouls are through cannibalizing the youth of the land, I’ve another idea.” “Spill it.”

“George, you collect stamps, don’t you?” “Yes.”

“How much would a cover be worth which had been to the Moon and been cancelled there?” “Huh? But you couldn’t, you know.”

“I think we could get our Moon ship declared a legal post office substation without too much trouble. What would it be worth?” “Uh, that depends on how rare they are.”

“There must be some optimum number which will fetch a maximum return. Can you estimate it?”

Strong got a faraway look in his eye, then took out an old-fashioned pencil and commenced to figure. Harriman went on, “Saul, my minor success in buying a share in the Moon from Jones went to my head. How about selling building lots on the Moon?”

“Let’s keep this serious, Delos. You can’t do that until you’ve landed there.”

“I am serious. I know you are thinking of that ruling back in the ‘forties that such land would have to be staked out and accurately described. I want to sell land on the Moon. You figure out a way to make it legal. I’ll sell the whole Moon, if I can—surface rights, mineral rights, anything.”

“Suppose they want to occupy it?”

“Fine. The more the merrier. I’d like to point out, too, that we’ll be in a position to assess taxes on what we have sold. If they don’t use it and won’t pay taxes, it reverts to us. Now you figure out how to offer it, without going to jail. You may have to advertise it abroad, then plan to peddle it personally in this country, like Irish Sweepstakes tickets.”

Kamens looked thoughtful. “We could incorporate the land company in Panama and advertise by video and radio from Mexico. Do you really think you can sell the stuff?” “You can sell snowballs in Greenland,” put in Montgomery. “It’s a matter of promotion.”

Harriman added, “Did you ever read about the Florida land boom, Saul? People bought lots they had never seen and sold them at tripled prices without ever having laid eyes on them. Sometimes a parcel would change hands a dozen times before anyone got around to finding out that the stuff was ten-foot deep in water. We can offer bargains better than that—an acre, a guaranteed dry acre with plenty of sunshine, for maybe ten dollars—or a thousand acres at a dollar an acre. Who’s going to turn down a bargain like that? Particularly after the rumor gets around that the Moon is believed to be loaded with uranium?”

“Is it?”

“How should I know? When the boom sags a little we will announce the selected location of Luna City—and it will just happen to work out that the land around the site is still available for sale. Don’t worry, Saul, if it’s real estate, George and I can sell it. Why, down in the Ozarks, where the land stands on edge, we used to sell both sides of the same acre.” Harriman looked thoughtful. “I think we’ll reserve mineral rights—there just might actually be uranium there!”

Kamens chuckled. “Delos, you are a kid at heart. Just a great big, overgrown, lovable—juvenile delinquent.” Strong straightened up. “I make it half a million,” he said.

“Half a million what?” asked Harriman.

“For the cancelled philatelic covers, of course. That’s what we were talking about. Five thousand is my best estimate of the number that could be placed with serious collectors and with dealers. Even then we will have to discount them to a syndicate and hold back until the ship is built and the trip looks like a probability.”

“Okay,” agreed Harriman. “You handle it. I’ll just note that we can tap you for an extra half million toward the end.” “Don’t I get a commission?” asked Kamens. “I thought of it.”

“You get a rising vote of thanks—and ten acres on the Moon. Now what other sources of revenue can we hit?” “Don’t you plan to sell stock?” asked Kamens.

“I was coming to that. Of course-but no preferred stock; we don’t want to be forced through a reorganization. Participating common, non-voting—” “Sounds like another banana-state corporation to me.”

“Naturally—but I want some of it on the New York Exchange, and you’ll have to work that out with the Securities Exchange Commission somehow. Not too much of it—that’s our show case and we’ll have to keep it active and moving up.”

“Wouldn’t you rather I swam the Hellespont?”

“Don’t be like that, Saul. It beats chasing ambulances, doesn’t it?” “I’m not sure.”

“Well, that’s what I want you—wups!” The screen on Harriman’s desk had come to life. Agirl said, “Mr. Harriman, Mr. Dixon is here. He has no appointment but he says that you want to see him.”

“I thought I had that thing shut off,” muttered Harriman, then pressed his key and said, “O.K., show him in.” “Very well, sir—oh, Mr. Harriman, Mr. Entenza came in just this second.”

“Look who’s talking,” said Kamens. Dixon came in with Entenza behind him. He sat down, looked around, started to speak, then checked himself. He looked around again, especially at Entenza. “Go ahead, Dan,” Harriman encouraged him. “‘Tain’t nobody here at all but just us chickens.”

Dixon made up his mind. “I’ve decided to come in with you, D.D.,” he announced. “As an act of faith I went to the trouble of getting this.” He took a formal-looking instrument from his pocket and displayed it. It was a sale of lunar rights, from Phineas Morgan to Dixon, phrased in exactly the same fashion as that which Jones had granted to Harriman.

Entenza looked startled, then dipped into his own inner coat pocket. Out came three more sales contracts of the same sort, each from a director of the power syndicate. Harriman cocked an eyebrow at them. “Jack sees you and raises you two, Dan. You want to call?”

Dixon smiled ruefully. “I can just see him.” He added two more to the pile, grinned and offered his hand to Entenza.

“Looks like a stand off.” Harriman decided to say nothing just yet about seven telestated contracts now locked in his desk—after going to bed the night before he had been quite busy on the phone almost till midnight. “Jack, how much did you pay for those things?”

“Standish held out for a thousand; the others were cheap.”

“Damn it, I warned you not to run the price up. Standish will gossip. How about you, Dan?” “I got them at satisfactory prices.”

“So you won’t talk, eh? Never mind—gentlemen, how serious are you about this? How much money did you bring with you?” Entenza looked to Dixon, who answered, “How much does it take?”

“How much can you raise?” demanded Harriman. Dixon shrugged. “We’re getting no place. Let’s use figures. Ahundred thousand.”

Harriman sniffed. “I take it what you really want is to reserve a seat on the first regularly scheduled Moon ship. I’ll sell it to you at that price.” “Let’s quit sparring, Delos. How much?”

Harriman’s face remained calm but he thought furiously. He was caught short, with too little information—he had not even talked figures with his chief engineer as yet. Confound it! Why had he left that phone hooked in? “Dan, as I warned you, it will cost you at least a million just to sit down in this game.”

“So I thought. How much will it take to stay in the game?” “All you’ve got.”

“Don’t be silly, Delos. I’ve got more than you have.”

Harriman lit a cigar, his only sign of agitation. “Suppose you match us, dollar for dollar.” “For which I get two shares?”

“Okay, okay, you chuck in a buck whenever each of us does—share and share alike. But I run things.”

“You run the operations,” agreed Dixon. “Very well, I’ll put up a million now and match you as necessary. You have no objection to me having my own auditor, of course.” “When have I ever cheated you, Dan?”

“Never and there is no need to start.”

“Have it your own way—but be damned sure you send a man who can keep his mouth shut.” “He’ll keep quiet. I keep his heart in a jar in my safe.”

Harriman was thinking about the extent of Dixon’s assets. “We just might let you buy in with a second share later, Dan. This operation will be expensive.” Dixon fitted his finger tips carefully together. “We’ll meet that question when we come to it. I don’t believe in letting an enterprise fold up for lack of capital.” “Good.” Harriman turned to Entenza. “You heard what Dan had to say, Jack. Do you like the terms?”

Entenza’s forehead was covered with sweat. “I can’t raise a million that fast.”

“That’s all right, Jack. We don’t need it this morning. Your note is good; you can take your time liquidating.”

“But you said a million is just the beginning. I can’t match you indefinitely; you’ve got to place a limit on it. I’ve got my family to consider.” “No annuities, Jack? No monies transferred in an irrevocable trust?”

“That’s not the point. You’ll be able to squeeze me-freeze me out.”

Harriman waited for Dixon to say something. Dixon finally said, “We wouldn’t squeeze you, Jack—as long as you could prove you had converted every asset you hold. We would let you stay in on a pro rata basis.”

Harriman nodded. “That’s right, Jack.” He was thinking that any shrinkage in Entenza’s share would give himself and Strong a clear voting majority. Strong had been thinking of something of the same nature, for he spoke up suddenly, “I don’t like this. Four equal partners—we can be deadlocked too easily.” Dixon shrugged. “I refuse to worry about it. I am in this because I am betting that Delos can manage to make it profitable.”

“We’ll get to the Moon, Dan!”

“I didn’t say that. I am betting that you will show a profit whether we get to the Moon or not. Yesterday evening I spent looking over the public records of several of your companies; they were very interesting. I suggest we resolve any possible deadlock by giving the Director—that’s you, Delos— the power to settle ties. Satisfactory, Entenza?”

“Oh, sure!”

Harriman was worried but tried not to show it. He did not trust Dixon, even bearing gifts. He stood up suddenly. “I’ve got to run, gentlemen. I leave you to Mr. Strong and Mr. Kamens. Come along, Monty.” Kamens, he was sure, would not spill anything prematurely, even to nominal full partners. As for Strong—George, he knew, had not even let his left hand know how many fingers there were on his right.

He dismissed Montgomery outside the door of the partners’ personal office and went across the hall. Andrew Ferguson, chief engineer of Harriman Enterprises, looked up as he came in. “Howdy, Boss. Say, Mr. Strong gave me an interesting idea for a light switch this morning. It did not seem practical at first but—”

“Skip it. Let one of the boys have it and forget it. You know the line we are on now.” “There have been rumors,” Ferguson answered cautiously.

“Fire the man that brought you the rumor. No-send him on a special mission to Tibet and keep him there until we are through. Well, let’s get on with it. I want you to build a Moon ship as quickly as possible.”

Ferguson threw one leg over the arm of his chair, took out a pen knife and began grooming his nails. “You say that like it was an order to build a privy.”

“Why not? There have been theoretically adequate fuels since way back in ‘49. You get together the team to design it and the gang to build it; you build it—I pay the bills. What could be

simpler?”

Ferguson stared at the ceiling. “‘Adequate fuels—’” he repeated dreamily.

“So I said. The figures show that hydrogen and oxygen are enough to get a step rocket to the Moon and back—it’s just a matter of proper design.”

“‘Proper design,’ he says,” Ferguson went on ifl the same gentle voice, then suddenly swung around, jabbed the knife into the scarred desk top and bellowed, “What do you know about proper design? Where do I get the steels? What do I use for a throat liner? How in the hell do I burn enough tons of your crazy mix per second to keep from wasting all my power breaking loose? How can I get a decent mass-ratio with a step rocket? Why in the hell didn’t you let me build a proper ship when we had the fuel?”

Harriman waited for him to quiet down, then said, “What do we do about it, Andy?”

“Hmmm… . I was thinking about it as I lay abed last night—and my old lady is sore as hell at you; I had to finish the night on the couch. In the first place, Mr. Harriman, the proper way to tackle this is to get a research appropriation from the Department of National Defense. Then you—”

“Damn it, Andy, you stick to engineering and let me handle the political and financial end of it. I don’t want your advice.”

“Damn it, Delos, don’t go off half-cocked. This is engineering I’m talking about. The government owns a whole mass of former art about rocketry—all classified. Without a government contract you can’t even get a peek at it.”

“It can’t amount to very much. What can a government rocket do that a Skyways rocket can’t do? You told me yourself that Federal rocketry no longer amounted to anything.” Ferguson looked supercilious. “I am afraid I can’t explain it in lay terms. You will have to take it for granted that we need those government research reports. There’s no sense in

spending thousands of dollars in doing work that has already been done.”

“Spend the thousands.” “Maybe millions.”

“Spend the millions. Don’t be afraid to spend money. Andy, I don’t want this to be a military job.” He considered elaborating to the engineer the involved politics back of his decision, thought better of it. “How bad do you actually need that government stuff? Can’t you get the same results by hiring engineers who used to work for the government? Or even hire them away from the government right now?”

Ferguson pursed his lips. “If you insist on hampering me, how can you expect me to get results?”

“I am not hampering you. I am telling you that this is not a government project. If you won’t attempt to cope with it on those terms, let me know now, so that I can find somebody who will.” Ferguson started playing mumblety-peg on his desk top. When he got to “noses”—and missed—he said quietly, “I mind a boy who used to work for the government at White Sands. He

was a very smart lad indeed-design chief of section.”

“You mean he might head up your team?” “That was the notion.”

“What’s his name? Where is he? Who’s he working for?”

“Well, as it happened, when the government closed down White Sands, it seemed a shame to me that a good boy should be out of a job, so I placed him with Skyways. He’s maintenance chief engineer out on the Coast.”

“Maintenance? What a hell of a job for a creative man! But you mean he’s working for us now? Get him on the screen. No—call the coast and have them send him here in a special rocket; we’ll all have lunch together.”

“As it happens,” Ferguson said quietly, “I got up last night and called him—that’s what annoyed the Missus. He’s waiting outside. Coster—Bob Coster.” Aslow grin spread over Harriman’s face. “Andy! You black-hearted old scoundrel, why did you pretend to balk?”

“I wasn’t pretending. I like it here, Mr. Harriman. Just as long as you don’t interfere, I’ll do my job. Now my notion is this: we’ll make young Coster chief engineer of the project and give him his head. I won’t joggle his elbow; I’ll just read the reports. Then you leave him alone, d’you hear me? Nothing makes a good technical man angrier than to have some incompetent nitwit with a check book telling him how to do his job.”

“Suits. And I don’t want a penny-pinching old fool slowing him down, either. Mind you don’t interfere with him, either, or I’ll jerk the rug out from under you. Do we understand each other?” “I think we do.”

“Then get him in here.”

Apparently Ferguson’s concept of a “lad” was about age thirty-five, for such Harriman judged Coster to be. He was tall, lean, and quietly eager. Harriman braced him immediately after shaking hands with, “Bob, can you build a rocket that will go to the Moon?”

Coster took it without blinking. “Do you have a source of X-fuel?” he countered, giving the rocket man’s usual shorthand for the isotope fuel formerly produced by the power satellite. Coster remained perfectly quiet for several seconds, then answered, “I can put an unmanned messenger rocket on the face of the Moon.”

“Not good enough. I want it to go there, land, and come back. Whether it lands here under power or by atmosphere braking is unimportant.”

It appeared that Coster never answered promptly; Harriman had the fancy that he could hear wheels turning over in the man’s head. “That would be a very expensive job.” “Who asked you how much it would cost? Can you do it?”

“I could try.”

“Try, hell. Do you think you can do it? Would you bet your shirt on it? Would you be willing to risk your neck in the attempt? If you don’t believe in yourself, man, you’ll always lose.” “How much will you risk, sir? I told you this would be expensive-and I doubt if you have any idea how expensive.” “And I told you not to worry about money. Spend what you need; it’s my job to pay the bills. Can you do it?”

“I can do it. I’ll let you know later how much it will cost and how long it will take.”

“Good. Start getting your team together. Where are we going to do this, Andy?” he added, turning to Ferguson. “Australia?” “No.” It was Coster who answered. “It can’t be Australia; I want a mountain catapult. That will save us one step-combination.” “How big a mountain?” asked Harriman~ “Will Pikes Peak do?”

“It ought to be in the Andes,” objected Ferguson. “The mountains are taller and closer to the equator. After all, we own facilities there—or the Andes Development Company does.”

“Do as you like, Bob,” Harriman told Coster. “I would prefer Pikes Peak, but it’s up to you.” He was thinking that there were tremendous business advantages to locating Earth’s space port ~ i inside the United States—and he could visualize the advertising advantage of having Moon ships blast off from the top of Pikes Peak, in plain view of everyone for hundreds of miles to the East.

“I’ll let you know.”

“Now about salary. Forget whatever it was we were paying you; how much do you want?” Coster actually gestured, waving the subject away. “I’ll work for coffee and cakes.” “Don’t be silly.”

“Let me finish. Coffee and cakes and one other thing: I get to make the trip.

Harriman blinked. “Well, I can understand that,” he said slowly. “In the meantime I’ll put you on a drawing account.” He added, “Better calculate for a three-man ship, unless you are a pilot.”

“I’m not.”

“Three men, then. You see, I’m going along, too.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“AGOOD THING YOU DECIDED to come in, Dan,” Harriman was saying, “or you would find yourself out of a job. I’m going to put an awful crimp in the power company before I’m through with this.”

Dixon buttered a roll. “Really? How?”

“We’ll set up high-temperature piles, like the Arizona job, just like the one that blew up, around the corner on the far face of the Moon. We’ll remote-control them; if one explodes it won’t matter. And I’ll breed more X-fuel in a week than the company turned out in three months. Nothing personal about it; it’s just that I want a source of fuel for interplanetary liners. If we can’t get good stuff here, we’ll have to make it on the Moon.”

“Interesting. But where do you propose to get the uranium for six piles? The last I heard the Atomic Energy Commission had the prospective supply earmarked twenty years ahead.” “Uranium? Don’t be silly; we’ll get it on the Moon.”

“On the Moon? Is there uranium on the Moon?”

“Didn’t you know? I thought that was why you decided to join up with me?” “No, I didn’t know,” Dixon said deliberately. “What proof have you?”

“Me? I’m no scientist, but it’s a well-understood fact. Spectroscopy, or something. Catch one of the professors. But don’t go showing too much interest; we aren’t ready to show our hand.” Harriman stood up. “I’ve got to run, or I’ll miss the shuttle for Rotterdam. Thanks for the lunch.” He grabbed his hat and left.

Harriman stood up. “Suit yourself, Mynheer van der Velde. I’m giving you and your colleagues a chance to hedge your bets. Your geologists all agree that diamonds result from volcanic action. What do you think we will find there?” He dropped a large photograph of the Moon on the Hollander’s desk.

The diamond merchant looked impassively at the pictured planet, pockmarked by a thousand giant craters. “If you get there, Mr. Harriman.”

Harriman swept up the picture. “We’ll get there. And we’ll find diamonds—though I would be the first to admit that it may be twenty years or even forty before there is a big enough strike to matter. I’ve come to you because I believe that the worst villain in our social body is a man who introduces a major new economic factor without planning his innovation in such a way as to permit peaceful adjustment. I don’t like panics. But all I can do is warn you. Good day.”

“Sit down, Mr. Harriman. I’m always confused when a man explains how he is going to do me good. Suppose you tell me instead how this is going to do you good? Then we can discuss

how to protect the world market against a sudden influx of diamonds from the Moon.”

Harriman sat down.

Harriman liked the Low Countries. He was delighted to locate a dog-drawn milk cart whose young master wore real wooden shoes; he happily took pictures and tipped the child heavily, unaware that the set-up was arranged for tourists. He visited several other diamond merchants but without speaking of the Moon. Among other purchases he found a brooch for Charlotte— a peace offering.

Then he took a taxi to London, planted a story with the representatives of the diamond syndicate there, arranged with his London solicitors to be insured by Lloyd’s of London through a dummy, against a successful Moon flight, and called his home office. He listened to numerous reports, especially those concerning Montgomery, and found that Montgomery was in New Delhi. He called him there, spoke with him at length, then hurried to the port just in time to catch his ship. He was in Colorado the next morning.

At Peterson Field, east of Colorado Springs, he had trouble getting through the gate, even though it was now his domain, under lease. Of course he could have called Coster and gotten it straightened out at once, but he wanted to look around before seeing Coster. Fortunately the head guard knew him by sight; he got in and wandered around for an hour or more, a tn- colored badge pinned to his coat to give him freedom.

The machine shop was moderately busy, so was the foundry … but most of the shops were almost deserted. Harriman left the shops, went into the main engineering building. The drafting room and the loft were fairly active, as was the computation section. But there were unoccupied desks in the structures group and a churchlike quiet in the metals group and in the adjoining metallurgical laboratory. He was about to cross over into the chemicals and materials annex when Coster suddenly showed up.

“Mr. Harriman! I just heard you were here.”

“Spies everywhere,” remarked Harriman. “I didn’t want to disturb you.” “Not at all. Let’s go up to my office.”

Settled there a few moments later Harriman asked, “Well—how’s it going?” Coster frowned. “All right, I guess.”

Harriman noted that the engineer’s desk baskets were piled high with papers which spilled over onto the desk. Before Harriman could answer, Coster’s desk phone lit up and a feminine voice said sweetly, “Mr. Coster— Mr. Morgenstern is calling.”

“Tell him I’m busy.”

After a short wait the girl answered in a troubled voice, “He says he’s just got to speak to you, sir.” Coster looked annoyed. “Excuse me a moment, Mr. Harriman—O.K., put him on.”

The girl was replaced by a man who said, “Oh there you are-what was the hold up? Look, Chief, we’re in a jam about these trucks. Every one of them that we leased needs an overhaul and now it turns out that the White Fleet company won’t do anything about it—they’re sticking to the fine print in the contract. Now the way I see it, we’d do better to cancel the contract and do business with Peak City Transport. They have a scheme that looks good to me. They guarantee to—”

“Take care of it,” snapped Coster. “You made the contract and you have authority to cancel. You know that.”

“Yes, but Chief, I figured this would be something you would want to pass on personally. It involves policy and—” “Take care of it! I don’t give a damn what you do as long as we have transportation when we need it.” He switched off. “Who is that man?” inquired Harriman.

“Who? Oh, that’s Morgenstern, Claude Morgenstem.” “Not his name—what does he do?”

“He’s one of my assistants—buildings, grounds, and transportation.” “Fire him!”

Coster looked stubborn. Before he could answer a secretary came in and stood insistently at his elbow with a sheaf of papers. He frowned, initialed them, and sent her out. “Oh, I don’t mean that as an order,” Harriman added, “but I do mean it as serious advice. I won’t give orders in your backyard,—but will you listen to a few minutes of advice?” “Naturally,” Coster agreed stiffly.

“Mmm … this your first job as top boss?” Coster hesitated, then admitted it.

“I hired you on Ferguson’s belief that you were the engineer most likely to build a successful Moon ship. I’ve had no reason to change my mind. But top administration ain’t engineering, and maybe I can show you a few tricks there, if you’ll let me.” He waited. “I’m not criticizing,” he added. “Top bossing is like sex; until you’ve had it, you don’t know about it.” Harriman had the mental reservation that if the boy would not take advice, he would suddenly be out of a job, whether Ferguson liked it or not.

Coster drummed on his desk. “I don’t know what’s wrong and that’s a fact. It seems as if I can’t turn anything over to anybody and have it done properly. I feel as if I were swimming in quicksand.”

“Done much engineering lately?”

“I try to.” Coster waved at another desk in the corner. “I work there, late at night.”

“That’s no good. I hired you as an engineer. Bob, this setup is all wrong. The joint ought to be jumping—and it’s not. Your office ought to be quiet as a grave. Instead your office is jumping and the plant looks like a graveyard.”

Coster buried his face in his hands, then looked up. “I know it. I know what needs to be done-but every time I try to tackle a technical problem some bloody fool wants me to make a decision about trucks—or telephones—or some damn thing. I’m sorry, Mr. Harriman. I thought I could do it.” Harriman said very gently, “Don’t let it throw you, Bob. You haven’t had much sleep lately, have you? Tell you what—we’ll put over a fast one on Ferguson. I’ll take that desk you’re at for a few days and build you a set-up to protect you against such things. I want that brain of yours thinking about reaction vectors and fuel efficiencies and design stresses, not about contracts for trucks.” Harriman stepped to the door, looked around the outer office and spotted a man who might or might not be the office’s chief clerk. “Hey, you! C’mere.”

The man looked startled, got up, came to the door and said, “Yes?”

“I want that desk in the corner and all the stuff that’s on it moved to an empty office on this floor, right away.” The clerk raised his eyebrows. “And who are you, if I may ask?”

“Damn it—”

“Do as he tells you, Weber,” Coster put in.

“I want it done inside of twenty minutes,” added Harriman. “Jump!” He turned back to Coster’s other desk, punched the phone, and presently was speaking to the main offices of Skyways. “Jim, is your boy Jock Berkeley around? Put him on leave and send him to me, at Peterson Field, right away, special trip. I want the ship he comes in to raise ground ten minutes after we sign off. Send his gear after him.” Harriman listened for a moment, then answered, “No, your organization won’t fall apart if you lose Jock— or, if it does, maybe we’ve been paying the wrong man the top salary .

“Okay, okay, you’re entitled to one swift kick at my tail the next time you catch up with me but send Jock. So long.”

He supervised getting Coster and his other desk moved into another office, saw to it that the phone in the new office was disconnected, and, as an afterthought, had a couch moved in there, too. “We’ll install a projector, and a drafting machine and bookcases and other junk like that tonight,” he told Coster. “Just make a list of anything you need—to work on engineering. And call me if you want anything.” He went back to the nominal chiefengineer’s office and got happily to work trying to figure where the organization stood and what was wrong with it.

Some four hours later he took Berkeley in to meet Coster. The chief engineer was asleep at his desk, head cradled on his arms. Harriman started to back out, but Coster roused. “Oh! Sorry,” he said, blushing, “I must have dozed off.”

“That’s why I brought you the couch,” said Harriman. “It’s more restful. Bob, meet Jock Berkeley. He’s your new slave. You remain chief engineer and top, undisputed boss. Jock is Lord High Everything Else. From now on you’ve got absolutely nothing to worry about—except for the little detail of building a Moon ship.”

They shook hands. “Just one thing I ask, Mr. Coster,” Berkeley said seriously, “bypass me all you want to-you’ll have to run the technical show—but for God’s sake record it so I’ll know what’s going on. I’m going to have a switch placed on your desk that will operate a sealed recorder at my desk.”

“Fine!” Coster was looking, Harriman thought, younger already.

“And if you want something that is not technical, don’t do it yourself. Just flip a switch and whistle; it’ll get done!” Berkeley glanced at Harriman. “The Boss says he wants to talk with you about the real job. I’ll leave you and get busy.” He left.

Harriman sat down; Coster followed suit and said, “Whew!” “Feel better?”

“I like the looks of that fellow Berkeley.”

“That’s good; he’s your twin brother from now on. Stop worrying; I’ve used him before. You’ll think you’re living in a well-run hospital. By the way, where do you live?” “At a boarding house in the Springs.”

“That’s ridiculous. And you don’t even have a place here to sleep?” Harriman reached over to Coster’s desk, got through to Berkeley. “Jock—get a suite for Mr. Coster at the Broadmoor, under a phony name.”

“Right.”

“And have this stretch along here adjacent to his office fitted out as an apartment.” “Right. Tonight.”

“Now, Bob, about the Moon ship. Where do we stand?”

They spent the next two hours contentedly running over the details of the problem, as Coster had laid them out. Admittedly very little work had been done since the field was leased but Coster had accomplished considerable theoretical work and computation before he had gotten swamped in administrative details. Harriman, though no engineer and certainly not a mathematician outside the primitive arithmetic of money, had for so long devoured everything he could find about space travel that he was able to follow most of what Coster showed him.

“I don’t see anything here about your mountain catapult,” he said presently. Coster looked vexed. “Oh, that! Mr. Harriman, I spoke too quickly.”

“Huh? How come? I’ve had Montgomery’s boys drawing up beautiful pictures of what things will look like when we are running regular trips. I intend to make Colorado Springs the spaceport capital of the world. We hold the franchise of the old cog railroad now; what’s the hitch?”

“Well, it’s both time and money.” “Forget money. That’s my pidgin.”

“Time then. I still think an electric gun is the best way to get the initial acceleration for a chem-powered ship. Like this—” He began to sketch rapidly. “It enables you to omit the first step- rocket stage, which is bigger than all the others put together and is terribly inefficient, as it has such a poor mass-ratio. But what do you have to do to get it? You can’t build a tower, not a tower a couple of miles high, strong enough to take the thrusts—not this year, anyway. So you have to use a mountain. Pikes Peak is as good as any; it’s accessible, at least.

“But what do you have to do to use it? First, a tunnel in through the side, from Manitou to just under the peak, and big enough to take the loaded ship—” “Lower it down from the top,” suggested Harriman.

Coster answered, “I thought of that. Elevators two miles high for loaded space ships aren’t exactly built out of string, in fact they aren’t built out of any available materials. It’s possible to gimmick the catapult itself so that the accelerating coils can be reversed and timed differently to do the job, but believe me, Mr. Harrima; it will throw you into other engineering problems quite as great … such as a giant railroad up to the top of the ship. And it still leaves you with the shaft of the catapult itself to be dug. It can’t be as small as the ship, not like a gun barrel for a bullet. It’s got to be considerably larger; you don’t compress a column of air two miles high with impunity. Oh, a mountain catapult could be built, but it might take ten years—or longer.”

“Then forget it. We’ll build it for the future but not for this flight. No, wait—how about a surface catapult. We scoot up the side of the mountain and curve it up at the end?” “Quite frankly, I think something like that is what will eventually be used. But, as of today, it just creates new problems. Even if we could devise an electric gun in which you could make

that last curve—we can’t, at present— the ship would have to be designed for terrific side stresses and all the additional weight would be parasitic so far as our main purpose is

concerned, the design of a rocket ship.”

“Well, Bob, what is your solution?” Coster frowned. “Go back to what we know how to do—build a step rocket.”

CHAPTER FIVE

“MONTY—”

“Yeah, Chief?”

“Have you ever heard this song?” Harriman hummed, “The Moon belongs to everyone; the best things in life are free—,” then sang it, badly off key. “Can’t say as I ever have.” “It was before your time. I want it dug out again. I want it revivcd, plugged until Hell wouldn’t have it, and on everybody’s lips.”

“O.K.” Montgomery took out his memorandum pad. “When do you want it to reach its top?”

Harriman considered. “In, say, about three months. Then I want the first phrase picked up and used in advertising slogans.” “Acinch.”

“How are things in Florida, Monty?”

“I thought we were going to have to buy the whole damned legislature until we got the rumor spread around that Los Angeles had contracted to have a City-Limits-of-Los-Angeles sign planted on the Moon for publicity pix. Then they came around.”

“Good.” Harriman pondered. “You know, that’s not a bad idea. How much do you think the Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles would pay for such a picture?” Montgomery made another note. “I’ll look into it.”

“I suppose you are about ready to crank up Texas, now that Florida is loaded?” “Most any time now. We’re spreading a few snide rumors first.”

Headline from Dallas-Fort Worth Banner: “THE MOON BELONGS TO TEXAS!!!”

“—and that’s all for tonight, kiddies. Don’t forget to send in those box tops, or reasonable facsimiles. Remember—first prize is a thousand-acre ranch on the Moon itself, free and clear; the second prize is a six-foot scale model of the actual Moon ship, and there are fifty, count them, fifty third prizes, each a saddle-trained Shetland pony. Your hundred word composition ‘Why I want to go to the Moon’ will be judged for sincerity and originality, not on literary merit. Send those boxtops to Uncle Taffy, Box 214, Juarez, Old Mexico.”

Harriman was shown into the office of the president of the Moka-Coka Company (“Only a Moke is truly a coke”—~ “Drink the Cola drink with the Lift”). He paused at the door, some twenty feet from the president’s desk and quickly pinned a two-inch wide button to his lapel.

Patterson Griggs looked up. “Well, this is really an honor, D.D. Do come in and—” The soft-drink executive stopped suddenly, his expression changed. “What are you doing wearing that?” he snapped. “Trying to annoy me?”

“That” was the two-inch disc; Harriman unpinned it and put it in his pocket. It was a celluloid advertising pin, in plain yellow; printed on it in black, almost covering it, was a simple 6+, the trademark of Moka-Coka’s only serious rival.

“No,” answered Harriman, “though I don’t blame you for being irritated. I see half the school kids in the country wearing these silly buttons. But I came to give you a friendly tip, not to annoy you.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I paused at your door that pin on my lapel was just the size—to you, standing at your desk—as the full Moon looks when you are standing in your garden, looking up at it. You didn’t have any trouble reading what was on the pin, did you? I know you didn’t; you yelled at me before either one of us stirred.”

“What about it?”

“How would you feel—and what would the effect be on your sales—if there was ‘six-plus’ written across the face of the Moon instead of just on a school kid’s sweater?” Griggs thought about it, then said, “D.D., don’t make poor jokes. I’ve had a bad day.”

“I’m not joking. As you have probably heard around the St~reet, I’m behind this Moon trip venture. Between ourselves, Pat, it’s quite an expensive undertaking, even for me. Afew days ago a man came to me—you’ll pardon me if I don’t mention names? You can figure it out. Anyhow, this man represented a client who wanted to buy the advertising concession for the Moon. He knew we weren’t sure of success; but he said his client would take the risk.

“At first I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about; he set me straight. Then I thought he was kidding. Then I was shocked. Look at this—” Harriman took out a large sheet of paper and spread it on Griggs’ desk. “You see the equipment is set up anywhere near the center of the Moon, as we see it. Eighteen pyrotechnics rockets shoot out in eighteen directions, like the spokes of a wheel, but to carefully calculated distances. They hit and the bombs they carry go off, spreading finely divided carbon black for calculated distances. There’s no air on the Moon, you know, Pat—a fine powder will throw just as easily as a javelin. Here’s your result.” He turned the paper over; on the back there was a picture of the Moon, printed lightly. Overlaying it, in black, heavy print was:

“So it is that outfit—those poisoners!”

“No, no, I didn’t say so! But it illustrates the point; six-plus is only two symbols; it can be spread large enough to be read on the face of the Moon.” Griggs stared at the horrid advertisement. “I don’t believe it will work!”

“Areliable pyrotechnics firm has guaranteed that it will—provided I can deliver their equipment to the spot. After all, Pat, it doesn’t take much of a pyrotechnics rocket to go a long distance on the Moon. Why, you could throw a baseball a couple of miles yourself—low gravity, you know.”

“People would never stand for it. It’s sacrilege!”

Harriman looked sad. “I wish you were right. But they stand for skywriting—and video commercials.”

Griggs chewed his lip. “Well, I don’t see why you come to me with it,” he exploded. “You know damn well the name of my product won’t go on the face of the Moon. The letters would be too small to read.”

Harriman nodded. “That’s exactly why I came to you. Pat, this isn’t just a business venture to me; it’s my heart and soul. It just made me sick to think of somebody actually wanting to use the face of the Moon for advertising. As you say, it’s sacrilege. But somehow, these jackals found out I was pressed for cash. They came to me when they knew I would have to listen.

“I put them off. I promised them an answer on Thursday. Then I went home and lay awake about it. After a while I thought of you.” “Me?”

“You. You and your company. After all, you’ve got a good product and you need legitimate advertising for it. It occurred to me that there are more ways to use the Moon in advertising than by defacing it. Now just suppose that your company bought the same concession, but with the public-spirited promise of never letting it be used. Suppose you featured that fact in your ads? Suppose you ran pictures of a boy and girl, sitting out under the Moon, sharing a bottle of Moke? Suppose Moke was the only soft drink carried on the first trip to the Moon? But I don’t have to tell you how to do it.” He glanced at his watch finger. “I’ve got to run and I don’t want to rush you. If you want to do business just leave word at my office by noon tomorrow and I’ll have our man Montgomery get in touch with your advertising chief.”

The head of the big newspaper chain kept him waiting the minimum time reserved for tycoons and cabinet members. Again Harriman stopped at the threshold of a large office and fixed a disc to his lapel.

“Howdy, Delos,” the publisher said, “how’s the traffic in green cheese today?” He then caught sight of the button and frowned. “If that is a joke, it is in poor taste.” Harriman pocketed the disc; it displayed not 6+, but the hammer-and-sickle.

“No,” he said, “it’s not a joke; it’s a nightmare. Colonel, you and I are among the few people in this country who realize that communism is still a menace.”

Sometime later they were talking as chummily as if the Colonel’s chain had not obstructed the Moon venture since its inception. The publisher waved a cigar at his desk. “How did you come by those plans? Steal them?”

“They were copied,” Harriman answered with narrow truth. “But they aren’t important. The important thing is to get there first; we can’t risk having an enemy rocket base on the Moon. For years I’ve had a recurrent nightmare of waking up and seeing headlines that the Russians had landed on the Moon and declared the Lunar Soviet—say thirteen men and two female scientists—and had petitioned for entrance into the U.S.S.R.—and the petition had, of course, been graciously granted by the Supreme Soviet. I used to wake up and tremble. I don’t know that they would actually go through with painting a hammer and sickle on the face of the Moon, but it’s consistent with their psychology. Look at those enormous posters they are always hanging up.”

The publisher bit down hard on his cigar. “We’ll see what we can work out. Is there any way you can speed up your take-off?”

CHAPTER SIX

“MR. HARRIMAN?”

“Yes?”

“That Mr. LeCroix is here again.” “Tell him I can’t see him.”

“Yes, sir—uh, Mr. Harriman, he did not mention it the other day but he says he is a rocket pilot.” “Send him around to Skyways. I don’t hire pilots.”

Aman’s face crowded into the screen, displacing Harriman’s reception secretary. “Mr. Harriman—I’m Leslie LeCroix, relief pilot of the Charon.” “I don’t care if you are the Angel Gab— Did you say Charon?”

“I said Charon. And I’ve got to talk to you.” “Come in.”

Harriman greeted his visitor, offered him tobacco, then looked him over with interest. The Charon, shuttle rocket to the lost power satellite, had been the nearest thing to a space ship the world had yet seen. Its pilot, lost in the same explosion that had destroyed the satellite and the Charon had been the first, in a way, of the coming breed of spacemen.

Harriman wondered how it had escaped his attention that the Charon had alternating pilots. He had known it, of course—but somehow he had forgotten to take the fact into account. He had written off the power satellite, its shuttle rocket and everything about it, ceased to think about them. He now looked at LeCroix with curiosity.

He saw a small, neat man with a thin, intelligent face, and the big, competent hands of a jockey. LeCroix returned his inspection without embarrassment. He seemed calm and utterly sure of himself.

“Well, Captain LeCroix?” “You are building a Moon ship.” “Who says so?”

“AMoon ship is being built. The boys all say you are behind it.” “Yes?”

“I want to pilot it.” “Why should you?”

“I’m the best man for it.” Harriman paused to let out a cloud of tobacco smoke. “If you can prove that, the billet is yours.” “It’s a deal.” LeCroix stood up. “I’ll leave my nameand address outside.”

“Wait a minute. I said ‘if.’ Let’s talk. I’m going along on this trip myself; I want to know more about you before I trust my neck to you.”

They discussed Moon flight, interplanetary travel, rocketry, what they might find on the Moon. Gradually Harriman warmed up, as he found another spirit so like his own, so obsessed with the Wonderful Dream. Subconsciously he had already accepted LeCroix; the conversation began to assume that it would be a joint venture.

After a long time Harriman said, “This is fun, Les, but I’ve got to do a few chores yet today, or none of us will get to the Moon. You go on out to Peterson Field and get acquainted with Bob Coster—I’ll call him. If the pair of you can manage to get along, we’ll talk contract.” He scribbled a chit and handed it to LeCroix. “Give this to Miss Perkins as you go out and she’ll put you on the payroll.”

“That can wait.” “Man’s got to eat.”

LeCroix accepted it but did not leave. “There’s one thing I don’t understand, Mr. Harriman.” “Huh?”

“Why are you planning on a chemically powered ship? Not that I object; I’ll herd her. But why do it the hard way? I know you had the City of Brisbane refitted for X-fuel—”

Harriman stared at him. “Are you off your nut, Les? You’re asking why pigs don’t have wings—there isn’t any X-fuel and there won’t be any more until we make some ourselves—on the Moon.”

“Who told you that?” “What do you mean?”

“The way I heard it, the Atomic Energy Commission allocated X-fuel, under treaty, to several other countries—and some of them weren’t prepared to make use of it. But they got it just the same. What happened to it?”

“Oh, that! Sure, Les, several of the little outfits in Central America and South America were cut in for a slice of pie for political reasons, even though they had no way to eat it. Agood thing, too—we bought it back and used it to ease the immediate power shortage.” Harriman frowned. “You’re right, though. I should have grabbed some of the stuff then.”

“Are you sure it’s all gone?”

“Why, of course, I’m— No, I’m not. I’ll look into it. G’bye, Les.”

His contacts were able to account for every pound of X-fuel in short order—save for Costa Rica’s allotment. That nation had declined to sell back its supply because its power plant, suitable for X-fuel, had been almost finished at the time of the disaster. Another inquiry disclosed that the power plant had never been finished.

Montgomery was even then in Managua; Nicaragua had had a change in administration and Montgomery was making certain that the special position of the local Moon corporation was protected. Harriman sent him a coded message to proceed to San Jose, locate X-fuel, buy it and ship it back—at any cost. He then went to see the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

That official was apparently glad to see him and anxious to be affable. Harriman got around to explaining that he wanted a license to do experimental work in isotopes—X-fuel, to be precise.

“This should be brought up through the usual channels, Mr. Harriman.” “It will be. This is a preliminary inquiry. I want to know your reactions.”

“After all, I am not the only commissioner … and we almost always follow the recommendations of our technical branch.” “Don’t fence with me, Carl. You know dern well you control a working majority. Off the record, what do you say?” “Well, D.D.—off the record—you can’t get any X-fuel, so why get a license?”

“Let me worry about that.”

“Mmmm . . we weren’t required by law to follow every millicurie of X-fuel, since it isn’t classed as potentially suitable for mass weapons. Just the same, we knew what happened to it. There’s none available.”

Harriman kept quiet.

“In the second place, you can have an X-fuel license, if you wish—for any purpose but rocket fuel.” “Why the restriction?”

“You are building a Moon ship, aren’t you?” “Me?”

“Don’t you fence with me, D.D. It’s my business to know things. You can’t use X-fuel for rockets, even if you can find it—which you can’t.” The chairman went to a vault back of his desk and returned with a quarto volume, which he laid in front of Harriman. It was titled: Theoretical Investigation into the Stability of Several Radioisotopic Fuels—With Notes on the Charon-Power- Satellite Disaster. The cover had a serial number and was stamped: SECRET.

Harriman pushed it away. “I’ve got no business looking at that—and I wouldn’t understand it if I did.”

The chairman grinned. “Very well, I’ll tell you what’s in it. I’m deliberately tying your hands, D.D., by trusting you with a defense secret—” “I won’t have it, I tell you!”

“Don’t try to power a space ship with X-fuel, D.D. It’s a lovely fuel— but it may go off like a firecracker anywhere out in space. That report tells why.”

“Confound it, we ran the Charon for nearly three years!”

“You were lucky. It is the official—but utterly confidential—opinion of the government that the Charon set off the power satellite, rather than the satellite setting off the Charon. We had thought it was the other way around at first, and of course it could have been, but there was the disturbing matter of the radar records. It seemed as if the ship had gone up a split second before the satellite. So we made an intensive theoretical investigation. X-fuel is too dangerous for rockets.”

“That’s ridiculous! For every pound burned in the Charon there were at least a hundred pounds used in power plants on the surface. How come they didn’t explode?”

“It’s a matter of shielding. Arocket necessarily uses less shielding than a stationary plant, but the worst feature is that it operates out in space. The disaster is presumed to have been triggered by primary cosmic radiation. If you like, I’ll call in one of the mathematical physicists to elucidate.”

Harriman shook his head. “You know I don’t speak the language.” He considered. “I suppose that’s all there is to it?”

“I’m afraid so. I’m really sorry.” Harriman got up to leave. “Uh, one more thing, D.D.—you weren’t thinking of approaching any of my subordinate colleagues, were you?” “Of course not. Why should I?”

“I’m glad to hear it. You know, Mr. Harriman, some of our staff may not be the most brilliant scientists in the world—it’s very hard to keep a first-class scientist happy in the conditions of government service. But there is one thing I am sure of; all of them are utterly incorruptible. Knowing that, I would take it as a personal affront if anyone tried to influence one of my people

—a very personal affront.”

“So?”

“Yes. By the way, I used to box light-heavyweight in college. I’ve kept it up.”

“Hmmm … well, I never went to college. But I play a fair game of poker.” Harriman suddenly grinned. “I won’t tamper with your boys, Carl. It would be too much like offering a bribe to a starving man. Well, so long.”

When Harriman got back to his office he called in one of his confidential clerks. “Take another coded message to Mr. Montgomery. Tell him to ship the stuff to Panama City, rather than to the States.” He started to dictate another message to Coster, intending to tell him to stop work on the Pioneer, whose skeleton was already reaching skyward on the Colorado prairie, and shift to the Santa Maria, formerly the City of Brisbane.

He thought better of it. Take-off would have to be outside the United States; with the Atomic Energy Commission acting stuffy, it would not do to try to move the Santa Maria: it would give the show away.

Nor could she be moved without refitting her for chem-powered flight. No, he would have another ship of the Brisbane class taken out of service and sent to Panama, and the power plant of the Santa Maria could be disassembled and shipped there, too. Coster could have the new ship ready in six weeks, maybe sooner … and he, Coster, and LeCroix would start for the Moon!

The devil with worries over primary cosmic rays! The Charon operated for three years, didn’t she? They would make the trip, they would prove it could be done, then, if safer fuels were needed, there would be the incentive to dig them out. The important thing was to do it, make the trip. If Columbus had waited for decent ships, we’d all still be in Europe. Aman had to take some chances or he never got anywhere.

Contentedly he started drafting the messages that would get the new scheme underway. He was intercupted by a secretary. “Mr. Harriman, Mr. Montgomery wants to speak to you.” “Eh? Has he gotten my code already?”

“I don’t know, sir.” “Well, put him on.”

Montgomery had not received the second message. But he had news for Harriman:Costa Rica had sold all its X-fuel to the English Ministry of Power, soon after the disaster. There was not an ounce of it left, neither in Costa Rica, nor in England.

Harriman sat and moped for several minutes after Montgomery had cleared the screen. Then he called Coster. “Bob? Is LeCroix there?” “Right here-we were about to go out to dinner together. Here he is, now.”

“Howdy, Les. Les, that was a good brain storm of yours, but it didn’t work. Somebody stole the baby.” “Eh? Oh, I get you. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t ever waste time being sorry. We’ll go ahead as originally planned. We’ll get there!” “Sure we will.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

FROM THE JUNE ISSUE of Popular Technics magazine: “URANIUM PROSPECTING ON THE MOON—A Fact Article about a soon-to-come Major Industry.” From HOLIDAY: “Honeymoon on the Moon—A Discussion of the Miracle Resort that your children will enjoy, as told to our travel editor.”

From the American Sunday Magazine: “DIAMONDS ON THE MOON?—AWorld Famous Scientist Shows Why Diamonds Must Be Common As Pebbles in the Lunar Craters.”

“Of course, Clem, I don’t know anything about electronics, but here is the way it was explained to me. You can hold the beam of a television broadcast down to a degree or so these days, can’t you?”

“Yes—if you use a big enough reflector.”

“You’ll have plenty of elbow room. Now Earth covers a space two degrees wide, as seen from the Moon. Sure, it’s quite a distance away, but you’d have no power losses and absolutely perfect and unchanging conditions for transmission. Once you made your set-up, it wouldn’t be any more expensive than broadcasting from the top of a mountain here, and a derned sight less expensive than keeping copters in the air from coast to coast, the way you’re having to do now.”

“It’s a fantastic scheme, Delos.”

“What’s fantastic about it? Getting to the Moon is my worry, not yours. Once we are there, there’s going to be television back to Earth, you can bet your shirt on that. It’s a natural set-up for line-of-sight transmission. If you aren’t interested, I’ll have to find someone who is.”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t interested.”

“Well, make up your mind. Here’s another thing, Clem—I don’t want to go sticking my nose into your business, but haven’t you had a certain amount of trouble since you lost the use of the power satellite as a relay station?”

“You know the answer; don’t needle me. Expenses have gone out of sight without any improvement in revenue.” “That wasn’t quite what I meant. How about censorship?”

The television executive threw up his hands. “Don’t say that word! How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over wLhat we can say and can’t say and what we can show and what we can’t show—it’s enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it’s like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can’t eat steak. If I were able to lay my hands on those confounded, prurient-minded, slimy—”

“Easy! Easy!” Harriman interrupted. “Did it ever occur to you that there is absolutely no way to interfere with a telecast from the Moon—and that boards of censorship on Earth won’t have

jurisdiction in any case?”

“What? Say that again.”

“LIFE goes to the Moon.’ LIFE-TIME Inc. is proud to announce that arrangements have been completed to bring LIFE’S readers a personally conducted tour of the first trip to our satellite. In place of the usual weekly feature ‘LIFE Goes to a Party’ there will commence, immediately after the return of the first successful—”

“ASSURANCE FOR THE NEW AGE”

(An excerpt from an advertisement of the North Atlantic Mutual Insurance and Liability Company)

“—the same looking-to-the-future that protected our policy-holders after the Chicago Fire, after the San Francisco Fire, after every disaster since the War of 1812, now reaches out to insure you from unexpected loss even on the Moon—”

“THE UNBOUNDED FRONTIERS OF TECHNOLOGY”

“When the Moon ship Pioneer climbs skyward on a ladder of flame, twenty-seven essential devices in her ‘innards’ will be powered by especiallyengineered DELTAbatteries—” “Mr. Harriman, could you come out to the field?”

“What’s up, Bob?”

“Trouble,” Coster answered briefly. “What sort of trouble?”

Coster hesitated. “I’d rather not talk about it by screen. If you can’t come, maybe Les and I had better come there.” “I’ll be there this evening.”

When Harriman got there he saw that LeCroix’s impassive face concealed bitterness, Coster looked stubborn and defensive. He waited until the three were alone in Coster’s workroom before he spoke. “Let’s have it, boys.”

LeCroix looked at Coster. The engineer chewed his lip and said, “Mr. Harriman, you know the stages this design has been through.” “More or less.”

“We had to give up the catapult idea. Then we had this—” Coster rummaged on his desk, pulled out a perspective treatment of a four-step rocket, large but rather graceful.”Theoretically it was a possibility; practically it cut things too fine. By the time the stress group boys and the auxiliary group and the control group got through adding things we were forced to come to this

—” He hauled out another sketch; it was basically like the first, but squattier, almost pyramidal. “We added a fifth stage as a ring around the fourth stage. We even managed to save some weight by using most of the auxiliary and control equipment for the fourth stage to control the fifth stage. And it still had enough sectional density to punch through the atmosphere with no important drag, even if it was clumsy.”

Harriman nodded. “You know, Bob, we’re going to have to get away from the step rocket idea before we set up a schedule run to the Moon.” “I don’t see how you can avoid it with chem-powered rockets.”

“If you had a decent catapult you could put a single-stage chem-powered rocket into an orbit around the Earth, couldn’t you?” “Sure.”

“That’s what we’ll do. Then it will refuel in that orbit.”

“The old space-station set-up. I suppose that makes sense-in fact I know it does. Only the ship wouldn’t refuel and continue on to the Moon. The economical thing would be to have special ships that never landed anywhere make the jump from there to another fueling station around the Moon. Then—”

LeCroix displayed a most unusual impatience. “AJ1 that doesn’t mean anything now. Get on with the story, Bob.” “Right,” agreed Harriman.

“Well, this model should have done it. And, damn it, it still should do it.” Harriman looked puzzled. “But, Bob, that’s the approved design, isn’t it? That’s what you’ve got two-thirds built right out there on the field.”

“Yes.” Coster looked stricken. “But it won’t do it. It won’t work.” “Why not?”

“Because I’ve had to add in too much dead weight, that’s why. Mr. Harriman, you aren’t an engineer; you’ve no idea how fast the performance falls off when you have to clutter up a ship with anything but fuel and power plant. Take the landing arrangements for the fifth-stage power ring. You use that stage for a minute and a half, then you throw it away. But you don’t dare take a chance of it falling on Wichita or Kansas City. We have to include a parachute sequence. Even then we have to plan on tracking it by radar and cutting the shrouds by radio control when it’s over empty countryside and not too high. That means more weight, besides the parachute. By the time we are through, we don’t get a net addition of a mile a second out of that stage. It’s not enough.”

Harriman stirred in his chair. “Looks like we made a mistake in trying to launch it from the States. Suppose we took off from someplace unpopulated, say the Brazil coast, and let the booster stages fall in the Atlantic; how much would that save you?”

Coster looked off in the distance, then took out a slide rule. “Might work.” “How much of a chore will it be to move the ship, at this stage?”

“Well … it would have to be disassembled completely; nothing less would do. I can’t give you a cost estimate off hand, but it would be expensive.” “How long would it take?” “Hmm…shucks, Mr. Harriman, I can’t answer off hand. Two years— eighteen months, with luck. We’d have to prepare a site. We’d have to build shops.”

Harriman thought about it, although he knew the answer in his heart. His shoe string, big as it was, was stretched to the danger point. He couldn’t keep up the promotion, on talk alone, for another two years; he had to have a successful flight and soon—or the whole jerry-built financial structure would burst. “No good, Bob.”

“I was afraid of that. Well, I tried to add still a sixth stage.” He held up another sketch. “You see that monstrosity? I reached the point of diminishing returns. The final effective velocity is actually less with this abortion than with the five-step job.”

“Does that mean you are whipped, Bob? You can’t build a Moon ship?” “No, I—”

LeCroix said suddenly, “Clear out Kansas.” “Eh?” asked Harriman.

“Clear everybody out of Kansas and Eastern Colorado. Let the fifth and fourth sections fall anywhere in that area. The third section falls in the Atlantic; the second section goes into a permanent orbit—and the ship itself goes on to the Moon. You could do it if you didn’t have to waste weight on the parachuting of the fifth and fourth sections. Ask Bob.”

“So? How about it, Bob?”

“That’s what I said before. It was the parasitic penalties that whipped us. The basic design is all right.”

“Hmmm… somebody hand me an Atlas.” Harriman looked up Kansas and Colorado, did some rough figuring. He stared off into space, looking surprisingly, for the moment, as Coster did when the engineer was thinking about his own work. Finally he said, “It won’t work.”

“Why not?”

“Money. I told you not to worry about money—for the ship. But it would cost upward of six or seven million dollars to evacuate that area even for a day. We’d have to settle nuisance suits out of hand; we couldn’t wait. And there would be a few diehards who just couldn’t move anyhow.”

LeCroix said savagely, “If the crazy fools won’t move, let them take their chances.”

“I know how you feel, Les. But this project is too big to hide and too big to move. Unless we protect the bystanders we’ll be shut down by court order and force. I can’t buy all the judges in two states. Some of them wouldn’t be for sale.”

“It was a nice try, Les,” consoled Coster.

“I thought it might be an answer for all of us,” the pilot answered.

Harriman said, “You were starting to mention another solution, Bob?” Coster looked embarrassed. “You know the plans for the ship itself—a three-man job, space and supplies for three.”

“Yes. What are you driving at?”

“It doesn’t have to be three men. Split the first step into two parts, cut the ship down to the bare minimum for one man and jettison the remainder. That’s the only way I see to make this basic design work.” He got out another sketch. “See? One man and supplies for less than a week. No airlock— the pilot stays in his pressure suit. No galley. No bunks. The bare minimum to keep one man alive for a maximum of two hundred hours. It will work.”

“It will work,” repeated LeCroix, looking at Coster.

Harriman looked at the sketch with an odd, sick feeling at his stomach. Yes, no doubt it would work—and for the purposes of the promotion it did not matter whether one man or three went to the Moon and returned. Just to do it was enough; he was dead certain that one successful flight would cause money to roll in so that there would be capital to develop to the point of practical, passenger-carrying ships.

The Wright brothers had started with less.

“If that is what I have to put up with, I suppose I have to,” he said slowly. Coster looked relieved. “Fine! But there is one more hitch. You know the conditions under which I agreed to tackle this job—I was to go along. Now Les here waves a contract under my nose and says he has to be the pilot.”

“It’s not just that,” LeCroix countered. “You’re no pilot, Bob. You’ll kill yourself and ruin the whole enterprise, just through bull-headed stubbornness.”

“I’ll learn to fly it. After all, I designed it. Look here, Mr. Harriman, I hate to let you in for a suit—Les says he will sue-but my contract antedates his. I intend to enforce it.” “Don’t listen to him, Mr. Harriman. Let him do the suing. I’ll fly that ship and bring her back. He’ll wreck it.”

“Either I go or I don’t build the ship,” Coster said flatly.

Harriman motioned both of them to keep quiet. “Easy, easy, both of you. You can both sue me if it gives you any pleasure. Bob, don’t talk nonsense; at this stage I can hire other engineers to finish the job. You tell me it has to be just one man.”

“That’s right.” “You’re looking at him.” They both stared.

“Shut your jaws,” Harriman snapped. “What’s funny about that? You both knew I meant to go. You don’t think I went to all this trouble just to give you two a ride to the Moon, do you? I intend to go. What’s wrong with me as a pilot? I’m in good health, my eyesight is all right, I’m still smart enough to learn what I have to learn. If I have to drive my own buggy, I’ll do it. I won’t step aside for anybody, not anybody, d’you hear me?”

Coster got his breath first. “Boss, you don’t know what you are saying.” Two hours later they were still wrangling. Most of the time Harriman had stubbornly sat still, refusing to answer their arguments. At last he went out of the room for a few minutes, on the usual pretext. When he came back in he said, “Bob, what do you weigh?”

“Me? Alittle over two hundred.”

“Close to two twenty, I’d judge. Les, what do you weigh?” “One twenty-six.”

“Bob, design the ship for a net load of one hundred and twenty-six pounds.” “Huh? Now wait a minute, Mr. Harriman—”

“Shut up! If I can’t learn to be a pilot in six weeks, neither can you.” “But I’ve got the mathematics and the basic knowledge to—”

“Shut up I said! Les has spent as long learning his profession as you have learning yours. Can he become an engineer in six weeks? Then what gave you the conceit to think that you can learn his job in that time? I’m not going to have you wrecking my ship to satisfy your swollen ego. Anyhow, you gave out the real key to it when you were discussing the design. The real limiting factor is the actual weight of the passenger or passengers, isn’t it? Everything—everything works in proportion to that one mass. Right?”

“Yes, but—” “Right or wrong?”

“Well … yes, that’s right. I just wanted—”

“The smaller man can live on less water, he breathes less air, he occunies less space. Les goes.” Harriman walked over and put a hand on Coster’s shoulder. “Don’t take it hard, son. It can’t be any worse on you than it is on me. This trip has got to succeed—and that means you and I have got to give up the honor of being the first man on the Moon. But I promise you this: we’ll go on the second trip, we’ll go with Les as our private chauffeur. It will be the first of a lot of passenger trips. Look, Bob-you can be a big man in this game, if you’ll play along now. How would you like to be chief engineer of the first lunar colony?”

Coster managed to grin. “It might not be so bad.”

“You’d like it. Living on the Moon will be an engineering problem; you and I have talked about it. How’d you like to put your theories to work? Build the first city? Build the big observatory we’ll found there? Look around and know that you were the man who had done it?”

Coster was definitely adjusting himself to it. “You make it sound good. Say, what will you be doing?”

“Me? Well, maybe I’ll be the first mayor of Luna City.” It was a new thought to him; he savored it. “The Honorable Delos David Harriman, Mayor of Luna City. Say, I like that! You know, I’ve never held any sort of public office; I’ve just owned things.” He looked around. “Everything settled?”

“I guess so,” Coster said slowly. Suddenly he stuck his hand out at LeCroix. “You fly her, Les; I’ll build her.”

LeCroix grabbed his hand. “It’s a deal. And you and the Boss get busy and start making plans for the next job-big enough for all of us.”

“Right!”

Harriman put his hand on top of theirs. “That’s the way I like to hear you talk. We’ll stick together and we’ll found Luna City together.” “I think we ought to call it “Harriman,” LeCroix said seriously.

“Nope, I’ve thought of it as Luna City ever since I was a kid; Luna City it’s going to be. Maybe we’ll put Harriman Square in the middle of it,” he added. “I’ll mark it that way in the plans,” agreed Coster.

Harriman left at once. Despite the solution he was terribly depressed and did not want his two colleagues to see it. It had been a Pyrrhic victory; he had saved the enterprise but he felt like an animal who has gnawed off his own leg to escape a trap.

CHAPTER EIGHT

STRONG WAS ALONE in the offices of the partnership when he got a call from Dixon. “George, I was looking for D.D. Is he there?” “No, he’s back in Washington—something about clearances. I expect him back soon.”

“Hmmm… . Entenza and I want to see him. We’re coming over.” They arrived shortly. Entenza was quite evidently very much worked up over something; Dixon looked sleekly impassive as usual. After greetings Dixon waited a moment, then said, “Jack, you had some business to transact, didn’t you?”

Entenza jumped, then snatched a draft from his pocket.

“Oh, yes! George, I’m not going to have to pro-rate after all. Here’s my payment to bring my share up to full payment to date.” Strong accepted it. “I know that Delos will be pleased.” He tucked it in a drawer. “Well,” said Dixon sharply, “aren’t you going to receipt for it?”

“If Jack wants a receipt. The cancelled draft will serve.” However, Strong wrote out a receipt without further comment; Entenza accepted it. They waited a while. Presently Dixon said, “George, you’re in this pretty deep, aren’t you?”

“Possibly.”

“Want to hedge your bets?”

“How?”

“Well, candidly, I want to protect myself. Want to sell one half of one. percent of your share?”

Strong thought about it. In fact he was worried—worried sick. The presence of Dixon’s auditor had forced them to keep on a cash basis—and only Strong knew how close to the line that had forced the partners. “Why do you want it?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t use it to interfere with Delos’s operations. He’s our man; we’re backing him. But I would feel a lot safer if I had the right to call a halt if he tried to commit us to something we couldn’t pay for. You know Delos; he’s an incurable optimist. We ought to have some sort of a brake on him.”

Strong thought about it. The thing that hurt him was that he agreed with everything Dixon said; he had stood by and watched while Delos dissipated two fortunes, painfully built up through the years. D.D. no longer seemed to care. Why, only this morning he had refused even to look at a report on the H & S automatic household switch—after dumping it on Strong.

Dixon leaned forward. “Name a price, George. I’ll be generous.” Strong squared his stooped shoulders. “I’ll sell—”

“Good!”

“—if Delos okays it. Not otherwise.” Dixon muttered something. Enteuza snorted. The conversation might have gone acrimoniously further, had not Harriman walked in.

No one said anything about the proposal to Strong. Strong inquired about the trip; Harriman pressed a thumb and finger together. “All in the groove! But it gets more expensive to do business in Washington every day.” He turned to the others. “How’s tricks? Any special meaning to the assemblage? Are we in executive session?”

Dixon turned to Entenza. “Tell him, Jack.”

Entenza faced Harriman. “What do you mean by selling television rights?” Harriman cocked a brow. “And why not?”

“Because you promised them to me, that’s why. That’s the original agreement; I’ve got it in writing.”

“Better take another look at the agreement, Jack. And don’t go off halfcocked. You have the exploitation rights for radio, television, and other amusement and special feature ventures in connection with the first trip to the Moon. You’ve still got ‘em. Including broadcasts from the ship, provided we are able to make any.” He decided that this was not a good time to mention that weight considerations had already made the latter impossible; the Pioneer would carry no electronic equipment of any sort not needed in astrogation. “What I sold was the franchise to erect a-television station on the Moon, later. By the way, it wasn’t even an exclusive franchise, although Clem Haggerty thinks it is. If you want to buy one yourself, we can accommodate you.”

“Buy it! Why you—” “Wups! Or you can have it free, if you can get Dixon and George to agree that you are entitled to it. I won’t be a tightwad. Anything else?” Dixon cut in. “Just where do we stand now, Delos?”

“Gentlemen, you can take it for granted that the Pioneer will leave on schedule—next Wednesday. And now, if you will excuse me, I’m on my way to Peterson Field.”

After he had left his three associates sat in silence for some time, Entenza muttering to himself, Dixon apparently thinking, and Strong just waiting. Presently Dixon said, “How about that fractional share, George?”

“You didn’t see fit to mention it to Delos.”

“I see.” Dixon carefully deposited an ash. “He’s a strange man, isn’t he?” Strong shifted around. “Yes.” “How long have you known him?”

“Let me see—he came to work for me in—” “He worked for you?”

“For several months. Then we set up our first company.” Strong thought back about it. “I suppose he had a power complex, even then.” “No,” Dixon said carefully. “No, I wouldn’t call it a power complex. It’s more of a Messiah complex.”

Entenza looked up. “He’s a crooked son of a bitch, that’s what he is!”

Strong looked at him mildly. “I’d rather you wouldn’t talk about him that way. I’d really rather you wouldn’t.”

“Stow it, Jack,” ordered Dixon. “You might force George to take a poke at you. One of the odd things about him,” went on Dixon, “is that he seems to be able to inspire an almost feudal loyalty. Take yourself. I know you are cleaned out, George-yet you won’t let me rescue you. That goes beyond logic; it’s personal.”

Strong nodded. “He’s an odd man. Sometimes I think he’s the last of the Robber Barons.”

Dixon shook his head. “Not the last. The last of them opened up the American West. He’s the first of the new Robber Barons—and you and I won’t see the end of it. Do you ever read Carlyle?”

Strong nodded again. “I see what you mean, the ‘Hero’ theory, but I don’t necessarily agree with it.”

“There’s something to it, though,” Dixon answered. “Truthfully, I don’t think Delos knows what he is doing. He’s setting up a new imperialism.

There’ll be the devil to pay before it’s cleaned up.” He stood up. “Maybe we should have waited. Maybe we should have balked him—if we could have. Well, it’s done. We’re on the merry- go-round and we can’t get off. I hope we enjoy the ride.. Come on, Jack.”

CHAPTER NINE

THE COLORADO p~ArRIE was growin’~ dusky. The Sun was behind the peak and the broad white face of Luna, full and round, was rising in the east. In the middle of Peterson Field the Pioneer thrust toward the sky. Abarbedwire fence, a thousand yards from its base in all directions, held back the crowds. Just inside the barrier guards patrolled restlessly. More guards circulated through the crowd. Inside the fence, close to it, trunks and trailers for camera, sound, and television equipment were parked and, at the far ends of cables, remote-control pick- ups were located both near and far from the ship on all sides. There were other trucks near the ship and a stir of organized activity.

Harriman waited in Coster’s office; Coster himself was out on the field, and Dixon and Entenza had a room to themselves. LeCroix, still in a drugged sleep, was in the bedroom of Coster’s on-the-job living quarters.

There was a stir and a challenge outside the door. Harriman opened it a crack. “If that’s another reporter, tell him ‘no.’ Send him to Mr. Montgomery across the way. Captain LeCroix will grant no unauthorized interviews.”

“Delos! Let me in.”

“Oh—you, George. Come in. We’ve been hounded to death.”

Strong came in and handed Harriman a large and heavy handbag. “Here it is.” “Here is what?”

“The cancelled covers for the philatelic syndicate. You forgot them. That’s half a million dollars, Delos,” he complained. “If I hadn’t noticed them in your coat locker we’d have been in the soup.”

Harriman composed his features. “George, you’re a brick, that’s what you are.” “Shall I put them in the ship myself?” Strong said anxiously.

“Huh? No, no. Les will handle them.” He glanced at his watch. “We’re about to waken him. I’ll take charge of the covers.” He took the bag and added, “Don’t come in now. You’ll have a chance to say goodbye on the field.”

Harriman went next door, shut the door behind him, waited for the nurse to give the sleeping pilot a counteracting stimulant by injection, then chased her out. When he turned around the pilot was sitting up, rubbing his eyes. “How do you feel, Les?”

“Fine. So this is it.”

“Yup. And we’re all rooting for you, boy. Look, you’ve got to go out and face them in a couple of minutes. Everything is ready—but I’ve got a couple of things I’ve got to say to you.” “Yes?”

“See this bag?” Harriman rapidly explained what it was and what it signified. LeCroix looked dismayed. “But I can’t take it, Delos; It’s all figured to the last ounce.”

“Who said you were going to take it? Of course you can’t; it must weigh sixty, seventy pounds. I just plain forgot it. Now here’s what we do: for the time being I’ll just hide it in here—” Harriman stuffed the bag far back into a clothes closet. “When you land, I’ll be right on your tail. Then we pull a sleight-of-hand trick and you fetch it out of the ship.”

LeCroix shook his head ruefully. “Delos, you beat me. Well, I’m in no mood to argue.”

“I’m glad you’re not; otherwise I’d go to jail for a measly half million dollars. We’ve already spent that money. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter,” he went on. “Nobody but you and me will know it— and the stamp collectors will get their money’s worth.” He looked at the younger man as if anxious for his approval.

“Okay, okay,” LeCroix answered. “Why should I care what happens to a stamp collector—tonight? Let’s get going.”

“One more thing,” said Harriman and took out a small cloth bag. “This you take with you—and the weight has been figured in. I saw to it. Now here is what you do with it.” He gave detailed and very earnest instructions.

LeCroix was puzzled. “Do I hear you straight? I let it be found—then I tell the exact truth about what happened?” “That’s right.”

“Okay.” LeCroix zipped the little bag into a pocket of his coveralls. “Let’s get out to the field. H-hour minus twenty-one minutes already.”

Strong joined Harriman in the control blockhouse after LeCroix had gone up inside the ship. “Did they get aboard?” he demanded anxiously. “LeCroix wasn’t carrying anything.” “Oh, sure,” said Harriman. “I sent them ahead. Better take your place. The ready flare has already gone up.”

Dixon, Entenza, the Governor of Colorado, the Vice-President of the United States, and a round dozen of V.I.P.’s were already seated at periscopes, mounted in slits, on a balcony above the control level. Strong and Harriman climbed a ladder and took the two remaining chairs.

Harriman began to sweat and realized he was trembling. Through his periscope out in front he could see the ship; from below he could hear Coster’s voice, nervously checking departure station reports. Muted through a speaker by him was a running commentary of one of the newscasters reporting the show. Harriman himself was the—well, the admiral, he decided—of the operation, but there was nothing more he could do, but wait, watch, and try to pray.

Asecond flare arched up in the sky, burst into red and green. Five minutes.

The seconds oozed away. At minus two minutes Harriman realized that he could not stand to watch through a tiny slit; he had to be outside, take part in it himself—he had to. He climbed down, hurried to the exit of the blockhouse. Coster glanced around, looked startled, but did not try to stop him; Coster could not leave his post no matter what happened. Harriman elbowed the guard aside and went outdoors.

To the east the ship towered skyward, her slender pyramid sharp black against the full Moon. He waited. And waited.

What had gone wrong? There had remained less than two minutes when he had come out; he was sure of that—yet there she stood, silent, dark, unmoving. There was not a sound, save the distant ululation of sirens warning the spectators behind the distant fence. Harriman felt his own heart stop, his breath dry up in his throat. Something had failed. Failure.

Asingle flare rocket burst from the top of the blockhouse; a flame licked at the base of the ship.

It spread, there was a pad of white fire around the base. Slowly, almost lumberingly, the Pioneer lifted, seemed to hover for a moment, balanced on a pillar of fire-then reached for the sky with acceleration so great that she was above him almost at once, overhead at the zenith, a dazzling circle of flame. So quickly was she above, rather than out in front, that it seemed as if she were arching back over him and must surely fall on him. Instinctively and futilely he threw a hand in front of his face.

The sound reached him.

Not as sound—it was a white noise, a roar in all frequencies, sonic, subsonic, supersonic, so incredibly loaded with energy that it struck him in the chest. He heard it with his teeth and with his bones as well as with his ears. He crouched his knees, bracing against it.

Following the sound at the snail’s pace of a hurricane came the backwash of the splash. It ripped at his clothing, tore his breath from his lips. He stumbled blindly back, trying to reach the lee of the concrete building, was knocked down.

He picked himself up coughing and strangling and remembered to look at the sky. Straight overhead was a dwindling star. Then it was gone. He went into the blockhouse.

The room was a babble of high-tension, purposeful confusion. Harriman’s ears, still ringing, heard a speaker blare, “Spot One! Spot One to blockhouse! Step five loose on schedule— ship and step five showing separate blips—” and Coster’s voice, high and angry, cutting in with, “Get Track One! Have they picked up step five yet? Are they tracking it?”

In the background the news commentator was still blowing his top. “Agreat day, folks, a great day! The mighty Pioneer, climbing like an angel of the Lord, flaming sword at hand, is even now on her glorious way to our sister planet. Most of you have seen her departure on your screens; I wish you could have seen it as I did, arching up into the evening sky, bearing her precious load of—”

“Shut that thing off!” ordered Coster, then to the visitors on the observation platform, “And pipe down up there! Quiet!”

The Vice-President of the United States jerked his head around, closed his mouth. He remembered to smile. The other V.I.P.’s shut up, then resumed again in muted whispers. Agirl’s voice cut through the silence, “Track One to Blockhouse—step five tracking high, plus two.” There was a stir in the corner. There a large canvas hood shielded a heavy sheet of Plexiglass from direct light. The sheet was mounted vertically and was edge-lighted; it displayed a coordinate map of Colorado and Kansas in fine white lines; the cities and towns glowed red. Unevacuated farms were tiny warning dots of red light.

Aman behind the transparent map touched it with a grease pencil; the reported location of step five shone out. In front of the map screen a youngish man sat quietly in a chair, a pear- shaped switch in his hand, his thumb lightly resting on the button. He was a bombardier, borrowed from the Air Forces; when he pressed the switch, a radio-controlled circuit in step five should cause the shrouds of step five’s landing ‘chute to be cut and let it plummet to Earth. He was working from radar reports aloi~e with no fancy computing bombsight to think for him. He was working almost by instinct— or, rather, by the accumulated subconscious knowledge of his trade, integrating in his brain the meager data spread before him, deciding where the tons of step five would land if he were to press his switch at any particular instant. He seemed unworried.

“Spot One to Blockhouse!” came a man’s voice again. “Step four free on schedule,” and almost immediately following, a deeper voice echoed, “Track Two, tracking step four, instantaneous altitude nine-five-one miles, predicted vector.”

No one paid any attention to Harriman.

Under the hood the observed trajectory of step five grew in shining dots of grease, near to, but not on, the dotted line of its predicted path. Reaching out from each location dot was drawn a line at right angles, the reported altitude for that location.

The quiet man watching the display suddenly pressed down hard on his switch. He then stood up, stretched, and said, “Anybody got a cigaret?” “Track Two!” he was answered. “Step four

—first impact prediction—forty miles west of Charleston, South Carolina.”

“Repeat!” yelled Coster.

The speaker blared out again without pause, “Correction, correction— forty miles east, repeat east.”

Coster sighed. The sigh was cut short by a report. “Spot One to Blockhouse—step three free, minus five seconds,” and a talker at Coster’s control desk called out, “Mr. Coster, Mister Coster—Palomar Observatory wants to talk to you.”

“Tell ‘em to go—no, tell ‘em to wait.” Immediately another voice cut in with, “Track One, auxiliary range Fox—Step one about to strike near Dodge City, Kansas~” “How near?”

There was no answer. Presently the voice of Track One proper said, “Impact reported approximately fifteen miles southwest of Dodge City.” “Casualties?”

Spot One broke in before Track One could answer, “Step two free, step two free-the ship is now on its own.” “Mr. Coster—please, Mr. Coster—”

And a totally new voice: “Spot Two to Blockhouse-we are now tracking the ship. Stand by for reported distances and bearings. Stand by—”

“Track Two to Blockhouse-step four will definitely land in Atlantic, estimated point of impact oh-five-seven miles east of Charleston bearing ohnine-three. I will repeat—” Coster looked around irritably. “Isn’t there any drinking water anywhere in this dump?”

“Mr. Coster, please-Palomar says they’ve just got to talk to you.”

Harriman eased over to the door and stepped out. He suddenly felt very much let down, utterly weary, and depressed.

The field looked strange without the ship. He had watched it grow; now suddenly it was gone. The Moon, still rising, seemed oblivious—and space travel was as remote a dream as it had been in his boyhood.

There were several tiny figures prowling around, the flash apron where the ship had stood—souvenir hunters, he thought contemptuously. Someone came up to him in the gloom. “Mr. Harriman?”

“Eh?”

“Hopkins—with the A.P. How about a statement?” “Uh? No, no comment. I’m bushed.”

“Oh, now, just a word. How does it feel to have backed the first successful Moon flight—if it is successful.”

“It will be successful.” He thought a moment, then squared his tired shoulders and said, “Tell them that this is the beginning of the human race’s greatest era. Tell them that every one of them will have a chance to follow in Captain LeCroix’s footsteps, seek out new planets, wrest a home for themselves in new lands. Tell them that this means new frontiers, a shot in the arm for prosperity. It means—” He ran down. “That’s all tonight. I’m whipped, son. Leave me alone, will you?”

Presently Coster came out, followed by the V.I.P.’s. Harriman went up to Coster. “Everything all right?”

“Sure. Why shouldn’t it be? Track three followed him out to the limit of range-all in the groove.” Coster added, “Step five killed a cow when it grounded.”

“Forget it—we’ll have steak for breakfast.” Harriman then had to make conversation with the Governor and the Vice-President, had to escort them out to their ship. Dixon and Entenza left together, less formally; at last Coster and Harriman were alone save for subordinates too junior to constitute a strain and for guards to protect them from the crowds. “Where you headed, Bob?”

“Up to the Broadmoor and about a week’s sleep. How about you?”

“if you don’t mind, I’ll doss down in your apartment.” “Help yourself. Sleepy pills in the bathroom.”

“I won’t need them.” They had a drink together in Coster’s quarters, talked aimlessly, then Coster ordered a copter cab and went to the hotel. Harriman went to bed, got up, read a day-old copy of the Denver Post filled with pictures of the Pioneer, finally gave up and took two of Coster’s sleeping capsules.

CHAPTER TEN

SOMEONE WAS SHAKING HIM. “Mr. Harriman! Wake up—Mr. Caster is on the screen.”

“Huh? Wazza? Oh, all right.” He got up and padded to the phone. Caster was :ooking tousie-headea and excited. “Hey, Boss—he made it!” “Huh? What do you mean?”

“Palomar just called me. They saw the mark and now they’ve spotted the ship itself. He—”

“Wait a minute, Bob. Slow up. He can’t be there yet. He just left last night.”

Coster looked disconcerted. “What’s the matter, Mr. Harriman? Don’t you feel well? He left Wednesday.”

Vaguely, Harriman began to be oriented. No, the take-off had not been the night before—fuzzily he recalled a drive up into the mountains, a day spent dozing in the sun, some sort of a party at which he had drunk too much. What day was today? He didn’t know. If LeCroix had landed on the Moon, then—never mind. “It’s all right, Bob-I was half asleep. I guess I dreamed the take-off all over again. Now tell me the news, slowly.”

Coster started over. “LeCroix has landed, just west of Archimedes crater. They can see his ship, from Palomar. Say that was a great stunt you thought up, marking the spot with carbon black. Les must have covered two acres with it. They say it shines out like a billboard, through the Big Eye.”

“Maybe we ought to run down and have a look. No—later,” he amended. “We’ll be busy.”

“I don’t see what more we can do, Mr. Harriman. We’ve got twelve of our best ballistic computers calculating possible routes for you now.”

Harriman started to tell the man to put on another twelve, switched off the screen instead. He was still at Peterson Field, with one of Skyways’ best stratoships waiting for him outside, waiting to take him to whatever point on the globe LeCroix might ground. LeCroix was in the upper stratosphere, had been there for more than twenty-four hours. The pilot was slowly, cautiously wearing out his terminal velocity, dissipating the incredible kinetic energy as shock wave and radiant heat.

They had tracked him by radar around the globe and around again—and again … yet there was no way of knowing just where and what sort of landing the pilot would choose to risk. Harriman listened to the running radar reports and cursed the fact that they had elected to save the weight of radio equipment.

The radar figures started coming closer together. The voice broke off and started again: “He’s in his landing glide!”

“Tell the field to get ready!” shouted Harriman. He held his breath and waited. After endless seconds another voice cut in with, “The Moon ship is now landing. It will ground somewhere west of Chihuahua in Old Mexico.”

Harriman started for the door at a run.

Coached by radio en route, Harriman’s pilot spotted the Pioneer incredibly small against the desert sand. He put his own ship quite close to it, in a beautiful landing. Harriman was fumbling at the cabin door before the ship was fairly stopped.

LeCroix was sitting on the ground, resting his back against a skid of his ship and enjoying the shade of its stubby triangular wings. Apaisano sheepherder stood facing him, open- mouthed. As Harriman trotted out and lumbered toward him LeCroix stood up, flipped a cigaret butt away and said, “Hi, Boss!”

“Les!” The older man threw his arms around the younger. “It’s good to see you, boy.”

“It’s good to see you. Pedro here doesn’t speak my language.” LeCroix glanced around; there was no one else nearby but the pilot of Harriman’s ship. “Where’s the gang? Where’s Bob?”

“I didn’t wait. They’ll surely be along in a few minutes—hey, there they come now!” It was another stratoship, plunging in to a landing. Harriman turned to his pilot. “Bill—go over and meet them.”

“Huh? They’ll come, never fear.” “Do as I say.”

“You’re the doctor.” The pilot trudged through the sand, his back expressing disapproval. LeCroix looked puzzled. “Quick, Les—help me with this.”

“This” was the five thousand cancelled envelopes which were supposed to have been to the Moon. They got them out of Harriman’s stratoship and into the Moon ship, there to be stowed in an empty food locker, while their actions were still shielded from the later arrivals by the bulk of the strataship. “Whew!” said Harriman. “That was close. Half a million dollars. We need it, Les.”

“Sure, but look, Mr. Harriman, the di—”

“Sssh! The others are coming. How about the other business? Ready with your act?” “Yes. But I was trying to tell you—”

“Quiet!”

It was not their colleagues; it was a shipload of reporters, camera men, mike men, commentators, technicians. They swarmed over them.

Harriman waved to them jauntily. “Help yourselves, boys. Get a lot of pictures. Climb through the ship. Make yourselves at home. Look at anything you want to. But go easy on Captain LeCroix—he’s tired.”

Another ship had landed, this time with Caster, Dixon and Strong. Entenza showed up in his own chartered ship and began bossing the TV, pix, and radio men, in the course of which he almost had a fight with an unauthorized camera crew. Alarge copter transport grounded and spilled out nearly a platoon of khaki-clad Mexican troops. Fom somewhere—out of the sand apparently—several dozen native peasants showed up. Harriman broke away from reporters, held a quick and expensive discussion with the captain of the local troops and a degree of order was restored in time to save the Pioneer from being picked to pieces.

“Just let that be!” It was LeCroix’s voice, from inside the Pioneer. Harriman waited and listened. “None of your business!” the pilot’s voice went on, rising higher, “and put them back!” Harriman pushed his way to the door of the ship. “What’s the trouble, Les?” Inside the cramped cabin, hardly large enough for a TVbooth, three men stood, LeCroix and two reporters. All three men looked angry. “What’s the trouble, Les?” Harriman repeated. LeCroix was holding a small cloth bag which appeared to be empty. Scattered on the pilot’s acceleration rest between him and the reporters were several small, dully brilliant stones. A

reporter held one such stone up to the light.

“These guys were poking their noses into things that didn’t concern them,” LeCroix said angrily. The reporter looked at the stone said, “You told us to look at what we liked, didn’t you, Mr. Harriman?” “Yes.”

“Your pilot here-” He jerked a thumb at LeCroix. “—apparently didn’t expect us to find these. He had them hidden in the pads of his chair.”

“What of it?” “They’re diamonds.” “What makes you think so?” “They’re diamonds all right.”

Harriman stopped and unwrapped a cigar. Presently he said, “Those diamonds were where you found them because I put them there.” Aflashlight went off behind Harriman; a voice said, “Hold the rock up higher, Jeff.”

The reporter called Jeff obliged, then said, “That seems an odd thing to do, Mr. Harriman.”

“I was interested in the effect of outer space radiations on raw diamonds. On my orders Captain LeCroix placed that sack of diamonds in the ship.”

Jeff whistled thoughtfully. “You know, Mr. Harriman, if you did not have that explanation, I’d think LeCroix had found the rocks on the Moon and was trying to hold out on you.” “Print that and you will be sued for libel. I have every confidence in Captain LeCroix. Now give me the diamonds.”

Jeff’s eyebrows went up. “But not confidence enough in him to let him keep them,.maybe?” “Give me the stones. Then get out.”

Harriman got LeCroix away from the reporters as quickly as possible and into Harriman’s own ship. “That’s all for now,” he told the news and pictures people. “See us at Peterson Field.” Once the ship raised ground he turned to LeCroix. “You did a beautiful job, Les.”

“That reporter named Jeff must be sort of confused.”

“Eh? Oh, that. No, I mean the flight. You did it. You’re head man on this planet.”

LeCroix shrugged it off. “Bob built a good ship. It was a cinch. Now about those diamonds—”

“Forget the diamonds. You’ve done your part. We placed those rocks in the ship; now we tell everybody we did—truthful as can be. It’s not our fault if they don’t believe us.” “But Mr. Harriman—”

“What?”

LeCroix unzipped a pocket in his coveralls, hauled out a soiled handkerchief, knotted into a bag. He untied it—and spilled into Harriman’s hands many more diamonds than had been displayed in the ship—larger, finer diamonds.

Harriman stared at them. He began to chuckle. Presently he shoved them back at LeCroix. “Keep them.” “I figure they belong to all of us.”

“Well, keep them for us, then. And keep your mouth shut about them. No, wait.” He picked out two large stones. “I’ll have rings made from these two, one for you, one for me. But keep your mouth shut, or they won’t be worth anything, except as curiosities.”

It was quite true, he thought. Long ago the diamond syndicate had realized that diamonds in plentiful supply were worth little more than glass, except for industrial uses. Earth had more than enough for that, more than enough for jewels. If Moon diamonds were literally “common as pebbles” then they were just that—pebbles.

Not worth the expense of bringing them to earth. But now take uranium. If that were plentiful— Harriman sat back and indulged in daydreaming. Presently LeCroix said softly, “You know, Boss, it’s wonderful there.”

“Eh? Where?”

“Why, on the Moon of course. I’m going back. I’m going back just as soon as I can. We’ve got to get busy on the new ship.” “Sure, sure! And this time we’ll build one big enough for all of us. This time I go, too!”

“You bet.”

“Les—” The older man spoke almost diffidently. “What does it look like when you look back and see the Earth?”

“Huh? It looks like— It looks—” LeCroix stopped. “Hell’s bells, Boss, there isn’t any way to tell you. It’s wonderful, that’s all. The sky is black and—well, wait until you see the pictures I took. Better .yet, wait and see it yourself.”

Harriman nodded. “But it’s hard to wait.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN “FIELDS OF DIAMONDS ON THE MOONU!”

“BILLIONAIRE BACKER DENIES DIAMOND STORY Says Jewels Taken Into Space for Science Reasons” “MOON DIAMONDS: HOAXOR FACT?”

“—but consider this, friends of the invisible audience: why would anyone take diamonds to the moon? Every ounce of that ship and its cargo was calculated; diamonds would not be taken along without reason. Many scientific authorities have pronounced Mr. Harriman’s professed reason an absurdity. It is easy to guess that diamonds might be taken along for the purpose of ‘salting’ the Moon, so to speak, with earthly jewels, with the intention of convincing us that diamonds exist on the Moon—but Mr. Harriman, his pilot Captain LeCroix, and everyone connected with the enterprise have sworn from the beginning that the diamonds did not come from the Moon. But it is an absolute certainty that the diamonds were in the space ship when it landed. Cut it how you will; this reporter is going to try to buy some lunar diamond mining stock—”

Strong was, as usual, already in the office when Harriman came in. Before the partners could speak, the screen called out, “Mr. Harriman, Rotterdam calling.” “Tell them to go plant a tulip.”

“Mr. van der Velde is waiting, Mr. Harriman.” “Okay.”

Harriman let the Hollander talk, then said, “Mr. van der Velde, the statements attributed to me are absolutely correct. I put those diamonds the reporters saw into the ship before it took off. They were mined right here on Earth. In fact I bought them when I came over to see you; I can prove it.”

“But Mr. Harriman—”

“Suit yourself. There may be more diamonds on the Moon than you can run and jump over. I don’t guarantee it. But I do guarantee that those diamonds the newspapers are talking about came from Earth.”

“Mr. Harriman, why would you send diamonds to the Moon? Perhaps you intended to fool us, no?”

“Have it your own way. But I’ve said all along that those diamonds came from Earth. Now see here: you took an option—an option on an option, so to speak. If you want to make the second payment on that option and keep it in force, the deadline is nine o’clock Thursday, New York time, as specified in the contract. Make up your mind.”

He switched off and found his partner looking at him sourly. “What’s eating you?”

“I wondered about those diamonds, too, Delos. So I’ve been looking through the weight schedule of the Pioneer.” “Didn’t know you were interested in engineering.”

“I can read figures.”

“Well, you found it, didn’t you? Schedule F-i 7-c, two ounces, allocated to me personally.” “I found it. It sticks out like a sore thumb. But I didn’t find something else.”

Harriman felt a ‘cold chill in his stomach. “What?”

“I didn’t find a schedule for the cancelled covers.” Strong stared at him.

“It must be there. Let me see that weight schedule.”

“It’s not there, Delos. You know, I thought it was funny when you insisted on going to meet Captain LeCroix by yourself. What happened, Delos? Did you sneak them aboard?” He continued to stare while Harriman fidgeted. “We’ve put over some sharp business deals—but this will be the first time that anyone can say that the firm of Harriman and Strong has cheated.”

“George—I would cheat, lie, steal, beg, bribe—do anything to accomplish what we have accomplished.”

Harriman got up and paced the room. “We had to have that money, or the ship would never have taken off. We’re cleaned out. You know that, don’t you?” Strong nodded. “But those covers should have gone to the Moon. That’s what we contracted to do.”

“I just forgot it. Then it was too late to figure the weight in. But it doesn’t matter. I figured that if the trip was a failure, if LeCroix cracked up, nobody would know or care that the covers hadn’t gone. And I knew if he made it, it wouldn’t matter; we’d have plenty of money. And we will, George, we will!”

“We’ve got to pay the money back.”

“Now? Give me time, George. Everybody concerned is ‘happy the way it is. Wait until we recover our stake; then I’ll buy every one of those covers back—out of my own pocket. That’s a promise.”

Strong continued to sit. Harriman stopped in front of him. “I ask you, George, is it worth while to wreck an enterprise of this size for a purely theoretical point?” Strong sighed and said, “When the time comes, use the firm’s money.”

“That’s the spirit! But I’ll use my own, I promise you.”

“No, the firm’s money. If we’re in it together, we’re in it together.” “O.K., if that’s the way you want it.”

Harriman turned back to his desk. Neither of the two partners had anything to say for a long while. Presently Dixon and Entenza were announced. “Well, Jack,” said Harriman. “Feel better now?”

“No thanks to you. I had to fight for what I did put on the air—and some of it was pirated as it was. Delos, there should have been a television pick-up in the ship.” “Don’t fret about it. As I told you, we couldn’t spare the weight this time. But there will be the next trip, and the next. Your concession is going to be worth a pile of money.” Dixon cleared his throat. “That’s what we came to see you about, Delos. What are your plans?”

“Plans? We go right ahead. Les and Coster and I make the next trip. We set up a permanent base. Maybe Coster stays behind. The third trip we send a real colony—nuclear engineers, miners, hydroponics experts, communications engineers. We’ll found Luna City, first city on another planet.”

Dixon looked thoughtful. “And when does this begin to pay off?”

“What do you mean by ‘pay off’? Do you want your capital back, or do you want to begin to see some return on your investment? I can cut it either way.” Entenza was about to say that he wanted his investment back; Dixon cut in first, “Profits, naturally. The investment is already made.”

“Fine!”

“But I don’t see how you expect profits. Certainly, LeCroix made the trip and got back safely. There is honor for all of us. But where are the royalties?” “Give the crop time to ripen, Dan. Do I look worried? What are our assets?” Harriman ticked them off on his fingers. “Royalties on pictures, television, radio—.” “Those things go to Jack.”

“Take a look at the agreement. He has the concession, but he pays the firm—that’s all of us—for them.”

Dixon said, “Shut up, Jack!” before Entenza could speak, then added, “What else? That won’t pull us out of the red.”

“Endorsements galore. Monty’s boys are working on that. Royalties from the greatest best seller yet—I’ve got a ghost writer and a stenographer following LeCroix around this very minute. Afranchise for the first and only space line-“

“From whom?”

“We’ll get it. Kamens and Montgomery are in Paris now, working on it. I’m joining them this afternoon. And we’ll tie down that franchise with a franchise from the other end, just as soon as we can get a permanent colony there, no matter how small. It will be the autonomous state of Luna, under the protection of the United Nations—and no ship will land or take off in its territory without its permission. Besides that we’ll have the right to franchise a dozen other companies for various purposes—and tax them, too—just as soon as we set up the Municipal Corporation of the City of Luna under the laws of the State of Luna. We’ll sell everything but vacuum— we’ll even sell vacuum, for experimental purposes. And don’t forgct—we’ll still have a big chunk of real estate, sovereign title in us—as a state-and not yet sold. The Moon is big.”

“Your ideas are rather big, too, Delos,” Dixon said dryly. “But what actually happens next?”

“First we get title confirmed by the U.N. The Security Council is now in secret session; the Assembly meets tonight. Things will be popping; that’s why I’ve got to be there. When the United Nations decides—as it will!— that its own non-profit corporation has the only real claim to the Moon, then I get busy. The poor little weak non-profit corporation is going to grant a number of things to some real honest-to-god corporations with hair on their chests—in return for help in setting up a physics research lab, an astronomical observatory, a lunography institute and some other perfectly proper nonprofit enterprises. That’s our interim pitch until we get a permanent colony with its own laws. Then we-“

Dixon gestured impatiently. “Never mind the legal shenanigans, Delos. I’ve known you long enough to know that you can figure out such angles. What do we actually have to do next?” “Huh? We’ve got to build another ship, a bigger one. Not actually bigger, but effectively bigger. Coster has started the design of a surface catapult— it will reach from Manitou Springs to

the top of Pikes Peak. With it we can put a ship in free orbit around the Earth. Then we’ll use such a ship to fuel more ships—it amounts to a space station, like the power station. It adds

up to a way to get there on chemical power without having to throw away nine-tenths of your ship to do it.”

“Sounds expensive.”

“It will be. But don’t worry; we’ve got a couple of dozen piddling little things to keep the money coming in while we get set up on a commercial basis, then we sell stock. We- sold stock before; now we’ll sell a thousand dollars’ worth where we sold ten before.”

“And you think that will carry you through until the enterprise as a whole is on a paying basis? Face it, Delos, the thing as a whole doesn’t pay off until you have ships plying between here and the Moon on a paying basis, figured in freight and passenger charges. That means customers, with cash. What is there on the Moon to ship—and who pays for it?”

“Dan, don’t you believe there will be? If not, why are you here?”

“I believe in it, Delos—or I believe in you. But what’s your time schedule? What’s your budget? What’s your prospective commodity? And please don’t mention diamonds; I think I understand that caper.”

Harriman chewed his cigar for a few moments. “There’s one valuable commodity we’ll start shipping at once.” “What?”

“Knowledge.”

Entenza snorted. Strong looked puzzled. Dixon nodded. “I’ll buy that. Knowledge is always worth something—to the man who knows how to exploit it. And I’ll agree that the Moon is a place to find new knowledge. I’ll assume that you can make the next trip pay off. What’s your budget and your time table for that?”

Harriman did not answer. Strong searched his face closely. To him Harriman’s poker face was as revealing as large print—he decided that his partner had been crowded into a corner. He waited, nervous but ready to back Harriman’s play. Dixon went on, “From the way you describe it, Delos, I judge that you don’t have money enough for your next step—and you don’t know where you will get it. I believe in you, Delos—and I told you at the start that I did not believe in letting a new business die of anemia. I’m ready to buy in with a fifth share.”

Harriman stared. “Look,” he said bluntly, “you own Jack’s share now, don’t you?” “I wouldn’t say that.”

“You vote it. It sticks out all over.”

Entenza said, “That’s not true. I’m independent. I—”

“Jack, you’re a damn liar,” Harriman said dispassionately. “Dan, you’ve got fifty percent now. Under the present rules I decide deadlocks, which gives me control as long as George sticks by me. If we sell you another share, you vote three-fifths—and are boss. Is that the deal you are looking for?”

“Delos, as I told you, I have confidence in you.”

“But you’d feel happier with the whip hand. Well, I won’t do it. I’ll let space travel—real space travel, with established runs—wait another twenty years before I’ll turn loose. I’ll let us all go broke and let us live on glory before I’ll turn loose. You’ll have to think up another scheme.”

Dixon said nothing. Harriman got up and began to pace. He stopped in front of Dixon. “Dan, if you really understood what this is all about, I’d let you have control. But you don’t. You see this is just another way to money and to power. I’m perfectly willing to let you vultures get rich—but I keep control. I’m going to see this thing developed, not milked. The human race is heading out to the stars—and this adventure is going to present new problems compared with which atomic power was a kid’s toy. Unless the whole matter is handled carefully, it will be fouled up. You’ll foul it up, Dan, if I let you have the deciding vote in it—because you don’t understand it.”

He caught his breath and went on, “Take safety for instance. Do you know why I let LeCroix take that ship out instead of taking it myself? Do you think I was afraid? No! I wanted it to come back—safely. I didn’t want space travel getting another set-back. Do you know why we have to have a monopoly, for a few years at least? Because every so-and-so and his brother is going to want to build a Moon ship, now that they know it can be done. Remember the first days of ocean flying? After Lindbergh did it, every so-called pilot who could lay hands on a crate took off for some over-water point. Some of them even took their kids along. And most of them landed in the drink. Airplanes get a reputation for being dangerous. Afew years after that the airlines got so hungry for quick money in a highly competitive field that you couldn’t pick up a paper without seeing headlines about another airliner crash.

“That’s not going to happen to space travel! I’m not going to let it happen.

Space ships are too big and too expensive; if they get a reputation for being unsafe as well, we might as well have stayed in bed. I run things.” He stopped. Dixon waited and then said, “I said I believed in you, Delos. How much money do you need?”

“Eh? On what terms?”

“Your note.”

“My note? Did you say my note?”

“I’d want security, of course.”

Harriman swore. “I knew there was a hitch in it. Dan, you know everything I’ve got is tied up in this venture.” “You have insurance. You have quite a lot of insurance, I know.”

“Yes, but that’s all made out to my wife.”

“I seem to have heard you say something about that sort of thing to Jack Entenza,” Dixon said. “Come, now—if I know your tax-happy sort, you have at least one irrevocable trust, or paid- up annuities, or something, to keep Mrs. Harriman out of the poor house.”

Harriman thought fiercely about it. “When’s the call date on this note?” “In the sweet bye and bye. I want a no-bankruptcy clause, of course.” “Why? Such a clause has no legal validity.”

“It would be valid with you, wouldn’t it?”

“Mmm … yes. Yes, it would.”

“Then get out your policies and see how big a note you can write.” Harriman looked at him, turned abruptly and went to his safe. He came back with quite a stack of long, stiff folders. They added them up together; it was an amazingly large sum—for those days. Dixon then consulted a memorandum taken from his pocket and said, “One seems to be missing— a rather large one. ANorth Atlantic Mutual policy, I think.”

Harriman glared at him. “Am I going to have to fire every confidential clerk in my force?”

“No,” Dixon said mildly, “I don’t get my information from your staff. Harriman went back to the safe, got the policy and added it to the pile. Strong spoke up, “Do you want mine, Mr. Dixon?” “No,” answered Dixon, “that won’t be necessary.” He started stuffing the policies in his pocket. “I’ll keep these, Delos, and attend to keeping up the premiums. I’ll bill you of course. You

can send the note and the changeof-beneficiary forms to my office. Here’s your draft.” He took out another slip of paper; it was the draft—already made out in the amount of the policies.

Harriman looked at it. “Sometimes,” he said slowly, “I wonder who’s kidding who?” He tossed the draft over to Strong. “O.K., George, take care of it. I’m off to Paris, boys. Wish me luck.” He strode out as jauntily as a fox terrier.

Strong looked from the closed door to Dixon, then at the note. “I ought to tear this thing up!”

“Don’t do it,” advised Dixon. “You see, I really do believe in him.” He added, “Ever read Carl Sandburg, George?” “I’m not much of a reader.”

“Try him some time. He tells a story about a man who started a rumor that they had struck oil in hell. Pretty soon everybody has left for hell, to get in on the boom. The man who started the rumor watches them all go, then scratches his head and says to himself that there just might be something in it, after all. So he left for hell, too.”

Strong waited, finally said, “I don’t get the point.”

“The point is that I just want to be ready to protect myself if necessary, George—and so should you. Delos might begin believing his own rumors. Diamonds! Come, Jack.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE ENSUING MONTHS were as busy as the period before the flight of the Pioneer (now honorably retired to the Smithsonian Institution). One engineering staff and great gangs of men were working on the catapult, two more staffs were busy with two new ships; the Mayflower, and the Colonial; a third ship was on the drafting tables. Ferguson was chief engineer for all of this; Coster, still buffered by Jock Berkeley, was engineering consultant, working where and as he chose. Colorado Springs was a boom town; the Denver-Trinidad roadcity settlements spread out at the Springs until they surrounded Peterson Field.

Harriman was as busy as a cat with two tails. The constantly expanding exploitation and promotion took eight full days a week of his time, but, by working Kamens and Montgomery almost to ulcers and by doing without sleep himself, he created frequent opportunities to run out to Colorado and talk things over with Caster.

Luna City, it was decided, would be founded on the very next trip. The Mayflower was planned for a pay-load not only of seven passengers, but with air, water and food to carry four of them over to the next trip; they would live in an aluminum Quonset-type hut, sealed, pressurized, and buried under the loose soil of Luna until—and assuming—they were succored.

The choice of the four extra passengers gave rise to another contest, another publicity exploitation—and more sale of stock. Harriman insisted that they be two married couples, over the united objections of scientific organizations everywhere. He gave in only to the extent of agreeing that there was no objection to all four being scientists, providing they constituted two married couples. This gave rise to several hasty marriages—and some divorces, after the choices were announced.

The Mayflower was the maximum size that calculations showed would be capable of getting into a free orbit around the Earth from the boost of the catapult, plus the blast of her own engines. Before she took off, four other ships, quite as large, would precede her. But they were not space ships; they were mere tankers—nameless. The most finicky of ballistic calculations, the most precise of launchings, would place them in the same orbit at the same spot. There the Mayflower would rendezvous and accept their remaining fuel.

This was the trickiest part of the entire project. If the four tankers could be placed close enough together, LeCroix, using a tiny maneuvering reserve, could bring his new ship to them. If not—well, it gets very lonely out in Space.

Serious thought was given to placing pilots in the tankers and accepting as a penalty the use of enough fuel from one tanker to permit a get-away boat, a life boat with wings, to decelerate, reach the atmosphere and brake to a landing. Caster found a cheaper way.

Aradar pilot, whose ancestor was the proximity fuse and whose immediate parents could be found in the homing devices of guided missiles, was given the task of bringing the tankers together. The first tanker would not be so equipped, but th~ second tanker through its robot would smell out the first and home on it with a pint-sized rocket engine, using the smallest of vectors to bring them together. The third would home on the first two and the fourth on the group.

LeCroix shouid have no trouble-if the scheme worked. CHAPTER THIRTEEN

STRONG WANTED TO SHOW HARRIMAN the sales reports on the H & S automatic household switch; Harriman brushed them aside.

Strong shoved them back under his nose. “You’d better start taking an interest in such things, Delos. Somebody around this office had better start seeing to it that some money comes in

—some money that belongs to us, personally-or you’ll be selling apples on a street corner.”

Harriman leaned back and clasped his hands back of his head. “George, how can you talk that way on a day like this? Is there no poetry in your soul? Didn’t you hear what I said when I came in? The rendezvous worked. Tankers one and two are as close together as Siamese twins. We’ll be leaving within the week.”

“That’s as may be. Business has to go on.”

“You keep it going; I’ve got a date. When did Dixon say he would be over?” “He’s due now.”

“Good!” Harriman bit the end off a cigar and went on, “You know, George, I’m not sorry I didn’t get to make the first trip. Now I’ve still got it t~ do. I’m as expectant as a bridegroom—and as happy.” He started to hum.

Dixon came in without Entenza, a situation that had obtained since the day Dixon had dropped the pretence that he controlled only one share. He shook hands. “You heard the news, Dan?”

“George told me.”

“This is it-or almost. Aweek from now, more or less, I’ll be on the Moon. I can hardly believe it.”

Dixon sat down silently. Harriman went on, “Aren’t you even going to congratulate me? Man, this is a great dayl” Dixon said, “D.D., why are you going?”

“Huh? Don’t ask foolish questions. This is what I ~have been working toward.”

“It’s not a foolish question. I asked why you were going. The four colonists have an obvious reason, and each is a selected specialist observer as well. LeCroix is the pilot. Coster is the man who is designing the permanent colony. But why are you going? What’s your function?”

“My function? Why, I’m the guy who runs things. Shucks, I’m going to run for mayor when I get there. Have a cigar, friend—the name’s Harriman. Don’t forget to vote.” He grinned. Dixon did not smile. “I did not know you planned on staying.”

Harriman looked sheepish. “Well, that’s still up in the air. If we get the shelter built in a hurry, we may save enough in the way of supplies to let me sort of lay over until the next trip. You wouldn’t begrudge me that, would you?”

Dixon looked him in the eye. “Delos, I can’t let you go at all.”

Harriman was too startled to talk at first. At last he managed to say, “Don’t joke, Dan. I’m going. You can’t stop me. Nothing on Earth can stop me.” Dixon shook his head. “I can’t permit it, Delos. I’ve got too much sunk in this. If you go and anything happens to you, I lose it all.”

“That’s silly. You and George would just carry on, that’s all.” “Ask George.”

Strong had nothing to say. He did not seem anxious to meet Harriman’s eyes. Dixon went on, “Don’t try to kid your way out of it, Delos. This venture is you and you are this venture. If you get killed, the whole thing folds up. I don’t say space travel folds up; I think you’ve already given that a boost that will carry it along even with lesser men in your shoes. But as for this venture—our company—it will fold up. George and I will have to liquidate at about half a cent on the dollar. It would take sale of patent rights to get that much. The tangible assets aren’t worth anything.”

“Damn it, it’s the intangibles we sell. You knew that all along.”

“You are the intangible asset, Delos. You are the goose that lays the golden eggs. I want you to stick around until you’ve laid them. You must not risk your neck in space flight until you have this thing on a profit-making basis, so that any competent manager, such as George or myself, thereafter can keep it solvent. I mean it, Delos. I’ve got too much in it to see you risk it in a joy ride.”

Harriman stood up and pressed his fingers down on the edge of his desk. He was breathing hard. “You can’t stop me!” he said slowly and forcefully. “Not all the forces of heaven or hell can stop me.”

Dixon answered quietly, “I’m sorry, Delos. But I can stop you and I will. I can tie up that ship out there.” “Try it! I own as many lawyers as you do—and better ones!”

“I think you will find that you are not as popular in American courts as you once were-not since the United States found out it didn’t own the Moon after all.” “Try it, I tell you. I’ll break you and I’ll take your shares away from you, too.”

“Easy, Delos! I’ve no doubt you have some scheme whereby you could milk the basic company right away from George and me if you decided to. But it won’t be necessary. Nor will it be necessary to tie up the ship. I want the flight to take place as much as you do. But you won’t be on it, because you will decide not to go.”

“I will, eh? Do I look crazy from where you sit?” “No, on the contrary.”

“Then why won’t I go?”

“Because of your note that I hold. I want to collect it.”

“What? There’s no due date.”

“No. But I want to be sure to collect it.”

“Why, you dumb fool, if I get killed you collect it sooner than ever.”

“Do I? You are mistaken, Delos. If you are killed-on a flight to the Moon—I collect nothing. I know; I’ve checked with every one of the companies underwriting you. Most of them have escape clauses covering experimental vehicles that date back to early aviation. In any case all of them will cancel and fight it out in court if you set foot inside that ship.”

“You put them up to this!”

“Calm down, Delos. You’ll be bursting a blood vessel. Certainly I queried them, but I was legitimately looking after my own interests. I don’t want to collect on that note-not now, not by your death. I want you to pay it back out of your own earnings, by staj’ing here and nursing this company through till it’s stable.”

Harriman chucked his cigar, almost unsmoked and badly chewed, at a waste basket. He missed. “I don’t give a hoot if you lose on it. If you hadn’t stirred them up, they’d have paid without a quiver.”

“But it did dig up a weak point in your plans, Delos. If space travel is to be a success, insurance will have to reach out and cover the insured anywhere.” “Confound it, one of them does now—N. A. Mutual.”

“I’ve seen their ad and I’ve looked over what they claim to offer. It’s just window dressing, with the usual escape clause. No, insurance will have to be revamped, all sorts of insurance.” Harriman looked thoughtful. “I’ll look into it. George, call Kamens. Maybe we’ll have to float our own company.”

“Never mind Kamens,” objected Dixon. “The point is you can’t go on this trip. You have too many details of that sort to watch and plan for and nurse along.” Harriman looked back at him. “You haven’t gotten it through your head, Dan, that I’m going! Tie up the ship if you can. If you put sheriffs around it, I’ll have goons there to toss them aside.” Dixon looked pained. “I hate to mention this point, Delos, but I am afraid you will be stopped even if I drop dead.”

“How?” “Your wife.”

“What’s she got to do with it?”

“She’s ready to sue for separate maintenance right now—she’s found out about this insurance thing. When she hears about this present plan, she’ll force you into court and force an accounting of your assets.”

“You put her up to it!”

Dixon hesitated. He knew that Entenza had spilled the beans to Mrs. Harriman—maliciously. Yet there seemed no point in adding to a personal feud. “She’s bright enough to have done some investigating on her own account. I won’t deny I’ve talked to her—but she sent for me.”

“I’ll fight both of you!” Harriman stomped to a window, stood looking out—it was a real window; he liked to look at the sky.

Dixon came over and put a hand on his shoulder, saying softly, “Don’t take it this way, Delos. Nobody’s trying to keep you from your dream. But you can’t go just yet; you can’t let us down. We’ve stuck with you this far; you owe it to us to stick with us until it’s done.”

Harriman did not answer; Dixon went on, “If you don’t feel any loyalty toward me, how about George? He’s stuck with you against me, when it hurt him, when he thought you were ruining him—and you surely were, unless you finish this job. How about George, Delos? Are you going to let him down, too?”

Harriman swung around, ignoring Dixon and facing Strong. “What about it, George? Do you think I should stay behind?” Strong rubbed his hands and chewed his lip. Finally he looked up. “It’s all right with me, Delos. You do what you think is best.”

Harriman stood looking at him for a long moment, his face working as if he were going to cry. Then he said huskily, “Okay, you rats. Okay. I’ll stay behind.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

IT WAS ONE OF THOSE GLORIOUS EVENINGS so common in the Pikes Peak region, after a day in which the sky has been well scrubbed by thunderstorms. The track of the catapult crawled in a straight line up the face of the mountain, whole shoulders having been carved away to permit it. At the temporary space port, still raw from construction, Harriman, in company with visiting notables, was saying good-bye to the passengers and crew of the Mayflower.

The crowds came right up to the rail of the catapult. There was no need to keep them back from the ship; the jets would not blast until she was high over the peak. Only the ship itself was guarded, the ship and the gleaming rails.

Dixon and Strong, together for company and mutual support, hung back at the edge of the area roped off for passengers and officials. They watched Harriman jollying those about to leave: “Good-bye, Doctor. Keep an eye on him, Janet. Don’t let him go looking for Moon Maidens.” They saw him engage Coster in private conversation, then clap the younger man on the back.

“Keeps his chin up, doesn’t he?” whispered Dixon. “Maybe we should have let him go,” answered Strong. “Eh? Nonsense! We’ve got to have him. Anyway, his place in history is secure.”

“He doesn’t care about history,” Strong answered seriously, “he just wants to go to the Moon.” “Well, confound it—he can go to the Moon … as soon as he gets his job done. After all, it’s his job. He made it.” “I know.”

Harriman turned around, saw them, started toward them. They shut up. “Don’t duck,” he said jovially. “It’s all right. I’ll go on the next trip. By then I plan to have it running itself. You’ll see.” He turned back toward the Mayflower. “Quite a sight, isn’t she?”

The outer door was closed; ready lights winked along the track and from the control tower. Asiren sounded. Harriman moved a step or two closer.

“There she goes!”

It was a shout from the whole crowd. The great ship started slowly, softly up the track, gathered speed, and shot toward the distant peak. She was already tiny by the time she curved up the face and burst into the sky.

She hung there a split second, then a plume of light exploded from her tail. Her jets had fired.

Then she was a shining light in the sky, a ball of flame, then—nothing. She was gone, upward and outward, to her rendezvous with her tankers. The crowd had pushed to the west end of the platform as the ship swarmed up the mountain. Harriman had stayed where he was, nor had Dixon and Strong followed the crowd. The

three were alone, Harriman most alone for he did not seem aware that the others were near him. He was watching the sky.

Strong was watching him. Presently Strong barely whispered to Dixon, “Do you read the Bible?” “Some.”

“He looks as Moses must have looked, when he gazed out over the promised land.”

Harriman dropped his eyes from the sky and saw them. “You guys still here?” he said. “Come on—there’s work to be done.”

The End

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PIHKAL (full HTML) by Alexander Shulgin

PIHKAL (Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved) is a unique book written by renowned psychopharmacologist Alexander Shulgin and his wife Ann Shulgin. This book gives details of their research and investigations into the use of psychedelic drugs for the study of the human mind, and is also a love story.

phen-ethyl-amine    \fen-'eth-al-a-,men\    n. [phenyl fr. F. phène, fr. Gk. phainein, to show (from its occurrence in illuminating gas)+ ethyl (+ yl) + amine fr. NL ammonia]    1: A naturally occurring compound found in both the animal and plant kingdoms. It is an endogenous component of the human brain.    2: Any of a series of compounds containing the phenethylamine skeleton, and modified by chemical constituents at appropriate positions in the molecule.

Introduction

Our human bodies and our human brains have evolved in such a way that we cannot see the full scope of what our universe and our reality actually looks like. Instead, we see what we need to survive on the earth and what we need to procreate. That’s it.

Unfortunately, it hampers our development. Not only scientifically, but spiritually as well.

There are techniques on how to “expand” or alter the way our mind interprets the sensory inputs to our brain. Most of which involve various kinds of drugs. These drugs come at a risk, for while they are able to alter the way that the sensory inputs are interpreted, they might give a distorted view of the universe. One that is just as distorted as we normally see in our day to day life.

Alexander Shulgin spent his life as a researcher / scientist for the CIA developing, designing and creating all sorts of drugs that alter the way that the brain interprets senses and works. These drugs were considered a dangerous asset by the United States government, and for the longest time banned the publication of the information.

Here is the free-to-distribute part of his book in conjunction with the Erowid Online Book website.

Disclaimer

I do not advocate the use of any types of drugs in any way other than for medical and therapeutic purposes. This information is provided for study purposes only.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

The Copyright for Part 1 of PiHKAL has been reserved in all forms and it may not be distributed.

Part 2 of PiHKAL may be distributed for non-commercial reproduction provided that the introductory information, copyright notice, cautionary notice and ordering information remain attached.

CAUTIONARY NOTE: READ BEFORE PROCEEDING

At the present time, restrictive laws are in force in the United States and it is very difficult for researchers to abide by the regulations which govern efforts to obtain legal approval to do work with these compounds in human beings….

No one who is lacking legal authorization should attempt the synthesis of any of the compounds described in these files, with the intent to give them to man.

To do so is to risk legal action which might lead to the tragic ruination of a life. It should also be noted that any person anywhere who experiments on himself, or on another human being, with any of the drugs described herin, without being familiar with that drug’s action and aware of the physical and/or mental disturbance or harm it might cause, is acting irresponsibly and immorally, whether or not he is doing so within the bounds of the law. — Alexander T. Shulgin

ABOUT THIS HTML VERSION OF PiHKAL

This is the online version of the second half of the book “PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story” by Alexander and Ann Shulgin.

It is presented with the express permission of the authors in order to spread the factual information as widely as possible and make it permanently available in the public domain.

It was originally transcribed into ASCII by Simson Garfinkle and was coverted into HTML by Lamont Granquist.

Any comments or corrections about the HTML version should be sent to Erowid. They can also forward serious and appropriate comments to the author if they are e-mailed.

Bolded entries indicate those substances that have been more popular or more available than others since 1991.

ORDERING INFORMATION

The first half of PiHKAL is an excellent commentary on the Shulgin’s personal experiences with phenethylamines. It is highly recommended and well worth purchasing the book.

Purchasing the book also gets you a far more complete cross-index into the chemicals described in the second half. If you are seriously interested in the chemistry contained in these files, you should order a copy.

The book may be ordered through Transform Press, for $22.95 ($18.95 + $4 p&h U.S., $8 p&h overseas). Box 13675, Berkeley, CA 94701. (510)934-4930 (voice), (510)934-5999 (fax). California residents please add $1.56 State sales tax.

Shulgin Rating Scale

PLUS / MINUS (+/-) The level of effectiveness of a drug that indicates a threshold action. If a higher dosage produces a greater response, then the plus/minus (+/-) was valid. If a higher dosage produces nothing, then this was a false positive.

PLUS ONE (+) The drug is quite certainly active. The chronology can be determined with some accuracy, but the nature of the drug’s effects are not yet apparent.

PLUS TWO (++) Both the chronology and the nature of the action of a drug are unmistakably apparent. But you still have some choice as to whether you will accept the adventure, or rather just continue with your ordinary day’s plans (if you are an experienced researcher, that is). The effects can be allowed a predominant role, or they may be repressed and made secondary to other chosen activities.

PLUS THREE (+++) Not only are the chronology and the nature of a drug’s action quite clear, but ignoring its action is no longer an option. The subject is totally engaged in the experience, for better or worse.

PLUS FOUR (++++) A rare and precious transcendental state, which has been called a ‘peak experience’, a ‘religious experience,’ ‘divine transformation,’ a ‘state of Samadhi’ and many other names in other cultures. It is not connected to the +1, +2, and +3 of the measuring of a drug’s intensity. It is a state of bliss, a participation mystique, a connectedness with both the interior and exterior universes, which has come about after the ingestion of a psychedelic drug, but which is not necessarily repeatable with a subsequent ingestion of that same drug. If a drug (or technique or process) were ever to be discovered which would consistently produce a plus four experience in all human beings, it is conceivable that it would signal the ultimate evolution, and perhaps the end of, the human experiment.

INDEX TO THE PHENETHYLAMINES

#	SUBSTANCE	CHEMICAL NAME
1	AEM	alpha-Ethyl-3,4,5-trimethoxy-PEA
2	AL	4-Allyloxy-3,5-dimethoxy-PEA
3	ALEPH	4-Methylthio-2,5-dimethoxy-A
4	ALEPH-2	4-Ethylthio-2,5-dimethoxy-A
5	ALEPH-4	4-Isopropylthio-2,5-dimethoxy-A
6	ALEPH-6	4-Phenylthio-2,5-dimethoxy-A
7	ALEPH-7	4-Propylthio-2,5-dimethoxy-A
8	ARIADNE	2,5-Dimethoxy-alpha-ethyl-4-methyl-PEA
9	ASB	3,4-Diethoxy-5-methoxy-PEA
10	B	4-Butoxy-3,5-dimethoxy-PEA
11	BEATRICE	2,5-Dimethoxy-4,N-dimethyl-A
12	BIS-TOM	2,5-Bismethylthio-4-methyl-A
13	BOB	4-Bromo-2,5,beta-trimethoxy-PEA
14	BOD	2,5,beta-Trimethoxy-4-methyl-PEA
15	BOH	beta-Methoxy-3,4-methylenedioxy-PEA
16	BOHD	2,5-Dimethoxy-beta-hydroxy-4-methyl-PEA
17	BOM	3,4,5,beta-Tetramethoxy-PEA
18	4-Br-3,5-DMA	4-Bromo-3,5-dimethoxy-A
19	2-Br-4,5-MDA	2-Bromo-4,5-methylenedioxy-A
20	2C-B	4-Bromo-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
21	3C-BZ	4-Benzyloxy-3,5-dimethoxy-A
22	2C-C	4-Chloro-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
23	2C-D	4-Methyl-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
24	2C-E	4-Ethyl-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
25	3C-E	4-Ethoxy-3,5-dimethoxy-A
26	2C-F	4-Fluoro-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
27	2C-G	3,4-Dimethyl-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
28	2C-G-3	3,4-Trimethylene-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
29	2C-G-4	3,4-Tetramethylene-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
30	2C-G-5	3,4-Norbornyl-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
31	2C-G-N	1,4-Dimethoxynaphthyl-2-ethylamine
32	2C-H	2,5-Dimethoxy-PEA
33	2C-I	4-Iodo-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
34	2C-N	4-Nitro-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
35	2C-O-4	4-Isopropoxy-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
36	2C-P	4-Propyl-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
37	CPM	4-Cyclopropylmethoxy-3,5-dimethoxy-PEA
38	2C-SE	4-Methylseleno-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
39	2C-T	4-Methylthio-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
40	2C-T-2	4-Ethylthio-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
41	2C-T-4	4-Isopropylthio-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
42	psi-2C-T-4	4-Isopropylthio-2,6-dimethoxy-PEA
43	2C-T-7	4-Propylthio-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
44	2C-T-8	4-Cyclopropylmethylthio-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
45	2C-T-9	4-(t)-Butylthio-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
46	2C-T-13	4-(2-Methoxyethylthio)-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
47	2C-T-15	4-Cyclopropylthio-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
48	2C-T-17	4-(s)-Butylthio-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
49	2C-T-21	4-(2-Fluoroethylthio)-2,5-dimethoxy-PEA
50	4-D	4-Trideuteromethyl-3,5-dimethoxy-PEA
51	beta-D	beta,beta-Dideutero-3,4,5-trimethoxy-PEA
52	DESOXY	4-Methyl-3,5-Dimethoxy-PEA
53	2,4-DMA	2,4-Dimethoxy-A
54	2,5-DMA	2,5-Dimethoxy-A
55	3,4-DMA	3,4-Dimethoxy-A
56	DMCPA	2-(2,5-Dimethoxy-4-methylphenyl)-cyclopropylamine
57	DME	3,4-Dimethoxy-beta-hydroxy-PEA
58	DMMDA	2,5-Dimethoxy-3,4-methylenedioxy-A
59	DMMDA-2	2,3-Dimethoxy-4,5-methylenedioxy-A
60	DMPEA	3,4-Dimethoxy-PEA
61	DOAM	4-Amyl-2,5-dimethoxy-A
62	DOB	4-Bromo-2,5-dimethoxy-A
63	DOBU	4-Butyl-2,5-dimethoxy-A
64	DOC	4-Chloro-2,5-dimethoxy-A
65	DOEF	4-(2-Fluoroethyl)-2,5-dimethoxy-A
66	DOET	4-Ethyl-2,5-dimethoxy-A
67	DOI	4-Iodo-2,5-dimethoxy-A
68	DOM (STP)	4-Methyl-2,5-dimethoxy-A
69	psi-DOM	4-Methyl-2,6-dimethoxy-A
70	DON	4-Nitro-2,5-dimethoxy-A
71	DOPR	4-Propyl-2,5-dimethoxy-A
72	E	4-Ethoxy-3,5-dimethoxy-PEA
73	EEE	2,4,5-Triethoxy-A
74	EEM	2,4-Diethoxy-5-methoxy-A
75	EME	2,5-Diethoxy-4-methoxy-A
76	EMM	2-Ethoxy-4,5-dimethoxy-A
77	ETHYL-J	N,alpha-diethyl-3,4-methylenedioxy-PEA
78	ETHYL-K	N-Ethyl-alpha-propyl-3,4-methylenedioxy-PEA
79	F-2	Benzofuran-2-methyl-5-methoxy-6-(2-aminopropane)
80	F-22	Benzofuran-2,2-dimethyl-5-methoxy-6-(2-aminopropane)
81	FLEA	N-Hydroxy-N-methyl-3,4-methylenedioxy-A
82	G-3	3,4-Trimethylene-2,5-dimethoxy-A
83	G-4	3,4-Tetramethylene-2,5-dimethoxy-A
84	G-5	3,4-Norbornyl-2,5-dimethoxy-A
85	GANESHA	3,4-Dimethyl-2,5-dimethoxy-A
86	G-N	1,4-Dimethoxynaphthyl-2-isopropylamine
87	HOT-2	2,5-Dimethoxy-N-hydroxy-4-ethylthio-PEA
88	HOT-7	2,5-Dimethoxy-N-hydroxy-4-(n)-propylthio-PEA
89	HOT-17	2,5-Dimethoxy-N-hydroxy-4-(s)-butylthio-PEA
90	IDNNA	2,5-Dimethoxy-N,N-dimethyl-4-iodo-A
91	IM	2,3,4-Trimethoxy-PEA
92	IP	3,5-Dimethoxy-4-isopropoxy-PEA
93	IRIS	5-Ethoxy-2-methoxy-4-methyl-A
94	J	alpha-Ethyl-3,4-methylenedioxy-PEA
95	LOPHOPHINE	3-Methoxy-4,5-methylenedioxy-PEA
96	M	3,4,5-Trimethoxy-PEA
97	4-MA	4-Methoxy-A
98	MADAM-6	2,N-Dimethyl-4,5-methylenedioxy-A
99	MAL	3,5-Dimethoxy-4-methallyloxy-PEA
100	MDA	3,4-Methylenedioxy-A
101	MDAL	N-Allyl-3,4-methylenedioxy-A
102	MDBU	N-Butyl-3,4-methylenedioxy-A
103	MDBZ	N-Benzyl-3,4-methylenedioxy-A
104	MDCPM	N-Cyclopropylmethyl-3,4-methylenedioxy-A
105	MDDM	N,N-Dimethyl-3,4-methylenedioxy-A
106	MDE	N-Ethyl-3,4-methylenedioxy-A
107	MDHOET	N-(2-Hydroxyethyl)-3,4-methylenedioxy-A
108	MDIP	N-Isopropyl-3,4-methylenedioxy-A
109	MDMA	N-Methyl-3,4-methylenedioxy-A
110	MDMC	N-Methyl-3,4-ethylenedioxy-A
111	MDMEO	N-Methoxy-3,4-methylenedioxy-A
112	MDMEOET	N-(2-Methoxyethyl)-3,4-methylenedioxy-A
113	MDMP	alpha,alpha,N-Trimethyl-3,4-methylenedioxy-PEA
114	MDOH	N-Hydroxy-3,4-methylenedioxy-A
115	MDPEA	3,4-Methylenedioxy-PEA
116	MDPH	alpha,alpha-Dimethyl-3,4-methylenedioxy-PEA
117	MDPL	N-Propargyl-3,4-methylenedioxy-A
118	MDPR	N-Propyl-3,4-methylenedioxy-A
119	ME	3,4-Dimethoxy-5-ethoxy-PEA
120	MEDA	3-methoxy-4,5-Ethylenedioxy-A [Erowid corrected]
121	MEE	2-Methoxy-4,5-diethoxy-A
122	MEM	2,5-Dimethoxy-4-ethoxy-A
123	MEPEA	3-Methoxy-4-ethoxy-PEA
124	META-DOB	5-Bromo-2,4-dimethoxy-A
125	META-DOT	5-Methylthio-2,4-dimethoxy-A
126	METHYL-DMA	N-Methyl-2,5-dimethoxy-A
127	METHYL-DOB	4-Bromo-2,5-dimethoxy-N-methyl-A
128	METHYL-J	N-Methyl-alpha-ethyl-3,4-methylenedioxy-PEA
129	METHYL-K	N-Methyl-alpha-propyl-3,4-methylenedioxy-PEA
130	METHYL-MA	N-Methyl-4-methoxy-A
131	METHYL-MMDA-2	N-Methyl-2-methoxy-4,5-methylenedioxy-A
132	MMDA	3-Methoxy-4,5-methylenedioxy-A
133	MMDA-2	2-Methoxy-4,5-methylenedioxy-A
134	MMDA-3a	2-Methoxy-3,4-methylenedioxy-A
135	MMDA-3b	4-Methoxy-2,3-methylenedioxy-A
136	MME	2,4-Dimethoxy-5-ethoxy-A
137	MP	3,4-Dimethoxy-5-propoxy-PEA
138	MPM	2,5-Dimethoxy-4-propoxy-A
139	ORTHO-DOT	2-Methylthio-4,5-dimethoxy-A
140	P	3,5-Dimethoxy-4-propoxy-PEA
141	PE	3,5-Dimethoxy-4-phenethyloxy-PEA
142	PEA	PEA
143	PROPYNYL	4-Propynyloxy-3,5-dimethoxy-PEA
144	SB	3,5-Diethoxy-4-methoxy-PEA
145	TA	2,3,4,5-Tetramethoxy-A
146	3-TASB	4-Ethoxy-3-ethylthio-5-methoxy-PEA
147	4-TASB	3-Ethoxy-4-ethylthio-5-methoxy-PEA
148	5-TASB	3,4-Diethoxy-5-methylthio-PEA
149	TB	4-Thiobutoxy-3,5-dimethoxy-PEA
150	3-TE	4-Ethoxy-5-methoxy-3-methylthio-PEA
151	4-TE	3,5-Dimethoxy-4-ethylthio-PEA
152	2-TIM	2-Methylthio-3,4-dimethoxy-PEA
153	3-TIM	3-Methylthio-2,4-dimethoxy-PEA
154	4-TIM	4-Methylthio-2,3-dimethoxy-PEA
155	3-TM	3-Methylthio-4,5-dimethoxy-PEA
156	4-TM	4-Methylthio-3,5-dimethoxy-PEA
157	TMA	3,4,5-Trimethoxy-A
158	TMA-2	2,4,5-Trimethoxy-A
159	TMA-3	2,3,4-Trimethoxy-A
160	TMA-4	2,3,5-Trimethoxy-A
161	TMA-5	2,3,6-Trimethoxy-A
162	TMA-6	2,4,6-Trimethoxy-A
163	3-TME	4,5-Dimethoxy-3-ethylthio-PEA
164	4-TME	3-Ethoxy-5-methoxy-4-methylthio-PEA
165	5-TME	3-Ethoxy-4-methoxy-5-methylthio-PEA
166	2T-MMDA-3a	2-Methylthio-3,4-methylenedioxy-A
167	4T-MMDA-2	4,5-Thiomethyleneoxy-2-methoxy-A
168	TMPEA	2,4,5-Trimethoxy-PEA
169	2-TOET	4-Ethyl-5-methoxy-2-methylthio-A
170	5-TOET	4-Ethyl-2-methoxy-5-methylthio-A
171	2-TOM	5-Methoxy-4-methyl-2-methylthio-A
172	5-TOM	2-Methoxy-4-methyl-5-methylthio-A
173	TOMSO	2-Methoxy-4-methyl-5-methylsulfinyl-A
174	TP	4-Propylthio-3,5-dimethoxy-PEA
175	TRIS	3,4,5-Triethoxy-PEA
176	3-TSB	3-Ethoxy-5-ethylthio-4-methoxy-PEA
177	4-TSB	3,5-Diethoxy-4-methylthio-PEA
178	3-T-TRIS	4,5-Diethoxy-3-ethylthio-PEA
179	4-T-TRIS	3,5-Diethoxy-4-ethylthio-PEA
Appendix B: Glossary

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The Rolling Stones (full text) by Robert Heinlein

This solid book of space travel is a great example of why Robert Heinlein is still a major name in Science Fiction. The Rolling Stones is primarily a Space Travel Science Fiction novel, as the story is centered on the Stone family’s trip through the solar system. It is a humorous science fiction story about a family traveling through space in a second-hand spaceship.

The Rolling Stones is one of Heinlein’s most lighthearted novels. It was written primarily for young adults, but it’s a good read at any age. The book is about a middle class family, living on the moon as the story begins, in a time when middle class families can buy spaceships about as easily as you or I could buy a large recreational vehicle or a small yacht.

The Rolling Stones

1 – THE UNHEAVENLY TWINS

The two brothers stood looking the old wreck over. “Junk,” decided Castor.

“Not junk,” objected Pollux. “A jalopy – granted. A heap any way you look at it A clunker possibly. But not junk.” “You’re an optimist, Junior.” Both boys were fifteen; Castor was twenty minutes older than his brother.

“I’m a believer, Grandpa – and you had better be, too. Let me point out that we don’t have money enough for anything better. Scared to gun it?”

Castor stared up the side of the ship. “Not at all – because that thing will never again rise high enough to crash. We want a ship that will take us out to the Asteroids – right? This superannuated pogo stick wouldn’t even take us to Earth.”

“It will when I get through hopping it up – with your thumb-fingered help. Let’s look through it and see what it needs.”

Castor glanced at the sky. “It’s getting late.” He looked not at the Sun making long shadows on the lunar plain, but at Earth, reading the time from the sunset line now moving across the Pacific.

“Look, Grandpa, are we buying a ship or are we getting to supper on time?”

Castor shrugged. “As you say, Junior.” He lowered his antenna, then started swarming up the rope ladder left there for the accommodation of prospective customers. He used his hands only and despite his cumbersome vacuum suit his movements were easy and graceful. Pollux swarmed after him. Castor cheered up a bit when they reached the control room. The ship had not been stripped for salvage as completely as had many of the ships on the lot. True, the ballistic computer was missing but the rest of the astrogation instruments were in place and the controls to the power room seemed to be complete. The space-battered old hulk was not a wreck, but merely obsolete. A hasty look at the power room seemed to confirm this.

Ten minutes later Castor, still mindful of supper, herded Pollux down the ladder. When Castor reached the ground Pollux said, “Well?” “Let me do the talking.”

The sales office of the lot was a bubble dome nearly a mile away; they moved toward it with the easy, fast lope of old Moon hands. The office airlock was marked by a huge sign:

DEALER DAN

THE SPACESHIP MAN

CRAFT OF ALL TYPES *** SCRAP METAL *** SPARE PARTS FUELING & SERVICE

(AEC License No. 739024)

They cycled through the lock and unclamped each other’s helmets. The outer office was crossed by a railing; back of it sat a girl receptionist. She was watching a newscast while buffing her nails. She spoke without taking her eyes off the TV tank:

“We’re not buying anything, boys – nor hiring anybody.” Castor said, “You sell spaceships?”

She looked up. “Not often enough.” “Then tell your boss we want to see him.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Whom do you think you are kidding, sonny boy? Mr. Ekizian is a busy man.” Pollux said to Castor, “Let’s go over to the Hungarian, Cas. These people don’t mean business.” “Maybe you’re right.”

The girl looked from one to the other, shrugged, and flipped a switch. “Mr. Ekizan – there are a couple of Boy Scouts out here who say they want to buy a spaceship. Do you want to bother with them?”

A deep voice responded, “And why not? We got ships to sell.” Shortly a bald-headed, portly man, dressed in a cigar and a wrinkled moonsuit came out of the inner office and rested his hands on the rail. He looked them over shrewdly but his voice was jovial. “You wanted to see me?”

“You’re the owner?” asked Castor.

“Dealer Dan Ekizian, the man himself. What’s on your mind, boys? Time is money.” “Your secretary told you,” Castor said ungraciously. “Spaceships.”

Dealer Dan took his cigar out of his mouth and examined it. “Really? What would you boys want with a spaceship?” Pollux muttered something; Castor said, “Do you usually do business out here?” He glanced at the girl.

Ekizan followed his glance. “My mistake. Come inside.” He opened the gate for them, led them into his office, and seated them. He ceremoniously offered them cigars; the boys refused politely. “Now out with it kids. Let’s not joke.”

Castor repeated, “Spaceships.”

He pursed his lips. “A luxury liner, maybe? I haven’t got one on the field at the moment but I can always broker a deal.” Pollux stood up. “He’s making fun of us, Cas. Let’s go see the Hungarian.”

“Wait a moment Pol. Mr. Ekizian, you’ve got a heap out there on the south side of the field, a class VII, model ’93 Detroiter. What’s your scrap metal price on her and what does she mass?”

The dealer looked surprised. “That sweet little job? Why, I couldn’t afford to let that go as scrap. And anyhow, even at scrap that would come to a lot of money. If it is metal you boys want, I got it. Just tell me how much and what sort.”

“We were talking about that Detroiter.” “I don’t believe I’ve met you boys before?”

“Sorry, sir. I’m Castor Stone. This is my brother Pollux.”

“Glad to meet you, Mr. Stone. Stone … Stone? Any relation to – The “Unheavenly Twins” – that’s it.” “Smile when you say that,” said Pollux.

“Shut up, Pol. We’re the Stone twins.”

“The frostproof rebreather valve, you invented it, didn’t you?” “That’s right.”

“Say, I got one in my own suit. A good gimmick – you boys are quite the mechanics.” He looked them over again. “Maybe you were really serious about a ship.”

“Of course we were.”

“Hmm. . . you’re not looking for scrap; you want something to get around it. I’ve got just the job for you, a General Motors Jumpbug, practically new. It’s been out on one grubstake job to a couple of thorium prospectors and I had to reclaim it. The hold ain’t even radioactive.”

“Not interested.”

“Better look at it. Automatic landing and three hops takes you right around the equator. Just the thing for a couple of lively, active boys.” “About that Detroiter – what’s your scrap price?”

Ekizian looked hurt. “That’s a deep space vessel, son – It’s no use to you, as a ship. And I can’t let it go for scrap; that’s a clean job. It was a family yacht – never been pushed over six g, never had an emergency landing. It’s got hundreds of millions of miles still in it. I couldn’t let you scrap that ship, even if you were to pay me the factory price. It would be a shame. I love ships. Now take this Jumpbug. . .”

“You can’t sell that Detroiter as anything but scrap,” Castor answered. “It’s been sitting there two years that I know of. If you had hoped to sell her as a ship you wouldn’t have salvaged the computer. She’s pitted, her tubes are no good, and an overhaul would cost more than she’s worth. Now what’s her scrap price?”

Dealer Dan rocked back and forth in his chair; he seemed to be suffering. “Scrap that ship? Just fuel her up and she’s ready to go – Venus, Mars, even the Jovian satellites.”

“What’s your cash price?” “Cash?”

“Cash.”

Ekizian hesitated, then mentioned a price. Castor stood up and said, “You were right, Pollux. Let’s go see the Hungarian.” The dealer looked pained. “If I were to write it off for my own use, I couldn’t cut that price – not in fairness to my partners.”

“Come on, Pol.”

“Look, boys, I can’t let you go over to the Hungarian’s. He’ll cheat you.” Pollux looked savage. “Maybe he’ll do it politely.”

“Shut up, Poll!” Castor went on, “Sorry, Mr. Ekizian, my brother isn’t housebroken. But we can’t do business.” He stood up.

“Wait a minute. That’s a good valve you boys thought up. I use it; I feel I owe you something.” He named another and lower sum. “Sorry. We can’t afford it.” He started to follow Pollux out.

”Wait!” Ekizian mentioned a third price. “Cash,” he added. “Of course. And you pay the sales tax?”

“Well. . . for a cash deal, yes.” “Good.”

“Sit down, gentlemen. I’ll call in my girl and we’ll state the papers.”

“No hurry,” answered Castor. “We’ve still got to see what the Hungarian has on his lot – and the government salvage lot, too.” “Huh? That price doesn’t stand unless you deal right now. Dealer Dan, they call me. I got no time to waste dickering twice.” “Nor have we. See you tomorrow. If it hasn’t sold we can take up where we left off.”

“If you expect me to hold that price, I’ll have to have a nominal option payment.”

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t expect you to pass up a sale for us. If you can sell it by tomorrow, we wouldn’t think of standing in your way. Come on, Pol.” Ekizian shrugged. “Been nice meeting you, boys.”

“Thank you, sir.”

As they closed the lock behind them and waited for it to cycle, Pollux said “You should have paid him an option.” His brother looked at him. “You’re retarded, Junior.”

On leaving Dealer Dan’s office the boys headed for the spaceport, intending to catch the passenger tube back to the city, fifty miles west of the port. They had less than thirty minutes if they were to get home for supper on time – unimportant in itself but Castor disliked starting a family debate on the defensive over a side issue. He kept hurrying Pollux along.

Their route took them through the grounds of General Synthetics Corporation, square miles of giant cracking plants, sun screens, condensers, fractionating columns, all sorts of huge machinery to take advantage of the burning heat, the bitter cold, and the endless vacuum for industrial chemical engineering purposes – a Dantesque jungle of unlikely shapes. The boys paid no attention to it; they were used to it. They hurried down the company road in the flying leaps the Moon’s low gravity permitted, making twenty miles an hour. Half way to the port they were overtaken by a company tractor; Pollux flagged it down.

As he ground to a stop, the driver spoke to them via his cab radio: “What do you want?” “Are you meeting the Terra shuttle?”

“Subject to the whims of fate – yes.”

“It’s Jefferson,” said Pollux. “Hey, Jeff – it’s Cas and Pol. Drop us at the tube station, will you?”

“Climb on the rack. Mind the volcano – come up the usual way.” As they did so he went on, “What brings you two carrot-topped accident-prones to this far reach of culture?”

Castor hesitated and glanced at Pollux. They had known Jefferson James for some time, having bowled against him in the city league. He was an old Moon hand but not a native, having come to Luna before they were born to gather color for a novel. The novel was still unfinished.

Pollux nodded. Castor said, “Jeff, can you keep a secret?”

“Certainly – but permit me to point out that these radios are not directional. See your attorney before admitting any criminal act or intention.” Castor looked around; aside from two tractor trucks in the distance no one seemed to be in line-of-sight. “We’re going into business.” “When were you out of it?”

“This is a new line – interplanetary trade. We’re going to buy our own ship and run it ourselves.”

The driver whistled. “Remind me to sell Four-Planet Export short. When does this blitz take place?”

“We’re shopping for a ship now. Know of a good buy?”

“I’ll alert my spies.” He shut up, being busy thereafter with the heavier traffic near the spaceport. Presently he said, “Here’s your stop.” As the boys climbed down from the rack of the truck he added, “If you need a crewman, keep me in mind.”

“Okay, Jeff. And thanks for the lift.”

Despite the lift they were late. A squad of marine M.P.s heading into the city on duty pre-empted the first tube car; by the time the next arrived the ship from Earth had grounded and its passengers took priority Thereafter they got tangled with the changing shift from the synthetics plant. It was well past suppertime when they arrived at their family’s apartment a half mile down inside Luna city

Mr. Stone looked up as they came in. “Well! the star boarders,” he announced. He was sitting with a small recorder in his lap, a throat mike clipped to his neck.

“Dad, it was unavoidable,” Castor began. “We -”

“It always is,” his father cut in. “Never mind the details. Your dinner is in the cozy. I wanted to send it back but your mother went soft and didn’t let me.”

Dr. Stone looked up from the far end of the living room, where she was modelling a head of their older sister, Meade. “Correction,” she said. “Your father went soft; I would have let you starve. Meade, quit turning your head.”

“Check,” announced their four-year old brother and got up from the floor where he had been playing chess with their grand mother. He ran towards them. “Hey, Cas, Pol – where you been? Did you go to the port? Why didn’t you take me? Did you bring me anything?”

Castor swung him up by his heels and held him upside down. “Yes. No. Maybe. And why should we? Here, Pol – catch.” He sailed the child through the air; his twin reached out and caught him, still by the heels.

“Check yourself,” announced Grandmother, “and mate in three moves. Shouldn’t let your social life distract you from your game, Lowell.” The youngster looked back at the board from his upside down position. “Wrong, Hazel. Now I let you take my queen, then – Blammie!”

His grandmother looked again at the board. “Huh? Wait a minute – suppose I refuse your queen, then – Why, the little scamp! He’s trapped me again.”

Meade said, “Shouldn’t let him beat you so often, Hazel. It’s not good for him.” “Meade, for the ninth time, quit turning your head!”

“Sorry, Mother. Let’s take a rest.”

Grandmother snorted. “You don’t think I let him beat me on purpose, do you? You play him; I am giving up the game for good.” Meade answered just as her mother spoke; at the same time Pollux chucked the boy back at Castor. “You take him. I want to eat.” The child squealed. Mr. Stone shouted, “QUIET!”

“And stay quiet,” he went on, while unfastening the throat mike. “How is a man to make a living in all this racket? This episode has to be done over completely, sent to New York tomorrow, shot, canned, distributed, and on the channels by the end of the week. It’s not possible.”

“Then don’t do it,” Dr. Stone answered serenely. “Or work in your room – it’s soundproof.”

Mr. Stone turned to his wife. “My dear, I’ve explained a thousand times that I can’t work in there by myself. I get no stimulation. I fall asleep.” Castor said, “How’s it going, Dad? Rough?”

“Well, now that you ask me, the villains are way ahead and I don’t see a chance for our heroes.”

“I thought of a gimmick while Pol and I were out. You have this young kid you introduced into the story slide into the control room while everybody is asleep. They don’t suspect him, see? – he’s too young so they haven’t put him in irons. Once in the control room – “ Castor stopped and looked crestfallen. “No, it won’t do; he’s too young to handle the ship. He wouldn’t know how.”

“Why do you say that?” his father objected. “All I have to do is to plant that he has had a chance to. . . let me see –“ He stopped; his face went blank. “No,” he said presently.

“No good, huh?”

“Eh? What? It smells – but I think I can use it. Stevenson did something like it in Treasure Island – and I think he got it from Homer. Let’s see; if we

–“ He again went into his trance.

Pollux had opened the warming cupboard Castor dropped his baby brother on the floor and accepted a dinner pack from his twin. He opened it.

“Meat pie again,” he stated bleakly and sniffed it. “Synthetic, too.”

“Say that over again and louder,” his sister urged him. “I’ve been trying for weeks to get Mother to subscribe to another restaurant.” “Don’t talk, Meade,” Dr. Stone answered. “I’m modelling your mouth.”

Grandmother Stone snorted. “You youngsters have it too easy. When I came to the Moon there was a time when we had nothing but soya beans and coffee powder for three months.”

Meade answered, “Hazel, the last time you told us about that it was two months and it was tea instead of coffee.”

“Young lady, who’s telling this lie? You, or me?” Hazel stood up and came over to her twin grandsons. “What were you two doing on Dan Ekizian’s lot?”

Castor looked at Pollux, who looked back. Castor said cautiously, “Who told you that we were there?” “Don’t try to kid your grandmother. When you have been on -”

The entire family joined her in chorus: “- on the Moon as long as I have!” Hazel sniffed. “Sometimes I wonder why I married!”

Her son said, “Don’t try to answer that question,” then continued to his sons, “Well, what were you doing there?” Castor consulted Pollux by eye, then answered, “Well, Dad, it’s like this -”

His father nodded. “Your best flights of imagination always start that way. Attend carefully, everybody.” “Well, you know that money you are holding for us?”

“What about it?”

“Three per cent isn’t very much.”

Mr. Stone shook his head vigorously. “I will not invest your royalties in some wildcat stock. Financial genius may have skipped my generation but when I turn that money over to you, it will be intact.”

“That’s just it. It worries you. You could turn it over to us now and quit worrying about it.” “No. You are too young.”

“We weren’t too young to earn it.”

His mother snickered. “They got you, Roger. Come here and I’ll see if I can staunch the blood.”

Dr. Stone said serenely, “Don’t heckle Roger when he is coping with the twins, Mother. Meade, turn a little to the left.”

Mr. Stone answered, “You’ve got a point there, Cas. But you may still be too young to hang on to it. What is this leading up to?”

Castor signalled with his eyes; Pollux took over. “Dad, we’ve got a really swell chance to take that money and put it to work. Not a wildcat stock, not a stock at all. We’ll have every penny right where we can see it, right where we could cash in on it at any time. And in the meantime we’ll be making lots more money.”

“Hmmm…how?”

“We buy a ship and put it to work.”

His father opened his mouth; Castor cut in swiftly, “We can pick up a Detroiter VII cheap and overhaul it ourselves; we won’t be out a cent for wages.”

Pollux filled in without a break. “You’ve said yourself, Dad, that we are both born mechanics; we’ve got the hands for it.” Castor went on. “We’d treat it like a baby because it would be our own.”

Pollux: “We’ve both got both certificates, control and power. We wouldn’t need any crew.” Castor: “No overhead – that’s the beauty of it.”

Pollux: “So we carry trade goods out to the Asteroids and we bring back a load of high-grade. We can’t lose.” Castor: “Four hundred percent, maybe five hundred.”

Pollux: “More like six hundred.”

Castor: “And no worries for you.”

Pollux: “And we’d be out of your hair.” Castor: “Not late for dinner.”

Pollux had his mouth open when his father again yelled, “QUIET!” He went on, “Edith, bring the barrel. This time we use it.” Mr. Stone had a theory, often expressed, that boys should be raised in a barrel and fed through the bunghole. The barrel had no physical existence.

Dr. Stone said, “Yes, dear,” and went on modelling.

Grandmother Stone said, “Don’t waste your money on a Detroiter. They’re unstable; the gyro system is no good. Wouldn’t have one as a gift. Get a Douglas.”

Mr. Stone turned to his mother. “Hazel, if you are going to encourage the boys in this nonsense -”

“Not at all! Not at all! Merely intellectual discussion. Now with a Douglas they could make some money. A Douglas has a very favorable -” “Hazel!”

His mother broke off, then said thoughtfully, as if to herself, “I know there is free speech on the Moon: I wrote it into the charter myself.”

Roger Stone turned back to his sons. “See here, boys – when the Chamber of Commerce decided to include pilot training in their Youth-Welfare program I was all for it. I even favored it when they decided to issue junior licenses to anybody who graduated high in the course. When you two got your jets I was proud as could be. It’s a young man’s game; they license commercial pilots at eighteen and -”

“And they retire them at thirty,” added Castor. “We haven’t any time to waste. We’ll be too old for the game before you know it.”

“Pipe down. I’ll do the talking for a bit. If you think I’m going to draw that money out of the bank and let you two young yahoos go gallivanting around the system in a pile of sky junk that will probably blow the first time you go over two g’s, you had better try another think. Besides, you’re going down to Earth for school next September.”

“We’ve been to Earth,” answered Castor. “We didn’t like it,” added Pollux.

“Too dirty.”

“Likewise too noisy.”

“Groundhogs everywhere,” Castor finished.

Mr. Stone brushed it aside. “Two weeks you were there – not time enough to find out what the place is like. You’ll love it, once you get used to it. Learn to ride horseback, play baseball, see the Ocean”

“A lot of impure water,” Castor answered. “Horses are to eat.”

“Take baseball,” Castor continued. “It’s not practical. How can you figure a one-g trajectory and place your hand at the point of contact in the free- flight time between bases? We’re not miracle men.”

“I played it.”

“But you grew up in a one-g field; you’ve got a distorted notion of physics. Anyhow, why would we want to learn to play baseball? When we come back, we wouldn’t be able to play it here. Why, you might crack your helmet”

Mr. Stone shook his head. “Games aren’t the point. Play base-ball or not, as suits you. But you should get an education.” “What does Luna City Technical lack that we need? And if so, why? After all, Dad, you were on the Board of Education.” “I was not; I was mayor.”

“Which made you a member ex-officio – Hazel told us.”

Mr. Stone glanced at his mother; she was looking elsewhere. He went on, “Tech is a good school, of its sort, but we don’t pretend to offer everything at Tech. After all, the Moon is still an outpost, a frontier -”

“But you said,” Pollux interrupted, “in your retiring speech as mayor, that Luna City was the Athens of the future and the hope of the new age.” “Poetic license. Tech is still not Harvard. Don’t you boys want to see the world’s great works of art? Don’t you want to study the world’s great

literature?”

“We’ve read lvanhoe,” said Castor.

“And we don’t want to read The Mill on the Floss,” added Pollux. “We prefer your stuff.”

“My stuff? My stuff isn’t literature. It’s more of an animated comic strip.” “We like it,” Castor said firmly.

His father took a deep breath. “Thank you. Which reminds me that I still have a full episode to sweat out tonight, so I will cut this discussion short. In the first place you can’t touch the money without my thumbprint – from now on I am going to wear gloves. In the second place both of you are too young for an unlimited license.”

“You could get us a waiver for out-system. When we got back we’d probably be old enough for unlimited.” “You’re too young!”

Castor said, “Why, Dad, not half an hour ago you accepted a gimmick from me in which you were going to have an eleven-year-old kid driving a ship.”

“I’ll raise his age!”

“It’ll ruin your gimmick.”

“Confound it! That’s just fiction – and poor fiction at that. It’s hokum, dreamed up to sell merchandise.” He suddenly looked suspiciously at his son. “Cas, you planted that gimmick on me. Just to give yourself an argument in favor of this hair-brained scheme – didn’t you?”

Castor looked pious. “Why, Father, how could you think such a thing?” “Don’t Father me! I can tell a hawk from a Hanshaw.”

“Anybody can,” Grandmother Hazel commented. “The Hawk class is a purely commercial type while the Hanshaw runabout is a sport job. Come to think about it, boys, a Hanshaw might be better than a Douglas. I like its fractional controls and -”

“Hazel!” snapped her son. “Quit encouraging the boys. And quit showing off. You’re not the only engineer in the family.” “I’m the only good one,” she answered smugly.

“Oh, yes? Nobody ever complained about my work.” “Then why did you quit?”

“You know why. Fiddle with finicky figures for months on end – and what have you got? A repair dock. Or a stamping mill. And who cares?” “So you aren’t an engineer. You’re merely a man who knows engineering.”

“What about yourself? You didn’t stick with it.”

“No,” she admitted, “but my reasons were different. I saw three big, hairy, male men promoted over my head and not one of them could do a partial integration without a pencil. Presently I figured out that the Atomic Energy Commission had a bias on the subject of women no matter what the civil service rules said. So I took a job dealing blackjack. Luna City didn’t offer much choice in those days – and I had you to support.”

The argument seemed about to die out; Castor judged it was time to mix it up again. “Hazel, do you really think we should get a Hanshaw? I’m not sure we can afford it.”

“Well, now, you really need a third crewman for a -” “Do you want to buy in?”

“Mr. Stone interrupted. “Hazel, I will not stand by and let you encourage this. I’m putting my foot down.”

“You look silly standing there on one foot. Don’t try to bring me up, Roger. At ninety-five my habits are fairly well set.” “Ninety-five indeed! Last week you were eighty-five.”

“It’s been a hard week. Back to our muttons – why don’t you buy in with them? You could go along and keep them out of trouble.”

“What? Me?” Mr. Stone took a deep breath. “(A) a marine guard couldn’t keep these two junior-model Napoleons out of trouble. I know; I’ve tried.

(B) I do not like a Hanshaw; they are fuel hogs. (C) I have to turn out three episodes a week of The Scourge of the Spaceways – including one which must be taped tonight, if this family will ever quiet down!”

“Roger,” his mother answered. “trouble in this family is like water for fish. And nobody asked you to buy a Hanshaw, As to your third point, give me a blank spool and I’ll dictate the next three episodes tonight while I’m brushing my hair.” Hazel’s hair was still thick and quite red. So far, no one had caught her dyeing it. “It’s about time you broke that contract anyway; you’ve won your bet.”

Her son winced. Two years before be had let himself be trapped into a bet that he could write better stuff than was being channeled up from Earth

and had gotten himself caught in a quicksand of fat checks and options. “I can’t afford to quit,” he said feebly.

“What good is money if you don’t have time to spend it? Give me that spool and the box.” “You can’t write it.”

“Want to bet?”

Her son backed down; no one yet had won a bet with Hazel.

“That’s beside the point I’m a family man; I’ve got Edith and Buster and Meade to think about, too.”

Meade turned her head again. “If you’re thinking about me, Daddy, I’d like to go. Why, I’ve never been any place – except that one trip to Venus and twice to New York.”

“Hold still. Meade,” Dr. Stone said quietly. She went on to her husband, “You know, Roger, I was thinking just the other day how cramped this apartment is. And we haven’t been any place, as Meade says, since we got back from Venus.”

Mr. Stone stared. “You too? Edith, this apartment is bigger than any ship compartment; you know that.” “Yes, but a ship seems bigger. In free fall one gets so much more use out of the room.”

“My dear, do I understand that you are supporting this junket?”

“Oh, not at all! I was speaking in general terms. But you do sleep better aboard ship. You never snore in free fall.” “I do not snore!”

Dr. Stone did not answer. Hazel snickered. Pollux caught Castor’s eye and Castor nodded; the two slipped quietly away to their own room. It was a lot of trouble to get mother involved in a family argument, but worth the effort; nothing important was ever decided until she joined in.

Meade tapped on their door a little later; Castor let her in and looked her over; she was dressed in the height of fashion for the American Old West. “Square dancing again, huh?”

“Eliminations tonight. Look here, Cas, even if Daddy breaks loose from the money you two might be stymied by being underage for an unlimited license – right?”

“We figure on a waiver.” They had also discussed blasting off without a waiver, but it did not seem the time to mention it. “But you might not get it. Just bear in mind that I will be eighteen next week. Bye now!”

“Good night.”

When she had gone Pollux said, “That’s silly. She hasn’t even taken her limited license.” “No, but she’s had astrogation in school and we could coach her.”

“Cas, you’re crazy. We can’t drag her all around the system; girls are a nuisance.” “You’ve got that wrong, Junior. You mean “sisters” – girls are okay.”

Pollux considered this. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” “I’m always right.”

“Oh, so? How about the time you tried to use liquid air to -” “Let’s not be petty!”

Grandmother Hazel stuck her head in next. “Just a quick battle report, boys. Your father is groggy but still fighting gamely.” “Is he going to let us use the money?”

“Doesn’t look like it, as now. Tell me, how much did Ekizian ask you for that Detroiter?”

Castor told her; she whistled. “The gonoph,” she said softly. “That unblushing groundhog – I’ll have his license lifted.” “Oh, we didn’t agree to pay it.”

“Don’t sign with him at all unless I’m at your elbow. I know where the body is buried.”

“Okay. Look, Hazel, you really think a Detroiter VII is unstable?”

She wrinkled her brow. “Its gyros are too light for the ship’s moment of inertia. I hate a ship that wobbles. If we could pick up a war-surplus triple- duo gyro system, cheap, you would have something. I’ll inquire around.”

It was much later when Mr. Stone looked in. “Still awake, boys?” “Oh, sure, come in.”

“About that matter we were discussing tonight -” Pollux said, “Do we get the money?”

Castor dug him in the ribs but it was too late. Their father said, “I told you that was out. But I wanted to ask you: did you, when you were shopping around today, happen to ask, us, about any larger ships?”

Castor looked blank. “Why, no sir. We couldn’t afford anything larger could we, Pol?” “Gee, no! Why do you ask, Dad?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing at all! Uh, good night.”

He left. The twins turned to each other and solemnly shook hands.

II – A CASE FOR DRAMATIC LICENSE

At breakfast the next morning – ‘morning’ by Greenwich time, of course; it was still late afternoon by local sun time and would be for a couple of days – the Stone family acted out the episode Hazel had dictated the night before of Mr. Stone’s marathon adventure serial. Grandma Hazel had stuck the spool of dictation into the autotyper as soon as she had gotten up; there was a typed copy for each of them. Even Buster had a small side to read and Hazel played several parts, crouching and jumping around and shifting her voice from rusty bass to soprano.

Everybody got into the act – everybody but Mr. Stone; he listened with a dour try-to-make-me-laugh expression.

Hazel finished her grand cliff-hanging finale by knocking over her coffee She plucked the cup out of the air and had a napkin under the brown flood before it could reach the floor under the urge of the Moon’s leisurely field. “Well?” she said breathlessly to her son, while still panting from the Galactic Overlord’s frantic attempts to escape a just fate. “How about it? Isn’t that a dilly? Did we scare the dickens out of ’em or didn’t we?”

Roger Stone did not answer; he merely held his nose. Hazel looked amazed. “You didn’t like it? Why, Roger, I do believe you’re jealous. To think I would raise a son with spirit so mean that he would be envious of his own mother!”

Buster spoke up. “I liked it Let’s do that part over where I shoot the space pirate.” He pointed a finger and made a buzzing noise. “Whee! Blood all over the bulkheads!”

“There’s your answer, Roger. Your public. If Buster likes it, you’re in.” “I thought it was exciting,” Meade put in. “What was wrong with it, Daddy?” “Yes,” agreed Hazel belligerently. “Go ahead. Tell us.”

“Very well. In the first place, spaceships do not make hundred-and eighty-degree turns.” “This one does!”

“In the second place, what in blazes is this “Galactic Overlord” nonsense? When did he creep in?” “Oh, that! Son, your show was dying on its feet, so I gave it a transfusion.”

“But “Galactic Overlords” – now, really! It’s not only preposterous: it’s been used over and over again.”

“Is that bad? Next week I’m going to equip Hamlet with atomic propulsion and stir it in with The Comedy of Errors. I suppose you think Shakespeare will sue me?”

“He will if he can stop spinning.” Roger Stone shrugged ‘I’ll send it in. There’s no time left to do another one and the contract doesn’t say it has to be good: it just says I have to deliver it. They’ll rewrite it in New York anyway.”

His mother answered, “Even money says your fan mail is up twenty-five per cent on this episode.” “No, thank you. I don’t want you wearing yourself out writing fan mail – not at your age.”

“What’s wrong with my age? I used to paddle you twice a week and I can still do it. Come on; put up your dukes!” “Too soon after breakfast.”

“Sissy! Pick your way of dying – Marquis of Queensbury, dockside, or kill-quick.”

“Send around your seconds; let’s do this properly. In the meantime –“ He turned to his sons. “Boys, have you any plans for today?” Castor glanoed at his brother, then said cautiously, “well, we were thinking of doing a little more shopping for ships.

“I’ll go with you.”

Pollux looked up sharply. “You mean we get the money?” His brother glared at him. Their father answered, “No, your money stays in the bank where it belongs.”

“Then why bother to shop?” He got an elbow in the ribs for this remark.

“I’m interested in seeing what the market has to offer,” Mr. Stone answered. “Coming, Edith?” Dr. Stone answered, “I trust your judgement, my dear.”

Hazel gulped more coffee and stood lip. “I’m coming along.” Buster bounced down out of his chair. “Me, too!”

Dr. Stone stopped him. “No, dear. Finish your oatmeal.”

“No! I’m going, too. Can’t I, Grandma Hazel?”

Hazel considered it. Riding herd on the child outside the pressurised city was a full-time chore; he was not old enough to be trusted to handle his vacuum-suit controls properly. On this occasion she wanted to be free to give her full attention to other matters. “I’m afraid not, Lowell. Tell you what, sugar, I’ll keep my phone open and we’ll play chess while I’m away.”

“It’s no fun to play chess by telephone. I can’t tell what you are thinking.”

Hazel stared at him. “So that’s it? I’ve suspected it for some time. Maybe I can win a game once. No, don’t start whimpering – or I’ll take your slide rule away from you for a week.” The child thought it over, shrugged, and his face became placid. Hazel turned to her son. “Do you suppose he really does hear thoughts?”

Her son looked at his least son. “I’m afraid to find out.” He sighed and added, “Why couldn’t I have been born into a nice, normal, stupid family? Your fault, Hazel.”

“His mother patted his arm. “Don’t fret, Roger. You pull down the average.”

“Hummph! Give me that spool. I’d better shoot it off to New York before I lose my nerve.”

Hazel fetched it; Mr. Stone took it to the apartment phone, punched in the code for RCA New York with the combination set for high speed transcription relay. As he slipped the spool into its socket he added, “I shouldn’t do this. In addition to that “Galactic Overlord” nonsense, Hazel, you messed up the continuity by killing off four of my standard characters.”

Hazel kept her eye on the spool; it had started to revolve. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got it all worked out. You’ll see.”

“Eh? What do you mean? Are you intending to write more episodes? I’m tempted to go limp and let you struggle with it – I’m sick of it and it would serve you right. Galactic Overlords indeed!”

His mother continued to watch the spinning spool in the telephone. At high speed relay the thirty-minute spool zipped through in thirty seconds. Shortly it went spung! and popped up out of the socket; Hazel breathed relief. The episode was now either in New York, or was being held automatically in the Luna City telephone exchange, waiting for a break in the live Luna-to-Earth traffic. In either case it was out of reach, as impossible to recall as an angry word.

“Certainly I plan to do more episodes,” she told him. “Exactly seven, in fact.” “Huh! Why seven?”

“Haven’t you figured out why I am killing off characters? Seven episodes is the end of this quarter and a new option date. This time they won’t pick up your option because every last one of the characters will be dead and the story will be over. I’m taking you off the hook, son.”

“What? Hazel, you can’t do that! Adventure serials never end.” “Does it say so in your contract?”

“No, but -”

“You’ve been grousing about how you wanted to get off this golden treadmill. You would never have the courage to do it yourself, so your loving mother has come to the rescue. You’re a free man again, Roger.”

“But -” His face relaxed. “I suppose you’re right Though I would prefer to commit suicide, even literary suicide, in my own way and at my own time. Mmm. .. see here, Hazel, when do you plan to kill off John Sterling?”

“Him? Why, Our Hero has to last until the final episode, naturally. He and the Galactic Overlord do each other in at the very end. Slow music.” “Yes. Yes, surely… that’s the way it would have to be. But you can’t do it”

“Why not?”

“Because I insist on writing that scene myself. I’ve hated that mealy-mouthed Galahad ever since I thought him up. I’m not going to let anyone else have the fun of killing him; he’s mine!”

His mother bowed. “Your honour, sir.”

Mr. Stone’s face brightened; he reached for his pouch and slung it over his shoulder. “And now let’s look at some space-ships!” “Geronimo!”

As the four left the apartment and stepped on the slid eway that would take them to the pressure lfft to the surface Pollux said to his grandmother, “Hazel, what does “Geronimo” mean?”

“Ancient Druid phrase meaning “Let’s get out of here even if we have to walk.” So pick up your feet.”

III – THE SECOND-HAND MARKET

They stopped at the Locker Rooms at East Lock and suited up. As usual, Hazel unbelted her gun and strapped it to her vacuum suit. None of the others was armed; aside from civic guards and military police no one went armed in Luna City at this late date except a few of the very old-timers like Hazel herself. Castor said, “Hazel, why do you bother with that?”

“To assert my right. Besides, I might meet a rattlesnake.” “Rattlesnakes? On the Moon? Now, Hazel!”

“’Now, Hazel’” yourself. More rattlesnakes walking around on their hind legs than ever wriggled in the dust. Anyhow, do you remember the reason the White Knight gave Alice for keeping a mouse trap on his horse?”

“Uh, not exactly.”

“Look it up when we get home. You kids are ignorant Give me a hand with this helmet.”

The conversation stopped, as Buster was calling his grandmother and insisting that they start their game. Castor could read her lips through her helmet; when he had his own helmet in place and his suit radio switched on he could hear them arguing about which had the white men last game. Hazel was preoccupied thereafter as Buster, with the chess board in front of him, was intentionally hurrying the moves, whereas Hazel was kept busy visualising the board.

They had to wait at the lock for a load of tourists, just arrived in the morning shuttle from Earth, to spill out. One of two women passengers stopped and stared at them. “Thelma,” she said to her companion, “that little man – he’s wearing a gun.”

The other woman urged her along. “Don’t take notice,” she said. “It’s not polite.” She went on, changing the subject ‘I wonder where we can buy souvenir turtles around here? I promised Herbert.”

Hazel turned and glared at them; Mr. Stone took her arm and urged her into the now empty lock. She continued to fume as the lock cycled. “Groundhogs! Souvenir turtles indeed!”

“Mind your blood pressure, Hazel,” her son advised.

“You mind yours.” She looked up at him and suddenly grinned. “I should ha’ drilled her, podnuh – like this.” She made a fast draw to demonstrate, then, before returning the weapon to its holster, opened the charge chamber and removed a cough drop. This she inserted through the pass valve of her helmet and caught it on her tongue. Sucking it, she continued. “Just the same, son, that did it. Your mind may not be made up; mine is. Luna is getting to be like any other ant hill. I’m going out somewhere to find elbow room, about a quarter of a billion miles of it.”

“How about your pension?”

“Pension be hanged! I got along all right before I had it, Hazel, along with the other remaining Founding Fathers – and mothers – of the lunar colony, had been awarded a lifetime pension from a grateful city. This might be for a long period, despite her age, as the normal human life span under the biologically easy conditions of the Moon’s low gravity had yet to be determined; the Luna city geriatrics clinic regularly revised the estimate upwards.

She continued, “How about you? Are you going to stay here, like a sardine in a can? Better grab your chance, son, before they run you for office again. Oueen to king’s bishop three, Lowell.”

“We’ll see. Pressure is down; let’s get moving.”

Castor and Pollux carefully stayed out of the discussion; things were shaping up.

As well as Dealer Dan’s lot, the government salvage yard and that of the Bankrupt Hungarian were, of course, close by the spaceport The Hungarian’s lot sported an ancient sun-tarnished sign – BARGAINS! BARGAINS!! BARGAINS!!! GOING OUT OF BUSINESS – but there were no bargains there, as Mr. Stone decided in ten minutes and Hazel in five. The government salvage yard held mostly robot freighters without living qnarters – one-trip ships, the interplanetary equivalent of discarded packing cases – and obsolete military craft unsuited for most private uses. They ended up at Ekizian’s lot.

Pollux headed at once for the ship he and his brother had picked out. His father immediately called him back ‘Hey,” Pol! What’s your hurry?” “Don’t you want to see our ship?”

“Your ship? Are you still laboring under the fancy that I am going to let you two refugees from a correction school buy that Deiroiter?”

“Huh? Then what did we come out here for?”

“I want to look at some ships. But I am not interested in a Detroiter VII.”

Pollux said, “Huh! See here, Dad, we aren’t going to settle for a jumpbug. We need a – “The rest of his protest was cut off as Castor reached over

and switched off his walkie-talkie; Castor picked it up:

“What sort of a ship, Dad? Pol and I have looked over most of these heaps, one time or another.” “Well, nothing fancy. A conservative family job. Let’s look at that Hanshaw up ahead.”

Hazel said, “I thought you said Hanshaws were fuel hogs, Roger?” “True, but they are very comfortable. You can’t have everything.” “Why not?”

Pollux had switched his radio back on immediately. He put in, “Dad, we don’t want a runabout. No cargo space.” Castor reached again for his belt switch; he shut up.

But Mr. Stone answered hirn. “Forget about cargo space. You two boys would lose your shirts if you attempted to compete with the sharp traders running around the system. I’m looking for a ship that will let the family make an occasional pleasure trip; I’m not in the market for a commercial freighter.”

Pollux shut up; they all went to the Hanshaw Mr. Stone had pointed out and swarmed up into her control room. Hazel used both hands and feet in climbing the rope ladder but was only a little behind her descendants. Once they were in the ship she went down the hatch into the power room; the others looked over the control roof and the living quarters, combined in one compartment. The upper or bow end was the control station with couches for pilot and co-pilot. The lower or after end had two more acceleration couches for passengers, all four couches were reversible, for the ship could be tumbled in flight, caused to spin end over end to give the ship artificial ‘gravity’ through centrifugal force – in which case the forward direction would be ‘down’, just the opposite of the ‘down’ of flight under power.

Pollux looked over these arrangements with distaste. The notion of cluttering up a ship with gadgetry to coddle the tender stomachs of groundhogs disgusted him. No wonder Hanshaws were fuel hogs!

But his father thought differently. He was happily stretched out in the pilot’s couch, fingering the controls. “This baby might do,” he announced, “if the price is right.”

Castor said, “I thought you wanted this for the family, “I do.”

“Be pretty cramped in here once you rigged extra couches. Edith won’t like that” “You let me worry, about your mother. Anyhow, there are enough couches now. “With only four? How do you figure?”

“Me, your mother, your grandmother, and Buster. If Meade is along we’ll rig something for the baby. By which you may conclude that I am really serious about you two juvenile delinquents finishing your schooling. Now don’t blow your safeties! – I have it in mind that you two can use this crate to run around in after you finish school. Or even during vacations, once you get your unlimited licenses. Fair enough?”

The twins gave him the worst sort of argument to answer; neither of them said anything. Their expressions said everything that was necessary. Their father went on, “See here – I’m trying to be fair and I’m trying to. be generous. But how many boys your age do you know, or have even heard of, who have their own ship? None – right? You should get it through your heads that you are not supermen.”

Castor grabbed at it. “How do you know that we are not “supermen”?”

Poliux followed through with, “Conjecture, pure conjecture.” Before Mr. Stone could think of an effective answer his mother poked her head up the power room hatch. Her expression seemed to say she had whiffed a very bad odor. Mr. Stone said, “What’s the trouble, Hazel? Power plant on the blink?”

“”On the blink”, he says! Why, I wouldn’t lift this clunker at two gravities.” “What’s the matter with it?”

“I never saw a more disgracefully abused – No, I won’t tell you. Inspect it yourself; you don’t trust my engineering ability.” “Now see here, Hazel, I’ve never told you I don’t trust your engineering.”

“No, but you don’t. Don’t try to sweet-talk me; I know. So check the power room yourself. Pretend I haven’t seen it”

Her son turned away and headed for the outer door, saying huffily, “I’ve never suggested that you did not know power plants. If you are talking about that Gantry design, that was ten years ago; by now you should have forgiven me for being right about it.”

To the surprise of the twins Hazel did not continue the argument but followed her son docilely into the air lock. Mr. Stone started down the rope ladder; Castor pulled his grandmother aside, switched off both her radio and pushed his helmet into contact with hers so that he might speak with her in private. “Hazel, what was wrong with the power plant? Pol and I went through this ship last week – I didn’t spot anything too bad.”

Hazel look at him pityingly. “You’ve been losing sleep lately? It’s obvious – only four couches.”

“Oh.” Castor switched on his radio and silently followed his brother and father to the ground.

Etched on the stern of the next ship they visited was Cherub, Roma, Terra, and she actually was of the Carlotti Motors Angel series, though she resembled very little the giant Archangels, She was short – barely a hundred fifty feet high – and slender, and she was at least twenty years old. Mr. Stone had been reluctant to inspect her. “She’s too big for us,” he protested, “and I’m not looking for a cargo ship.”

“Too big how?” Hazel asked ‘”Too big” is a financial term, not a matter of size. And with her cargo hold empty, think how lively she’ll be. I like a ship that jumps when I twist its tail – and so do you.”

“Mmmm, yes,” he admitted. “Well, I suppose it doesn’t cost anything to look her over.” “You’re talking saner every day, son.” Hazel reached for the rope ladder.

The ship was old and old-fashioned and she had plied many a lonely million miles of space, but, thanks to the preservative qualities of the Moon’s airless waste, she had not grown older since the last time her jets bad blasted. She had simply slumbered timelessly, waiting for someone to come along and appreciate her sleeping beauty. Her air had been. salvaged; there was no dust in her compartments. Many of her auxiliary fittings had been stripped and sold, but she herself was bright and clean and spaceworthy.

The light Hazel could see in her son’s eyes she judged to be love at first sight. She hung back and signalled the twins to keep quiet. The open airlock had let them into the living quarters; a galley-saloon, two little staterooms, and a bunkroom. The control room was separate, above them, and was a combined conn. & comm. Roger Stone immediately climbed into it.

Below the quarters was the cargo space and below that the power room. The little ship was a passenger-carrying freighter, conversely a passenger ship with cargo space; it was this dual nature which had landed her, an unwanted orphan, in Dealer Dan’s second-hand lot. Too slow when carrying cargo to compete with the express liners, she could carry too few passengers to make money without a load of freight, Although of sound construction she did not fit into the fiercely competitive business world.

The twins elected to go on down into the power room. Hazel poked around the living quarters, nodded approvingly at the galley, finally climbed up into the control room. There she found her son stretched out in the pilot’s couch and fingering the controls. Hazel promptly swung herself into the co- pilot’s couch, settled down in the bare rack – the pneumatic pads were missing – and turned her head toward Roger Stone. She called out ‘All stations manned and ready, Captain !”

He looked at her and grinned. “Stand by to raise ship!”

She answered, “Board green! Clear from tower! Ready for count off!”

“Minus thirty! Twenty-nine – twenty-eight –“ He broke off and added sheepishly, “It does feel good.”

“You’re dern tootin’ it does. Let’s grab ourselves a chunk of it before we’re too old. This city life is getting us covered with moss.” Roger Stone swung his long legs out of the pilot’s couch. “Um, maybe we should. Yes, we really should.”

Hazel’s booted feet hit the deck plates by his. “That’s my boy! I’ll raise you up to man size yet. Let’s go see what the twins have taken apart.”

The twins were still in the power room. Roger went down first; he said to Castor, “Well, son, how does it look? Will she raise high enough to crash?”

Castor wrinkled his forehead. “We haven’t found anything wrong, exactly, but they’ve taken her boost units out. The pile is just a shell.”

Hazel said, “What do you expect? For ’em to leave “hot” stuff sitting in a decommissioned ship? In time the whole stern would be radioactive, even if somebody didn’t steal it.

Her son answered, “Quit showing off, Hazel, Cas knows that. We’ll check the log data and get a metallurgical report later – if we ever talk business.”

Hazel answered, “King’s knight to queen bishop five. What’s the matter, Roger? Cold feet?”

“No, I like this ship. . . but I don’t know that I can pay for her. And even if she were a gift, it will cost a fortune to overhaul her and get her ready for space.”

“Pooh! I’ll run the overhaul myself, with Cas and Pol to do the dirty work. Won’t cost you anything but dockage. As for the price, we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”

“I’ll supervise the overhaul, myself.”

“Want to fight? Let’s go down and find out just what inflated notions Dan Ekizian has this time. And remember – let me do the talking.” “Now wait a minute – I never said I was going to buy this bucket.”

“Who said you were? But it doesn’t cost anything to dicker. I can make Dan see reason.”

Dealer Dan Ekizian was glad to see them, doubly so when he found that they were interested, not in the Detroiter VII, but in a larger, more

expensive ship. At Hazel’s insistence she and Ekizian went into his inner office alone to discuss prices. Mr. Stone let her get away with it, knowing

that his mother drove a merciless bargain. The twins and he waited outside for quite a while; presently Mr. Ekizian called his office girl in.

She came out a few minutes later, to be followed shortly by Ekizian and Hazel. “It’s all settled,” she announced, looking smug. The dealer smiled grudgingly around his cigar. “Your mother is a very smart woman, Mister Mayor.”

“Take it easy!” Roger Stone protested. “You are both mixed up in your timing. I’m no longer mayor, thank heaven – and nothing is settled yet. What are the terms?”

Ekizian glanced at Hazel, who pursed her lips. “Well, now, son,” she said slowly, “it’s like this. I’m too old a woman to fiddle around. I might die in bed, waiting for you to consider all sides of the question. So I bought it”

“You?”

“For all practical purposes. It’s a syndicate. Dan puts up the ship; I wangle the cargo – and the boys and I take the stuff out to the Asteroids for a fat profit. I’ve always wanted to be a skipper.”

Castor and Pollux had been lounging in the background, listening and watching faces. At Hazel’s announcement Pollux started to speak; Castor caught his eye and shook his head. Mr. Stone said explosively, “That’s preposterous! I won’t let you do it”

“I’m of age, son.” –

“Mr. Ekizian, you must be out of your mind.”

The dealer took his cigar and stared at the end of it. “Business is business.” “Well…at least you won’t get my boys mixed up in it That’s out!”

“Mmm. . . “ said Hazel. “Maybe. Maybe not. Let’s ask them.” “They’re not of age.”

“No. . . not quite. But suppose they went into court and asked that I be appointed their guardian?”

Mr. Stone listened to this quietly, then turned to his sons.’Cas. . . Pol . . . did you frame this with your grandmother?” Pollux answered, “No, sir.”

“Would you do what she suggests?”

Castor answered, “Now, Dad, you know we wouldn’t like to do anything like that.” “But would you do it, eh?”

“I didn’t say so, sir.”

“Hmm – “ Mr. Stone turned back. “This is pure blackmail – and I won’t stand for it. Mr. Ekizian, you knew that I came in here to bid on that ship. You knew that my mother was to bargain for it as my agent. You both knew that – but you made a deal behind my back. Now either you set that so-called deal aside and we start over – or I haul both of you down to the Better Business Bureau.

Hazel was expressionless; Mr. Ekizan examined his rings.

“There’s something in what you say, Mr. Stone. Suppose we go inside and talk it over?” “I think we had better.”

Hazel followed them in and plucked at her son’s sleeve before he had a chance to start anydung. “Roger? You really want to buy this ship?” “I do.”

She pointed to papers spread on Ekizian’s desk. “Then just sign right there and stamp your thumb.”

He picked up the papers instead. They contained no suggestion of the deal Hazel had outlined; instead they conveyed to him all right, title and interest in the vessel he had just inspected, and at a price much lower than he had been prepared to pay. He did some hasty mental arithmetic and concluded that Hazel had not only gotten the ship at scrapmetal prices but also must have bulldozed Ekizian into discounting the price by what it would have cost him to cut the ship up into pieces for salvage.

In dead silence he reached for Mr. Ekizian’s desk stylus, signed his name, then carefully affixed his thumb print. He looked up and caught his mother’s eye. “Hazel, there is no honesty in you and you’ll come to a bad end.”

She smiled. “Roger, you do say the sweetest things.”

Mr. Ekizian sighed. “As I said, Mr. Stone, your mother is a very smart woman. I offered her a partnership.”

“Then there was a deal?”

Oh, no, no, not that deal – I offered her a partnership in the lot.” “But I didn’t take it.” Hazel added. “I want elbow room.”

Roger Stone grinned and shrugged, stood up. “Well, anyway – who’s skipper now?” “You are – Captain.”

As they came out both twins said, “Dad, did you buy it?”

Hazel answered, “Don’t call him “Dad” – he prefers to be called “Captain”.” “Oh.”

“Likewise “Oh”,” Pol repeated.

Dr. Stone’s only comment was, “Yes, dear, I gave them notice on the lease.” Meade was almost incoherent; Lowell was incoherent After dinner Hazel and the twins took Meade and the baby out to see their ship; Dr. Stone – who had shown no excitement even during the Great Meteor Shower

stayed home wrth her husband. He spent the time making lists of things that must be attended to, both in the city and on the ship itself, before they could leave. He finished by making a list that read as follows:

Myself – skipper

Castor – 1st officer & pilot Meade – 2nd officer & asst. cook Hazel – chief engineer

Pollux – asst. eng. & relief pilot Edith – ship’s surgeon & cook Buster – “supercargo”

He stared at it for a while, then said softly to himself, “Something tells me this isn’t going to work.”

II – ASPECTS OF DOMESTIC ENGINEERING

Mr. Stone did not show his ship’s organisation bill to the rest of the family; he knew in his heart that the twins were coming along, but he was not ready to concede it publicly. The subject was not mentioned while they were overhauling the ship and getting it ready for space.

The twins did most of the work with Hazel supervising and their father, from time to time, arguing with her about her engineering decisions. When this happened the twins usually went ahead and did it in the way they thought it ought to be done. Neither of them had much confidence in the skill and knowledge of their elders; along with their great natural talent for mechanics and their general brilliance went a cocksure, half-baked conceit which led them to think that they knew a great deal more than they did.

This anarchistic and unstable condition came to a head over the overhaul of the intermediate injector sequence. Mr. Stone had decreed, with Hazel concurring, that all parts which could be disassembled would so be, interior surfaces inspected, tolerances checked, and gaskets replaced with new ones. The intermediate sequence in this model was at comparatively low pressure; the gasketing was of silicone-silica laminate rather than wrung metal.

Spare gaskets were not available in Luna city, but had to be ordered up from Earth; this Mr. Stone had done. But the old gaskets appeared to be in perfect condition, as Pollux pointed when they opened the sequence. “Hazel, why don’t we put these back in? They look brand new.”

His grandmother took one of the gaskets, looked it over, flexed it, and handed it back. “Lots of life left in it; that’s sure. Keep it for a spare.”

Castor said, “That wasn’t what Pol said. The new gaskets have to be flown from Rome to Pikes Peak, then jumped here. Might be three days, or it might be a week. And we can’t do another thing until we get this mess cleaned up.”

“You can work in the control room. Your father wants all new parts on everything that wears out.” “Oh, bother! Dad goes too much by the book; you’ve said so yourself.”

Hazel looked up at her grandson, bulky in his pressure suit. “Listen, runt, your father is an A-one engineer. I’m privileged to criticise him; you aren’t.”

Pollux cut in hastily, “Just a Sec, Hazel, let’s keep personalities out of this. I want your unbiased professional opinion; are those gaskets fit to put back in, or aren’t they? Cross your heart and shame the devil.”

“Well. . . I say they are fit to use. You can tell your father I said so. He ought to be here any minute now; I expect he will agree.” She straightened up. “I’ve got to go.”

Mr. Stone failed to show up when expected. The twins fiddled around, doing a little preliminarv work on the preheater. Finally Pollux said, “What time is it?”

“Past four.”

“Dad won’t show up this afternoon. Look, those gaskets are all right and, anyhow, two gets you five he’d never know the difference.” “Well – he would okay them if he saw them.”

“Hand me that wrench.”

Hazel did show up again but by then they had the sequence put back together and had opened up the preheater. She did not ask about the injector sequence but got down on her belly with a flashlight and mirror and inspected the preheater’s interior. Her frail body, although still agile as a cricket under the Moon’s weak pull, was not up to heavy work with a wrench, but her eyes were sharper – and much more experienced – than those of the twins. Presently she wiggled out. “Looks good,” she announced. “We’ll put it back together tomorrow. Let’s go see what the cook ruined tonight.” She helped them disconnect their oxygen hoses from the ship’s tank and reconnect to their back packs, then the three went down out of the ship and back to Luna City.

Dinner was monopolised by a hot argument over the next installment of The Scourge of the Spaceways. Hazel was still writing it but the entire family, with the exception of Dr. Stone, felt free to insist on their own notions of just what forms of mayhem. and violence the characters should indulge in next. It was not until his first pipe after dinner that Mr. Stone got around to inquiring about the day’s progress.

Castor explained that they were about to close up the preheater. Mr. Stone nodded. “Moving right along – good! Wait a minute; You’ll just have to tear it down again to put in the – Or did they send those gaskets out to the ship? I didn’t think they had come in yet?”

“What gaskets?” Pollux said innocently. Hazel glanced quickly at him but said nothing. “The gaskets for the intermediate injector sequence, of course.”

“Oh, those!” Pollux shrugged. “They were okay, absolutely perfect to nine decimal places – so we put ’em back in.”

“Oh, you did? That’s interesting. Tomorrow you can take them out again – and I’ll stand over you when you put the new ones in.” Castor took over. “But Dad, Hazel said they were okay!”

Roger Stone looked at his mother. “Well, Hazel?”

She hesitated. She knew that she had not been sufficiently emphatic in telling the twins that their father’s engineering instructions were to be carried out to the letter; on the other hand she had told them to check with him. Or had she? ‘The gaskets were okay, Roger. No harm done.”

He looked at her thoughtfully. “So you saw fit to change my instructions? Hazel, are you itching to be left behind?” She noted the ominously gentle tone of his voice and checked an angry reply. “No,” she said simply.

“”No” what?”

“No, Captain.”

“Not captain yet, perhaps, but that’s the general idea.” He turned to his sons. “I wonder if you two yahoos understand the nature of this situation?”

Castor bit his lip. Pollux looked at his twin, then back at his father. “Dad, you‘re the one who doesn’t understand the nature of the situation. You’re making a fuss over nothing. If it’ll give you any satisfaction, we’ll open it up again – but you’ll simply see that we were right. If you had seen those gaskets, you would have passed them.”

“Probably. Almost certainly. But a skipper’s orders as to how he wants his ship gotten ready for space are not subject to change by a dockyard mechanic – which is what you both rate at the moment. Understand me?”

“Okay, so we should have waited: Tomorrow we’ll open her up, you’ll see that we were right and we’ll close it up again.”

“Wrong. Tomorrow you will go out, open it up, and bring the old gaskets back to me. Then you will both stay right here at home until the new gaskets arrive. You can spend the time contemplating the notion that orders are meant to be carried out.”

Castor said, “Now just a minute, Dad! You’ll put us days behind.”

Pollux added, “Not to mention the hours of work you are making us waste already.” Castor: “You can’t expect us to get the ship ready if you insist on jiggling our elbows!” Pollux: “And don’t forget the money we’re saving you.”

Castor: “Right! It’s not costing you a square shilling!”

Pollux: “And yet you pull this “regulation skipper” act on us.” Castor: “Discouraging! That’s what it is!”

“Pipe down!” Without waiting for them to comply he stood up and grasped each of them by the scruff of his jacket. Luna’s one-sixth gravity permitted him to straight-arm them both; he held them high up off the floor and wide apart. They struggled helplessly, unable to reach anything.

“Listen to me,” he ordered. “Up to now I hadn’t quite decided whether to let you two wild men go along or not. But now my mind’s made up.” There was a short silence from the two, then Pollux said mournfully, “You mean we don’t go?”

“I mean you do go. You need a taste of strict ship’s discipline a durn sight more than you need to go to school; these modern schools aren’t tough enough for the likes of you. I mean to run a taut ship – prompt, cheerful obedience, on the bounce! Or I throw the book at you. Understand me? Castor?”

“Uh, yes, sir.” “Pollux?”

“Ayeaye,sir!”

“See that you remember it. Pull a fast-talk like that on me when we’re in space and I’ll stuff you down each other’s throat.” He cracked their heads together smartly and threw them away.

The next day, on the way back from the field with the old gaskets, the twins stopped for a few minutes at the city library. They spent the four days they had to wait boning up on space law. They found it rather sobering reading, particularly the part which asserted that a commanding officer in space, acting independently, may and must maintain his authority against any who might attempt to usurp or dispute it. Some of the cited cases were quite grisly. They read of a freighter captain who, in his capacity as chief magistrate, had caused a mutineer to be shoved out an airlock, there to rupture his lungs in the vacuum of space, drown in his own blood

Pollux made a face. “Grandpa,” he inquired, “how would you like to be spaced?” “No future in it. Thin stuff, vacuum. Low vitamin content”

“Maybe we had better be careful not to irritate Dad. This “captain” pose has gone to his head.”

“It’s no pose. Once we raise ship it’s legal as church on Sunday. But Dad won’t space us, no matter what we do.”

“Don’t count on it. Dad is a very tough hombre when he forgets that he’s a loving father” “Junior, you worry too much.”

“So? When you feel the pressure drop remember what I said.”

It had been early agreed that the ship could not stay the Cherub. There had been no such agreement on what the new name should be. After several noisy arguments Dr. Stone, who herself had no special preference, suggested that they place a box on the dining table into which proposed names might be placed without debate. For one week the slips accumulated; then the box was opened.

Dr. Stone wrote them down:

Dauntless Icarus

Jabberwock Susan B. Anthony

H. M. S. Pinafore Iron Duke

The Clunker Morning Star Star Wagon Tumbleweed

Go-Devil Oom Paul

Onward Viking

“One would think,” Roger grumbled, “that with all the self-declared big brains there are around this table someone would show some originality. Almost every name on the list can be found in the Big Register – half of them for ships still in commission. I move we strike out those tired, second- hand, wed-before names and consider only fresh ones.”

Hazel looked at him suspiciously. “What ones will that leave?” “Well -”

“You’ve looked them up, haven’t you? I thought I caught you sneaking a look at the slips before breakfast.” “Mother, “your allegation is immaterial, irrelevant, and unworthy of you.”

“But true. Okay; let’s have a vote. Or does someone want to make a campaign speech?”

Dr. Stone rapped on the table with her thimble. “We’ll vote. I’ve still got a medical association meeting to get to tonight.” As chairman she ruled that any name receiving less than two votes in the first round would be eliminated. Secret ballot was used; when Meade canvassed the vote, seven names had gotten one vote each, none had received two.

Roger Stone pushed back his chair. “Agreement from this family is too much to expect . I’m going to bed. Tomorrow morning I’m going to register her as the R. S. Deadlock.”

“Daddy, you wouldn’t!” Meade protested.

“Just watch me. The R. S. Hair Shirt might be better. Or the R. S. Madhouse.” “Not bad,” agreed Hazel. “It sounds like us. Never a dull moment.”

“I, for one,” retorted her son, “could stand a little decent monotony.” “Rubbish! We thrive on trouble. Do you want to get covered with moss?” “What’s “moss”, Grandma Hazell?” Lowell demanded.

“Huh? It’s. . . well, it’s what rolling stones don’t gather.”

Roger snapped his fingers. “Hazel, you’ve just named the ship.” “Eh? Come again.”

“The Rolling Stones. No, the Rolling Stone.”

Dr. Stone glanced up. “I like that, Roger.” “Meade?”

“Sounds good, Daddy.” “Hazel?”

“This is one of your brighter days, son.”

“Stripped of the implied insult, I take it that means “yes.”“

“I don’t like it,” objected Pollux. “Castor and I plan to gather quite a bit of moss.”

“It’s four to three, even if you get Buster to go along with you and your accomplice. Overruled. The Roiling Stone it is.”

Despite their great sizes and tremendous power spaceships are surprisingly simple machines. Every technology goes through three stages: first, a crudely simple and quite unsatisfactory gadget; second, an enormously complicated group of gadgets designed to overcome the shortcomings of the original and achieving thereby somewhat satisfactory performance through extremely complex compromise; third, a final stage of smooth simplicity and efficient performance based on correct under-standing of natural laws and proper design therefrom.

In transportation, the ox cart and the rowboat represent the first stage of technology.

The second stage might well be represented by the automobiles of the middle twentieth century just before the opening of interplanetary travel. These unbelievable museum pieces were for the time fast, sleek and powerful -. but inside their skins were assembled a preposterous collection of mechanical buffoonery. The prime mover for such a juggernaut might have rested in one’s lap; the rest of the mad assembly consisted of afterthoughts intended to correct the uncorrectable, to repair the original basic mistake in design – for automobiles and even the early aeroplanes were ‘powered’ (if one may call it that) by ‘reciprocating engines.”

A reciprocating engine was a collection of miniature heat engines using (in a basically inefficient cycle) a small percentage of an exothermic chemical reaction, a reaction which was started and stopped every split second. Much of the heat was intentionally thrown away into a ‘water jacket’ or ‘cooling system,” then wasted into the atmosphere through a heat exchanger.

What little was left caused blocks of metal to thump foolishly back-and-forth (hence the name ‘reciprocating’) and thence through a linkage to cause a shaft and flywheel to spin around. The flywheel (believe it if you can) had no gyroscopic function; it was used to store kinetic energy in a futile attempt to cover up the sins of reciprocation. The shaft at long last caused wheels to turn and thereby propelled this pile of junk over the countryside.

The prime mover was used only to accelerate and to overcome ‘friction’ – a concept then in much wider engineering use. To decelerate, stop, or turn the heroic human operator used their own muscle power, multiplied precariously through a series of levers.

Despite the name ‘automobile’ these vehicles had no autocontrol circuits; control, such as it was, was exercised second by second for hours on end by a human being peering out through a small pane of dirty silica glass, and judging unassisted and often disastrously his own motion and those of other objects. In almost all cases the operator had no notion of the kinetic energy stored in his missile and could not have written the basic equation. Newton’s Laws of Motion were to him mysteries as profound as the meaning of the universe.

Nevertheless millions of these mechanical jokes swarmed over our home planet, dodging each other by inches or failing to dodge. None of them ever worked right; by their nature they could not work right; and they were constantly getting out of order. Their operators were usually mightily pleased when they worked at all. When they did not, which was every few hundred miles (hundred, not hundred thousand) they hired a member of a social class of arcane specialists to make inadequate and always expensive temporary repairs.

Despite their mad shortcomings, these ‘automobiles’ were the most characteristic form of wealth and the most cherished possessions of their time. Three whole generations were slaves to them.

The Rolling Stone was the third stage of technology. Her power plant was nearly 100% efficient, and, save for her gyro-scopes, she contained almost no moving parts – the power plant used no moving parts at all; a rocket engine is the simplest of all possible heat engines. Castor and Pollux might have found themselves baffled by the legendary Model-T Ford automobile, but the Roiling Stone was not nearly that complex, she was

merely much larger. Many of the fittings they had to handle were very massive, but the Moon’s one-sixth gravity was an enormous advantage; only occasionally did they have to resort to handling equipment.

Having to wear a vacuum suit while doing mechanic’s work was a handicap but they were not conscious of it. They had worn space suits whenever they were outside the pressurised underground city since before they could remember; they worked in them and wore them without thinking about them, as their grandfather had worn overalls. They conducted the entire overhaul without pressurising the ship because it was such a nuisance to have to be forever cycling an airlock, dressing and undressing, whenever they wanted anything outside the ship.

An IBM company representative from the city installed the new ballistic computer and ran it in, but after he had gone the boys took it apart and checked it throughout themselves, being darkly suspicious of any up-check given by a manufacturer’s employee. The ballistic computer of a space ship has to be right; without perfect performance from it a ship is a mad robot, certain to crash and kill its passengers. The new computer was of the standard ‘I-tell-you-three-times’ variety, a triple brain each third of which was capable of solving the whole problem; if one triplet failed, the other two would out-vote it and cut it off from action, permitting thereby at least one perfect landing and a chance to correct the failure.

The twins made personally sure that the multiple brain was sane in all its three lobes, then, to their disgust, their father and grandmother checked everything that they had done.

The last casting had been x-rayed, the last metallurgical report had been received from the spaceport laboratories, the last piece of tubing had been reinstalled and pressure tested; it was time to move the Rolling Stone from Dan Ekizian’s lot to the port, where a technician of the Atomic Energy Commission – a grease monkey with a Ph.D – would install and seal the radioactive bricks which fired her ‘boiler.” There, too, she would take on supplies and reactive mass, stablised mon-atomic hydrogen; in a pinch the Rolling Stone could eat anything, but she performed best on ‘single-H.”

The night before the ship was to be towed to the spaceport the twins tackled their father on a subject dear to their hearts – money. Castor made an indirect approach. “See here, Dad, we want to talk with you seriously.”

“So? Wait till I phone my lawyer.”

“Aw, Dad! Look, we just want to know whether or not you’ve made up your mind where we are going?”

“Eh? What do you care? I’ve already promised you that it will be some place new to you. We won’t go to Earth, nor to Venus, not this trip.” “Yes, but where?”

“I may just close my eyes, set up a prob on the computer by touch, and see what happens. If the prediction takes us close to any rock bigger than the ship, we’ll scoot off and have a look at it. That’s the way to enjoy travelling.”

Pollux said, “But, Dad, you can’t load a ship if you don’t know where it’s going.”

Castor glared at him; Roger Stone stared at him. “Oh,” he said slowly, “I begin to see. But don’t worry about it. As skipper, it is my responsibility to see that we have whatever we need aboard before we blast.”

Dr. Stone said quietly, “Don’t tease them, Roger.” “I’m not teasing.”

“You’re managing to tease me, Daddy,” Meade said suddenly. “Let’s settle it. I vote for Mars.” Hazel said, “The deuce it ain’t!”

“Pipe down, Mother. Time was, when the senior male member of a family spoke, everybody did what he -” “Roger, if you think I am going to roll over and play dead-”

“I said, “pipe down.” But everybody in this family thinks it’s funny to try to get around Pop. Meade sweet-talks me. The twins fast-talk me. Buster yells until he gets what he wants. Hazel bullies me and pulls seniority.” He looked at his wife. “You, too, Edith. You give in until you get your own way.”

“Yes, dear.”

“See what I mean? You all think papa is a schnook. But I’m not. I’ve got a soft head, a pliable nature, and probably the lowest I.Q. in the family, but this clambake is going to be run to suit me.”

“What’s a clambake?” Lowell wanted to know. “Keep your child quiet, Edith.”

“Yes, dear.”

“I’m going on a picnic, a wanderjahr. Anyone who wants to come along is invited. But I refuse to deviate by as much as a million miles from whatever trajectory suits me. I bought this ship from money earned in spite of the combined opposition of my whole family; I did not touch one thin credit of the money I hold in trust for our two young robber barons – and I don’t propose to let them run the show.”

Dr. Stone said quietly, “They merely asked where we were going. I would like to know, too.” “So they did. But why? Castor, you want to know so that you can figure a cargo, don’t you?”

“Well – yes. Anything wrong with that? Unless we know what market we’re taking it to, we won’t know what to stock.” “True enough. But I don’t recall authorising any such commercial ventures. The Rolling Stone is a family yacht.” Pollux cut in with, “For the love of Pete, Dad! With all that cargo space just going to waste, you’d think that -”

“An empty hold gives us more cruising range.” “But -”

“Take it easy. This subject is tabled for the moment. What do you two propose to do about your education?”

Castor said, “I thought that was settled. You said we could go along.”

“That part is settled. But we’ll be coming back this way in a year or two. Are you prepared to go down to Earth to school then – and stay there – until you get your degrees?”

The twins looked at each other; neither one of them said anything. Hazel butted in: “Quit being so offensively orthodox, Roger. I’ll take over their education. I’ll give them the straight data. What they taught me in school darn near ruined me, before I got wise and started teaching myself.”

Roger Stone looked bleakly at his mother. “You would teach them, all right. No, thanks, I prefer a somewhat more normal approach.” “”Normal!” Roger, that’s a word with no meaning.”

“Perhaps not, around here. But I’d like the twins to grow up as near normal as possible.”

“Roger, have you ever met any normal people? I never have. The so-called normal man is a figment of the imagination; every member of the human race, from Jojo the cave man right down to that final culmination of civilisation, namely me, has been as eccentric as a pet coon – once you caught him with his mask off.”

“I won’t dispute the part about yourself.”

“It’s true for everybody. You try to make the twins “normal” and you’ll simply stunt their growth.” Roger Stone stood up. “That’s enough. Castor, Pollux – come with me. Excuse us, everybody.” “Yes, dear.”

“Sissy,” said Hazel. “I was just warming up to my rebuttal.” He led them into his study, closed the door. “Sit down.”

The twins did so. “Now we can settle this quietly. Boys, I’m quite serious about your education. You can do what you like with your lives – turn pirate or get elected to the Grand Council. But I won’t let you grow up ignorant.”

Castor answered, “Sure, Dad, but we do study. We study all the time. You’ve said yourself that we are better engineers than half the young snots that come up from Earth.”

“Granted. But it’s not enough. Oh, you can learn most things on your own but I want you to have a formal, disciplined, really sound grounding in mathematics.”

“Huh? Why, we cut our teeth on differential equations!”

Pollux added, “We know Hudson’s Manual by heart We can do a triple integration in our heads faster than Hazel can. If there’s one thing we do

know, it’s mathematics.”

Roger Stone shook his head sadly. “You can count on your fingers but you can’t reason. You probably think that the interval from zero to one is the same as the interval from ninety-nine to one hundred.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Is it? If so, can you prove it?” Their father reached up to the spindles on the wall, took down a book spool, and inserted it in the to his study projector. He spun the selector, stopped with a page displayed on the wall screen. It was a condensed chart of fields of mathematics invented, thus far by the human mind. “Let’s see you find your way around that page.”

The twins blinked at it. In the upper left-hand corner of the chart they spotted the names of subjects they had studied; the rest of the array was unknown territory; in most cases they did not even recognise the names of the subjects. In the ordinary engineering forms of the calculus they actually were adept; they had not been boasting. They knew enough of vector analysis to find their way around unassisted in electrical engineering and electronics; they knew classical geometry and trigonometry well enough for the astrogating of a space ship, and they had had enough of non- Euclidean geometry, tensor calculus, statistical mechanics, and quantum theory to get along with an atomic power plant

But it had never occurred to them that they had not yet really penetrated the enormous and magnificent field of mathematics. “Dad,” asked Pollux in a small voice, “what’s a “hyperideal”?”

“Time you found out.”

Castor looked quickly at his father. “How many of these things have you studied, Dad?” “Not enough. Not nearly enough. But my sons should know more than I do.”

It was agreed that the twins would study mathematics intensively the entire time the family was in space, and not simply under the casual supervision of their father and grandmother but formally and systematically through I.C.S. correspondence courses ordered up from Earth. They

would take with them spools enough to keep them busy for at least a year and mail their completed lessons from any port they might touch. Mr.

Stone was satisfied, being sure in his heart that any person skilled with mathematical tools could learn anything else he needed to know, with or without a master.

“Now, boys, about this matter of cargo-”

The twins waited; he went on: “I’ll lift the stuff for you -” “Gee, Dad, that’s swell!”

“- at cost.”

“You figure it and I’ll check your figures. Don’t try to flummox me or I’ll stick on a penalty. If you’re going to be businessmen, don’t confuse the vocation with larceny.”

“Right, sir. Uh. . . we still can’t order until we know where we are going.” “True. Well, how would Mars suit you, as the first stop?”

“Mars?” Both boys got far-away looks in their eyes; their lips moved soundlessly. “Well? Quit figuring your profits; you aren’t there yet”

“Mars? Mars is fine, Dad!”

“Very well. One more thing: fail to keep up your studies and I won’t let you sell a tin whistle.”

“Oh, we’ll study!” The twins ‘got out while they were ahead. Roger Stone looked at the closed door with a fond smile on his face, an expression he rarely let them see, Good boys! Thank heaven he hadn’t been saddled with a couple of obedient, well-behaved little nincompoops!

When the twins reached their own room Castor got down the general catalog of Four Planets Export. Pollux said, “Cas?” “Don’t bother me.”

“Have you ever noticed that Dad always gets pushed around until he gets his own way?” “Sure. Hand me that slide rule.”

III – BICYCLES AND BLAST-OFF

The Rolling Stone was moved over to the spaceport by the port’s handling & spotting crew – over the protests of the twins, who wanted to rent a tractor and dolly and do it themselves. They offered to do so at half price, said price to be applied against freightage on their trade goods to Mars.

“Insurance?” inquired their father. “Well, not exactly,” Pol answered.

“W’e’d carry our own risk,” added Castor. “After all, we’ve got assets to cover it.”

But Roger Stone was not to be talked into it; he preferred, not unreasonably, to have the ticklish job done by bonded professionals. A spaceship on the ground is about as helpless and unwieldly as a beached whale. Sitting on her tail fins with her bow pointed at the sky and with her gyros dead a ship’s precarious balance is protected by her lateral jacks, slanting down in three directions. To drag her to a new position requires those jacks to be raised clear of the ground, leaving the ship ready to topple, vulnerable to any jar. The Rolling Stone had to be moved thus through a pass in the hills to the port ten miles away. First she was jacked higher until her fins were two feet off the ground, then a broad dolly was backed under her; to this she was clamped. The bottom handler ran the tractor; the top handler took position in the control room. With his eyes on a bubble level, his helmet hooked by wire phone to his mate, he nursed a control stick which let him keep the ship upright. A hydraulic mercury capsule was under each fin of the ship; by tilting the stick the top handler could force pressure into any capsule to offset any slight irregularity in the road.

The twins followed the top handler up to his station. “Looks easy,” remarked Pol while the handler tested his gear with the jack still down.

“It is easy,” agreed the handler, “provided you can out-guess the old girl and do the opposite of what she does – only do it first. Get out now; we’re ready to start.”

“Look, Mister,” said Castor, we want to learn how. We’ll hold still and keep quiet.”

“Not even strapped down – you might twitch an eyebrow and throw me half a degree off.” “Well, for the love of Pete!” complained Pollux. “Whose ship do you think this is?”

“Mine, for the time being,” the man answered without rancor. “Now do you prefer to climb down, or simply be kicked clear of the ladder?”

The twins climbed out and clear, reluctantly but promptly. The Rolling Stone, designed for the meteoric speeds of open space, took off for the spaceport at a lively two miles an hour. It took most of a Greenwich day to get her there. There was a bad time in the pass when a slight moonquake set her to rocking, but the top handler had kept her jacks lowered as far as the terrain permitted. She bounced once on number-two jack, then he caught her and she resumed her stately progress.

Seeing this, Pollux admitted to Castor that he was glad they had not gotten the contract. He was beginning to realise that this was an estoric skill, like glassblowing or chipping flint arrowheads. He recalled stories of the Big Quake of ’31 when nine ships had toppled.

No more temblors were experienced save for the microscopic shivers Luna continually experiences under the massive tidal strains of her eighty- times-heavier cousin Terra. The Rolling Stone rested at last on a launching flat on the east side of Leyport, her jet pointed down into splash baffles. Fuel bricks, water, and food, and she was ready to go – anywhere.

The mythical average man needs three and a half pounds of food each day, four pounds of water (for drinking, not washing), and thirty-four pounds of air. By the orbit most economical of fuel, the trip to Mars from the Earth-Moon system takes thirty-seven weeks. Thus it would appear that the seven rolling Stones would require some seventy-five thousand pounds of consumable supplies for the trip, or about a ton a week.

Fortunately the truth was brighter or they would never have raised ground. Air and water in a space ship can be used over and over again with suitable refreshing, just as they can be on a planet. Uncounted trillions of animals for uncounted millions of years have breathed the air of Terra and drunk of her streams, yet air of Earth is still fresh and her rivers still run full. The Sun sucks clouds up from the ocean brine and drops it as sweet rain; the plants swarming over the cool green hills and lovely plains of Earth take the carbon dioxide of animal exhalation from the winds and convert it into carbohydrates, replacing it with fresh oxygen.

With suitable engineering a spaceship can be made to behave in the same way.

Water is distilled; with a universe of vacuum around the ship, low-temperature, low-pressure distillation is cheap and easy. Water is no problem – or, rather, shortage of water is no problem. The trick is to get rid of excess, for the human body creates water as one of the by-prodncts of its metabolism, in ‘burning’ the hydrogen in food. Carbon dioxide can be replaced by oxygen through ‘soilless’ gardening’ – hydroponics. Short-jump ships, such as the Earth-Moon shuttles, do not have such equipment, any more than a bicycle has staterooms or a galley, but the Rolling Stone, being a deep-space vessel, was equipped to do these things.

Instead of forty-one and a half pounds of supplies per person per day the Rolling Stone could get along with two; as a margin of safety and for luxury she carried about three, or a total of about eight tons, which included personal belongings. They would grow their own vegetables en route; most foods carried along would be dehydrated. Meade wanted them to carry shell eggs, but she was overruled both by the laws of physics and her mother – dried eggs weigh so very much less.

Baggage included a tossed salad of books as well as hundreds of the more usual flim spools. The entire family, save the twins tended to be old-

fashioned about books; they liked books with covers, volumes one could hold in the lap. Film spools were not quite the same.

Roger Stone required his sons to submit lists of what they proposed to carry to Mars for trade. The first list thus submitted caused him to call them into conference. “Castor, would you mind explaining this proposed manifest to me?”

“Huh? What is there to explain? Pol wrote it up. I thought it was clear enough.” “I’m afraid it’s entirely too clear. Why all this copper tubing?”

“Well, we picked it up as scrap. Always a good market for copper on Mass.” “You mean you’ve already bought it?”

“Oh, no. We just put down a little to hold it.” “Same for the valves and fittings I suppose?” “Yes, sir.”

“That’s good. Now these other items – cane sugar, wheat, dehydrated potatoes, polished rice. How about those?” Pollux answered. “Cas thought we ought to buy hardware; I favored foodstuffs. So compromised.”

“Why did you pick the foods you did?”

“Well, they’re all things they grow in the city’s air-conditioning tanks, so they’re cheap. No Earth imports on the list, you noticed.” “I noticed.”

“But most of the stuff we raise here carries too high a percentage of water. You wouldn’t want to carry cucumbers to Mars, would you?” “I don’t want to carry anything to Mars; I’m just going for the ride.” Mr. Stone put down the cargo list, picked up another. “Take a look at this.” Pollux accepted it gingerly. “What about it?”

“I used to be a pretty fair mechanic myself. I got to wondering just what one could build from the ‘hardware’ you two want to ship. I figure I could build a fair-sized still. With the “foodstuffs” you want to take a man would be in a position to make anything from vodka to grain alcohol. But I don’t suppose you two young innocents noticed that?”

Castor looked at the list. “Is that so?”

“Hmm – Tell me: did you plan to sell this stuff to the government import agency, or peddle it on the open market?” “Well, Dad, you know you can’t make much profit unless you deal on the open market.”

“So I thought. You didn’t expect me to notice what the stuff was good for – and you didn’t expect the customs agents on Mars to notice, either.” He looked them over. “Boys, I intend to try to keep you out of prison until you are of age. After that I’ll try to come to see you. each visiting day.” He chucked the list back at them. “Guess again. And bear in mind that we raise ship Thursday – and that I don’t care whether we carry cargo or not.”

Pollux said, “Oh, for pity’s sake, Dad! Abraham Lincoln used to sell whiskey. They taught us that in history. And Winston Churchill used to drink it.” “And George Washington kept slaves,” his father agreed. “None of which has anything to do with you two. So scram!”

They left his study and passed through the living room; Hazel was there. She cocked a brow at them. “Did you get away with it?” “No.”

She stuck out a hand, palm up. “Pay me. And next time don’t bet that you can outsmart your Pop. He’s my boy.”

Cas and Pol settled on bicycles as their primary article of export. On both Mars and Luna prospecting by bicycle was much more efficient than prospecting on foot; on the Moon the old-style rock sleuth with nothing but his skis and Shank’s ponies to enable him to scout the area where he had landed his jumpbug had almost disappeared; all the prospectors took bicycles along as a matter of course, just as they carried climbing ropes and spare oxygen. In the Moon’s one-sixth gravity it was an easy matter to shift the bicycles to one’s back and carry it over any obstacle to further progress.

Mars’ surface gravity is more than twice that of Luna, but it is still only slightly more than one-third Earth normal, and Mars is a place of flat plains and very gentle slopes; a cyclist could maintain fifteen to twenty miles an hour. The solitary prospector, deprived of his traditional burro, found the bicycle an acceptable and reliable, if somewhat less congenial, substitute. A miner’s bike would have looked odd in the streets of Stockholm; over- sized wheels, doughnut sand tires, towing yoke and trailer, battery trickle charger, two-way radio, saddle bags, and Geiger-counter mount made it not the vehicle for a spin in the perk – but on Mars or on the Moon it fitted its purpose the way a canoe fits a Canadian stream.

Both planets imported their bicycles from Earth – until recently. Lunar Steel Products Corporation had lately begun making steel tubing, wire, and extrusions from native ore; Sears & Montgomery had subsidised an assembly plant to manufacture miner’s bikes on the Moon under the trade

name ‘Lunocycle’ and Looney bikes, using less than twenty per cent. by weight of parts raised up from Earth, undersold imported bikes by half.

Castor and Pollux decided to buy up second-hand bicycles which were consequently flooding the market and ship them to Mars. In interplanetary trade cost is always a matter of where a thing is gravity-wise – not how far away. Earth is a lovely planet but all her products lie at the bottom of a very deep ‘gravity well,” deeper than that of Venus, enormously deeper than Luna’s. Although Earth and Luna average exactly the same distance from Mars in miles, Luna is about five miles per second ‘closer’ to Mars in terms of fuel and shipping cost.

Roger Stone released just enough of their assets to cover the investment. They were still loading their collection of tired bikes late Wednesday afternoon, with Cas weighing them in, Meade recording for him, and Pol hoisting. Everything else had been loaded; trial weight with the crew aboard would be taken by the port weightmaster as soon as the bicycles were loaded Roger Stone supervised the stowing, he being personally responsible for the ship being balanced on take off.

Castor and he went down to help Pol unload the last flat. “Some of these seem hardly worth shipping,” Mr. Stone remarked. “Junk, if you ask me,” added Meade.

“Nobody asked you,” Pol told her.

“Keep a civil tongue in your head,” Meade answered sweetly, “or go find yourself another secretary.”

“Stow it, Junior,” admonished Castor. “Remember she’s working free. Dad, I admit they aren’t much to look at, but wait a bit. Pol and I will overhaul them and paint them in orbit. Plenty of time to do a good job – like new.”

“Mind you don’t try to pass them off as new. But it looks to me as if you had taken too big a bite. When we get these inside and clamped down, there won’t be room enough in the hold to swing a cat, much less do repair work. If you were thinking of monopolising the living space, consider it vetoed.”

“Why would anyone want to swing a cat?” asked Meade. “The cat wouldn’t like it. Speaking of that, why don’t we take a cat?” “No cats,” her father replied. “I travelled with a cat once and I was in executive charge of its sand box. No cats.”

“Please, Cap’n Daddy! I saw the prettiest little kitten over at the Haileys’ yesterday and -”

“No cats. And don’t call me “Captain Daddy.” One or the other, but the combination sounds silly.” “Yes, Captain Daddy.”

“We weren’t planning on using the living quarters.” Castor answered. “Once we are in orbit we’ll string ’em outside and set up shop in the hold. Plenty of room.”

A goodly portion of Luna City came out to see them off. The current mayor, the Honorable Thomas Beasley, was there to say good-by to Roger Stone; the few surviving members of the Founding Fathers turned out to honor Hazel. A delegation from the Junior League and what appeared to be approximately half of the male members of the senior class of City Tech showed up to mourn Meade’s departure. She wept and hugged them all, but kissed none of them; kissing while wearing a space suit is a futile, low-caloric business.

The twins were attended only by a dealer who wanted his payment and wanted it now and wanted it in full.

Earth hung in half phase over them and long shadows of the Obelisk Mountains stretched over most of the field. The base of the Rolling Stone was floodlighted; her slender bow thrust high above the circle of brightness. Beyond her, masking the far side of the field, the peaks of Rodger Young Range were still shining in the light of the setting Sun. Glorious Orion glittered near Earth; north and east of it, handle touching the horizon, was the homely beauty of the Big Dipper. The arching depth of sky and the mighty and timeless monuments of the Moon dwarfed the helmeted, squatty figures at the base of the spaceship.

A searchlight on the distant control tower pointed at them; blinked red three times. Hazel turned to her son. “Thirty minutes, Captain.”

“Right.” He whistled into his microphone. “Silence, everyone! Please keep operational silence until you are underground Thanks for coming, everybody. Good-by!”

“Bye, Rog!” “Good trip, folks!” “Aloha!”

“Hurry back”

Their friends started filing down a ramp mto one of the field tunnels; Mr. Stone turned to his family. “Thirty minutes. Man the ship!” “Aye aye, sir.”

Hazel started up the ladder with Pollux after her. She stopped suddenly, backed down and stepped on his fingers. “Out of my way, youngster!” She jumped down and ran toward the group disappearing down the ramp. “Hey, Tom! Beasley! Wait! Half a mo-”

The mayor paused and turned around; she thrust a package into his hand. “Mail this stuff for me?” “Certainly, Hazel.”

“That’s a good boy. ‘Bye!”

She came back to the ship; her son inquired, “What was the sudden crisis, Hazel?”

“Six episodes. I stay up all night getting them ready. . . then I didn’t even notice I still had ’em until I had trouble climbing with one hand.” “Sure your head’s on tight?”

“None of your lip, boy.” “Get in the ship.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Once they were all inboard the port’s weightmaster made his final check, reading the scales on the launching flat under each fin, adding them together. “Two and seven-tenths pounds under, Captain. Pretty close figuring.” He fastened trim weights in that amount to the foot of the ladder. “Take it up.”

“Thank you, sir.” Roger Stone hauled up the ladder, gathered in the trim weights, and closed the door of the air lock. He let himself into the ship proper, closed and dogged the inner door behind him, then stuck his head up into the control room. Castor was already in the co-pilot’s couch. “Time?”

“Minus seventeen minutes, Captain.”

“She tracking?” He reached out and set the trim weights on a spindle at the central axis of the ship.

“Pretty as could be.” The main problem and the exact second of departure had been figured three weeks earlier; there is only one short period every twenty-six months when a ship may leave the Luna-Terra system for Mars by the most economical orbit. After trial weight had been taken the day before Captain Stone had figured his secondary problem, i.e., how much thrust for how long a period was required to put this particular ship into that orbit. It was the answer to this second problem which Castor was now tracking in the automatic pilot.

The first leg of the orbit would not be towards Mars but toward Earth, with a second critical period, as touchy as the take off, as they rounded Earth. Captain Stone frowned at the thought, then shrugged; that worry had to come later. “Keep her tracking. I’m going below.”

He went down into the power room, his eyes glancing here and there as he went. Even to a merchant skipper, to whom it is routine, the last few minutes before blast-off are worry making. Blast-off for a spaceship has a parachute-jump quality; once you jump it is usually too late to correct any oversights. Space skippers suffer nightmares about misplaced decimal points.

Hazel and Pollux occupied the couches of the chief and assistant. Stone stuck his head down without going down. “Power Room?” “She’ll be ready. I’m letting her warm slowly.”

Dr. Stone, Meade, and Buster were riding out the lift in the bunkroom, for company; he stuck his head in. “Everybody okay?”

His wife looked up from her couch. “Certainly, dear. Lowell has had his injection.” Buster was stretched out on his back, strapped down and sleeping. He alone had never experienced acceleration thrust and free falling; his mother had decided to drug him lest he be frightened.

Roger Stone looked at his least son. “I envy him.” Meade sat up. “Head pretty bad, Daddy?”

“I’ll live. But today I regard farewell parties as much overrated affairs, especially for the guest of honor.” The horn over his head said in Castor’s voice, “Want me to boost her, Dad? I feel fine.”

“Mind your own business, co-pilot. She still tracking?” “Tracking, sir. Eleven minutes.”

Hazel’s voice came out of the horn. ” ‘The wages of sin are death’.”

“Look who’s talking! No more unauthorised chatter over the intercom. That’s an order.” “Aye aye, Captain.”

He started to leave; his wife stopped him. “I want you to take this, dear.” She held out a capsule. “I don’t need it.”

“Take it.”

“Yes, Doctor darling.” He swallowed it, made a face, and went up to the control room. As he climbed into his couch he said, “Call tower for clearance.”

“Aye aye, sir. Rolling Stone, Luna City registry, to Tower – request clearance to lift according to approved plan.” “Tower to Rolling Stone – you are cleared to lift”

“Rolling Stone to Tower – roger!” Castor answered. Captain Stone looked over his board. All green, except one red light from power room which would not wink green until he told his mother to unlock the safety on the cadmium damper plates. He adjusted the microvernier on his tracking indicator, satisfied himself that the auto-pilot was tracking to perfection as Castor had reported. “All stations, report in succession -power room !”

“She’s sizzling, Skipper!” came back Hazel’s reply. “Passengers!”

“We’re ready, Roger.” “Co-pilot!”

“Clear and green, sir! Check off completed. Five minutes.” “Strap down and report!”

“Power gang strapped.” – “We’re strapped, dear.” – “Strapped, sir all stations.” “Power room, unlock for lift.”

The last red light on his board winked green as Hazel reported, “Power board unlocked, Skipper. Ready to blast.” Another voice followed hers, more softly: “Now I lay me down to sleep -”

“Shut up, Meade!” Roger Stone snapped. “Co-pilot, commence the count!”

Castor started singsonging: “Minus two minutes ten. . . minus two minutes. . . minus one minute fifty. . . minus one minute forty -”

Roger Stone felt his blood begin to pound and wished heartily that he had had the sense to come home early, even if the party had been in his honor.

“Minus one minute!. . . minus fifty-five. . . minus fifty -”

He braced his right hand with his forefinger over the manual firing key, ready to blast if the auto-pilot should fail – then quickly took it away. This was no military vessel! If it failed to fire, the thing to do was to cancel – not risk his wife and kids with imperfect machinery. After all, he held only a private license – “Minus thirty-five. . . half minute!”

His head felt worse. Why leave a warm apartment to bounce around in a tin covered wagon? “Twenty-eight, twenty–sev‘n, twenty-six -”

Well, if anything went wrong, at least there wouldn’t be any little orphans left around. The whole Stone family was here, root and branch. The rolling Stones –

“Nineteen. . . eighteen. . . seventeen -,

He didn’t fancy going back and meeting all those people who had just come out to say good-by – telling them, “It’s like this: we swung and we missed -”

“Twelve! Eleven! and ten! and nine! “

He again placed his forefinger over the manual button, ready to stab. “And five!

“And four!

“And three! “And two!

“And – “ Castor’s chant was blanked out by the blazing ‘white noise’ of the jet; the Rolling Stone cast herself into the void.

– BALLISIICS AND BUSTER

Blasting off from Luna is not the terrifying and oppressive experience that a lift from Earth is. The Moon’s field is so weak, her gravity well so shallow, that a boost of one-g would suffice – just enough to produce Earth-normal weight.

Captain Stone chose to use two gravities, both to save time and to save fuel by getting quickly away from Luna – “quickly’ because any reactive mass spent simply to hold a spaceship up against the pull of a planet is an ‘overhead’ cost; it does nothing toward getting one where one wants to go. Furthermore, while the Rolling Stone would operate at low thrust she could do so only by being very wasteful of reactive mass, i.e., by not letting the atomic pile heat the hydrogen hot enough to produce a really efficient jet speed.

So he caused the Stone to boost at two gravities for slightly over two minutes. Two gravities – a mere nothing! The pressure felt by a wrestler pinned to the mat by the body of his opponent – the acceleration experienced by a child in a school-yard swing – hardly more than the push resulting from standing up very suddenly.

But the Stone family had been living on Luna; all the children had been born there – two gravities was twelve times what they were used to.

Roger’s headache, which had quieted under the sedative his wife had prescribed for him, broke out again with renewed strength. His chest felt caved in; he fought for breath and he had to read and reread the accelerometer to convince himself that the ship had not run wild.

After checking over his board and assuring himself that all was going according to plan even if it did feel like a major catastrophe he turned his head heavily. “Cas? You all right?”

Castor gasped, “Sure Skipper . . . tracking to flight plan.

“Very well, sir.” He turned his face to his inter-com link. “Edith -” There was no answer. “Edith“

This time a strained voice replied, “Yes, dear.”

“Are you alright?”

“Yes, dear. Meade and I. . . are all right. The baby is having a bad time.”

He was about to call the power room when Castor reminded him of the passage of time. “Twenty seconds! Nineteen! Eighteen -”

He tumed his eyes to the brennschluss timer and poised his hand on the cut-off switch, ready to choke the jet if the autopilot should fail. Across from him Castor covered him should he fail; below in the power room Hazel was doing the same thing, hand trembling over the cut-off.

As the timer flashed the last half second, as Castor shouted, “Brennschluss!”, three hands slammed at three switches – but the autopilot had beaten them to it. The jet gasped as its liquid food was suddenly cut off from it; damper plates quenched the seeking neutrons in the atomic pile – and the Stone was in free orbit, falling toward Earth in a sudden, aching silence broken only by the whispering of the airconditioner.

Roger Stone reswallowed his stomach, “Power room!” he rasped. “Report!”

He could hear Hazel sighing heavily. “Okay, son,” she said feebly, “but mind that top step – it’s a dilly!” “Cas, call the port. Get a doppler check.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Castor called the radar & doppler station at Leyport. The Rolling Stone had all the usual radar and piloting instruments but a spaceship cannot possibly carry equipment of the size and accuracy of those mounted as pilot aids at all ports and satellite stations. “Rolling Stone to Luna Pilot – come in, Luna Pilot.” While he called he was warming up their own radar and doppler-radar, preparing to check the performance of their own instruments against the land-based standards. He did this without being told, it being a co-pilot’s routine duty.

“Luna Pilot to Rolling Stone.”

“Rolling Stone to Luna Pilot – request range, bearing and separation rate, and flight plan deviations, today’s flight fourteen – plan as field; no variations.”

“We’re on you. Stand by to record.”

“Standing by,” answered Castor and flipped the switch on the recorder. They were still so close to the Moon that the speed-of-light lag in transmission was unnoticeable.

A bored voice read off the reference time to the nearest half second, gave the double co-ordinates of their bearing in terms of system standard – corrected back to where the Moon had been at their blast-off – then gave their speed and distance relative to Luna with those figures also corrected back to where the Moon had been. The corrections were comparatively small since the Moon ambles along at less than two-thirds of a mile per second, but the corrections were utterly necessary. A pilot who disregarded them would find himself fetching up thousands or even millions of miles from his destination.

The operator added, “Deviation from flight plan negligible. A very pretty departure, Rolling Stone.”

Castor thanked him and signed off. “In the groove, Dad!” “Good. Did you get our own readings?”

“Yes, sir. About seven seconds later than theirs.”

“Okay. Run ’em back on the flight line and apply the vectors. I want a check.” He looked more closely at his son; Castor’s complexion was a delicate chartreuse. “Say, didn’t you take your pills?”

“Uh, yes, sir. It always hits me this way at first. I’ll be all right.” “You look like a week-old corpse.”

“You don’t look so hot yourself, Dad.”

“I don’t feel so hot, just between us. Can you work that prob, or do you want to sack in for a while?” “Sure I can!”

“Well. . . mind your decimal places.” “Aye aye, Captain.”

“I’m going aft.” He started to unstrap, saying into the intercom as he did so, “All hands, unstrap at will. Power room, secure the pile and lock your board.”

Hazel answered, “I heard the flight report, Skipper. Power room secured.” “Don’t anticipate my orders, Hazel – unless you want to walk back.”

She answered, “I expressed myself poorly, Captain. What I mean to say is, we are now securing the power room, as per your orders, sir. There – it’s done. Power room secured!”

“Very well, Chief.” He smiled grimly, having noted by the tell tales on his own board that the first report was the correct one; she had secured as soon as she had known they were in the groove. Just as he had feared: playing skipper to a crew of rugged individualists was not going to be a picnic. He grasped the centre stanchion, twisted around so that he faced aft and floated through the hatch into the living quarters.

He wiggled into the bunkroom and checked himself by a handhold. His wife, daughter, and least child were all unstrapped. Dr. Stone was manipulating the child’s chest and stomach. He could not see just what she was doing but it was evident that Lowell had become violently nauseated – Meade, glassy-eyed herself, was steadying herself with one hand and trying to clean up the mess with the other. The boy was still unconscious.

Roger Stone felt suddenly worse himself. “Good grief!” His wife looked over her shoulder. “Get my injection kit,” she ordered. “In the locker behind you. I’ve got to give him the antidote and get him awake. He keeps trying to swallow his tongue.”

He gulped. “Yes, dear, Which antidote?” “Neocaffeine – one c.c. Move!”

He found the case, loaded the injector, handed it to Dr. Stone. She pressed it against the child’s side. “What else can I do?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Is he in any danger?”

“Not while I have an eye on him. Now get out and ask Hazel to come here.”

“Yes, dear. Right away.” He swam on aft, found his mother sitting in midair, looking pleased with herself. Pollux was still loosely secured to his control couch. “Everything all right back here?” he asked.

“Sure. Why not? Except my assistant, maybe. I believe he wants off at the next stop.” Pollux growled. “I’m feeling okay. Quit riding me.”

Roger Stone said, “Edith could use your help, Mother. Buster has thrown up all over the bunkroom.” “Why, the little devil! He didn’t have a thing to eat today; I rode herd on him myself.”

“You must have let him out of your sight for a few minutes, from the evidence. Better go give Edith a hand.”

“To hear is to obey, Master.” She kicked one heel against the bulkhead behind her and zipped out the hatch. Roger turned to his son.

“How’s it going?”

“I’ll be all right in a couple of hours. It’s just one of those things you have to go through with, like brushing your teeth.” “Check. I’d like to rent a small planet myself. Have you written up the engineering log?”

“Not yet.”

“Do so. It will take your mind off your stomach.” Roger Stone went forward again and looked into the bunkroom. Lowell was awake and crying; Edith had him sheeted to a bunk to give him a feeling of pressure and stability.

The child wailed, “Mama! Make it hold still” “Shush, dear. You’re all right. Mother is here,” “I want to go home!”

She did not answer but caressed his forehead. Roger Stone backed hastily out and pulled himself forward.

By supper time all hands except Lowell were over the effects of free fall – a sensation exactly like stepping off into an open elevator shaft in the dark. Nevertheless no one wanted much to eat; Dr. Stone limited the menu to a clear soup, crackers, and stewed dried apricots. Ice cream was available but there were no takers.

Except for the baby none of them had any reason to expect more than minor and temporary discomfort from the change from planet-surface weight to the endless falling of free orbit. Their stomachs and the semicircular canals of their ears had been through the ordeal before; they were inured to it, salted.

Lowell was not used to it; his physical being rebelled against it, nor was he old enough to meet it calmly and without fear. He cried and made himself worse, alternating that with gagging and choking. Hazel and Meade took turns trying to quiet him. Meade finished her skimpy dinner and relieved the watch; when Hazel came into the control room where they were eating Roger Stone said, “How is he now?”

Hazel shrugged. “I tried to get him to play chess with me. He spat in my face.” “He must be getting better.”

“Not so you could notice it.”

Castor said, “Gee whiz, Mother, can’t you dope him up till he gets his balance?”

“No,” answered Dr. Stone, “I’m giving him the highest dosage now that his body mass will tolerate.” “How long do you think it will take him to snap out of it?” asked her husband.

“I can’t make a prediction. Ordinarily children adapt more readily than adults, as you know, dear – but we know also that some people never do adapt. They simply are constitutionally unable to go out into space.”

Pollux let his jaw sag. “You mean Buster is a natural-born groundhog?” He made the word sound like both a crippling disability and a disgrace. “Pipe down,” his father said sharply.

“I mean nothing of the sort,” his mother said crisply. “Lowell is having a bad time but he may adjust very soon.”

There was glum silence for some minutes. Pollux refilled his soup bag, got himself some crackers, and eased back to his perch with one leg hooked around a stanchion. He glanced at Castor; the two engaged in a conversation that consisted entirely of facial expressions and shrugs. Their father looked at them and looked away; the twins often talked to each other that way; the code – if it was a code – could not be read by anyone else. He turned to his wife. “Edith, do you honestly think there is a chance that Lowell may not adjust?”

“A chance, of course.” She did not elaborate, nor did she need to. Spacesickness like seasickness does not itself kill, but starvation and exhaustion do.

Castor whistled. “A fine time to find it out, after it’s too late. We’re akeady in orbit for Mars.” Hazel said sharply. “You know better than that, Castor.”

“Huh?”

“Of course, dopy,” his twin answered. “We’ll have to tack back.’ 1

“Oh.” Castor frowned. “I forgot for the moment that this was a two-legged jump.” He sighed. “Well, that’s that. I guess we go back.” There was one point and one only at which they could decide to return to the Moon. They were falling now toward Earth in a conventional ‘S-orbit” practically a straight line. They would pass very close to Earth in an hyperboloid at better than five miles per second, Earth relative. To continue to Mars they planned to increase this speed by firing the jet at the point of closest approach, falling thereby into an ellipsoid, relative to the Sun, which would let them fall to a rendezvous with Mars. They could reverse this maneuver, check their plunging progress by firing the jet against their motion and

thereby force the Stone into an ellipsoid relative to Earth, a curve which, if correctly calculated, would take them back to Luna, back home before their baby brother could starve or wear himself out with retching. “Yep, that’s that,” agreed Pollux. He suddenly grinned. “Anybody want to buy a load of bicycles? Cheap?”

“Don’t be in too big a hurry to liquidate,” his father told him, “but we appreciate your attitude. Edith, what do you think?” “I say we mustn’t take any chances,” announced Hazel. “That baby is sick.”

Dr. Stone hesitated: “Roger, how long is it to perigee?” He glanced at his control board. “About thirty-five hours.”

“Why don’t you prepare both maneuvers? Then we will not have to decide until it’s time to turn ship.”

“That makes sense, Hazel, you and Castor work the homing problem; Pol and I will work the Mars vector. First approximations only; we’ll correct when we’re closer. Everyone work independently, then we’ll swap and check. Mind your decimals!”

“You mind yours.” Hazel answered.

Castor gave his father a sly grin. “You picked the easy one, eh, Dad?” His father looked at him. “Is it too hard for you? Do you want to swap?” “Oh, no, Sir! I can do it.”

“Then get on with it – and bear in mind you are a crew member in space.” “Aye aye, sir.”

He had in fact ‘picked the easy one’; the basic tack-around-Earth-for-Mars problem had been solved by the big computers of Luna Pilot Station before they blasted off. To be sure, Luna Pilot’s answer would have to be revised to fit the inevitable errors, or deviations from flight plan, that would show up when they reached perigee rounding Earth – they might be too high, too low, too fast, too slow, or headed somewhat differently from the theoretical curve which had bem computed for them. In fact they could be sure to be wrong in all three factors; the tiniest of errors at blast-off had a quarter of a million miles in which to multiply.

But nothing could be done to compute the corrections for those errors for the next fifteen or twenty hours; the deviations had to be allowed to grow before they could be measured accurately.

But the blast back to shape an ellipsoid home to Luna was a brand-new, unpremeditated problem. Captain Stone had not refused it out of laziness; he intended to do both problems but had kept his intention to himself. In the meantime he had another worry; strung out behind him were several more ships, all headed for Mars. For the next several days there would be frequent departures from the Moon, all ships taking advantage of the one favorable period in every twenty-six months when the passage to Mars was relatively ‘cheap’, i.e., when the minimum-fuel ellipse tangent to both planet’s orbits would actually make rendezvous with Mars rather than arrive foolishly at some totally untenanted part of Mars’ orbit. Except for military vessels and super expensive passenger-ships, all traffic for Mars left at this one time.

During the four-day period bracketing the ideal instant of departure ships leaving Leyport paid a fancy premium for the privilege over and above the standard service fee. Only a large ship could afford such a fee; the saving in cost of single-H reactive mass had to be greater than the fee. The Rolling Stone had departed just before the premium charge went into effect; consequently she had trailing her like beads on a string a round dozen of ships, all headed down to Earth, to tack around her toward Mars.

If the Rolling Stone vectored back and shaped course for Luna rather than Mars, there was a possibility of traffic trouble.

Collisions between spaceships are almost unheard of; space is very large and ships are very tiny. But they are possible, particularly when many ships are doing much the same thing at the same time ia the same region of space. Spacemen won’t forget the Rising Star and the patrol vessel Trygve Lie – four hundred and seven dead, no survivors.

Ships for Mars would be departing Luna for the next three days and more; the Rolling Stone, in rounding Earth and heading back to Luna (toward where Luna would be on her arrival) would cut diagonally across their paths. Besides these hazards, there were Earth’s three radio- satellites and her satellite space station; each ship’s flight plan, as approved by Luna Pilot Station, took into consideration these four orbits, but the possible emergency maneuver of the Rolling Stone had had no such safety check. Roger Stone mentally chewed his nails at the possibility that Traffic Control might refuse permission for the Rolling Stone to change its approved flight plan – which they would do if there was the slightest possibility of collision, sick child or no.

And Captain Stone would ignore their refusal, risk collision and take his child home – there to lose his pilot’s license certainly and to face a stiff sentence from the Admiralty court possibly.

Besides the space station and the radio satellites there were the robot atom-bomb peace rockets of the Patrol, circling the Earth from pole to pole, but it was most unlikely that the Rolling Stone’s path would intersect one of their orbits; they moved just outside the atmosphere, lower than a spaceship was allowed to go other than in landing, whereas in order to tack the Rolling Stone would necessarily go inside the orbits of the radio satellites and that of the space station wait a minute – Roger Stone thought over that last idea. Would it be possible to match in with the space station instead of going back to Luna?

If he could, he could get Lowell back to weight a couple of days sooner – in the spinning part of the space station!

The ballistic computer was not in use; Castor and Hazel were still in the tedious process of setting up their problems. Captain Stone moved to it and started making a rough set-up directly on the computer itself, ignoring the niceties of ballistics, simply asking the machine, “Can this, or can this not, be done?”

Half an hour later he gave up, let his shoulders sag. Oh, yes, he could match in with the space station’s orbit – but at best only at a point almost a hundred degrees away from the station. Even the most lavish expenditure of reaction mass would not permit him to reach the station itself.

He cleared the computer almost violently. Hazel glanced toward him. “What’s eating you, son?” “I thought we might make port at the station. We can’t.”

“I could have told you that”

He did not answer but went aft. Lowell, he found, was as sick as ever.

Earth was shouldering into the starboard port, great and round and lovely; they were approaching her rapidly, less than ten hours from the critical point at which they must maneuver, one way or the other. Hazel’s emergency flight plan, checked and rechecked by the Captain, had been radioed to Traffic Control. They were all resigned to a return to Luna; nevertheless Pollux was, with the help of Quito Pilot, Ecuador, checking their deviations from the original flight plan and setting up the problem of preparing a final ballistic for Mars.

Dr. Stone came into the control room, poised near the hatch, caught her husband’s eye and beckoned him to come with her. He floated after her into their stateroom. “What is it?” he asked. “Is Lowell worse?”

“No, he’s better.” “Eh?”

“Dear, I don’t think he was spacesick at all.” “What’s that?”

“Oh, a little bit, perhaps. But I think his symptoms were largely allergy; I think he is sensitive to the sedative.” “Huh? I never heard of anyone being sensitive to that stuff before.”

“Neither have I, but there can always be a first time I withdrew the drug several hours ago since it did not seem to help him. His symptoms eased off gradually and his pulse is better now.”

“Is he okay? Is it. safe to go on to Mars?”

“Too early to say. I’d like to keep him under observation another day or two.”

“But – Edith, you know that’s impossible. I’ve got to maneuver.” He was wretched from strain and lack of sleep; neither had slept since blast-off more than twenty-four hours earlier.

“Yes, I know. Give me thirty minutes warning before you must have an answer. I’ll decide then.” “Okay. I’m sorry I snapped at you.”

“Dear Roger!”

Before they were ready to ’round the corner’ on their swing past Earth the child was much better. His mother kept him under a light hypnotic for several hours; when he woke from it he demanded food. She tried letting him have a few mouthfuls of custard; he choked on the first bite but that was simply mechanical trouble with no gravity – on the second bite he learned how to swallow and kept it down.

He kept several more down and was still insisting that he was starved when she made him stop. Then he demanded to be untied from the couch. His mother gave in on this but sent for Meade to keep him under control and in the bunk-room. She pulled herself forward and found her husband. Hazel and Castor were at the computer; Castor was reading off to her a problem program while she punched the keys; Pollux was taking a doppler reading on Earth. Edith drew Roger Stone away from them and whispered, “Dear, I guess we can relax. He has eaten – and he didn’t get sick.”

“Are you sure? I wouldn’t want to take even a slight chance.”

She shrugged. “How can I be sure? I’m a doctor, not a fortune-teller.” “What’s your decision?”

She frowned, “I would say to go on to Mars.”

“It’s just as well.” He sighed. “Traffic turned down my alternate flight plan. I was just coming back to tell you.”

“Then we have no choice.”

“You know better than that. I’d rather tell it to the judge than read the burial service. But I have one more card up my sleeve.”

She looked her query; he went on. “The War God is less than ten thousand miles behind us. If necessary, by using our mass margin, in less than

a week I could match with her and you and the baby could transfer. She’s a “tumbling. pigeon” since they refitted her – anything from Luna-surface to

a full gravity.”

“I hadn’t thought of that. Well, I don’t think it will be necessary but it’s a comfort to know that there is help close by.” She frowned. “I would not like to leave you and the children to shift for yourselves – and besides, it’s risky to use your margin; you may need it badly when we approach Mars.”

“Not if we handle the ship properly. Don’t you worry; Hazel and I will get it there if we have to get out and push.”

Pollux had stopped what he was doing and had been trying to overhear his parents’ conversation. He was unsuccessful; they had had too many years’ practice in keeping the kids from hearing. But he could see their intent expressions and the occasional frowns; he signaled his twin.

Castor said, “Hold it, Hazel. Time out to scratch. What goes, Pol?” “‘Now is the time for all good men”.” He nodded toward their parents. “Right. I’ll do the talking.” They moved aft.

Roger Stone looked at them and frowned. “What is it, boys? We’re busy.” “Yes, sir. But this seems like a salubrious time to make an announcement.” “Yes?”

“Pol and I vote to go back home. “Huh?”

“We figure that there’s no percentage in taking a chance with Buster.”

Pol added, “Sure, he’s a brat, but look how much you’ve got invested in him.” “If he died on us,” Castor went on, “it would spoil all the fun.”

“And even if he didn’t, who wants to clean up after him for weeks on end?” “Right,” agreed Pol. “Nobody likes to play room steward to a sick groundhog.” “And if he did die, the rest of you would blame us for the rest of our lives.” “Longer than that,” Pol added.

“Don’t worry about that “negat” from Traffic. Hazel and I are working out a skew path that will let us miss the Queen Mary ,with minutes to spare – seconds anyhow. Course it may scare em a little.”

“Quiet!” said Captain Stone. “One at a time – Castor, let me get this straight: do I understand that you and your brother are sufficiently concerned about your younger brother’s welfare that you want to return to Luna in any case?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Even if your mother decides that it is safe for him to continue?”

“Yes, sir. We talked it over. Even if he’s looking pretty good now, he was one sick pup and anybody that sick might not make it to Mars. It’s a long haul. We don’t want to risk it.”

Hazel had come aft and listened; now she said, “Nobility ill-becomes you, Cas. You were more convincing with the other routine.” “You butt out of this, Mother. Pol?”

“Cas told you. Shucks, we can make other trips”

Roger Stone looked at his sons. “I must say,” he said slowly, “that it is surprising and gratifying to find so much family solidarity in this aggregation of individualists. Your mother and I will remember it with pride. But I am glad to say that it is unnecessary. We will continue for Mars.”

Hazel scowled at him. “Roger, did you bump your head on the take-off? This is no time to take a chance; we take the kid back to Luna. I’ve talked with the boys and they mean it. So do I.”

Castor said, “Dad, if you’re afraid of that skew orbit, I’ll pilot. I know-”

“Silence!” When he got it he went on as if to himself, “It says right here in the book to give orders, not explanations, and never to let them be

argued. So help me, I’m going to run a taut ship if I have to put my own mother in irons.” He raised his voice. “All hands! Prepare for maneuvering.

Departure for Mars, gravity-well procedure.”

Edith Stone said softly to Hazel, “The baby is all right. Mother. I’m sure.” Then she turned to her sons. “Castor, Pollux – come here, dears.” “But Dad said -”

“I know. Come here first.” She kissed each of them and said, “Now man your stations.”

Mead appeared at the hatch, towing Lowell behind her like a toy balloon. He seemed cheerful and his face was cheerfully smeared with chocolate. “What’s all the racket about?” she demanded. “You not only woke us; you must be disturbing people three ships behind.”

V – IN THE GRAVITY WELL

A gravity-well maneuver involves what appears to be a contradiction in the law of conservation of energy. A ship leaving the Moon or a space station for some distant planet can go faster on less fuel by dropping first toward Earth, then performing her principal acceleration while as close to Earth as possible. To be sure, a ship gains kinetic energy (speed) in falling towards Earth, but one would expect that she would lose exactly the same amount of kinetic energy as she coasted away from Earth.

The trick lies in the fact that the reactive mass or ‘fuel’ is itself mass and as such has potential energy of position when the ship leaves the Moon. The reactive mass used in accelerating near Earth (that is to say, at the bottom of the gravity well) has lost its energy of position by falling down the gravity well. That energy has to go somewhere, and so it does – into the ship, as kinetic energy. The ship ends up going faster for the same force and duration of thrust than she possibly could by departing directly from the Moon or from a space station. The mathematics of this is somewhat baffling – but it works.

Captain Stone put both the boys in the power room for this maneuver and placed Hazel as second pilot. Castor’s feelings were hurt but he did not argue, as the last discussion of ship’s discipline was still echoing. The pilot has his hands full in this maneuver, leaving it up to the co-pilot to guard the auto-pilot, to be ready to fire manually if need he, and to watch for brennschluss. It is the pilot’s duty to juggle his ship on her gyros and flywheel with his eyes glued to a measuring telescope, a ‘coelostat’, to be utterly sure to the extreme limit of the accuracy of his instruments that his ship is aimed exactly right when the jet fires.

In the passage from Earth to Mars a mistake in angle of one minute of arc, one sixtieth of a degree, will amount to – at the far end – about fifteen thousand miles. Such mistakes must be paid for in reactive mass by maneuvering to correct, or, if the mistake is large enough, it will he paid for tragically and inexorably with the lives of captain and crew while the ship plunges endlessly on into the empty depths of space.

Roger Stone had a high opinion of the abilities of his twins, but on this touchy occasion, he wanted the co-pilot backing him up to have the steadiness of age and experience. With Hazel riding the other. couch he could give his whole mind to his delicate task.

To establish a frame of reference against which to aim his ship he had three stars, Spica, Deneb, and Fomalhaut, lined up in his scope, their images brought together by prisms. Mars was still out of sight beyond the bulging breast of Earth, nor would it have helped to aim for Mars; the road to Mars is a long curve, not a straight line. One of the images seemed to drift a trifle away from the others; sweating, he unclutched his gyros and nudged the ship by flywheel. The errant image crept back into position. “Doppler?” he demanded.

“In the groove.” “Time?”

“About a minute. Son, keep your mind on your duck shooting and don’t fret.”

He wiped his hands on his shirt and did not answer. For some seconds silence obtained, then Hazel said quietly, “Unidentified radar beacon blip on the screen, sir. Robot response and a string of numbers.”

“Does it concern us?”

“Closing north and starboard. Possible collision course.”

Roger Stone steeled himself not to look at his own screen; a quick glance would tell him nothing that Hazel had not reported. He kept his face glued to the eyeshade of the coelostat. “Evasive maneuver indicated?

“Son, you’re as likely to dodge into it as duck away from it. Too late to figure a ballistic.”

He forced himself to watch the star images and thought about it. Hazel was right, one did not drive a spaceship by the seat of the pants. At the high speeds and tight curves at the bottom of a gravity well, close up to a planet, an uncalculated maneuver might bring on a collision. Or it might throw them into an untenable orbit, one which would never allow them to reach Mars.

But what could it be? Not a spaceship, it was unmanned. Not a meteor, it carried a beacon. Not a bomb rocket, it was too high. He noted that the images were steady and stole a glance, first at his own screen, which told him nothing, and then through the starboard port.

Good heavens! he could see it!

A great gleaming star against the black of space… growing growmg! “Mind your scope, son,” said Hazel. “Nineteen seconds.”

He put his eye back to the scope; the images were steady. Hazel continued, “It seems to be drawing ahead slightly.”

He had to look. As he did so something flashed up and obscured the starboard port and at once was visible in the portside port – visible but shrinking rapidly. Stone had a momentary impression of a winged torpedo shape.

“Whew!” Hazel sighed. “They went that-a-way, podnuh!” She added briskly, “All hands, brace for acceleration – five seconds!”

He had his eye on the star images, steady and perfectly matched, as the jet slammed him into his pads. The force was four gravities, much more

than the boost from Luna, but they held it for oniy slightly more than one minute. Captain Stone kept watching the star images, ready to check her if

she started to swing, but the extreme care with which he had balanced his ship in loading was rewarded: she held her attitude.

He heard Hazel shout, “Brennschluss!” just as the noise and pressure dropped off and died. He took a deep breath and said to the mike, “You all right, Edith?”

“Yes, dear,” she answered faintly. “We’re all right.” “Power room?”

“Okay!” Pollux answered.

“Secure and lock.” There was no need to have the power room stand by, any correction to course and speed on this leg would be made days or weeks later, after much calculation.

“Aye aye, sir. Say, Dad, what was the chatter about a blip?”

“Pipe down,” Hazel interrupted. “I’ve got a call coming in.” She added, “Rolling Stone, Luna, to Traffic – come in, Traffic.” There was a whir and a click and a female voice chanted:

“Traffic Control to Rolling Stone, Luna – routine traffic precautionary: your plan as filed will bring you moderately close to experimental rocket satellite of Harvard Radiation Laboratory. Hold to flight plan; you will fail contact by ample safe margin. End of message; repeat – “ The transcription ran itself through once more and shut off.

“Nowthey tell us!” Hazel exploded. “Oh, those cushion warmers! Those bureaucrats! I’ll bet that message has been holding in the tank for the past hour waiting for some idiot to finish discussing his missing laundry.”

She went on fuming: “”Moderately close!” “Ample safe margin!” Why, Roger, the consarned thing singed my eye-brows!” “”A miss is as good as a mile”.”

“A mile isn’t nearly enough, as you know darn well. It took ten years off my life – and at my age I can’t afford that.”

Roger Stone shrugged. After the strain and excitement he was feeling let down and terribly weary; since blast-off he had been running on stimulants instead of sleep. “I’m going to cork off for the next twelve hours. Get a preliminary check on our, vector; if there’s nothing seriously wrong, don’t wake me. I’ll look at it when I turn out.”

“Aye aye, Captain Bligh.”

First check showed nothing wrong with their orbit: Hazel followed him to bed – “bed’ in a figurative sense, for Hazel never strapped herself to her bunk in free fall, preferring to float loosely wherever air currents wafted her. She shared a stateroom with Meade. The three boys were assigned to the bunkroom and the twins attempted to turn in – but Lowell was not sleepy. He felt fine and was investigating the wonderful possibilities of free fall. He wanted to play tag. The twins did not want to play tag; Lowell played tag anyhow,.

Pollux snagged him by an ankle. “Listen, you! Weren’t you enough trouble by being sick?” “I was not sick!”

“So? Who was it we had to clean up after? Santa Claus?”

“There ain’t any Santa Claus. I was not sick. You’re a fibber, you’re a fibber, you’re a fibber!”

“Don’t argue with him,” Castor advised. “Just choke him and stuff him out the lock. We can explain and correct the ship’s mass factor tomorrow.” “I was not sick!”

Pollux said, “Meade had quite a bit of sack time on the leg down. Maybe you can talk her into taking him off our hands?” “I’ll try’.”

Meade was awake; she considered it. “Cash?” “Sis, don’t be that way!”

“Well … three days’ dishwashing?”

“Skinflint! It’s a deal; come take charge of the body.” Meade had to use the bunkroom as a nursery; the boys went forward and slept in the control room, each strapping himself loosely to a control couch as required by ship’s regulations to avoid the chance of jostling instruments during sleep.

VI – THE MIGHTY BOOM

Captain Stone had all hands with the exception of Dr. Stone and Lowell compute their new orbit. They all worked from the same. data, using readings supplied by Traffic Control and checked against their own instruments. Roger Stone waited until all had finished before comparing results.

“What do you get, Hazel?”

“As I figure, Captain, you won’t miss Mars by more than a million miles or so.” “I figure it right on.”

“Well, now that you mention it, so do I.” “Cas? Pol? Meade?”

The twins were right together to six decimal places and checked with their father and grandmother to five, but Meade’s answer bore no resemblance to any of the others. Her father looked it over curiously. “Baby girl, I can’t figure out how you got this out of the computer. As near as I can tell you have us headed for Proxima Centauri.”

Meade looked at it with interest. “Is that so? Tell you what let’s use mine and see what happens. It ought to be interesting.” “But not practical. You have us going faster than light.”

“I thought the figures were a bit large.”

Hazel stuck out a bony forefinger. “That ought to be a minus sign, hon.”

“That’s not all that’s wrong,” announced Pollux. “Look at this – “ He held out Meade’s programming sheet. “That will do, Pol,” his father interrupted. “You are not called on to criticise Meade’s astrogation.”

“But -”

“Stow it.”

“I don’t mind, Daddy,” Meade put in. “I knew I was wrong.” She shrugged. “It’s the first one I’ve ever worked outside of school. Somehow it makes a difference when it’s real.”

“It certainly does as every astrogator learns. Never mind, Hazel has the median figures. We’ll log hers.” Hazel shook hands with herself. “The winnah and still champeen!”

Castor said, “Dad, that’s final? No more maneuvers until you calculate your approach to Mars?” “Of course not. No changes for six months at least. Why?”

“Then Pol and I respectfully request the Captain’s permission to decompress the hold and go outside. We want to get to work on our bikes.”

“Never mind the fake military-vessel phraseology. But I have news for you.” He took a sheet of paper out of his belt pouch. “Just a moment while I make a couple of changes.” He wrote on it, then fastened it to the control room bulletin board. It read:

SHIP’S ROUTINE

0700 Reveille (optional for Edith, Hazel, & Buster) 0745 Breakfast (Meade cooks. Twins wash dishes) 0900 School C & P, math

Meade, astrogation, coached by Hazel

Lowell, reeling, writhing, and fainting in coils – or whatever his mother deems necessary

1200 End of morning session 1215 Lunch

1300 School C&P, math

Hydroponics chores, Meade 1600 End of afternoon session

1800 Dinner – All Hands initial ship’s maintenance schedule.

SATURDAY ROUTINE – turn to after breakfast and clean ship, Hazel in charge. Captain’s inspection at 1100. Personal laundry in afternoon. SUNDAY ROUTINE – meditation, study, and recreation. Make & Mend in afternoon.

Hazel looked it over. “Where are we headed, Rog? Botany Bay? You forgot to set a time to flog the peasants.” “It seems very reasonable to me.”

“Possibly. Six gets you ten it won’t last a week.” “Done. Let’s see your money.”

The twins had read it with dismay. Pollux blurted out, “But Dad! You haven’t left us any time to repair our bikes – do you want us to lose our investment?”

“I’ve assigned thirty hours of study a week. That leaves one hundred and thirty-eight other hours. How you use them is your business as long as you keep our agreement about studying.”

Castor said, “Suppose we want to start math at eight-thirty and again right after lunch? Can we get out of school that much earlier?” “I see no objection.”

“And suppose we study evenings sometimes? Can we work up some velvet?”

Their father shrugged. “Thirty hours a week – any reasonable variations in the routine will be okay, provided you enter in the log the exact times.” “Now that that’s settled,” Hazel commenced, “I regret to inforrn you, Captain, that there is one other little item on that Procrustean program that will

have to be canceled for the time being at least. Much as I would enjoy inducing our little blossom into the mysteries of astrogation I don’t have the time right now. You’ll have to teach her yourself.”

“Why?”

“‘Why” the man asks? You should know better than anyone. The Scourge of the Spaceways, that’s why. I’ve got to hole up and write like mad for the next three or four weeks; I’ve got to get several months of episodes ahead before we get out of radio range.”

Roger Stone looked at his mother sadly. “I knew it was bound to come, Hazel, but I didn’t expect it to hit you so young. The mental processes dull, the mind tends to wander, the -”

“Whose mind does what? Why you young -”

“Take it easy. If you’ll look over your left shoulder out the starboard port and squint your eyes, you might imagine that you see a glint on the War

God. It can’t be much over ten thousand miles away.”

“What’s that got to do with me?” she demanded suspiciously.

“Poor Hazel! We’ll take good care of you, Mother, we’re riding in orbit with several large commercial vessels; every one of them has burners powerful enough to punch through to Earth. We won’t ever be out of radio contact with Earth.”

Hazel stared out the port as if she could actually spot the War God. “Well, I’ll be dogged,” she breathed. “Roger, lead me to my room – that’s a good boy. It’s senile decay, all right You’d better take back your show; I doubt if I can write it.”

“Huh, uh! You let them pick up that option; you’ve got to write it. Speaking of The Scum of the Waste Spaces, I’ve been meaning to ask you a couple of questions about it and this is the first spare moment we’ve had. In the first place, why did you let them sign us up again?”

“Because they waved too much money under my nose, as you know full well. It’s an aroma we Stones have hardly ever been able to resist.” “I just wanted to make you admit it. You were going to get me off the hook – remember? So you swallowed it yourself.”

“More bait.”

“Surely. Now the other point: I don’t see how you dared to go ahead with it, no matter how much money they offered. The last episode you showed

me, while you had killed off the Galactic Overlord you had also left Our Hero in a decidedly untenable position. Sealed in a radioactive sphere, if I

remember correctly, at the bottom of an ammonia ocean on Jupiter. The ocean was swarming with methane monsters, whatever they are, each hypnotised by the Overlord’s mind ray to go after John Sterling at the first whiff – and him armed only with his Scout knife. How did you get him out of it?”

“We found a way,” put in Pol. “If you assume -”

“Quiet infants. Nothing to it, Roger. By dint of superhuman effort Our Hero extricated himself from his predicament and-” “That’s no answer.”

“You don’t understand. I open the next episode on Ganymede. John Sterling is telling Special Agent Dolores O’Shanahan about his adventure. He’s making light of it, see? He’s noble so he really wouldn’t want to boast to a girl. Just as he is jokingly disparaging his masterly escape the next action starts and it’s so fast and so violent and so bloody that our unseen audience doesn’t have time to think about it until the commercial. And by then they’ve got too much else to think about.”

Roger shook his head. “That’s literary cheating.”

“Who said this was literature? It’s a way to help corporations take tax deductions. I’ve got three new sponsors.” “Hazel,” asked Pollux, “where have you got them now? What’s the situation?”

Hazel glanced at the chronometer. “Roger, does that schedule take effect today? Or can we start fresh tomorrow?” He smiled feebly. “Tomorrow, I guess.”

“If this is going to degenerate into a story conference, I’d better get Lowell. I get my best ideas from Lowell; he’s just the mental age of my average audience.”

“If I were Buster, I would resent that.”

“Quiet!” She slithered to the hatch and called out, “Edith! May I borrow your wild animal for a while?” Meade said, “I’ll get him, Grandmother. But wait for me.”

She returned quickly with the child. Lowell said, “What do you want, Grandma Hazel? Bounce tag?” She gathered him in an arm. “No, son – blood. Blood and gore. We’re going to kill off some villains.” “Swell!

“Now as I recall it – and mind you, I was only there once – I left them lost in the Dark Nebula. Their food is gone and so is the Q-fuel. They’ve made a temporary truce with their Arcturian prisoners and set them free to help – which is safe enough because they are silicon-chemistry people and can’t eat humans. Which is about what they are down to; the real question is – who gets barbecued for lunch? They need the help of the Arcturian prisoners because the Space Entity they captured in the last episode and imprisoned in an empty fuel tank has eaten its way through all but the last bulkhead and it doesn’t have any silly previous prejudices about body chemistry. Carbon or silicon; it’s all one to it.”

“I don’t believe that’s logical,” commented Roger stone. “If its own chemistry was based-”

“Out of order,” ruled Hazel. “Helpful suggestions only, please. Pol? You seem to have a gleam in your eye” “This, Space Entity jigger can he stand up against radar wave lengths?”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. But we’ve got to complicate it a bit Well, Meade?”

The twins started moving their bicycles outside the following day. The suits they wore were the same ones they had worn outdoors on the Moon, With the addition of magnetic boots and small rocket motors. These latter were strapped to their backs with the nozzles sticking straight out from their waists. An added pressure bottle to supply the personal rocket motor was mounted on the shoulders of each boy but, being weightless, the additional mass was little handicap.

“Now remember,” their father warned them, “those boost units are strictly for dire emergency. Lifelines at all times. And don’t depend on your boots when you shift lines, snap on the second line before you loose the first.”

“Shucks, Dad, we’ll be careful.”

“No doubt. But you can expect me to make a surprise inspection at any time. One slip on a safety precaution and it’s the rack and thumb screws, plus fifty strokes of bastinado.”

“No boiling oil?”

“Can’t afford it. See here, you think I’m joking. If one of you should happen to get loose and drift away from the ship, don’t expect me to come after you. One of you is a spare anyway.”

“Which one?” asked Pollux. “Cas, maybe?”

“Sometimes I think it’s one, sometimes the other. Strict compliance with ship’s orders will keep me from having to decide at this time.”

The cargo hatch had no airlock; the twins decompressed the entire hold, then opened the door, remembering just in time to snap on their lines as the door opened. They looked out and both hesitated. Despite their lifelong experience with vacuum suits on the face of the Moon this was the first time either one had ever been outside a ship in orbit.

The hatch framed endless cosmic night, blackness made colder and darker by the unwinking diamond stars many light-years away. They were on the night side of the Stone; there was nothing but stars and the swallowing depths. It was one thing to see it from the safety of Luna or through the strong quartz of a port; it was quite another to see it with nothing at all between one’s frail body and the giddy, cold depths of eternity.

Pollux said, “Cas, I don’t like this.” “There’s nothing to be afraid of.” “Then why are my teeth chattering?”

“Go ahead; I’ll keep a tension on your line.”

“You are too good to me, dear brother – a darn sight too good! You go and I’ll keep a tension on your line.” “Don’t be silly! Get on out there.”

“After you, Grandpa.”

“Oh, well!” Castor grasped the frame of the hatch and swung himself out. He scrambled to click his magnetic boots to the side of the ship but the position was most awkward, the suit was cumbersome, and he had no. gravity to help him. Instead, he swung around and his momentum pulled his fingers loose from the smooth frame. His floundering motions bumped the side of the ship and pushed him gently away. He floated out, still floundering, until his line checked him three or four feet from the side. “Pull me in!”

“Put your feet down, clumsy!”

“I can’t. Pull me in, you red-headed moron!”

“Don’t call me “red-headed”.” Pollux let out a couple of feet more line. “Pol, quit fooling. I don’t like this.”

“I thought you were brave. Grandpa?”

Castor’s reply was incoherent. Pollux decided that it had gone far enough; he pulled Castor in and, while holding firmly to a hatch dog himself, he grabbed one of Castor’s boots and set it firmly against the side; it clicked into place. “Snap on your other line,” he ordered.

Castor, still breathing heavily, looked for a padeye in the side of the ship. He found one nearby and walked over to it, picking up his feet as if he walked in sticky mud. He snapped his second line to the ring of the padeye and straightened up. “Catch,” Pollux called out and sent his own second line snaking out to his twin

Castor caught it and fastened it beside his own. “All set?” asked Pollux. “I’m going to unsnap us in here.” “All secure.” Castor moved closer to the hatch.

“Here I come.”

“So you do.” Castor gave Pollux’s line a tug; Pollux came sailing out of the hatch – and Castor let him keep on sailing. Castor checked the line gently through his fingers, soaking up the momentum, so that Pollux reached the end of the fifty-foot line and stayed there without bouncing back.

Pollux had been quite busy on the way out but to no effect -sawing vacuum is futile. When he felt himself snubbed to a stop he quit straggling. “Pull me back!”

“Say “uncle”.”

Pollux said several other things, some of which he had picked up dockside on Luna, plus some more colorful expressions derived from his grandmother. “You had better get off this ship,” he concluded, “because I’m coming down this line and take your helmet off.” He made a swipe for the line with one hand; Castor flipped it away.

“Say “even-Steven” then.”

Pollux had the line now, having remembered to reach for his belt where it was hooked instead of grabbing for the bight.” Suddenly he grinned. “Okay – “even-Steven”.”

“Even-Steven it is. Hold still; I’ll bring you in.” He towed him in gently, grabbing Pol’s feet and clicking them down as he approached. “You looked mighty silly out there,” he commented when Pollux was firm to the ship’s side.

His twin invoked their ritual. “Even-Steven!” “My apologies, Junior. Let’s get to work.”

Padeyes were spaced about twenty feet apart all over the skin of the ship. They had been intended for convenience in rigging during overhauls and to facilitate outside inspections while underway; the twins now used them to park bicycles. They removed the bicycles from the hold half a dozen at a time, strung on a wire loop like a catch of fish. They fastened each clutch of bikes to a padeye; the machines floated loosely out from the side like boats tied up to an ocean ship.

Stringing the clusters of bicycles shortly took them over the ‘horizon’ to the day side of the ship. Pollux was in front carrying six bicycles in his left hand. He stopped suddenly. “Hey, Grandpa! Get a load of this!”

“Don’t look at the Sun,” Castor said sharply. “Don’t be silly. But come see this.”

Earth and Moon swam in the middle distance in slender crescent phase. The Stone was slowly dropping behind Earth in her orbit, even more slowly drifting outward away from the Sun. For many weeks yet Earth would appear as a ball, a disc, before distance cut her down to a brilliant star. Now she appeared about as large as she had from Luna but she was attended by Luna herself. Her day side was green and dun and lavished with cottony clouds; her night side showed the jewels of cities.

But the boys were paying no attention to the Earth; they were looking at the Moon. Pollux sighed. “Isn’t she beautiful?” “What’s the matter, Junior? Homesick?”

“No. But she’s beautiful, just the same. Look, Cas, whatever ships we ever own, let’s always register them out of Luna City. Home base.” “Suits. Can you make out the burg?”

“I think so.”

“Probably just a spot on your helmet. I can’t. Let’s get back to work.”

They had used all the padeyes conveniently close to the hatch and were working aft when Pollux said, “Wups I Take it easy. Dad said not to go aft of frame 65.”

“Shucks, it must be “cool” back to 90, at least. We’ve used the jet less than five minutes.”

“Don’t be too sure; neutrons are slippery customers. And you know what a stickler Dad is, anyway.” “He certainly is,” said a third voice.

They did not jump out of their boots because they were zipped tight. Instead they turned around and saw their father standing, hands on hips, near the passenger airlock. Pollux gulped and said, “Howdy, Dad.”

“You sure gave us a start,” Castor added sheepishly.

“Sorry. But don’t let me disturb you; I just came out to enjoy the view.” He looked over their work. “You’ve certainly got my ship looking like a junkyard.”

“Well, we had to have room to work. Anyhow, who’s to see?”

“In this location you have the Almighty staring down the back of your neck. But I don’t suppose He’ll mind.” “Say, Dad, Pol and I sort of guessed that you wouldn’t want us to do any welding inside the hold?”

“You sort of guessed correctly – not after what happened in the Kong Christian.”

“So we figured we could jury-rig a rack for welding out here. Okay?”

“Okay. But it’s too nice a day to talk business.” He raised his open hands to the stars and looked out. “Swell place. Lots of elbow room. Good scenery.”

“That’s the truth; But come around to the Sun side if you want to see something.”

“Right. Here, help me shift my lines.” They walked around the hull and into the sunlight. Captain Stone, Earth born, looked first at the mother planet. “Looks like a big storm is working up around the Philippines.”

Neither of the twins answered; weather was largely a mystery to them, nor did they approve of weather. Presently he turned to them and said softly, “I’m glad we came, boys. Are you?”

“Oh, you bet!”

“Sure!” They had forgotten how cold and unfriendly the black depths around them had seemed only a short time before. Now it was an enormous

room, furnished in splendor, though not yet fully inhabited. It was their own room, to live in, to do with as they liked.

They stood there for quite a long time, enjoying it At last Captain Stone said, “I’ve had all the sun I can stand for a while. Let’s work around back into the shade.” He shook his head to dislodge a drop of sweat from his nose.

“We ought to get back to work anyhow.” “I’ll help you; we’ll get done faster.”

The Rolling Stone swung on and outward toward Mars; her crew fell into routine habits. Dr. Stone was handy at weightless cooking, unusually skilful, in fact, from techniques she had picked up during a year’s internship in the free-fall research clinic in Earth’s station. Meade was not so skilled but very little can be done to ruin breakfast. Her father supervised her hydroponics duties, supplementing thereby the course she had had in Luna City High School. Dr. Stone split the care of her least child with his grandmother and used her leisure placidly collating some years of notes for a paper ‘On the Cumulative Effects of Marginal Hypoxia.”

The twins discovered that mathematics could be even more interesting than they had thought and much more difficult – it required even more ‘savvy’ than they thought they had (already a generous estimate) and they were forced to stretch their brains. Their father caught up on the back issues of The Reactomotive World and studied his ship’s manual but still had plenty of time to coach them and quiz them. Pollux, he discovered, was deficient in the ability to visualise a curve on glancing at ,an equation.

“I don’t understand it,” he said. “You got good marks in analytical geometry.” Pollux turned red. “What’s biting you?” his father demanded.

“Well, Dad, you see it’s this way -” “Go on.”

“Well, I didn’t exactly get good marks in analyt.”

Eh? What is this? You both got top marks; I remember clearly.”

“Well, now, you see – Well, we were awfully busy that semester and, well, it seemed logical. . . “ His voice trailed off. “Out with it! Out with it!”

“Cas took both courses in analyt.” Pollux blurted out, “and I took both courses in history. But I did read the book.”

“Oh, my!” Roger Stone sighed. “I suppose it’s covered by the statute of limitations by this time. Anyhow, you are finding out the hard way that such offences carry their own punishments. When you need it, you don’t know it worth a hoot.”

“Yessir.”

“But an extra hour a day for you, just the same – until you can visualise instantly from the equation a four-coordinate hyper-surface in a non- Euclidean continuum – standing on your head in a cold shower.”

“Yessir.”

“Cas, what course did you fudge? Did you read the book?” “Yes, sir. It was medieval European history, sir.”

“Hmm . . . You’re equally culpable, but I’m not too much concerned with any course that does not require a slide rule and tables. You coach your brother.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“If you are pinched for time, I’ll give you a hand with those broken-down bicycles, though I shouldn’t.”

The twins pitched into it, hard. At the end of two weeks Roger Stone announced himself satisfied with Pollux’s proficiency in analytical geometry. They moved on to more rarefied heights . . . the complex logics of matrix algebra, frozen in beautiful arrays. . . the tensor calculus that unlocks the atom. . . the wild and wonderful field equations that make Man king of the universe . . . the crashing, mind-splitting intuition of Forsyte’s Solution that had opened the 21st century and sent mankind another mighty step toward the stars. By the time Mars shone larger in the sky than Earth they had gone beyond the point where their father could reach them; they ploughed on together.

They usually studied together, out of the same book, floating head to head in their bunkroom, one set of feet pointed to celestial south, the other pair to the north. The twins had early gotten into the habit of reading the same book at the same time; as a result either of them could read upside down as easily as in the conventional attitude. While so engaged Pollux said to his brother, “You know, Grandpa, some of this stuff makes me think we ought to go into research rather than business. After all, money isn’t everything.”

“No,” agreed Castor, “there are also stocks, bonds, and patent rights, not to mention real estate and chattels.”

“I’m serious.

“We’ll do both. I’ve finished this page; flip the switch when you’re ready.”

The War God, riding in a slightly different orbit, had been gradually closing on them until she could be seen as a ‘star’ by naked eye – a variable star that winked out and flared up every sixteen seconds. Through the Stone‘s coelostat the cause could easily be seen; the War God was tumbling end over end, performing one full revolution every thirty-two seconds to provide centrifugal ‘artificial gravity’ to coddle the tender stomachs of her groundhog passengers. Each half revolution the Sun’s rays struck her polished skin at the proper angle to flash a dazzling gleam at the Stone. Through the ‘scope the reflection was bright enough to hurt the eyes.

The observation turned out to be both ways. A radio message came in; Hazel printed it and handed it with a straight face to her son: “WAR GOD TO ROLLING STONE – PVT – ROG OLD BOY, I HAVE YOU IN THE SCOPE. WHAT IN SPACE HAVE YOU GOT ON YOU? FUNGUS? OR SEA WEEDS? YOU LOOK LIKE A CHRISI’MAS TREE. P. VANDENBERGH, MASTER.”

Captain Stone glared at the message stat. “Why, that fat Dutchman’! I’ll “fungus” him. Here, Mother, send this: “Master to Master – private message: In that drunken tumbling pigeon how do you keep your eye to a scope? Do you enjoy playing nursemaid to a litter of groundhogs? No doubt the dowagers fight over a chance to eat at the captain’s table. Fun, I’ll bet. R. Stone, Master”.”

The answer came back: “ROGER DODGER YOU OLD CODGER, I’VE LIMITED MY TABLE TO FEMALE PASSENGERS CIRCA AGE TWENTY SO I CAN KEEP AN EYE ON THEM – PREFERENCE GIVEN TO BLONDES AROUND FIFTY KILOS MASS. COME OVER FOR DINNER. VAN.”

Pollux looked out the port, caught the glint on the War God. “Why don’t you take him up, Dad? I’ll bet I could make it across on my suit jet with one spare oxy bottle.”

“Don’t be silly. We haven’t that much safety line, even at closest approach. Hazel, tell him: “Thanks a million but I’ve got the prettiest little girl in the system cooking for me right now.”“

Meade said, “Me, Daddy? I thought you didn’t like my cooking?” “Don’t give yourself airs, snub nose. I mean your mother, of course.” Meade considered this. “But I look like her, don’t I?”

“Some. Send it, Hazel.”

“RIGHT YOU ARE! MY RESPECTS TO EDITH. “TRUTHFULLY, WHAT IS THAT STUFF? SHALL I SEND OVER WEEDKILLER, OR BARNACLE REMOVER? OR COULD WE BEAT IT TO DEATH WITH A STICK?”

“Why not tell him, Dad?” Castor inquired

“Very well, I will, send: “Bicycles: want to buy one?”“ To their surprise Captain Vandenbergh answered: “MAYBE. GOT A RALEIGH “SANDMAN”?”

“Tell him, “Yes!”

“Pollux put in. “A-number-one condition and brand-new tires. A bargain.”

“Slow up there,” his father interrupted. “I’ve seen your load. If you’ve got a bike in first-class condition, Raleigh or any other make, you’ve got it well hidden.”

“Aw, Dad, it will be – by the time we deliver.”

“What do you suppose he wants a bicycle for, dear?” Dr. Stone asked. “Prospecting? Surely not.”

“Probably just sightseeing. All right, Hazel, you can send it – but mind you, boys, I’ll inspect that vehicle-myself; Van trusts me.” Hazel pushed herself away from the rig. “Let the boys tell their own whoppers. I’m getting bored with this chit-chat.”

Castor took over at the key, started to dicker. The passenger skipper, it developed, really was willing to buy a bicycle. After a leisurely while they settled on a price well under Castor’s asking price, attractively under the usual prices on Mars, but profitably over what the boys had paid on Luna – this for delivery F.O.B. Phobos, circum Mars.

Roger Stone exchanged affectionate insults and gossip with his friend from time to time over the next several days. During the following week the War God came within phone range, but the conversations dropped off and stopped; they had exhausted topics of conversation. The War God had made her closest approach and was pulling away again; they did not hear from her for more than three weeks.

The call was taken by Meade. She hurried aft to the hold where her father was helping the twins spray enamel on reconditioned bicycles. “Daddy,

you’re wanted on the phone? War God, master to master – official.”

“Coming.” He hurried forward and took the call. “Rolling Stone, Captain Stone speaking.” “War God, commanding officer speaking. Captain, can you –

“Just a moment. This does not sound like Captain Vandenbergh.” “It isn’t. This is Rowley, Second Officer. I -”

“I understand that your captain wanted me, officially. Let me speak with him.”

“I’m trying to explain, Captain.” The officer sounded strained and irritable. “I am the commanding officer. Both Captain Vandenbergh and Mr. O’Flynn are on the binnacle list.”

“Eh? Sorry. Nothing serious, I hope?”

“I’m afraid it is, sir. Thirty-seven cases on the sick list this morning – and four deaths.” “Great Scott, man! What is it?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Well, what does your medical officer say it is?” “That’s it, sir. The Surgeon died during the midwatch.” “Oh-”

“Captain, can you possibly match with us? Do you have enough maneuvering margin?” “What? Why?”

“You have a medical officer aboard. Haven’t you?” “Huh? But she’s my wife!” –

“She’s an M.D., is she not?”

Roger Stone remained silent for a long moment. Then he said, “I’ll call you back shortly, sir.”

It was a top level conference, limited to Captain Stone, Dr. Stone, and Hazel. First, Dr. Stone insisted on calling the War God and getting a full report on symptoms and progress of the disease. When she switched off her husband said, “Well, Edith, what is it?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to see it.”

“Now, see here, I’m not going to have you risking -” “I’m a doctor, Roger.”

“You’re not in practice, not now. And you are the mother of a family. It’s quite out of the ques -” “I am a doctor, Roger.”

He sighed heavily. “Yes, dear.”

“The only thing to be determined is whether or not you can match in with the War God. Have you two reached an answer?” “We’ll start computing.”

“I’m going aft and check over my supplies.” She frowned. “1 didn’t expect to have to cope with an epidemic.” When she was gone Roger turned his face, twisted with indecision, to Hazel. “What do you think, Mother?” “Son, you don’t stand a chance. She takes her oath seriously. You’ve known that a long time.”

“I haven’t taken the Hippocratic oath! If I won’t move the ship, there’s nothing she can do about it.”

“You’re not a doctor, true. But you’re a master in space. I guess the “succour & rescue” rule might apply.” “The devil with rules! This is Edith.”

“Well,” Hazel said slowly, “I guess I might stack the Stone family up against the welfare of the entire human race in a pinch, myself. But I can’t decide it for you.”

“I won’t let her do it! It’s not me. There’s Buster – he’s no more than a baby still; he needs his mother.” “Yes, he does.”

“That settles it. I’m going aft and tell her.”

“Wait a minute! If that’s your decision, Captain, you won’t mind me saying that’s the wrong way to do it.” “Eh?”

“The only way you’ll get it past your wife is to get on that computer and come out with the answer you’re looking for. . . an answer that says it’s physically impossible for us to match with them and still reach Mars.”

“Oh. You’re right. Look, will you help me fake it?” “I suppose so.”

“Then let’s get busy.”

“As you say, sir. You know, Roger, if the War God comes in with an unidentified and uncontrolled disease aboard, they’ll never let her make port at Mars. They’ll swing her in a parking orbit, fuel her up again, and send her back at next optimum.”

“What of it? It’s nothing to me if fat tourists and a bunch of immigrants are disappointed.”

“Check. But I was thinking of something else. With Van and the first officer sick, maybe about to check in, if the second officer comes down with it, too, the War God might not even get as far as a parking orbit.”

Roger Stone did not have to have the thought elaborated; a ship approaching a planet, unless manoeuvred at the last by a skilled pilot, can do one of only two things – crash, or swing on past and out endlessly into empty space to take up a comet-like orbit which arrives nowhere ever.

He covered his face with his hands. “What do I do, Mother?” “You are captain, son.”

He sighed. “I suppose I knew it all along.”

“Yes, but you had to struggle with it first.” She kissed him. “Orders, son?” “Let’s get to it. It’s a good thing we didn’t waste any margin in departure.” “That it is.”

When Hazel told the others the news Castor asked, “Does Dad want us to compute a ballistic?” “No.”

“A good thing – for we’ve got to get those bikes inboard, fast! Come on, Pol. Meade, how about suiting up and giving us a hand? Unless Mother needs you?”

“She does,” answered Hazel, “to take care of Lowell and keep him out of the way. But you won’t be bringing the bikes inboard.”

“What? You can’t balance the ship for maneuvers with them where they are. Besides, the first blast would probably snap the wires and change your mass factor.”

“Cas, where are your brains? Can’t you see the situation? We jettison.” “Huh? We throw away our bikes? After dragging almost to Mars?”

“Your bikes, all our books, and everything else we can do without. The rough run-through on the computer made that clear as quartz; it’s the only way we can do this maneuver and still be sure of having a safe margin for homing in. Your father is checking over the weight schedule right now.”

“But -, Castor’s face suddenly relaxed and became impassive. “Aye aye, ma’am.”

The twins were suiting up but had not yet gone outside when Pollux was struck by a notion. “Cas? We cut the bikes loose; then what happens?” “We charge it off to experience – and try to recover from Four-Planets Transit. They won’t pay up, of course.”

“Use your skull. Where do the bikes end up?” “Huh? Why, at Mars!”

“Right. Or pretty near. In the orbit we’re in now, they swing in mighty close and then head down Sunside again. Suppose, on closest approach, we are standing there waiting to snag ’em?”

“Not a chance. It will take us just as long to get to Mars – and in a different orbit, same as the War God’s?

“Yes, but just supposing. You know, I wish I had a spare radar beacon to hang on them. Then if we could reach them, we’d know where they were.”

“Well, we haven’t got one. Say! Where did you put that used reflecting foil?”

“Huh? Oh, I see. Grandpa, sometimes your senile decay is not quite so noticeable.” The Stone had started out, of course, covered on one side of her living quarters by mirror-bright aluminium foil. As she drifted farther and farther from the Sun, reflecting the Sun’s heat had grown less

necessary, absorbing it more desirable. To reduce the load on the ship’s heating and cooling system, square yards of it were peeled up and taken inside to store from week to week.

“Let’s ask Dad.”

Hazel stopped them at the hatch to the control room. “He’s at the computer. What’s the complaint?” “Hazel, the reflecting foil we’ve been salvaging – is it on the jettison list?”

“Certainly. We’ll pick up some more on Mars for the trip back. Why?”

“A radar corner – that’s why!” They explained the plan. She nodded. “A long chance, but it makes sense. See here, wire everything we jettison to the bikes. We might get it all back.”

“Sure thing!” The twins got busy. While Pollux gathered together the bunches of bicycles, all but a few in good repair and brave with new paint. Castor constructed a curious geometrical toy. With 8-gauge wire, aluminium foil, and sticky tape he made a giant square of foil, edged and held flat with wire. This he bisected at right angles with a second square. The two squares he again bisected at the remaining possible right angle with a third square. The result was eight shiny right-angled corners facing among them in all possible directions – a radar reflector. Each corner would bounce radar waves directly back to source, a principle easily illustrated with a rubber ball and any room or box corner. The final result was to step up the effectiveness or radar from an inverse fourth-power law to an inverse square law – in theory, at least. In practice it would be somewhat less than perfectly efficient but the radar response of the assembly would be increased enormously. A mass so tagged would stand out on a radar screen like a candle in a cave.

This flimsy giant kite Castor anchored to the ball of bicycles and other jetsam with an odd bit of string. No stronger link was necessary; out here no vagrant wind would blow it away, no one would cut it loose. “Pol,” he said, “go bang on the port and tell ’em we’re ready.”

Pollux walked forward and did so, rapping on the quartz first to attract his grandmother’s attention, then tapping code to report. While he was gone Castor attached a piece of paper reading:

NOT FOR SALVAGE

This cargo is in free transit by intention. The undersigned owner intends to recover it and warns all parties not to claim it as abandoned. U.P. Rev. Stat. # 193401

Roger Stone, Master

P.Y. Rolling Stone, Luna

When Pollux came back he said, “Hazel says go ahead but take it easy.”

“Of course.” Castor untwisted the single wire that held the ungainly mass to the ship, then stood back and watched it. It did not move. He reached out and gave it the gentlest shove with his little finger, then continued watching. Slowly, slowly it separated from the ship. He wished to disturb its orbit as little as possible, to make it easy to find. The petty vector he had placed on it – an inch a minute was his guess – would act for all the days from there to Mars; he wanted the final sum to remain small.

Pollux twisted around and picked out the winking gleam of the War God. “Will the jet be clear of it when we swing ship?” he asked anxiously. “Quit worrying. I already figured that.”

The maneuver to he performed was of the simplest – point to point in space in a region which could be treated as free of gravity strain since the two ships were practically the same distance from the Sun and Mars was too far away to matter. There were four simple steps: cancellation of the slight vector difference between the two ships (the relative speed with which the War God was puffing away), acceleration toward the War God, transit of the space between them, deceleration to match orbits and lie dead in space relative to each other on arrival.

Steps one and two would be combined by vector addition; step three was simply waiting time. The operation would be two maneuvers, two blasts on the jet.

But step three, the time it would take to reach the War God, could be enormously cut down by lavish use of reactive mass. Had time been no object they could have, as Hazel put it, closed the gap ‘by throwing rocks off the stern.” There was an infinite number of choices, each requiring

different amounts of reactive mass. One choice would have saved the bicycles and their personal possessions – but it would have stretched the

transit time out to over two weeks.

This was a doctor’s emergency call – Roger Stone elected to jettison.

But he did not tell the twins this and he did not require them to work a ballistic. He did not care to let them know of the choice between sacrificing their capital or letting strangers wait for medical attention. After all, he reflected, the twins were pretty young.

Eleven hours from blast time the Stone hung in space close by the War God. The ships were still plunging toward Mars at some sixteen miles per second; relative to each other they were stationary – except that the liner continued her stately rotation, end over end. Dr. Stone, her small figure encumbered not only with space suit, pressure bottles, radio, suit jet, and life lines, but also with a Santa Claus pack of surgical supplies, stood with her husband on the side of the Stone nearest the liner. Not knowing exactly what she might need she had taken all that she believed could be spared from the stock of their own craft -drugs, antibiotics, instruments, supplies.

The others had been kissed good-by inside and told to stay there. Lowell had cried and tried to keep his mother from entering the lock. He had not been told what was going on, but the emotions of the others were contagious.

Roger Stone was saying anxiously, “Now see here, the minute you have this under control, back you come – you hear?” She shook her head. “I’ll see you on Mars, dearest.”

“No indeed! You -”

“No, Roger. I might act as a carrier. We can’t risk it.”

“You might act as a carrier corning back to us on Mars, too. Don’t you ever expect to come back?”

She ignored the rhetorical question. “On Mars there will be hospitals. But I can’t risk a family epidemic in space.” “Edith I’ve a good mind to refuse to-”

“They’re ready for me, dear. See?”

Over their heads, two hundred yards away, a passenger lock on the rotation axis of the mighty ship had opened; two small figures spilled silently out, flipped neatly to boot contact, stood on the ship’s side, their heads pointing ‘down’ at Mr. and Mrs Stone. Roger Stone called into his microphone, “War God!”

“WarGod aye aye!” “Are you ready?” “Whenever you are.” “Stand by for transfer.”

Acting Captain Rowley had proposed sending a man over to conduct Dr. Stone across the gap. She had refused, not wishing to have anyone from the infected ship in contact with the Rolling Stone. Now she said, “Are my lines free for running, Roger?”

“Yes, dearest.” He had bent several lines together, one end to her waist, the other to a padeye. “Will you do my boots, dear?”

He kneeled and unzipped her magnetic boots without speaking, his voice having become uncertain. He straightened and she put her arms around him. They embraced awkwardly, hampered by the suits, hampered by the extra back pack she carried. “Adios, my darling,” she said softly. “Take care of the children.”

“Edith! Take care of yourself!” “Yes, dear. Steady me now.”

He slipped his hands to her hips; she stepped out of the boots, was now held against the ship only by his hands.

“Ready! One! Two!” They crouched down together. “Three!” She jumped straight away from the ship, her lines snaking after her. For long, long seconds she sailed straight out over his head, closing the gap between her and the liner. Presently it became evident that she had not leapt quite straight; her husband got ready to haul her back in.

But the reception committee was ready for the exigency. One of them was swinging a weighted line around his head; he let the end of it swing farther and farther out. As she started to move past the side of the War God he swung it against her safety line; the weighted end wrapped itself around her line. Back at the Rolling Stone Roger Stone snubbed her line and stopped her; the man on the liner gently pulled her in.

The second man caught her and snapped a hook to her belt, then unfastened the long line from the Stone. Before she entered the lock she waved, and the door closed.

Roger Stone looked at the closed door for a moment, then pulled in the line. He let his eyes drop to the pair of little boots left standing empty

beside him. He pulled them loose, held them to him, and plodded back to his own airlock.

II – ASSETS RECOVERABLE

The twins kept out of their father’s way for the next several days. He was unusually tender and affectionate with all of them but he never smiled and his mood was likely to flare suddenly and unexpectedly into anger. They stayed in their bunkroom and pretended to study they actually did study some of the time. Meade and Hazel split the care of Lowell between them; the child’s feeling of security was damaged by the absence of his mother. He expressed it by temper tantrums and demands for attention.

Hazel took over the cooking of lunch and dinner; she was no better at it than Meade. She could be heard twice a day, burning herself and swearing and complaining that she was not the domestic type and never had had any ambitions that way. Never!

Dr. Stone phoned once a day, spoke briefly with her husband, and begged off from speaking to anyone else for the reason that she was much too busy. Roger Stone’s explosions of temper were most likely to occur shortly after these daily calls.

Hazel alone had the courage to quiz him about the calls. On the sixth day at lunch she said, “Well, Roger? What was the news today? Give.” “Nothing much. Hazel, these chops are atrocious.’.

“They ought to be good; I flavored ’em with my own blood.” She held out a bandaged thumb. “Why don’t you try cooking? But back to the subject. Don’t evade me, boy.”

“She thinks she’s on the track of something. So far as she can tell from their medical records, nobody has caught it so far who is known to have had measles.”

Meade said, “Measles? People don’t die of that, do they?”

“Hardly ever,” agreed her grandmother, “though it can be fairly serious in an adult.”

“I didn’t say it was measles,” her father answered testily, “nor did your mother. She thinks it’s related to measles, a mutant strain maybe more virulent.”

“Call it “neomeasles”,” suggested Hazel. “That’s a good question-begging tag and it has an impressive scientific sound to it Any more deaths, Roger?”

“Well, yes.” “How many?”

“She wouldn’t say. Van is still alive, though, and she says that he is recovering. She told me,” he added, as if trying to convince himself, “that she thought she was learning how to treat it.”

“Measles,” Hazel said thoughtfully. “You’ve never had it, Roger.” “No.”

“Nor any of the kids.”

“Of course not,” put in Pollux. Luna City was by long odds the healthiest place in the known universe; the routine childhood diseases of Earth had never been given a chance to establish.

“How did she sound, Son?”

“Dog tired.” He frowned. “She even snapped at me.” “Not Mummy!”

“Quiet, Meade.” Hazel went on, “I’ve had measles, seventy or eighty years ago. Roger, I had better go over and help her.” He smiled without humor. “She anticipated that. She said to tell you thanks but she had all the unskilled help she could use.”

“”Unskilled help!” I like that! Why, during the epidemic of ’93 there were times when I was the only woman in the colony able to change a bed. Hummph!”

Hazel deliberately waited around for the phone call the next day, determined to get a few words at least with her daughter-in-law. The call came in about the usual time; Roger took it. It was not his wife.

“Captain Stone? Turner, sir Charlie Turner. I’m the third engineer. Your wife asked me to phone you.” “What’s the matter? She busy?”

“Quite busy.”

“Tell her to call me as soon as she’s free. I’ll wait by the board.”

“I’m afraid that’s no good, sir. She was quite specific that she would not be calling you today. She won’t have time.” “Fiddlesticks! It will only take her thirty seconds. In a big ship like yours you can hook her in wherever she is.”

The man sounded embarrassed. “I’m sorry, sir. Dr. Stone gave strict orders not to be disturbed.” “But confound it, I -”

“I’m very sorry, sir. Good-by.” He left him sputtering into a dead circuit.

Roger Stone remained quiet for several moments, then turned a stricken face to his mother. “She’s caught it.”

Hazel answered quietly, “Don’t jump to conclusions, Son.” But in her own heart she had already reached the same conclusion. Edith Stone had contracted the disease she had gone to treat.

The same barren stall was given Roger Stone on the following day; by the third day they gave up the pretence. Dr. Stone was ill, but her husband was not to worry. She had already, before she gave into it herself, progressed far enough in standardizing a treatment that all the new cases – hers among them – were doing nicely. So they said.

No, they would not arrange a circuit to her bed. No, he could not talk to Captain Vandenbergh; the Captain was still too ill. “I’m coming over!” Roger Stone shouted.

Turner hesitated. “That’s up to you, Captain. But if you do, we’ll have to quarantine you here. Dr. Stone’s written orders.”

Roger Stone switched off. He knew that that settled it; in matters medical Edith was a Roman judge – and he could not abandon his own ship, his family, to get to Mars by themselves. One frail old woman, two cocksure half-trained student pilots – no, he had to take his ship in.

They sweated it out The cooking got worse, when anyone bothered to cook. It was seven endless, Earth-standard days later when the daily call was answered by, “Roger – hello, darling!”

“Edith! Are you all right?” “Getting that way.”

“What’s your temperature?”

“Now, darling, I won’t have you quack-doctoring me. My temperature is satisfactory, as is the rest of my physical being. I’ve lost a little weight, but I could stand to – don’t you think?”

“No, I don’t. Listen – you come home! You hear me?”

“Roger dearest! I can’t and that’s settled. This entire ship is under quarantine. But how is the rest of my family?” “Oh, shucks, fine, fine! We’re all in the pink.”

“Stay that way. I’ll call you tomorrow. Bye, dear.”

Dinner that night was a celebration. Hazel cut her thumb again, but not even she cared.

The daily calls, no longer a naging worry but a pleasure, continued. It was a week later that Dr. Stone concluded by saying ‘Hold on, dear. A friend of yours wants to speak with you.”

“Okay, darling: Love and stuff – good-by.” “Roger Dodger?” came a bass voice.

“Van! You squareheaded bay window! I knew you were too mean to die.”

“Alive and kicking, thanks to your wonderful wife. But no longer with a bay window; I haven’t had time to regrow it yet” “You will.”

“No doubt. But I was asking the good doctor about something and she couldn’t give me much data. Your department Rog, how did this speed run leave you for single-H? Could you use some g-juice?”

Captain Stone considered it. “Have you any surplus, Captain?”

“A little. Not much for this wagon, but it might be quite a lot for a kiddie cart like yours.”

“We had to jettison, did you know?”

“I know – and I’m sorry. I’ll see that a claim is pushed through promptly. I’d advance it myself, Captain, if alimony on three planets left me anything to advance.”

“Maybe it won’t be necessary.” He explained about the radar reflector. “If we could nudge back into the old groove we just might get together with our belongings.”

Vandenbergh chuckled. “I want to meet those kids of yours again; they appear to have grown up a bit in the last seven years.” “Don’t. They’ll stea! your bridgework. Now about this single-H: how much can you spare?”

“Enough, enough, I’m sure. This caper is worth trying, just for the sport. I’m sure it has never been done before. Never.”

The two ships, perfectly matched to eye and almost so by instrument, nevertheless had drifted a couple. of miles apart while the epidemic in the liner raged and died out. The undetectable gravitational attraction between them gave them mutual escape velocity much less than their tiny residual relative motion. Up to now nothing had been done about it since they were still in the easiest of phone range. But now it was necessary to pump reactive mass from one to the other.

Roger Stone threw a weight fastened to a light messenger line as straight and as far as he could heave. By the time it was slowed to a crawl by the drag of the line a crewman from the War God came out after it on his suit jet, In due course the messenger line brought over a heavier line which was fastened to the smaller ship. Hand power alone took a strain on the line. While the mass of Rolling Stone was enormous by human muscle standards, the vector involved was too small to handle by jet and friction was nil. In warping in a space ship the lack of brakes is a consideration more important than numerous dents to ships and space stations testify.

As a result of that gentle tug, two and a half days later the ships were close enough to permit a fuel hose to be connected between them. Roger and Hazel touched the hose only with wrench and space-suit gauntlet, not enough contact to affect the quarantine even by Dr. Stone’s standards. Twenty minutes later even that connection was broken and the Stone had a fresh supply of jet juice.

And not too soon. Mars was a ruddy gibbous moon, bulging ever bigger in the sky; it was time to prepare to maneuver. “There it is!” Pollux was standing watch on the radar screen; his yelp brought his grandmother floating over.

“More likely a flock of geese,” she commented, “Where?” “Right there. Can’t you see it?”

Hazel grudgingly conceded that the blip might be real. The next several hours were spent in measuring distance, bearing, and relative motion by radar and doppler and in calculating the cheapest maneuver to let them match with the errant bicycles, baggage, and books. Roger Stone took it as easily as he could, being hurried somewhat by the growing nearness of Mars. He finally settled them almost dead in space relative to the floating junk pile, with a slight drift which would bring them within three hundred yards of the mass – so he calculated – at closest approach a few hours hence.

They spent the waiting time figuring the maneuvers to rendezvous with Mars. The Rolling Stone would not, of course, land on Mars but at the port on Phobos. First they must assume an almost circular ellipse around Mars matching with Phobos, then as a final maneuver they must settle the ship on the tiny moon – simple maneuvers made fussy by one thing only; Phobos has a period of about ten hours; the Stone would have to arrive not only at the right place with the right speed and direction, but also at the right time. After the bicycles were taken aboard the ship would have to be nursed along while still fairly far out if she were to fall to an exact rendezvous.

Everybody worked on it but Buster, Meade working under Hazel’s tutelage. Pollux continued to check by radar their approach to their cargo. Roger Stone had run through and discarded two trial solutions and was roughing out another which, at last, seemed to be making sense when Pollux announced that his latest angulation of the radar data showed that they were nearly as close as they would get.

His father unstrapped himself and floated to a port. “Where is it? Good heavens, we’re practically sitting on it. Let’s get busy, boys.” “I’m coming, too,” announced Hazel.

“Me, too!” agreed Lowell.

Meade reached out and snagged him. “That’s what you think, Buster. You and Sis are going to play a wonderful game called, “What’s for dinner?” Have fun, folks.” She headed aft, towing the infant against his opposition.

Outside the bicycles looked considerably farther away. Cas glanced at the mass and said. “Maybe I ought to go across on my suit jet, Dad? It would save time.”

“I strongly doubt it. Try the heaving line, Pol.” Pollux snapped the light messenger line to a padeye. Near the weighted end had been fastened a half a dozen large hooks fashioned of 6-gauge wire. His first heave seemed to be strong enough but it missed the cluster by a considerable margin,

“Let me have it, Pol,” Castor demanded.

“Let him be,” ordered their father. “So help me, this is the last time I’m going into space without a proper line-throwing gun. Make note of that,

Cas. Put it on the shopping list when we go inside.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

The second throw was seen to hit the mass, but when Pol heaved in the line came away, the hooks having failed to catch. He tried again. This time the floating line came taut.

“Easy, now!” his father cautioned. “We don’t want a bunch of bikes in our lap. There – “vast heaving. She’s started.” They waited.

Castor became impatient and suggested that they give the line another tug. His father shook his head. Hazel added, “I saw a green hand at the space station try to hurry a load that way. Steel plate, it was.”

“What happened?”

“He had started it with a pull; he thought he could stop it with a shove. They had to amputate both legs but they saved his life.” Castor shut up.

A few minutes later the disorderly mass touched down, bending a handlebar of one bike that got pinched but with no other damage. The twins and Hazel swarmed over the mass, working free on their safety lines and clicking on with their boots only to pass bicycles into the hold, where Roger Stone stowed them according to his careful mass distribution schedule.

Present!y Pollux came across Castor’s ‘Not for Salvage’ warning. “Hey, Cas! Here’s your notice.” “It’s no good now.” Nevertheless he accepted it and glanced at it. Then his eyes snapped wider. An endorsement had been added at the bottom:

“Sez you!

‘The Galactic Overlord.”

Captain Stone came out to investigate the delay, took the paper and read it. He looked at his mother. “Hazel!” “Me? Why, I’ve been right here in plain sight the whole time. How could I have done it?”

Stone crumpled the paper. “I do not believe in ghosts, inside straights, nor “Galactic Overlords.”“

If Hazel did it, no one saw her and she never admitted it. She persisted in the theory that the Galactic Overlord wasn’t really dead after all. To prove it, she revived him in her next episode.

– PHOBOS PORT

Mars has two ready-made space stations, her two tiny, close-in moons – Phobos and Deimos, the dogs of the War God, Fear and Panic. Deimos is a jagged, ragged mass of rock; a skipper would he hard put to find a place to put down a ship. Phobos was almost spherical and fairly smooth as we found her; atomic power has manicured her into one big landing field all around her equator – a tidying-up that may have been over hasty; by one very plausible theory the Martian ancients used her themselves as a space station. The proof, if such there be, may lie buried under the slag of Phobos port.

The Rolling Stone slid inside the orbit of Deimos, blasted as she approached the orbit of Phobos and was matched in with Phobos, following an almost identical orbit around Mars only a scant five miles from that moon. She was falling now, falling around Mars but falling toward Phobos, for no vector had been included as yet to prevent that. The fall could not be described as a headlong plunge; at this distance, one radius of Phobos, the moon attracted the tiny mass of the spaceship with a force of less than three ten-thousandths of one Earth surface gravity. Captain Stone had

ample time in which to calculate a vector which would let him land; it would take the better part of an hour for the Stone to sink to the surface of the satellite.

However, he had chosen to do it the easy way, through outside help. The jet of the Rolling Stone, capable of blasting at six gravities, was almost too much of a tool for the thin gravity field of a ten-mile rock – like swatting a fly with a pile-driver. A few minutes after they had ceased blasting, a small scooter rocket up from Phobos matched with them and anchored to their airlock.

The spacesuited figure who swam in removed his helmet and said, “Permission to board, sir? Jason Thomas, port pilot – you asked for pilot-and- tow?”

“That’s right, Captain Thomas.”

“Just call me Jay. Got your mass schedule ready?”

Roger Stone gave it to him; he look it over while they looked him over. Meade thought privately that he looked more like a bookkeeper than a dashing spaceman – certainly nothing like the characters in Hazel’s show. Lowell stared at him gravely and said, “Are you a Martian, Mister?”

The port pilot answered him with equal gravity. “Sort of, son.” “Then where’s your other leg?”

Thomas looked startled, but recovered. “I guess I’m a cut-rate Martian.”

Lowell seemed doubtful but did not pursue the point. The port official returned the schedule and said, “Okay, Captain. Where are your outside control-circuit jacks?”

“Just forward of the lock. The inner terminals are here on the board.”

“Be a few minutes.” He went back outside, moving very rapidly. He was back inside in less than ten minutes. “That’s all the time it took you to mount auxiliary rockets?” Roger Stone asked incredulously.

“Done it a good many times. Gets to be a routine. Besides, I’ve got good boys working with me.” Quickly he plugged a small portable control board to the jacks pointed out to him earlier, and tested his controls. “All set.” He glanced at the radar screen. “Nothing to do but loaf for a bit You folks immigrating?”

“Not exactly. It’s more of a pleasure trip.”

“Now ain’t that nice! Though it beats me what pleasure you expect to find on Mars.” He glanced out the port where the reddish curve of Mars pushed up into the black.

“We’ll do some sightseeing I expect”

“More to see in the State of Vermont than on this whole planet I know.” He looked around. “This your whole family?” “All but my wife.” Roger Stone explained the situation.

“Oh, yes! Read about it in the daily War Cry. They got the name of your ship wrong, though.”

Hazel snorted in disgust ‘Newspapers!”

Yes, mum. I put the War God down just four hours ago. Berths 32 & 33. She’s in quarantine, though.” He pulled out a pipe ‘You folks got static precipitation?”

Yes,” agreed Hazel. “Go ahead and smoke, young man.”

“Thanks on both counts.” He made almost a career of getting it lighted; Pollux began to wonder when he intended to figure his ballistic.

But Jason Thomas did not bother even to glance at the radar screen; instead he started a long and meandering story about his brother-in-law

back Earthside. It seemed that this connection of his had tried to train a parrot to act as an alarm clock.

The twins knew nothing of parrots and cared less. Castor began to get worried. Was this moron going to crash the Stone? He began to doubt that Thomas was a pilot of any sort. The story ambled on and on. Thomas interrupted him-self to say, “Better hang on, everybody. And somebody ought to hold the baby.”

“I’m not a baby,” Lowell protested.

“I wish I was one, youngster.” His hand sought his control panel as Hazel gathered Lowell in. “But the joke of the whole thing was – A deafening rumble shook the ship, a sound somehow more earsplitting than their own jet. It continued for seconds only, as it died Thomas continued triumphantly:

the bird never did learn to tell time. Thanks, folks. The office’ll bill you.” He stood up with a catlike motion, slid across or without lifting his feet ‘Glad to have met you. G’bye!”

They were down on Phobos.

Pollux got up from where he had sprawled on the deck-plates – and bumped his head on the overhead. After that he tried to walk like Jason Thomas. He had weight, real weight, for the first time since Luna, but it amounted to only two ounces in his clothes. “I wonder how high I can jump here?” he said.

“Don’t try it,” Hazel advised. “Remember the escape velocity of this piece of real estate is only sixty-six feet a second.” “I don’t think a man could jump that fast”

“There was Ole Gunderson. He dived right around Phobos – a free circular orbit thirty-five miles long. Took him eighty-five minutes. He’d have been traveling yet. If they hadn’t grabbed as he came back around.”

“Yes, but wasn’t he an Olympic jumper or something? And didn’t he have to have a special rack or some such to take off from?”

“You wouldn’t have to jump,” Castor put in. “Sixty-six feet a second is forty-five miles an hour, so the circular speed comes out a bit more than thirty miles an hour. A man can run twenty miles an hour back home, easy. He could certainly get up to forty-five here.”

Pollux shook tiis head. “No traction.”

“Special spiked shoes and maybe a tangent launching ramp for the last hundred yards – then woosh! off the end and you’re gone for good.” “Okay, you try it, Grandpa. I’ll wave good-by to you.”

Roger Stone whistled loudly. “Quiet, please! If you armchair athletes are quite through, I have an announcement to make.” “Do we go groundside now, Dad?”

“Not if you don’t quit interrupting me. I’m going over to the War God. Anyone who wants to come along, or wishes to take a stroll outside, may do so – just as long as you settle the custody of Buster among you. Wear your boots; I understand they have steel strip walkways for the benefit of transients.”

Pollux was the first one suited up and into the lock, where he was surprised to find the rope ladder still rolled up. He wondered about Jason Thomas and decided that he must have jumped. . . a hundred-odd feet of drop wouldn’t hurt a man’s arches here. But when he opened the outer door he discovered that it was quite practical to walk straight down the side of the ship like a fly on a wall. He had heard of this but had not quite believed it, not on a planet . . . well, a moon.

The others followed him, Hazel carrying Lowell. Roger Stone stopped when they were down and looked around. “I could have sworn,” he said with a puzzled air, “that I spotted the War God not very far east of us just before we landed.”

“There is something sticking up over there,” Castor said, pointing north. The object was a rounded dome swelling up above the extremely near horizon – an horizon only two hundred yards away for Castor’s height of eye: The dome looked enormous but it grew rapidly smaller as they approached it and finally got it entirely above the horizon. The sharp curvature of the little globe played tricks on them; it was so small that it was possible to see that it was curved, but the habit of thinking of anything over the horizon as distant stayed with them.

Before they reached the dome they encountered one of the steel walking strips running across their path, and on it a man. He was spacesuited as they were and was carrying with ease a large coil of steel line, a hand-powered winch, and a ground anchor with big horns. Roger Stone stopped him. “Excuse me, friend but could you tell me the way to the R.S. War God? Berths thirty-two and -three, I believe she is.”

Off east there. Just follow this strip about five miles; you’ll raise her. Say, are you from the Rolling Stone?” “Yes. I’m her master. My name’s Stone, too.”

“Glad to know you, Captain. I’m just on my way out to respot your ship. You’ll find her in berth thirteen, west of here when you come back.”

The twins looked curiously at the equipment he was carrying. “Just with that?” asked Castor, thinking of the ticklish problem it had been to move

the Stone on Luna.

“Did you leave your gyros running?” asked the port jockey. “Yes,” answered Captain Stone.

“I won’t have any trouble. See you around.” He headed out to the ship. The family party turned east along the strip; the traction afforded by their boot magnets against steel made much easier walking. Hazel put Lowell down and let him run.

They were walking toward Mars, a great arc of which filled much of the eastern horizon. The planet rose appreciably as they progressed; like Earth in the Lunar sky Mars never rose nor set for any particular point of the satellite’s surface – but they were moving over the curve of Phobos so rapidly that theff own walking made it rise. About a mile farther along Meade spotted the bow of the War God silhouetted against the orange-red face of Mars. They hurried, but it was another three miles before they had her in sight down. to her fins.

At last they reached her – to find a temporary barrier of line and posts around her and signs prominently displayed: “WARNING! – QUARANTINE – no entrance by order of Phobos Port Authority.”

I can t read,” said Hazel.

Roger Stone pondered it ‘The rest of you stay here, or go for a walk – whatever you please. I’m going in. Mind you stay off the field proper.” “Shucks,” answered Hazel, “there’s plenty of time to see a ship coming in and run for it, the way they float in here. That’s all the residents do. But

don’t you want me to come with you, boy?”

“No its my pidgin.” He left them at the barrier, went toward the liner. They waited. Hazel passed the time by taking a throat lozenge from her gun and popping it in through her mouth valve; she gave one to Lowell. Presently they saw Roger walk up the side of the ship to a view port. He stayed there quite a whlle, then walked down again.

When he got back to them his face was stormy. Hazel said ‘No go, I take it?”

“None at all. Oh, I saw Van and he rapped out some irrelevant insults. But he did let me see Edith – through the port” “How did she look?”

“Wonderful, just wonderful! A little bit thinner perhaps, but not much. She blew a kiss for all of you.” He paused and frowned. “But I can’t get in and I can’t get her out.”

“You can’t blame Van,” Hazel pointed out. “It would mean his ticket.” “I’m not blaming anybody! I’m just mad, that’s all.”

“Well, what next?”

He thought about it. “The rest of you do what you like for the next hour or so. I’m going to the administration building – it’s that dome back there. I’ll meet you all at the ship – berth thirteen.”

The twins elected to walk on east while Meade and Hazel returned at once to the ship Buster was getting restless. The boys wanted a really good look at Mars. They had watched it through the Stone‘s ports, of course, on the approach – but this was different. . . more real, somehow – not framed like a television shot. Three more miles brought all of it in sight, or all of it that was illuminated, for the planet was in half phase to them, the Sun being at that point almost overhead.

They studied the ruddy orange deserts, the olive green fertile stretches, the canals stretching straight as truth across her fiat landscape. The south polar cap was tipped slightly toward them; it had almost disappeared. Facing them was the great arrowhead of Syrtis Major.

They agreed that it was beautiful, almost as beautiful as Luna – more beautiful perhaps than Earth in spite of Earth’s spectacular and always changing cloud displays. But after a while they grew bored with it and headed back to the ship.

They found berth thirteen without trouble and walked up into the ship. Meade had dinner ready; Hazel was playing with Buster. Their father came in just as they were ready to eat. “You,” announced Hazel, “looked as if you had bribed a chair-warmer.”

“Not quite.” He hesitated, then said, “I’m going into quarantine with Edith. I’ll come out when she does.” “But Daddy -” protested Meade.

“I’m not through. While I’m gone Hazel takes command. She is also head of this family.” “I always have been,” Hazel said smugly.

“Please, Mother. Boys, if she finds it necessary to break your arms, please be advised that the action is authorised in advance. You understand me?”

“Yes sir. – “Aye aye, sir.”

“Good. I’m going to pack now and leave.”

“But Daddy!” Meade objected, almost in tears, “aren’t you going to wait for dinner?”

He stopped and smiled. “Yes, sugar pie. You are getting to be a good cook, did you know?”

Castor glanced at Pollux, then said, “Uh, Dad, let me get this straight We are simply to wait here in the ship – on this under-sized medicine ball until you and Mother get out of hock?”

“Why, yes – no, that isn’t really necessary. I simply hadn’t thought about it. If Hazel is willing, you can close down the ship and go down to Mars. Phone us your address and we’ll join you there. Yes, I guess that’s the best scheme.”

The twins sighed with relief.

IV – “WELCOME TO MARS!”

Roger Stone promptly caught the epidemic disease and had to be nursed through it – and thereby extended the quarantine time It gave the twins that much more time in which to exercise their talent for trouble. The truncated family went from Phobos down to Marsport by shuttle – not the sort of shuttle operating between Pikes Peak and Earth’s station, but little glider rockets hardly more powerful than the ancient German war rockets. Mars’ circular-orbit speed is only a trifle over two miles per second.

Nevertheless the fares were high . . . and so were freight charges The twins had unloaded their cargo, moved it to the freight lots between the customs shed and the administration building and arranged for it to follow them down, all before they boarded the shuttle. They had been horrified when they were presented with the bill – payable in advance. It had come to more than the amount they had paid their father for the added ship’s costs of boosting the bicycles all the way to Mars.

Castor was still computing their costs and possible profits as the five Stones were strapping down for the trip down to Marsport. “Pol, he said fretfully, “we’d better by a darn sight get a good price for those bikes.”

“We will, Grandpa, we will. They’re good bikes.”

The thuttle swooped to a landing on the Grand Canal and was towed into a slip, rocking gently the while. The twins were glad to climb out; they had never before been in a water-borne vehicle and it seemed to them an undependable if not outright dangerous mode of travel. The little ship was unsealed with a soft sigh and they were breathing the air of Mars. It was thin but the pressure was not noticeably lower than that they had maintained in the Rolling Stone – a generation of the atmosphere project had made skin suits and respirators unnecessary. It was not cold; the Sun was right at the zenith. Meade sniffed as she climbed to the dock. “What’s the funny smell, Hazel?”

“Fresh air. Odd stuff, isn’t it? Come on, Lowell.” They all went inside the Hall of Welcome, that being the only exit. from the dock. Hazel looked around, spotted a desk marked ‘Visas’ and headed for it. “Come on, kids Let’s stick together.”

The clerk looked over their papers as if he had never seen anything of the sort before and didn’t want to now. “You had your physical examinations at Phohos port?” he said doubtfully.

“See for yourself. They’re all endorsed.”

“Well. . . you don’t have your property declaration filled out for immigration.” “We’re not imrnjgrants; we’re visitors.”

“Why didn’t you say so? You haven’t posted a bond; all terrestrial citizens have to post bonds.”

Pollux looked at Castor and shook his head. Hazel counted up to ten and replied, “We’re not terrestrials; we’re citizens of Luna Free State – and entitled to full reciprocity under the treaty of ’07. Look it up and see.”

“Oh.’. The clerk looked baffled and endorsed and stamped their papers. He stuck them in the stat machine, then handed them back. “That’ll be five pounds.”

“Five pounds?”

“Pounds Martian, of course. If you apply for citizenship it’s returnable.”

Hazel counted it out. Pollux converted the figure into System credit in his head and swore under his breath; he was beginning to think that Mars was the Land of the Fee. The clerk. recounted the money, then reached for a pile of pamphlets, handed them each one. “Welcome to Mars,” he said, smiling frigidly. “I know you’ll like it here.”

“I was beginning to wonder,” Hazel answered, accepting a pamphlet “Eh?”

“Never mind. Thank you.”

They turned away. Castor glanced at his pamphlet; it was titled:

WELCOME TO MARS! ! !

Compliments of the Marsport

Chamber of Commerce &

Booster Club

He skimmed the table of contents: What to See – Where to Eat – And Now to Sleep – “When in Rome-” – In Ancient Times – Souvenirs? of course – Business Opportunities – Facts & Figures about Marsport, Fastest Growing City in the System.

The inside, he found, contained more advertising space than copy. None of the pictures were stereo. Still, it was free; he stuck it in his pouch. They had not gotten more than ten steps away when the clerk suddenly called out, “Hey! Madam! Just a moment, please-comeback!”

Hazel turned around and advanced on him, her mouth set grimly. “What’s biting you, bub?” He pointed to her holster. “That gun. You can’t wear that – not in the city limits.”

“I can’t, eh?” She drew it, opened the charge chamber, and offered it to him with a sudden grin. “Have a cough drop?”

A very pleasant lady at the Travellers’ Aid desk, after determining that they really did not want to rent an ancient Martian tower believed to be at least a million years old but sealed and airconditioned nevertheless, made out for them a list of housekeeping apartments for rent. Hazel had vetoed going to any of the tourist hotels even for one night, after telephoning three and getting their rates. They tramped through a large part of the city, searching. There was no public transit system; many of the inhabitants used powered roller skates, most of them walked. The city was laid out in an oblong checkerboard with the main streets parallel to the canal. Except for a few remaining pressurised domes in ‘Old Town’ the buildings were all one-storey prefabricated boxlike structures without eaves or windows, all of depressing monotony.

The first apartment turned out to be two little stalls in the back of a private home – share refresher with family. The second was large enough but was in sniffing range of a large plastics plant; one of its exhalations seemed to be butyl mersaptan though Hazel insisted it put her more in mind of a dead goat The third – but none of them approached the standard of comfort they had enjoyed on the Moon, nor even that of the Rolling Stone.

Hazel came out of the last one they had jooked at, jumped back suddenly to keep from being run over by a delivery boy pulling a large hand truck, caught her breath and said, “What’ll it be, children? Pitch a tent, or go back up to the Stone?”

Pollux protested, “But we can’t do that We’ve got to sell our bicycles.”

“Shut up, Junior,” his brother told him ‘Hazel, I thought there was one more? “Casa” something?”

“Casa Mañana Apartments, way out south along the canal – and likely no better than the rest Okay, troops, mush on!”

The buildings thinned out and they saw some of the heliotropic Martian vegetation, spreading greedy hands to the Sun. Lowell began to complain at the walk. “Carry me, Grandma Hazel!”

“Nothing doing, pet,” she said emphatically, “your legs are younger than mine.” Meade stopped. “My feet hurt, too.”

“Nonsense! This is just a shade over one-third gravity.”

“Maybe so, but it’s twice what it is back home and we’ve been in free fall for half a year and more. Is it much farther?” “Sissy!”

The twins’ feet hurt, too, but they would not admit it They alternated taking Buster piggy-back the rest of the way. Casa Mañana turned out to be quite new and, by their suddenly altered standards, acceptable. The walls were of compacted sand, doubled against the bitter nights; the roof was of sheet metal sandwich with glass-wool core for insulation. It was a long, low building which made Hazel think of chicken coops but she kept the thought to herself. It had no windows but there were sufficient glow tubes and passable air ducting.

The apartment which the owner and manager showed to them consisted of two tiny cubicles, a refresher, and a general room. Hazel looked them over. “Mr. d’Avril, don’t you have something a bit larger?”

“Well, yes, ma’am, I do – but I hate to rent larger ones to such a small family with the tourist season just opening up: I’ll bring in a cot for the youngster.”

She explained that two more adults would be coming. He considered this. “You dbn’t know how long the War God will be quarantined? “Not the slightest”

“Then why don’t we play that hand after it’s dealt? We’ll accomodate you somehow; that’s a promise.” Hazel decided to close the deal; her feet were killing her. “How much?”

“Four hundred and fifty a month – four and a quarter if you take a lease for the whole season.”

At first Hazel was too surprised to protest She had not inquired rents at the other places since she had not considered renting them. “Pounds or credits?” she said feebly.

“Why, pounds, of course.”

“See here, I don’t want to buy this du – this place. I just want to use it for a while.”

Mr. d’Avril looked hurt. “You needn’t do either one, ma’am. With ships arriving every day now I’ll have my pick of tenants. My prices are considered very reasonable. The Property Owner’s Association has tried to get me to up ’em – and that’s a fact”

Hazel dug into her memory to recall how to compare a hotel price with a monthly rental – add a zero to the daily rate; that was it Why, the man must be telling the truth! – if the hotel rates she had gotten were any guide. She shook her head. “I’m just a country girl, Mr. d’Avril. How much did this place cost to build?”

Again he looked hurt ‘You’re not looking at it properly, ma’am. Every so often we have a big load of tourists dumped on us. They stay awhile, then they go away and we have no rent coming in at all. And you’d be surprised how these cold nights nibble away at a house. We can’t build the way the Martians could.”

Hazel gave up. “Is that season discount you mentioned good from now to Venus departure?”

“Sorry, ma’am. It has to be the whole season.” The next favorable time to shape an orbit for Venus was ninety-six Earth-standard days away – ninety-four Mars days – whereas the ‘whole season’ ran for the next fifteen months, more than half a Martian year before Earth and Mars would again be in a position to permit a minimum-fuel orbit.

“We’ll take it by the month. May I borrow your stylus? I don’t have that much cash on me.”

Hazel felt better after dinner. The Sun was down and the night would soon be too bitter for any human not in a heated suit, but inside Casa Mañana it was cozy, even though cramped. Mr. d’Avril, for an extra charge only mildly extortionate, had consented to plug in television for them and Hazel was enjoying for the first time in months one of her own shows. She noted that they had rewritten it in New York, as usual, and, again as usual, she found the changes no improvement. But she could recognise some of the dialogue and most of the story line.

That Galactic Overlord – he was a baddy, he was! Maybe she should kill him off again.

They could try to find a cheaper place tomorrow. At least as long as the show kept up its audience rating the family wouldn’t starve, but she hated to think of Roger’s face when he heard what rent he was paying. Mars! All right to visit, maybe, but no place to live. She frowned.

The twins were whispering in their own cubicle about some involved financial dealing; Meade was knitting quietly and watching the screen. She caught Hazel’s expression. “What were you thinking about, Grandmother?”

“I know what she’s thinking about!” announced Lowell.

“If you do, keep it to yourself. Nothing much, Meade – that pipsqueak clerk. Imagine the nerve of him, saying I couldn’t pack a gun!”

– FREE ENTERPRISE

The twins started out to storm the marts of trade next morning after breakfast Hazel cautioned them. “Be back in time for dinner. And try not to commit any capital crimes.”

“What are they here?”

“Um, let me see. Abandonment without shelter. . . pollution of the water supply . . . violation of treaty regulations with the natives – I think. that’s about all.”

“Murder?”

“Killing is largely a civil matter here – but they stick you for the prospective earnings of your victim for whatever his life expectancy was. Expensive. Very expensive, if the prices we’ve run into are any guide. Probably leave you indentured the rest of your life.”

“Hmm – We’ll be careful. Take note of that, Pol. Don’t kill anybody.” “You take note of it. You’re the one with the bad temper.”

“Back sharp at six, boys. Have you adjusted your watches?”

“Pol slowed his down; I’m leaving mine on Greenwich rate.” “Sensible.”

“Pol!” put in Lowell. “Cas! Take me along!” “Can’t. do it, sprout. Business.”

“Take me! I want to see a Martian. Grandma Hazel, when am I going to. see a Martian?”

She hesitated. Ever since an unfortunate but instructive incident forty years earlier a prime purpose of the planetary government had been to keep humans as far away from the true Martians as possible – tourists most especially. Lowell had less chance of getting his wish than a European child visiting Manhattan would have of seeing an American Indian. “Well, Lowell, it’s like this -The twins left hastily, not wishing to be drawn into what was sure to be a fruitless debate.

They soon found the street catering to the needs of prospectors. They picked a medium-sized shop displaying the sign of Angelo & Sons, Ltd., General Outfitters, which promised ‘Bed-rolls, Geiger Counters, Sand Cycles, Assaying Service, Black-Light Lamps, Firearms, Hardware- Ironmongery – Ask for It; We’ve Got It or Can Get It’.

Inside they found a single shopkeeper leaning against a counter while picking his teeth and playing with something that moved on the counter top. Pollux glanced curiously at it; aside from the fact that it was covered with fur and seemed to be roughly circular, he could not make out what it was. Some sort of Martian dingus probably. He would investigate later – business first.

The shopkeeper straightened up and remarked with professional cheer, “Good morning, gentlemen. Welcome to Mars.” “How did you know?” asked Castor.

“Know what?”

“That we had just gotten here.”

“Eh? That’s hard to say. You’ve still got some free fall in your walk and – oh, I don’t know. Little things that add up automatically. You get to know.”

Pollux shot Castor a glance of warning; Castor nodded. This man’s ancestors, he realised subconsciously, had plied the Mediterranean, sizing up customers, buying cheap and selling dear. “You’re Mr. Angelo?”

“I’m Tony Angelo. Which one did you want?”

“Uh, no one in particular, Mr. Angelo. We were just looking around.” “Help yourselves. Looking for souvenirs?”

“Well, maybe.”

“How about this?” Mr. Angelo reached into a box behind him and pulled out a battered face mask. “A sandstorm mask with the lenses pitted by the sands of Mars. You can hang it up in your parlor and tell a real thiller about how it got that way and how lucky you are to be alive. It won’t add much to your baggage weight allowance and I can let you have it cheap – I’d have to replace the lenses before I could sell it to the trade.”

Pollux was beginning to prowl the stock, edging towards the bicycles; Castor decided that he should keep Mr. Angelo engaged while his brother picked up a few facts, “Well, I don’t know,” he replied. “I wouldn’t want to tell a string of lies about it”

“Not Lies, just creative storytelling. After all, it could have happened – it did happen to the chap that wore it; I know him. But never mind.” He put the mask back. “I’ve got some honest-to-goodness Martian gems, only K’Raath HimseIf knows how old – but they are very expensive. And I’ve got some others that can’t be told from the real ones except in a laboratory under polarised light; they come from New Jersey and aren’t expensive at all. What’s your pleasure?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Castor repeated, “Say Mr. Angelo, what is this? At first I thought it was a fur cap; now I see its alive” Castor pointed to the furry heap on the counter. It was slowly slithering toward the edge.

The shopkeeper reached out and headed it back to the middle. “That? That’s a “flat cat”.” “”Flat cat?”“

“It has a Latin name but I never bothered to learn it.” Angelo tickled it with a forefinger; it began to purr like a high-pitched buzzer. It had no discernible features, being merely a pie-shaped mass of sleek red fur a little darker than Castor’s own hair. “They’re affectionate little things and many of the sand rats keep them for pets – a man has to have someone to talk to when he’s out prospecting and a flat cat is better than a wife because it can’t talk back. It just purrs and snuggles up to you. Pick it up.”

Castor did so, trying not seem gingerly about it The flat cat promptly plastered itself to Castor’s shirt, fattened its shape a little to fit better the crook of the boy’s arm, and changed its purr to a low throbbing which Castor could feel vibrate in his chest. He looked down and three beady little eyes stared trust-fully back up at him, then closed and disappeared completely. A little sigh interrupted the purrs and the creature snuggled closer.

Castor chuckled ‘It is like a cat, isn’t it? “Except that it doesn’t scratch. Want to buy it?”

Castor hesitated. He found himself thinking of Lowell’s anxiety to see a ‘real Martian’. Well, this was a ‘Martian’, wasn’t it? A sort of a Martian. “I wouldn’t know how to take care of it”

“No trouble at all. In the first place they’re cleanly little heasties – no problem that way. And they’ll eat anything; they love garbage. Feed it every week or so and let it have all the water it will take every month or six weeks – it doesn’t matter really; if it isn’t fed or watered it just slows down until it is. Doesn’t hurt a bit And you don’t even have see that it keeps warm. Let me show you.” He reached out and took the flat cat back, jiggled it in his hand. It promptly curled up into a ball.

“See that? Like everything else on Mars, it can wrap itself up when the weather is bad. A real survivor type.” The shopkeeper started to mention another of its survival characteristics, then decided it had no bearing on the transaction. “How about it? I’ll make you a good price.”

Castor decided that Lowell would love it – and besides, it was a legitimate business expense, chargeable to good will. “How much?”

Angelo hesitated, trying to estimate what the traffic would bear, since a flat cat on Mars had roughly the cash value of still another kitten on a Missouri farm. Still, the boys must be rich or they wouldn’t be here – just in and with spending money burning holes in their pockets, no doubt Business had been terrible lately anyhow. “A pound and a half,” he said firmly.

Castor was surprised at how reasonable the price was. “That seems like quite a lot,” he said automatically. Angelo shrugged. “It likes you. Suppose we say a pound?”

Castor was again surprised, this time at the speed and the size of the mark-down. “I don’t know,” he murmured. “Well. . . ten per cent off for cash.”

Out of the corner of his eye Castor could see that Pollux had finished inspecting the rack of bicycles and was coming back. He decided to clear the decks and establish that good will, if possible, before Pol got down to business. “Done.” He fished out a pound note, received his change, and picked up the flat cat ‘Come to papa, Fuzzy Britches.” Fuzzy Britches came to papa, snuggled up and purred.

Pollux came back, stared at the junior Martian. “What in the world?” “Meet the newest member of the family. We just bought a flat cat”

“We?” Pollux started to protest that it was no folly of his, but caught the warning in Castor’s eye in time. “Uh, Mr. Angelo, I don’t see any prices marked?”

The shopkeeper nodded. “That’s right The sand rats like to haggle and we accommodate them. It comes to the same thing in the long run. We always settle at list: they know it and we know it, but it’s part of their social life. A prospector doesn’t get much.”

“That Raleigh Special over there – what’s the list on it?” Pollux had picked it because it looked very much like the sand-cycle their father had delivered for them to Captain Vandenbergh when he had gone into quarantine.

“You. want to buy that bike?”

Castor shook his head a sixteenth of an inch; Pollux answered, “Well, no, I was just pricing it. I couldn’t take it Sunside. you know.”

“Well, seeing that there are no regular customers around, I’ll tell you. List is three hundred and seventy-five – and a bargain!”

“Whew! That seems high.”

“A bargain. She’s a real beauty. Try any of the other dealers.”

“Mr. Angelo,” Castor said carefully, “suppose I offered to sell you one just like it, not new but reconditioned as good as new and looking new, for just half that?”

“Eh? I’d probably say you were crazy”

“I mean it I’ve got it to sell. You might as well have the benefit of the low price as one of your competitors, I’m not going to offer it retail; this is for dealers.”

“Mmm. . . you didn’t come in here to buy souvenirs, did you?” “No, sir.”

“If you had come to me with that proposition four months ago, and could have backed it up, I’d have jumped at it. Now. . . well, no.” “Why not? it’s a good bike I’m offering you. A real bargain.”

“I’m not disputing it.” He reached out and stroked the flat cat. “Shucks, it can’t hurt anything to tell you why. Come along.”

He led them into the rear, past shelves crammed with merchandise, and on out behind the store. He waved a hand at stacks of merchandise that looked all too familiar. “See that? Second-hand bikes. That shed back there is stuffed with ’em; that’s why I’ve got these stored in the open.”

Castor tried to keep surprise and dismay out of his voice. “So you’ve got secoud-hand bikes,” he said, “all beat-up and sand pitted. I’ve got second-hand bikes that look like new and will wear like new – and I can sell them cheaper than you can sell these, a lot cheaper. Don’t you want to bid on them, at least?”

Angelo shook his head. “Brother, I admit that I didn’t take you for a jobber. But I have bad news for you. You can’t sell them to me; you can’t sell them to my competitors; you can’t sell them anywhere.”

“Why not?”

“Because there aren’t any retail customers.” “Huh?”

“Haven’t you heard of the Hallelujah Node? Didn’t you notice I didn’t have any customers? Three fourths of the sand rats on Mars are swarming into town – but they’re not buying, leastwise not bicycles. They’re stocking up for the Asteroids and kicking in together to charter ships. That’s why I have used bikes; I had to take them back on chattel mortgages -and that’s why you can’t sell bikes. Sorry – I’d like to do business with you.”

The twins had heard of the Hallelujah, all right – the news bad reached them in space: a strike of both uranium and core metal out in the Asteroids. But they had given it only intellectual attention, the Asteroids no longer figuring into their plans.

“Two of my brothers have already gone,” Angelo went on, “and I might give it a whirl myself if I weren’t stuck with the store. But I’d close and reopen as strictly a tourist trap if I could unload my present stock. That’s how bad things are.”

They crept out into the street as soon as they could do so gracefully. Pollux looked at Castor. “Want to buy a bicycle, sucker?” “Thanks, I’ve got one. Want to buy a flat cat?”

“Not likely. Say, let’s go over to the receiving dock. If any tourists are coming in, we might find another sucker to unload that thing on. We might even show a small profit – on flat cats, that is.”

“No, you don’t. Fuzzy Britches is for Buster – that’s settled. But let’s go over anyway; our bikes might be down.” “Who Ceres?”

“I do. Even if we can’t sell them, we can ride a couple of them. My feet hurt.”

Their shipment was not yet down from Phobos but it was expected about an hour hence. They stopped in the Old Southern Dining Room & Soda Fountain across from the Hall of Welcome. There they nursed sodas, petted Fuzzy Britches, and considered their troubles. “I don’t mind losing the money so much –“ Castor started in.

“I do!”

“Well, so do I. But what really hurts is the way Dad will laugh when he finds out. And what he’ll say.” “Not to mention Hazel.”

“Yes, Hazel. Junior, weve just got to figure out some way of picking up some money before we have to tell them.”

“With what? Our capital is gone. And Dad wouldn’t let us touch any more of our money even if he were here – which he isn’t.” “Then it has to be a way without capital.”

“Not many. Not for real money.”

“Hazel makes plenty credits without capital.”

“You aren’t suggesting that we write a television serial?” Pollux sounded almost shocked. “Of course not. We don’t have a customer for one. But there must be a way. Start thinking.”

After a glum silence Pollux said, “Grandpa, did you notice that announcement in the Hall of Welcome of the Mars chess championship matches next month?”

“No. Why?”

“People bet on ’em here – same as race horses Earthside.” “I don’t like bets. You can lose.”

“Sometimes. But suppose we entered Buster?”

“Huh? Are you crazy? Enter him against the best players on Mars?”

“Why not? Hazel used to be Luna champion, but Buster beats her regularly.” “But you know why. He reads her mind.”

“That’s precisely what I am talking about”

Castor shook his head. “It wouldn’t be honest, Junior.” “Since when did they pass a law against telepathy?”

“Anyhow you don’t know for certain that he does read her mind. And you don’t know that he could read a stranger’s mind. And it would take plenty cash to set up a good bet – which we haven’t got. And besides, we might lose.

“Okay, okay, it was just a thought You produce one.”

Castor frowned. “I don’t have one. Let’s go back over and see if our bikes are in. If they are, let’s treat ourselves to a day off and go sightseeing. We might as well get some use out of those bikes; they cost us enough.” He stood up.

Pollux sat still and stared at his glass. Castor added, “Come on.” Pollux said, “Sit down, Grandpa. I think I’m getting an idea.” “Don’t frighten it”

“Quiet.” Presently Pollux said, “Grandpa, you and I have just arrived here. We want to go sightseeing – so we immediately think of our bikes. Why wouldn’t tourists like to do the same thing – and pay for it?”

“Huh?” Castor thought about it ‘There must be some catch in it – or somebody would have done it long before this.”

“Not necessarily. it has only been the past few years that you could get a tourist visa to Mars; you came as a colonist or you didn’t come at all. I’d guess that nobody has thought of shipping bikes to Mars for tourists. Bikes cost plenty and they have been imported just for prospectors – for work, because a sand rat could cover four or five times as much territory on a sand cycle as on foot I’ll bet nobody here has ever thought of them for pleasure.”

“What do you want us to do? Paint a sign and then stand under it, shouting, “Bicycles! Get your bicycle here! You can’t see the sights of Mars without a bicycle”.”

Pollux thought it over. “We could do worse. But we would do better to try to sell somebody else on it, somebody who has the means to get it going. Shucks, we couldn’t even rent a lot for our bike stand.”

“There’s the soft point in the whole deal. We tell somebody and what does he do? He doesn’t buy our bikes; he goes to Tony Angelo and makes a deal with him to put Angelo’s bikes to work, at a lower cost.”

“Use your head, Grandpa. Angelo and the other dealers won’t rent their new machines to tourists; they cost too much. And tourists won’t rent that junk Angelo has in his back lot, they’re in a holiday mood; they’ll go for something new and shiny and cheerful. And for rental purposes. Remember, our bikes aren’t just practically new; they are new. Anybody who rents anything knows it has been used before; he’s satisfied if it looks new.

Castor stood up again. “Okay, you’ve sold me. Now let’s see if you can sell it to somebody else. Pick a victim.”

“Sit down; what’s your hurry? Our benefactor is probably right under this roof.” “Huh?”

“What’s the first thing a tourist sees when he first comes out of the Hall of Welcome? The Old Southern Dining Room, that’s what. The bike stand ought to be right out in front of this restaurant”

“Let’s find the owner.”

Joe Pappalopoulis was in the kitchen; he came out wiping his hands on his apron. “What’s the matter, boys? You don’t like your soda? “Oh, the sodas were swell! Look, Mr. Pappalopoulis, can you spare us a few minutes?”

“Call me “Poppa”; you wear yourself out. Sure.”

“Thanks. I’m Cas Stone; this is my brother Pol. We live on Luna and we came in with a load you might be interested in.” “You got a load of imported food? I don’t use much. Just coffee and some flavors.”

“No, no, not food. How would you like to add a new line that would fit right in with your restaurant business? Twice as much volume and only one overhead.”

The owner took out a knife and began to pare his nails. “Keep talking.”

Pollux took over, explained his scheme with infectious enthusiasm. Pappalopoulis looked up from time to time, said nothing. When Pollux seemed to be slowing down Castor took over; ‘Besides renting them by the hour, day, or week, you set up sightseeing tours and charge extra for those.”

“The guides don’t cost you any salary; you make ’em pay for the concession and then allow them a percentage of the guide fee.” “They rent their own bikes from you, too.”

“No overhead; you’ve already got the best spot in town. You just arrange to be out in front every time a shuttle comes down and maybe pay one of your guides a commission on rentals he makes to watch the stand in between times.”

“But the best deal is the long-term lease. A tourist uses a bike one day; you point out to him how cheap he can get it for the full time of his stay and you get the full price of the bike back in one season. From then on you’re operating on other people’s money.

The restaurateur put his knife away and said, “Tony Angelo is a good businessman. Why don’t I buy second hand bikes from him- cheap?

Castor took the plunge. “Go look at his bikes. Just look at them, sand pits and worn-out tires and all. Then we’ll meet his price – with better bikes.” “Any price he names?”

“Any firm price, not a phony. If his price is really low, we’ll buy his bikes ourselves.” Pollux looked a warning but Castor ignored it ‘We can undersell any legitimate price he can afford to make – with better merchandise. Let’s go see his bikes.”

Pappalopoulis stood up. “I’ve seen bikes in from the desert We go see yours.”

“They may not be down yet.” But they were down. Joe Poppa looked them over without expression, but the twins were very glad of the hours they had spent making them brave with paint, gaudy with stripes, polish and new decals.

Castor picked out three he knew to be in tiptop shape and said, “How about a ride? I’d like to do some sightseeing myself – free. Pappalopoulis smiled for the first time. “Why not?”

They rode north along the canal clear to the power pile station, then back to the city, skirted it, and right down Clarke Boulevard to the Hall of Welcome and the Old Southern Dining Room. After they had dismounted and returned the vehicles to the pile. Castor signaled Pollux and waited silently.

The cafe owner said nothing for several moments. At last he said, “Nice ride, boys. Thanks.” “Don’t mention it”

He stared at the heap of bikes. “How much?”

Castor named a price. Pappalopoulis shook his head sadly, “That’s a lot of money.”

Before Pollux could name a lower price Castor said, “Make it easy on yourself. We’d rather be cut in on the gravy but we thought you might prefer to own them yourselves. So let’s make it a partnership; you run the business, we put up the bikes. Even split on the gross and you absorb the overhead. Fair enough?”

Pappalopoulis reached over and stroked the flat cat ‘Partnerships make quarrels,” he said thoughtfully.

“Have it your own way,” Castor answered. “Five per cent for cash.

Pappalopoulis pulled out a roll that would have choked a medium-large Venerian sand hog. “I buy ’em.”

The twins spent the afternoon exploring the city on foot and looking for presents for the rest of the family. When they started home their way led them back through the square between the receiving station and Poppa’s restaurant The sign now read:

THE OLD SOUTHERN DINING ROOM AND

TOURIST BUREAU

Sodas Souvenirs Candy Sightseeing Trips BICYCLES RENTED

Guide Service

See the Ancient Martian Ruins!!!

Pollux looked at it. “He’s a fast operator, all right. Maybe you should have insisted on a partnership.” “Don’t be greedy. We turned a profit, didn’t we?”

“I told you we would. Well, let’s get Fuzzy Britches home to Buster.”

VI – CAVEAT VENDOR

Fuzzy Britches was not an immediate success with Lowell. “Where its legs?” he said darkly. “If it’s a Martian, it ought to have three legs.” “Well,” argued Castor, “some Martians don’t have legs.”

“Prove it!”

“This one doesn’t That proves it”

Meade picked Fuzzy Britches up; it immediately began to buzz – whereupon Lowell demanded to hold it Meade passed it over. “I don’t see,” she remarked, “why anything as helpless as that would have such bright colors.”

“Think again, honey lamb,” advised Hazel. “Put that thing out on the desert sand and you would lose it at ten feet, Which might be a good idea.” “No!” answered Lowell.

“”No” what, dear?”

“Don’t you lose Fuzzy Britches. He’s mine.” The child left carrying the flat cat and cooing a lullaby to it. Fuzzy Britches might lack legs but it knew how to win friends; anyone who picked it up hated to put it down. There was something intensely satisfying about petting the furry thing. Hazel tried to analyse it but could not.

No one knew when the quarantine of the War God would be lifted. Therefore Meade was much surprised one morning to return to Casa Mañana and fined her father in the general room. “Daddy!” she yelled, swarming over him. “When did you get down?.

“Just now.” “Mummy, too?”

“Yes. She’s in the ‘fresher.”

Lowell stood in the doorway, watching them impassively. Roger Stone loosed himself from his daughter and said, “Good morning, Buster.” “Good morning, Daddy. This is Fuzzy Britches. He’s a Martian. He’s also a flat cat.”

“Glad to know you, Fuzzy Britches. Did you say “flat cat”?” “Yes.”

“Very well. But it looks more like a wig.”

Dr. Stone entered, was subjected to the same treatment by Meade, then turned to Lowell. He permitted her to kiss him, then said, “Mama, this is Fuzzy Britches. Say hello to him.”

“How do you do, Fuzzy Britches? Meade, where are your brothers? And your grandmother?” Meade looked upset. “I was afraid you would get around to that. The twins are in jail again.” Roger Stone groaned. “Oh, no, not again! Edith, we should have stayed on Phobos.”

“Yes, dear.”

“Well, let’s face it What is the charge this time, Meade?” “Fraud and conspiring to evade the customs duties.”

“I feel better. The last time but one, you’ll remember, it was experimenting with atomics inside the city limits and without license. But why aren’t they out on bail? Or is there some-thing worse you haven’t told us?”

“No, it’s just that the court has tied up their bank account and Hazel wouldn’t get them bond. She said they were safer where they were.” “Good for Hazel!”

“Daddy, if we hurry we can get back downtown for the hearing. I’ll tell you and Mummy about it on the way.”

The ‘fraud’ part of it came from Mr. Pappalopoulis; the rest of it came straight from the planetary government. Mars, being in a state of expanding economy, just beginning to be self-supporting and only recently of declared sovereignty, had a strongly selective tariff. Being forced to import much and having comparatively little to export which could not be had cheaper Earthside, all her economic statutes and regulations were bent toward relieving her chronic credit gap; Articles not produced on Mars but needed for her economy came in duty free; articles of luxury or pleasure carried

very high rates; articles manufactured on Mars were completely protected by embargo against outside competition.

Bicycles were classed by the Import Commission as duty free since they were necessary to prospecting – but bicycles used for pleasure became ‘luxury items’. The customs authorities had gotten around to noticing the final disposition of the cargo of the Rolling Stone. “Of courss somebody put them up to it,” continued Meade, “but Mr. Angelo swears he didn’t do it and I believe him. He’s nice.”

“That’s clear enough. What’s the fraud angle?”

“Oh, that!” The bicycles had at once been impounded for unpaid duty penalties and costs whereupon their new owner had sworn an information charging fraud. “He’s getting a civil suit, too, but I think Hazel has it under control. Mr. Poppa says he just wants his bicycles back; he’s losing business. He’s not mad at anybody.”

“I would be,” Roger Stone answered grimly. “I intend to skin those two boys with a dull knife. What makes Hazel think she can square Mr. Pappa- et-cetera? Just what, I’d like to know?”

“She got a temporary court order freeing the bicycles to Mr. Poppa pending the outcome of the hearing; she had to put up a delivery bond on the bicycles. So Mr. Poppa dropped the fraud matter and is waiting on the civil suit to see if he’s hurt”

“Hmm – My bank account feels a little better anyway. Well, dear, we might as well go down and get it over with. There doesn’t seem to be anything here that a long check book can’t cover.”

“Yes, dear.”

“Remind me to buy a pair of Oregon boots on the way home. Meade, how much is this tariff?” “Forty per cent.”

“Not too bad. They probably made more profit than that”

“But that’s not all, Daddy. Forty per cent, plus another forty per cent penalty – plus confiscation of the bicycles.” “Plus two weeks in pillory, I hope?”

“Don’t do anything hasty, Daddy. Hazel is arguing the case.” “Since when was she admitted to the bar?”

“I don’t know, but it seems to be all right She got that court order.”

“Dear,” said Dr. Stone, “Shouldn’t the boys have a regular lawyer? Your mother is a wonderful person, but she is sometimes just a bit impetuous.” “If you mean she’s as crazy as a skew orbit, I agree with you. But I’m betting on Hazel anyhow. We’ll let her have her turn at the board. It probably

won’t cost me much more.”

“As you say, dear.”

They slipped into the back of the courtroom, which appeaed to be a church on some other days. Hazel was up front, talking to the judge. She saw them come in but did not appear to recognise them. The twins, looking very sober, were sitting together near the bench; they recognised their parents but took their cue from their grandmother.

“May it please the court,” said Hazel, “I am a stranger here in a strange land I am not skilled in your laws nor sophisticate in your customs. If I err, I pray the court to forgive me in advance and help me back to the proper path.”

The judge leaned back and looked at her. “We were over all that earlier this morning.” “Sure, judge, but it looks good in the record.”

“Do you expect to get me reversed?”

“Oh, no! We’ll settle the whole thing right here and now, I’d guess.”

“I wouldn’t venture to guess. I told you this morning that I would advise you as to the law, if need be. As to courtroom formalities, this Is a frontier. I can remember the time when, if one of us became involved in a misadventure which caused public disapproval, the matter was settled by calling a town meeting and taking a show of hands – and I’ve no doubt that as much justice was dispensed that way as any other. Times have changed but I don’t think you will find this court much bothered by etiquette. Proceed.”

“Thanks, judge. This young fellow here – “ She hooked a thumb at the prosecutor’s table. “ – would have you believe that my boys cooked up a nefarious scheme to swindle the citizens of this nation out of their rightful and lawful taxes. I deny that. Then he asks you to believe that, having hatched this Machiavellian plot, they carried it through and got away with it, until the hand of justice, slow but sure, descended on them and grabbed them. That’s a pack of nonsense, too.”

“One moment I thought you stipulated this morning to the alleged facts?”

“I admitted that my boys didn’t pay duty on those bikes. I didn’t admit anything else. They didn’t pay duty because nobody asked them to pay.”

“I see your point You’ll have to lay a foundation for that and get it in by proper evidence later. I can see that this is going to be a little involved.”

“It needn’t be, if we’ll all tell the truth and shame the devil.” She paused and looked puzzled. “Warburton . . . Warburton . . .” she said slowly, “Your name is Warburton, Judge? Any kinfolk on Luna?”

The judge squared his shoulders. “I’m a hereditary citizen of the Free State,” he said proudly. “Oscar Warburton was my grandfather.”

“That’s it!” agreed Hazel. “It’s been bothering me all morning but the numbers didn’t click into place until I noticed your profile just now. I knew your, granddaddy well. I’m a Founding Father, too.”

“How’s that? There weren’t any Stones on the roster.” “Hazel Meade Stone.”

“You’re Hazel Meade? But you can’t be!You must be dead!” “Take another look, Judge. I’m Hazel Meade.”

“Well, by the breath of K’Raath! Excuse me, ma’am. We must get together when this is over.” He straightened up again. “In the meantime I trust you realize that this in no way affects the case before us?”

“Oh, naturally not! But I must say it makes me feel better to know who’s sitting on this case. Your granddaddy was a just man.” “Thank you. And now shall we proceed?”

The young prosecutor was on his feet. “May it please the court!” “May what. please the court?”

“We feel that this is most irregular. We feel that under the circumstances the only proper procedure is for this court to disqualify itself. We feel -”

“Cut out that “we” stuff, Herbert You’re neither an editor nor a potentate. Motion denied. You know as well as I do that Judge Bonelli is laid up sick. I don’t propose to clutter up the calendar on the spurious – theory that I can’t count fingers in front of my face.” He glanced at the clock. “In fact, unless one of you has new facts to produce – facts, not theories – I’m going to assume that you have both stipulated to the same body of facts. Objection?”

“Okay with me, Judge.”

“No objection,” the prosecutor said wearily.

“You may continue, ma’am. I think we ought to wind this up in about ten minutes, if you both will stick to the subject. Let’s have your theory.” “Yes, your honor. First, I want you to take a look at those two young and innocent lads and see for yourself that they could not be up to anything

criminal.” Castor and Pollux made a mighty effort to look the description; they were not notably successful.

Judge Warburton looked at them and scratched his chin. “That’s a conclusion, ma’am. I can’t see any wings sprouting from here.”

“Forget it, then. They’re a couple of little hellions, both of them. They’ve given me plenty of grief. But this time they didn’t do anything wrong and they deserve a vote of thanks from your chamber of commerce – and from the citizens of Mars Cornmonwealth.

“The first part sounds plausible. The latter part is outside the jurisdiction of this court”

“You’ll see. The key to this case is whether or not a bicycle is a production item, or a luxury. Right?”

“Correct And the distinction depends on the end use of the imported article. Our tariff schedule is flexible in that respect. Shall I cite the pertinent cases?”

“Oh, don’t bother!”

Her son looked her over. “Hazel, it occurs to me that the the end use of sightseeing, that the defendants knew that, that they even suggested that end use and made it part of their sales argument, and that they neglected to inform the buyer of the customs status of the articles in question. Correct?”

“Right to nine decimals, Judge.”

“I’ve not yet gotten a glimpse of your theory. Surely you are not contending that sightseeing is anything but a luxury?” “Oh, it’s a luxury all right!”

“Madam, it seems to me that you are doing your grandsons no good. If you will withdraw, I will appoint counsel.”

“Better ask them, Judge.”

“I intended to.” He looked inquiringly at the twins. “Are you satisfied with your representation?”

Castor caught Pollux’s eye, then answered promptly, “We’re as much in the dark as you are, sir – but we’ll string along with grandmother.” “I admire your courage at least Proceed, ma’am”

“We agreed that sightseeing is a luxury. But “luxury” is a relative term. Luxury for whom? Roast suckling pig is a luxury for you and me-” “It certainly is. I haven’t tasted one on this planet”

“- but it’s an early death for the pig. Will the court take judicial notice of an activity known as “Mars” Invisible Export?”“ “The tourist trade? Certainly, if it’s necessary to your theory.”

“Objection!”

“Just hang on to that objection, Herbert; she may not establish a connection. Proceed.”

“Let’s find out who eats that pig. Your tariff rules, so it has been explained, are to keep citizens of the Commonwealth from wasting valuable foreign exchange on unnecessary frills. You’ve got a credit gap -”

“Regrettably, we have. We don’t propose to increase it”

“That’s my point Who pays the bill? Do you go sightseeing? Does he?” She pointed again at the prosecutor. “Shucks, no! It’s old stuff to both of you. But 1 do – I’m a tourist I rented one of those bicycles not a week ago – and helped close your credit gap. Your honor, we contend that the renting of bicycles to tourists, albeit a luxury to the tourist, is a productive activity for export to the unmixed benefit of every citizen of the Commonwealth and that therefore those bicycles are “articles of production” within the meaning and intent of your tariff laws!”

“Finished?” She nodded. “Herbert?”

“Your honor, this is ridiculous! The prosecution has clearly established its case and the defense does not even dare to dispute it I have never heard a more outlandish mixture of special pleading and distortion of the facts. But I am sure the facts are clear to the court. The end use is sightseeing, which the defence agrees is a luxury. Now a luxury is a luxury -,

“Not to the pig, son.”

“.”The pig?” What pig? There are no pigs in this case; there isn’t a pig on Mars. If we -” “Herbert! Have you anything to add?”

“I – “ The young prosecutor slumped. “Sorry Dad, I got excited. We rest.”

The judge turned to Hazel. “He a good boy, but he’s impetuous – like yours. I’ll make a lawyer out of him yet.” He straightened up. “And the court rests – ten minutes out for a pipe. Don’t go away.” He ducked out

The twins whispered and fidgeted; Hazel caught the eyes of her son and daughter-in-law and gave them a solemn wink. Judge Warburton returned in less than ten minutes and the bailiff shouted for order. The judge stared at the prisoners. “The court rules,” he said solemnly, “that the bicycles in question are “articles of production” within the meaning of the tariff code. The prisoners are acquitted and discharged. The clerk will release the delivery bond.”

There was very scattered applause, led by Hazel. “No demonstrations!” the judge said sharply. He looked again at the twins. “You’re extremely lucky – you know that, don’t you?”

“Yessir!”

“Then get out of my sight and try to stay out of trouble.”

Dinner was a happy family reunion despite the slight cloud that still hung over the twins. It was also quite good, Dr. Stone having quietly taken over the cooking. Captain Vandenbergh, down on the same shuttle, joined them for dinner. By disconnecting the TV receiver and placing it temporarily on Meade’s bunk and by leaving open the door to the twins’ cubicle so that Captain Vandenbergh’s chair could be backed into the door frame, it was just possible for all of them to sit down at once. Fuzzy Britches sat in Lowell’s lap; up till now the flat cat had had its own chair.

Roger Stone tried to push back his chair to make more room for his knees, found himself chock-a-block against the wall ‘Edith, we will just have to get a larger place.”

“Yes, dear. Hazel and I spoke to the landlord this afternoon.” “What did he say?”

Hazel took over. “I’m going to cut his gizaard out I reminded him that he had promised to take care of us when you two got down. He looked saintly and pointed out that he had given us two more cots. Lowell, quit feeding that mop with your own spoon!”

“Yes, Grandma Hazel. May I borrow yours?”

“No. But he did say that we could have the flat the Burkhardts are in, come Venus depasture. It has one more cubicle.”

“Better,” agreed Roger Stone, “but hardly a ballroom – and Venus departure is still three weeks away. Edith, we should have kept our nice room in the War God. How about it, Van? Want some house guests? Until you blast for Venus, that is?”

“Certainly.”

“Daddy! You wouldn’t go away again?” “I’m joking, snub nose.”

“I wasn’t” answered the liner’s captain. “Until Venus departure – or all the way to Venus and then back to Luna, if you choose. I got official approval of my recommendation this afternoon; you two can drag free in the War God until death or decommission do you past How about it? Come on to Venus with me?”

“We’ve been to Venus,” announced Meade. “Gloomy place.”

“Whether they take you up or not,” Hazel commented, “that’s quite a concession to get out of Four-Planets. Ordinarily that bunch of highbinders wouldn’t give away a bucketful of space.”

“They were afraid of the award an admiralty court might hand out.” Vandenbergh said drily. “Speaking of courts, I understand you put in a brilliant defence today, Hazel. Are you a lawyer, along with your other accomplishments?”

“No,” answered her son, “but she’s a fast talker.” “Who’s not a lawyer?”

“You aren’t”

“of course I am!”

“When and where? Be specific.”

“Years and years ago, back in Idaho – before you were born. I just never got around to mentioning it” Her son looked her over. “Hazel, it occurs to me that the records in Idaho are conveniently far away.” “None of your sass, boy. Anyway, the courthouse burned down.”

“I thought as much”

“In any case,” Vandenbergh put in soothingly, “Hazel got the boys off. When I heard about it, I expected that they would have to pay the duty at least You young fellows must have made quite a tidy profit”

“We did all right,” Castor admitted. “Nothing spectacular,” Pollux hedged.

“Figure it up,” Hazel said happily, “because I am going to collect a fee from you of exactly two-thirds your net profit for getting your necks out of a bight”

The twins stared at her. “Hazel, you wouldn’t?” Castor said uncertainly. “Wouldn’t I!”

“Don’t tease them, Mother,” Dr. Stone suggested.

“I’m not teasing. I want this to be a lesson to them. Boys, anybody who sits in a game without knowing the house rules is a sucker. Time you knew

it”

Vandenbergh put in smoothly, “It doesn’t matter too much these days when the government -” He stopped suddenly. “What in the world!” “What’s the matter, Van?” demanded Roger. Vandenbergh’s face cleared and he grinned sheepishly. Nothing. Just your flat cat crawling up my

leg. For a moment I thought I had wandered into your television show.”

Roger Stone shook his head. “Not mine, Hazel’s. And it wouldn’t have been a flat cat; it would have been human gore.”

Captain Vandenbergh picked up Fuzzy Britches, stroked it, then returned it to Lowell “It’s a Martian,” announced Lowell.”

“Yes?”

Hazel caught his attention. “The situation has multifarious ramifications not immediately apparent to the unassisted optic. This immature zygote holds it as the ultimate desideratum to consort with the dominate aborigine of the trifurcate variety. Through a judicious use of benign mendacity, Exhibit “A” performs as a surrogate in spirit if not in letter. Do you dig me, boy?”

Vandenbergh blinked. “I think so. Perhaps it’s just as well. They are certainly engaging little pets – though I wouldn’t have one in any ship of mine. They -”

“She means,” Lowell explained, “that I want to see a Martian with legs. I still do. Do you know one?” Hazel said, “Coach, I tried, but they were too big for me.”

Captain Vandenbergh stared at Lowell. “He’s quite serious about it, isn’t he?” “I’m afraid he is”

He turned to Dr. Stone. “Ma’am, I’ve fair connections around here and these things can always be arranged, in spite of treaties. Of course, there would be a certain element of danger – not much in my opinion.”

Dr. Stone answered, Captain, I have never considered danger to be an evaluating factor.” “Um, no, you wouldn’t, ma’am. Shall I try it?”

“If you would be so kind.”

“It will pay interest on my debt. I’ll let you know.” He dismissed the matter and turned again to the twins. “What profit-tax classification does your enterprise come under?”

“Profit tax?”

“Haven’t you figured it yet?”

“We didn’t know there was one.”

“I can see you haven’t done much importing and exporting, not on Mars anyhow. If you are a Commonwealth citizen, it all goes into income tax, of course. But if you come from out planet, you pay a single-shot tax on each transaction. Better find yourself a tax expert; the formula is somewhat complicated”

“We won’t pay it!” said Pollux.

His father answered quietly, “Haven’t you two been in jail in enough lately?”

Pollux shut up. For the next few minutes they exchanged glances, whispers, and shrugs. Presently Castor stood up. “Dad, Mother – may we be excused?”

“Certainly. If you can manage to squeeze out.” “No dessert, boys?”

“We aren’t very hungry.”

They went into town, to return an hour later not with a tax expert but with a tax guide they had picked up at the Chamber of Commerce. The adults were still seated in the general room, chatting; the table had been folded up to the ceiling. They threaded through the passageway of knees into their cubicle; they could be heard whispering in there from time to time.

Presently they came out. “Excuse us, folks. Uh, Hazel?” “What is it, Cas?”

“You said your fee was two-thirds of our net.”

“Huh? Did your leg come away in my hand, chum? I wouldn’t -”

“Oh, no, we’d rather pay it.” He reached out, dropped half a dozen small coins in her hand ‘There it is.” She looked at it ‘This is two-thirds of all you made on the deal?”

“Of course,” added Pollux, “it wasn’t a total loss. We had the use of the bicycles for a couple of hundred million miles.”

VII – FLAT CATS FACTORIAL

Vandenbergh made good his offer. Lowell and he went by stratorocket to the treaty town of Richardson, were gone about three days. When Lowell came back he had seen a Martian, he had talked with one. But he had been cautioned not to talk about it and his family could get no coherent account out of him.

But the simple matter of housing was more difficult than the presumably impossible problem of meeting a Martian. Roger Stone had had no luck in finding larger and more comfortable quarters, even after he had resigned himself to fantastic rentals. The town was bursting with tourists and would be until Venus departure, at which time those taking the triangular trip would leave – a majority, in fact. In the meantime they crowded the restaurants, took pictures of everything including each other, and ran their bicycles over the toes of pedestrians. Further packing a city already supersaturated were sand rats in from the desert and trying to arrange some way, any way, to get out to the Hallelujah Node in the Asteroid Belt.

Dr. Stone said one night at dinner, “Roger, tomorrow is rent day. Shall I pay it for a full month? Mr. d’Avril says that the Burkhardts are talking about staying on.”

“Pay it for six days only,” Hazel advised. “We can do better than this after Venus departure – I hope.” Roger Stone looked up and scowled. “Look here, why pay the rent at all?”

“What are you saying, dear?”

“Edith, I’ve been chewing this over in my mind. When we first came here our plans, such as they were, called for living here through one wait.” He referred to the fifteen months elapsed time from arrival Mars to Earth departure from Mars, using the economical orbits. Then we planned to shape orbit home. Fair enough, if this overrated tourist trap had decent housing. But I haven’t been able to start writing my book. When Buster isn’t climbing into my lap, his pet is slithering down the back of my neck.”

“What do you suggest, dear?”

“Go to Phobos tomorrow, get the old Rock ready to go, and blast for Venus when the others do.” “Loud cheers!” agreed Meade. “Let’s go!”

Dr. Stone said, “Meade, I thought you didn’t like Venus?”

“I don’t. But I don’t like it here and I’m tired all the time. I’d like to get back into free fall.” “You shouldn’t be tired. Perhaps I had better check you over.”

“Oh, Mother, I’m perfectly well! I don’t want to be poked at.” Lowell grinned. “I know why she wants to go to Venus – Mr. Magill.”

“Don’t be a snoop, Snoop!” Meade went on with quiet dignity. “In case anyone is interested, I am not interested in Second Officer Magill – and I wouldn’t be going in the Caravan in any case. Besides, I found out he afready has a wife in Colorado.” Hazel said, “Well, that’s legal. He’s still eligible off Earth,”

“Perhaps it is, but I don’t like it.”

“Neither do I,” Roger Stone cut in. “Meade, you weren’t really getting interested in this wolf in sheep’s clothing, were you?” “Of course not, Daddy!” She added, “But I suppose I’ll get married one of these days.”

“That’s the trouble with girls,” Castor commented. “Give them education – boom! They get married. Wasted.”

Hazel glared at them, “Oh, so? Where would you be if I hadn’t married?”

“It didn’t happen that way,” Roger Stone cut in, “so there is no use talking about other possibilities. They probably aren’t really possibilities at all, if only we understood it”

Pollux: “Predestination.” Castor: “Very shaky theory.”

Roger grinned. “I’m not a determinist and you can’t get my goat. I believe in free will.” Pollux: “Another very shaky theory.”

“Make up your minds,” their father told them. “You can’t have it both ways.”

“Why not?” asked Hazel. “Free will is a golden thread running through the frozen matrix of fixed events.” “Not mathematical,” objected Pollux.

Castor nodded. “Just poetry.”

“And not very good poetry.”

“Shut up!” ordered their father. “Boys, it’s quite evident that you have gone to considerable trouble to change the subject. Why?” The twins swapped glances; Castor got the go-ahead. “Uh, Dad, the way we see it, this Venus proposition hasn’t been thought out” “Go on. I suppose you have an alternative suggestion?”

“Well, yes. But we didn’t mean to bring it up until after Venus departure.”

“I begin to whiff something. What you mean is that you intended to wait until the planetary aspects were wrong – too late to shape orbit for Venus.” “Well, there was no use in letting the matter get cluttered up with a side issue.”

“What matter? Speak up.”

Castor said worriedly, “Look, Dad, we aren’t unreasonable. We can compromise. How about this: you and Mother and Buster and Meade go to Venus in the War God. Captain Van would love to have you do it – you know that. And -”

“Slow up. And what would you be doing? And Hazel? Mother, are you in on this?” “Not that I know of. But I’m getting interested.”

“Castor, what’s on your mind? Speak up.”

Well, I will if you’ll just let me, sir. You and the rest of the family could have a pleasant trip back home – in a luxury liner. Hazel and Pol and I – well, I suppose you know that Mars will be in a favorable position for the Hallelujah Node in about six weeks?”

“For a cometary-type orbit, that is,” Pollux added.

“So it’s the Asteroids again,” their father said slowly. “We settled that about a year ago.” “But we’re a year older now.”

“More experienced.”

“You’re still not old enough for unlimited licenses. I suppose that is why you included your grandmother.” “Oh,no! Hazel is an asset.”

“Thank you, boys.”

“Hazel, you had no inkling of this latest wild scheme?”

“No. But I don’t think it’s so wild. I’m caught up and then some on my episodes – and I’m tired of this place. I’ve seen the Martian ruins; they’re in a poor state of repair. I’ve seen a canal; it has water in it. I understand that the rest of the planet is much the same, right through to chapter eighty- eight. And I’ve seen Venus. I’ve never seen the Asteroids.”

“Right!” agreed Castor. “We don’t like Mars. The place is one big clip joint” “Sharp operators,” added Pollux.

“Sharper than you are, you mean,” said Hazel.

“Never mind, Mother. Boys, it is out of the question. I brought my ship out from Luna; I intend to take her back.” He stood up. “You can give Mr. d’Avril notice, dear.”

“Dad!”

“Yes, Castor?”

“That was just a compromise offer. What we really hoped you would do – what we wanted you to do – was for all of us to go out to the Hallelujah.” “Eh? Why, that’s silly! I’m no meteor miner.”

“You could learn to be. Or you could just go for the ride. And make a profit on it, too.” “Yes? How?”

Castor wet his lips. “The sand rats are offering fabulous prices just for cold-sleep space. We could carry about twenty of them at least And we could put them down on Ceres on the way, let them outfit there’.

“Cas! I suppose you are aware that only seven out of ten cold-sleep passengers arrive alive in a long orbit?”

“Well. . . they know that That’s the risk they are taking.” Roger Stone shook his head. “We aren’t going, so I won’t have to find out if you are as cold-blooded as you sound. Have you ever seen a burial in space?”

“No, sir’.”

“I have. Let’s hear no more about cold-sleep freight.”

Castor passed it to Pollux, who took over: “Dad, if you won’t listen to us all going, do you have any objections to Cas and me going?” “Eh? How ‘do you mean?”

“As Asteroid miners, of course. We’re not afraid of cold-sleep. If we haven’t got a ship, that’s how we would have to go.” “Bravo!” said Hazel. “I’m going with you, boys,”

“Please, Mother!” He turned to his wife. “Edith, I sometimes wonder if we brought the right twins back from the hospital.”

“They may not be yours,” said Hazel, “but they are my grandsons, I’m sure of that. Hallelujah, here I come! Anybody coming with me?” Dr. Stone said quietly, “You know, dear, I don’t much care for Venus, either. And it would give you leisure for your book”

The Rolling Stone shaped orbit from Phobos outward bound for the Asteroids six weeks later. This was no easy lift like the one from Luna to Mars; in choosing to take a ‘cometary’ or fast orbit to the Hallelujah the Stones had perforce to accept an expensive change-of-motion of twelve and a half miles per second for the departure maneuver. A fast orbit differs from a maximum-economy orbit in that it cuts the orbit being abandoned at an angle instead of being smoothly tangent to it. . . much more expensive in reaction mass. The far end of the cometary orbit would be tangent to the orbit of the Hallelujah; matching at that point would be about the same for either orbit; it was the departure from Phobos-circum-Mars that would be rugged.

The choice of a cometary orbit was not a frivolous one. In the first place, it would have been necessary to wait more than one Earth year for Mars to be in the proper relation, orbit-wise, with the Hallelujah Node for the economical orbit; secondly, the travel time itself would be more than doubled

five hundred and eighty days for the economical orbit versus two hundred and sixty-nine days for the cometary orbit (a mere three days longer than the Luna-Mars trip).

Auxiliary tanks for single-H were fitted around the Stone‘s middle, giving her a fat and sloppy appearance, but greatly improving her mass-ratio for the ordeal. Port Pilot Jason Thomas supervised the refitting; the twins helped. Castor got up his nerve to ask Thomas how he had managed to conn the Stone in to a landing on their arrival. “Did you figure a ballistic before you came aboard, sir?”

Thomas put down his welding torch. “A ballistic? Shucks, no, son, I’ve been doing it so long that I know every little bit of space hereabouts by its freckles.”

Which was all the satisfaction Cas could get out of him The twins talked it over and concluded that piloting must be something more than a mathematical science.

In addition to more space for single-H certain modifications were made inside the ship. The weather outside the orbit of Mars is a steady ‘clear but cold’; no longer would they need reflecting foil against the Sun’s rays. Instead one side of the ship was painted with carbon black and the capacity of the air-heating system was increased by two coils. In the control room a time-delay variable-baseline stereoscopic radar was installed by means of which they would be able to see the actual shape of the Hallelujah when they reached it.

All of which was extremely expensive and the Galactic Overlord had to work overtime to pay for it Hazel did not help with the refitting. She stayed in her room and ground out, with Lowell’s critical help, more episodes in the gory but virtuous career of Captain John Sterling – alternating this activity with sending insulting messages and threats of blackmail and/or sit-down strike to her producers back in New York; she wanted an unreasonably large advance and she wanted it right now. She got it, by sending on episodes equal to the advance. She had to write the episodes in advance anyhow; this time the Rolling Stone would be alone, no liners comfortably near by. Once out of radio range of Mars, they would not be

able to contact Earth again until Ceres was in range of the Stone‘s modest equipment. They were not going to Ceres but would be not far away; the Hallelujah was riding almost the same orbit somewhat ahead of that tiny planet.

The boost to a cometary orbit left little margin for cargo but what there was the twins wanted to use, undeterred by their father’s blunt disapproval of the passengers-in-cold-sleep idea. Their next notion was to carry full outfits for themselves for meteor mining – rocket scooter, special suits, emergency shelter, keyed radioactive claiming stakes, centrifuge speegee tester, black lights, Geiger counters, prospecting radar, portable spark spectroscope, and everything else needed to go quietly rock-happy.

Their father said simply, “Your money?” “Of course. And we pay for the boost.”

“Go ahead. Go right ahead. Don’t let me discourage you. Any objections from me would simply confirm your preconceptions.” Castor was baffled by the lack of opposition. “What’s the matter with it, Dad? You worried about the danger involved?”

“Danger? Heavens, no! It’s your privilege to get yourselves killed in your own way. Anyhow, I don’t think you will. You’re young and you’re both

smart, even if you don’t show it sometimes, and you’re both in tiptop physical condition, and I’m sure you’ll know your equipment.”

“Then what is it?”

“Nothing. For myself, I long since came to the firm conclusion that a man can do more productive work, and make more money if this is his object, by sitting down with his hands in his pockets than by any form of physical activity. Do you happen to know the average yearly income of a meteor miner?”

“Well, no, but -”

“Less than six hundred a year.” “But some of them get rich!”

“Sure they do. And some make much less than six hundred a year; that’s an average, including the rich strikes. Just as a matter of curiosity, bearing in mind that most of those miners are experienced and able, what is it that you two expect to bring to this trade that will enable you to raise the yearly average? Speak up; don’t be shy.”

“Doggone it, Dad, what would you ship?”

“Me? Nothing. I have no talent for trade. I’m going out for the ride – and to take a look at the bones of Lucifer. I’m beginning to get interested in planetology. I may do a book about it-”

“What happened to your other book?”

“I hope that isn’t sarcasm, Cas. I expect to have it finished before we get there.” He adjourned the discussion by leaving. The twins turned to leave, found Hazel griamng at them. Castor scowled at her. “What are you smirking at, Hazel?”

“You two.”

“Well. . . why shouldn’t we have a whirl at meteor mining?”

“No reason. Go ahead; you can afford the luxury. But see here, boys, do you really want to know what to ship to make some money?” “Sure!”

“What’s your offer?”

“Percentage cut? Or flat fee? But we don’t pay if we don’t take your advice.”

“Oh, rats! I’ll give it to you free. If you get advice free, you won’t take it and I’ll be able to say, “I told you so!”“ “You would, too.”

“Of course I would. There’s no warmer pleasure than being able to tell a smart aleck, “I told you so, but you wouldn’t listen.” Okay, here it is, in the form of a question, just like an oracle: Who made money in all the other big mining rushes of history?”

“Why, the chaps who struck it rich, I suppose.”

“That’s a laugh. There are so few cases of prospectors who actually hung on to what they had found and died rich that they stand out like supernovae. Let’s take a famous rush, the California Gold Rush back in 1861- no, 1861 was something else; I forget. 1849, that was it – the ‘Forty- niners. Read about ’em in history?”

“Some.”

“There was a citizen named Sutter; they found gold on his place. Did it make him rich? It ruined him. But who did get rich?” “Tell us, Hazel. Don’t bother to dramatise it”

“Why not? I may put it in the show – serial numbers rubbed off, of course. I’ll tell you: everybody who had something the miners had to buy. Grocers, mostly. Boy, did they get rich! Hardware dealers. Men with stamping mills, Everybody but the poor miner. Even laundries in Honolulu.”

“Honolulu? But that’s way out in the Pacific, off China somewhere.”

“It was in Hawaii the last time I looked. But they used to ship dirty laundry from California clear to Honolulu to have it washed – both Ways by sailing ship. That’s about like having your dirty shirts shipped from Marsport to Luna. Boys, if you want to make money, set up a laundry in the Hallelujah. But it doesn’t have to be a laundry – just anything, so long as the miners want it and you’ve got it If your father wasn’t a Puritan at heart, I’d set up a well-run perfectly honest gambling hall! That’s like having a rich uncle.”

The twins considered their grandmother’s advice and went into the grocery business, with a few general store sidelines. They decided to stock only luxury foods, things that the miners would not be likely to have and which would bring highest prices per pound. They stocked antibiotics and

surgical drugs and vitamins as well, and some lightweight song-and-story projectors and a considerable quantity of spools to go with them. Pollux

found a supply of pretty-girl pictures, printed on thin stock in Japan and intended for calendars on Mars, and decided to take a flyer on them, since they didn’t weigh much. He pointed out to Castor that they could not lose entirely, since they could look at them themselves.

Dr. Stone found them, ran through them, and required him to send some of them back. The rest passed her censorship; they took them along. The last episode was speeding toward Earth; the last weld had been approved; the last pound of food and supplies was at last aboard. The

Stone lifted gently from Phobos and dropped toward Mars. A short gravity-well maneuver around Mars at the Stone‘s best throat temperature –

which produced a spine-grinding five gravities – and she was headed out and fast to the lonely reaches of space inhabited only by the wreckage of

the Ruined Planet.

“They fell easily and happily back into free fall routine. More advanced mathematical texts had been obtained for the boys on Mars; they did not have to be urged to study, having grown really interested – and this time they had no bicycles to divert their minds. Fuzzy Britches took to free fall if the creature had been born in space; if it was not being held and stroked by someone (which it usually was) it slithered over wall and bulkhead, or floated gently around the compartments, undulating happily.

Castor maintained that it could swim through the air; Pollux insisted that it could not and that its maneuvers arose entirely from the air currents of the ventilation system, They wasted considerable time, thought, and energy in trying to devise scientific tests to prove the matter, one way or the other. They were unsuccessful.

The flat cat did not care; it was warm, it was well fed, it was happy. It had numerous friends all willing to take time off to reward its tremendous and undiscriminating capacity for affection. Only one incident marred its voyage.

Roger Stone was strapped to his pilot’s chair, blocking out – so he said – a chapter in his book. If so, the snores may have helped. Fuzzy Britches was cruising along about its lawful occasions, all three eyes open and merry. It saw one of its friends; good maneuvering or a random air current enabled it to make a perfect landing – on Captain Stone’s face.

Roger came out of the chair with a yell, clutching at his face. He bounced against the safety belt, recovered, and pitched the flat cat away from him. Fuzzy Britches, offended but not hurt, flipped itself flat to its progress, air-checked and made another landing on the far wall.

Roger Stone used several other words, then shouted, “Who put that animated toupee on my face?” But the room was otherwise empty. Dr. Stone appeared at the hatch and said, “What is it, dear?”

“Oh, nothing – nothing important. Look, dear, would you return this tailend offspring of a dying planet to Buster? I’m trying to think.”

“Of course, dear.” She took it aft and gave it to Lowell, who promptly forgot it, being busy working out a complicated gambit against Hazel. The flat cat was not one to hold a grudge; there was not a mean bone in its body, had it had bones, which it did not The only emotion it could feel wholeheartedly was love. It got back to Roger just as he had. again fallen asleep.

It again settled on his face, purring happily.

Captain Stone proved himself a mature man. Knowing this time what it was,.he detached it gently and himself returned it to Lowell. “Keep it,” he said. “Don’t let go of it.” He was careful to close the door behind him.

He was equally careful that night to close the door of the stateroom he shared with his wife. The Rolling Stone, being a small private ship, did not have screens guarding her ventilation ducts; they of course had to be left open at all times. The flat cat found them a broad highway. Roger Stone had a nightmare in which he was suffocating, before his wife woke him and removed Fuzzy Britches from his face. He used some more words.

“It’s all right, dear,” she answered soothingly. “Go back to sleep.” She cuddled it in her arms and Fuzzy Britches settled for that.

The ship’s normal routine was disturbed the next day while everyone who could handle a wrench or a spot welder installed screens in the ducts.

Thirty-seven days out Fuzzy Britches had eight golden little kittens, exactly like their parent but only a couple of inches across when flat, marble- sized when contracted. Everyone, including Captain Stone thought they were cute; everyone enjoying petting them, stroking them with a gentle forefinger and listening carefully for the tiny purr, so high as to be almost beyond human ear range. Everyone enjoyed feeding them and they seemed to be hungry all the time.

Sixty-four days later the kittens had kittens, eight each. Sixty-four days after that, the one hundred and forty-sixth day after Phobos departure, the kittens’ kittens had kittens; that made five hundred and thirteen.

“This,” said Captain Stone, “has got to stop!” “Yes, dear.”

“I mean it At this rate we’ll run out of food before we get there, including the stuff the twins hope to sell. Besides that we’ll be suffocated under a mass of buzzing fur mats. What’s eight times five hundred and twelve? Then what’s eight times that?”

“Too many, I’m sure.”

“My dear, that’s the most masterly understatement since the death of Mercutio. And I don’t think I’ve figured it properly anyway; its an exponential

expansion, not a geometric – provided we don’t all starve first”

“Roger.”

“I think we should-Eh? What?”

“I believe there is a simple solution. These are Martian creatures; they hibernate in cold weather.” “Yes?”

“We’ll put them in the hold – fortunately there is room.” “I agree with all but the “fortunately.”“

“And we’ll keep it cold.”

“I wouldn’t want to kill the little things. I can’t manage to hate them. Drat it, they’re too cute.”

“We’ll hold it about a hundred below, about like a normal Martian winter night. Or perhaps warmer will do.” “We certainly will. Get a shovel. Get a net Get a barrel.” He began snagging flat cats out of the air.

“You aren’t going to freeze Fuzzy Britches!” Lowell was floating in the stateroom door behind them, clutching an adult flat cat to his small chest. It may or may not have been Fuzzy Britches; none of the others could tell the adults apart and naming had been dropped after the first litter. But Lowell was quite sure and it did not seem to matter whether or not he was right The twins had discussed slipping in a ringer on him while he was asleep, but they had been overheard and the project forbidden. Lowell was content and his mother did not wish him disturbed in his belief.

“Dear, we aren’t going to hurt your pet”

“You better not! You do and I’ll – I’ll space you!”

“Oh, dear, he’s been helping Hazel with her serial!” Dr. Stone got face to face with her son. “Lowell, Mother has never lied to you, has she?” “Uh, I guess not”

“We aren’t going to hurt Fuzzy Britches. We aren’t going to hurt any of the flat kitties. But we haven’t got room for all of them. You can keep Fuzzy Britches, but the other kittens, are going for a long nap. They’ll be perfectly safe; I promise.

“By the code of the Galaxy?” “By the code of the Galaxy.”

Lowell left, still guarding his pet. Roger said, “Edith, we’ve got to put a stop to that collaboration.”

“Don’t worry dear; it won’t harm him.” She frowned. “But I’m afraid I will have to disappoint him on another score.” “Such as?”

“Roger, I didn’t have much time to study the fauna of Mars – and I certainly didn’t study flat cats, beyond making sure that they were harmless.” “Harmless!” He batted a couple of them out of the way. “Woman, I’m drowning.”

“But Martian fauna have certain definite patterns, survival adaptations. Except for the water-seekers, which probably aren’t Martian in origin anyhow, their methods are both passive and persistent. Take the flat cat-”

“You take it!” He removed one gently from his chest.

“It is defenseless. It can’t even seek its own food very well. I understand that in its native state it is a benign parasite attaching itself to some more mobile animal-”

“If only they would quit attaching to me! And you look as if you were wearing a fur coat Let’s put ’em in freeze!”

“Patience, dear. Probably it has somewhat the same pleasing effect on the host that it has on us; consequently the host tolerates it and lets it pick up the crumbs. But its other characteristic it shares with almost anything Martian. It can last long periods in hibernation, or if that isn’t necessary, in a state of lowered vitality and activity – say when there is no food available. But with any increase in the food supply, then at once – almost like

throwing a switch – it expands, multiplies to the full extent of the food ‘supply.”

“I’ll say it does!”

“Cut off the food supply and it simply waits for more good times. Pure theory, of course, since I am reasoning by analogy from other Martian life forms – but that’s why I’m going to have to disappoint Lowell – Fuzzy Britches will have to go on very short rations.”

Her husband frowned. “That won’t be easy; he feeds it all the time. We’ll just have to watch him – or there will be more little visitors from heaven.

Honey, let’s get busy. Right now.”

“Yes, dear. I just had to get my thoughts straight”

Roger called them all to general quarters; Operation Round-up began. They shooed them aft and into the hold; they slithered back, purring and seeking companionship. Pollux got into the hold and tried to keep them herded together while the others scavenged through the ship. His father stuck his head in; tried to make out his son in a cloud of flat cats; ‘How many have you got so far?”

“I can’t count them – they keep moving around. Close the door!” “How can I keep the door closed and still send them in to you?”

“How can I keep them in here if you keep opening the door?” Finally they all got into space suits – Lowell insisted on taking Fuzzy Britches inside with him, apparently not trusting even ‘the code of the Galaxy’ too far. Captain Stone reduced the temperature of the entire ship down to a chilly twenty below; the flat cats, frustrated by the space suits and left on their own resources, gave up and began forming themselves into balls, like fur- covered grape fruit. They were then easy to gather in, easy to count, easy to store in the hold.

Nevertheless the Stones kept finding and incarcerating fugitives for the next several days.

VIII – “INTER JOVEM ET MARTEM PLANETAM INTERPOSUI”

The great astronomer Kepler wrote: “Between Mars and Jupiter I put a planet.” His successors devised a rule for planetary distances, called ‘Bode’s Law’, which seemed to require a planet at precisely two and eight/tenths the distance from Sun to Earth, 2.8 astro units.

On the first night of the new nineteenth century the Monk Giuseppe Piazzi discovered a new heavenly body. It was the Asteroid Ceres – just where a planet should have been. It was large for an Asteroid, the largest in fact – diameter 485 miles. In the ensuing two centuries hundreds and thousands more were discovered, down to size of rocks. “The Asteroids’ proved a poor name; they were not little stars, nor were they precisely planetoids. It was early suggested that they were the remains of a once sizable planet and by the middle of the twentieth century mathematical investigation of their orbits seemed to prove it.

But it was not until the first men in the early days of the exploration of space actually went out to the lonely reaches between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and looked that we learned for certain that the Asteroids were indeed fragments of a greater planet – destroyed Lucifer, long dead brother

of Earth.

As the Rolling Stone rose higher and ever higher above the Sun, she slowed, curved her path in, and approached the point where she would start to fall back toward the Sun. She was then at the orbit of Ceres and not far in front of that lady. The Stone had been in the region of the Asteroids for the past fifty million miles. The ruins of Lucifer are scattered over a wide belt of space; the Hallelujah Node was near the middle of that belt.

The loose group of rocks, sand, random molecules, and microplanetoids known as the Hallelujah Node was travelling in company around the Sun at a speed of eleven miles per second. The Stone‘s vector was eight miles per, second and in the same direction. Captain Stone speeded up his ship to match in by a series of blasts during the last two days, coming by a radar beacon deep in the swarm and thereby sneaking up on the collection of floating masses at a low relative speed.

The final blast that positioned them dead with the swarm was a mere love tap; the Stone did clear her throat – and she was one with the other rolling space stones of space.

Captain Stone took a last look into the double eyepiece of the stereo radar, swung the sweep control fore and aft and all around; the masses of the Hallelujah, indistinguishable from the background of stars by naked eye, hung in greatly exaggerated perspective in the false ‘space’ of the stereo tank while the true stars showed not at all. None of them displayed the crawling trail of relative motion.

A point brighter than the rest glowed in a fluctuating pattern fairly close by and a few degrees out-orbit; it was the radar beacon on which he had homed. It too, seemed steady by stereo; he turned to Castor and said, “Take a doppler on City Hall.”

“Just getting it, Captain.” In a moment he added, “Uh, relative about ten miles an hour – nine point seven and a whisper. And just under seven hundred miles away.”

“Vector?”

“Closing almost for it We ought to slide past maybe ten, fifteen miles south and in-orbit”

Roger Stone relaxed and grinned. “How’s that for shooting? Your old man can still figure them, eh?” “Pretty good, Dad – considering.”

“Considering what?”

“Considering you used Pol’s figures.”

“When I figure out which one of us you are insulting, I’ll answer that.” He spoke to the mike: “All hands, secure from maneuvers. Power room, report when secure. Edith, how soon can we have dinner?”

“It’s wrapped up, son,” Hazel reported.

“About thirty minutes, dear,” his wife answered.

“A fine thing! A man slaves over a hot control board and then has to wait thirty minutes for his dinner. What kind of a hotel is this?” “Yes, dear. By the way, I’m cutting your calorie ration again.”

“Mutiny! What would John Sterling do?”

“Daddy’s getting fat! Daddy’s getting fat!” Lowell chanted. “And strangle your child. Anybody want to come out with me while I set units?” “I will, Daddy!”

“Meade, you’re just trying to get out of helping with dinner.”

“I can spare her, dear.”

“Spare the child and spoil the fodder. Come with your fodder, baby.” “Not very funny, Daddy.”

“And I’m not getting paid for it, either.” Captain Stone went aft, whistling. The twins as well as Meade went out with him; they made quick work of setting jato units, the young people locking them in place and the Captain seeing to the wiring personally. They set a belt of them around the waist of the ship and matched pairs on the bow and quarter. Wired for triggering to the piloting radar, set at minimum range, they would give the ship a sharp nudge in the unlikely event that any object came toward them on a collision course at a relative speed high enough to be dangerous.

Coming through the Asteroid Belt to their present location deep in it, they had simply taken their chances. Although one is inclined to think of the Belt as thick with sky junk, the statistical truth is that there is so enormously more space than rock that the chance of being hit is negligible. Inside a node the situation was somewhat different, the concentration of mass being several hundred times as great as in the ordinary reaches of the Belt. But most of the miners took no precautions even there, preferring to bet that this unending game of Russian roulette would always work out in their favor rather than go to the expense and trouble of setting up a meteor guard. This used up a few miners, but not often; the accident rate in Hallelujah node was about the same as that of Mexico City.

They went inside and found dinner ready. “Call for you, Captain.” announced Hazel. “Already?”

“City Hall. Told ’em you were out but would call back. Nine point six centimeters.” “Come eat your dinner, dear, while it’s hot”

“You all go ahead. I won’t be long.”

Nor was he. Dr. Stone looked inquiringly at him as he joined them. “The Mayor,” he told her and the others. “Welcome to Rock City and all that sort of thing. Advised me that the Citizen’s Committee has set a speed limit of a hundred miles an hour for ships, five hundred miles an hour for scooters, anywhere within a thousand miles of City Hall.”

Hazel bristled. “I suppose you told him what they could do with their speed limits?”

“I did not I apologized sweetly for having unwittingly offended on my approach and said that I would be over to pay my respects tomorrow or the next day.”

“I thought Mars would have some elbow room,” Hazel grumbled. “It turned out to be nothing but scissorbills and pantywaists and tax collectors. So we come on out to the wide open spaces and what do we find? Traffic cops! And my only son without the spunk to talk back to them. I think I’ll go to Saturn.”

“I hear that Titan Base is awfully chilly,” her son answered without rancor. “Why not Jupiter? Pol, flip the salt over this way, please.” “Jupiter? The position isn’t favorable. Besides I hear that, Ganymede has more regulations than a girls’ school.”

“Mother, you are the only juvenile delinquent old enough for a geriatrics clinic whom I have ever known. You know perfectly well that an artificial colony has to have regulations.”

“An excuse for miniature Napoleons! This whole system has taken to wearing corsets.” “What’s a corset?” inquired Lowell.

“Uh . . . a predecessor to the spacesuit, sort of.”

Lowell still looked puzzled; his mother said, “Never mind, dear. When we get back, Mother will show you one, in the museum.”

Captain Stone proposed that they all turn in right after supper; they had all run short on sleep during the maneuvering approach. “I keep seeing spots before my eyes,” he said, rubbing them, “from staring into the tank. I think I’ll sleep the clock around.”

Hazel started to answer when an alarm shrilled; he passed instantly from sleepy to alert. “Object on collision course! Grab something, everybody.” He clutched at a stanchion with one hand, gathered in Lowell with the other.

But no shove from a firing jato followed. “Green,” Hazel announced quietly. “Whatever it is, it isn’t moving fast enough to hurt us. Chances favor a near miss, anyway.”

Captain Stone took a deep breath, “I hope you’re right, but I’ve been on the short end of too many long shots to place much faith in statistics. I’ve been jumpy ever since we entered the Belt”

Meade went aft with dirty dishes. She returned in a hurry, round eyed. “Daddy – somebody’s at the door.” “What? Meade, you’re imagining things.”

“No, I’m not I heard him. Listen.”

“Quiet, everyone.” In the silence they could hear the steady hiss of an air injector; the lock was cycling. Roger Stone lunged toward the airlock; he

was stopped by a sharp warning from his mother. “Son! Hold it a second”

“What?”

“Keep back from that door.” She had her gun out and at the ready. “Huh? Don’t be silly. And put that thing away; it isn’t charged anyhow.” “He won’t know that. Whoever is coming in that lock.”

Dr. Stone said quietly, “Mother Hazel, what are you nervous about?”

“Can’t you see? We’ve got a ship here with food in it. And oxy. And a certain amount of single-H. This isn’t Luna City; there are men out here who would be tempted.”

Dr. Stone did not answer but turned to her husband. He hesitated only momentarily, then snapped, “Go forward, dear. Take Lowell. Meade, you go along and lock the access hatch. Leave the ship’s phones open. If you hear anything wrong, radio City Hall and tell them we are being hijacked. Move!” He was already ducking into his stateroom, came out with his own gun.

By the time the hatch to the control room had clanged shut the airlock finished cycling. The four remaining waited, surrounding the airlock inner door. “Shall we jump him, Dad?” Castor whispered.

“No just stay out of my line of ifre.”

Slowly the door swung open. A spacesuited figure crouched in the frame, its features indistinct in its helmet. It looked around, saw the guns trained on it, and spread both its hands open in front of it. “What’s the matter?” a muffled voice said plaintively. “I haven’t done anything.”

Captain Stone could see that the man, besides being empty-handed, carried no gun at his belt. He put his own away. “Sorry. Let me give you a hand with that helmet”

The helmet revealed a middle-aged, sandy-haired man with mild eyes. “What was the matter?” he repeated.

“Nothing. Nothing at all. We didn’t know who was boarding us and we were a bit nervous. My name’s Stone, by the way. I’m master.” “Glad to know you, Captain Stone. I’m Shorty Devine.”

“I’m glad to know you, Mr. Devine. Welcome aboard.”

“Just Shorty.” He looked around. “Uh, excuse me for bursting in on you and scaring you but I heard you had a doctor aboard. A real doctor, I mean

not one of those science johnnies.”

“We have.”

“Gee, that’s wonderful! The town hasn’t had a real doctor since old Doc Schultz died. And I need one, bad.” “Sorry! Pol, get your mother.”

“I heard, dear,” the speaker horn answered. “Coming.” The hatch opened and Dr. Stone came in. “I’m the doctor, Mr. Devine. Dear, I’ll use this room, I think. If you will all go somewhere else, please?”

The visitor said hastily, “Oh, they needn’t”

“I prefer to make examinations without an audience,” she said firmly. “But I didn’t explain, ma’am – Doctor. It isn’t me; it’s my partner.” “Oh?”

“He broke his leg. Got careless with two big pieces of core material and got his leg nipped between ’em. Broke it. I guess I didn’t do too well by him for he’s a powerfully sick man. Could you come over right away, Doctor?”

“Certainly.” “Now, Edith!”

“Castor, get my surgical kit – the black one. Will you help me suit up, dear?” “But Edith, you -”

“It’s all right, Captain; I’ve got my scooter right outside. We’re only eight-five, ninety miles away; we won’t be gone long.” Captain Stone sighed. “I’m going with you. Will your scooter take three?”

“Sure, sure! It’s got Reynolds saddles; set any balance you need.”

“Take command, Hazel” “Aye aye, sir!”

They were gone all night, ship’s time, rather than a short while. Hazel sat at the control board, tracking them all the way out – then watched and waited until she spotted them leaving, and tracked them back. Devine, profuse with thanks, had breakfast with them. Just before he left Lowell came into the saloon carrying Fuzzy Britches. Devine stopped with a bite on the way to his mouth and stared. “A flat cat! Or am I seeing things?”

“Of course it is. Its name is Fuzzy Britches. It’s a Martian.” “You bet it is! Say, do you mind if I pet her for a moment?”

Lowell looked him over suspiciously, granted the boon. The prospector held it like one who knows flat cats, cooed to it, and stroked it. “Now ain’t that nice! Almost makes me wish I had never left Mars – not but what its better here.” He handed it back reluctantly, thanked them all around again, and left

Dr. Stone flexed her fingers. “That’s the first time I’ve done surgery in free fall since the old clinic days. I must review my techniques.” “My dear, you were magnificent. And Jock Donaher is mighty lucky that you were near by.”

“Was he pretty bad, Mummy?” asked Meade.

“Quite,” answered her father. “You wouldn’t enjoy the details. But your Mother knew what to do and did it And I was a pretty fair scrub nurse myself, if I do say so as shouldn’t.”

“You do say so and shouldn’t,” agreed Hazel.

“Roger,” asked Dr. Stone, “that thing they were living in could it be operated as a ship?” “I doubt it, not the way they’ve got it rigged now. I wouldn’t call it a ship; I’d call it a raft” “What do they do when they want to leave?”

“They probably don’t want to leave. They’ll probably die within hailing distance of Rock City – as Jock nearly did. I suppose they sell their high grade at Ceres, by scooter – circum Ceres, that is. Or maybe the sell it here.”

“But the whole town is migratory. They have to move some-time.”

“Oh, I imagine you could move that hulk with a few jato units, if you were gentle about it and weren’t in any hurry. I think I’d decompress it before I tried it, though.”

IX – ROCK CITY

The Asteroid Belt is a flattened torus ring or doughnut in space encompassing thirteen thousand five hundred thousand million trillion cubic miles. This very conservative figure is arrived at by casting out of the family the vagrant black sheep who wander in down to Mars and farther – even down close, to Sun itself – and by ignoring those which strayed too far out and became slaves to mighty Jove, such as the Trojan Asteroids which make him a guard of honor sixty degrees ahead and behind him, in orbit. Even those that swing too far north or south are excluded; an arbitrary limit of six degrees deviation from ecliptic has been assumed.

13,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic miles of space.

Yet the entire human race could be tucked into one corner of a single cubic mile; the average human body is about two cubic feet in bulk. Even Hazel’s dauntless hero ‘Captain John Sterling’ would he hard put to police such a beat. He would need to be twins, at least.

Write the figure as 1.35 x 1025th cubic miles; that makes it easier to see if no easier to grasp. At the time the Rolling Stone arrived among the rolling stones of Rock City the Belt had a population density of one human soul for every two billion trillion cubic miles – read 2 x 1021. About half of these six thousand-odd lived on the larger planetoids. Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, Juno; one of the few pleasant surprises in the exploration of our system was the discovery that the largest Asteroids were unbelievably dense and thus had respectable surface gravitations. Ceres, with a diameter of only 485 miles, has an average density five times that of Earth and a surface gravity about the same as Mars. These large planetoids are believed to be mainly core material of lost Lucifer, covered with a few miles of lighter debris.

The other three thousand inhabitants constitute the Belt’s floating population in a most literal sense; they live and work in free fall. Almost all of them are gathered into half a dozen loose communities working the nodes or clusters of the Belt. The nodes are several hundred times as dense as the main body of the Belt – if ‘dense’ is the proper word; a transport for Ganymede could have ploughed through the Hallelujah node and Rock City and never noticed it except by radar. The chance that such a liner would hit anything is extremely small.

The miners worked the nodes for uranium, transuranics, and core material, selling their high grade at the most conveniently positioned large Asteroid and occasionally moving on to some other node. Before the strike in the Hallelujah the group calling themselves Rock City had been working Kaiser Wilhelm node behind Ceres in orbit; at the good news they moved, speeding up a trifle and passing in-orbit of Ceres, a ragtag caravan nudged through the sky by scooters, chemical rocket engines, jato units, and faith. Theirs was the only community well placed to migrate. Grogan’s Boys were in the same orbit but in Heartbreak node beyond the Sun, half a billion miles away. New Joburg was not far away but was working the node known as Reynolds Number Two, which rode the Themis orbital pattern, inconveniently far out.

None of these cities in the sky was truly self-supporting, nor perhaps ever would be; but the ravenous appetite of Earth’s industries for power metal and for the even more valuable planetary-core materials for such uses as jet throats and radiation shields – this insatiable demand for what the Asteroids could yield – made certain that the miners could swap what they had for what they needed Yet in many ways they were almost self- supporting; uranium refined no further away than Ceres gave them heat and light and power; all of their vegetables and much of their protein came from their own hydroponic tanks and yeast vats, Single-H and oxygen came from Ceres or Pallas.

Wherever there is power and mass to manipulate, Man can live.

For almost three days, the Rolling Stone coasted slowly through Rock City. To the naked eye looking out a port or even to a person standing outside on the hull Rock City looked like any other stretch of space – empty, with a backdrop of stars. A sharp-eyed person who knew the constellations well would have noticed far too many planets distorting the classic configurations, planets which did not limit their wanderings to the Zodiac. Still sharper attention would have spotted motion on the part of these ‘planets’, causing them to open out and draw aft from the direction the Stone was heading.

Just before lunch on the third day Captain Stone slowed his ship still more and corrected her vector by firing a jato unit; City Hall and several other shapes could be seen ahead. Later in the afternoon he fired one more jato unit, leaving the Stone dead in space relative to City Hall and less than an eighth of a mile from it He turned to the phone and called the Mayor.

“Rolling Stone, Luna, Captain Stone speaking.”

“We’ve been watching you come in, Captain,” came the voice of the Mayor.

“Good. Mr. Fries, I’m going to try to get a line over to you. With luck. I’ll be over to see you in a half-hour or so.” “Using a line-throwing gun? I’ll send someone out to pick it up.”

“No gun, worse luck. With the best of intentions I forgot to stock one.”

Fries hesitated. “Uh, Captain, pardon me, but are you in good practice for free-fall suit work?” “Truthfully, no.”

“Then let me send a boy across to put a line on you. No, no! I insist”

Hazel, the Captain, and the twins suited up, went outside, and waited. They could make out a small figure on the ship across from them; the ship

itself looked larger now, larger than the Stone. City Hall was an obsolete space-to-space vessel, globular, and perhaps thirty years old. Roger Stone surmised correctly that she had made a one-way freighter trip after she was retired from a regular run.

In close company with City Hall was a stubby cylinder; it was either smaller than the spherical ship or farther away. Near it was an irregular mass impossible to make out; the sunlight on it was bright enough but the unfilled black shadows gave no clear clues. All around them were other ships or shapes close enough to be distinguished from the stars; Pollux estimated that there must be two dozen within as many miles. While he watched a scooter left a ship a mile or more away and headed toward City Hall.

The figure they had seen launched himself across the gap. He seemed to swell; in half a minute he was close by, checking himself by the line he carried. He dropped to an easy landing near the bow of the Stone; they went to meet him.

“Howdy, Captain. I’m Don Whitsitt, Mr. Fries’ bookkeeper.”

“Howdy, Don.” He introduced the others; the twins helped haul in the light messenger line and coil it; it was followed by a steel line which Don Whitsitt shackled to the ship.

“See you at the store,” he said. “So long.” He launched himself back the way he came, carrying the coiled messenger line and not bothering with the line he had rigged.

Pollux watched him draw away. “I think I could do that”

“Just keep on thinking it,” his father said, “and loop yourself to that guide line.”

One leap took them easily across the abyss, provided one did not let one’s loop twist around the guide line. Castor’s loop did so; it braked him to a stop. He had to unsnarl it, then gain momentum again by swarming along the line hand over hand

Whitsitt had gone inside but he had recycled the lock and left it open for them. They went on in, to be met there by the Honorable Jonathan Fries, Mayor of Rock City. He was a small, bald, pot-bellied man with a sharp, merry look in his eye and a stylus tucked back of his ear. He shook hands with Roger Stone enthusiastically. “Welcome, welcome! We’re honored to have you with us, Mister Mayor. I ought to have a key to the city, or some such, for you. Dancing girls and brass bands.”

Roger shook his head. “I’m an ex-mayor and a private traveller. Never mind the brass bands.” “But you’ll take the dancing girls?”

“I’m a married man. Thanks anyhow.”

“If we had any dancing girls I’d keep ’em for myself. And I’m a married man, too.” “You certainly are!” A plump, plain but very jolly woman had floated up behind them.

Yes, Martha.” They completed the rest of the introductions; Mrs Fries took Hazel in tow; the twins trailed along with the two men, into the forward half of the globe. It was a storeroom and a shop; racks had been fitted to the struts and thrust members; goods and provisions of every sort were lashed or netted to them. Don Whitsitt clung with his knees to a saddle in the middle of the room with a desk folded into his lap. In his reach were ledgers on lazy tongs and a rack of clips holding several hundred small account books. A miner floated in front of him. Several more were burrowing through the racks of merchandise.

Seeing the display of everything a meteor miner could conceivably need, Pollux was glad that they had concentrated on luxury goods then remembered with regret that they had precious little left to sell; the flat cats, before they were placed in freeze, had eaten so much that the family had been delving into their trade goods, from caviar to Chicago sausage. He whispered to Castor, “I had no idea the competition would be so stiff.”

“Neither did I.”

A miner slithered up to Mr. Fries. “One-Price, about that centrifuge -” “Later, Sandy. I’m busy.”

Captain Stone protested, “Don’t let me keep you from your customers.”

“Oh, Sandy hasn’t got anything to do but wait. Right, Sandy? Shake hands with Captain Stone – it was his wife who fixed up old Jocko.”

“It was? Say, I’m mighty proud to know you, Captain! You’re the best news we’ve had in quite a while.” Sandy turned to Fries. “You better put him right on the Committee.”

“I shall. I’m going to call a phone meeting this evening.”

“Just a moment!” objected Roger Stone. “I’m just a visitor. I don’t belong on your Citizens’ Committee.”

Fries shook his head. “You don’t know what it means to our people to have a medical doctor with us again. The Committee ain’t any work, really. It’s just to let you know we’re glad you’ve joined us. And we’ll make Mrs Stone – I mean Doctor Stone – a member if she wants it. She won’t have time for it, though.”

Captain Stone was beginning to feel hemmed in. “Slow down! We expect to be leaving here come next Earth departure – and my wife is not now

engaged in regular practice, anyhow. We’re on a pleasure trip.”

Fries looked worried. “You mean she won’t attend the sick? But she operated on Jock Donaher.”

Stone was about to say that she positively would not under any circumstances take over a regular practice when he realized that he had very little voice in the matter. “She’ll attend the sick. She’s a doctor.”

“Good!”

“But, confound it, man! We didn’t come here for that She’s on a vacation.”

Fries nodded. “We’ll see what we can work out to make it easy on her. We won’t expect the lady to go hopping rocks the way Doc Schultz did. Get that, Sandy? We can’t have every rock-happy rat in the swarm hollering for the doctor every time he gets a sore finger. We want to get the word around that if a man gets sick or gets hurt it’s up to him and his neighbours to drag him in to City Hall if he can possibly wear a suit. Tell Don to draft me a proclamation.”

The miner nodded solemnly. “That’s right, One-Price.”

Sandy moved away; Fries went on, “Let’s go back into the restaurant and see if Martha has some fresh coffee. I’d like to get your opinion on several civic matters”

“Frankly, I couldn’t possibly have opinions on your public affairs here. Things are so different”

“Oh, why don’t I be truthful and admit I want to gossip about politics with another pro. I don’t meet one every day. First, though, did you have any shopping in mind today? Anything you need? Tools? Oxy? Catalysts? Planning on doing any prospecting and if so, do you have your gear?”

“Nothing especial today – except one thing: we need to buy, or by preference rent, a scooter. We’d like to explore a bit”

Fries shook his head. “Friend, I wish you hadn’t asked me that. That’s one thing I haven’t got All these sand rats booming in here from Mars, and even from Luna, half of ’em with no equipment They lease a scooter and a patent igloo and away they go, red hot to make their fortunes. Tell you what I can do, though – I’ve got more rocket motors and tanks coming in from Ceres two months from now. Don and I can weld you up one and have it ready to slap the motor in when the Firefly gets here.”

Roger Stone frowned, “With Earth departure only five months away that’s a long time to wait”

“Well, we’ll just have to see what we can scare up. Certainly the new doctor is entitled to the best – and the doctor’s family. Say -”. A miner tapped him on the shoulder. “Say, storekeeper, I -”

Fries’ face darkened. “You can address me as “Mr. Mayor!”‘ “Huh?”

“And beat it! Can’t you see I’m busy?” The man backed away; Fries fumed, “”One Price” I’m known as, to my friends and to my enemies, from here to the Trojans. If he doesn’t know that, he can call me by my title – or take his trade else-where. Where was I? Oh, yes! You might try old Charlie.”

“Eh?”

“Did you notice that big tank moored to City Hall? That’s Charlie’s hole. He’s a crazy old coot, rock-happy as they come, and he’s a hermit by intention. Used to hang around the edge of the community, never mixing – but with this boom and ten strangers swarming in for every familiar face Charlie got timid and asked could he please tie in at civic center? I guess he was afraid that somebody would slit his throat and steal his hoorah’s nest Some of the boomers are a rough lot at that”

“He sounds like some of the old-timers on Luna. What about him?”

“Oh! Too much on my mind these days; it wanders. Charlie runs a sort of a fourth-hand shop, and I say that advisedly. He has stuff I won’t handle. Every time a rock jumper dies, or goes Sunside, his useless plunder winds up in Charlie’s hole. Now I don’t say he’s got a scooter – though you just might lease his own now that he’s moored in-city. But he might have parts that could be jury-rigged. Are you handy with tools?”

“Moderately. But I’ve got just the team for such a job.” He looked around for the twins, finally spotted them pawing through merchandise. “Cas! Pol! Come here.”

The storekeeper explained what he had in mind. Castor nodded. “If it worked once, we’ll fix it” “That’s the spirit Now let’s go test that coffee.”

Castor hung back ‘Dad? Why don’t Pol and I go over there and see what he’s got? It’ll save you time.” “Well-”

“It’s just a short jump,” said Fries.

“Okay, but don’t jump. Use your lines and follow the mooring line over.”

The twins left Once in the airlock Pollux started fuming. “Stow it,” said Cas. “Dad just wants us to be careful.” “Yes, but why does he have to say it where everybody can hear?”

Charlie’s hole, they decided, had once been a tow tank to deliver oxygen to a colony. They let themselves into the lock, started it cycling. When pressure was up, they tried the inner door; it wouldn’t budge. Pollux started pounding on it with his belt wrench while Castor searched for a switch or other signal. The lock was miserably lighted by a scant three inches of glow tube.

“Cut the racket,” Castor told Pollux. “If he’s alive, he’s heard you by now.” Pollux complied and tried the door again – still locked. They heard a muffled voice: “Who’s there?”

Castor looked around for the source of the voice, could not spot it. “Castor and Pollux Stone,” he answered, “from the Rolling Stone, out of Luna”

Somebody chuckled. “You don’t fool me. And you can‘t arrest me without a warrant Anyhow I won’t let you in.” Castor started to explode,” Pollux patted his arm. “We aren’t cops. Shucks, we aren’t old enough to be cops.” “Take your. helmets off.”

“Don’t do it,” Castor cautioned. “He could recycle while we’re unsealed.”

Pollux went ahead and took his off; Castor hesitated, then followed. “Let us in,” Pollux said mildly. “Why should I?”

“We’re customers. We want to buy things.” “What you got to trade?”

“We’ll pay cash”

“Cash!” said the voice. “Banks! Governments! What you got to trade? Any chocolate?” “Cas,” Pollux whispered, “have we got any chocolate left?”

“Maybe six or seven pounds. Not more.” “Sure we got chocolate.”

“Let me see it.”

Castor interrupted. “What sort of nonsense is this? Pol, let’s go back and see Mr. Fries again. He’s a businessman.” The voice moaned, “Oh, don’t do that! He’ll cheat you.”

“Then open up!”

After a few seconds of silence the voice said wheedlingly,. “You look like nice boys. You wouldn’t hurt Charlie? Not old Charlie?” “Of course not We want to trade with you.”

The door opened at last In the gloom a face, etched by age and darkened by raw sunlight, peered out at them ‘Come in easy. Don’t try any tricks – I know you.”

Wondering if it were the sensible thing to do the boys pulled themselves in. When their eyes adjusted to the feeble circle of glow tube in the middle of the space they looked around while their host looked at them. The tank, large outside, seemed smaller by the way it was stuffed. As in Fries’ shop, every inch, every strut, every nook was crammed, but where the City Hall was neat, this was rank disorder, where Fries’ ‘shop was rational, this was nightmare confusion. The air was rich enough but ripe with ancient and nameless odors.

Their host was a skinny monkey of a man, covered with a single dark garment, save for head, hands, and bare feet. It had once been, Pollux decided, heated underwear for space-suit use far out starside, or in caves.

Old Charlie stared at them, then grinned, reached up and scratched his neck with his big toe. “Nice boys,” he said. “I knew you wouldn’t hurt Charlie. I was just foolin’.”

“We wouldn’t hurt anybody. We just wanted to get acquainted, and do a little business.”

“We want a – “ Pollux started; Castor’s elbow cut off the rest; Castor ‘went on,’Nice place you’ve got here.”

“Comfortable. Practical. Just right for a man with no nonsense about him. Good place for a man who likes to be quiet and think. Good place to

read a book You boys like to read?”

“Sure. Love to.”

“You want to see my books?” Without waiting for an answer he dared like a bat into the gloom, came back in a few moments with books in both hands and a half dozen held by his feet. He bumped to a stop with his elbows and offered them

There were old-style bound books, most of them, the twins saw, ships’ manuals of ships long dead. Castor’s eyes widened when he saw the dates on some of them, and wondered what the Astrogation Institute would pay for them. Among them was a dog-eared copy of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi.

“Look ’em over, boys. Make yourselves comfortable. Bet you didn’t expect to find a literary man out here among these yokels. You boys can read, can’t you?”

“Sure we can.”

“Didn’t know. They teach such funny things nowadays. Quote a bit of latin to ’em and they look like you’re crazy in the head. You boys hungry? You want something to eat?” He looked anxious.

They both assured him that they had fed well and recently; he looked relieved. “Old Charlie ain’t one to let a man go hungry, even if he hasn’t got enough for himself.” Castor had noted a net of sealed rations; there must have been a thousand of them by conservative estimate. But the old man continued, “Seen the time, right herein this node – no, it was the Emmy Lou – when a man didn’t dare make breakfast without he barred his lock first and turned off his beacon. It was about that time that Lafe Dumont ate High-Grade Henderson. He was dead first, naturally – but it brought on a crisis in our community affairs. They formed up the vigilantes, what they call the Committee nowadays.”

“Why did he eat him?”

“Why, he was dead. I told you that. Just the same, I don’t think a man ought to eat his own partner, do you?” The boys agreed that it was a breech of etiquette.

“I think he ought to limit it to members of his own family, unless the two of them have got a signed and sealed contract. See any ghosts yet?” The acceleration was so sharp that it left both the twins a bit confused. “Ghosts?”

“You will. Many’s the time I’ve talked to High-Grade Henderson. Said he didn’t blame Lafe a bit, would ‘a’ done the same thing in his place. Ghosts all around here. All the rockmen that have died out here, they can’t get back to Earth. They’re in a permanent orbit – see? And it stands to reason that you can’t accelerate anything that doesn’t have mass.” He leaned toward them confidentially. “Sometimes you see ’em, but mostly they whisper in your earphones. And when they do, listen – because that’s the only way you’ll ever find any of the big strikes that got found and then got lost again. I’m telling you this because I like you, see? So listen. If it’s too faint, just close your chin valve and hold your breath; then it comes clearer.”

They agreed and thanked him. “Now tell me about your-selves, boys.” To their surprise he appeared to mean it; when they slowed down he taxed them for details, filling in only occasionally with his own disjointed anecdotes. At last Castor described the fiasco of the flat cats. “So that’s why we don’t have much food to trade with. But we do have some chocolate left and lots of other things.”

Charlie rocked back and forth from his perch in the air. “Flat cats, eh? I ain’t had my hands on a flat cat in a power of years. Nice to hold, they are. Nice to have around. Philosophical, if we just understand ’em.” He suddenly fixed Castor with his eye. “What you planning to do with all those flat cats?”

“Why, nothing, I guess.”

“That’s just what I thought You wouldn’t mind giving a poor old man who hasn’t kith nor kin nor wife nor chick one of those harmless flat cats? An old man who would always give you a bite to eat and a charge for your suit bottle?”

Castor glanced at Pollux and agreed cautiously that any dicker they reached would certainly include a flat cat as a mark of faith in dealing. “Then what do you want? You talked about scooters. You know old Charlie hasn’t got a scooter – except the one I have to have myself to stay alive.”

Castor broached the notion about repairing old parts, fitting together a scooter. Charlie scratched an inch-long stubble. “Seems. to me I did have a rocket motor – you wouldn’t mind if it lacked a valve or two? Or did I trade that to Swede Gonzalez? No, that was another one. I think – just a second while I take a look.” He was gone more nearly 600 seconds, buried in the mass; he came out dragging a piece of junk behind. “There you are! Practically new. Nothing a couple of bright boys couldn’t fix.”

Pollux looked at Castor. “What do you think it’s worth?”

Castor’s lips moved silently: “He ought to pay us to take it away.” It took them another twenty minutes but they got it for three pounds of chocolate and one flat cat.

X – FLAT CATS FINANCIAL

It took the better part of two weeks to make the ancient oxyalcohol engine work; another week to build a scooter rack to receive it, using tubing from Fries’ second-hand supply. It was not a pretty thing, but, with the Stone‘s stereo gear mounted on it, it was an efficient way to get around the node. Captain Stone shook his head over it and subjected it to endless tests before he conceded that it was safe even though ugly.

In the meantime the Committee had decreed a taxi service for the doctor lady; every miner working within fifty miles of City Hall was required to take his turn at standby watch with his scooter, with a fixed payment in high grade for any run he might have to make. The Stones saw very little of Edith Stone during this time: it seemed as if every citizen of Rock City had been saving up ailments.

But they were not forced to fall back on Hazel’s uninspired cooking. Fries had the Stone warped into contact with City Hall and a passenger tube sealed from the Stone‘s lock to an unused hatch of the bigger ship; when Dr. Stone was away they ate in his restaurant Mrs Fries was an excellent cook and she raised a great variety in her hydroponics garden.

While they were rigging the scooter the twins had time to mull over the matter of the flat cats. It had dawned on them that here in Rock City was a potential, unexploited market for flat cats. The question was: how best to milk it for all the traffic would bear?

Pol suggested that they peddle them in the scooter; he pointed out that a man’s sales resistance was lowest, practically zero, when he actually had a flat cat in his hands. His brother shook his head. “No good,” Junior.”

“Why not?”

“One, the Captain won’t let us monopolize the scooter; you know he regards it as ship’s equipment, built by the crew, namely us. Two, we would burn up our profits in scooter fuel. Three, it’s too slow; before we could move a third of them, some idiot would have fed our first sale too much, it has kittens – and there you are, with the market flooded with flat cats. The idea is to sell them as nearly as possible all at one time.”

“We could stick up a sign in the store – One-Price would let us – and sell them right out of the Stone.”

“Better but not good enough. Most of these rats shop only every three or four months. No, sir, we’ve got to build that better mouse trap and make the world beat a path to our door.”

“I’ve never been able to figure out why anybody would want to trap a mouse. Decompress a compartment and you kill all of them, every time.” “Just a figure of speech, no doubt Junior, what can we do to make Rock City flat-cat conscious?”

They found a way. The Belt, for all its lonely reaches – or because of them – was as neighbourly as a village. They gossiped among themselves, by suit radio. Out in the shining blackness it was good to know that, if something went wrong, there was a man listening not five hundred miles away who would come and investigate if you broke off and did not answer.

They gossiped from node to node by their more powerful ship’s radios. A rumor of death, of a big strike, or of accident, would bounce around the entire belt, relayed from rockman to rockman, at just short of the speed of light. Heartbreak node was sixty-six light minutes away, following orbit; big news often reached it in less than two hours, including numerous manual relays.

Rock City even had its own broadcast. Twice a day One-Price picked up the news from Earthside, then re-broadcast it with his own salty comments. The twins decided to follow it with one of their own, on the same wave length – a music & chatter show, with commercials. Oh, decidedly with commercials. They had hundreds of spools in stock which they could use, then sell, along with the portable projectors they had bought on Mars.

They started in; the show never was very good, but, on the other hand, it had no competition and it was free. Immediately following Fries’ sign-off Castor would say, “Don’t go away, neighbours! Here we are again with two hours of fun and music – and a few tips on bargains. But first, our theme

the warm and friendly purr of a Martian flat cat.” Pollux would hold Fuzzy Britches up to the microphone and stroke it; the good-natured little creature would always respond with a loud buzz. “Wouldn’t that be nice to come home to? And now for some music: Harry Weinstein’s Sunbeam Six in “High Gravity”. Let me remind you that this tape, like all other music on this program, may be purchased at an amazing saving in Flat Cat Alley, right off the City Hall – as well as Ajax three-way projectors in the Giant, Jr. model, for sound, sight, and stereo. The Sunbeam Six – hit it, Harry!”

Sometimes they would do interviews:

Castor: “A few words with one of our leading citizens, Rocks-in-his-Head Rudolf. Mr. Rudolf, all Rock City is waiting to hear from you. Tell me, do you like it out here?”

Pollux: “Naw!”

Castor: “But you’re making lots of money, Mr. Rudolf?” Pollux: “Naw!”

Castor: “At least you bring in enough high grade to eat well.” “Naw!”

“No? Tell me, why did you come out here in the first place?”

Pollux, “Bub, was you ever married?”

Sound effect of blow with blunt instrument, groan, and the unmistakable cycling of an air lock – Castor: “Sorry, folks. My assistant has just spaced Mr. Rudolf. To the purchaser of the flat cat we had been saving for Mr. Rudolf we will give away – absolutely free! – a beautiful pin-up picture printed in gorgeous living colors on fireproof paper. I hate to tell you what these pictures ordinarily sell for on Ceres; it hurts me to say how little we are letting them go for now, until our limited stock is exhausted. To the very first customer who comes in that door wanting to purchase a flat cat we will – Lock that door! Lock that door! All right, all right – all three of you will receive pin-up pictures; we don’t want anyone fighting here. But you’ll have to wait until we finish this broadcast Sorry, neighbours – a slight interruption but we settled it without bloodshed. But I find myself in a dilemma. I made you a promise and I did not know what would happen, but the truth is, too many customers were already here, pounding on the door of Flat Cat Alley. But to make good our promise I am enlarging it: not to the first customer, not to the second, nor to the third – but to the next twenty persons

purchasing flat cats will go, absolutely free, one of these gorgeous pictures. Bring no money – we accept high grade or core material at the standard

rates.”

Sometimes they varied it by having Meade sing. She was not of concert standards, but she had a warm, intimate contralto. After hearing her, a man possessing not even a flat cat felt lonely indeed. She pulled even better than the slick professional recordings; the twins found it necessary to cut her in for a percentage.

But in the main they depended on the flat cats themselves. The boomers from Mars, almost to a man, bought flat cats as soon as they heard that they were available, and each became an unpaid travelling salesman for the enterprise. Hardrock men from Luna, or directly from Earth, who had never seen a flat cat, now had opportunities to see them, pet them, listen to their hypnotic purr – and were lost. The little things not only stirred to aching suppressed loneliness, but, having stimulated it, gave it an outlet.

Castor would hold Fuzzy Britches to the mike and coo, “Here is a little darling – Molly Malone. Sing for the boys, honey pet.” While he stroked Fuzzy Britches Pollux would step up the power. “No, we can’t let Molly go – she’s a member of the family. But here is Bright Eyes. We’d like to keep Bright Eyes, too, but we mustn’t be selfish. Say hello to the folks, Bright Eyes.” Again he would stroke Fuzzy Britches. “Mr. P., now hand me Velvet.”

The stock of flat cats in deep freeze steadily melted. Their stock of high grade grew.

Roger Stone received their suggestion that they save out a few for breeding stock with one of his more emphatic refusals; once, he declaimed, was enough to be swamped in flat cats. Fuzzy Britches could stay, safely on short rations – but one was enough.

They had reached the last few at the back of the hold and were thinking about going out of business when a tired-looking, grey-haired man showed up after their broadcast. There were several other customers; he hung back and let the twins sell flat cats to the others. He had with him a girl child, little older than Lowell. Castor had not seen him before but he guessed that he might be Mr. Erska; bachelors far out-numbered families in the node and families with children were very rare. The Erskas picked up a precarious living down orbit and north; they were seldom seen at City Hall. Mr. Erska spoke Basic with some difficulty; Mrs Erska spoke it not at all. The family used some one of the little lingos – Icelandic, it might have been.

When the other customers had left the Stone Castor put on his professional grin and introduced himself. Yes, it was Mr. Erska. “And what can I do for you today, sir? A flat cat?”

“I’m afraid not”

“How about a projector? With a dozen tapes thrown in? Just the thing for a family evening.”

Mr. Erska seemed nervous. “Uh, very nice, I’m sure. No.” He tugged at the little girl’s hand. “We better go now, babykin.”

“Don’t rush off. My baby brother is around somewhere – or was. He’d like to meet your kid. Maybe he’s wandered over into the store. I’ll look for him”

“We better go.”

“What’s the rush? He can’t be far.”

Mr. Erska swallowed in embarrassment ‘My little girl. She heard your program and she wanted to see a flat cat. Now she’s seen one, so we go.” “Oh-” Castor brought himself face to face with the child. “Would you like to hold one, honey?” She did not answer, but nodded solemnly. “Mr. P.,.

bring up the Duchess.”

“Right, Mr. C.” Pollux went aft and fetched the Duchess – the first flat cat that came to hand, of course. He came back, warming it against his belly to revive it quickly.

Castor took it and massaged it until it flattened out and opened its eyes. “Here, honeybunch. Don’t be afraid”

Still silent, the child took it, cuddled it The small furry bundle sighed and began to purr. Castor turned to her father. “Don’t you want to get it for her?”

The man turned red. “No, no!”

“Why not? They’re no trouble. She’ll love it. So will you.”

“No!” He reached out and tried to take the flat cat from his daughter, speaking to her in another language.

She clung to it, replying in what was clearly the negative. Castor looked at them thoughtfully. “You would like to buy it for her, wouldn’t you?” The man looked away. “I can’t buy it.”

“But you want to.” Castor glanced at Pollux. “Do you know what you are, Mr. Erska. You are the five hundredth customer of Flat Cat Alley.”

“Uh?”

“Didn’t you hear our grand offer? You must have missed one of our programs. The five hundredth flat cat is absolutely free.”

The little girl looked puzzled but clung to the flat cat Her father looked doubtful. “You’re fooling?” Castor laughed. “Ask Mr. P.”

Pollux nodded solemnly. “The bare truth, Mr. Erska. It’s a celebration of a successful season. One flat cat, absolutely free with the compliments of the management And with it goes either one pin-up, or two candy bars – your choice.”

Mr. Erska seemed only half convinced, but they left with the child clinging to ‘Duchess’ and the candy bars. When the door was closed behind them Castor said fretfully, “You didn’t need to chuck in the candy bars They were the last; I didn’t mean us to sell them”

“Well, we didn’t sell them; we gave ’em away.”

Castor grinned and shrugged. “Okay, I hope they don’t make her sick. What was her name?” “I didn’t get it.”

“No matter. Our Mrs Fries will know.” He turned around, saw Hazel behind them in the hatch. “What are you grinning about?”

“Nothing, nothing. I just enjoy seeing a couple of cold-cash businessmen at work.” “Money isn’t everything!”

“Besides,” added Pollux, “it’s good advertising.”

“Advertising? With your stock practically gone?” She snickered. “There wasn’t any “grand offer” – and I’ll give you six to one it wasn’t your five hundredth sale.”

Castor looked embarrassed. “Aw, she wanted it! What would you have done?”

Hazel moved up to them, put an arm around the neck of each. “My boys! I’m beginning to think you may grow up yet. In thirty, forty, fifty more years you may be ready to join the human race.”

“Aw, lay off it!”

XI – THE WORM IN THE MUD

Cost-accounting on the flat-cat deal turned out to be complicated. The creatures were all descendants of Fuzzy Britches, chattel of Lowell. But the increase was directly attributable to food fed to them by everyone – which in turn had forced them to eat most of the luxury foods stocked by the

twins for trade. But it had been the twins’ imaginative initiative which had turned a liability into an asset. On the other hand they had used freely the capital goods (ship and electronic equipment) belonging to the entire family. But how to figure the probable worth of the consumed luxury foods? Whatever the figure was, it was not just original cost plus lift fuel.

Roger Stone handed down a Solomon’s decision. From the gross proceeds would be subtracted Meade’s percentage for singing; the twins would be reimbursed for the trade goods that had been commandeered; the balance would be split three ways among the twins and Lowell – all to be settled after they had traded high grade for refined metal at Ceres, then sold their load at Luna.

In the meantime he agreed to advance the twins’ money to operate further. Fries having promised to honor his sight draft on Luna City National.

But for once the twins found no immediate way to invest money. They toyed with the idea of using their time to prospect on their own, but a few trips out in the scooter convinced them that it was a game for experts and one in which even the experts usually made only a bare living. It was the fixed illusion that the next mass would be ‘the glory rock’ – the one that would pay for years of toil – that kept the old rockmen going. The twins knew too much about statistics now, and they believed in their ability rather than their luck. Finding a glory rock was sheer gamble.

“They made one fairly long trip into the thickest part of the node, fifteen hundred miles out and back taking all one day and the following night to do it. They got the scooter up to a dawdling hundred and fifty miles per hour and let it coast, planning to stop and investigate if they found promising masses having borrowed a stake-out beacon from Fries with the promise that they would pay for it they kept it

They did not need it. Time after time they would spot a major blip in the stereo radar, only to have someone else’s beacon wink on when they got within thirty miles of the mass. At the far end they did find a considerable collection of rock travelling loosely in company; they matched, shackled on their longest lines (their father had emphatically forbidden free jumping) and investigated. Having neither experience nor a centrifuge, their only way of checking on specific gravity was by grasping a mass and clutching it to them vigorously, then getting a rough notion of its inertia by its resistance to being shoved around. A Geiger counter (borrowed) had shown no radioactivity; they were searching for the more valuable core material.

Two hours of this exercise left them tired but no richer. “Grandpa,” announced Pollux, “this is a lot of left-over country rock.” “Not even that. Most of it’s pumice, I’d say.”

“Get for home?” “Check.”

They turned the scooter around by flywheel and homed on the City Hall beacon, boosting it up to four hundred miles per hour before. letting it coast, that being the top maneuver they could figure on for the juice they had left in their tanks. They would have preferred to break the speed limit, being uneasily aware that they were late – and being anxious to get home; the best designed suit is not comfortable for too long periods. They knew that their parents would not be especially worried; while they were out of range for their suit radios, they had reported in by the gossip grapevine earlier.

Their father was not worried. But the twins spent the next week under hatches, confined to the ship for failing to get back on time.

For a longer period nothing more notable took place than the incident in which Roger Stone lost his breathing mask while taking a shower and almost drowned (so he claimed) before he could find the water cut-off valve. There are very few tasks easier to do in a gravity field than in free fall, but bathing is one of them.

Dr. Stone continued her practice, now somewhat reduced. Sometimes she was chauffeured by the miner assigned to that duty; sometimes the twins took her around. One morning following her office hours in City Hall she came back into the Stone looking for the twins. “Where are the boys?”

“Haven’t seen them since breakfast,” answered Hazel. “Why?”

Dr. Stone frowned slightly. “Nothing, really. I’ll ask Mr. Fries to call a scooter for me.” “Got to make a call? I’ll take you unless those lunks have taken our scooter.”

“You needn’t, Mother Hazel.”

“I’d enjoy it. I’ve been promising Lowell a ride for weeks. Or will it take too long?”

“Shouldn’t. It’s only eight hundred miles or so out.” The doctor was not held down to the local speed limit in her errand of mercy.

“Do it in two hours, with juice to spare.” Off they went, with Buster much excited. Hazel allotted one-fourth her fuel as safety margin, allotted the working balance for maximum accelerations, figuring the projected mass-ratios in her head. Quite aside from the doctor’s privilege to disregard the law, high speed was not dangerous in the sector they would be in, it being a ‘thin’ volume of the node.

Their destination was an antiquated winged rocket, the wings of which had been torched off and welded into a tent-shaped annex to give more living room. Hazel thought that it had a shanty-town air -but so did many of the ships in Rock City. She was pleased enough to go inside and have a

sack of tea and let Lowell out of his spacesuit for a time. The patient, Mr. Bakers, was in a traction splint; his wife could not pilot their scooter, which was why Dr. Stone granted the house call. Dr. Stone received a call by radio while they were there; she came back into the general room looking troubled. “’S matter?” inquired Hazel.

“Mrs Silva. I’m not really surprised; it’s her first child.”

“Did you get the co-ordinates and beacon pattern? I’ll run you right-” “Lowell?”

“Oh. Oh, yes,” It would be a long time in a suit for a youngster. Mrs Eakers suggested that they leave the child with her.

Before Lowell could cloud up at the suggestion Dr. Stone said, “Thanks, but it isn’t necessary. Mr. Silva is on his way here. What I was trying to say, Mother Hazel, is that I probably had better go with him and let you and Lowell go back alone. Do you mind?”

“Of course not. Pipe down, Lowell! I’ll have us home in three-quarters of an hour and Lowell can have his nap or his spanking on time, as the case may be.”

She gave Dr. Stone one of two spare oxygen bottles before she left; Dr. Stone refused to take both of them. Hazel worked the new mass figures over; with Edith, her suit, and the spare bottle subtracted she had spare fuel. Better hit it up pretty fast and get home before the brat got cranky –

She lined up on City Hall by flywheel and stereo, spun on that axis to get the sun out of her eyes, clutched her gyros, and gave it the gun.

The next thing she knew she was tumbling like a liner in free fall. She remembered from long habit to cut the throttle but only after a period of aimless acceleration, for she had been chucked around in her saddle, thrown against her belts, and could not at first find the throttle.

When they were in free fall again she remembered to laugh. “Some ride, eh, Lowell?” “Do it again, Grandma!”

“I hope not.” Quickly she checked things over. There was not much that could go wrong with the little craft, it being only a rocket motor, an open rack with saddles and safety harness, and a minimum of instruments and controls. It was the gyros, of course; the motor had been sweet and hot. They were hunting the least bit, she found, that being the only evidence that they had just tumbled violently. Delicately she adjusted them by hand, putting her helmet against the case so that she could hear what she was doing.

Only then did she try to find where they were and where they were going. Let’s see – the Sun is over there and that’s Betelgeuse over yonder – so City Hall must be out that way. She ducked her helmet into the hemispherical ‘eye shade’ of the stereo. Yup! there she be!

The Eakers place was the obvious close-by point on which to measure her vector. She looked around for it, was startled to discover how far away it was. They must have coasted quite a distance while she was fiddling with the gyros. She measured the vector in amount and direction, then whistled. There were, she thought, few grocery shops out that way – darn few neighbours of any sort. She decided that it might be smart to call Mrs Eakers and tell her what had happened and ask her to call City Hall – just in case.

She could not raise Mrs Eakers. The sloven, she thought bitterly, has probably switched off her alarm so she could sleep. Lazy baggage! Her house looked it – and smelled it, too.

But she kept trying to call Mrs Eakers, or anyone else in range of her suit radio while she again lined up the ship for City, with offset to compensate for the now vector. She was cautious and most alert this time – in consequence she wasted only a few seconds of fuel when the gyros again tumbled.

She unclutched the gyros and put them out of her mind, then took careful measure of the situation. The Eakers dump was now a planetary light in the sky, shrinking almost noticeably, but it was still the proper local reference point. She did not like the vector she got. As always, they seemed to be standing still in the exact center of a starry globe – but her instruments showed them speeding for empty space, headed clear outside the node.

“What’s the matter, Grandma Hazel?”

“Nothing, son, nothing. Grandma has to stop and look at some road signs, that’s all.” She was thinking that she would gladly swap her chance of eternal bliss for an automatic distress signal and a beacon. She reached over, switched off the child’s receiver, then repeatedly called for help.

No answer. She switched Lowell’s receiver back on. “Why. did you do that, Grandma Hazel?” “Nothing. Just checking it”

“You can’t fool me! You’re scared! Why?”

“Not scared, pet Worried a little, maybe. Now shut up; Grandma’s got work to do.”

Carefully she lined up the craft by flywheel; carefully she checked it when it tried to swing past She aimed both to offset the new and disastrous vector and to create a vector for City Hall. She intentionally left the gyros unclutched. Then she restrapped Lowell in his saddle, checked its position. “Hold still,” she warned. “Move your little finger and Grandma will scalp you”

Just as carefully she positioned herself, considering lever arms, masses, and angular moments in her head Without gyros the craft must be

balanced just so. “Now,” she said to herself, “Hazel, we find out whether you are a pilot – or just a Sunday pilot.” She ducked her helmet into the eyeshade, picked a distant blip on which to center her crosshairs, and gunned the craft

The blip wavered; she tried to rebalance by shifting her body. When the blip suddenly slipped off to one side she cut the throttle quickly. Again she checked her vector. Their situation was somewhat improved. Again she called for help, not stopping to cut the child out of hearing. He said nothing and looked grave.

She went through the same routine, cutting power again when the craft ‘fell off its tail.” She measured the vector, called for help – and did it all again. A dozen times she tried it. On the last try the thrust stopped with the throttle still wide open. With all fuel gone there was no need to be in a hurry. She measured her vector most carefully on the Eakers’ ship, now far away, then checked the results against the City Hall blip, all the while calling for help. She ran through the figures again; in a fashion she had been successful. They were now unquestionably headed for City Hall, could not miss it by more than a few miles at most – almost jumping distance. But, while the vector was correct in direction, it was annoyingly small in quantity – six hundred and fifty miles at about forty miles an hour; they would be closest in about sixteen hours.

She wondered whether Edith really had needed that other spare oxygen bottle. Her own gauge showed about half full. She called for help again, then decided to go through the problem once more; maybe she had dropped a decimal in her head. While she was lining up on City Hall, the tiny light in the stereo tank faded and died. Her language caused Lowell to inquire, “What’s the matter now, Grandma?”

“Nothing more than I should have expected, I guess. Some days, hon, it just isn’t worth while to wake up in the morning.” The trouble, she soon found, was so simple as to be beyond repair. The stereo radar would no longer work because all three cartridges in the power pack were dead. She was forced to admit that she had been using it rather continuously – and it took a lot of power.

“Grandma Hazel! I want to go home!” She pulled out of her troubled thoughts to answer the child. “We’re going home, dear. But it’s going to take quite a while.”

“I want to go home right now?” “I’m sorry but you can’t”

“But -”

“Shut it up – or when I get you out of that sack, I’ll give you something to yelp for. I mean it” She again called for help. Lowell made one of his lightning changes to serenity. “That’s better,” approved Hazel. “Want to play a game of chess?” “No.”

“Sissy. You’re afraid I’ll beat you. I’ll bet you three spanks and a knuckle rub.” Lowell considered this. “I get the white men?”

“Take ’em. I’ll beat you anyhow.”

To her own surprise she did. It was a long drawn-out game; Lowell was not as practised as she was in visualising a board and they had had to recount the moves on several occasions before he would concede the arrangement of men . . . and between each pair of moves she had again called for help. About the middle of the game she had found it necessary to remove her oxygen bottle and replace it with the one spare. She and the child had started out even but Lowell’s small mass demanded much less oxygen.

“How about another one? Want to get your revenge?” “No! I want to go home.”

“We’re going home, dear.”

“How soon?”

“Well… it’ll be a while yet I’ll tell you a story.” “What story?”

“Well, how about the one about the worm that crawled up out of the mud?” “Oh, I know that one! I’m tired of it”

“There are parts I’ve never told you, And you can’t get tired of it, not really, because there is never any end to it. Always something new.” So she told him again about the worm that crawled up out of the slime, not because it didn’t have enough to eat, not because it wasn’t nice and warm and comfortable down there under the water – but because the worm was restless. How it crawled up on dry land and grew legs. How part of it got to be the Elephant’s Child and part of it got to be a monkey, grew hands, and fiddled with things. How, still insatiably restless, it grew wings and reached up for the stars. She spun it out a long, long time, pausing occasionally to call for aid.

Thechild was either bored and ignored her, or liked it and kept quiet on that account. But when she stopped he said, “Tell me another one”

“Not just now, dear.” His oxygen gauge showed empty. “Go on! Tell me a new one – a better one.”

“Not now, dear. That’s the best story Hazel knows. The very best. I told it to you again because I want you to remember it.” She watched his

anoxia warning signal turn red, then quietly disconnected the partly filled bottle on her own suit, closing the now useless suit valves, and replaced his empty bottle with hers. For a moment she considered cross-connecting the bottle to both suits, then shrugged and let it stand. “Lowell -”

“What, Grandma?”

“Listen to me, dear. You’ve heard me calling for help. You’ve got to do it now. Every few minutes, all the time.” “Why?”

“Because Hazel is tired, dear. Hazel has to sleep. Promise me you’ll do it” “Well… all right”

She tried to hold perfectly still, to breathe as little of the air left in her suit as possible. It wasn’t so bad, she thought She had wanted to see the Rings – but there wasn’t much else she had missed. She supposed everyone had his Carcassonne; she had no regrets.

“Grandma! Grandma Hazel!” She did not answer. He waited, then began to cry, endlessly and without hope.

Dr. Stone arrived back at the Rolling Stone to find only her husband there. She greeted him and added, “Where’s Hazel, dear? and Lowell?” “Eh? Didn’t they come back with you? I supposed they had stopped in the store.”

“No, of course not” “Why “of course not”?”

She explained the arrangement; he looked at her in stunned astonishment ‘They left the same time you did?” “They intended to. Hazel said she would be home in forty-five minutes.”

“There’s a bare possibility that they are still with the Eakers. We’ll find out.” He lunged toward the door.

The twins returned to find their home and City Hall as well in turmoil. They had been spending an interesting and instructive several hours with old Charlie.

Their father turned away from the Stone‘s radio and demanded, “Where have you two been?” “Just over in Charlie’s hole. What’s the trouble?”

Roger Stone explained. The twins looked at each other. “Dad,” Castor said painfully, “you mean Hazel took Mother out in our scooter?” “Certainly.” The twins questioned each other wordlessly again.

‘Why shouldn’t she? Speak up.” “Well, you . . . well, it was like this -” “Speak up!”

“There was a bearing wobble, or something, in one of the gyros,” Pollux admitted miserably. We were working on it”

“You were? In Charlie’s place!”

“Well, we went over there to see what he had in the way of spare parts and, well, we got detained, sort of.”

Their father looked at them for several seconds with no expression of any sort. He then said in a flat voice, “You left a piece of ship’s equipment out of commission. You failed to log it. You failed to report it to the Captain. He paused. “Go to your room.”

“But Dad! We want to help!”

“Stay in your room; you are under arrest”

The twins did as they were ordered. While they waited, the whole of Rock City was alerted. The word went out: the doctor’s little boy is missing; the boy’s grandmother is missing. Fuel up your scooters; stand by to help. Stay on this wave length.

“Pol, quit muttering!”

Pollux turned to his brother. “How can I help it?”

“They can’t be lost, not really lost Why, the stereo itself would stand out on a screen like a searchlight”

Pollux thought about it ‘I don’t know. You remember I said I thought we might have a high-potential puncture in the power pack?” “I thought you fixed that?”

“I planned to, just as soon as we got the bugs smoothed out in the gyros.”

Castor thought about it ‘That’s bad. That could be really bad.” He added suddenly, “But quit muttering, just the same. Start thinking instead. What happened? We’ve got to reconstruct it”

“”What happened?” Are you kidding? Look, the pesky thing tumbles, then anything can happen. No control.” “Use your head, I said. What would Hazel do in this situation?”

They both kept quiet for some moments, then Pollux said, “Cas, that derned thing always tumbled to the left, didn’t it? Always.”

“What good does that do us? Left can be any direction.”

“No! You asked what Hazel would do. She’d be along her homing line, of course – and Hazel always oriented around her drive line so as to get the Sun on the back of her neck, if possible. Her eyes aren’t too good.”

Castor screwed up his face, trying to visualise it. “Say Eakers’ is off that way and City Hall over here; if the Sun is over on this side, then, when it tumbles, she’d vector off that way.” He acted it with his hands.

“Sure, sure! When you put in the right coordinates, that is. But what else would she do? What would you do? You’d vector back I mean vector home.”

“Huh? How could she? With no gyros?”

“Think about it Would you quit? Hazel is a pilot. She’d ride that thing like a broomstick.” He shaped the air with his hands. “So she’d be coming back, or trying to, along here – and everybody will be looking for her way over here.”

Castor scowled. “Could be.”

“It had better be. They’ll be looking for her in a cone with its vertex at Eakers’ – and they ought to be looking in a cone with its vertex right here, and along one side of it at that”

Castor said, “Come along!” “Dad said we were under arrest” “Come along!”

City Hall was empty, save for Mrs Fries who was standing watch, red-eyed and tense, at the radio. She shook her head. “Nothing yet.”

“Where can we find a scooter?”

“You can’t Everybody is out searching.”

Castor tugged at Pollux’s sleeve. “Old Charlie.” “Huh?” Say, Mrs Fries, is old Charlie out searching?” “I doubt if he knows about it.”

They rushed into their suits, cycled by spilling and wasting air, did not bother with safety lines. Old Charlie let them in. “What’s all the fuss about, boys?”

Castor explained Charlie shook his head. “That’s too bad, that really is. I’m right sorry.” “Charlie, we’ve got to have your scooter.”

“Right now!” added Pollux.

Charlie looked astorsished. “Are you fooling? I’m the only one can gun that rig.” “Charlie, this serious! We’ve got to have it”

“You couldn’t gun it”

“We’re both pilots.”

Charlie scratched meditatively while Castor considered slugging him for his keys – but his keys probably weren’t on him – and how would one find

anything in that trash pile? Charlie finally said, “If you’ve just got to, I suppose I better gun it for you.”

“Okay, okay! Hurry up! Get your suit on!”

“Don’t be in such a rush. It just slows you down.”

Charlie disappeared into the underbush, came out fairly promptly with a suit that seemed to consist mostly of vulcanized patches. “Dog take it,” he complained as he began to struggle with it, “if your mother would stay home and mind her own business, these things wouldn’t happen.”

“Shut up and hurry!”

“I am hurrying. She made me take a bath. I don’t need no doctors. All the bugs that ever bit me, died.”

When Charlie had dug his scooter out of the floating junk-yard moored to his home they soon saw why he had refused to lend it. It seemed probable that no one else could possibly pilot it Not only was it of vintage type, repaired with parts from many other sorts, but also the controls were arranged for a man with four hands. Charlie had been in free fall so long that he used his feet almost as readily for grasping and handling as does an ape; his space suit had had the feet thereof modified so that he could grasp things between the big toe and the second, as with Japanese stockings.

“Hang on. Where we going?”

“Do you know where the Eakers live?”

“Sure. Used to live out past that way myself. Lonely stretch.” He pointed. “Right out there, “bout half a degree right of that leetle second-magnitude star – say eight hundred, eight hundred ten miles.”

“Cas, maybe we’d better check the drift reports in the store?”

Charlie seemed annoyed. “I know Rock City. I keep up with the drifts. I have to.” “Then let’s go.”

“To Eakers’?”

“No, no – uh, just about. . .” He strained his neck, figured the position of the Sun, tried to imagine himself in Hazel’s suit, heading back. “About there – would you say, Pol?”

“As near as we can guess it.”

The crate was old but Charlie had exceptionally large tanks on it; it could maintain a thrust for plenty of change-of-motion. Its jet felt as sweet as any. But it had no radar of any sort. “Charlie, how do you tell where you are in this thing?”

“That”

“’That’ proved to be an antiquated radio compass loop. The twins had never seen one, knew how it worked only by theory. They were radar pilots, not used to conning by the seats of their suits. Seeing their faces Charlie added, “Shucks, if you’ve got any eye for angle, you don’t need fancy gear. Anywhere within twenty miles of the City Hall, I don’t even turn on my suit jet – I just jump.”

They cruised out the line that the twins had picked. Once in free fall Charlie taught them how to handle the compass loop. “Just plug it into your suit in place of your regular receiver. If you pick up a signal, swing the loop until it’s least loud.

“That’s the direction of the signal – an arrow right through the middle of the loop.” “But which way? The loop faces both ways.”

“You have to know that. Or guess wrong and go back and try again.”

Castor took the first watch. He got plenty of signals; the node was buzzing with talk – all bad news. He found, too, that the loop, while not as directional as a ‘salad bowl’ antenna, usually did not pick up but one signal at a time. As they scooted along, endlessly he swung the loop, staying with each signal just long enough to be sure that the sound could not be Hazel.

Pollux tapped his arm and put his helmet in contact with Castor’s. “Anything?” “Just chatter.”

“Keep trying. We’ll stay out until we find them. Want me to spell you?” “No. If we don’t find them. I’m not going back.”

“Quit being a cheap hero and listen. Or give me that loop.”

City Hall dropped astern until it was no longer a shape – Castor at last reluctantly gave over the watch to Pollux. His twin had been at it for

perhaps ten minutes when he suddenly made motions waving them to silence even though he could not have heard them in any case. Castor spoke

to him helmet to helmet. “What is it?”

“Sounded like a kid crying. Might have been Buster.” “Where?”

“I’ve lost it I tried to get a minimum. Now I can’t raise it”

Charlie, anticipating what would be needed, had swung ship as soon as he had quit accelerating. Now he blasted back as much as he had accelerated, bringing them dead in space relative to City Hall and the node. He gave it a gentle extra bump to send them cruising slowly back the way they had come. Pollux listened, slowly swinging his loop. Castor strained his eyes, trying to see something, anything, other than the cold stars.

“Got it again!” Pollux pounded his brother.

Old Charlie killed their relative motion; waited. Pollux cautiously tried for a minimum, then swung the loop, and tried again. He pointed, indicating that it had to be one of two directions, a hundred and eighty degrees apart

“Which way?” Castor asked Charlie. “Over that way.”

“I can’t see anything.”

“Me neither. I got a hunch.”

Castor did not argue. Either direction was equally likely.

Charlie gunned it hard in the direction he had picked, roughly toward Vega. He had hardly cut the gun and let it coast in free fall when Pollux was nodding vigorously. They coasted for some minutes, with Pollux reporting the signal stronger and the minimum sharper . . . but still nothing in sight Castor longed for radar. By now he could hear crying in his own phones. It could he Buster – it must be Buster.

“There she is!”

It was Charlie’s shout. Castor could not see anything, even though old Charlie pointed it out to him. At last he got it – a point of light, buried in stars. Pollux unplugged from the compass when it was clear that what they saw was a mass, not a star, and in the proper direction. Old Charlie handled his craft as casually as a bicycle, bringing them up to it fast and killing his headway so that they were dead with it. He insisted on making the jump himself. Lowell was too hysterical to be coherent. Seeing that he was alive and not hurt, they turned at once to Hazel. She was still strapped in her seat, eyes open, a characteristic half-smile on her face. But she neither greeted them nor answered.

Charlie looked at her and shook his head. “Not a chance, boys. She ain’t even wearing an oxy bottle.”

Nevertheless they hooked a bottle to her suit – Castor’s bottle; no one had thought to bring a spare. The twins went back cross-connected on what was left in Pollux’s bottle, temporarily Siamese twins. The family scooter they left in orbit, to he picked up and towed in by someone else. Charlie used almost all his fuel on the way back, gunning as high a speed as he dared while still saving boost to brake them at City Hall.

They shouted the news all the way back. Somewhere along the line someone picked up their signal; passed it along.

They took her into Fries’ store, there being more room there. Mrs Fries pushed the twins aside and applied artificial respiration herself, to be displaced ten minutes later by Dr. Stone. She used the free-fall method without strapping down, placing herself behind Hazel and rhythmically squeezing her ribs with both arms.

It seemed that all of Rock City wanted to come inside. Fries chased them out, and, for the first time in history, barred the door to his store. After a while Dr. Stone swapped off with her husband, then took back the task after only a few minutes’ rest

Meade was weeping silently; old Charlie was wringing his hands and looking out of place and unhappy. Dr. Stone worked with set face, her features hardened to masculine, professional lines. Lowell, his hand in Meade’s was dry-eyed but distressed, not understanding, not yet knowing death. Castor’s mouth was twisted, crying heavily as a man cries, the sobs wrung from him; Pollux, emotion already exhausted, was silent.

When Edith Stone relieved him, Roger Stone backed away, turned toward the others. His face was without anger but without hope. Pollux whispered, “Dad? Is she?”

Roger Stone then noticed them, came over and put an arm around Castor’s heaving shoulders. “You must remember, boy, that she is very old. They don’t have much comeback at her age.”

Hazel’s eyes opened. “Who doesn’t boy?”

XII – THE ENDLESS TRAIL

Hazel had used the ancient fakir’s trick, brought to the west, so it is said, by an entertainer called Houdini, of breathing as shallowly as possible and going as quickly as may be into a coma. To hear her tell it, there never had been any real danger. Die? Shucks, you couldn’t suffocate in a coffin in that length of time. Sure, she had had to depend on Lowell to keep up the cry for help; he used less oxygen. But deliberate suicide to save the boy? Ridiculous! There hadn’t been any need to.

It was not until the next day that Roger Store called the boys in. He told them, “You did a good job on the rescue. We’ll forget the technical breach of confinement to the ship.”

Castor answered, “It wasn’t anything. Hazel did it, really. I mean, it was an idea that we got out of her serial, the skew orbit episode.” “I must not have read that one.”

“Well, it was a business about how to sort out one piece of space from another when you don’t have too much data to go on. You see, Captain Sterling had to -”

“Never mind. That’s not what I wanted to talk with you about, you did a good job, granted, no matter what suggested it to you. If only conventional search methods had been used, your grandmother would unquestionably now be dead. You are two very intelligent men – when you take the trouble. But you didn’t take the trouble soon enough. Not about the gyros.”

“But Dad, we never dreamed -”

“Enough.” He reached for his waist; the twins noticed that he was wearing an old-fashioned piece of apparel – a leather belt. He took it off. “This belonged to your great grandfather. He left it to your grandfather – who in turn left it to me. I don’t know how far back it goes – but you might say that the Stone family was founded on it.” He doubled it and tried it on the palm of his hand. “All of us, all the way back, have very tender memories of it. Very tender. Except you two.” He again whacked his palm with it.

Castor said, “You mean you’re going to beat us with that?” “Have you any reason to offer why I shouldn’t?”

Castor looked at Pollux, sighed and moved forward, I’ll go first, I’m the older.”

Roger moved to a drawer, put the belt inside. “I should have used it ten years ago.” He closed the drawer. “It’s too late, now.” “Aren’t you going to do it?”

“I never said I was going to. No.”

The twins swapped glances. Castor went on. “Dad – Captain. We’d rather you did.” Pollux added quickly, “Much rather.”

“I know you would. That way you’d be through with it. But instead you’re going to have to live with it. That’s the way adults have to do it.” “But Dad -”

“Go to your quarters, sir.”

When it was time for the Rolling Stone to leave for Ceres a good proportion of the community crowded into City Hall to bid the doctor and her family good-by; all the rest were hooked in by radio, a full town meeting. Mayor Fries made a speech and presented them with a scroll which made them all honorary citizens of Rock City, now and forever; Roger Stone tried to answer and choked up. Old Charlie, freshly bathed, cried openly. Meade sang one more time into the microphone, her soft contralto unmixed this time with commercialism. Ten minutes later the Stone drifted out- orbit and back.

As at Mars, Roger Stone left her circum Ceres, not at a station or satellite – there was none – but in orbit. Hazel, the Captain, and Meade went down by shuttle to Ceres City, Meade to see the sights. Roger to arrange the disposal of their high grade and core material and for a cargo of refined metal to take back to Luna, Hazel to take care of business or pleasure of her own. Doctor Stone chose not to go – on Lowell’s account; the shuttle was no more than an over-sized scooter with bumper landing gear.

The twins were still under hatches, not allowed to go.

Meade assured them, on return, that they had not missed anything. “It’s just like Luna City, only little and crowded and no fun.” Their father added, “She’s telling the truth, boys, so don’t take it too hard. You’ll be seeing Luna itself next stop anyway.

“Oh, we weren’t kicking!” Castor said stiffly.

“Not a bit,” insisted Pollux. “We’re willing to wait for Luna.”

Roger Stone grinned, “You’re not fooling anyone. But we will be shaping orbit home in a couple of weeks. In a way I’m sorry. All in all, it’s been two good years.”

Meade said suddenly, “Did you say “home” Daddy? It seems to me we are home. We’re going back to Luna, but we’re taking home with us.” “Eh? Yes, I suppose you’re right; the good old Rolling Stone is home, looked at that way. She’s taken us through a lot.” He patted a bulkhead

affectionately. “Right, Mother?”

Hazel had been unusually silent. Now she looked at her son and said, “Oh, sure, sure. Of course.” Dr. Stone said, “What did you do downside, Mother Hazel?”

“Me? Oh, not much. Swapped lies with a couple of old-timers. And sent off that slough episodes. By the way, Roger, better start thinking about story lines.”

“Eh? What was that, Mother?”

“That’s my last. I’m giving the show back to you.” “Well, all right – but why?”

“Uh, I’m not going to find it so convenient now.” She seemed embarrassed. “You see – well, would any of you mind very much if I checked out now?”

“What do you mean?”

“The Helen of Troy is shaping for the Trojans and the Wellington is matching there for single-H and a passenger. Me. I’m going on out to Titan.”

Before they could object she went on, “Now don’t look at me that way. I’ve always wanted to see the Rings, close up – close enough to file my nails on ’em. They must be the gaudiest sight in the System. I got to thinking right seriously about it when the air was getting a little stuffy back – well, back you-know-when. I said to myself; Hazel, you aren’t getting any younger; you catch the next chance that comes your way. I missed one once, Roger, when you were three. A good chance, but they wouldn’t take a child and well, never mind. So now I’m going.”

She paused, then snapped, “Don’t look so much like a funeral! You don’t need me now. What I mean is, Lowell is bigger now and not such a problem”

“I’ll always need you, Mother Hazel,” her daughter-in-law said quietly.

“Thanks. But not true. I’ve taught Meade all the astrogation I know, She could get a job with Four-Planets tomorrow if they weren’t so stuffy about hiring female pilots. The twins -well, they’ve soaked up all the meanness I can pass on to them; they’ll put up a good fight, whatever comes up. And you, Son, I finished with you when you were in short pants. You’ve been bringing me up ever since.”

“Mother!”

“Yes, Son?”

“What’s your real reason? Why do you want to go?”

“Why? Why does anybody want to go anywhere? Why did the bear go round the mountain? To see what he could see! I’ve never seen the Rings. That’s reason enough to go anywhere. The race has been doing it for all time. The dull ones stay home – and the bright ones stir around and try to see what trouble they can dig up. It’s the human pattern. It doesn’t need a reason, any more than a flat cat needs a reason to buzz. Why anything?”

“When are you coming back?”

“I may never come back. I like free fall. Doesn’t take any muscle. Take a look at old Charlie. You know how old he is? I did some checking. He’s at least a hundred and sixty. That’s encouraging at my age – makes me feel like a young girl. I may see quite a few things yet,”

Dr. Stone said, “Of course you will, Mother Hazel.” Roger Stone turned to his wife. “Edith?”

“Yes, dear?”

“What’s your opinion?”

“Well . . . there’s actually no reason why we should go back to Luna, not just now.” “So I was thinking. But what about Meade?”

“Me?” said Meade.

Hazel put in dryly, “They’re thinking you are about husband-high, hon.”

Dr. Stone looked at her daughter and nodded slightly. Meade looked surprised, then said, “Pooh! I’m in no hurry. Besides – there’s a Patrol base on Titan. There ought to be lots of young officers.”

Hazel answered, “It’s a Patrol research base, hon – probably nothing but dedicated scientists.” “Well, perhaps when I get through with them they won’t be quite so dedicated!”

Roger Stone turned to the twins. “Boys?”

Castor answerd for the team. “Do we get a vote? Sure!”

Roger Stone grasped a stanchion, pulled himself forward. “Then it’s settled. All of you – Hazel, boys, Meade – set up trial orbits. I’ll start the mass computations”

“Easy, son – count me out on that,” “Eh?”

“Son, did you check the price they’re getting for single-H here? If we are going to do a cometary for Saturn instead of a tangential for Earth, it’s back to the salt mines for me. I’ll radio New York for an advance, then I’ll go wake Lowell and we’ll start shoveling gore.”

“Well… okay. The rest of you-mind your decimals!”

All stations were manned and ready; from an instruction couch rigged back of the pilot and co-pilot Meade was already running down the count- off. Roger Stone glanced across at his mother and whispered, “What are you smiling about?”

“And five! And four!” chanted Meade.

“Nothing much. After we get to Titan we might-”

The blast cut off her words; the Stone trembled and threw herself outward bound, toward Saturn. In her train followed hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands of thousands of restless rolling Stones. . . to Saturn. . . to Uranus, to Pluto. . . rolling on out to the stars. . . outward bound to the ends of the Universe.

The End

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Farmer in the Sky (full text) by Robert Heinlein

“Farmer in the Sky” is another one of Heinlein’s excellent novels. It is set in the “Heinlein solar system” which means Venus and Mars have life. It is about a family trying to be homesteaders on Ganymede as it orbits Jupiter. The descriptions of the sky from the surface of Ganymede are some of the best parts of this well written and engaging story.

Farmer in the sky

1. Earth

Our troop had been up in the High Sierras that day and we were late getting back. We had taken off from the camp field on time but Traffic Control swung us ‘way east to avoid some weather. I didn’t like it; Dad usually won’t eat if I’m not home.

Besides that, I had had a new boy shoved off on me as co-pilot; my usual co-pilot and assistant patrol leader was sick, so our Scoutmaster, Mr. Kinski, gave me this twerp. Mr. Kinski rode in the other copter with the Cougar Patrol.

“Why don’t you put on some speed?” the twerp wanted to know.

“Ever hear of traffic regulations?” I asked him.

The copter was on slave-automatic, controlled from the ground, and was cruising slowly, down a freight lane they had stuck us in.

The twerp laughed. “You can always have an emergency. Here–I’ll show you.” He switched on the mike. “Dog Fox Eight Three, calling traffic–“

I switched it off, then switched on again when Traffic answered and told them that we had called by mistake. The twerp looked disgusted. “Mother’s good little boy!” he said in sticky sweet tones.

That was just the wrong thing to say to me. “Go aft,” I told him, “and tell Slats Keifer to come up here.” “Why? He’s not a pilot.”

“Neither are you, for my money. But he weighs what you do and I want to keep the crate trimmed.” He settled back in his seat. “Old Man Kinski assigned me as co-pilot; here I stay.”

I counted to ten and let it ride. The pilot compartment of a ship in the air is no place for a fight. We had nothing more to say to each other until I put her down on North Diego Platform and cut the tip jets.

I was last one out, of course. Mr, Kinski was waiting there for us but I didn’t see him; all I saw was the twerp. I grabbed him by the shoulder. “Want to repeat that crack now?” I asked him.

Mr. Kinski popped up out of nowhere, stepped between us and said, “Bill! Bill! What’s the meaning of this?” “I–” I started to say that I was going to slap the twerp loose from his teeth, but I thought better of it

Mr. Kinski turned to the twerp. “What happened, Jones?” “I didn’t do anything! Ask anybody.”

I was about to say that he could tell that to the Pilots’ Board. Insubordination in the air is a serious matter. But that “Ask anybody” stopped me. Nobody else had seen or heard anything.

Mr. Kinski looked at each of us, then said, “Muster your patrol and dismiss them, Bill.” So I did and went on home.

All in all, I was tired and jumpy by the time I got home. I had listened to the news on the way home; it wasn’t good. The ration had been cut another ten calories–which made me still hungrier and reminded me that I hadn’t been home to get Dad’s supper. The newscaster went on to say that the Spaceship Mayflower had finally been commissioned and that the rolls were now opened for emigrants. Pretty lucky for them, I thought. No short rations. No twerps like Jones.

And a brand new planet.

George–my father, that is–was sitting in the apartment, looking over some papers. “Howdy, George,” I said to him, “eaten yet?” “Hello, Bill. No.”

“I’ll have supper ready right away.” I went into the pantry and could see that he hadn’t eaten lunch, either. I decided to fix him a plus meal.

I grabbed two Syntho-Steaks out of the freezer and slapped them in quickthaw, added a big Idaho baked potato for Dad and a smaller one for me, then dug out a package of salad and let it warm naturally.

By the time I had poured boiling water over two soup cubes and over coffee powder the steaks were ready for the broiler. I transferred them, letting it cycle at medium rare, and stepped up the gain on the quickthaw so that the spuds would be ready when the steaks were–then back to the freezer for a couple of icekreem cake slices for dessert.

The spuds were ready. I took a quick look at my ration accounts, decided we could afford it, and set out a couple of pats of butterine for them. The

broiler was ringing; I removed the steaks, set everything out, and switched on the candles, just as Anne would have done.

“Come and get it!” I yelled and turned back to enter the calorie and point score on each item from the wrappers, then shoved the wrappers in the incinerator. That way you never get your accounts fouled up.

Dad sat down as I finished. Elapsed time from scratch, two minutes and twenty seconds–there’s nothing hard about cooking; I don’t see why women make such a fuss about it. No system, probably.

Dad sniffed the steaks and grinned. “Oh boy! Bill, you’ll bankrupt us.”

“You let me worry,” I said. I’m still plus for this quarter.” Then I frowned. “But I won’t be, next quarter, unless they quit cutting the ration.” Dad stopped with a piece of steak on its way to his mouth. “Again?”

“Again. Look, George, I don’t get it. This was a good crop year and they started operating the Montana yeast plant besides.” “You follow all the commissary news, don’t you, Bill?”

“Naturally.”

“Did you notice the results of the Chinese census as well? Try it on your slide rule.”

I knew what he meant–and the steak suddenly tasted like old rubber. What’s the use in being careful if somebody on the other side of the globe is going to spoil your try? “Those darned Chinese ought to quit raising babies and start raising food!”

“Share and share alike, Bill.”

“But–” I shut up. George was right, he usually is, but somehow it didn’t seem fair. “Did you hear about the Mayflower?” I asked to change the subject.

“What about the Mayflower?” Dad’s voice was suddenly cautious, which surprised me. Since Anne died –Anne was my mother–George and I have been about as close as two people can be.

“Why, she was commissioned, that’s all. They’ve started picking emigrants.” “So?” There was that cautious tone again. “What did you do today?”

“Nothing much. We hiked about five miles north of camp and Mr. Kinski put some of the kids through tests. I saw a mountain lion.” “Really? I thought they were all gone.”

“Well, I thought I saw one.”

“Then you probably did. What else?”

I hesitated, then told him about this twerp Jones. “He’s not even a member of our troop. How does he get that way, interfering with my piloting?” “You did right, Bill. Sounds as if this twerp Jones, as you call him, was too young to be trusted with a pilot’s license.”

“Matter of fact, he’s a year older than I am.”

“In my day you had to be sixteen before you could even go up for your license.” “Times change, George.”

“So they do. So they do.”

Dad suddenly looked sad and I knew he was thinking about Anne. I hastily said, “Old enough or not, how does an insect like Jones get by the temperament-stability test?”

“Psycho tests aren’t perfect, Bill. Neither are people.” Dad sat back and lit his pipe. “Want me to clean up tonight?”

“No, thanks.” He always asked; I always turned him down. Dad is absent-minded; he lets ration points get into the incinerator. When I salvage, I really salvage. “Feel like a game of cribbage?”

“I’ll beat the pants off you.”

“You and who else?” I salvaged the garbage, burned the dishes, followed him into the living room. He was getting out the board and cards.

His mind wasn’t really on the game. I was around the corner and ready to peg out before he was really under way. Finally he put down his cards and looked square at me. “Son–“

“Huh? I mean, ‘Yes, George?'”

“I’ve decided to emigrate in the Mayflower.“

I knocked over the cribbage board. I picked it up, eased my throttle, and tried to fly right. “That’s swell! When do we leave?” Dad puffed furiously on his pipe. “That’s the point, Bill. You’re not going.”

I couldn’t say anything. Dad had never done anything like this to me before. I sat there, working my mouth like a fish. Finally I managed, “Dad, you’re joking.”

“No, I’m not, Son.”

“But why? Answer me that one question: why?” “Now see here, Son–“

“Call me ‘Bill’.”

“Okay, Bill. It’s one thing for me to decide to take my chances with colonial life but I’ve got no right to get you off to a bad start. You’ve got to finish your education. There are no decent schools on Ganymede. You get your education, then when you’re grown, if you want to emigrate, that’s your business.”

“That’s the reason? That’s the only reason? To go to school?“

“Yes. You stay here and take your degree. I’d like to see you take your doctor’s degree as well. Then, if you want to, you can join me. You won’t have missed your chance; applicants with close relatives there have priority.”

“No!”

Dad looked stubborn.

So did I, I guess. “George, I’m telling you, if you leave me behind, it won’t do any good. I won’t go to school. I can pass the exams for third class citizenship right now. Then I can get a work permit and–“

He cut me short. “You won’t need a work permit. I’m leaving you well provided for, Bill. You’ll–“

‘Well provided for’! Do you think I’d touch a credit of yours if you go away and leave me? I’ll live on my student’s allowance until I pass the exams and get my work card.”

“Bring your voice down, Sonl” He went on, “You’re proud of being a Scout, aren’t you?”

“Well–yes.”

“I seem to remember that Scouts are supposed to be obedient. And courteous, too.” That one was pretty hot over the plate. I had to think about it. “George–“

“Yes, Bill?”

“If I was rude, I’m sorry. But the Scout Law wasn’t thought up to make it easy to push a Scout around. As long as I’m living in your home I’ll do what you say. But if you walk out on me, you don’t have any more claim on me. Isn’t that fair?”

“Be reasonable, Son. I’m doing it for your own good.”

“Don’t change the subject, George. Is that fair or isn’t it? If you go hundreds of millions of miles away, how can you expect to run my life after you’re gone? I’ll be on my own.”

“I’ll still be your father.”

“Fathers and sons should stick together. As I recall, the fathers that came over in the original Mayflower brought their kids with them.” “This is different.”

“How?”

“It’s further, incredibly further–and dangerous.”

“So was that move dangerous–half the Plymouth Rock colony died the first winter; everybody knows that. And distance doesn’t mean anything; what matters is how long it takes. If I had had to walk back this afternoon, I’d still be hiking next month. It took the Pilgrims sixty-three days to cross the Atlantic or so they taught me in school–but this afternoon the caster said that the Mayflower–will reach Ganymede in sixty days. That makes Ganymede closer than London was to Plymouth Rock.”

Dad stood up and knocked out his pipe. “I’m not going to argue, Son.”

“And I’m not, either.” I took a deep breath. I shouldn’t have said the next thing I did say, but I was mad. I’d never been treated this way before and I guess I wanted to hurt back. “But I can tell you this: you’re not the only one who is sick of short rations. If you think I’m going to stay here while you’re eating high on the hog out in the colonies, then you had better think about it again. I thought we were partners.”

That last was the meanest part of it and I should have been ashamed. That was what he had said to me the day after Anne died, and that was the way it had always been.

The minute I said it I knew why George had to emigrate and I knew it didn’t have anything to do with ration points. But I didn’t know how to unsay it. Dad stared. Then he said slowly, “You think that’s how it is? That I want to go away so I can quit skipping lunch to save ration points?”

“What else?” I answered. I was stuck in a groove; I didn’t know what to say. “Hmm … well, if you believe that, Bill, there is nothing I can say. I think I’ll turn in.”

I went to my room, feeling all mixed up inside. I wanted Mother around so bad I could taste it and I knew that George felt the same way. She would never have let us reach the point where we were actually shouting at each other–at least I had shouted. Besides that, the partnership was busted up, it would never be the same.

I felt better after a shower and a long massage. I knew that the partnership couldn’t really be busted up. In the long run, when George saw that I had to go, he wouldn’t let college stand in the way. I was sure of that–well, pretty sure at least.

I began to think about Ganymede.

Ganymede!

Why, I had never even been out to the Moon!

There was a boy in my class who had been born on the Moon. His parents were still there; he had been sent home for schooling. He gave himself airs as a deep-space man. But Luna was less than a quarter of a million miles away; you could practically throw rocks at it. It wasn’t self-supporting; Moon Colony had the same rations as Earth. It was really part of Earth. But Ganymede!

Let’s see–Jupiter was half a billion miles away, more or less, depending on the time of year. What was the tiny distance to the Moon compared with a jump like that?

Suddenly I couldn’t remember whether Ganymede was Jupiter’s third moon or fourth. And I just had to know. There was a book out in the living room that would tell and more besides–Ellsworth Smith’s A Tour of Earth’s Colonies. I went out to get it.

Dad hadn’t gone to bed. He was sitting up, reading. I said, “Oh–hello,” and went to look for the book. He nodded and went on reading. The book wasn’t where it should have been. I looked around and Dad said, “What are you looking for, Bill?”

Then I saw that he was reading it. I said, “Oh, nothing. I didn’t know you were using it.” “This?” He held it up.

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll find something else.” “Take it. I’m through with it.”

“Well … All right-thanks.” I took it and turned away. “Just a minute, Bill.”

I waited. “I’ve come to a decision, Bill. I’m not going.”

“Huh?”

“You were right about us being partners. My place is here.”

“Yes, but– Look, George, I’m sorry I said what I did about rations. I know that’s not the reason. The reason is–well, you’ve got to go.” I wanted to tell him I knew the reason was Anne, but if I said Anne’s name out loud I was afraid I’d bawl.

“You mean that you are willing to stay behind–and go to school?”

“Uh–” I wasn’t quite ready to say that; I was dead set on going myself. “I didn’t quite mean that. I meant that I know why you want to go, why you’ve

got to go.”

“Hmm …” He lit his pipe, making a long business of it. “I see. Or maybe I don’t” Then he added, “Let’s put it this way, Bill. The partnership stands. Either we both go, or we both stay–unless you decide of your own volition that you will stay to get your degree and join me out there later. Is that fair?”

“Huh? Oh, yes!”

“So let’s talk about it later.”

I said goodnight and ducked into my room quick. William, my boy, I told myself, it’s practically in the bag–if you can just keep from getting soft- hearted and agreeing to a split up. I crawled into bed and opened the book.

Ganymede was Jupiter-III; I should have remembered that. It was bigger than Mercury, much bigger than the Moon, a respectable planet, even if it was a moon. The surface gravity was one third of Earth-normal; I would weigh about forty-five pounds there. First contacted in 1985–which I knew– and its atmosphere project started in 1998 and had been running ever since.

There was a stereo in the book of Jupiter as seen from Ganymede–round as an apple, ruddy orange, and squashed on both poles. And big as all outdoors. Beautiful. I fell asleep staring at it.

Dad and I didn’t get a chance to talk for the next three days as my geography class spent that time in Antarctica. I came back with a frostbitten nose and some swell pix of penguins–and some revised ideas. I had had time to think.

Dad had fouled up the account book as usual but he had remembered to save the wrappers and it didn’t take me long to straighten things out. After dinner I let him beat me two games, then said, “Look, George–“

“Yes?”

“You know what we were talking about?” “Well, yes.”

“It’s this way. I’m under age; I can’t go if you won’t let me. Seems to me you ought to, but if you don’t, I won’t quit school. In any case, you ought to go– you need to go–you know why. I’m asking you to think it over and take me along, but I’m not going to be a baby about it.”

Dad almost looked embarrassed. “That’s quite a speech, Son. You mean you’re willing to let me go, you stay here and go to school, and not make a fuss about it?”

“Well, not ‘willing’-but I’d put up with it.”

“Thanks.” Dad fumbled in his pouch and pulled out a flat photo. “Take a look at this.” “What is it?”

“Your file copy of your application for emigration. I submitted it two days ago.”

2. The Green-Eyed Monster

I wasn’t much good in school for the next few days. Dad cautioned me not to get worked up over it; they hadn’t approved our applications as yet. “You know, Bill, ten times as many people apply as can possibly go.”

“But most of them want to go to Venus or Mars. Ganymede is too far away; that scares the sissies out.”

“I wasn’t talking about applications for all the colonies; I meant applications for Ganymede, specifically for this first trip of the Mayflower“

“Even so, you can’t scare me. Only about one in ten can qualify. That’s the way it’s always been.”

Dad agreed. He said that this was the first time in history that some effort was being made to select the best stock for colonization instead of using colonies as dumping grounds for misfits and criminals and failures. Then he added, “But look, Bill, what gives you the notion that you and I can necessarily qualify? Neither one of us is a superman,”

That rocked me back on my heels. The idea that we might not be good enough hadn’t occurred to me. “George, they couldn’t turn us down!“

“They could and they might.”

“But how? They need engineers out there and you’re tops. Me–I’m not a genius but I do all right in school. We’re both healthy and we don’t have any

bad mutations; we aren’t color blind or bleeders or anything like that.”

“No bad mutations that we know of,” Dad answered. “However, I agree that we seem to have done a fair job in picking our grandparents. I wasn’t thinking of anything as obvious as that.”

“Well, what, then? What could they possibly get us on?”

He fiddled with his pipe the way he always does when he doesn’t want to answer right away. “Bill, when I pick a steel alloy for a job, it’s not enough to say, ‘Well, it’s a nice shiny piece of metal; let’s use it.’ No, I take into account a list of tests as long as your arm that tells me all about that alloy, what it’s good for and just what I can expect it to do in the particular circumstances I intend to use it. Now if you had to pick people for a tough job of colonizing, what would you look for?”

“Uh … I don’t know.”

“Neither do I. I’m not a social psychometrician. But to say that they want healthy people with fair educations is like saying that I want steel rather than wood for a job. It doesn’t tell what sort of steel. Or it might not be steel that was needed; it might be titanium alloy. So don’t get your hopes too high.”

“But–well, look, what can we do about it?”

“Nothing. If we don’t get picked, then tell yourself that you are a darn good grade of steel and that it’s no fault of yours that they wanted magnesium.” It was all very well to look at it that way, but it worried me. I didn’t let it show at school, though. I had already let everybody know that we had put in for

Ganymede; if we missed–well, it would be sort of embarrassing.

My best friend, Duck Miller, was all excited about it and was determined to go, too. “But how can you?” I asked. “Do your folks want to go?”

“I already looked into that,” Duck answered. “All I have to have is a grown person as a sponsor, a guardian. Now if you can tease your old man into signing for me, it’s in the bag.”

“But what will your father say?”

“He won’t care. He’s always telling me that when he was my age he was earning his own living. He says a boy should be self reliant. Now how about it? Will you speak to your old man about it–tonight?”

I said I would and I did. Dad didn’t say anything for a moment, then he asked: “You really want Duck with you?” “Sure I do. He’s my best friend.”

“What does his father say?”

“He hasn’t asked him yet,” and then I explained how Mr. Miller felt about it “So?” said Dad. “Then let’s wait and see what Mr. Miller says.”

“Well–look, George, does that mean that you’ll sign for Duck if his father says it’s okay?” “I meant what I said, Bill. Let’s wait. The problem may solve itself.”

I said, “Oh well, maybe Mr. and Mrs. Miller will decide to put in for it, too, after Duck gets them stirred up.”

Dad just cocked an eyebrow at me. “Mr. Miller has, shall we say, numerous business interests here. I think it would be easier to jack up one corner of Boulder Dam than to get him to give them up.”

“You’re giving up your business.”

“Not my business, my professional practice. But I’m not giving up my profession; I’m taking it with me.” I saw Duck at school the next day and asked him what his father had said.

“Forget it,” he told me. “The deal is off.” “Huh?”

“My old man says that nobody but an utter idiot would even think of going out to Ganymede. He says that Earth is the only planet in the system fit to live on and that if the government wasn’t loaded up with a bunch of starry-eyed dreamers we would quit pouring money down a rat hole trying to turn a bunch of bare rocks in the sky into green pastures. He says the whole enterprise is doomed.”

“You didn’t think so yesterday.”

“That was before I got the straight dope. You know what? My old man is going to take me into partnership. Just as soon as I’m through college he’s going to start breaking me into the management end. He says he didn’t tell me before because he wanted me to learn self reliance and initiative, but he thought it was time I knew about it. What do you think of that?”

“Why, that’s pretty nice, I suppose. But what’s this about the ‘enterprise being doomed’?”

‘Nice’, he calls it! Well, my old man says that it is an absolute impossibility to keep a permanent colony on Ganymede. It’s a perilous toehold, artificially maintained–those were his exact words–and someday the gadgets will bust and the whole colony will be wiped out, every man jack, and then we will quit trying to go against nature.”

We didn’t talk any more then as we had to go to class. I told Dad about it that night. “What do you think, George?” “Well, there is something in what he says–“

“Huh?”

“Don’t jump the gun. If everything went sour on Ganymede at once and we didn’t have the means to fix it, it would revert to the state we found it in. But that’s not the whole answer. People have a funny habit of taking as ‘natural’ whatever they are used to–but there hasn’t been any ‘natural’ environment, the way they mean it, since men climbed down out of trees. Bill, how many people are there in California?”

“Fifty-five, sixty million.”

“Did you know that the first four colonies here starved to death? ‘S truthl How is it that fifty-odd million can live here and not starve? Barring short rations, of course.”

He answered it himself. “We’ve got four atomic power plants along the coast just to turn sea water into fresh water. We use every drop of the Colorado River and every foot of snow that falls on the Sierras. And we use a million other gadgets.

If those gadgets went bad–say a really big earthquake knocked out all four atomic plants–the country would go back to desert. I doubt if we could evacuate that many people before most of them died from thirst. Yet I don’t think Mr. Miller is lying awake nights worrying about it. He regards Southern California as a good ‘natural’ environment.

“Depend on it, Bill. Wherever Man has mass and energy to work with and enough savvy to know how to manipulate them, he can create any environment he needs.”

I didn’t see much of Duck after that. About then we got our preliminary notices to take tests for eligibility for the Ganymede colony and that had us pretty busy. Besides, Duck seemed different–or maybe it was me. I had the trip on my mind and he didn’t want to talk about it. Or if he did, he’d make some crack that rubbed me the wrong way.

Dad wouldn’t let me quit school while it was still uncertain as to whether or not we would qualify, but I was out a lot, taking tests. There was the usual physical examination, of course, with some added wrinkles. A g test, for example–I could take up to eight gravities before I blacked out, the test showed. And a test for low-pressure tolerance and hemorrhaging–they didn’t want people who ran to red noses and varicose veins. There were lots more.

But we passed them. Then came the psycho tests which were a lot worse because you never knew what was expected of you and half the time you

didn’t even know you were being tested. It started off with hypno-analysis, which really puts a fellow at a disadvantage. How do you know what you’ve blabbed while they’ve got you asleep?

Once I sat around endlessly waiting for a psychiatrist to get around to seeing me. There were a couple of clerks there; when I came in one of them dug my medical and psycho record out of file and laid it on a desk. Then the other one, a red-headed guy with a permanent sneer, said, “Okay, Shorty, sit down on that bench and wait.”

After quite a while the redhead picked up my folder and started to read it. Presently he snickered and turned to the other clerk and said, “Hey, Ned– get a load of this!”

The other one read what he was pointing to and seemed to think it was funny, too. I could see they were watching me and I pretended not to pay any attention.

The second clerk went back to his desk, but presently the redhead went over to him, carrying my folder, and read aloud to him, but in such a low voice that I couldn’t catch many of the words. What I did catch made me squirm.

When he had finished the redhead looked right at me and laughed. I stood up and said, “What’s so funny?” He said, “None of your business, Shorty. Sit down.”

I walked over and said, “Let me see that.”

The second clerk stuffed it into a drawer of his desk. The redhead said, “Mamma’s boy wants to see it, Ned. Why don’t you give it to him?” “He doesn’t really want to see it,” the other one said.

“No, I guess not.” The redhead laughed again and added, “And to think he wants to be a big bold colonist.”

The other one looked at me while chewing a thumbnail and said, “I don’t think that’s so funny. They could take him along to cook.” This seemed to convulse the redhead. “I’ll bet he looks cute in an apron.”

A year earlier I would have poked him, even though he outweighed me and outreached me. That “Mamma’s boy” remark made me forget all about wanting to go to Ganymede; I just wanted to wipe the silly smirk off his face.

But I didn’t do anything. I don’t know why; maybe it was from riding herd on that wild bunch of galoots, the Yucca Patrol–Mr. Kinski says that anybody who can’t keep order without using his fists can’t be a patrol leader under him.

Anyhow I just walked around the end of the desk and tried to open the drawer. It was locked. I looked at them; they were both grinning, but I wasn’t. “I had an appointment for thirteen o’clock,” I said. “Since the doctor isn’t here, you can tell him I’ll phone for another appointment.” And I turned on my heel and left.

I went home and told George about it. He just said he hoped I hadn’t hurt my chances.

I never did get another appointment. You know what? They weren’t clerks at all; they were psycho-metricians and there was a camera and a mike on me the whole time.

Finally George and I got notices saying that we were qualified and had been posted for the Mayflower, “subject to compliance with all requirements.”

That night I didn’t worry about ration points; I really set us out a feast.

There was a booklet of the requirements mentioned. “Satisfy all debts”–that didn’t worry me; aside from a half credit I owed Slats Keifer I didn’t have any. “Post an appearance bond”–George would take care of that “Conclude any action before any court of superior jurisdiction”–I had never been in court except the Court of Honor. There were a flock of other things, but George would handle them.

I found some fine print that worried me. “George,” I said, “It says here that emigration is limited to families with children.”

He looked up. “Well, aren’t we such a family? If you don’t mind being classified as a child.” “Oh. I suppose so. I thought it meant a married couple and kids.”

“Don’t give it a thought.”

Privately I wondered if Dad knew what he was talking about.

We were busy with innoculations and blood typing and immunizations and I hardly got to school at all. When I wasn’t being stuck or being bled, I was sick with the last thing they had done to me. Finally we had to have our whole medical history tattooed on us–identity number, Rh factor, blood type, coag time, diseases you had had, natural immunities and inoculations. The girls and the women usually had it done in invisible ink that showed up only under infra-red light, or else they put it on the soles of their feet.

They asked me where I wanted it, the soles of my feet? I said no, I don’t want to be crippled up; I had too much to do. We compromised on putting it where I sit down and then I ate standing up for a couple of days. It seemed a good place, private anyhow. But I had to use a mirror to see it.

Time was getting short; we were supposed to be at Mojave Space Port on 26 June, just two weeks away. It was high time I was picking out what to take. The allowance was fifty-seven and six-tenths pounds per person and had not been announced until all our body weights had been taken.

The booklet had said, “Close your terrestrial affairs as if you were dying.” That’s easy to say. But when you die, you can’t take it with you, while here we could– fifty-seven-odd pounds of it.

The question was: what fifty-seven pounds?

My silkworms I turned over to the school biology lab and the same for the snakes. Duck wanted my aquarium but I wouldn’t let him; twice he’s had fish and twice he’s let them die. I split them between two fellows in the troop who already had fish. The birds I gave to Mrs. Fishbein on our deck. I didn’t have a cat or a dog; George says ninety floors up is no place to keep junior citizens–that’s what he calls them.

I was cleaning up the mess when George came in. “Well,” he says, “first time I’ve been able to come into your room without a gas mask.” I skipped it; George talks like that. “I still don’t know what to do,” I said, pointing at the heap on my bed.

“Microfilmed everything you can?”

“Yes, everything but this picture.” It was a cabinet stereo of Anne, weighing about a pound and nine ounces. “Keep that, of course. Face it, Bill, you’ve got to travel light. We’re pioneers.”

“I don’t know what to throw out.”

I guess I looked glum for he said, “Quit feeling sorry for yourself. Me, I’ve got to give up this—and that’s tough, believe me.” He held out his pipe. “Why?” I asked. “A pipe doesn’t weigh much.”

“Because they aren’t raising tobacco on Ganymede and they aren’t importing any.”

“Oh. Look, George, I could just about make it if it weren’t for my accordion. But it licks me.” “Hmm … Have you considered listing it as a cultural item?”

“Huh?”

“Read the fine print. Approved cultural items are not covered by the personal weight schedule. They are charged to the colony.” It had never occurred to me that I might have anything that would qualify. “They wouldn’t let me get away with it, George!”

“Can’t rule you out for trying. Don’t be a defeatist.”

So two days later I was up before the cultural and scientific board, trying to prove that I was an asset. I knocked out Turkey in the Straw, Nehru’s Opus 81, and the introduction to Morgenstern’s Dawn of the 22nd Century, as arranged for squeeze boxes. I gave them The Green Hills of Earth for an encore.

They asked me if I liked to play for other people and told me politely that I would be informed as to the decision of the board … and about a week later I got a letter directing me to turn my accordion over to the Supply Office, Hayward Field. I was in, I was a “cultural asset”!

Four days before blast-off Dad came home early – he had been closing his office–and asked me if we could have something special for dinner; we were having guests. I said I supposed so; my accounts showed that we would have rations to turn back.

He seemed embarrassed. “Son–” “Huh? Yes, George?”

“You know that item in the rules about families?” “Uh, yes.”

“Well, you were right about it, but I was holding out on you and now I’ve got to confess. I’m getting married tomorrow.” There was a sort of roaring in my ears. Dad couldn’t have surprised me more if he had slapped me.

I couldn’t say anything. I just stood there, looking at him. Finally I managed to get out, “But, George, you can’t do that!” “Why not, Son?”

“How about Anne?” “Anne is dead.”

“But– But–” I couldn’t say anything more; I ducked into my room and locked myself in. I lay on the bed, trying to think. Presently I heard Dad trying the latch. Then he tapped on the door and said, “Bill?”

I didn’t answer. After a while he went away. I lay there a while longer. I guess I bawled, but I wasn’t bawling over the trouble with Dad. It seemed the way it did the day Anne died, when I couldn’t get it through my head that I wouldn’t ever see her again. Wouldn’t ever see her smile at me again and hear her say, “Stand tall, Billy.”

And I would stand tall and she would look proud and pat my arm.

How could George do it? How could he bring some other woman into Anne’s home?

I got up and had a look at myself in the mirror and then went in and set my ‘fresher for a needle shower and a hard massage. I felt better afterwards, except that I still had a sick feeling in my stomach. The ‘fresher blew me off and dusted me and sighed to a stop. Through the sound it seemed to me I could hear Anne speaking to me, but that must have been in my head.

She was saying, “Stand tall, Son.” I got dressed again and went out.

Dad was messing around with dinner and I do mean messing. He had burned his thumb on the shortwave, don’t ask me how. I had to throw out what he had been fiddling with, all except the salad. I picked out more stuff and started them cycling. Neither of us said anything.

I set the table for three and Dad finally spoke. “Better set it for four, Bill. Molly has a daughter, you know.”

I dropped a fork. “Molly? You mean Mrs. Kenyon?”

“Yes. Didn’t I tell you? No, you didn’t give me a chance to.”

I knew her all right. She was Dad’s draftsman. I knew her daughter, too–a twelve-year-old brat. Somehow, it being Mrs. Kenyon made it worse, indecent. Why, she had even come to Anne’s Farewell and had had the nerve to cry.

I knew now why she had always been so chummy with me whenever I was down at Dad’s office. She had had her eye on George. I didn’t say anything. What was there to say?

I said “How do you do?” politely when they came in, then went out and pretended to fiddle with dinner. Dinner was sort of odd. Dad and Mrs. Kenyon talked and I answered when spoken to. I didn’t listen. I was still trying to figure out how he could do it. The brat spoke to me a couple of times but I soon put her in her place.

After dinner Dad said how about all of us going to a show? I begged off, saying that I still had sorting to do. They went. I thought and thought about it. Any way I looked at it, it seemed like a bad deal.

At first I decided that I wouldn’t go to Ganymede after all, not if they were going. Dad would forfeit my bond, but I would work hard and pay it back–I wasn’t going to owe them anything!

Then I finally figured out why Dad was doing it and I felt some better, but not much. It was too high a price.

Dad got home late, by himself, and tapped on my door. It wasn’t locked and he came in. “Well, Son?” he said. “‘Well’ what?”

“Bill, I know that this business comes as a surprise to you, but you’ll get over it.”

I laughed, though I didn’t feel funny. Get over it! Maybe he could forget Anne, but I never would.

“In the meantime,” he went on, “I want you to behave yourself. I suppose you know you were as rude as you could be without actually spitting in their faces?”

“Me rude?”I objected. “Didn’t I fix dinner for them? Wasn’t I polite?”

“You were as polite as a judge passing sentence. And as friendly. You needed a swift kick to make you remember your manners.”

I guess I looked stubborn. George went on, “That’s done; let’s forget it. See here, Bill–in time you are going to see that this was a good idea. All I ask you to do is to behave yourself in the meantime. I don’t ask you to fall on their necks; I do insist that you be your own normal, reasonably polite and friendly self. Will you try?”

“Uh, I suppose so.” Then I went on with, “See here, Dad, why did you have to spring it on me as a surprise?”

He looked embarrassed. “That was a mistake. I suppose I did it because I knew you would raise Cain about it and I wanted to put it off.” “But I would have understood if you had only told me. I know why you want to marry her–“

“Eh?”

“I should have known when you mentioned that business about rules. You have to get married so that we can go to Ganymede–“

“What?”

I was startled. I said, “Huh? That’s right, isn’t it? You told me so yourself. You said–“

“I said nothing of the sort!” Dad stopped, took a deep breath, then went on slowly, “Bill, I suppose you possibly could have gathered that impression–though I am not flattered that you could have entertained it. Now I’ll spell out the true situation: Molly and I are not getting married in order to emigrate. We are emigrating because we are getting married. You may be too young to understand it, but I love Molly and Molly loves me. If I wanted to stay here, she’d stay. Since I want to go, she wants to go. She’s wise enough to understand that I need to make a complete break with my old background. Do you follow me?”

I said I guessed so.

“I’ll say goodnight, then.”

I answered, “Goodnight.” He turned away, but I added, “George–” He stopped. I blurted out. “You don’t love Anne any more, do you?”

Dad turned white. He started back in and then stopped. “Bill,” he said slowly, “it has been some years since I’ve laid a hand on you–but this is the first time I ever wanted to give you a thrashing.”

I thought he was going to do it. I waited and I had made up my mind that if he touched me he was going to get die surprise of his life. But he didn’t come any nearer; he just closed the door between us.

After a while I took another shower that I didn’t need and went to bed. I must have lain there an hour or more, thinking that Dad had wanted to hit me and wishing that Anne were around to tell me what to do. Finally I switched on the dancing lights and stared at them until they knocked me out.

Neither one of us said anything until breakfast was over and neither of us ate much, either. Finally Dad said, “Bill, I want to beg your pardon for what I said last night. You hadn’t done or said anything to justify raising a hand to you and I had no business thinking it or saying it.”

I said, “Oh, that’s all right.” I thought about it and added, “I guess I shouldn’t have said what I did.”

“It was all right to say it What makes me sad is that you could have thought it. Bill, I’ve never stopped loving Anne and I’ll never love her any less.” “But you said–” I stopped and finished, “I just don’t get it.”

“I guess there is no reason to expect you to.” George stood up. “Bill, the ceremony is at fifteen o’clock. Will you be dressed and ready about an hour before that time?”

I hesitated and said, “I won’t be able to, George. I’ve got a pretty full day.”

His face didn’t have any expression at all and neither did his voice. He said, “I see,” and left the room. A bit later he left the apartment. A while later

I. tried to call him at his office, but the autosecretary ground out the old stall about “Would you like to record a message?” I didn’t. I figured that George would be home some time before fifteen hundred and I got dressed in my best. I even used some of Dad’s beard cream.

He didn’t show up. I tried the office again, and again, got the “Would-you-like-to-record-a-message?” routine. Then I braced myself and looked up the code on Mrs. Kenyon.

He wasn’t there. Nobody was there.

The time crawled past and there was nothing I could do about it. After a while it was fifteen o’clock and I knew that my father was off somewhere getting married but I didn’t know where. About fifteen-thirty I went out and went to a show.

When I got back the red light was shining on the phone. I dialed playback and it was Dad: “Bill I tried to reach you but you weren’t in and I can’t wait. Molly and I are leaving on a short trip. If you need to reach me, call Follow Up Service, Limited, in Chicago–we’ll be somewhere in Canada. We’ll be back Thursday night. Goodbye.” That was the end of the recording.

Thursday night–blast-off was Friday morning.

3. Space Ship Bifrost

Dad called me from Mrs. Kenyon’s–I mean from Molly’s–apartment Thursday night. We were both polite but uneasy. I said yes, I was all ready and I hoped they had had a nice time. He said they had and would I come over and we would all leave from there in the morning.

I said I hadn’t known what his plans were, so I had bought a ticket to Mojave port and had reserved a room at Hotel Lancaster. What did he want me to do?

He thought about it and said, “It looks like you can take care of yourself, Bill.” “Of course I can.”

“All right. We’ll see you at the port. Want to speak to Molly?” “Uh, no, just tell her hello for me.”

“Thanks, I will.” He switched off.

I went to my room and got my kit–fifty-seven and fifty-nine hundredths pounds; I couldn’t have added a clipped frog’s hair. My room was bare, except for my Scout uniform. I couldn’t afford to take it, but I hadn’t thrown it away yet.

I picked it up, intending to take it to the incinerator, then stopped. At the physical exam I had been listed at one hundred thirty-one and two tenths pounds mass in the clothes I would wear for blast off.

But I hadn’t eaten much the last few days.

I stepped into the ‘fresher and onto the scales–one hundred twenty-nine and eight tenths. I picked up the uniform and stepped back on the scales– one hundred thirty-two and five tenths.

William, I said, you get no dinner, you get no breakfast, and you drink no water tomorrow morning. I bundled up my uniform and took it along.

The apartment was stripped. As a surprise for the next tenant I left in the freezer the stuff I had meant to eat for supper, then switched all the gadgets to zero except the freezer, and locked the door behind me. It felt funny; Anne and George and I had lived there as far back as I could remember.

I went down to subsurface, across town, and caught the In-Coast tube for Mojave. Twenty minutes later I was at Hotel Lancaster in the Mojave Desert.

I soon found out that the “room” I had reserved was a cot in the billiard room. I trotted down to find out what had happened.

I showed the room clerk the ‘stat that said I had a room coming to me. He looked at it and said, “Young man, have you ever tried to bed down six thousand people at once?”

I said no, I hadn’t.

“Then be glad you’ve got a cot. The room you reserved is occupied by a family with nine children.” I went.

The hotel was a madhouse. I couldn’t have gotten anything to eat even if I hadn’t promised myself not to eat; you couldn’t get within twenty yards of the dining room. There were children underfoot everywhere and squalling brats galore. There were emigrant families squatting in the ball room. I looked them over and wondered how they had picked them; out of a grab bag?

Finally I went to bed. I was hungry and got hungrier. I began to wonder why I was going to all this trouble to hang on to a Scout uniform I obviously wasn’t going to use.

If I had had my ration book I would have gotten up and stood in line at the dining room–but Dad and I had turned ours in. I still had some money and

thought about trying to find a free-dealers; they say you can find them around a hotel. But Dad says that “free-dealer” is a fake word; they are black

marketeers and no gentleman will buy from them.

Besides that I didn’t have the slightest idea of how to go about finding one.

I got up and got a drink and went back to bed and went through the relaxing routine. Finally I got to sleep and dreamed about strawberry shortcake with real cream, the kind that comes from cows.

I woke up hungry but I suddenly remembered that this was it!–my last day on Earth. Then I was too excited to be hungry. I got up, put on my Scout uniform and my ship suit over it.

I thought we would go right on board. I was wrong.

First we had to assemble under awnings spread out in front of the hotel near the embarking tubes. It wasn’t air conditioned outside, of course, but it was early and the desert wasn’t really hot yet. I found the letter “L” and sat down under it, sitting on my baggage. Dad and his new family weren’t around yet; I began to wonder if I was going to Ganymede by myself. I didn’t much care.

Out past the gates about five miles away, you could see the ships standing on the field, the Daedalus and the Icarus, pulled off the Earth-Moon run for this one trip, and the old Bifrost that had been the shuttle rocket to Supra-New-York space station as far back as I could remember.

The Daedalus and the Icarus were bigger but I hoped I would get the Bifrost; she was the first ship I ever saw blast off.

A family put their baggage down by mine. The mother looked out across the field and said, “Joseph, which one is the Mayflower?“

Her husband tried to explain to her, but she still was puzzled. I nearly burst, trying to keep from laughing. Here she was, all set to go to Ganymede and yet she was so dumb she didn’t even know that the ship she was going in had been built out in space and couldn’t land anywhere.

The place was getting crowded with emigrants and relatives coming to see them off, but I still didn’t see anything of Dad. I heard my name called and turned around and there was Duck Miller. “Gee, Bill,” he said, “I thought I’d missed you.”

“Hi, Duck. No, I’m still here.”

“I tried to call you last night but your phone answered ‘service discontinued,’ so I hooked school and came up.” “Aw, you shouldn’t have done that.”

“But I wanted to bring you this.” He handed me a package, a whole pound of chocolates. I didn’t know what to say. I thanked him and then said, “Duck, I appreciate it, I really do. But I’ll have to give them back to you.”

“Huh? Why?”

“Weight Mass, I mean. I can’t get by with another ounce.” “You can carry it.”

“That won’t help. It counts just the same.”

He thought about it and said, “Then let’s open it.”

I said, “Fine,” and did so and offered him a piece. I looked at them myself and my stomach was practically sitting up and begging. I don’t know when I’ve been so hungry.

I gave in and ate one. I figured I would sweat it off anyhow; it was getting hot and I had my Scout uniform on under my ship suit–and that’s no way to dress for the Mojave Desert in June! Then I was thirstier than ever, of course; one thing leads to another.

I went over to a drinking fountain and took a very small drink. When I came back I closed the candy box and handed it back to Duck and told him to

pass it around at next Scout meeting and tell the fellows I wished they were going along. He said he would and added, “You know, Bill, I wish I was

going. I really do.”

I said I wished he was, too, but when did he change his mind? He looked embarrassed but about then Mr. Kinski showed up and then Dad showed up, with Molly and the brat–Peggy–and Molly’s sister, Mrs. van Metre. Everybody shook hands all around and Mrs. van Metre started to cry and the brat wanted to know what made my clothes so bunchy and what was I sweating about?

George was eyeing me, but about then our names were called and we started moving through the gate.

George and Molly and Peggy were weighed through and then it was my turn. My baggage was right on the nose, of course, and then I stepped on the scales. They read one hundred and thirty-one and one tenth pounds–I could have eaten another chocolate.

“Check!” said the weightmaster, then he looked up and said, “What in the world have you got on, son?”

The left sleeve of my uniform had started to unroll and was sticking out below the half sleeve of my ship suit. The merit badges were shining out like signal lights.

I didn’t say anything. He started feeling the lumps the uniform sleeves made. “Boy,” he said, “you’re dressed like an arctic explorer; no wonder you’re sweating. Didn’t you know you weren’t supposed to wear anything but the gear you were listed in?”

Dad came back and asked what the trouble was? I just stood there with my ears burning. The assistant weightmaster got into the huddle and they argued what should be done. The weightmaster phoned somebody and finally he said, “He’s inside his weight limit; if he wants to call that monkey suit part of his skin, we’ll allow it. Next customer, please!”

I trailed along, feeling foolish. We went down inside and climbed on the slide strip, it was cool down there, thank goodness. A few minutes later we got off at the loading room down under the rocket ship. Sure enough, it was the Bifrost, as I found out when the loading elevator poked above ground and stopped at the passenger port. We filed in.

They had it all organized. Our baggage had been taken from us in the loading room; each passenger had a place assigned by his weight. That split us up again; I was on the deck immediately under the control room. I found my place, couch 14-D, then went to a view port where I could see the Daedalus and the Icarus.

A brisk little stewardess, about knee high to a grasshopper, checked my name off a list and offered me an injection against dropsickness. I said no, thanks.

She said, “You’ve been out before?”

I admitted I hadn’t; she said, “Better take it.”

I said I was a licensed air pilot; I wouldn’t get sick I didn’t tell her that my license was just for copters. She shrugged and turned away. A loudspeaker said, “The Daedalus is cleared for blasting.” I moved up to get a good view.

The Daedalus was about a quarter of a mile away and stood up higher than we did. She had fine lines and was a mighty pretty sight, gleaming in the morning sunshine. Beyond her and to the right, clear out at the edge of the field, a light shone green at the traffic control blockhouse.

She canted slowly over to the south, just a few degrees.

Fire burst out of her base, orange, and then blinding white. It splashed down into the ground baffles and curled back up through the ground vents. She lifted.

She hung there for a breath and you could see the hills shimmer through her jet. And she was gone.

Just like that–she was gone. She went up out of there like a scared bird, just a pencil of white fire in the sky, and was gone while we could still hear and feel the thunder of her jets inside the compartment.

My ears were ringing. I heard someone behind me say, “But I haven’t had breakfast. The Captain will just have to wait. Tell him, Joseph.”

It was the woman who hadn’t known that the Mayflower was a space-to-space ship. Her husband tried to hush her up, but he didn’t have any luck.

She called over the stewardess. I heard her answer, “But, madam, you can’t speak to the Captain now. He’s preparing for blast-off.”

Apparently that didn’t make any difference. The stewardess finally got her quiet by solemnly promising that she could have breakfast after blast-off. I bent my ears at that and I decided to put in a bid for breakfast, too.

The Icarus took off twenty minutes later and then the speaker said, “All hands! Acceleration stations-prepare to blast off.” I went back to my couch and the stewardess made sure that we were all strapped down. She cautioned us not to unstrap until she said we could. She went down to the deck below.

I felt my ears pop and there was a soft sighing in the ship. I swallowed and kept swallowing. I knew what they were doing: blowing the natural air out and replacing it with the standard helium-oxygen mix at half sea-level pressure. But the woman–the same one–didn’t like it. She said, “Joseph, my head aches. Joseph, I can’t breathe. Do something!”

Then she clawed at her straps and sat up. Her husband sat up, too, and forced her back down. The Bifrost tilted over a little and the speaker said, “Minus three minutes!”

After a long time it said, “Minus two minutes!”

And then “Minus one minutel” and another voice took up the count: “Fifty-nine! Fifty-eight! Fifty-seven!”

My heart started to pound so hard I could hardly hear it. But it went on: “-thirty-five! Thirty-four! Thirty-three! Thirty-two! Thirty-one! Half! Twenty-nine! Twenty-eight!”

And it got to be: “Ten!”

And “Nine!” “Eight! “Seven! “And six! “And five! “And four! “And three! “And two–“

I never did hear them say “one” or “fire” or whatever they said. About then something fell on me and I thought I was licked. Once, exploring a cave with the fellows, a bank collapsed on me and I had to be dug out. It was like that–but nobody dug me out.

My chest hurt. My ribs seemed about to break. I couldn’t lift a finger. I gulped and couldn’t get my breath.

I wasn’t scared, not really, because I knew we would take off with a high g, but I was awfully uncomfortable. I managed to turn my head a little and saw that the sky was already purple. While I watched, it turned black and the stars came out, millions of stars. And yet the Sun was still streaming in through the port

The roar of the jets was unbelievable but the noise started to die out almost at once and soon you couldn’t hear it at all. They say the old ships used to be noisy even after you passed the speed of sound; the Bifrost was not. It got as quiet as the inside of a bag of feathers.

There was nothing to do but lie there, stare out at that black sky, try to breathe, and try not to think about the weight sitting on you.

And then, so suddenly that it made your stomach turn flip-flops, you didn’t weigh anything at all.

4. Captain DeLongPre

Let me tell you that the first time you fall is no fun. Sure, you get over it. If you didn’t you would starve. Old space hands even get so they like it– weightlessness, I mean. They say that two hours of weightless sleep is equal to a full night on Earth. I got used to it, but I never got to like it.

The Bifrost had blasted for a little more than three minutes. It seemed lots longer because of the high acceleration; we had blasted at nearly six g. Then she was in free orbit for better than three hours and we fell the whole time, until the Captain started to maneuver to match orbits with the Mayflower.

In other words we fell straight up for more than twenty thousand miles.

Put that way, it sounds silly. Everybody knows that things don’t fall up; they fall down.

Everybody knew the world was flat, too. We fell up.

Like everybody, I had had the elements of space ballistics in grammar school physics, and goodness knows there have been enough stories about how you float around in a spaceship when it’s in a free orbit. But, take it from me, you don’t really believe it until you’ve tried it.

Take Mrs. Tarbutton–the woman who wanted breakfast. I suppose she went to school like everybody else. But she kept insisting that the Captain had to do something about it. What he could do I don’t know; find her a small asteroid, maybe.

Not that I didn’t sympathize with her–or with myself, I guess. Ever been in an earthquake? You know how everything you ever depended on suddenly goes back on you and terra firma isn’t firma any longer? It’s like that, only much worse. This is no place to review grammar school physics but when a spaceship is in a free trajectory, straight up or any direction, the ship and everything in it moves along together and you fall, endlessly–and your stomach darn near falls out of you.

That was the first thing I noticed. I was strapped down so that I didn’t float away, but I felt weak and shaky and dizzy and as if I had been kicked in the stomach. Then my mouth filled with saliva and I gulped and I was awfully sorry I had eaten that chocolate.

But it didn’t come up, not quite.

The only thing that saved me was no breakfast. Some of the others were not so lucky. I tried not to look at them. I had intended to unstrap as soon as we went free and go to a port so I could look at Earth, but I lost interest in that project entirely. I stayed strapped down, and concentrated on being miserable.

The stewardess came floating out the hatch from the next deck, shoved herself along with a toe, checked herself with a hand at the center stanchion, and hovered in the air in a swan dive, looking us over. It was very pretty to watch if I’d been in shape to appreciate it.

“Is everybody comfy?” she said cheerfully.

It was a silly remark but I suppose nurses get that way. Somebody groaned and a baby on the other side of the compartment started to cry. The stewardess moved over to Mrs. Tarbutton and said, “You may have breakfast now. What would you like? Scrambled eggs?”

I clamped my jaw and turned my head away, wishing she would shut up. Then I looked back. She had paid for that silly remark–and she had to clean it up.

When she was through with Mrs. Tarbutton I said, “Uh-oh, Miss–” “Andrews.”

“Miss Andrews, could I change my mind about that drop-sick injection?”

“Righto, chum,” she agreed, smiling, and whipped out an injector from a little kit she had at her belt. She gave me the shot. It burned and for a moment I thought I was going to lose the chocolate after all. But then things quieted down and I was almost happy in a miserable sort of way.

She left me and gave shots to some others who had kidded themselves the same way I had. Mrs. Tarbutton she gave another sort of shot to knock her out entirely. One or two of the hardier souls unstrapped themselves and went to the ports; I decided I was well enough to try it.

It’s not as easy as it looks, this swimming around in free fall. I undid the safety belts and sat up; that’s all I meant to do. Then I was scrambling in the air, out of control, trying frantically to grasp at anything.

I turned over in the air and cracked the back of my head against the underside of the control room deck and saw stars, not the ones out the ports– some of my own. Then the deck with the couches on it was approaching me slowly.

I managed to grab a safety belt and came to anchor. The couch it belonged to was occupied by a little plump man. I said, “Excuse me.”

He said, “Don’t mention it,” and turned his face away, looking as if he hated me. I couldn’t stay there and I couldn’t even get back to my own couch without grabbing handholds on other couches that were occupied, too, so I pushed off again, very gently this time, and managed to grab hold when I bumped against the other deck.

It had handholds and grab lines all over it. I didn’t let go again, but pulled myself along, monkey fashion, to one of the ports. And there I got my first view of Earth from space.

I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t what I expected. There it was, looking just like it does in the geography books, or maybe more the way it does in the station announcements of Super-New-York TV station. And yet it was different. I guess I would say it was like the difference between being told about a good hard kick in the rear and actually being kicked.

Not a transcription. Alive.

For one thing it wasn’t prettily centered in a television screen; it was shouldering into one side of the frame of the port, and the aft end of the ship cut a big chunk out of the Pacific Ocean. And it was moving, shrinking. While I hung there it shrunk to about half the size it was when I first got there and got rounder and rounder. Columbus was right.

From where I was it was turned sideways; the end of Siberia, then North America, and finally the north half of South America ran across from left to right. There were clouds over Canada and the eastern part of the rest of North America; they were the whitest white I ever saw–whiter than the north pole cap. Right opposite us was the reflection of the Sun on the ocean; it hurt my eyes. The rest of the ocean was almost purple where there weren’t clouds.

It was so beautiful my throat ached and I wanted to reach out and touch it.

And back of it were stars, even brighter and bigger and more of them than the way they look from Little America.

Pretty soon there were more people crowding around, trying to see, and kids shoving and their mothers saying, “Now, now, darling!” and making silly remarks themselves. I gave up. I pulled myself back to my couch and put one belt around me so I wouldn’t float away and thought about it.

It makes you proud to know that you come from a big, fancy planet like that. I got to thinking that I hadn’t seen all of it, not by a long sight, in spite of all the geography trips I had made and going to one Scout round-up in Switzerland and the time George and Anne and I went to Siam.

And now I wasn’t going to see any more of it. It made me feel pretty solemn.

I looked up; there was a boy standing in front of me. He said, “What’s the trouble, William, my boy? Dropsick?”

It was that twerp Jones. You could have knocked me out with a feather. If I had known he was going to emigrate, I would have thought twice about it. I asked him where in the world he had come from.

“The same place you did, naturally. I asked you a question.”

I informed him that I was not dropsick and asked him whatever gave him that silly notion. He reached out and grabbed my arm and turned it so that the red spot the injection had made showed. He laughed and I jerked my arm away.

He laughed again and showed me his arm; it had a red spot on it, too. “Happens to the best of us,” he said. “Don’t be shy about it.” Then he said, “Come on. Let’s look around the joint before they make us strap down again.”

I went along. He wasn’t what I would pick for a buddy but he was a familiar face. We worked our way over to the hatch to the next deck. I started to go through but Jones stopped me. “Let’s go into the control room,” he suggested.

“Huh? Oh, they wouldn’t let us!”

“Is it a crime to try? Come on.” We went back the other way and through a short passage. It ended in a door that was marked: CONTROL ROOM- STAY OUT! Somebody had written under it: This means you!!! and somebody else had added: Who? Me?

Jones tried it; it was locked. There was a button beside it; he pushed it.

It opened and we found ourselves staring into the face of a man with two stripes on his collar. Behind him was an older man with four stripes on his; he called out, “Who is it, Sam? Tell ’em we’re not in the market.”

The first man said, “What do you kids want?”

Jones said, “Please, sir, we’re interested in astrogation. Could we have permission to visit the control room?”

I could see he was going to chuck us out and I had started to turn away when the older man called out, “Oh, shucks, Sam, bring ’em in!” The younger fellow shrugged and said, “As you say, Skipper.”

We went in and the Captain said, “Grab on to something; don’t float around. And don’t touch anything, or I’ll cut your ears off. Now who are you?”

We told him; he said, “Glad to know you, Hank-same to you, Bill. Welcome aboard.” Then he reached out and touched the sleeve of my uniform–it had come loose again. “Son, your underwear is showing.”

I blushed and told him how I happened to be wearing it. He laughed and said, “So you swindled us into lifting it anyway. That’s rich–eh, Sam? Have a cup of coffee.”

They were eating sandwiches and drinking coffee– not from cups, of course, but from little plastic bags like they use for babies. The bags even had nipples on them. I said no, thanks. While the shot Miss Andrews gave me had made me feel better, it hadn’t made me feel that much better. Hank Jones turned it down, too.

The control room didn’t have a port in it of any sort. There was a big television screen forward on the bulkhead leading to the nose, but it wasn’t turned on. I wondered what Mrs. Tarbutton would think if she knew that the Captain couldn’t see where we were going and didn’t seem to care.

I asked him about the ports. He said ports were strictly for tourists. “What would you do with a port if you had one?” he asked. “Stick your head out the window and look for road signs? We can see anything we need to see. Sam, heat up the video and show the kids.”

“Aye aye, Skipper.” The other chap swam over to his couch and started turning switches. He left his sandwich hanging in the air while he did so.

I looked around. The control room was circular and the end we came in was bigger than the other end; it was practically up in the nose of the ship and the sides sloped in. There were two couches, one for the pilot and one for the co-pilot, flat against the wall that separated the control room from the passenger compartments. Most of the space between the couches was taken up by the computer.

The couches were fancier than the ones the passengers had; they were shaped to the body and they lifted the knees and the head and back, like a hospital bed, and there were arm rests to support their hands over the ship’s controls. An instrument board arched over each couch at the middle, where the man in the couch could see the dials and stuff even when his head was pushed back into the cushions by high g.

The TV screen lighted up and we could see Earth; it filled most of the screen. “That’s ‘View Aft’,” the copilot said, “from a TV camera in the tail.

We’ve got ’em pointing in all directions. Now we’ll try ‘View Forward’.” He did, but it didn’t amount to anything, just a few tiny little dots that might have been stars. Hank said you could see more stars out a port.

“You don’t use it to look at stars,” he answered. “When you need to take a star sight, you use the coelostats. Like this.” He lay back on the couch and reached behind his head, pulling an eye piece arrangement over his face until the rubber guard fitted over one eye without lifting his head off the couch.

“Coelostat” is just a trick name for a telescope with a periscope built into it. He didn’t offer to let us look through it, so I looked back at the instrument board. It had a couple of radar presentations, much like you’ll find in any atmosphere ship, even in a copter, and a lot of other instruments, most of which I didn’t understand, though some of them were pretty obvious, like approach rate and throat temperature and mass ratio and ejection speed and such.

“Watch this,” said the co-pilot. He did something at his controls; one of the tiny blips on the TV screen lit up very brightly, blinked a few times, then died away. “That was Supra-New-York; I triggered her radar beacon. You are not seeing it by television; it’s radar brought on to the same screen.” He fiddled with the controls again and another light blinked, two longs and a short. “That’s where they’re building the Star Rover.”

“Where’s the Mayflower?” Hank asked.

“Want to see where you’re going, eh?” He touched his controls again; another light came on, way off to one side, flashing in groups of three.

I said it didn’t look much like we were going there. The Captain spoke up. “We’re taking the long way round, past the fair grounds. That’s enough, Sam. Lock your board.”

We all went back where the Captain was still eating. “You an Eagle Scout?” he asked me. I said yes and Hank said he was too.

“How old were you when you made it?” he wanted to know. I said I had been thirteen, so Hank said twelve, whereupon the Captain claimed he had made it at eleven. Personally I didn’t believe either one of them.

The Captain said so now we were going out to Ganymede; he envied both of us. The co-pilot said what was there to envy about that? The Captain said, “Sam, you’ve got no romance in your soul. You’ll live and die running a ferry boat.”

“Maybe so,” the co-pilot answered, “but I sleep home a lot of nights.”

The Captain said pilots should not marry. “Take me,” he said, “I always wanted to be a deep-space man. I was all set for it, too, when I was captured by pirates and missed my chance. By the time I had the chance again, I was married.”

“You and your pirates,” said the co-pilot.

I kept my face straight. Adults always think anybody younger will swallow anything; I try not to disillusion them.

“Well, all that’s as may be,” said the Captain. “You two young gentlemen run along now. Mr. Mayes and I have got to fake up a few figures, or we’ll be landing this bucket in South Brooklyn.”

So we thanked him and left.

I found Dad and Molly and the Brat in the deck aft of my own. Dad said, “Where have you been, Bill? I’ve been looking all over the ship for you.” I told them, “Up in the control room with the Captain.”

Dad looked surprised and the Brat made a face at me and said, “Smarty, you have not. Nobody can go up there.”

I think girls should be raised in the bottom of a deep, dark sack until they are old enough to know better. Then when it came time, you could either let them out or close the sack and throw them away, whichever was the best idea.

Molly said, “Hush, Peggy.”

I said, “You can just ask Hank. He was with me. We–” I looked around but Hank was gone. So I told them what had happened, all but the part about pirates.

When I finished the Brat said, “I want to go into the control room, too.”

Dad said he didn’t think it could be arranged. The Brat said, “Why not? Bill went.”

Molly said hush again. “Bill is a boy and older than you are.” The Brat said it wasn’t fair.

I guess she had something there–but things hardly ever are. Dad went on, “You should feel flattered, Bill, being entertained by the famous Captain DeLongPre.”

“Huh?”

“Maybe you are too young to remember it. He let himself be sealed into one of the robot freighters used to jump thorium ore from the lunar mines– and busted up a ring of hijackers, a gang the newscasters called the ‘Ore Pirates.'”

I didn’t say anything.

I wanted to see the Mayflower from space, but they made us strap down before I could locate it. I got a pretty good view of Supra-New-York though; the Mayflower was in the 24-hour orbit the space station rides in and we were closing almost directly on it when the word came to strap down.

Captain DeLongPre was quite some pilot. He didn’t fiddle around with jockeying his ship into the new groove; he gave one long blast on the jet, the right time, the right amount, and the right direction. As it says in the physics book, “every one-plane correction-of-orbit problem which can be solved at all, can be solved with a single application of acceleration”–provided the pilot is good enough.

He was good enough. When we went weightless again, I looked over my shoulder out a port and there was the Mayflower, with the Sun gleaming on her, large as life and not very far away. There was the softest sort of a correction bump and the loudspeaker sang out, “Contact completed. You may unstrap.”

I did and went to the port from which we could see the Mayflower. It was easy to see why she could never land; she had no airfoils of any sort, not even fins, and she was the wrong shape–almost spherical except that one side came out to a conical point.

She looked much too small–then I realized that a little bulge that was sticking out past her edge at one point was actually the bow of the Icarus,

unloading on the far side. Then suddenly she was enormous and the little flies on her were men in space suits.

One of them shot something at us and a line came snaking across. Before the knob on the end of it quite reached us there was a bright purple brush discharge from the end of it and every hair on my head stood straight up and my skin prickled.

A couple of the women in the compartment squealed and I heard Miss Andrews soothing them down and telling them that it was just the electrical potential adjusting between the two ships. If she had told them it was a bolt of lightning she would have been just as correct, but I don’t suppose that would have soothed them.

I wasn’t scared; any kid who had fooled around with radio or any sort of electronics would have expected it.

The knob on the line clunked against the side of the ship and after a bit the little line was followed by a heavier line and then they warped us together, slowly. The Mayflower came up until she filled the port.

After a bit my ears popped and the loudspeaker said, “All hands–prepare to disembark.”

Miss Andrews made us wait quite a while, then it was our deck’s turn and we pulled ourselves along to the deck we had come in by. Mrs. Tarbutton didn’t come along; she and her husband were having some sort of a discussion with Miss Andrews.

We went right straight out of our ship, through a jointed steel drum about ten feet long, and into the Mayflower.

5. Captain Harkness

Do you know the worst thing about spaceships? They smell bad.

Even the Mayflower smelled bad and she was brand new. She smelled of oil and welding and solvents and dirty, sweaty smells of all the workmen who had lived in her so long. Then we came, three shiploads of us, most of us pretty whiff with that bad odor people get when they’re scared or very nervous. My stomach still wasn’t happy and it almost got me.

The worst of it is that there can’t be very good ‘freshers in a ship; a bath is a luxury. After the ship got organized we were issued tickets for two baths a week, but how far does that go, especially when a bath means two gallons of water to sponge yourself off with?

If you felt you just had to have a bath, you could ask around and maybe buy a ticket from somebody who was willing to skip one. There was one boy in my bunk room who sold his tickets for four weeks running until we all got sick of it and gave him an unscheduled bath with a very stiff brush. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

And you couldn’t burn your clothes either; you had to wash them.

When we first got into the Mayflower it took them maybe half an hour to get us all sorted out and into our acceleration couches. The people from the Daedalus and the Icarus were supposed to be stowed away by the time we got there, but they weren’t and the passageways were traffic jams. A traffic jam when everybody is floating, and you don’t know which end is up, is about eight times as confusing as an ordinary one.

There weren’t any stewardesses to get us straight, either; there were emigrants instead, with signs on their chests reading SHIP’S AIDE-but a lot of them needed aid themselves; they were just as lost as anybody else. It was like amateur theatricals where the ushers don’t know how to find the reserved seats.

By the time I was in the bunk room I was assigned to and strapped down there were bells ringing all over the place and loudspeakers shouting: “Prepare for acceleration! Ten minutes!”

Then we waited.

It seemed more like half an hour. Presently the count-off started. I said to myself, William, if the blast-off from Earth was rugged, this is going to knock the teeth right out of your head. I knew what we were going to build up to–better than ninety-three miles per second. That’s a third of a million miles an hour! Frankly I was scared.

The seconds ticked away; there was a soft push that forced me down against the cushions–and that was all. I just lay there; the ceiling was the ceiling again and the floor was under me, but I didn’t feel extra heavy, I felt fine.

I decided that was just the first step; the next one would be a dilly.

Up overhead in the bunk room was a display screen; it lighted up and I was looking into the face of a man with four collar stripes; he was younger than Captain DeLongPre. He smiled and said, “This is your Captain speaking, friends–Captain Harkness. The ship will remain at one gravity for a little more than four hours. I think it is time to serve lunch, don’t you?”

He grinned again and I realized that my stomach wasn’t bothering me at all–except that I was terribly hungry. I guess he knew that all of us ground hogs would be starving to death as soon as we were back to normal weight. He went on:

“We’ll try to serve you just as quickly as possible. It is all right for you to unstrap now, sit up, and relax, but I must ask you to be very careful about one thing:

“This ship is precisely balanced so that the thrust of our drive passes exactly through our center of gravity. If that were not so, we would tend to spin instead of moving in a straight line–and we might fetch up in the heart of the Sun instead of at Ganymede.

“None of us wants to become an impromptu barbecue, so I will ask each of you not to move unnecessarily from the neighborhood of your couch. The ship has an automatic compensator for a limited amount of movement, but we must not overload it–so get permission from your ship’s aide before moving as much as six inches from your present positions.”

He grinned again and it was suddenly a most unpleasant grin. “Any one violating this rule will be strapped down by force–and the Captain will assign punishment to fit the crime after we are no longer under drive.”

There wasn’t any ship’s aide in our compartment; all we could do was wait. I got acquainted with the boys in the bunkroom, some older, some

younger. There was a big, sandy-haired boy about seventeen, by the name of Edwards–“Noisy” Edwards. He got tired of waiting.

I didn’t blame him; it seemed like hours went past and still nothing to eat. I thought we had been forgotten.

Edwards had been hanging around the door, peering out. Finally he said, “This is ridiculous! We can’t sit here all day. I’m for finding out what’s the hold up. Who’s with me?”

One of the fellows objected, “The Captain said to sit tight.”

“What if he did? And what can he do if we don’t? We aren’t part of the crew.”

I pointed out that the Captain had authority over the whole ship, but he brushed me off. “Tommyrot! We got a right to know what’s going on–and a right to be fed. Who’s coming along?”

Another boy said, “You’re looking for trouble, Noisy.”

Edwards stopped; I think he was worried by the remark but he couldn’t back down. Finally he said, “Look, we’re supposed to have a ship’s aide and we haven’t got one. You guys elect me ship’s aide and I’ll go bring back chow. How’s that?”

Nobody objected out loud. Noisy said, “Okay, here I go.”

He couldn’t have been gone more than a few seconds when a ship’s aide showed up carrying a big box of packaged rations. He dealt them out and had one left over. Then he counted the bunks. “Weren’t there twenty boys in here?” he asked.

We looked at each other but nobody said anything. He pulled out a list and called our names. Edwards didn’t answer, of course, and he left, taking Noisy’s ration with him.

Then Noisy showed up and saw us eating and wanted to know where his lunch was. We told him; he said, “For the love of Mike! Why didn’t you guys save it for me? A fine bunch you turned out to be.” And he left again.

He came back shortly, looking mad. A ship’s aide followed him and strapped him down.

We had about reached the teeth-picking stage when the screen on the ceiling lit up again and there was the Moon. It looked as if we were headed right toward it and coming up fast. I began to wonder if Captain Harkness had dropped a decimal point.

I lay back on my couch and watched it grow. After a while it looked worse. When it had grown until it filled the screen and more and it seemed as if we couldn’t possibly miss, I saw that the mountains were moving past on the screen from right to left. I breathed a sigh of relief; maybe the Old Man knew what he was doing after all.

A voice came over the speaker: “We are now passing the Moon and tacking slightly in so doing. Our relative speed at point of closest approach is more than fifty miles per second, producing a somewhat spectacular effect.”

I’ll say it was spectacular! We zipped across the face of the Moon in about half a minute, then it faded behind us. I suppose they simply kept a TV camera trained on it, but it looked as if we had dived in, turned sharply, and raced out again. Only you don’t make sharp turns at that speed.

About two hours later they stopped gunning her. I had fallen asleep and I dreamed I was making a parachute jump and the chute failed to open. I woke up with a yell, weightless, with my stomach dropping out of me again. It took me a moment to figure out where I was.

The loudspeaker said: “End of acceleration. Spin will be placed on the ship at once.”

But it did not happen all at once; it happened very slowly. We drifted toward one wall and slid down it toward the outer wall of the ship. That made what had been the outer wall the floor; we stood on it– and the side with the bunks on it was now a wall and the side with the TV screen on it, which had been the ceiling, was now the opposite wall. Gradually we got heavier.

Noisy was still strapped to his couch; the ship’s aide had moved the buckles so that he could not reach them himself. Now he was up against the wall, hanging on the straps like a papoose. He began to yell for us to help him down.

He was not in any danger and he could not have been too uncomfortable, for we weren’t up to a full gravity, not by a whole lot. It turned out later that

the Captain had brought the spin up to one-third g and held it there, because Ganymede has one-third g. So there wasn’t any urgent need to turn Noisy loose.

Nor was there any rush to do so. We were still discussing it and some of the fellows were making comical remarks which Noisy did not appreciate when the same ship’s aide came in, unstrapped Noisy, and told all of us to follow him.

That’s how I happened to attend Captain’s mast.

“Captain’s mast” is a sort of court, like when in ancient times the lord of the countryside would sit and dispense the high and middle justice. We followed the aide, whose name was Dr. Archibald, to Captain Harkness’s cabin. There were a lot of other people waiting there in the passage outside the cabin. Presently Captain Harkness came out and Noisy was the first case.

We were all witnesses but the Captain didn’t question but a few of us; I wasn’t questioned. Dr. Archibald told about finding Noisy wandering around the ship while we were under acceleration and the Captain asked Noisy if he had heard the order to stay at his bunk?

Noisy beat around the bush a good deal and tried to spread the blame on all of us, but when the Captain pinned him down he had to admit that he had heard the order.

Captain Harkness said, “Son, you are an undisciplined lunk. I don’t know what sort of trouble you’ll run into as a colonist, but so far as my ship is concerned, you’ve had it.”

He mused for a moment, than added, “You say you did this because you were hungry?” Noisy said yes, he hadn’t had anything since breakfast and he still hadn’t had his lunch. “Ten days bread and water,” said the Captain. “Next case.”

Noisy looked as if he couldn’t believe his ears.

The next case was the same thing, but a woman-one of those large, impressive ones who run things. She had had a row with her ship’s aide and had stomped off to tell the Captain about it personally– while we were under acceleration.

Captain Harkness soon cut through the fog. “Madam,” he said, with icy dignity, “by your bull-headed stupidity you have endangered the lives of all of us. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

She started a tirade about how “rude” the aide had been to her and how she never heard of anything so preposterous in her life as this kangaroo court, and so forth, and so forth. The Captain cut her short.

“Have you ever washed dishes?” he asked. “Why, no!”

“Well, you are going to wash dishes–for the next four hundred million miles.”

6. E = MC 2

I looked up dad after they let us go. It was like finding a needle in a haystack but I kept asking and presently I found him. Molly and he had a room to themselves. Peggy was there and I thought she was rooming with them, which annoyed me some, until I saw that there were only two couches and realized that Peggy must be in a dormitory. It turned out that all the kids over eight were in dormitories.

Dad was busy unclamping their couches and moving them to what was the floor, now that the ship was spinning. He stopped when I came in and we sat around and talked. I told him about Captain’s mast. He nodded. “We saw it in the screen. I didn’t notice your shining face, however.”

I said I hadn’t been called on.

“Why not?” Peggy wanted to know.

“How should I know?” I thought about mast for a bit and said, “Say, George, the skipper of a ship in space is just about the last of the absolute monarchs, isn’t he?”

Dad considered it and said, “Mmm … no, he’s a constitutional monarch. But he’s a monarch all right.” “You mean we have to bow down to him and say ‘Your Majesty?” Peggy wanted to know.

Molly said, “I don’t think that would be advisable, Peg.” “Why not? I think it would be fun.”

Molly smiled. “Well, let me know how you make out. I suspect that he will just turn you over his knee and paddle you.” “Oh, he wouldn’t dare! I’d scream.”

I wasn’t so sure. I remembered those four hundred million miles of dirty dishes. I decided that, if the Captain said “Frog,” I’d hop.

If Captain Harkness was a monarch, he didn’t seem anxious to rule; the first thing he had us do was to hold an election and set up a ship’s council. After that we hardly laid eyes on him.

Everybody over eighteen could vote. The rest of us got to vote, too; we were told to set up a junior council–not that it was ever good for anything.

But the senior council, the real council, ran the ship from then on. It even acted as a court and the Captain never handed out punishments again. Dad told me that the Captain reviewed everything that the council did, that he had to, to make it legal–but I never heard of him over-ruling their decisions.

And you know what the first thing was that that council did–after setting up meal hours and simple things like that? They decided we had to go to school!

The junior council promptly held a meeting and passed a resolution against it, but it didn’t mean anything. We had school, just the same.

Peggy was on the junior council. I asked her why she didn’t resign if she wasn’t going to do anything. I was just teasing–as a matter of fact she put up quite a battle for us.

School wasn’t so bad, though. There is very little to do in space and when you’ve seen one star you’ve seen ’em all. And the first thing we had in school was a tour of the ship, which was all right.

We went in groups of twenty and it took all day – “day” by ship’s time, I mean. The Mayflower was shaped like a ball with a cone on one side–top shaped. The point of the cone was her jet–although Chief Engineer Ortega, who showed us around, called it her “torch.”

If you count the torch end as her stern, then the round end, her bow, was where the control room was located; around it were the Captain’s cabin and the staterooms of the officers. The torch and the whole power plant space were cut off from the rest of the ship by a radiation shield that ran right through the ship. From the shield forward to the control room was a big cargo space.

It was a cylinder more than a hundred feet in diameter and was split up into holds. We were carrying all sorts of things out to the colony –earth moving machinery, concentrated soil cultures, instruments, I don’t know what all.

Wrapped around this central cylinder were the decks for living, “A” deck just inside the skin of the ship, “B” deck under it, and “C” deck just inside that, with “D” deck’s ceiling being the outer wall of the cargo space. “D” deck was the mess rooms and galley and recreation rooms and sick bay and such; the three outer decks were bunk rooms and staterooms. “A” deck had steps in it every ten or fifteen feet because it was fitted into the outer curve of the ship; this made the ceilings in it of various heights.

The furthest forward and furthest aft on “A” deck were only about six feet between floor and ceiling and some of the smaller kids lived in them, while at the greatest width of the ship the ceilings in “A” deck must have been twelve or thirteen feet high.

From inside the ship it was hard to see how it all fitted together. Not only was it all chopped up, but the artificial gravity we had from spinning the ship made directions confusing–anywhere you stood on a deck it seemed level, but it curved sharply up behind you and in front of you. But you never came to the curved part; if you walked forward it was still level. If you walked far enough you looped the loop and came back to where you started, having walked clear around the ship.

I never would have figured it out if Mr. Ortega hadn’t drawn a sketch for us.

Mr. Ortega told us that the ship was spinning three and six-tenths revolutions per minute or two hundred and sixteen complete turns an hour, which was enough to give “B” deck a centrifugal force of one-third g. “B” deck was seventy-five feet out from the axis of the Mayflower; “A” deck where I lived was further out and you weighed maybe a tenth more there, while “C” deck caught about a tenth less. “D” deck was quite a lot less and you could make yourself dizzy if you stood up suddenly in the mess room.

The control room was right on the axis; you could float in it even when the ship was spinning–or so they told me; I never was allowed inside. Spinning the ship had another odd effect: all around us was “down.” I mean to say that the only place you could put a view port was in the floor

plates of “A” deck and that’s where they were, four of them–big ones, each in its own compartment.

Mr. Ortega took us into one of these view galleries. The view port was a big round quartz plate in the floor, with a guard rail around it.

The first ones into the room went up to the guard rail and then backed away from it quick and two of the girls squealed. I pushed forward and got to the rail and looked down . . and I was staring straight into the very bottom of the universe, a million trillion miles away and all of it down.

I didn’t shy away–George says I’m more acrobat than acrophobe–but I did sort of grip the railing. Nobody wants to fall that far.

The quartz was surface-treated so that it didn’t give off reflections and it looked as if there were nothing at all between you and Kingdom Come.

The stars were reeling across the hole from the ship spinning, which made it worse. The Big Dipper came swinging in from the left, passed almost under me, and slid away to the right–and a few seconds later it was back again. I said, “This is where I came in,” and gave up my place so that someone else could have a look, but nobody seemed anxious to.

Then we went through the hydroponics plant, but there wasn’t anything fancy about that–just enough plants growing to replace the oxygen we used up breathing. Eel grass, it was mostly, but there was a vegetable garden as well. I wondered how they had gotten it going before they had the passengers aboard? Mr. Ortega pointed to a CO2 fitting in the wall. “We had to subsidize them, of course.”

I guess I should have known it; it was simple arithmetic.

The Chief led us back into one of the mess rooms, we sat down, and he told us about the power plant.

He said that there had been three stages in the development of space ships: first was the chemical fuel rocket ship that wasn’t very different from the big German war rockets used in the Second World War, except that they were step rockets. “You kids are too young to have seen such rockets,” he said, “but they were the biggest space ships ever built. They had to be big because they were terribly inefficient. As you all know, the first rocket to reach the Moon was a four-stage rocket. Its final stage was almost as long as the Mayflower–yet its pay load was less than a ton.

“It is characteristic of space ship development that the ships have gotten smaller instead of bigger. The next development was the atom-powered rocket. It was a great improvement; steps were no longer necessary. That meant that a ship like the Daedalus could take off from Earth without even a catapult, much less step rockets, and cruise to the Moon or even to Mars.

But such ships still had the shortcomings of rockets; they depended on an atomic power plant to heat up reaction mass and push it out a jet, just as their predecessors depended on chemical fuel for the same purpose.

“The latest development is the mass-conversion ship, such as the Mayflower, and it may be the final development–a mass-conversion ship is theoretically capable of approaching the speed of light. Take this trip: we accelerated at one gravity for about four hours and twenty minutes which brought us up to more than ninety miles a second. If we had held that drive for a trifle less than a year, we would approach the speed of light.

“A mass-conversion ship has plenty of power to do just that. At one hundred per cent efficiency, it would use up about one per cent of her mass as energy and another one per cent as reaction mass. That’s what the Star Rover is going to do when it is finished.”

One of the younger kids was waving his hand. “Mister Chief Engineer?”

“Yes, son?”

“Suppose it goes on a few weeks longer and passes the speed of light?” Mr. Ortega shook his head. “It can’t.”

“Why not, sir?”

“Eh, how far have you gone in mathematics, sonny?”

“Just through grammer school calculus,” the kid answered.

‘Tm afraid there is no use in trying to explain it, then. Just take it from me that the big brains are sure it can’t be done.”

I had worried about that very point more than once. Why can’t you go faster than light? I know all that old double-talk about how the Einstein equations show that a speed faster than light is a meaningless quantity, like the weight of a song or the color of a sound, because it involves the square root of minus one–but all of that is just theory and if the course we had in history of science means anything at all, it means that scientists change their theories about as often as a snake changes his skin. I stuck up my hand.

“Okay,” he says. “You with the cowlick. Speak up.”

“Mr. Ortega, admitting that you can’t pass the speed of light, what would happen if the Star Rover got up close to the speed of light–and then the Captain suddenly stepped the drive up to about six g and held it there?”

“Why, it would– No, let’s put it this way–” He broke off and grinned; it made him look real young. “See here, kid, don’t ask me questions like that. I’m an engineer with hairy ears, not a mathematical physicist.” He looked thoughtful and added, “Truthfully, I don’t know what would happen, but I would sure give a pretty to find out. Maybe we would find out what the square root of minus one looks like– from the inside.”

He went on briskly, “Let’s go on about the Mayflower. You probably know that when the original Star Rover failed to come back, the Mayflower was designed to be the Star Rover II, but the design was obsolete before they ever started putting her together.

So they shifted the name over to the new intersteller ship, the Star Rover III, renamed this one the Mayflower and grabbed her for the colonial service.

“You kids should consider how lucky you are. Up to now, emigrants to Ganymede have had to spend two years and nine months in space, just to get there. You’re making it in two months.”

“Couldn’t we go faster?” somebody wanted to know.

“We could,” he told us. “But we don’t need to and it runs up the astrogation and control difficulties. In these new ships the power plant has gotten way ahead of the instrumentation. Be patient; your grandchildren will make the trip in a week, blasting at one g all the way. There’ll be so many ships they’ll have to have traffic cops and maybe we can come close to shipping out as many people as there are extras born each year.

“Enough about that,” he went on. “Who here can tell me what ‘E equals M C squared’ means?”

I could have answered but I had already spoken up once and it doesn’t do to get a reputation for apple polishing. Finally one of the older kids said, “It means that mass can be converted into energy.”

“Right!” Mr. Ortega agreed. “The first real demonstration of that was the atom bomb they set off ‘way back in 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico. That was a special case; they still didn’t know how to control it; all they could do was to make one whale of a big bang.

Then came the uranium power plants, but that still didn’t amount to much because it was a very special case and only a microscopic percentage of the mass was converted into energy. It wasn’t until Kilgore’s energy transformation equations–don’t worry about them; you’ll study them when you are older if you are interested–it wasn’t until Kilgore showed how it could be done that we had any idea of howto do what Dr. Einstein’s energy- mass equation said, clear back in 1905.

“And we still didn’t know how to control it. If we were going to turn mass into energy, we needed more mass with which to surround the reaction, a very special sort of mass that would not turn into energy when we didn’t want it to and would hold the reaction where we wanted it. Ordinary metal

wouldn’t do; one might as well use soft butter.

“But the Kilgore equations showed how to do that, too, when they were read correctly. Now has anyone here any notion of how much energy you get when you convert a chunk of mass into raw energy?”

Nobody knew. “It’s all in that one equation,” he said, “good old Doc Einstein’s ‘E equals M C squared.’ It comes out that one gram of mass gives nine times ten to the twentieth power ergs.” He wrote it down for us: 1 gm. = 9 x l020 ergs.

“Doesn’t look like much, does it?” he said. “Now try it this way:” He wrote down 900,000,000,000,000,000,000 ergs.

“Read it off. Nine hundred thousand million billion ergs. It still doesn’t mean much, does it? Figures like that are impossible to comprehend. The nuclear physicists keep a barrel of zeroes around handy the way a carpenter does a keg of nails.

“I’ll try once more,” he went on. “A pound of mass, any old mass, say a pound of feathers, when converted into energy equals fifteen billion

horsepower-hours. Does that give anyone a notion of why the Mayflower was assembled out in an orbit and will never ever land anywhere?”

“Too hot,” somebody said.

“‘Too hot’ is an understatement. If the Mayftower had blasted off from Mojave space port the whole Los Angeles Borough of the City of Southern California would have been reduced to a puddle of lava and people would have been killed by radiation and heat from Bay City to Baja California. And that will give you an idea of why the shielding runs right through the ship between here and the power plant, with no way at all to get at the torch.”

We had the misfortune to have Noisy Edwards along, simply because he was from the same bunk room. Now he spoke up and said, “Suppose you have to make a repair?”

“There is nothing to go wrong,” explained Mr. Ortega. “The power plant has no moving parts of any sort” Noisy wasn’t satisfied. “But suppose something did go wrong, how would you fix it if you can’t get at it?”

Noisy has an irritating manner at best; Mr. Ortega sounded a little impatient when he answered. “Believe me, son, even if you could get at it, you wouldn’t want to. No indeed!”

“Humph!” said Noisy. “All I’ve got to say is, if there isn’t any way to make a repair when a repair is needed, what’s the use in sending engineer officers along?”

You could have heard a pin drop. Mr. Ortega turned red, but all he said was, “Why, to answer foolish questions from youngsters like yourself, I suppose.” He turned to the rest of us. “Any more questions?”

Naturally nobody wanted to ask any then. He added, “I think that’s enough for one session. School’s out.”

I told Dad about it later. He looked grim and said, “I’m afraid Chief Engineer Ortega didn’t tell you the whole truth.” “Huh?”

“In the first place there is plenty for him to do in taking care of the auxiliary machinery on this side of the shield. But it is possible to get at the torch, if necessary.”

“Huh? How?”

“There are certain adjustments which could conceivably have to be made in extreme emergency. In which case it would be Mr. Ortega’s proud privilege to climb into a space suit, go outside and back aft, and make them.”

“You mean–“

“I mean that the assistant chief engineer would succeed to the position of chief a few minutes later. Chief engineers are very carefully chosen, Bill, and not just for their technical knowledge.”

It made me feel chilly inside; I didn’t like to think about it.

1. Scouting in Space

Making a trip in a space ship is about the dullest way to spend time in the world, once the excitement wears off. There’s no scenery, nothing to do, and no room to do it in. There were nearly six thousand of us crowded into the Mayflower and that doesn’t leave room to swing a cat.

Take “B” deck–there were two thousand passengers sleeping in it. It was 150 feet across–fore and aft, that is–and not quite 500 feet around, cylinder fashion. That gives about forty square feet per passenger, on the average, but a lot was soaked up in stairs, passageways, walls, and such. It worked out that each one had about room enough for his bunk and about that much left over to stand on when he wasn’t sleeping.

You can’t give a rodeo in that kind of space; you can’t even get up a game of ring-around-the-rosy.

“A” deck was larger and “C” deck was smaller, being nearer the axis, but they averaged out the same. The council set up a staggered system to get the best use out of the galley and the mess rooms and to keep us from falling over each other in the ‘freshers. “A” deck was on Greenwich time; “B” deck was left on zone plus-eight time, or Pacific West Coast time; and “C” deck drew zone minus-eight time, Philippine time.

That would have put us on different days, of course, but the day was always figured officially on Greenwich time; the dodge was just to ease the pressure on eating facilities.

That was really all we had to worry about. You would wake up early, not tired but bored, and wait for breakfast Once breakfast was over, the idea was to kill time until lunch. All afternoon you could look forward to the terrific excitement of having dinner.

I have to admit that making us go to school was a good plan; it meant that two and a half hours every morning and every afternoon was taken care of. Some of the grown ups complained that the mess rooms and all the spare space was always crowded with classes, but what did they expect us to do? Go hang on sky hooks? We used up less space in class than if we had been under foot.

Still, it was a mighty odd sort of school. There were some study machines in the cargo but we couldn’t get at them and there wouldn’t have been enough to go around. Each class consisted of about two dozen kids and some adult who knew something about something. (You’d be surprised how many adults don’t know anything about anything!) The grown up would talk about what he knew best and the kids would listen, then we would ask questions and he would ask questions. No real examinations, no experiments, no demonstrations, no stereos.

Dad says this is the best kind of a school, that a university consists of a log with a teacher on one end and a pupil on the other. But Dad is a sort of romantic.

Things got so dull that it was hardly worth while to keep up my diary, even if I had been able to get microfilm, which I wasn’t.

Dad and I played an occasional game of cribbage in the evening–somehow Dad had managed to squeeze the board and a pack of cards into his weight allowance. Then he got too busy with technical planning he was doing for the council and didn’t have time. Molly suggested that I teach her to play, so I did.

After that I taught Peggy to play and she pegged a pretty sharp game, for a girl. It worried me a little that I wasn’t being loyal to Anne in getting chummy with Peg and her mother, but I decided that Anne would want me to do just what I did. Anne was always friendly with everybody.

It still left me with time on my hands. What with only one-third gravity and no exercise I couldn’t sleep more than six hours a night. The lights were out eight hours but they didn’t make us go to bed, not after the trouble they had with it the first week. I used to fool around the corridors after lights out, usually with Hank Jones, until we both would get sleepy. We talked a lot. Hank turned out not to be such a bad guy as long as you kept him trimmed down to size.

I still had my Scout suit with me and kept it folded up in my bunk. Hank came in one morning while I was making up my bunk and noticed it. “See here, William,” he said, “why do you hang on to that? Let the dead past bury its dead.”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe there will be Scouting on Ganymede.”

“Not that I ever heard of.”

“Why not? There is Scouting on the Moon.” “Proves nothing,” he answered.

But it got us to talking about it and Hank got a brilliant idea. Why not start up Scouting right now, in the Mayflower?

We called a meeting. Peggy spread the word around for us, through the junior council, and we set it for fifteen-thirty that same afternoon, right after school. Fifteen-thirty Greenwich, or “A” deck time, that is. That made it seven-thirty in the morning for the “B” deck boys and a half hour before midnight for the fellows on “C” deck. It was the best we could do. “B” deck could hurry through breakfast and get to the meeting if they wanted to and we figured that those who were really interested from “C” would stay up for the meeting.

I played my accordion while they were drifting in because Hank’s father said that you needed music to warm up a meeting before it got down to work. The call had read “all Scouts and former Scouts;” by fifteen-forty we had them packed in and spilling into the corridors, even though we had the use of the biggest mess room. Hank called them to order and I put away my accordion and acted as Scribe pro tem, having borrowed a wire recorder from the Communications Officer for the purpose.

Hank made a little speech. I figure him for politics when he grows up. He said that all of us had enjoyed the benefits, the comradeship, and the honorable traditions of Scouting on Earth and it seemed a shame to lose them. He said that the Scouting tradition was the tradition of the explorer and pioneer and there could be no more fitting place and time for it than in the settlement of a new planet. In fact the spirit of Daniel Boone demanded that we continue as Scouts.

I didn’t know he had it in him. It sounded good.

He stopped and slipped me the wink. I got up and said that I wanted to propose a resolution. Then I read it–it had been a lot longer but we cut it down. It read: “Be it resolved–we the undersigned, Scouts and former Scouts of many jurisdictions and now passengers in the good ship Mayflower, having as our purpose to continue the Scouting tradition and to extend the Scouting trail out to the stars, do organize ourselves as the Boy Scouts of Ganymede in accordance with the principles and purpose of Scouting and in so doing do reaffirm the Scout Law.”

Maybe it was flowery but it sounded impressive; nobody laughed. Hank said, “You have heard the resolution; what is your pleasure? Do I hear a second?”

He surely did; there were seconds all over the place. Then he asked for debate.

Somebody objected that we couldn’t call ourselves the Boy Scouts of Ganymede because we weren’t on Ganymede yet. He got a chilly reception and shut up. Then somebody else pointed out that Ganymede wasn’t a star, which made that part about “Carrying the Scouting trail out to the stars” nonsense.

Hank told him that was poetic license and anyhow going out to Ganymede was a step in the right direction and that there would be more steps; what about the Star Rover III? That shut him up.

The worst objection was from “Millimetre” Muntz, a weary little squirt too big for his britches. He said, “Mr. Chairman, this is an outlaw meeting. You haven’t any authority to set up a new Scouting jurisdiction. As a member in good standing of Troop -Ninety-Six, New Jersey, I object to the whole proceeding.”

Hank asked him just what authority he thought Troop Ninety-Six, New Jersey, had out around the orbit of Mars? Somebody yelled, “Throw him out!” Hank banged on the mess table. “It isn’t necessary to throw him out–but, since Brother Millimetre thinks this is not a proper meeting, then it isn’t

proper for him to take part in it. He is excused and the chair will recognize him no further. Are you ready to vote?”

It was passed unanimously and then Hank was elected organizational chairman. He appointed a flock of committees, for organization and for plans and programs and for credentials and tests and for liaison, and such. That last was to dig out the men in the ship who had been troop masters and commissioners and things and get a Court of Honor set up. There were maybe a dozen of the men passengers at the meeting, listening. One of them, a Dr. Archibald who was an aide on “A” deck, spoke up.

“Mr. Chairman, I was a Scoutmaster in Nebraska. I’d like to volunteer my services to this new organization.” Hank looked him straight in the eye. “Thank you, sir. Your application will be considered.”

Dr. Archibald looked startled, but Hank went smoothly on, “We want and need and will appreciate the help of all you older Scouts. The liaison committee is instructed to get the names of any who are willing to serve.”

It was decided that we would have to have three troops, one for each deck, since it wasn’t convenient to try to meet all at the same time. Hank asked all the Explorer Scouts to stand up. There were too many of them, so he asked those who were Eagles to remain standing. There were about a dozen of us.

Hank separated us Eagles by decks and told us to get busy and organize our troops and to start by picking an acting senior patrol leader. “A” deck had only three Eagles, me, Hank, and a kid from another bunk room whom I hadn’t met before, Douglas MacArthur Okajima. Doug and Hank combined on me and I found myself tagged with the job.

Hank and I had planned to finish the meeting with setting up exercises, but there just wasn’t room, so I got out my accordion again and we sang The Scouting Trail and followed it with The Green Hills of Earth. Then we took the oath together again:

“Upon my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my planet, and to keep myself physically fit, mentally alert, and morally straight.” After that the meeting busted up.

For a while we held meetings every day. Between troop meetings and committee meetings and Explorer meetings and patrol leader meetings we didn’t have time to get bored. At first the troops were just “A” troop, “B” troop, and “C” troop, after the decks, but we wanted names to give them some personality. Anyhow I wanted a name for my troop; we were about to start a membership drive and I wanted something with more oomph to it than “‘A'” deck troop.”

Somebody suggested “The Space Rats” but that was voted down, and somebody else suggested “The Mayflowers”; they didn’t bother to vote on that; they simply sat on him.

After that we turned down “The Pilgrims,” “Deep Space Troop,” “Star Rovers,” and “Sky High.” A kid named John Edward Forbes-Smith got up. “Look,” he said, “we’re divided into three troops on the basis of the time zones we use, aren’t we? “B” deck has California time; “C” deck has Philippine time; and we have Greenwich or English time. Why don’t we pick names that will show that fact? We could call ourselves the Saint George Troop.”

Bud Kelly said it was a good idea as far as it went but make it Saint Patrick instead of Saint George; after all, Dublin was on Greenwich time, too, and Saint Patrick was a more important saint.

Forbes-Smith said, “Since when?”

Bud said, “Since always, you limey–” So we sat on both of them, too, and it was decided not to use saints. But Johnny Edwards had a good idea, just the same; we settled on the Baden-Powell Troop, Boy Scouts of Ganymede, which tied in with the English time zone and didn’t offend anybody.

The idea took hold; “C” deck picked Aguinaldo as a name and “B” deck called themselves the Junipero Serra Troop. When I heard that last I was kind of sorry our deck didn’t have California time so that we could have used it. But I got over it; after all “Baden-Powell” is a mighty proud name, too.

For that matter they were all good names–scouts and explorers and brave men, all three of them. Two of them never had a chance to be Scouts in the narrow, organized meaning, but they were all Scouts in the wider sense–like Daniel Boone.

Dad says there is a lot in a name.

As soon as they heard about what we were doing the girls set up Girl Scouting, too, and Peggy was a member of the Florence Nightingale Troop. I suppose there was no harm in it, but why do girls copy what the boys do? We were too busy to worry about them, though; we had to revamp Scouting activities to fit new conditions.

We decided to confirm whatever ranks and badges a boy had held in his former organization–permanent rankings, I mean, not offices. Having been a patrol leader or a scribe didn’t mean anything, but if you were an Eagle on Earth, you stayed one in the B.S.G.; if you were a Cub, then you were still a Cub. If a boy didn’t have records–and about half of them didn’t– we took his Scout oath statement as official.

That was simple; working over the tests and the badges was complicated. After all you can’t expect a boy to pass beekeeping when you haven’t any bees.

(It turned out that there were several swarms of bees sleep-frozen in the cargo, but we didn’t have the use of them.)

But we could set up a merit badge in hydroponics and give tests right there in the ship. And Mr. Ortega set up a test for us in spaceship engineering and Captain Harkness did the same for ballistics and astrogation. By the end of the trip we had enough new tests to let a boy go up for Eagle Scout, once we had a Court of Honor.

That came last. For some reason I couldn’t figure Hank had kept putting off the final report of the liaison committee, the committee which had as its job getting Scout Masters and Commissioners and such. I asked him about it, but he just looked mysterious and said that I would see.

I did see, eventually. At last we had a joint meeting of all three troops to install Scout Masters and dedicate the Court of Honor and such. And from then on the adults ran things and we went back to being patrol leaders at the most. Oh well–it was fun while it lasted.

2. Trouble

When we were fifty-three days out and about a week to go to reach Ganymede, Captain Harkness used the flywheel to precess the ship so that we could see where we were going–so that the passengers could see, that is; it didn’t make any difference to his astrogation.

You see, the axis of the Mayflower had been pointed pretty much toward Jupiter and the torch had been pointed back at the Sun. Since the view ports were spaced every ninety degrees around the sides, while we had been able to see most of the sky, we hadn’t been able to see ahead to Jupiter nor behind to the Sun. Now he tilted the ship over ninety degrees and we were rolling, so to speak, along our line of flight. That way, you could see Jupiter and the Sun both, from any view port, though not both at the same time.

Jupiter was already a tiny, ruddy-orange disc. Some of the boys claimed they could make out the moons. Frankly, I couldn’t, not for the first three days after the Captain precessed the ship. But it was mighty fine to be able to see Jupiter.

We hadn’t seen Mars on the way out, because Mars happened to be on the far side of the Sun, three hundred million miles away. We hadn’t seen anything but the same old stars you can see from Earth. We didn’t even see any asteroids.

There was a reason for that. When we took off from the orbit of Supra-New-York, Captain Harkness had not aimed the Mayflower straight for where Jupiter was going to be when we got there; instead he had lifted her north of the ecliptic high enough to give the asteroid belt a wide berth. Now anybody knows that meteors are no real hazard in space.

Unless a pilot does deliberately foolish things like driving his ship through the head of a comet it is almost impossible to get yourself hit by a meteor. They are too far between.

On the other hand the asteroid belt has more than its fair share of sky junk. The older power-pile ships used to drive straight through the belt, taking their chances, and none of them was ever hit to amount to anything. But Captain Harkness, having literally all the power in the world, preferred to go around and play it safe. By avoiding the belt there wasn’t a chance in a blue moon that the Mayflower would be hit.

Well, it must have been a blue moon. We were hit.

It was just after reveille, “A” deck time, and I was standing by my bunk, making it up. I had my Scout uniform in my hands and was about to fold it up and put it under my pillow. I still didn’t wear it. None of the others had uniforms to wear to Scout meetings so I didn’t wear mine. But I still kept it tucked away in my bunk.

Suddenly I heard the goldarnest noise I ever heard in my life. It sounded like a rifle going off right by my ear, it sounded like a steel door being slammed, and it sounded like a giant tearing yards and yards of cloth, all at once.

Then I couldn’t hear anything but a ringing in my ears and I was dazed. I shook my head and looked down and I was staring at a raw hole in the ship, almost between my feet and nearly as big as my fist.

There was scorched insulation around it and in the middle of the hole I could see blackness–then a star whipped past and I realized that I was staring right out into space.

There was a hissing noise.

I don’t remember thinking at all. I just wadded up my uniform, squatted down, and stuffed it in the hole. For a moment it seemed as if the suction would pull it on through the hole, then it jammed and stuck and didn’t go any further. But we were still losing air. I think that was the point at which I first realized that we were losing air and that we might be suffocated in vacuum.

There was somebody yelling and screaming behind me that he was killed and alarm bells were going off all over the place. You couldn’t hear yourself think. The air-tight door to our bunk room slid across automatically and settled into its gaskets and we were locked in.

That scared me to death.

I know it has to be done. I know that it is better to seal off one compartment and kill the people who are in it than to let a whole ship die–but, you see, I was in that compartment, personally. I guess I’m just not the hero type.

I could feel the pressure sucking away at the plug my uniform made. With one part of my mind I was recalling that it had been advertised as “tropical weave, self ventilating” and wishing that it had been a solid plastic rain coat instead. I was afraid to stuff it in any harder, for fear it would go all the way through and leave us sitting there, chewing vacuum. I would have passed up desserts for the next ten years for just one rubber patch, the size of my hand.

The screaming had stopped; now it started up again. It was Noisy Edwards, beating on the air-tight door and yelling, “Let me out of here! Get me out of here!”

On top of that I could hear Captain Harkness’s voice coming through the bull horn. He was saying, “H-twelve! Report! H-twelve! Can you hear me?”

On top of that everybody was talking at once.

I yelled: “Quiet!” at the top of my voice–and for a second or so there was quiet.

Peewee Brunn, one of my Cubs, was standing in front of me, looking big-eyed. “What happened, Billy?” he said. I said, “Grab me a pillow off one of the bunks. Jump!”

He gulped and did it. I said, “Peel off the cover, quick!”

He did, making quite a mess of it, and handed it to me–but I didn’t have a hand free. I said, “Put it down on top of my hands.”

It was the ordinary sort of pillow, soft foam rubber. I snatched one hand out and then the other, and then I was kneeling on it and pressing down with the heels of my hands. It dimpled a little in the middle and I was scared we were going to have a blowout right through the pillow.

But it held. Noisy was screaming again and Captain Harkness was still asking for somebody, anybody, in compartment H-12 to tell him what was going on. I yelled “Quiet!” again, and added, “Somebody slug Noisy and shut him up.”

That was a popular idea. About three of them jumped to it. Noisy got clipped in the side of the neck, then somebody poked him in the pit of his stomach and they swarmed over him. “Now everybody keep quiet,” I said, “and keep on keeping quiet. If Noisy lets out a peep, slug him again,” I gasped and tried to take a deep breath and said, “H-twelve, reporting!”

The Captain’s voice answered, “What is the situation there?” “There is a hole in the ship, Captain, but we got it corked up.” “How? And how big a hole?”

I told him and that is about all there was to it. They took a while to get to us because–I found this out afterward–they isolated that stretch of corridor first, with the air-tight doors, and that meant they had to get everybody out of the rooms on each side of us and across the passageway. But presently two men in space suits opened the door and chased all the kids out, all but me. Then they came back. One of them was Mr. Ortega.

“You can get up now, kid,” he said, his voice sounding strange and far away through his helmet. The other man squatted down and took over holding the pillow in place.

Mr. Ortega had a big metal patch under one arm. It had sticky padding on one side. I wanted to stay and watch him put it on but he chased me out and closed the door. The corridor outside was empty but I banged on the air-tight door and they let me through to where the rest were waiting. They wanted to know what was happening but I didn’t have any news for them because I had been chased out.

After a while we started feeling light and Captain Harkness announced that spin would be off the ship for a short time. Mr. Ortega and the other man came back and went on up to the control room. Spin was off entirely soon after that and I got very sick.

Captain Harkness kept the ship’s speaker circuits cut in on his conversations with the men who had gone outside to repair the hole, but I didn’t listen. I defy anybody to be interested in anything when he is drop sick

Then spin came back on and everything was all right and we were allowed to go back into our bunk-room. It looked just the same except that there was a plate welded over the place where the meteorite had come in.

Breakfast was two hours late and we didn’t have school that morning.

That was how I happened to go up to Captain’s mast for the second time. George was there and Molly and Peggy and Dr. Archibald, the Scoutmaster of our deck, and all the fellows from my bunk room and all the ship’s officers. The rest of the ship was cut in by visiplate. I wanted to wear my uniform but it was a mess–torn and covered with sticky stuff. I finally cut off the merit badges and put it in the ship’s incinerator.

The First Officer shouted, “Captain’s Mast for punishments and rewards!” Everybody sort of straightened up and Captain Harkness walked out and faced us. Dad shoved me forward.

The Captain looked at me. “William Lermer?” he said. I said, “Yessir.”

He said, “I will read from yesterday’s log: ‘On twenty-one August at oh-seven-oh-four system standard, while cruising in free fall according to plan, the ship was broached by a small meteorite. Safety interlocks worked satisfactorily and the punctured volume, compartment H-twelve, was isolated with no serious drop in pressure elsewhere in the ship.

‘Compartment H-twelve is a bunk room and was occupied at the time of the emergency by twenty passengers. One of the passengers, William J. Lermer, contrived a makeshift patch with materials at hand and succeeded in holding sufficient pressure for breathing until a repair party could take over.

‘His quick thinking and immediate action unquestionably saved the lives of all persons in compartment H-twelve.’ “

The Captain looked up from the log and went on, “A certified copy of this entry, along with depositions of witnesses, will be sent to Interplanetary Red Cross with recommendation for appropriate action. Another copy will be furnished you. I have no way to reward you except to say that you have my heart-felt gratitude. I know that I speak not only for the officers but for all the passengers and most especially for the parents of your bunk mates.”

He paused and waggled a finger for me to come closer. He went on in a low voice, to me alone, “That really was a slick piece of work. You were on your toes. You have a right to feel proud.”

I said I guessed I had been lucky.

He said, “Maybe. But that sort of luck comes to the man who is prepared for it.”

He waited a moment, then said, “Lermer, have you ever thought of putting in for space training?”

I said I suppose I had but I hadn’t thought about it very seriously. He said, “Well, Lermer, if you ever do decide to, let me know. You can reach me care of the Pilots’ Association, Luna City.”

With that, mast was over and we went away, George and I together and Molly and Peggy following along. I heard Peggy saying, “That’s my brother.” Molly said, “Hush, Peggy. And don’t point.”

Peggy said, “Why not? He is my brother–well, isn’t he?”

Molly said, “Yes, but there’s no need to embarrass him.” But I wasn’t embarrassed.

Mr. Ortega looked me up later and handed me a little, black, twisted piece of metal, about as big as a button. “That’s all there was left of it,” he said, “but I thought you would like to have it–pay you for messing up your Scout suit, so to speak.”

I thanked him and said I didn’t mind losing the uniform; after all, it had saved my neck, too. I looked at the meteorite. “Mr. Ortega, is there any way to tell where this came from?”

“Not really,” he told me, “though you can get the scientific johnnies to cut it up and then express an opinion–if you don’t mind them destroying it.”

I said no, I’d rather .keep it–and I have; I’ve still got it as a pocket piece. He went on, “It’s either a bit of a comet or a piece of the Ruined Planet. We can’t tell which because where we were, there shouldn’t have been either one.”

“Only there was,” I said. “As you say, there was.”

“Uh, Mr. Ortega, why don’t they put enough armor on a ship to stop a little bitty thing like this?” I remembered what the skin of the ship looked like where it had been busted; it seemed awful thin.

“Well, now, in the first place, this meteor is a real giant, as meteors go. In the second place–do you know anything about cosmic rays, Bill?” “Uh, not much, I guess.”

“You undoubtedly know that the human body is transparent to primary cosmic radiation and isn’t harmed by it. That is what we encounter out here in space. But metal is not completely transparent to it and when it passes through metal it kicks up all sorts of fuss–secondary and tertiary and quaternary cosmic radiation.

The stuff cascades and it is not harmless, not by a darn sight. It can cause mutations and do you and your descendants a lot of harm. It adds up to this: a man is safest in space when he has just enough ship around him to keep the air in and ultraviolet out.”

Noisy didn’t have much to say around the compartment for the next couple of days and I thought maybe he had learned his lesson. I was wrong. I ran into him in one of the lower passageways when there was nobody else around. I started to go around him but he stepped in my way. “I want to talk to you,” he said.

“Okay,” I answered. “What’s on your mind?” “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?”

I didn’t like the way he said it, nor what he said. I said, “I don’t think I’m smart; I am smart.” He made me tired.

“Pretty cocky, aren’t you? You think I ought to be kissing your hand and telling you how grateful I am for saving my life, don’t you?” I said, “Oh, yeah? If that’s what is worrying you, you can just skip it; I didn’t do it for you.“

“I know that,” he answered,” and I’m not grateful, see?”

“That’s fine with me,” I told him. “I wouldn’t want a guy like you being grateful to me.”

He was breathing hard. “I’ve had just about enough of you,” he said slowly. And the next thing I knew I had a mouthful of knuckles and I was down.

I got up cautiously, trying to surprise him. But it was no good; he knocked me down again. I tried to kick him while I was down, but he danced out of my way.

The third time he hit me I stayed down. When I quit seeing stars he was gone–and I hadn’t managed to lay a finger on him. I never was any good in a fight; I’m still talking when I ought to be slugging.

I went to a scuttlebutt and bathed my face. Hank ran across me there and asked me what in the world I had been doing. I told him I had run into a door. I told Dad the same thing.

Noisy didn’t bother me any more and we never had anything to say to each other again. I lay awake a long time that night, trying to figure it out. I didn’t get it. The chap who thought up that malarkey about “my strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure” certainly had never met Noisy Edwards.

For my taste Noisy was a no good so-and-so and I wished I had been able to use his face to stuff the hole the meteor made. I thought about a number of ways to fix him, but none of them was any good. As Dad says, sometimes there just isn’t any cure for a situation.

3. The Moons of Jupiter

Nothing much happened until it was time to make our approach to Jupiter, except that a four-year-old kid turned up missing. The kid’s parents searched all around and they passed the word from the control room for everybody to keep an eye open but they still couldn’t find him.

So we had a chance to try out the Scouts’ emergency organization. The ship’s officers couldn’t search the ship, since there was just the Captain and two watch officers and Mr. Ortega and his assistant chief. Captain Harkness supplied plans to each of the Scoutmasters and we went through that ship like a kid searching his clothes for a half credit. We turned the kid up, all right, in about twenty minutes. Seems the little devil had snuck into the hydroponics room while it was being serviced and had got himself locked in.

While he was in there he had got thirsty and had tried to drink the solutions they raise the plants in – had drunk some, in fact. The result was just about what you would expect. It didn’t do him any real harm but, boy, was that place a mess!

I was talking to Dad about it that night over a game. Peggy had a Girl Scout meeting and Molly was off somewhere; we were alone for once. The baby’s mother had raised particular Ned, just as if there had really been something wrong–I mean, what can happen in a space ship? The kid couldn’t fall overboard.

Dad said her reaction was perfectly natural.

I said, “See, here, George, does it seem to you that some of the emigrants don’t have what it takes to be colonists?” “Mmmm… possibly.”

I was thinking of Noisy but the ones I mentioned were Mrs. Tarbutton, who gave up and didn’t even come along, and that female–Mrs. Grigsby–who got in trouble and had to wash dishes. And another fellow named Saunders who was continually in trouble with the council for trying to live his own life, wild and free, no matter what it did to the rest of us. “George, how did those characters get past the psycho tests?”

George stopped to peg fifteen-four, then said, “Bill, haven’t you ever heard of political influence?” All I said was, “Huh?”

“It’s a shocking thought I know, but you are old enough to get used to the world as it is, instead of the way it ought to be. Take a hypothetical case: I don’t suppose that a niece of a state councilor would be very likely to fail the psycho tests. Oh, she might fail the first tests, but a review board might find differently – if the councilor really wanted her to pass.”

I chewed this over a while. It did not sound like George; he isn’t the cynical type. Me, I’m cynical, but George is usually naive. “In that case, George, there is no use in having psycho tests at all, not if people like that can sneak past.”

“Contrariwise. The tests are usually honest. As for those who sneak past, it doesn’t matter. Old Mother Nature will take care of them in the long run. Survivors survive.” He finished dealing and said, “Wait till you see what I’m going to do to you this hand. You haven’t a chance.”

He always says that. I said, “Anybody who would use public office like that ought to be impeached!”

George said mildly, “Yep. But don’t bum out your jets, son; we’ve got human beings, not angels, to work with.”

On the twenty-fourth of August Captain Harkness took spin off and started bringing us in. We decelerated for better than four hours and then went into free fall about six hundred thousand miles out from Jupiter and on the opposite side from where Ganymede was then. Weightlessness still wasn’t any fun but this time we were ready and everyone got shots for it who wanted them. I took mine and no nonsense.

Theoretically the Mayflower could have made it in one compound maneuver, ending up at the end of deceleration in a tight circular orbit around Ganymede. Practically it was much better to sneak in easy and avoid any more trouble with meteorites–with the “false rings,” that is.

Of course Jupiter doesn’t have rings like Saturn, but it does have quite a lot of sky junk traveling around in the same plane as its moons. If there were enough of it, it would show up like Saturn’s rings. There isn’t that much, but there is enough to make a pilot walk on eggs coming in. This slow approach gave us a fine front seat for a tour of Jupiter and its satellites.

Most of this stuff we were trying to avoid is in the same plane as Jupiter’s equator, just the way Saturn’s rings are–so Captain Harkness brought us in over the top of Jupiter, right across Jupiter’s north pole. That way, we never did get in the danger zone until we had curved down on the other side to reach Ganymede–and by then we were going fairly slow.

But we weren’t going slow when we passed over Jupiter’s north pole, no indeedy! We were making better than thirty miles a second and we were close in, about thirty thousand miles. It was quite a sight.

Jupiter is ninety thousand miles thick; thirty thousand miles is close–too close for comfort.

I got one good look at it for about two minutes from one of the view ports, then had to give up my place to somebody who hadn’t had a turn yet and go back to the bunk room and watch through the vision screen. It was an odd sight; you always think of Jupiter with equatorial bands running parallel across it. But now we were looking at it end on and the bands were circles. It looked like a giant archery target, painted in orange and brick red and brown– except that half of it was chewed away. We saw it in half moon, of course.

There was a dark spot right at the pole. They said that was a zone of permanent clear weather and calm and that you could see clear down to the surface there. I looked but I couldn’t see anything; it just looked dark.

As we came over the top, Io–that’s satellite number one–suddenly came out of eclipse. Io is about as big as the Moon and was about as far away from us at the time as the Moon is from the Earth, so it looked about Moon size. There was just black sky and then there was a dark, blood red disc and in less than five minutes it was brilliant orange, about the color of Jupiter itself. It simply popped up, like magic.

I looked for Barnard’s satellite while we were close in, but missed it. It’s the little one that is less than one diameter from the surface of Jupiter–so close that it whirls around Jupiter in twelve hours. I was interested in it because I knew that the Jovian observatory was on it and also the base for Project Jove.

I probably didn’t miss anything; Barnard’s satellite is only about a hundred and fifty miles in diameter. They say a man can come pretty close to jumping right off it. I asked George about it and he said, no, the escape speed was about five hundred feet per second and who had been filling me up with nonsense?

I looked it up later; he was right. Dad is an absolute mine of useless information. He says a fact should be loved for itself alone.

Callisto was behind us; we had passed her on the way in, but not very close. Europa was off to the right of our course nearly ninety degrees; we saw her in half moon. She was more than four hundred thousand miles away and was not as pretty a sight as the Moon is from Earth.

Ganymede was straight ahead, almost, and growing all the time–and here was a funny thing; Callisto was silvery, like the Moon, but not as bright; Io and Europa were bright orange, as bright as Jupiter itself. Ganymede was downright dull!

I asked George about it; he came through, as usual “Ganymede used to be about as bright as Io and Europa,” he told me. “It’s the greenhouse effect–the heat trap. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to live on it.”

I knew about that, of course; the greenhouse effect is the most important part of the atmosphere project When the 1985 expedition landed Ganymede had a surface temperature a couple of hundred degrees below zero–that’s cold enough to freeze the milk of human kindness! “But look, George,” I objected, “sure, I know about the heat trap, but why is it so dark? It looks like the inside of a sack.”

“Light is heat; heat is light,” he answered. “What’s the difference? It’s not dark on the ground; it goes in and doesn’t come out–and a good thing, too.”

I shut up. It was something new to me and I didn’t understand it, so I decided to wait and not pound my teeth about it.

Captain Harkness slowed her down again as we came up to Ganymede and we got in one good meal while she was under drive. I never did get so I could eat at free fall, even with injections. He leveled her off in a tight circular orbit about a thousand miles up from Ganymede. We had arrived–just as soon as we could get somebody to come and get us.

It was on the trip down to Ganymede’s surface that I began to suspect that being a colonist wasn’t as glamorous and romantic as it had seemed back on Earth. Instead of three ships to carry us all at once, there was just one ship, the Jitterbug, and she would have fitted into one of the Bifrost‘s compartments. She could carry only ninety of us at a time and that meant a lot of trips.

I was lucky; I had to wait only three days in free fall. But I lost ten pounds.

While I waited, I worked, helping to stow the freight that the Jitterbug brought up each trip. At last it came our turn and we piled into the Jitterbug. She was terrible; she had shelves rather than decks–they weren’t four feet apart. The air was stale and she hadn’t been half way cleaned up since the last trip. There weren’t individual acceleration couches; there were just pads covering the deck space and we covered the pads, shoulder to shoulder–and foot in your eye, for that matter.

The skipper was a loud-mouthed old female they called “Captain Hattie” and she kept bawling us out and telling us to hurry. She didn’t even wait to make sure that we were all strapped down.

Fortunately it didn’t take very long. She drove away so hard that for the first time except in tests I blacked out, then we dropped for about twenty minutes; she gunned her again, and we landed with a terrible bump. And Captain Hattie was shouting, “Out you come, you ground hogsl This is it.”

The Jitterbug carried oxygen, rather than the helium-oxygen mix of the Mayflower. We had come down at ten pounds pressure; now Captain Hattie spilled the pressure and let it adjust to Ganymede normal, three pounds. Sure, three pounds of oxygen is enough to live on; that’s all Earth has–the other twelve pounds are nitrogen. But a sudden drop in pressure like that is enough to make you gasp anyhow. You aren’t suffocating but you feel as if you were.

We were miserable by the time we got out and Peggy had a nose bleed. There weren’t any elevators; we had to climb down a rope ladder. And it was cold!

It was snowing; the wind was howling around us and shaking the ladder–the smallest kids they had to lower with a line. There was about eight inches of snow on the ground except where the splash of the Jitterbugs jet had melted it. I could hardly see, the wind was whipping the snow into my face so, but a man grabbed me by the shoulder, swung me around, and shouted, “Keep moving! Keep moving! Over that way.”

I headed the way he pointed. There was another man at the edge of the blast clearing, singing the same song, and there was a path through the snow, trampled to slush. I could see some other people disappearing in the snow ahead and I took out after them, dogtrotting to keep warm.

It must have been half a mile to the shelter and cold all the way. We weren’t dressed for it. I was chilled through and my feet were soaking wet by the time we got inside.

The shelter was a big hangarlike building and it was not much warmer, the door was open so much, but it was out of the weather and it felt good to be inside. It was jammed with people, some of them in ship suits and some of them Ganymedeans–you couldn’t miss the colonial men; they were bearded and some of them wore their hair long as well. I decided that was one style I was not going to copy; I’d be smooth shaven, like George.

I went scouting around, trying to find George & Co. I finally did. He had found a bale of something for Molly to sit on and she was holding Peggy on her lap. Peg’s nose had stopped bleeding. I was glad to see, but there were dried tears and blood and dirt on her face. She was a sight.

George was looking gloomy, the way he did the first few days without his pipe. I came up and said, “Hi, folks!” George looked around and smiled and said, “Well, Bill, fancy meeting you here! How is it going?”

“Now that you ask me,” I answered, “it looks like a shambles.”

He looked gloomy again and said, “Oh, I suppose they will get things straightened out presently.”

We didn’t get a chance to discuss it. A colonist with snow on his boots and hair on his face stopped near us, put his little fingers to his lips, and whistled. “Pipe down!” he shouted. “I want twelve able-bodied men and boys for the baggage party.” He looked around and started pointing. “You– and you–and you–“

George was the ninth “You”; I was the tenth.

Molly started to protest. I think George might have balked if she had not. Instead he said, “No, Molly, I guess it has to be done. Come on, Bill.” So we went back out into the cold.

There was a tractor truck outside and we were loaded in it standing up, then we lumbered back to the rocket site. Dad saw to it that I was sent up into the Jitterbug to get me out of the weather and I was treated to another dose of Captain Hattie’s tongue; we couldn’t work fast enough to suit her. But we got our baggage lowered finally; it was in the truck by the time I was down out of the ship. The trip back was cold, too.

Molly and Peggy were not where we had left them. The big room was almost empty and we were told to go on into another building through a connecting door. George was upset, I could see, from finding Molly gone.

In the next building there were big signs with arrows: MEN & BOYS-TO THE RIGHT and WOMEN & GIRLS-TO THE LEFT. George promptly turned to the left. He got about ten yards and was stopped by a stem-faced woman dressed like a colonial, in a coverall. “Back the other way,” she said firmly. “This is the way to the ladies’ dormitory.”

“Yes, I know,” agreed Dad, “but I want to find my wife.” “You can look for her at supper.”

“I want to see her now.“

“I haven’t any facilities for seeking out any one person at this time. You’ll have to wait.”

“But–” There were several women crowding past us and going on inside. Dad spotted one from our deck in the Mayflower. “Mrs. Archibald!” She turned around. “Oh–Mr. Lermer. How do you do?”

“Mrs. Archibald,” Dad said intently, “could you find Molly and let her know that I’m waiting here?” “Why, I’d be glad to try, Mr. Lermer.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Archibald, a thousand thanks!”

“Not at all.” She went away and we waited, ignoring the stern-faced guard. Presently Molly showed up without Peggy. You would have thought Dad hadn’t seen her for a month.

“I didn’t know what to do, dear,” she said. “They said we had to come and it seemed better to get Peggy settled down. I knew you would find us.” “Where is Peggy now?”

“I put her to bed.”

We went back to the main hall. There was a desk there with a man behind it; over his head was a sign: IMMIGRATION SERVICE-INFORMATION. There was quite a line up at it; we took our place in the queue.

“How is Peggy?” Dad asked.

“I’m afraid she is catching a cold.”

“I hope-” Dad said. “Ah, I HOPE–Atchoo!“ “And so are you,” Molly said accusingly.

“I don’t catch cold,” Dad said, wiping his eyes. “That was just a reflex.”

“Hmm–” said Molly.

The line up took us past a low balcony. Two boys, my age or older, were leaning on the rail and looking us over. They were colonials and one was trying to grow a beard, but it was pretty crummy.

One turned to the other and said, “Rafe, will you look at what they are sending us these days?” The other said, “It’s sad.”

The first one pointed a thumb at me and went on, “Take that one, now–the artistic type, no doubt.” The second one stared at me thoughtfully. “Is it alive?” he asked.

“Does it matter?” the first one answered.

I turned my back on them, whereupon they both laughed. I hate self-panickers.

4. The Promised Land

Mr. Saunders was ahead of us in line. He was crabbing about the weather. He said it was an outrage to expose people the way we had been. He had been with us on the working party, but he had not worked much.

The man at the desk shrugged. “The Colonial Commission set your arrival date; we had nothing to say about it. You can’t expect us to postpone winter to suit your convenience.”

“Somebody’s going to hear about this!”

“By all means.” The man at the desk handed him a form, “Next, please!” He looked at Dad and said, “What may I do for you, citizen?” Dad explained quietly that he wanted to have his family with him. The man shook his head. “Sorry. Next case, please.”

Dad didn’t give up his place. “You can’t separate a man and wife. We aren’t slaves, nor criminals, nor animals. The Immigration Service surely has some responsibilities toward us.”

The man looked bored. “This is the largest shipload we’ve ever had to handle. We’ve made the best arrangements we could. This is a frontier town, not the Astor.”

“All I’m asking for is a minimum family space, as described in the Commission’s literature about Ganymede.” “Citizen, those descriptions are written back on Earth. Be patient and you will be taken care of.”

“Tomorrow?”

“No, not tomorrow. A few days–or a few weeks.”

Dad exploded. “Weeks, indeed! Confound it, I’ll build an igloo out on the field before I’ll put up with this.”

“That’s your privilege.” The man handed Dad a sheet of paper. “If you wish to lodge a complaint, write it out on this.”

Dad took it and I glanced at it. It was a printed form–and it was addressed to the Colonial Commission back on Earth! The man went on, “Turn it in to me any time this phase and it will be ultramicro-filmed in time to go back with the mail in the Mayflower.“

Dad looked at it, snorted, crumpled it up, and stomped away. Molly followed him and said, “George! Georgel Don’t be upset. We’ll live through it.”

Dad grinned sheepishly. “Sure we will, honey. It’s the beauty of the system that gets me. Refer all complaints to the head office–half a billion miles away!”

The next day George’s reflexes were making his nose run. Peggy was worse and Molly was worried about her and Dad was desperate. He went off somewhere to raise a stink about the way things were being handled.

Frankly, I didn’t have it too bad. Sleeping in a dormitory is no hardship to me; I could sleep through the crack of doom. And the food was everything they had promised.

Listen to this: For breakfast we had corn cakes with syrup and real butter, little sausages, real ham, strawberries with cream so thick I didn’t know what it was, tea, all the milk you could drink, tomato juice, honey-dew melon, eggs–as many eggs as you wanted.

There was an open sugar bowl, too, but the salt shaker had a little sign on it; DON’T WASTE THE SALT.

There wasn’t any coffee, which I wouldn’t have noticed if George had not asked for it. There were other things missing, too, although I certainly didn’t notice it at the time. No tree fruits, for example–no apples, no pears, no oranges. But who cares when you can get strawberries and watermelon and pineapples and such? There were no tree nuts, too, but there were peanuts to burn.

Anything made out of wheat flour was a luxury, but you don’t miss it at first.

Lunch was choice of corn chowder or jellied consomme, cheese souffle, fried chicken, corned beef and cabbage, hominy grits with syrup, egg plant au gratin, little pearl onions scalloped with cucumbers, baked stuffed tomatoes, sweet potato surprise, German-fried Irish potatoes, tossed endive, coleslaw with sour cream, pineapple and cottage cheese with lettuce.

Then there was peppermint ice cream, angel berry pie, frozen egg nog, raspberry ice, and three kinds of pudding–but I didn’t do too well on the desserts. I had tried to try everything, taking a little of this and a dab of that, and by the time desserts came along I was short on space. I guess I ate too much.

The cooking wasn’t fancy, about like Scout camp, but the food was so good you couldn’t ruin it. The service reminded me of camp, too–queueing up for servings, no table cloths, no napkins. And the dishes had to be washed; you couldn’t throw them away or burn them–they were imported from Earth and worth their weight in uranium.

The first day they took the first fifty kids in the chow line and the last fifty lads to leave the mess hall and made them wash dishes. The next day they changed pace on us and took the middle group. I got stuck both times.

The first supper was mushroom soup, baked ham, roast turkey, hot corn bread with butter, jellied cold meats, creamed asparagus, mashed potatoes and giblet gravy, spinach with hard boiled egg and grated cheese, corn pudding, creamed peas and carrots, smothered lettuce and three kinds of salad. Then there was frozen custard and raisin pudding with hard sauce and Malaga and Thompson grapes and more strawberries with powdered sugar.

Besides that you could drop around to the kitchen and get a snack any time you felt like it.

I didn’t go outside much the first three days. It snowed and although we were in Sun phase when we got there it was so murky that you couldn’t see the Sun, much less Jupiter. Besides, we were in eclipse part of the time. It was as cold as Billy-be-switched and we still didn’t have any cold weather clothes.

I was sent along with the commissary tractor once to get supplies over in town. Not that I saw much of the town–and not that Leda is much of a town, anyhow, to a person who has lived in Diego Borough–but I did see the hydroponics farms.

There were three of them, big multiple sheds, named for what they grew in them, “Oahu,” “Imperial Valley,” and “Iowa.” Nothing special about them, just the usual sort of soiless gardening. I didn’t hang around because the flicker lighting they use to force the plants makes my eyes burn.

But I was interested in the tropical plants they grew in “Oahu”–I had never seen a lot of them before. I noticed that most of the plants were marked “M-G” while a few were tagged “N. T.” I asked one of the gardeners; he said that “M-G” meant “mutation-Ganymede” and the other meant “normal terrestrial.”

I found out later that almost everything grown on Ganymede was a special mutation adapted to Ganymede conditions.

Beyond there was another of the big multiple sheds named “Texas”; it had real cows in it and was very interesting. Did you know a cow moves its lower jaw from side to side? And no matter what you’ve heard, there is not one teat that is especially for cream.

I hated to leave, but “Texas” shed smelled too much like a space ship. It was only a short dash through the snow to the Exchange where all of Leda’s retail buying and selling takes place–big and little shops all under one roof.

I looked around, thinking I might take a present back to Peggy, seeing that she was sick. I got the shock of my life. The prices!

If I had had to buy in the Exchange the measly fifty-eight pounds of stuff they had let me bring with me, it would have cost–I’m telling the truth!– several thousand credits. Everything that was imported from Earth cost that kind of money. A tube of beard cream was two hundred and eighty credits.

There were items for sale made on Ganymede, hand work mostly, and they were expensive, too, though not nearly as expensive as the stuff brought up from Earth.

I crept out of that place in a hurry. As nearly as I could figure the only thing cheap on Ganymede was food.

The driver of the commissary tractor wanted to know where I had been when there was loading to do? “I should have left you behind to walk back,” he groused. I didn’t have a good answer so I didn’t say anything.

They shut off winter soon after that. The heat trap was turned on full force, the skies cleared and it was lovely. The first view I got of the Ganymede sky was a little after dawn next Sun phase. The heat trap made the sky a pale green but Jupiter shone right through it, ruddy orange, and big. Big and beautiful–I’ve never gotten tired of looking at Jupiter!

A harvest moon looks big, doesn’t it? Well, Jupiter from Ganymede is sixteen or seventeen times as wide as the Moon looks and it covers better than two hundred and fifty times as much sky. It hangs there in the sky, never rising, never setting, and you wonder what holds it up.

I saw it first in half-moon phase and I didn’t see how it could be any more beautiful than it was. But the Sun crept across the sky and a day later Jupiter was a crescent and better than ever. At the middle of Sun phase we went into eclipse, of course, and Jupiter was a great red, glowing ring in the sky, brightest where the Sun had just passed behind it.

But the best of all is during dark phase.

Maybe I ought to explain how the phases work; I know I didn’t understand it until I came to Ganymede. Ganymede is such a small planet and so close to its primary that it is tide-locked, just the way the Moon is; it keeps one face always toward Jupiter and therefore Jupiter does not move in the sky. The sun moves, the other Jovian moons move, the stars move–but not good old Jove; it just hangs there.

Ganymede takes just over an Earth week to revolve around Jupiter, so we have three and a half days of sunlight and then three and a half days of darkness. By Ganymede time the period of rotation is exactly one week; twenty-four Ganymede hours is one seventh of the period. This arrangement makes a Ganymede minute about a standard second longer than an Earth minute, but who cares? Except scientists, of course, and they have clocks that keep both sorts of time.

So here is the way a week goes on Ganymede: the Sun rises at Sunday midnight every week; when you get up Monday morning it’s a little above the eastern horizon and Jupiter is in half-moon phase.

The Sun keeps climbing higher and about suppertime on Tuesday it slides behind Jupiter and Ganymede is in eclipse; eclipse can last an hour or so up to a maximum of about three hours and a half. The stars come out and Jupiter shows that beautiful red ring effect because of its thick atmosphere. Then it’s light again by bedtime Tuesday.

At noon on Thursday the Sun goes down and we start the dark phase; that’s best of all. Jupiter’s colors really show and the other moons are easier to see. They can be almost anywhere and in almost any combination.

Jupiter and its satellites is sort of a miniature solar system; from Ganymede you have a front seat for the show. There is always something new in the sky. Besides the eleven “historical” satellites ranging in size from Ganymede down to Jay-ten or Nicholson-Alpha, which is a ball of rock and ice only fifteen miles thick, there are maybe a dozen more a few miles or less in diameter but big enough to be called moons and heaven knows how many smaller than that.

Sometimes these little ones come close enough to Ganymede to show discs; they mostly have very eccentric orbits. Any time there will be several

that are conspicuous lights in the sky, like the planets are from Earth.

Io, and Europa, and Callisto are always discs. When Europa passes between Jupiter and Ganymede it is as big in the sky as the Moon is from Earth. It actually is as big as the Moon and at that time it is only about a quarter of a million miles away.

Then it swings around to the far side and is very much smaller–more than a million miles away and less than a quarter as wide. Io goes through the same sorts of changes, but it never gets as big.

When Io and Europa pass between Ganymede and Jupiter you can see them move with your naked eye, chasing their shadows or running ahead of them, depending on the phase. Io and Europa, being inside Ganymede’s orbit, never get very far away from Jupiter, Io sticks within a couple of diameters of the big boy; Europa can get about sixty degrees away from it. Callisto is further out than Ganymede and goes all around the sky.

It’s a show you never get tired of. Earth’s sky is dull.

By six o’clock Saturday morning Jupiter would be in full phase and it was worthwhile to get up to see it. Not only was it the most gorgeous thing I had ever seen, but there was always the reverse eclipse, too, and you could see Ganymede’s shadow, a little round black dot, crawling across old Jupiter’s face. It gave you an idea of just how colossally big Jupiter was– there was the shadow of your whole planet on it and it wasn’t anything more than a big freckle.

Jupiter is ninety thousand miles across the equator, eighty-four thousand from pole to pole. Ganymede is only a little better than three thousand.

For the next couple of days after full phase Jupiter would wane and at Sunday midnight it would be in half phase again, the Sun would rise and a new light phase would start. One thing I expected but didn’t find was dim sunlight. Jupiter is a long way out; it gets only one twenty-seventh the sunlight that Earth does. I expected that we would always be in a sort of twilight.

It didn’t work out that way. It seemed to me that the sunlight was just as bright as on Earth.

George says that this is an optical illusion and that it has to do with the way the human eye works, because the iris of the eye simply shuts out light it doesn’t need. Bright desert sunlight back on Earth is maybe ten thousand foot-candles; the same thing on Ganymede is only four hundred foot- candles. But really good bright artificial light is only twenty–five foot candles and a “well-lighted” room is seldom that bright.

If you’ve got only a two-gallon bucket does it make any difference whether you fill it from the ocean or from a small pond? Sunlight on Ganymede was still more than the eye could accept, so it looked just as bright as sunlight on Earth.

I did notice, however, that it was almost impossible to get a sunburn.

5. “Share Croppers”

George got us a place to live when we had been there about a week, which was a lot better than most of the other immigrants did, but it didn’t suit him and it didn’t suit Molly and it didn’t really suit me.

The trouble was he had to take a job as a staff engineer with the colonial government to get quarters for us–and that meant he would be too tied down to prove a piece of land for homestead. But it did carry private family quarters with it, if you could call two rooms twelve feet square a home.

It was like this: the colony was made up of homesteaders and townies. The townies worked for the government and lived in government-owned buildings –except for a very few who were in private trade.

The townies included the Colonial Commission representative, Captain Hattie the pilot, the hydroponics engineers, the hospital staff, the engineers who ran the power plant and the heat trap, the staff of the local office of Project Jove, and everybody else who worked at anything but land farming.

But most of the colonials were homesteaders and that’s what George had meant us to be. Like most everybody, we had come out there on the promise of free land and a chance to raise our own food.

There was free land, all right, a whole planet of it. Putting up a house and proving a farm was another matter.

Here is the way it was supposed to work: A colonist comes out from Earth with his family and lands at Leda. The Colonial Commission gives him an apartment in town on arrival, helps him pick out a piece of land to improve and helps him get a house up on it. The Commission will feed him and his family for one Earth year–that is, two Ganymede years–while he gets a couple of acres under cultivation.

Then he has ten G-years in which to pay back the Commission by processing at least twenty acres for the Commission– and he is allowed to process as much land for himself as for the Commission during the time he is paying what he owes. At the end of five Earth years he owns a tidy little farm, free and clear. After that, he can spread out and acquire more land, get into trade, anything he likes. He has his toehold and has paid off his debt.

The Colonial Commission had a big expensive investment in having started the atmosphere project and made the planet fit to live on in the first place. The land processed by the colonists was its return on the investment; the day would come when the Colonial Commission would own thousands of acres of prime farmland on Ganymede which it could then sell Earthside to later settlers … if you wanted to emigrate from Earth you would have to pay for the privilege and pay high. People like us would not be able to afford it.

By that time, although Ganymede would be closed to free immigration, Callisto would have an atmosphere and pioneers could move in there and do it all over again. It was what the bankers call “Self-liquidating,” with the original investment coming from Earth.

But here is the way it actually did work out: when we landed there were only about thirty thousand people on Ganymede and they were geared to accept about five hundred immigrants an Earth year, which was about all the old-type ships could bring out. Remember, those power-pile ships took over five years for the round trip; it took a fleet of them to bring in that many a year.

Then the Star Rover II was renamed the Mayflower and turned over to the Colonial Commission, whereupon six thousand people were dumped on them all at once. We were about as welcome as unexpected overnight guests when there is sickness in the family.

The colonists had known, for a full Earth year, that we were coming, but they had not been able to protest. While Earth Sender can punch a message through to Ganymede anytime except when the Sun is smack in the way, at that time the best radio the colony could boast had to relay via Mars to reach Earth–and then only when Mars was at its closest approach to Jupiter– which it wasn’t.

I’ve got to admit that they did what they could for us. There was plenty to eat and they had managed to fix up places for us to sleep. The Immigrants’ Receiving Station had formerly been split up into family apartments; they had torn out the partitions and used the partitions to build bunks for the big dormitories we were stacked in. They had moved their town hall and made it over into a mess hall and kitchen for us. We were in out of the weather and well fed, even if we were about as crowded as we had been in the Mayflower.

You may ask why, with a year to get ready, they had not built new buildings for us? Well, we asked the same thing, only we weren’t asking, we were demanding, and we were sore about it!

They hadn’t built new buildings because they could not. Before the Earthmen moved in, Ganymede was bare rock and ice. Sure, everybody knows that–but does everybody know what that means? I’m sure I didn’t.

No lumber. No sheet metal. No insulation. No wires, No glass. No pipe. The settlers in North America built log cabins–no logs.

The big hydroponics sheds, the Receiving Station and a few other public buildings had been built with materials lifted a half a billion miles from Earth. The rest of Leda and every homesteader’s farm house had been built the hard way, from country rock. They had done their best for us, with what they had.

Only we didn’t appreciate it.

Of course we should not have complained. After all, as George pointed out, the first California settlers starved, nobody knows what happened to the Roanoke Colony, and the first two expeditions to Venus died to the last man. We were safe.

Anyhow, even if we had to put up with barracks for a while, there was all that free land, waiting for us.

On close inspection, it looked as if it would have to wait quite a while. That was why George had given in and taken a staff engineering job. The closest land to town open to homesteading was nine miles away. To find enough land for six thousand people meant that most of them would have to go about eighteen to twenty miles away.

“What’s twenty miles? A few minutes by tube, an up-and-down hop for a copter–brother, have you ever walked twenty miles? And then walked back again?

It wasn’t impossible to settle six thousand people that far from town; it was just difficult–and slow. The pioneer explorer used to set out with his gun

and an axe; the settler followed by hitching his oxen to a wagonload of furniture and farm tools. Twenty miles meant nothing to them.

They weren’t on Ganymede.

The colony had two tractor trucks; another had come in the Mayflower. That’s all the transportation there was on the whole planet–not just to settle six thousand people but for the daily needs of thirty thousand people who were there ahead of us.

They explained it all to us at a big meeting of heads of families. I wasn’t supposed to be there but it was held outdoors and there was nothing to stop me. The chief ecologist and the chief engineer of the planet were there and the chairman of the colony council presided. Here was the proposition:

What Ganymede really needed was not more farmers, but manufacturing. They needed prospectors and mines and mills and machine shops. They needed all the things you can make out of metal and which they simply could not afford to import from Earth. That’s what they wanted us to work on and they would feed any of us who accepted, not just for a year, but indefinitely.

As for any who insisted on homesteading–well, the land was there; help ourselves. There wasn’t enough processing machinery to go around, so it might be two or three years before any particular immigrant got a chance to process his first acre of ground.

Somebody stood up near the front of the crowd and yelled, “We’ve been swindled!”

It took Mr. Tolley, the chairman, quite a while to calm them down. When they let him talk again, he said, “Maybe you have been swindled, maybe you haven’t. That’s a matter of opinion. I’m quite willing to concede that conditions here are not the way they were represented to you when you left Earth. In fact–“

Somebody yelled. “That’s mighty nice of you!” only the tone was sarcastic.

Mr. Tolley looked vexed. “You folks can either keep order, or I’ll adjourn this meeting.”

They shut up again and he went on. Most of the present homesteaders had processed more land than they could cultivate. They could use hired hands to raise more crops. There was a job waiting for every man, a job that would keep him busy and teach him Ganymede farming–and feed his wife and family-while he was waiting his turn to homestead.

You could feel a chill rolling over the crowd when the meaning of Mr. Tolley’s words sunk in. They felt the way Jacob did when he had labored seven years and then was told he would have to labor another seven years to get the girl he really wanted. I felt it myself, even though George had already decided on the staff job.

A man spoke up. “Mr. Chairman!” “Yes? Your name, please.”

“Name of Saunders. I don’t know how the rest of them feel, but I’m a farmer. Always have been. But I said ‘farmer,’ not sharecropper. I didn’t come here to hire out to no boss. You can take your job and do what you see fit with it. I stand on my rights!”

There was scattered applause and the crowd began to perk up. Mr. Tolley looked at him and said, “That’s your privilege, Mr. Saunders.”

“Huh? Well, I’m glad you feel that way, Mr. Chairman. Now let’s cut out the nonsense. I want to know two things: what piece of land am I going to get and when do I lay hands on some machinery to start putting it into condition?”

Mr. Tolley said, “You can consult the land office about your first question. As to the second, you heard the chief engineer say that he estimates the average wait for processing machinery will be around twenty-one months.”

“That’s too long.”

“So it is, Mr. Saunders.”

“Well, what do you propose to do about it?” Mr. Tolley shrugged and spread his hands. “I’m not a magician. We’ve asked the Colonial Commission by urgent message going back on the Mayflower not to send us any more colonists on the next trip, but to send us machinery. If they agree, there may be some relief from the situation by next winter. But you have seen–all of you have already seen–that the Colonial Commission makes

decisions without consulting us. The first trip of the Mayflower should have been all cargo; you folks should have waited.”

Saunders thought about it. “Next winter, eh? That’s five months away. I guess I can wait–I’m a reasonable man. But no sharecropping; that’s outl” “I didn’t say you could start homesteading in five months, Mr. Saunders. It may be twenty-one months or longer.”

“No, indeedy!”

“Suit yourself. But you are confronted with a fact, not a theory. If you do have to wait and you won’t work for another farmer, how do you propose to feed yourself and your family in the mean time?”

Mr. Saunders looked around and grinned, “Why, in that case, Mr. Chairman, I guess the government will just have to feed us until the government can come through on its end of the deal. I know my rights.”

Mr. Tolley looked at him as if he had just bitten into an apple and found Saunders inside. “We won’t let your children starve,” he said slowly, “but as for you, you can go chew rocks. If you won’t work, you won’t eat.”

Saunders tried to bluster. “You can’t get away with it! I’ll sue the government and I’ll sue you as the responsible government official You can’t–“

“Shut up!” Mr. Tolley went on more quietly, speaking to all of us. “We might as well get this point straight. You people have been enticed into coming out here by rosy promises and you are understandably disappointed. But your contract is with the Colonial Commission back on Earth.

But you have no contract with the common council of Ganymede, of which I am chairman, and the citizens of Ganymede owe you nothing. We are trying to take care of you out of common decency.

“If you don’t like what we offer you, don’t start throwing your weight around with me; I won’t stand for it. Take it up with the representative of the Immigration Service. That’s what he is here for. Meeting’s adjourned!”

But the immigration representative wasn’t there; he had stayed away from the meeting.

6. Bees and Zeroes

We had been swindled all right. It was equally clear that there was no help for it. Some of the immigrants did see the Colonial Commission representative, but they got no comfort out of him. He had resigned, he said, fed up with trying to carry out impossible instructions five hundred million miles from the home office. He was going home as soon as his relief arrived.

That set them off again; if he could go home so could they. The Mayflower was still in orbit over us, taking on cargo. A lot of people demanded to go back in her.

Captain Harkness said no, he had no authority to let them deadhead half way across the system. So they landed back on the Commission representative, squawking louder than ever.

Mr. Tolley and the council finally settled it. Ganymede wanted no soreheads, no weak sisters. If the Commission refused to ship back those who claimed they were gypped and didn’t want to stay, then the next shipload wouldn’t even be allowed to land. The representative gave in and wrote Captain Harkness out a warrant for their passage.

We held a family pow-wow over the matter, in Peggy’s room in the hospital–it had to be there because the doctors were keeping her in a room pressurized to Earth normal

Did we stay, or did we go back? Dad was stuck in a rut. Back Earthside he at least had been working for himself; here he was just an employee. If he quit his job and elected to homestead, it meant working two or three G-years as a field hand before we could expect to start homesteading.

But the real rub was Peggy. In spite of having passed her physical examination Earthside she hadn’t adjusted to Ganymede’s low pressure. “We might as well face it,” George said to Molly. “We’ve got to get Peg back to the conditions she’s used to.”

Molly looked at him; his face was as long as my arm. “George, you don’t want to go back, do you?”

“That’s not the point, Molly. The welfare of the kids comes first.” He turned to me and added, “You’re not bound by this, Bill. You are big enough to make up your own mind. If you want to stay, I am sure it can be arranged.”

I didn’t answer right away. I had come into the family get-together pretty disgusted myself, not only because of the run-around we had gotten, but also because of a run-in I had had with a couple of the Colonial kids. But you know what it was that swung me around? That pressurized room. I had gotten used to low pressure and I liked it. Peggy’s room, pressurized to Earth normal, felt like swimming in warm soup. I could hardly breath. “I don’t think I want to go back,” I said.

Peggy had been sitting up in bed, following the talk with big eyes, like a little lemur. Now she said, “I don’t want to go back, eitherl”

Molly patted her hand and did not answer her, “George,” she said, “I’ve given this a lot of thought You don’t want to go back, I know. Neither does Bill But we don’t all have to go back. We can–“

“That’s out, Molly,” Dad answered firmly. “I didn’t marry you to split up. If you have to go back, I go back.”

“I didn’t mean that. Peggy can go back with the O’Farrells and my sister will meet her and take care of her at the other end. She wanted me to leave Peggy with her when she found I was determined to go. It will work out all right.” She didn’t look at Peggy as she said it.

“But, Molly!” Dad said.

“No George,” she answered, “I’ve thought this all out. My first duty is to you. It’s not as if Peggy wouldn’t be well taken care of; Phoebe will be a mother to her and–“

By now Peggy had caught her breath. “I don’t want to go live with Aunt Phoebe!” she yelled and started to bawl. George said, “It won’t work, Molly.”

Molly said, “George, not five minutes ago you were talking about leaving Bill behind, on his own.” “But Bill is practically a man!”

“He’s not too old to be lonesome. And I’m not talking about leaving Peggy alone; Phoebe will give her loving care. No, George, if the womenfolk ran home at the first sign of trouble there never would be any pioneers. Peggy has to go back, but I stay.”

Peggy stopped her blubbering long enough to say, “I won‘t go back! I’m a pioneer, too–ain’t I, Bill?” I said, “Sure kid, sure!” and went over and patted her hand. She grabbed onto mine.

I don’t know what made me say what I did then. Goodness knows the brat had never been anything but a headache, with her endless questions and her insistence that she be allowed to do anything I did. But I heard myself saying, “Don’t worry, Peggy. If you go. back, I’ll go with you.”

Dad looked at me sharply, then turned to Peggy. “Bill spoke hastily, Baby. You mustn’t hold him to that.” Peggy said, “You did so mean it, didn’t you, Bill?”

I was regretting it already. But I said, “Sure, Peggy.”

Peggy turned back to Dad. “See? But it doesn’t matter; we’re not going back, not any of us. Please Daddy –I’ll get well, I promise you I will. I’m getting better every day.”

Sure, she was–in a pressurized room. I sat there, sweating, and wishing I had kept my big mouth shut. Molly said, “It defeats me, George. What do you think?”

“Mmmm–“

“Well?”

“Uh, I was thinking we could pressurize one room in our quarters. I could rig some sort of an impeller in the machine shop.” Peggy was suddenly all over her tears. “You mean I can get out of the hospital?”

“That’s the idea, Sugar, if Daddy can work it.”

Molly looked dubious. “That’s no answer to our problems, George.”

“Maybe not.” Dad stood up and squared his shoulders. “But I have decided one thing; we all go, or we’ll all stay. The Lermers stand together. That’s settled.”

Homesteading wasn’t the only thing we had been mistaken about. There was Scouting on Ganymede even if the news hadn’t gotten back to Earth. There hadn’t been any meetings of the Mayflower troops after we landed; everybody had been just too busy to think about it. Organized Scouting is fun, but sometimes there just isn’t time for it.

There hadn’t been any meetings of the Leda Troop, either. They used to meet in their town hall; now we had their town hall as a mess hall, leaving them out in the cold. I guess that didn’t tend to make them fee! chummy towards us.

I ran into this boy over in the Exchange. Just as he was passing me I noticed a little embroidered patch on his chest. It was a homemade job and not very good, but I spotted it. “Hey!” I said.

He stopped. ” ‘Hey’ yourself! Were you yelling at me?” “Uh, yes. You’re a Scout, aren’t you?”

“Certainly.”

“So am I. My name’s Bill Lermer. Shake.” I slipped him the Scout grip.

He returned it. “Mine’s Sergei Roskov.” He looked me over. “You’re one of the Johnny-Come-Latelies, aren’t you?” “I came over in the Mayflower” I admitted.

“That’s what I meant. No offense– I was born Earth-side, myself. So you used to be a Scout, back home. That’s good. Come around to meeting and

we’ll sign you up again.”

“I’m still a Scout,” I objected.

“Huh? Oh, I get you–‘Once a Scout, always a Scout.’ Well, come around and we’ll make it official.”

That was a very good time for me to keep my lip zipped. But not me–oh, no! When comes the Tromp of Doom, I’ll still be talking instead of listening. I said, “It’s as official as it can be. I’m senior patrol leader, Baden-Powell Troop.”

“Huh? You’re kind of far away from your troop, aren’t you?”

So I told him all about it. He listened until I was through, then said quietly, “And you laddie bucks had the nerve to call yourselves the ‘Boy Scouts of Ganymede.’ Anything else you would like to grab? You already have our meeting hall; maybe you’d like to sleep in our beds?”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing.” He seemed to be thinking it over. “Just a friendly warning, Bill–” “Huh?”

“There is only one senior patrol leader around here-and you’re looking right at him. Don’t make any mistake about it. But come on around to

meeting anyhow,” he added. “You’ll be welcome. We’re always glad to sign up a new tenderfoot.”

I went back to the Receiving Station and looked up Hank Jones and told him all about it. He looked at me admiringly. “William, old son,” he said, “I’ve got to hand it to you. It takes real talent to louse things up that thoroughly. It’s not easy.”

“You think I’ve messed things up?”

“I hope not. Well, let’s look up Doc Archibald and see what can be done.”

Our troop master was holding clinic; we waited until the patients were out of the way, then went in. He said, “Are you two sick, or just looking for a ticket to gold brick?”

“Doc,” I said, “we were wrong. There are so Scouts on Ganymede.” “So I know,” he answered.

I said, “Huh?”

“Mr. Ginsberg and Mr. Bruhn and I have been negotiating with the senior Scout officials here to determine just how our troops will be taken into the parent organization. It’s a bit complicated as there are actually more Mayflower Scouts than there are in the local troop. But they have jurisdiction, of course.”

I said, “Oh.”

“Well have a joint meeting in a few days, after we get the rules ironed out.”

I thought it over and decided I had better tell him what had happened, so I did.

He listened, not saying anything. Finally I said, “Hank seems to think I’ve messed things up. What do you think, Doc?” “Mmmm–” he said. “Well, I hope he’s wrong. But I think I may say you haven’t helped the situation any.”

I didn’t know what to say. “Don’t look so tragic about it,” he urged. “You’ll get well. Now run along and forget it. It may not make any difference.”

But it did make a difference. Doc and the others had been pitching for our troops to be recognized as properly constituted troops, with all ratings acknowledged. But after Sergei spread the word around, the regular Ganymede Scouts all squawked that we were nothing but a bunch of tenderfeet, no matter what we had been back on Earth. The place for us to start was the bottom; if we were any good, we could prove it– by tests.

It was compromised; George says things like that are always compromised. Ratings were confirmed on probation, with one G-year to make up any tests that were different. Our troops were kept intact But there was one major change:

All patrol leaders had to be from the original Ganymede Scouts; they were transferred from the Leda troop. I had to admit the justice of it. How could I be a patrol leader on Ganymede when I was still so green that I didn’t know northwest from next week? But it didn’t set well with the other fellows who had been patrol leaders when the word got around that I was responsible for the flies in the soup.

Hank talked it over with me. “Billy my boy,” he told me, “I suppose you realize that you are about as popular as ants at a picnic?” “Who cares?” I objected.

“You care. Now is the time for all good men to perform an auto da fe”

“What in great blazing moons is an auto da fe?”

“In this case it means for you to transfer to the Leda Troop.”

“Have you gone crazy? You know what those guys think of us, especially me. I’d be lucky to get away with my life.”

“Which just goes to show how little you know about human nature. Sure, it would be a little rough for a while, but it’s the quickest way to gain back some respect.”

“Hank, you really are nuts. In that troop I really would be a tenderfoot–and how!”

“That’s just the point,” Hank went on quietly, “We’re all tenderfeet–only here in our own troop it doesn’t show. If we stay here, we’ll keep on being tenderfeet for a long time. But if we transfer, we’ll be with a bunch who really know their way around–and some of it will rub off on us.”

“Did you say ‘we’?”

“I said ‘we’.”

“I catch on. You want to transfer, so you worked tip this gag about how I ought to do so, so you would have company. A fine chum you are!”

He just grinned, completely unembarrassed. “Good old Bill! Hit him in the head eight or nine times and he can latch on to any idea. It won’t be so bad, Bill. In precisely four months and nine days we won’t be tenderfeet; we’ll be old timers.”

“Why the exact date?”

“Because that is the due date of the Mayflower on her next trip–as soon as they arrive they‘ll be the Johnny-Come-Latelies.” “Oh!”

Anyhow, we did it–and it was rough at first, especially on me … like the night they insisted that I tell them how to be a hero. Some twerp had gotten hold of the meteorite story. But the hazing wasn’t too bad and Sergei put a stop to it whenever he caught them at it. After a while they got tired of it.

Sergei was so confounded noble about the whole thing that I wanted to kick him.

The only two merit badges to amount to anything that stood in the way of my getting off probation and back up to my old rating of Eagle Scout were agronomy and planetary ecology, Ganymede style. They were both tough subjects but well worth studying. On Ganymede you had to know them to stay alive, so I dug in.

Ecology is the most involved subject I ever tackled. I told George so and he said possibly politics was worse–and on second thought maybe politics was just one aspect of ecology. The dictionary says ecology is “the science of the interrelations of living organisms and their environment.” That doesn’t get you much, does it? It’s like defining a hurricane as a movement of air.

The trouble with ecology is that you never know where to start because everything affects everything else. An unseasonal freeze in Texas can affect the price of breakfast in Alaska and that can affect the salmon catch and that can affect something else.

Or take the old history book case: the English colonies took England’s young bachelors and that meant old maids at home and old maids keep cats and the cats catch field mice and the field mice destroy the bumble bee nests and bumble bees are necessary to clover and cattle eat clover and cattle furnish the roast beef of old England to feed the soldiers to protect the colonies that the bachelors emigrated to, which caused the old maids.

Not very scientific, is it? I mean you have too many variables and you can’t put figures to them. George says that if you can’t take a measurement and write it down in figures you don’t know enough about a thing to call what you are doing with it “science” and, as for him, hell stick to straight engineering, thank you.

But there were some clear cut things about applied ecology on Ganymede which you could get your teeth into. Insects, for instance–on Ganymede, under no circumstances do you step on an insect. There were no insects on Ganymede when men first landed there. Any insects there now are there because the bionomics board planned it that way and the chief ecologist okayed the invasion. He wants that insect to stay right where it is, doing whatever it is that insects do; he wants it to wax and grow fat and raise lots of little insects.

Of course a Scout doesn’t go out of his way to step on anything but black widow spiders and the like, anyhow–but it really brings it up to the top of your mind to know that stepping on an insect carries with it a stiff fine if you are caught, as well as a very pointed lecture telling you that the colony can get along very nicely without you but the insects are necessary.

Or take earthworms. I knowthey are worth their weight in uranium because I was buying them before I was through. A farmer can’t get along without

earthworms.

Introducing insects to a planet isn’t as easy as it sounds. Noah had less trouble with his animals, two by two, because when the waters went away he still had a planet that was suited to his load. Ganymede isn’t Earth.

Take bees–we brought bees in the Mayflower but we didn’t turn them loose; they were all in the shed called “Oahu” and likely to stay there for a smart spell. Bees need clover, or a reasonable facsimile. Clover would grow on Ganymede but our real use for clover was to fix nitrogen in the soil and thereby refresh a worn out field. We weren’t planting clover yet because there wasn’t any nitrogen in the air to fix–or not much.

But I am ahead of my story. This takes us into the engineering side of ecology. Ganymede was bare rock and ice before we came along, cold as could be, and no atmosphere to speak of–just traces of ammonia and methane. So the first thing to do was to give it an atmosphere men could breathe.

The material was there–ice. Apply enough power, bust up the water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen goes up–naturally–and the oxygen sits on the surface where you can breathe it. That went on for more than fifty years.

Any idea how much power it takes to give a planet the size of Ganymede three pressure-pounds of oxygen all over its surface?

Three pressure-pounds per square inch means nine mass pounds, because Ganymede has only one third the surface gravitation of Earth. That means you have to start with nine pounds of ice for every square inch of Ganymede–and that ice is cold to start with, better than two hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

First you warm it to the freezing point, then you melt it, then you dissociate the water molecule into oxygen and hydrogen–not in the ordinary laboratory way by electrolysis, but by extreme heat in a mass converter. The result is three pressure pounds of oxygen and hydrogen mix for that square inch. It’s not an explosive mixture, because the hydrogen, being light, sits on top and the boundary layer is too near to being a vacuum to maintain burning.

But to carry out this breakdown takes power and plenty of it–65,000 BTUs for each square inch of surface, or for each nine pounds of ice, whichever way you like it. That adds up; Ganymede may be a small planet but it has 135,000,000,000,000,000 square inches of surface. Multiply that by 65,000 BTUs for each square inch, then convert British Thermal Units to ergs and you get:

92,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ergs.

Ninety-two-and-a-half million billon quadrillion ergs! That figure is such a beauty that I wrote it down in my diary and showed it to George.

He wasn’t impressed. George said that all figures were the same size and nobody but a dimwit is impressed by strings of zeroes. He made me work out what the figure meant in terms of mass-energy, by the good old E = MC2 formula, since mass-energy converters were used to give Ganymede its atmosphere.

By Einstein’s law, one gram mass equals 9×1020 ergs, so that fancy long figure works out to be 1.03×1011 grams of energy, or 113,200 tons. It was ice, mostly, that they converted into energy, some of the same ice that was being turned into atmosphere–though probably some country rock crept in along with the ice. A mass converter will eat anything.

Let’s say it was all ice; that amounts to a cube of ice a hundred and sixty feet on an edge. That was a number I felt I could understand.

I showed my answer to George and he still was not impressed. He said I ought to be able to understand one figure just as easily as the other, that both meant the same thing, and both figures were the same size.

Don’t get the idea that Ganymede’s atmosphere was made from a cube of ice 160 feet on a side; that was just the mass which had to be converted to energy to turn the trick. The mass of ice which was changed to oxygen and hydrogen would, if converted back into ice, cover the entire planet more than twenty feet deep —like the ice cap that used to cover Greenland.

George says all that proves is that there was a lot of ice on Ganymede to start with and that if we hadn’t had mass converters we could never have colonized it. Sometimes I think engineers get so matter of fact that they miss a lot of the juice in life.

With three pressure-pounds of oxygen on Ganymede and the heat trap in place and the place warmed up so that blood wouldn’t freeze in your veins, colonists could move in and move around without wearing space suits and without living in pressure chambers.

The atmosphere project didn’t stop, however. In the first place, since Ganymede has a low escape speed, only 1.8 miles per second compared with

Earth’s 7 m/s, the new atmosphere would gradually bleed off to outer space, especially the hydrogen, and would be lost– in a million years or so. In

the second place, nitrogen was needed.

We don’t need nitrogen to breathe and ordinarily we don’t think much about it. But it takes nitrogen to make protein–muscle. Most plants take it out of the ground; some plants, like clover and alfalfa and beans, take it out of the air as well and put it back into the ground. Ganymede’s soil was rich in nitrogen; the original scanty atmosphere was partly ammonia–but the day would come when we would have to put the nitrogen back in that we were taking out. So the atmosphere project was now turned to making nitrogen.

This wasn’t as simple as breaking up water; it called for converting stable isotope oxygen-16 into stable isotope nitrogen-14, an energy consuming reaction probably impossible in nature–or so the book said–and long considered theoretically impossible.

I hadn’t had any nucleonics beyond high school physics, so I skipped the equations. The real point was, it could be done, in the proper sort of a mass-energy converter, and Ganymede would have nitrogen in her atmosphere by the time her fields were exhausted and had to be replenished.

Carbon dioxide was no problem; there was dry ice as well as water ice on Ganymede and it had evaporated into the atmosphere long before the first homesteader staked out a claim.

Not that you can start farming with oxygen, carbon dioxide, and a stretch of land. That land was dead. Dead as Christopher Columbus. Bare rock, sterile, no life of any sort–and there never had been any life in it. It’s a far piece from dead rock to rich, warm, black soil crawling with bacteria and earthworms, the sort of soil you have to have to make a crop.

It was the job of the homesteaders to make the soil.

See how involved it gets? Clover, bees, nitrogen, escape speed, power, plant-animal balance, gas laws, compound interest laws, meteorology–a mathematical ecologist has to think of everything and think of it ahead of time. Ecology is explosive; what seems like a minor and harmless invasion can change the whole balance. Everybody has heard of the English sparrow.

There was the Australian jack rabbit, too, that darn near ate a continent out of house and home. And the Caribbean mongoose that killed the chickens it was supposed to protect. And the African snail that almost ruined the Pacific west coast before they found a parasite to kill it.

You take a harmless, useful insect, plant, or animal to Ganymede and neglect to bring along its natural enemies and after a couple of seasons you’ll wish you had imported bubonic plague instead.

But that was the chief ecologist’s worry; a farmer’s job was engineering agronomy–making the soil and then growing things in it.

That meant taking whatever you came to–granite boulders melted out of the ice, frozen lava flows, pumice, sand, ancient hardrock–and busting it up into little pieces, grinding the top layers to sand, pulverizing the top few inches to flour, and finally infecting the topmost part with a bit of Mother Earth herself-then nursing what you had to keep it alive and make it spread. It wasn’t easy.

But it was interesting. I forgot all about my original notion of boning up on the subject just to pass a merit badge test. I asked around and found out where I could see the various stages going on and went out and had a look for myself. I spent most of one light phase just looking.

When I got back to town I found that George had been looking for me. “Where in blazes have you been?” he wanted to know. “Oh, just out and around,” I told him, “seeing how the ‘steaders do things.”

He wanted to know where I had slept and how I had managed to eat? “Bill, it’s all very well to study for your merit badges but that’s no reason to turn into a tramp,” he objected. “I guess I have neglected you lately–I’m sorry.” He stopped and thought for a moment, then went on, “I think you had better enter school here. It’s true they haven’t much for you, but it would be better than running around at loose ends.”

“George?”

“Yes, that’s probably the best-huh?”

“Have you completely given up the idea of home-steading?”

Dad looked worried. “That’s a hard question, Bill. I still want us to, but with Peggy sick–it’s difficult to say. But our name is still in the hat. I’ll have to make up my mind before the drawing.”

“Dad, I’ll prove it.” “Eh?”

“You keep your job and take care of Peggy and Molly. I’ll make us a farm.”

7. Johnny Appleseed

The drawing of our division took place three weeks later; the next day George and I walked out to see what we had gotten. It was west of town out through Kneiper’s Ridge, new country to me; I had done my exploring east of town, over toward the power plant, where most of the proved land was located.

We passed a number of farms and some of them looked good, several acres in cultivation, green and lush, and many more acres already chewed level. It put me in mind of Illinois, but there was something missing. I finally figured out what it was–no trees.

Even without trees it was beautiful country. On the right, north of us, were the foothills of the Big Rock Candy Mountains. Snow-covered peaks thrust up beyond them, twenty or thirty miles away. On the left, curving in from the south and closer than it came to Leda, was Laguna Serenidad. We were a couple of hundred feet higher than the lake. It was a clear day and I tried to see the far shore, but I couldn’t be sure.

It was a mighty cheerful scene. Dad felt it, too. He strode along, whistling “Beulah Land” off key. I get my musical talent from Anne. He broke off and said, “Bill, I envy you.”

I said, “We’ll all be together yet, George. I’m the advance guard.” I thought a bit and said, “George, do you know what the first thing I raise is going to be-after I get some food crops in?”

“What?”

“I’m going to import some seed and raise you some tobacco.” “Oh, no, Son!”

“Why not?” I knew he was touched by it, because he called me ‘Son’. “I could do it, as well as not.”

“It’s a kind thought, but we’ll have to stick to the main chance. By the time we can afford that, I will have forgotten how to light a pipe. Honest, I don’t miss it.”

We slogged along a bit further, not saying anything but feeling close together and good. Presently the road played out. Dad stopped and took his sketch map out of his pouch. “This must be about it.”

The sketch showed where the road stopped, with just a dotted line to show where it would be, some day. Our farm was outlined on it, with the nearest comer about half a mile further along where the road ought to be and wasn’t. By the map, the edge of our property–or what would be ours if we proved it–ran along the north side of the road about a quarter of a mile and from there back toward the foothills. It was marked “Plot 117-H-2” and had the chief engineer’s stamp on it.

Dad was staring at where the road ended. There was a lava flow right across it, high as my head and rough as a hard winter in Maine. “Bill,” he said, “How good an Indian are you?”

“Fair, I guess.”

“We’ll have to try to pace it off and hold a straight line due west.”

But it was almost impossible to do it. We struggled and slipped on the lava and made detours. Lava looks soft and it isn’t. Dad slipped and skinned his shin and I discovered that I had lost track of how many paces we had come. But presently we were across the flow and in a boulder field. It was loose rubble, from pieces the size of a house down to stuff no bigger than your fist–stuff dropped by the ice when it melted and formed Laguna

Serenidad.

George says that Ganymede must have had a boisterous youth, covered with steam and volcanoes.

The boulder field was somewhat easier going but it was even harder to hold a straight line. After a bit Dad stopped. “Bill,” he said, “do you know where we are?”

“No,” I admitted, “but we aren’t really lost. If we head back east we are bound to come to proved ground.” “Perhaps we had better.”

“Wait a minute.” There was a particularly big boulder ahead of us. I picked a way and managed to scramble to the top with nothing worse than a cut on my hand. I stood up. “I can see the road,” I told Dad. “We’re north of where we ought to be. And I think maybe we’ve come too far.” I marked a spot with my eye and came down.

We worked south the amount I thought was right and then headed east again. After a bit I said, “I guess we missed it, George. I’m not much of an In- He said, “So? What’s this?” He was a little ahead of me and had stopped.

It was a cairn with a flat rock on top. Painted on it was: “117-H-2, SE corner.”

We had been on our farm for the past half hour; the big boulder I had climbed up on was on it.

We sat down on a fairly flat rock and looked around. Neither of us said anything for a while; we were both thinking the same thing: if this was a farm, I was my own great uncle.

After a bit Dad muttered something. I said, “What did you say?”

“Golgotha,” he said out loud. “Golgotha, the place of skulls.” He was staring straight ahead.

I looked where he was looking; there was a boulder sitting on top of another and the way the sun caught it, it did look like a skull. It leered at us.

It was so darn quiet you could hear your hair grow. The place was depressing me. I would have given anything to hear something or see something move. Anything–just a lizard darting out from behind a rock, and I could have kissed it.

But there were no lizards here and never had been.

Presently Dad said, “Bill, are you sure you want to tackle this?” “Sure I’m sure.”

“You don’t have to, you know. If you want to go back to Earth and go to M.I.T., I could arrange it for the next trip.”

Maybe he was thinking that if I went back, I could take Peggy with, me and she would be willing to go. Maybe I should have said something about it. But didn’t; I said, “Are you going back?”

“No.”

“Neither am I.” At the moment is was mostly stubbornness. I had to admit that our “farm” wasn’t flowing with milk and honey; in fact it looked grim. Nobody but a crazy hermit would want to settle down in such a spot.

“Think it over, Bill.” “I’ve thought it over.”

We sat there a while longer, not saying anything, just thinking long thoughts. Suddenly we were almost startled out of our boots by somebody

yodelling at us. A moment before I had been wishing to hear just anything, but when it came it was like unexpectedly encountering a clammy hand in

the dark.

We both jumped and Dad said, “What in the–?” I looked around. There was a large man coming toward us. In spite of his size he skipped through the rocks like a mountain goat, almost floating in the low gravity. As he got closer I knew I had seen him before; he was on the Court of Honor, a Mr. Schultz.

Dad waved to him and pretty soon he reached us. He stood half a head taller than Dad and would have made the pair of us, he was so big. His chest was as thick as my shoulders were broad and his belly was thicker than that. He had bushy, curly red hair and his beard spread out over his chest like a tangle of copper springs. “Greetings, citizens,” he boomed at us, “my name is Johann Schultz.”

Dad introduced us and he shook hands and I almost lost mine in his. He fixed his eyes on me and said, “I’ve seen you before, Bill.” I said I guessed he had, at Scout meetings. He nodded and added, “A patrol leader, no?”

I admitted that I used to be. He said, “And soon again,” as if the matter were all settled. He turned to Dad. “One of the kinder saw you going past on the road, so Mama sent me to find you and bring you back to the house for tea and some of her good coffee cake.”

Dad said that was very kind but that we didn’t want to impose. Mr. Schultz didn’t seem to hear him. Dad explained what we were there for and showed him the map and pointed out the cairn. Mr. Schultz nodded four or five times and said, “So we are to be neighbors. Good, good!” He added to Dad “My neighbors call me John, or sometimes ‘Johnny’.” Dad said his name was George and from then on they were old friends.

Mr. Schultz stood by the cairn and sighted off to the west and then north to the mountains. Then he scrambled up on a big boulder where he could see better and looked again. We went up after him.

He pointed to a rise west of us. “You put your house so, not too far from the road, but not on it. And first you work this piece in here and next season you work back further toward the hills.” He looked at me and added. “No?”

I said I guessed so. He said, “It is good land, Bill. You will make a fine farm.” He reached down and picked up a piece of rock and rubbed it between his fingers. “Good land,” he repeated.

He laid it down carefully, straightened up, and said, “Mama will be waiting for us.”

Mama was waiting for us, all right, and her idea of a piece of coffee cake was roughly what they used to welcome back the Prodigal Son. But before we got into the house we had to stop and admire the Tree.

It was a real tree, an apple tree, growing in a fine bluegrass lawn out in front of his house. Furthermore it was bearing fruit on two of its limbs. I stopped and stared at it.

“A beauty, eh, Bill?” Mr. Schultz said, and I agreed. “Yes,” he went on, “it’s the most beautiful tree on Ganymede–you know why? Because it’s the

only tree on Ganymede.” He laughed uproariously and dug me in the ribs as if he had said something funny. My ribs were sore for a week.

He explained to Dad all the things he had had to do to persuade it to grow and how deep down he had had to go to prepare for it and how he had had to channel out to drain it. Dad asked why it was bearing only on one side. “Next year we pollenate the other side,” he answered, “and then we have Stark’s Delicious. And Rome Beauties. This year, Rhode Island Greenings and Winesaps.” He reached up and picked one. “A Winesap for you, Bill.”

I said thanks and bit into it. I don’t know when I’ve tasted anything so good.

We went inside and met Mama Schultz and four or five other Schultzes of assorted sizes, from a baby crawling around in the sand on the floor up to a girl as old as I was and nearly as big. Her name was Gretchen and her hair was red like her father’s, only it was straight and she wore it in long braids. The boys were mostly blond, including the ones I met later.

The house was mainly a big living room, with a big table down the middle of it. It was a solid slab of rock, maybe four feet wide and twelve or thirteen feet long, supported by three rock pillars. A good thing it was rock, the way Mama Schultz loaded it down.

There were rock slab benches down the long sides and two real chairs, one at each end, made out of oil drums and padded with stuffed leather cushions.

Mama Schultz wiped her face and hands on her apron and shook hands and insisted that Dad sit down in her chair; she wouldn’t be sitting down

much, she explained. Then she turned back to her cooking while Gretchen poured tea for us.

The end of the room was the kitchen and was centered around a big stone fireplace. It had all the earmarks of being a practical fireplace–and it was, as I found out later, though of course nothing had ever been burned in it. It was really just a ventilation hole. But Papa Schultz had wanted a fireplace so he had a fireplace. Mama Schultz’s oven was set in the side of it.

It was faced with what appeared to be Dutch tile, though I couldn’t believe it. I mean, who is going to import anything as useless as Ornamental tile all the way from Earth? Papa Schultz saw me looking at them and said, “My little girl Kathy paints good, huh?” One of the medium-sized girls blushed and giggled and left the room.

I had the apple down to a very skinny core and was wondering what to do with it in that spotless room when Papa Schultz stuck out his hand. “Give it to me, Bill.”

I did. He took out his knife and very gently separated out the seeds. One of the kids left the room and fetched him a tiny paper envelope in which he placed the seeds and then sealed it. He handed it to me. “There, Bill,” he said. “I have only one apple tree, but you have eight!”

I was sort of surprised, but I thanked him. He went on, “That place just this side of where you will build your house–if you will fill that gully from the bottom, layer by layer, building your soil as you go, with only a very little ‘pay dirt’ you will have a place that will support a whole row of trees. When your seedlings are big, we’ll bud from my tree.”

I put them very carefully in my pouch.

Some of the boys drifted in and washed up and soon we were all sitting around the table and digging into fried chicken and mashed potatoes and tomato preserves and things. Mama Schultz sat beside me and kept pressing food on me and insisting that I wasn’t eating enough to keep body and soul together which wasn’t true.

Afterwards I got acquainted with the kids while George and Papa Schultz talked. Four of the boys I knew; they were Scouts. The fifth boy, Johann Junior –they called him “Yo”–was older than I, almost twenty, and worked in town for the chief engineer. The others were Hugo and Peter, both Cubs, then Sam, and then Vic, who was an Explorer Scout, same as I was. The girls were the baby, Kathy and Anna, who seemed to be twins but weren’t, and Gretchen. They all talked at once.

Presently Dad called me over. “Bill, you know we don’t rate a chance at a rock crusher for several months.” “Yes,” I said, somewhat mystified.

“What are your plans in the meantime?”

“Uh, well, I don’t know exactly. Study up on what I’ll have to do.”

“Mmrn … Mr. Schultz has very kindly offered to take you on as a farm hand in the meantime. What do you think of the idea?”

8. Land of My Own

Papa Schultz needed a field hand about as much as I need four ears, but that didn’t keep me from moving in. In that family everybody worked but the baby and you could count on it that she would be washing dishes as soon as she was up off the floor. Everybody worked all the time and seemed to enjoy it. When the kids weren’t working they were doing lessons and the boys were punished when they weren’t up on their lessons by being required to stay in from the fields.

Mama would listen to them recite while she cooked. Sometimes she listened to lessons in things I’m pretty sure she never had studied herself, but Papa Schultz checked up on them, too, so it didn’t matter.

Me, I learned about pigs. And cows. And chickens. And how you breed pay dirt to make more pay dirt. “Pay dirt” is the stuff that is actually imported from Earth, concentrated soil cultures with the bacteria and so forth in it you have to have to get a field alive.

There was an awful lot to learn. Take cows, now-half the people you meet can’t tell their left hands from their right so who would think that a cow

would care about such things? But they do, as I found out when I tried to milk one from the left.

Everything was stoop labor around the place, as primitive as a Chinese farm. The standard means of transportation was a wheelbarrow. I learned not to sneer at a wheelbarrow after I priced one at the Exchange.

The total lack of power machinery wasn’t through lack of power; the antenna on the farm house roof could pick up as much power as necessary–but there wasn’t any machinery. The only power machinery in the colony belonged to the whole colony and was the sort of thing the colony absolutely couldn’t get along without, like rock chewers and the equipment for the heat trap and the power plant itself.

George explained it this way: every load that was sent up from Earth was a compromise between people and cargo. The colonists were always yapping for more machinery and fewer immigrants; the Colonial Commission always insisted on sending as many people as possible and holding the imports down to a minimum.

“The Commission is right, of course,” he went on. “If we have people, we’ll get machinery–we’ll make it ourselves. By the time you have a family of your own, Bill, immigrants will arrive here bare-handed, no cargo at all, and we’ll be able to outfit a man with everything from plastic dishes for his cupboard to power cultivators for his fields.”

I said, “If they wait until I have a family, they’ll have a long wait. I figure a bachelor travels faster and further.”

Dad just grinned, as if he knew something I didn’t know and wouldn’t tell. I had walked into town to have dinner with him and Molly and the kid. I hadn’t seen much of them since I went to work for Papa Schultz. Molly was teaching school, Peggy couldn’t come out to the farm, of course, and Dad was very busy and very excited over a strike of aluminum oxides twenty miles east of town. He was in the project up to his ears and talking about having sheet aluminum on sale in another G-year.

As a matter or fact, cultivating a farm by stoop labor wasn’t too bad, not on Ganymede. Low gravity was a big help; you didn’t wear yourself out just dragging your own carcass around. I grossed a hundred and forty-two mass pounds, what with the way Mama Schultz stuffed me; that meant I weighed less than fifty pounds, field boots and all. A wheelbarrow was similarly light when loaded.

But the real advantage that made the work easy was something you might not guess. No weeds.

No weeds at all; we had very carefully not imported any. Once the land was built, making a crop was darn near a case of poking a seed into the ground and then stepping back quick before the stalk shot up and hit you in the eye.

Not that we didn’t work. There is plenty of work around a farm even with no weeds to worry about. And a light wheelbarrow load simply meant that we piled three times as much on. But we had fun, too; I never met a family that laughed so much.

I brought my squeeze box out from town and used to play it after supper. We would all sing, with Papa Schultz booming away on his own and leaving it up to the rest of us to find the key he was singing in. We had fun.

It turned out that Gretchen was an awful tease when she got over being shy. But I could always get her goat by pretending that her head was on fire and either warming my hands over her hair or threatening to pour water on her before she burned the place down.

The day finally came when it was my turn to have the colony’s crushers work on my land and I was almost sorry to see it arrive; I had had such a nice time at the Schultz’s. But by then I could caponize a rooster or plant a row of corn; I still had a lot to learn, but there wasn’t any good reason why I shouldn’t start making my own farm.

Dad and I had had to prepare our farm for the crusher by dynamiting the biggest boulders. A crusher will choke on anything much bigger than a barrel but it will handle up to that size very nicely. Dynamite is cheap, thank goodness, and we used plenty of it. The raw material is nitroglycerine which we didn’t have to import from Earth, the glycerine being refined from animal fats and the nitric acid being a synthetic byproduct of the atmosphere project.

Dad spent two weekends with me, making medium-sized ones out of big ones, then decided it was safe to trust me to set powder by myself and I finished the job. There was a little stream of melted snow water coming down from the hills at the far side of our property; we blew out a new bed for it to lead it close to the place where the house would go.

We left it dry for the time being, with a natural rock dam to blow up later. One fair-sized hill we moved entirely and blew it into a gully on the lake side of the land. Big charges that took and I almost got fitted for a halo through underestimating how far some of the stuff would throw.

It was easy work and lots of fun. I had a vibro-drill, borrowed from the engineer’s office; you could sink a charge hole with it twenty feet into rock as easily as you could sink a hot knife into butter. Then drop in the powder, fill the rest of the hole with rock dust, light the fuse, and run like the dickens!

But the most fun was blowing up that rock that looked like a grinning skull. I fixed it properly, it and its leer!

We had a visitor while we were dynamiting the land. Dad and I had just knocked off for lunch one day when Saunders, “The One-Man Lobby”–that’s George’s name for him–showed up. We invited him to share what we had; he had brought nothing but his appetite.

He complained about this and that. Dad tried to change the subject by asking him how he was getting along with his blasting. Saunders said it was slow work. Dad said, “You have the crusher the day after us, don’t you?”

Saunders admitted it and said he wanted to borrow some powder; he was running short of time. Dad let him have it, though it meant another trip out from town, after work, for him the next day. Saunders went on, “I’ve been looking this situation over, Mr. Lermer. We’re tackling it all wrong.”

George said, “So?”

Saunders said, “Yes, indeedy! Now in the first place this blasting ought not to be done by the homesteader; it should be done by trained crews, sent out by the government. It’s really part of the contract anyway; we’re supposed to receive processed land.”

Dad said mildly that, while that might be a nice idea, he didn’t know where they would find enough trained crews to do the work for fifteen hundred new farms.

“Let the government hire them!” Mr. Saunders answered. “Bring them in from Earth for that purpose. Now, see here, Mr. Lermer, you are in the chief engineer’s office. You ought to put in a word for the rest of us.”

George picked up the vibro and got ready to set a charge. Presently he answered, “I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong party. I’m in an entirely different department.”

I guess Mr. Saunders saw he was off on the wrong tack for he went on, “In the second place, I have been looking into the matter of the soil, or what they call ‘soil’–again they are off on the wrong foot.” He kicked a rock. “This stuff isn’t good for anything. You can’t grow anything in stuff like that.”

“Naturally not,” agreed Dad. “You have to make soil first.”

“That’s just what I’m getting at,” Saunders went on. “You have to have soil–good, black, rich soil. So they tell us to breed it, a square foot at a time. Plough garbage into it, raise earthworms–I don’t know how many tomfool stunts.”

“Do you know of a better way?”

“You bet you I do! That’s just what I’m getting at. Here we are, piddling along, doing things the way a bunch of bureaucrats who never made a crop tell us to, all for a few inches of second-rate soil–when there are millions of cubic feet of the richest sort of black soil going begging.”

Dad looked up sharply. “Where?”

“In the Mississippi Delta, that’s where! Black soil goes down there for hundreds of feet.”

We both looked at him, but he was quite serious about it. “Now here’s what you’ve got to have–Level the ground off, yes. But after that spread real Earth soil over the rock to a depth of at least two feet; then it will be worth while to farm. As it is, we are just wasting our time.”

Dad waited a bit before answering, “Have you figured out what this would cost?”

Mr. Saunders brushed that aside. “That’s not the point; the point is, that’s what we’ve got to have. The government wants us to settle here, doesn’t it? Well, then, if we all stick together and insist on it, we’ll get it.” He jerked his chin triumphantly.

George started to say something, then stopped. He patted rock dust in on top of his charge, then straightened up and wiped the sweat off his beard. “Listen, citizen,” he said, “can’t you see that we are busy? I’m about to light this fuse; I suggest that you back away out of danger.”

“Huh?” said Saunders. “How big a charge is it? How far?”

If he had kept his eyes open, he would have seen how big a charge it was and known how far to give back. Dad said, “Oh, say a mile and a half–or even two miles. And keep backing.”

Saunders looked at him, snorted disgustedly, and stalked away. We backed out of range and let her blow.

While we were setting the next charge I could see George’s lips moving. After a while he said, “Figuring gumbo mud conservatively at a hundred pounds per cubic foot it would take one full load of the Mayflower to give Mr. Saunders alone the kind of a farm he would like to have handed to him. At that rate it would take just an even thousand G-years–five hundred Earth years–for the Mayflower to truck in top-soil for farms for our entire party.”

“You forgot the Covered Wagon,” I said brightly.

George grinned. “Oh, yes! When the Covered Wagon is commissioned and in service we could cut it down to two hundred and fifty years–provided no new immigrants came in and there was a ban on having babies!” He frowned and added, “Bill, why is it that some apparently-grown men never learn to do simple arithmetic?” I didn’t know the answer, so he said, “Come on, Bill, let’s get on with our blasting. I’m afraid we’ll just have to piddle along in our inefficient way, even if it doesn’t suit our friend Saunders.”

The morning the crusher was scheduled to show up I was waiting for it at the end of the road. It came breezing down the road at twenty miles an hour, filling it from side to side. When it came to the wall of lava, it stopped. I waved to the operator; he waved back, then the machine grunted a couple of times, inched forward, and took a bite out of the lava.

Lava didn’t bother it; it treated it like peanut brittle. A vibro-cutter built into its under carriage would slice under the flow like a housewife separating biscuit from a pan, the big steel spade on the front of the thing would pry under and crack the bite off, and the conveyor would carry the chunk up into the jaws.

The driver had a choice of dropping the chewed up material under the rear rollers or throwing it off to the side. Just now he was throwing it away, leaving the clean slice made by the vibro-cutter as a road bed –a good road, a little dusty but a few rains would fix that.

It was terrifically noisy but the driver didn’t seem to mind. He seemed to enjoy it; there was a good breeze taking the dust away from him and he had his anti-silicosis mask pushed up on his forehead, showing the grin on his face.

By noon he was down to our place and had turned in. We had a bite to eat together, then he started in levelling a farm for me–five acres, the rest would have to wait. At that I was lucky for I was to get land to work months ahead of the original schedule.

The second trip of the Mayflower had brought in three more crushers and very few immigrants, just enough to replace those who had given up and gone back out of our party, that being the compromise the town council had worked out with the Colonial Commission.

The racket was still worse when the crusher bit into hard rock, instead of lava, but it was music to me and I didn’t get tired of watching. Every bite was a piece of land to me. At suppertime the second-shift driver showed up with Dad. We watched together for a while, then Dad went back to town. I stayed. About midnight I went over into a stretch that was not to be processed now, found a big rock to keep the Sun out of my eyes and lay down for a quick nap.

Then the relief driver was shaking me and saying, “Wake up, kid–you got a farm.”

I stood up and rubbed my eyes and looked around. Five acres, with just enough contour for drainage and a low hummock in the middle where the house would sit. I had a farm.

The next logical thing to do would have been to get the house up, but, under the schedule, I rated the use of a cud-chewer for the following week. A cud-chewer is a baby rock crusher. It uses a power pack instead of an antenna, it is almost fool proof and anybody can run one, and it finishes up what the crusher starts. It is small and low-powered compared with a crusher. The colony had about forty of them.

The crusher left loose rubble several feet deep in pieces as big as my fist. The cud-chewer had a fork spade on the front of it, several sizes of spade forks, in fact. The coarse fork went down into the loose rocks about eighteen inches and picked up the big ones. These drifted back into the hopper as the machine moved forward and were busted into stuff about the size of walnuts.

When you had been over the ground once with the coarse fork, you unshipped it and put on the medium fork and reset the chewing rollers. This time you went down only ten inches and the result was gravel. Then you did it again for medium-fine and then fine and when you were done the upper six inches or so was rock flour, fine as the best loam–still dead, but ready to be bred into life.

Round and round and round, moving forward an inch at a time. To get real use out of your time allotment the cud-chewer had to be moving twenty- four hours a day until they took it away from you. I stayed at it all through the first day, eating my lunch in the saddle. Dad spelled me after supper and Hank came out from town and we alternated through the night-light phase it was, actually, it being Monday night.

Papa Schultz found me asleep with my head on the controls late next afternoon and sent me back to his house to get some real sleep. Thereafter one of the Schultzes always showed up when I had been at it alone for four or five hours. Without the Schultzes I don’t know how Dad and I would have gotten through the dark phase of that week.

But they did help and by the time I had to pass the cud-chewer along I had nearly three and a half acres ready to be seeded with pay dirt.

Winter was coming on and I had my heart set on getting my house up and living in it during the winter month, but to do so I really had to hump. I had to get some sort of a holding crop in or the spring thaw would wash my top soil away. The short Ganymede year is a good idea and I’m glad they run it that way; Earth’s winters are longer than necessary. But it keeps you on the jump.

Papa Schultz advised grass; the mutated grass would grow in sterile soil much like growing things in hydroponic solutions. The mat of rootlets would hold my soil even if the winter killed it and the roots would furnish something through which the infection could spread from the “pay dirt.”

Pay dirt is fundamentally just good black soil from Earth, crawling with bacteria and fungi and microscopic worms–everything you need but the big fishing worms; you have to add those. However, it wouldn’t do simply to ship Earth dirt to Ganymede by the car load. In any shovelful of loam there are hundreds of things, plant and animal, you need for growing soil–but there are hundreds of other things you don’t want. Tetanus germs. Plant disease viruses. Cut worms. Spores. Weed seeds. Most of them are too small to be seen with the naked eye and some of them can’t even be filtered out

So to make pay dirt the laboratory people back on Earth would make pure cultures of everything they wanted to keep in the way of bacteria, raise the little worms under laboratory conditions, do the same for fungi and everything else they wanted to save–and take the soil itself and kill it deader than Luna, irradiate it, bake it, test it for utter sterility.

Then they would take what they had saved in the way of life forms and put it back into the dead soil That was “pay dirt,” the original pay dirt. Once on Ganymede the original stuff would be cut six ways, encouraged to grow, then cut again. A hundred weight of pay dirt supplied to a ‘steader might contain a pound of Terra’s own soil.

Every possible effort was made to “limit the invasion,” as the ecologists say, to what was wanted. One thing that I may not have mentioned about the trip out was the fact that our clothes and our baggage were sterilized during the trip and that we ourselves were required to take a special scrub before we put our clothes back on. It was the only good bath I got the whole two months, but it left me smelling like a hospital.

The colony’s tractor trucks delivered the pay dirt I was entitled to in order to seed my farm; I left the Schultz place early that morning to meet them. There is difference of opinion as to the best way to plant pay dirt; some ‘steaders spread it all over and take a chance on it dying; some build up little pockets six or eight feet apart, checker board style … safe but slow. I was studying the matter, my mind not made up, when I saw something moving down the road.

It was a line of men, pushing wheelbarrows, six of them. They got closer and I could see that it was all the male Schultzes. I went out to meet them. Every one of those wheelbarrows was loaded with garbage and all for me!

Papa Schultz had been saving it as a surprise for me. I didn’t know what to say. Finally I blurted out, “Gee, Papa Schultz, I don’t know when I’ll be able to pay you back!”

He looked fierce and said, “Who is speaking of paying back when we have compost running out of our ears yet?” Then he had the boys dump their loads down on top of my pay dirt, took a fork and began mixing it as gently as Mama Schultz folding in beaten egg white.

He took charge and I didn’t have to worry about the best way to use it. In his opinion–and you can’t bet that I didn’t buck itl–what we had was good for about an acre and his method was to spread it through the soil. But he did not select one compact acre; he laid out strips, seven of them, a couple of hundred yards long each and stretching across my chewed soil thirty-five or forty feet apart. Each of us took a wheelbarrow–their six and my one–and distributed the mix along each line.

When that was done and cairns had been set to show where the strips ran, we raked the stuff into the rock dust five or six feet on each side of each line. Around noon Mama and Gretchen showed up, loaded down, and we stopped and had a picnic.

After lunch Yo had to go back to town but he had almost finished his strip. Papa had finished his and proceeded to help Hugo and Peter who were

too small to swing a good rake. I dug in and finished mine soon enough to be able to finish what Yo had left.

Dad showed up at the end of the day, expecting to help me all evening–it was light phase and you could work as late as you could stand up under it-

– but there was nothing left to do. And he didn’t know how to thank them either.

I like to think that we would have gotten the farm made anyhow, without the Schultzes, and maybe we would have–but I’m sure not sure. Pioneers need good neighbors.

The following week I spent working artificial nitrates from the colony’s power pile into the spaces between the strips–not as good as pay dirt from Earth, but not as expensive, either.

Then I tackled sowing the grass, by hand, just like in the Bible, and then raking it gently in. That old pest Saunders showed up. He still did so every now and then, but never when Dad was around. I guess he was lonely. His family was still in town and he was camping out in a ten-foot rock shed he had built. He wasn’t really making a farm, not properly; I couldn’t figure out what he was up to. It didn’t make sense.

I said, “Howdy,” and went on with my work.

He watched me, looking sour, and finally said, “You still bent on breaking your heart on this stuff, aren’t you, youngster?” I told him I hadn’t noticed any wear and tear on my pump, and anyhow, wasn’t he making a farm, too?

He snorted. “Not likely!” “Then what are you doing?”

“Buying my ticket, that’s what.”

“Huh?”

“The only thing you can sell around this place is improved land. I’m beating them at their own game, that’s what. I’ll get that land in shape to unload it on some other sucker and then me and mine are heading straight back for that ever-lovin’ Earth. And that’s just what you’ll be doing if you aren’t an utter fool. You’ll never make a farm here. It can’t be done.”

I was getting very tired of him but I’m short on the sort of point-blank guts it takes to be flatly rude. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Look at Mr. Schultz– he’s got a good farm.”

Saunders snorted again. “You mean ‘Johnny Apple-seed?” “I mean Mr. Johann Schultz.”

“Sure, sure–Johnny Appleseed. That’s what everybody calls him in town. He’s nuts. You know what he did? He gave me a handful of apple seeds and acted like he had handed me the riches of Solomon.”

I stopped raking. “Well, hadn’t he?”

Saunders spat on the ground between us. “He’s a clown.”

I lifted up the head of the rake. I said, “Mr. Saunders, you are standing on my land, my property. I’ll give you just two shakes to get off it and never set foot on it again!”

He backed away and said, “Hey! You stop that! Watch what you are doing with that rake!” I said, “Git!”

He got.

The house was a problem. Ganymede has little quakes all the time. It has to do with “isostasy” which doesn’t mean a thing but “equal-pressure”

when you get right down to it, but it’s the science of how the mountains balance the seas and the gravitation of a planet all comes out even.

It has to do with tidal strains, too, which is odd, since Ganymede doesn’t have any tides; the Sun is too far away to matter and Ganymede always keeps the same face toward Jupiter. Oh, you can detect a little tide on Laguna Serenidad when Europa is closest to Ganymede and even a trifle from Callisto and lo, but what I mean is it doesn’t have tides—not like the Pacific Ocean.

What it does have is a frozen tidal strain. The way Mr. Hooker, the chief meteorologist, explains it is that Ganymede was closer to Jupiter when it cooled off and lost its rotation, so that there is a tidal bulge in the planet itself–sort of a fossil tidal bulge. The Moon has one, you know.

Then we came along and melted off the ice cap and gave Ganymede an atmosphere. That rearranged the pressures everywhere and the isostatic balance is readjusting. Result: little quakes all the time.

I’m a California boy; I wanted a quakeproof house. Schultzes had a quakeproof house and it seemed like a good idea, even though there had never been a quake heavy enough to knock a man down, much less knock a house down. On the other hand most of the colonists didn’t bother; it is hard to make a rock house really quakeproof.

Worse than that, it’s expensive. The basic list of equipment that a ‘steader is promised in his emigration contract reads all right, a hoe, a spade, a shovel, a wheelbarrow, a hand cultivator, a bucket, and so forth down the list–but when you start to farming you find that is only the beginning and you’ve got to go to the Exchange and buy a lot of other stuff. I was already in debt a proved acre and a half, nearly, before the house ever went up.

As usual we compromised. One room had to be quake proof because it had to be air tight–Peggy’s room. She was getting better all the time, but she still couldn’t take low pressure for any length of time. If the family was going to move out to the farm, her bedroom had to be sealed, it had to have an air lock on it, and we had to have an impeller. All that runs into money.

Before I was through I had to pledge two more acres. Dad tried to sign for it but they told him bluntly that while a ‘steader’s credit was good, his wasn’t. That settled the matter. We planned on one reinforced room and hoped to build on to it later. In the mean time the house would be a living room, ten by twelve, where I would sleep, a separate bedroom too small to swing a cat for George and Molly, and Peggy’s room. All but Peggy’s room would be dry wall rock with a patent roof.

Pretty small, eh? Well, what’s wrong with that? Abe Lincoln started with less.

I started in cutting the stone as soon as the seed was in. A vibro-saw is like a vibro-drill, except that it cuts a hair line instead of drilling a hole. When the power is on you have to be durned careful not to get your fingers or anything into the field, but it makes easy work of stone cutting. By the contract you got the use of one for forty-eight hours free and another forty-eight hours, if you wanted it, at a reduced rate.

I got my work lined up and managed to squeeze it into the two free days. I didn’t want to run up any more debt, because there was another thing I was hankering for, come not later than the second spring away–flicker flood lights. Papa Schultz had them for his fields and they just about doubled his crops. Earth plants aren’t used to three and half days of darkness, but, if you can tickle them during the dark phase with flicker lights, the old photosynthesis really gets in and humps itself.

But that would have to wait.

The patrol got the house up–the patrol I was in, I mean, the Auslanders. It was a surprise to me and yet it wasn’t, because everybody has a house raising; you can’t do it alone. I had already taken part in six myself–not just big-heartedness, don’t get me wrong. I had to learn how it was done.

But the patrol showed up before I had even passed the word around that I was ready to hold a house raising. They came swinging down our road; Sergei marched them up to where the house was to be, halted them, and said to me, “Bill, are your Scout dues paid up?” He sounded fierce. I said, “You know they are.”

“Then you can help. But don’t get in our way.” Suddenly he grinned and I knew I had been framed. He turned to the patrol and shouted, “House raising drill! Fall out and fall to.”

Suddenly it looked like one of those TV comedies where everything has been speeded up. I never saw anybody work the way they did. Let me tell you it doesn’t take Scout uniforms to make Scouts. None of us ever had uniforms; we couldn’t afford special clothes just for Scouting.

Besides the Auslanders there was Vic Schultz and Hank Jones, both from the Hard Rock patrol and Doug Okajima, who wasn’t even of our troop but still with the Baden-Powell. It did my heart good. I hadn’t seen much of the fellows lately; during light phase I always worked too late to get in to meetings; during dark phase a cold nine miles into town after supper is something to think twice about.

I felt sheepish to realize that while I might have forgotten them, they hadn’t forgotten me, and I resolved to get to meetings, no matter how tired I was.

And take the tests for those two merit badges, too–the very first chance I got.

That reminded me of another item of unfinished business, too–Noisy Edwards. But you can’t take a day off just to hunt somebody up and poke him in the snoot, not when you are making a farm. Besides it wouldn’t hurt anything for me to put on another ten pounds; I didn’t want it to be a repetition of the last time.

Dad showed up almost immediately with two men from his office and he took charge of bracing and sealing Peggy’s room. The fact that he showed up at all let me know that he was in on it–which he admitted. It had been Sergei’s idea and that was why Dad had put me off when I said it was about time to invite the neighbors in.

I got Dad aside. “Look, George,” I said, “how in tarnation are we going to feed ’em?” “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

“But I do worry about it!” Everybody knows it’s the obligation of the ‘steader whose house is being raised to provide the victuals and I had been taken by surprise.

“I said not to,” he repeated. And presently I knew why; Molly showed up with Mama Schultz, Gretchen, Sergei’s sister Marushka, and two girls who were friends of Peggy–and what they were carrying they couldn’t have carried on Earth. It was a number one picnic and Sergei had trouble getting them back to work after lunch.

Theoretically, Molly had done the cooking over at the Schultz’s but I know Mama Schultz–anyhow, let’s face it, Molly wasn’t much of a cook.

Molly had a note for me from Peggy. It read: “Dearest Billy, Please come into town tonight and tell me all about it. Pretty please!” I told Molly I would. By eighteen o’clock that afternoon the roof was on and we had a house. The door wasn’t hung; it was still down at the ‘Change. And the power unit

wasn’t in and might not be for a week. But we had a house that would keep off the rain, and a pint-sized cow barn as well, even if I didn’t own a cow.

9. Why Did We Come?

According to my diary we moved into the house on the first day of spring.

Gretchen came over and helped me get ready for them. I suggested that we ask Marushka as well, since there would be lots of work to do. Gretchen said, “Suit yourself!” and seemed annoyed, so I didn’t. Women are funny. Anyhow Gretchen is a right good worker.

I had been sleeping in the house ever since the raising and even before the technicians from the engineer’s office had come and installed the antenna on the roof and rigged the lights and heat–but that was done before winter was started and I passed a comfortable month, fixing up the inside of the place and getting in a crop of ice for the summer. I stored the ice, several tons of it, in the gully at the side of the house, where I meant to plant apple trees just as soon as I could get fixed for it. The ice would keep there until I could build a proper cold cellar.

The first few months after the folks moved out are the happiest I can remember. We were together again and it was good. Dad still spent most of each dark phase in town, working on a part time basis, but that was quite as much because he was interested in the manufacturing project as it was to help pay off our debts. During light phase we worked almost around the clock, side by side or at least within earshot.

Molly seemed to like being a housewife. I taught her how to cook and she caught on real fast. Ganymede cooking is an art. Most things have to be cooked under pressure, even baked things, for water boils at just a little over a hundred and forty degrees. You can stir boiling water with your finger if you don’t leave it in too long. Then Molly started learning from Mama Schultz but I didn’t mind that; Mama Schultz was an artist. Molly got to be a really good cook.

Peg had to live in her room, of course, but we had hopes that she would be out soon. We had the pressure down to eight pounds, half oxygen and half nitrogen, and we usually all ate in her room. I still hated the thick stuff but it was worth while putting up with it so that the family could eat together. After a while I got so that I could change pressure without even an earache.

Peggy could come outside, too. We had brought her from town in a bubble stretcher–another thing bought on credit!–and Dad had fitted it with the gas apparatus from an old space suit he had salvaged from the Project Jove people. Peggy could get into the stretcher and shut herself in and we could bleed off the pressure in her room and take her outside where she could get some sunshine and look at the mountains and the lake and watch Dad and me work in the fields. The clear plastic of the bubble did not stop ultraviolet and it was good for her.

She was a skinny little runt and it was no trouble to move her around, even in the stretcher. Light phase, she spent a lot of time outdoors.

We had started with a broody hen and fifteen fertile eggs, and a pair of rabbits. Pretty soon we had meat of our own. We always let Peggy think that the fryers we ate came from the Schultzes and I don’t think she ever caught on. At first I used to go to the Schultz farm every day for fresh milk for Peggy, but I got a chance, midsummer, to get a fresh two-year-old cow on tick at a reasonable price. Peggy named her Mabel and was much irked that she couldn’t get at her to pet her.

We were on the move all the time. I still hadn’t managed to take my merit badge tests and I hadn’t done much better about getting in to Scout meetings. There was just too much to do. Building a pond, for example–Laguna Serenidad was being infected with plankton and algae but there weren’t fish in it yet and it would be a long time, even after the fish were stocked, before fishing would be allowed. So we did fish-pond gardening, Chinese style, after I got the pond built.

And there were always crops to work on. My cover grass had taken hold all right and shortly after we moved in the soil seemed ready to take angle worms. Dad was about to send a sample into town for analysis when Papa Schultz stopped by. Hearing what we were about he took up a handful of the worked soil, crumbled it, smelled it, tasted it, and told me to go ahead and plant my worms. I did and they did all right; we encountered them from time to time in working the fields thereafter.

You could see the stripes on the fields which had been planted with pay dirt by the way the grass came up. You could see that the infection was spreading, too, but not much. I had a lot of hard work ahead before the stripes would meet and blend together and then we could think about renting a cud-chewer and finishing off the other acre and a half, using our own field loam and our own compost heap to infect the new soil. After that we could see about crushing some more acres, but that was a long way away.

We put in carrots and lettuce and beets and cabbage and brussels sprouts and potatoes and broccoli. We planted corn between the rows. I would like to have put in an acre of wheat but it didn’t make sense when we had so little land. There was one special little patch close to the house where we put in tomatoes and Hubbard squash and some peas and beans.

Those were “bee” plants and Molly would come out and pollenate them by hand, a very tedious business. We hoped to have a hive of bees some day and the entomologists on the bionomics staff were practically busting their hearts trying to breed a strain of bees which would prosper out doors. You see, among other things, while our gravity was only a third Earth-normal, our air pressure was only a little better than a fifth Earth-normal and the bees resented it; it made flying hard work for them. Or maybe bees are just naturally conservative.

I guess I was happy, or too tired and too busy to be unhappy, right up to the following winter.

At first winter seemed like a good rest. Aside from getting the ice crop in and taking care of the cow and the rabbits and the chickens there wasn’t too much to do. I was tired out and cranky and didn’t know it; Molly, I think, was just quietly, patiently exhausted. She wasn’t used to farm life and she wasn’t handy at it, the way Mama Schultz was.

Besides that, she wanted inside plumbing and it just wasn’t in the cards for her to have it any time soon. I carried water for her, of course, usually having to crack ice in the stream to get it, but that didn’t cover everything, not with snow on the ground. Not that she complained.

Dad didn’t complain, either, but there were deep lines forming from his nose down to his mouth which his beard didn’t cover entirely. But it was mostly Peggy.

When we first moved her out to the farm she perked up a lot. We gradually reduced the pressure in her room and she kept insisting that she was fine and teasing for a chance to go out without the bubble stretcher. We even tried it once, on Dr. Archibald’s advice, and she didn’t have a nose bleed but she was willing to get back in after about ten minutes.

The fact was she wasn’t adjusting. It wasn’t just the pressure; something else was wrong. She didn’t belong here and she wouldn’t growhere. Have you ever had a plant that refused to be happy where you planted it? It was like that.

She belonged back on Earth.

I suppose we weren’t bad off, but there is a whale of a difference between being a rich farmer, like Papa Schultz, with heaps of cow manure in your barn yard and hams hanging in your cold cellar and every modern convenience you could want, even running water in your house, and being poor farmers, like us, scratching for a toe hold in new soil and in debt to the Commission. It told on us and that winter we had time to brood about it.

We were all gathered in Peggy’s room after lunch one Thursday. Dark phase had just started and Dad was due to go back into town; we always gave him a send off. Molly was darning and Peg and George were playing cribbage. I got out my squeeze box and started knocking out some tunes. I guess we all felt cheerful enough for a while. I don’t know how I happened to drift into it, but after a bit I found I was playing The Green Hills of Earth. I hadn’t played it in a long time.

I brayed through that fortissimo part about “Out ride the sons of Terra; Far drives the thundering jet–” and was thinking to myself that jets didn’t thunder any more. I was still thinking about it when I went on into the last chorus, the one you play very softly: “We pray for one last landing on the globe that gave us birth–“

I looked up and there were tears running down Molly’s cheeks.

I could have kicked myself. I put my accordion down with a squawk, not even finishing, and got up. Dad said, “What’s the matter, Bill?”, I muttered something about having to go take a look at Mabel.

I went out into the living room and put on my heavy clothes and actually did go outside, though I didn’t go near the barn. It had been snowing and it was already almost pitch dark, though the Sun hadn’t been down more than a couple of hours. The snow had stopped but there were clouds overhead and you couldn’t see Jupiter.

The clouds had broken due west and let the sunset glow come through a bit. After my eyes adjusted, by that tiny amount of light I could see around me–the mountains, snow to their bases, disappearing in the clouds, the lake, just a sheet of snow-covered ice, and the boulders beyond our fields, making weird shapes in the snow. It was a scene to match the way I felt; it looked like the place where you might be sent for having lived a long and sinful life.

I tried to figure out what I was doing in such a place.

The clouds in the west shifted a little and I saw a single bright green star, low down toward the horizon, just above where the Sun had set. It was Earth.

I don’t know how long I stood there. Presently somebody put a hand on my shoulder and I jumped. It was Dad, all bundled up for a nine-mile tramp through the dark and the snow.

“What’s the matter, Son?” he said.

I started to speak, but I was all choked up and couldn’t. Finally I managed to say, “Dad, why did we come here?” “Mmmm … you wanted to come. Remember?”

“I know,” I admitted.

“Still, the real reason, the basic reason, for coming here was to keep your grandchildren from starving. Earth is overcrowded, Bill.”

I looked back at Earth again. Finally I said, “Dad, I’ve made a discovery. There’s more to life than three square meals a day. Sure, we can make crops here– this land would grow hair on a billiard ball. But I don’t think you had better plan on any grandchildren here; it would be no favor to them. I know when I’ve made a mistake.”

“You’re wrong, Bill, Your kids will like this place, just the way Eskimos like where they live.” “I doubt it like the mischief.”

“Remember, the ancestors of Eskimos weren’t Eskimos; they were immigrants, too. If you send your kids back to Earth, for school, say, they’ll be homesick for Ganymede. They’ll hate Earth. They’ll weigh too much, they won’t like the air, they won’t like the climate, they won’t like the people.”

“Hmm–look, George, do you like it here? Are you glad we came?”

Dad was silent for a long time. At last he said, “I’m worried about Peggy, Bill.” “Yeah, I know. But how about yourself–and Molly?”

“I’m not worried about Molly. Women have their ups and downs. You’ll learn to expect that.” He shook himself and said, “I’m late. You go on inside

and have Molly fix you a cup of tea. Then take a look at the rabbits. I think the doe is about to drop again; we don’t want to lose the young ‘uns.” He

hunched his shoulders and set off down toward the road. I watched him out of sight and then went back inside.

1. Line Up

Then suddenly it was spring and everything was all right.

Even winter seemed like a good idea when it was gone. We had to have winter; the freezing and thawing was necessary to develop the ground, not to mention the fact that many crops won’t come to fruit without cold weather. Anyway, anybody can live through four weeks of bad weather.

Dad laid off his job when spring came and we pitched in together and got our fields planted. I rented a power barrow and worked across my strips to spread the living soil. Then there was the back-breaking job of preparing the gully for the apple trees. I had started the seeds soon after Papa Schultz had given them to me, forcing them indoors, first at the Schultz’s, then at our place. Six of them had germinated and now they were nearly two feet tall.

I wanted to try them outdoors. Maybe I would have to take them in again next winter, but it was worth a try.

Dad was interested in the venture, too, not just for fruit trees, but for lumber. Wood seems like an obsolete material, but try getting along without it. I think George had visions of the Big Rock Candy Mountains covered with tall straight pines … someday, someday.

So we went deep and built it to drain and built it wide and used a lot of our winter compost and some of our precious topsoil. There was room enough for twenty trees when we got through, where we planted our six little babies. Papa Schultz came over and pronounced a benediction over them.

Then he went inside to say hello to Peggy, almost filling her little room. George used to say that when Papa inhaled the pressure in the room dropped.

A bit later Papa and Dad were talking in the living room; Dad stopped me as I was passing through. “Bill,” he asked, “how would you like to have a window about here?” He indicated a blank wall.

I stared. “Huh? How would we keep the place warm?” “I mean a real window, with glass.”

“Oh.” I thought about it. I had never lived in a place with windows in my life; we had always been apartment dwellers. I had seen windows, of course, in country houses back Earthside, but there wasn’t a window on Ganymede and it hadn’t occurred to me that there ever would be.

“Papa Schultz plans to put one in his house. I thought it might be nice to sit inside and look out over the lake, light phase evenings,” Dad went on. “To make a home you need windows and fireplaces,” Papa said placidly. “Now that we glass make, I mean to have a view.”

Dad nodded. “For three hundred years the race had glazed windows. Then they shut themselves up in little air-conditioned boxes and stared at silly television pictures instead. One might as well be on Luna.”

It was a startling idea, but it seemed like a good one. I knew they were making glass in town. George says that glassmaking is one of the oldest manufacturing arts, if not the oldest, and certainly one of the simplest. But I had thought about it for bottles and dishes, not for window glass. They already had glass buckets on sale at the ‘Change, for about a tenth the cost of the imported article.

A view window–it was a nice idea. We could put one on the south and see the lake and another on the north and see the mountains. Why, I could even put in a skylight and lie on my bunk and see old Jupiter.

Stow it, William, I said to myself; you’ll be building a whole house out of glass next. After Papa Schultz left I spoke to George about it. “Look,” I said, “about this view window idea. It’s a good notion, especially for Peggy’s room, but the question is: can we afford it?”

“I think we can,” he answered.

“I mean can we afford it without your going back to work in town? You’ve been working yourself to death –and there’s no need to. The farm can support us now.”

He nodded. “I had been meaning to speak about that. I’ve about decided to give up the town work, Bill–except for a class I’ll teach on Saturdays.” “Do you have to do that?”

“Happens that I like to teach engineering, Bill And don’t worry about the price of the glass; well get it free–a spot of cumshaw coining to your old man for designing the glass works. “The kine who tread the grain,'” he quoted. “Now you and I had better get busy; there is a rain scheduled for fifteen o’clock.’

It was maybe three weeks later that the moons lined up. This is an event that almost never happens, Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and Europa, all perfectly lined up and all on the same side of Jupiter. They come close to lining up every seven hundred and two days, but they don’t quite make it ordinarily. You see, their periods are all different, from less than two days for Io to more than two weeks for Callisto and the fractions don’t work out evenly. Besides that they have different eccentricities to their orbits and their orbits aren’t exactly in the same plane.

As you can see, a real line up hardly ever happens.

Besides that, this line up was a line up with the Sun, too; it would occur at Jupiter full phase. Mr. Hooker, the chief meteorologist, announced that it had been calculated that such a perfect line up would not occur again for more than two hundred thousand years. You can bet we were all waiting to see it. The Project Jove scientists were excited about it, too, and special arrangements had been made to observe it.

Having it occur at Jupiter full phase meant not only that a sixth heavenly body–the Sun–would be in the line up, but that we would be able to see it. The shadows of Ganymede and Callisto would be centered on Jupiter just as Io and Europa reached mid transit.

Full phase is at six o’clock Saturday morning; we all got up about four-thirty and were outside by five. George and I carried Peggy out in her bubble stretcher. We were just in time.

It was a fine, clear summer night, light as could be, with old Jupiter blazing overhead like a balloon on fire. Io had just barely kissed the eastern edge of Jupiter–“first contact” they call it. Europa was already a bit inside the eastern edge and I had to look sharp to see it.

When a moon is not in full phase it is no trouble to pick it out while it’s making its transit, but at full phase it tends to blend into the background. However, both Ioand Europa are just a hair brighter than Jupiter. Besides that, they break up the pattern of Jupiter’s bands and that lets you see them, too.

Well inside, but still in the eastern half–say about half way to Jupiter’s center point–were the shadows of Ganymede and Callisto. I could not have told them apart, if I hadn’t known that the one further east had to be Ganymede’s. They were just little round black dots; three thousand miles or so isn’t anything when it’s plastered against Jupiter’s eighty-nine thousand mile width.

Io looked a bit bigger than the shadows; Europa looked more than half again as big, about the way the Moon looks from Earth.

We felt a slight quake but it wasn’t even enough to make us nervous; we were used to quakes. Besides that, about then Io”kissed” Europa. From then on, throughout the rest of the show, Io gradually slid underneath, or behind, Europa.

They crawled across the face of Jupiter; the moons fairly fast, the shadows in a slow creep. When we had been outside a little less than half an hour the two shadows kissed and started to merge. Io had slid halfway under Europa and looked like a big tumor on its side. They were almost halfway to center and the shadows were even closer.

Just before six o’clock Europa–you could no longer see Io; Europa covered it–as I was saying, Europa kissed the shadow, which by now was round, just one shadow.

Four or five minutes later the shadow had crawled up on top of Europa; they were all lined up–and I knew I was seeing the most extraordinary sight I would ever see in my life, Sun, Jupiter, and the four biggest moons all perfectly lined up.

I let out a deep breath: I don’t know how long I had been holding it. “Gee whiz!” was all I could think of to say.

“I agree in general with your sentiments, Bill,” Dad answered. “Molly, hadn’t we better get Peggy inside? I’m afraid she is getting cold.”

“Yes,” agreed Molly. “I know I am, for one.”

“I’m going down to the lake now,” I said. The biggest tide of record was expected, of course. While the lake was too small to show much tide, I had made a mark the day before and I hoped to be able to measure it.

“Don’t get lost in the dark,” Dad called out. I didn’t answer him. A silly remark doesn’t require an answer. I had gotten past the road and maybe a quarter of a mile beyond when it hit.

It knocked me flat on my face, the heaviest shake I had ever felt in my life. I’ve felt heavy quakes in California; they weren’t a patch on this one. I lay face down for a long moment, digging into the rock with my finger nails and trying to get it to hold still.

The seasick roll kept up and kept up and kept up, and with it the noise–a deep bass rumble, deeper than thunder and more terrifying.

A rock rolled up against me and nipped my side. I got to my feet and managed to stay there. The ground was still swaying and the rumble kept on. I headed for the house, running–like dancing over shifting ice. I fell down twice and got up again.

The front end of the house was all caved in. The roof slanted down at a crazy angle. “George!” I yelled. “Molly! Where are you?”

George heard me and straightened up. He was on the other side of the house and now I saw him over the collapsed roof. He didn’t say anything. I rushed around to where he stood. “Are you all right?” I demanded.

“Help me get Molly out–” he gasped.

I found out later that George had gone inside with Molly and Peggy, had helped get Peg out of the stretcher and back into her room, and then had gone outside, leaving Molly to get breakfast. The quake had hit while he was returning from the barn. But we didn’t have time then to talk it over; we dug–moving slabs with our bare hands that had taken four Scouts, working together, to lay. George kept crying, “Molly! Molly! Where are you?”

She was lying on the floor beside the stone work bench that was penned in by the roof. We heaved it off her; George scrambled over the rubble and reached her. “Molly! Molly darling!”

She opened her eyes. “George!” “Are you all right?”

“What happened?”

“Quake. Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

She sat up, made a face as if something hurt her, and said, “I think I– George! Where’s Peggy? Get Peggy!”

Peggy’s room was still upright; the reinforcements had held while the rest of the house had gone down around it. George insisted on moving Molly out into the open first, then we tackled the slabs that kept us from getting at the air lock to Peggy’s room.

The outer door of the air lock was burst out of its gaskets and stood open, the wrong way. It was black inside the lock; Jupiter light didn’t reach inside. I couldn’t see what I was doing but when I pushed on the inner door it wouldn’t give. “Can’t budge it,” I told Dad. “Get a light.”

“Probably still held by air pressure. Call out to Peggy to get in the stretcher and we’ll bleed it.” “I need a light,” I repeated.

“I haven’t got a light.”

“Didn’t you have one with you?” I had had one; we always carried torches, outdoors in dark phase, but I had dropped mine when the quake hit. I didn’t know where it was.

Dad thought about it, then climbed over the slabs. He was back in a moment. “I found it between here and the barn. I must have dropped it.” He shined it on the inner door and we looked over the situation.

“It looks bad,” Dad said softly. “Explosive decompression.” There was a gap you could poke your fingers through between the top of the door and the frame; the door wasn’t pressure held, it was jammed.

Dad called out, “Peggy! Oh, Peggy, darling–can you hear me?”

No answer. “Take the light, Bill–and stand aside.” He reared back and then hit the door hard with his shoulder. It gave a bit but didn’t open. He hit it again and it flew open, spilling him on his hands and knees. He scrambled up as I shined the light in past him.

Peggy lay half in and half out of bed, as if she had been trying to get up when she passed out. Her head hung down and a trickle of blood was dripping from her mouth on to the floor.

Molly had come in right behind us; she and Dad got Peggy into the stretcher and Dad brought the pressure up. She was alive; she gasped and choked and sprayed blood over us while we were trying to help her. Then she cried. She seemed to quiet down and go to sleep –or maybe fainted again–after we got her into the bubble.

Molly was crying but not making any fuss about it. Dad straightened up, wiped his face and said, “Grab on, Bill. We’ve got to get her into town.”

I said, “Yes,” and picked up one end. With Molly holding the light and us carrying, we picked our way over the heap of rock that used to be our house and got out into the open. We put the stretcher down for a moment and I looked around.

I glanced up at Jupiter; the shadows were still on his face and Io and Europa had not yet reached the western edge. The whole thing had taken less than an hour. But that wasn’t what held my attention; the sky looked funny.

The stars were too bright and there were too many of them. “George,” I said, “what’s happened to the sky?” “No time now–” he started to say. Then he stopped and said very slowly, “Great Scott!”

“What?” asked Molly. “What’s the matter?”

“Back to the house, all of you! We’ve got to dig out all the clothes we can get at. And blanketsl” “What? Why?”

“The heat trap! The heat trap is gone–the quake must have gotten the power house.”

So we dug again, until we found what we had to have. It didn’t take long; we knew where things had to be. It was just a case of getting the rocks off. The blankets were for the stretcher; Dad wrapped them around like a cocoon and tied them in place. “Okay, Bill,” he said. “Quick march, nowl”

It was then that I heard Mabel bawl. I stopped and looked at Dad. He stopped too, with an agony of indecision on his face. “Oh, damn!” he said, the first time I had ever heard him really swear. “We can’t just leave her to freeze; she’s a member of the family. Come, Bill.”

We put the stretcher down again and ran to the bam. It was a junk heap but we could tell by Mabel’s complaints where she was. We dragged the roof off her and she got to her feet. She didn’t seem to be hurt but I guess she had been knocked silly. She looked at us indignantly.

We had a time of it getting her over the slabs, with Dad pulling and me pushing. Dad handed the halter to Molly. “How about the chickens?” I asked, “And the rabbits?” Some of them had been crushed; the rest were loose around the place. I felt one–a rabbit –scurry between my feet

“No time!” snapped Dad. “We can’t take them; all we could do for them would be to cut their throats. Come!” We headed for the road.

Molly led the way, leading and dragging Mabel and carrying the light. We needed the light. The night, too bright and too clear a few minutes before, was now suddenly overcast. Shortly we couldn’t see Jupiter at all, and then you couldn’t count your fingers in front of your face.

The road was wet underfoot, not rain, but sudden dew; it was getting steadily colder.

Then it did rain, steadily and coldly. Presently it changed to wet snow. Molly dropped back. “George,” she wanted to know, “have we come as far as the turn off to the Schultz’s?”

“That’s no good,” he answered. “We’ve got to get the baby into the hospital.” That isn’t what I meant. Oughtn’t I to warn them?”

They’ll be all right. Their house is sound.”

“But the cold?”

“Oh.” He saw what she meant and so did I, when I thought about it. With the heat trap gone and the power house gone, every house in the colony was going to be like an ice box. What good is a power receiver on your roof with no power to receive? It was going to get colder and colder and colder ….

And then it would get colder again. And colder….

“Keep moving,” Dad said suddenly. “We’ll figure it out when we get there.”

But we didn’t figure it out, because we never found the turn off. The snow was driving into our faces by then and we must have walked on past it. It was a dry snow now, little sharp needles that burned when they hit.

Without saying anything about it, I had started counting paces when we left the walls of lava that marked the place where the new road led to our place and out to the new farms beyond. As near as I could make it we had come about five miles when Molly stopped. “What’s the matter?” yelled Dad.

“Dear,” she said, “I can’t find the road. I think I’ve lost it.”

I kicked the snow away underfoot. It was made ground, all right–soft. Dad took the torch and looked at his watch. “We must have come about six miles,” he announced.

“Five,” I corrected him. “Or five and a half at the outside,” I told him I had been counting.

He considered it. “We’ve come just about to that stretch where the road is flush with the field,” he said. “It can’t be more than a half mile or a mile to the cut through Kneiper’s Ridge. After that we can’t lose it. Bill, take the light and cast off to the right for a hundred paces, then back to the left. If that doesn’t do it, well go further. And for heaven’s sakes retrace your steps–it’s the only way you’ll find us in this storm.”

I took the light and set out. To the right was no good, though I went a hundred and fifty paces instead of a hundred, I got back to them, and reported, and started out again. Dad just grunted; he was busy with something about the stretcher.

On the twenty-third step to the left I found the road –by stepping down about a foot, falling flat on my face, and nearly losing the light. I picked myself up and went back.

“Good!” said Dad. “Slip your neck through this.”

“This” was a sort of yoke he had devised by retying the blankets around the stretcher so as to get some free line. With my neck through it I could carry the weight on my shoulders and just steady my end with my hands. Not that it was heavy, but our hands were getting stiff with cold. “Good enough!” I said, “But, look, George–let Molly take your end.”

“Nonsense!”

“It isn’t nonsense. Molly can do it–can’t you, Molly? And you know this road better than we do; you’ve tramped it enough times in the dark.” “Bill is right, dear,” Molly said at once. “Here–take Mabel.”

Dad gave in, took the light and the halter. Mabel didn’t want to go any further; she wanted to sit down, I guess. Dad kicked her in the rear and jerked

on her neck. Her feelings were hurt; she wasn’t used to that sort of treatment–particularly not from Dad. But there was no time to humor her; it was getting colder.

We went on. I don’t know how Dad kept to the road but he did. We had been at it another hour, I suppose, and had left Kneiper’s slot well behind, when Molly stumbled, then her knees just seemed to cave in and she knelt down in the snow.

I stopped and sat down, too; I needed the rest. I just wanted to stay there and let it snow.

Dad came back and put his arms around her and comforted her and told her to lead Mabel now; she couldn’t get lost on this stretch. She insisted that she could still carry. Dad ignored her, just lifted the yoke business off her shoulders. Then he came back and peeled a bit of blanket off the bubble and shined the torch inside. He put it back into place. Molly said, “How is she?’

Dad said, “She’s still breathing. She opened her eyes when the light hit them. Let’s go.” He got the yoke on and Molly took the light and the halter. Molly couldn’t have seen what I saw; the plastic of the bubble was frosted over on the inside. Dad hadn’t seen Peggy breathe; he hadn’t seen

anything.

I thought about it for a long while and wondered how you would classify that sort of a lie. Dad wasn’t a liar, that was certain–and yet it seemed to me that such a lie, right then, was better than the truth. It was complicated.

Pretty soon I forgot it; I was too busy putting one foot in front of the other and counting the steps. I couldn’t feel my feet any longer. Dad stopped and I bumped into the end of the stretcher. “Listen!” he said.

I listened and heard a dull rumble. “Quake?”

“No. Keep quiet.” Then he added, “It’s down the road. Off the road, everybody! Off to the right.”

The rumble got louder and presently I made out a light through the snow, back the way we had come. Dad saw it, too, and stepped out on the road and started waving our torch.

The rumble stopped almost on top of him; it was a rock crusher and it was loaded down with people, people clinging to it all over and even riding the spade. The driver yelled, “Climb on! And hurry!”

Then he saw the cow and added, “No live stock.”

“We’ve got a stretcher with my little girl in it,” Dad shouted back to him. “We need help.”

There was a short commotion, while the driver ordered a couple of men down to help us. In the mix up Dad disappeared. One moment Molly was holding Mabel’s halter, then Dad was gone and so was the cow.

We got the stretcher up onto the spade and some of the men braced it with their backs. I was wondering what to do about Dad and thinking maybe I ought to jump off and look for him, when he appeared out of the darkness and scrambled up beside me. “Where’s Molly?” he asked.

“Up on top. But where is Mabel? What did you do with her?”

“Mabel is all right.” He folded his knife and put it in his pocket. I didn’t ask any more questions.

2. Disaster

We passed several more people after that, but the driver wouldn’t stop. We were fairly close into town and he insisted that they could make it on their own. His emergency power pack was running low, he said; he had come all the way from the bend in the lake, ten miles beyond our place.

Besides, I don’t know where he would have put them. We were about three deep and Dad had to keep warning people not to lean on the bubble of

the stretcher.

Then the power pack did quit and the driver shouted, “Everybody off! Get on in on your own.” But by now we were actually in town, the outskirts, and it would have been no trouble if it hadn’t been blowing a blizzard. The driver insisted on helping Dad with the stretcher. He was a good Joe and turned out to be–when I saw him in the light–the same man who had crushed our acreage.

At long, long last we were inside the hospital and Peggy was turned over to the hospital people and put in a pressurized room. More than that, she was alive. In bad shape, but alive.

Molly stayed with her. I would like to have stayed, too–it was fairly warm in the hospital; it had its own emergency power pack. But they wouldn’t let me.

Dad told Molly that he was reporting to the chief engineer for duty. I was told to go to the Immigration Receiving Station. I did so and it was just like the day we landed, only worse–and colder. I found myself right back in the very room which was the first I had ever been in on Ganymede.

The place was packed and getting more packed every minute as more refugees kept pouring in from the surrounding country. It was cold, though not so bitterly cold as outside. The lights were off, of course; light and heat all came from the power plant for everything.

Hand lights had been set up here and there and you could sort of grope your way around. There were the usual complaints, too, though maybe not as bad as you hear from immigrants. I paid no attention to any of them; I was happy in a dead beat sort of way just to be inside and fairly warm and feel the blood start to go back into my feet.

We stayed there for thirty-seven hours. It was twenty-four hours before we got anything to eat.

Here was the way it went: the metal buildings, such as the Receiving Station, stood up. Very few of the stone buildings had, which we knew by then from the reports of all of us. The Power Station was out, and with it, the heat trap. They wouldn’t tell us anything about it except to say that it was being fixed.

In the mean time we were packed in tight as they could put us, keeping the place warm mainly by the heat from our bodies, sheep style. There were, they say, several power packs being used to heat the place, too, one being turned on every time the temperature in the room dropped below freezing. If so, I never got close to one and I don’t think it ever did get up to freezing where I was.

I would sit down and grab my knees and fall into a dopey sleep. Then a nightmare would wake me up and I’d get up and pound myself and walk around. After a while I’d sit down on the floor and freeze my fanny again.

I seem to remember encountering Noisy Edwards in the crowd and waving my finger under his nose and telling him I had an appointment to knock his block off. I seem to remember him staring back at me as if he couldn’t place me. But I don’t know; I may have dreamed it. I thought I ran across Hank, too, and had a long talk with him, but Hank told me afterwards that he never laid eyes on me the whole time.

After a long time–it seemed a week but the records show it was eight o’clock Sunday morning–they passed us out some lukewarm soup. It was wonderful. After that I wanted to leave the building to go to the hospital. I wanted to find Molly and see how Peggy was doing.

They wouldn’t let me. It was seventy below outside and still dropping. About twenty-two o’clock the lights came on and the worst was over.

We had a decent meal soon after that, sandwiches and soup, and when the Sun came up at midnight they announced that anybody could go outside who cared to risk it. I waited until noon Monday. By then it was up to twenty below and I made a dash for it to the hospital.

Peggy was doing as well as could be expected. Molly had stayed with her and had spent the time in bed with her, huddling up to her to keep her warm. While the hospital had emergency heat, it didn’t have the capacity to cope with any such disaster as had struck us; it was darn near as cold as the Receiving Station. But Peggy had come through it, sleeping most of the time. She even perked up enough to smile and say hello.

Molly’s left arm was in a sling and splinted. I asked how that happened–and then I felt foolish. It had happened in the quake itself but I hadn’t known it and George still didn t know about it; none of the engineers were back.

It didn’t seem possible that she could have done what she did, until I recalled that she carried the stretcher only after Dad had rigged the rope yokes. Molly is all right.

They chased me out and I high-tailed it back to the Receiving Station and ran into Sergei almost at once. He hailed me and I went over to him. He

had a pencil and a list and a number of the older fellows were gathered around him. “What’s up?” I said.

“Just the guy I’m looking for,” he said. “I had you down for dead. Disaster party–are you in?”

I was in, all right. The parties were made up of older Scouts, sixteen and up, and the younger men, We were sent out on the town’s tractors, one to each road, and we worked in teams of two. I spotted Hank Jones as we were loading and they let us make up a team.

It was grim work. For equipment we had shovels and lists–lists of who lived on which farm. Sometimes a name would have a notation “known to be alive,” but more often not. A team would be dropped off with the lists for three or four farms and the tractor would go on, to pick them up on the return trip.

Our job was to settle the doubt about those other names and–theoretically–to rescue anyone still alive. We didn’t find anyone alive.

The lucky ones had been killed in the quake; the unlucky ones had waited too long and didn’t make it into town. Some we found on the road; they had tried to make it but had started too late. The worst of all were those whose houses hadn’t fallen and had tried to stick it out. Hank and I found one couple just sitting, arms around each other. They were hard as rock.

When we found one, we would try to identify it on the list, then cover it up with snow, several feet deep, so it would keep for a while after it started to thaw.

When we settled with the people at a farm, we rummaged around and found all the livestock we could and carried or dragged their carcasses down to the road, to be toted into town on the tractor and slapped into deep freeze. It seemed a dirty job to do, robbing the dead, but, as Hank pointed out, we would all be getting a little hungry by and by.

Hank bothered me a little; he was merry about the whole thing. I guess it was better to laugh about it, in the long run, and after a while he had me doing it. It was just too big to soak up all at once and you didn’t dare let it get you.

But I should have caught on when we came to his own place. “We can skip it,” he said, and checked off the list. “Hadn’t we better check for livestock?” I said.

“Nope. We’re running short of time. Let’s move on to the Millers’ place.” “Did they get out?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see any of them in town.”

The Millers hadn’t gotten out; we barely had time to take care of them before the tractor picked us up. It was a week later that I found out that both of Hank’s parents had been killed in the quake. He had taken time to drag them out and put them into their ice cellar before he had headed for town.

Like myself, Hank had been outside when it hit, still looking at the line up. The fact that the big shock had occurred right after the line up had kept a lot of people from being killed in their beds–but they say that the line up caused the quake, triggered it, that is, with tidal strains, so I guess it sort of evens up. Of course, the line up didn’t actually make the quake; it had been building up to it ever since the beginning of the atmosphere project. Gravity’s books have got to balance.

The colony had had thirty-seven thousand people when the quake hit. The census when we finished it showed less than thirteen thousand. Besides that we had lost every crop, all or almost all the livestock. As Hank said, we’d all be a little hungry by and by.

They dumped us back at the Receiving Station and a second group of parties got ready to leave. I looked for a quiet spot to try to get some sleep. I was just dozing off, it seemed to me, when somebody shook me. It was Dad. “Are you all right, Bill?”

I rubbed my eyes. “I’m okay. Have you seen Molly and Peggy?”

“Just left them. I’m off duty for a few hours. Bill, have you seen anything of the Schultzes?”

I sat up, wide awake. “No. Have you?” “No.”

I told him what I had been doing and he nodded. “Go back to sleep, Bill. I’ll see if there has been a report on them.”

I didn’t go to sleep. He was back after a bit to say that he hadn’t been able to find out anything one way or another. “I’m worried, Bill.” “So am I.”

“I’m going out and check up.” “Let’s go.”

Dad shook his head. “No need for us both. You get some sleep.” I went along, just the same.

We were lucky. A disaster party was just heading down our road and we hitched a ride. Our own farm and the Schultz’s place were among those to be covered on this trip; Dad told the driver that we would check both places and report when we got back to town. That was all right with him.

They dropped us at the turn off and we trudged up toward the Schultz’s house. I began to get the horrors as we went. It’s one thing to pile snow over comparative strangers; it’s another thing entirely to expect to find Mama Schultz or Gretchen with their faces blue and stiff.

I didn’t visualize Papa as dead; people like Papa Schultz don’t die-they just go on forever. Or it feels like that. But I still wasn’t prepared for what we did find.

We had just come around a little hummock that conceals their house from the road. George stopped and said, “Well, the house is still standing. His quake-proofing held.”

I looked at it, then I stared–and then I yelled. “Hey, George! The Tree is gone!”

The house was there, but the apple tree–“the most beautiful tree on Ganymede”–was missing. Just gone. I began to run. We were almost to the house when the door opened. There stood Papa Schultz.

They were all safe, every one of them. What remained of the tree was ashes in the fireplace. Papa had cut it down as soon as the power went off and the temperature started to drop–and then had fed it, little by little, into the flames.

Papa, telling us about it, gestured at the blackened firebox. “Johann’s folly, they called it. I guess they will not think old Appleseed Johnny quite so foolish now, eh?” He roared and slapped Dad on the shoulders.

“But your tree,” I said stupidly.

“I will plant another, many others.” He stopped and was suddenly serious. “But your trees, William, your brave little baby trees–they are dead, not?” I said I hadn’t seen them yet. He nodded solemnly. “They are dead of the cold. Hugo!”

“Yes, Papa.”

“Fetch me an apple.” Hugo did so and Papa presented it to me. “You will plant again.” I nodded and stuck it in my pocket.

They were glad to hear that we were all right, though Mama clucked over Molly’s broken arm. Yo had fought his way over to our place during the first part of the storm, found that we were gone and returned, two frost bitten ears for his efforts. He was in town now to look for us.

But they were all right, every one of them. Even their livestock they had saved–cows, pigs, chickens, people, all huddled together throughout the

cold and kept from freezing by the fire from their tree.

The animals were back in the barn, now that power was on again, but the place still showed that they had been there–and smelled of it, too. I think Mama was more upset by the shambles of her immaculate living room than she was by the magnitude of the disaster. I don’t think she realized that most of her neighbors were dead. It hadn’t hit her yet.

Dad turned down Papa Schultz’s offer to come with us to look over our farm. Then Papa said he would see us on the tractor truck, as he intended to go into town and find out what he could do. We had mugs of Mama’s strong tea and some corn bread and left.

I was thinking about the Schultzes and how good it was to find them alive, as we trudged over to our place. I told Dad that it was a miracle. He shook his head. “Not a miracle. They are survivor types.”

“What type is a survivor type?” I asked.

He took a long time to answer that one. Finally he said, “Survivors survive. I guess that is the only way to tell the survivor type for certain.” I said. “We’re survivor types, too, in that case.”

“Could be,” he admitted. “At least we’ve come through this one.”

When I had left, the house was down. In the mean time I had seen dozens of houses down, yet it was a shock to me when we topped the rise and I saw that it really was down. I suppose I expected that after a while I would wake up safe and warm in bed and everything would be all right.

The fields were there, that was all that you could say for it. I scraped the snow off a stretch I knew was beginning to crop. The plants were dead of course and the ground was hard. I was fairly sure that even the earth worms were dead; they had had nothing to warn them to burrow below the frost line.

My little saplings were dead, of course.

We found two of the rabbits, huddled together and stiff, under a drift against what was left of the barn. We didn’t find any of the chickens except one, the first old hen we ever had. She had been setting and her nest wasn’t crushed and had been covered by a piece of the fallen roof of the barn. She was still on it, hadn’t moved and the eggs under her were frozen. I think that was what got me.

I was just a chap who used to have a farm.

Dad had been poking around the house. He came back to the barn and spoke to me. “Well, Bill?” I stood up. “George, I’ve had it.”

“Then let’s go back to town. The truck will be along shortly.” “I mean I’ve really had it!”

“Yes, I know.”

I took a look in Peggy’s room first, but Dad’s salvage had been thorough. My accordion was in there, however, with snow from the broken door drifted over the case. I brushed it off and picked it up. “Leave it,” Dad said. “It’s safe here and you’ve no place to put it.”

“I don’t expect to be back,” I said. “Very well.”

We made a bundle of what Dad had gotten together, added the accordion, the two rabbits and the hen, and carried it all down to the road. The tractor showed up presently, we got aboard and Dad chucked the rabbits and chicken on the pile of such that they had salvaged. Papa Schultz was waiting at his turnoff.

Dad and I tried to spot Mabel by the road on the trip back, but we didn’t find her. Probably she had been picked up by an earlier trip, seeing that she

was close to town. I was just as well pleased. All right, she had to be salvaged–but I didn’t want the job. I’m not a cannibal.

I managed to get some sleep and a bite to eat and was sent out on another disaster party. The colony began to settle down into some sort of routine. Those whose houses had stood up moved back into them and the rest of us were taken care of in the Receiving Station, much as we had been when our party landed. Food was short, of course, and Ganymede had rationing for the first time since the first colonials really got started.

Not that we were going to starve. In the first place there weren’t too many of us to feed and there had been quite a lot of food on hand. The real pinch would come later. It was decided to set winter back by three months, that is, start all over again with spring–which messed up the calendar from then on. But it would give us a new crop as quickly as possible to make up for the one that we had lost.

Dad stayed on duty with the engineer’s office. Plans called for setting up two more power plants, spaced around the equator, and each of them capable of holding the heat trap alone. The disaster wasn’t going to be allowed to happen again. Of course the installations would have to come from Earth, but we had been lucky on one score; Mars was in a position to relay for us. The report had gone into Earth at once and, instead of another load of immigrants, we were to get what we needed on the next trip.

Not that I cared. I had stayed in town, too, although the Schultzes had invited me to stay with them. I was earning my keep helping to rebuild and quakeproof the houses of the survivors. It had been agreed that we would all go back, George, Molly, Peggy, and me, on the first trip, if we could get space. It had been unanimous except that Peggy hadn’t been consulted; it just had to be.

We weren’t the only ones who were going back. The Colonial Commission had put up a squawk of course, but under the circumstances they had to give in. After it had been made official and the lists were opened Dad and I went over to the Commission agent’s office to put in our applications. We were about the last to apply; Dad had been out of town on duty and I had waited until he got back.

The office was closed with a “Back in a half hour” sign stuck on the door. We waited. There were bulletin boards outside the office; on them were posted the names of those who had applied for repatriation. I started reading them to kill time and so did Dad.

I found Saunders’ name there and pointed it out to George. He grunted and said, “No loss.” Noisy Edwards’ name was there, too; maybe I had seen him in the Receiving Station, although I hadn’t seen him since. It occurred to me that I could probably corner him in the ship and pay him back his lumps, but I wasn’t really interested in the project. I read on down.

I expected to find Hank Jones’ name there, but I couldn’t find it. I started reading the list carefully, paying attention to every name I recognized. I began to see a pattern.

Presently the agent got back and opened the door. Dad touched my arm. “Come on, Bill.” I said, “Wait a minute, George. You read all the names?”

“Yes, I did.”

“I’ve been thinking. You know, George, I don’t like being classed with these lugs.” He chewed his lip. “I know exactly what you mean.”

I took the plunge. “You can do as you like, George, but I’m not going home, if I ever do, until I’ve licked this joint.”

Dad looked as unhappy as he could look. He was silent for a long time, then he said, “I’ve got to take Peggy back, Bill. She won’t go unless Molly and I go along. And she’s got to go.”

“Yes, I know.”

“You understand how it is, Bill?”

“Yes, Dad, I understand.” He went on in to make out his application, whistling a little tune he used to whistle just after Anne died. I don’t think he knew he was whistling it.

I waited for him and after a bit we went away together.

I moved back out to the farm the next day. Not to the Schultzes–to the farm. I slept in Peggy’s room and got busy fixing the place up and getting

ready to plant my emergency allowance of seed.

Then, about two weeks before they were to leave in the Covered Wagon, Peggy died, and there wasn’t any reason for any of us to go back to Earth.

Yo Schultz had been in town and Dad sent word back by him. Yo came over and woke me up and told me about it. I thanked him.

He wanted to know if I wanted to come back to the house with him. I said, no, thanks, that I would rather be alone. He made me promise to come over the next day and went away.

I lay back down on Peggy’s bed.

She was dead and there was nothing more I could do about it She was dead and it was all my fault … if I hadn’t encouraged her, they would have been able to get her to go back before it was too late. She would be back Earthside, going to school and growing up healthy and happy–right back in California, not here in this damned place where she couldn’t live, where human beings were never meant to live.

I bit the pillow and blubbered. I said, “Oh, Anne, Anne! Take care of her, Anne–She’s so little; she won’t know what to do.” And then I stopped bawling and listened, half way expecting Anne to answer me and tell me she would,

But I couldn’t hear anything, not at first … and what I did hear was only, “Stand tall, Billy,” . .. very faint and far away, “Stand tall, son.” After a while I got up and washed my face and started hoofing it back into town.

3. Pioneer Party

We all lived in Peggy’s room until Dad and I had the seeds in, then we built on to it, quake proof this time and with a big view window facing the lake and another facing the mountains. We knocked a window in Peggy’s room, too; it made it seem like a different place.

We built on still another room presently, as it seemed as if we might be needing it. All the rooms had windows and the living room had a fireplace. Dad and I were terribly busy the second season after the quake. Enough seed could be had by then and we farmed the empty farm across the road

from us. Then some newcomers, the Ellises, moved in and paid us for the crop. It was just what they call a “book transaction,” but it reduced our

debt with the Commission.

Two G-years after the line up you would never have known that anything had happened. There wasn’t a wrecked building in the community, there were better than forty-five thousand people, and the town was booming. New people were coming in so fast that you could even sell some produce to the Commission in lieu of land.

We weren’t doing so badly, ourselves. We had a hive of bees. We had Mabel II, and Margie and Mamie, and I was sending the spare milk into town by the city transport truck that passed down our road once a day. I had broken Marge and Mamie to the yoke and used them for ploughing as well– we had crushed five more acres–and we were even talking about getting a horse.

Some people had horses already, the Schultzes for instance. The council had wrangled about it before okaying the “invasion,” with conservatives holding out for tractors. But we weren’t equipped to manufacture tractors yet and the policy was to make the planet self-sufficient–the hay burners won out. Horses can manufacture more horses and that is one trick that tractors have never learned.

Furthermore, though I would have turned my nose up at the idea when I was a ground hog back in Diego Borough, horse steak is very tasty.

It turned out we did need the extra room. Twins– both boys. New babies don’t look as if they were worth keeping, but they get over it–slowly. I bought a crib as a present for them, made right here on Ganymede, out of glass fabric stuck together with synthetic resin. It was getting possible to buy quite a number of home products.

I told Molly I would initiate the brats into the Cubs when they were old enough. I was getting in to meetings oftener now, for I had a patrol again–the Daniel Boone patrol, mostly new kids. I still hadn’t taken my own tests but you can’t do everything at once. Once I was scheduled to take them and a

litter of pigs picked that day to arrive. But I planned to take them; I wanted to be an Eagle Scout again, even if I was getting a little old to worry about badges in themselves.

It may sound as if the survivors didn’t give a hoot about those who had died in the disaster. But that isn’t the truth. It was just that you work from day to day and that keeps your mind busy. In any case, we weren’t the first colony to be two-thirds wiped out– and we wouldn’t be the last. You can grieve only so much; after that it’s self pity. So George says.

George still wanted me to go back to Earth to finish my education and I had been toying with the idea myself. I was beginning to realize that there were a few things I hadn’t learned. The idea was attractive; it would not be like going back right after the quake, tail between my legs. I’d be a property owner, paying my own way. The fare was considerable–five acres–and would about clean me out, my half, and put a load on George and Molly. But they were both for it.

Besides, Dad owned blocked assets back Earthside which would pay my way through school. They were no use to him otherwise; the only thing the Commission will accept as pay for imports is proved land. There was even a possibility, if the council won a suit pending back Earthside, that his blocked assets could be used for my fare as well and not cost us a square foot of improved soil. All in all, it was nothing to turn down idly.

We were talking about me leaving on the NewArk when another matter came up–the planetary survey.

Ganymede had to have settlements other than Leda; that was evident even when we landed. The Commission planned to set up two more ports-of- entry near the two new power stations and let the place grow from three centers. The present colonists were to build the new towns–receiving stations, hydroponics sheds, infirmaries, and so forth–and be paid for it in imports. Immigration would be stepped up accordingly, something that the Commission was very anxious to do, now that they had the ships to dump them in on us in quantity.

The old Jitterbug was about to take pioneer parties out to select sites and make plans–and both Hank and Sergei were going.

I wanted to go so bad I could taste it In the whole time I had been here I had never gotten fifty miles from Leda. Suppose somebody asked me what it was like on Ganymede when I got back on Earth? Truthfully, I wouldn’t be able to tell them; I hadn’t been any place.

I had had a chance, once, to make a trip to Barnard’s Moon, as a temporary employee of Project Jove–and that hadn’t worked out either. The twins. I stayed back and took care of the farm.

I talked it over with Dad.

“I hate to see you delay it any longer,” he said seriously. I pointed out that it would be only two months. “Hmmm–” he said. “Have you taken your merit badge tests yet?”

He knew I hadn’t; I changed the subject by pointing out that Sergei and Hank were going. “But they are both older than you are,” he answered.

“Not by very much!”

“But I think they are each over the age limit they were looking for–and you are just under.”

“Look, George,” I protested, “rules were made to be broken. I’ve heard you say that There must be some spot I can fill–cook, maybe.” And that’s just the job I got–cook.

I always have been a pretty fair cook–not in Mama Schultz’s class, but good. The party had nothing to complain about on that score.

Captain Hattie put us down at a selected spot nine degrees north of the equator and longitude 113 west–that is to say, just out of sight of Jupiter on the far side and about thirty-one hundred miles from Leda.

Mr. Hooker says that the average temperature of Ganymede will rise about nine degrees over the next century as more and more of the ancient ice melts–at which time Leda will be semi-tropical and the planet will be habitable half way to the poles. In the meantime colonies would be planted only at or near the equator.

I was sorry we had Captain Hattie as pilot; she is such an insufferable old scold. She thinks rocket pilots are a special race apart–supermen. At

least she acts like it.

Recently the Commission had forced her to take a relief pilot; there was just too much for one pilot to do. They had tried to force a check pilot on her, too–an indirect way to lead up to retiring her, but she was too tough for them. She threatened to take the Jitterbug up and crash it … and they didn’t dare call her bluff. At that time they were absolutely dependent on the Jitterbug.

Originally the Jitterbug‘s only purpose was for supply and passengers between Leda and the Project Jove station on Barnard’s Moon–but that was back in the days when ships from Earth actually landed at Leda. Then the Mayflower came along and the Jitterbug was pressed into service as a shuttle.

There was talk of another shuttle rocket but we didn’t have it yet, which is why Captain Hattie had them where it hurt. The Commission had visions of a loaded ship circling Ganymede, just going round and round and round again, with no way to get down, like a kitten stuck up in a tree.

I’ll say this for Hattie; she could handle her ship. I think she had nerve ends out in the skin of it. In clear weather she could even make a glide landing, in spite of our thin air. But I think she preferred to shake up her passengers with a jet landing.

She put us down, the Jitterbug took on more water mass, and away it bounced. She had three more parties to land. All in all the Jitterbug was servicing eight other pioneer parties. It would be back to pick us up in about three weeks.

The leader of our party was Paul du Maurier, who was the new assistant Scoutmaster of the Auslander troop and the chap who had gotten me taken on as cookie. He was younger than some of those working for him; furthermore, he shaved, which made him stand out like a white leghorn in a hog pen and made him look even younger. That is, he did shave, but he started letting his beard grow on this trip. “Better trim that grass,” I advised him.

He said, “Don’t you like my beard, Doctor Slop?” –that was a nickname he had awarded me for “Omnibus stew,” my own invention. He didn’t mean any harm by it.

I said, “Well, it covers your face, which is some help–but you might be mistaken for one of us colonial roughnecks. That wouldn’t do for one of you high-toned Commission boys.”

He smiled mysteriously and said, “Maybe that’s what I want.”

I said, “Maybe. But they’ll lock you up in a zoo if you wear it back to Earth.” He was due to go back for Earthside duty by the same trip I expected to make, via the Covered Wagon, two weeks after the end of the survey.

He smiled again and said, “Ah, yes, so they would,” and changed the subject. Paul was one of the most thoroughly good guys I have ever met and smart as a whip as well. He was a graduate of South Africa University with Post Grad on top of that at the System Institute on Venus–an ecologist, specializing in planetary engineering.

He handled that gang of rugged individualists without raising his voice. There is something about a real leader that makes it unnecessary for him to get tough.

But back to the survey–I didn’t see much of it as I was up to my elbows in pots and pans, but I knew what was going on. The valley we were in had been picked from photographs taken from the Jitterbug; it was now up to Paul to decide whether or not it was ideally suited to easy colonization.

It had the advantage of being in direct line-of-sight with power station number two, but that was not essential. Line-of-sight power relays could be placed anywhere on the mountains (no name, as yet) just south of us.

Most of the new villages would have to have power relayed anyhow. Aside from a safety factor for the heat trap there was no point in setting up extra power stations when the whole planet couldn’t use the potential of one mass-conversion plant.

So they got busy–an engineering team working on drainage and probable annual water resources, topographers getting a contour, a chemistry- agronomy team checking on what the various rock formations would make as soil, and a community architect laying out a town and farm and rocket port plot. There were several other specialists, too, like the mineralogist, Mr. Villa, who was doodlebugging the place for ores.

Paul was the “general specialist” who balanced all the data in his mind, fiddled with his slip stick, stared off into the sky, and came up with the over all answer. The over all answer for that valley was “nix”–and we moved on to the next one on the list, packing the stuff on our backs.

That was one of the few chances I got to look around. You see, we had landed at sunrise–about five o’clock Wednesday morning sunrise was, in

that longitude–and the object was to get as much done as possible during each light phase.

Jupiter light is all right for working in your own fields, but no good for surveying strange territory–and here we didn’t even have Jupiter light–just Callisto, every other dark phase, every twelve-and-half days, to be exact. Consequently we worked straight through light phase, on pep pills.

Now a man who is on the pills will eat more than twice as much as a man who is sleeping regularly. You know, the Eskimos have a saying, “Food is sleep.” I had to produce hot meals every four hours, around the clock. I had no time for sightseeing.

We got to camp number two, pitched our tents, I served a scratch meal, and Paul passed out sleeping pills. By then the Sun was down and we really died for about twenty hours. We were comfortable enough –spun glass pads under us and resin sealed glass canvas over us.

I fed them again, Paul passed out more sleepy pills, and back we went to sleep. Paul woke me Monday afternoon. This time I fixed them a light breakfast, then really spread myself to turn them out a feast. Everybody was well rested by now, and not disposed to want to go right back to bed. So I stuffed them.

After that we sat around for a few hours and talked. I got out my squeeze box–brought along by popular demand, that is to say, Paul suggested it– and gave ’em a few tunes. Then we talked some more.

They got to arguing about where life started and somebody brought up the old theory that the Sun had once been much brighter–Jock Montague, it was, the chemist. “Mark my words,” he said, “When we get around to exploring Pluto, you’ll find that life was there before us. Life is persistent, like mass-energy.”

“Nuts,” answered Mr. Villa, very politely. “Pluto isn’t even a proper planet; it used to be a satellite of Neptune.”

“Well, Neptune, then,” Jock persisted. “Life is all through the universe. Mark my words–when the Jove Project straightens out the bugs and gets going, they’ll even find life on the surface of Jupiter.”

“On Jupiter?” Mr. Villa exploded. “Please, Jock! Methane and ammonia and cold as a mother-in-law’s kiss. Don’t joke with us. Why, there’s not even light down under on the surface of Jupiter; it’s pitch dark.”

“I said it and I’ll say it again,” Montague answered. “Life is persistent. Wherever there is mass and energy with conditions that permit the formation of large and stable molecules, there you will find life. Look at Mars. Look at Venus. Look at Earth–the most dangerous planet of the lot. Look at the Ruined Planet.”

I said, “What do you think about it, Paul?”

The boss smiled gently. “I don’t. I haven’t enough data.”

“There!” said Mr. Villa. “There speaks a wise man. Tell me, Jock, how did you get to be an authority on this subject?”

“I have the advantage,” Jock answered grandly, “of not knowing too much about the subject. Facts are always a handicap in philosophical debate.” That ended that phase of it, for Mr. Seymour, the boss agronomist, said, “I’m not so much worried about where life came from as where it is going–

here.”

“How?” I wanted to know. “In what way?”

“What are we going to make of this planet? We can make it anything we want. Mars and Venus–they had native cultures. We dare not change them much and we’ll never populate them very heavily. These Jovian moons are another matter; it’s up to us. They say man is endlessly adaptable. I say on the contrary that man doesn’t adapt himself as much as he adapts his environment. Certainly we are doing so here. But how?”

“I thought that was pretty well worked out,” I said. “We set up these new centers, more people come in and we spread out, same as at Leda.”

“Ah, but where does it stop? We have three ships making regular trips now. Shortly there will be a ship in every three weeks, then it will be every week, then every day. Unless we are almighty careful there will be food rationing here, same as on Earth. Bill, do you know how fast the population is increasing, back Earthside?”

I admitted that I didn’t

“More than one hundred thousand more persons each day than there were the day before. Figure that up.”

I did. “That would be, uh, maybe fifteen, twenty shiploads a day. Still, I imagine they could build ships to carry them.”

“Yes, but where would we put them? Each day, more than twice as many people landing as there are now on this whole globe. And not just on Monday, but on Tuesday, and Wednesday, and Thursday–and the week and the month and the year after that, just to keep Earth’s population stable. I tell you, it won’t work. The day will come when we will have to stop immigration entirely.” He looked around aggressively, like a man who expects to be contradicted.

He wasn’t disappointed. Somebody said, “Oh, Seymour, come off it! Do you think you own this place just because you got here first? You snuck in while the rules were lax.”

“You can’t argue with mathematics,” Seymour insisted. “Ganymede has got to be made self-sufficient as soon as possible–and then we’ve got to slam the door!”

Paul was shaking his head. “It won’t be necessary.”

“Huh?” said Seymour. “Why not? Answer me that. You represent the Commission: what fancy answer has the Commission got?”

“None,” Paul told him. “And your figures are right but your conclusions are wrong. Oh, Ganymede has to be made self-sufficient, true enough, but your bogeyman about a dozen or more shiploads of immigrants a day you can forget.”

“Why, if I may be so bold?”

Paul looked around the tent and grinned apologetically. “Can you stand a short dissertation on population dynamics? I’m afraid I don’t have Jock’s advantage; this is a subject I am supposed to know something about.”

Somebody said, “Stand back. Give him air.”

“Okay,” Paul went on, “you brought it on yourselves. A lot of people have had the idea that colonization is carried on with the end purpose of relieving the pressure of people and hunger back on Earth. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

I said. “Huh?”

“Bear with me. Not only is it physically impossible for a little planet to absorb the increase of a big planet, as Seymour pointed out, but there is another reason why well never get any such flood of people as a hundred thousand people a day–a psychological reason. There are never as many people willing to emigrate (even if you didn’t pick them over) as there are new people born. Most people simply will not leave home. Most of them won’t even leave their native villages, much less go to a far planet.”

Mr. Villa nodded. “I go along with you on that The willing emigrant is an odd breed of cat. He’s scarce.”

“Right,” Paul agreed. “But let’s suppose for a moment that a hundred thousand people were willing to emigrate every day and Ganymede and the other colonies could take them. Would that relieve the situation back home–I mean “back Earthside’? The answer is, ‘No, it wouldn’t’.”

He appeared to have finished. I finally said, “Excuse my blank look, Paul, but why wouldn’t it?” “Studied any bionomics, Bill?”

“Some.”

“Mathematical population bionomics?” “Well-no.”

“But you do know that in the greatest wars the Earth ever had there were always more people after the war than before, no matter how many were killed. Life is not merely persistent, as Jock puts it; life is explosive.

The basic theorem of population mathematics to which there has never been found an exception is that population increases always, not merely up to extent of the food supply, but beyond it, to the minimum diet that will sustain life–the ragged edge of starvation.

In other words, if we bled off a hundred thousand people a day, the Earth’s population would then grow until the increase was around two hundred thousand a day, or the bionomical maximum for Earth’s new ecological dynamic.”

Nobody said anything for a moment; there wasn’t anything to say. Presently Sergei spoke up with, “You paint a grim picture, boss. What’s the answer?”

Paul said, “There isn’t any!”

Sergei said, “I didn’t mean it that way. I mean, what is the outcome?”

When Paul did answer it was just one word, one monosyllable, spoken so softly that it would not have been heard if there had not been dead silence. What he said was:

“War.”

There was a shuffle and a stir; it was an unthinkable idea. Seymour said, “Come now, Mr. du Maurier–I may be a pessimist, but I’m not that much of one. Wars are no longer possible.”

Paul said, “So?”

Seymour answered almost belligerently, “Are you trying to suggest that the Space Patrol would let us down? Because that is the only way a war could happen.”

Paul shook his head. “The Patrol won’t let us down. But they won’t be able to stop it. A police force is all right for stopping individual disturbances; it’s fine for nipping things in the bud. But when the disturbances are planet wide, no police force is big enough, or strong enough, or wise enough. They’ll try–they’ll try bravely. They won’t succeed.”

“You really believe that?”

“It’s my considered opinion. And not only my opinion, but the opinion of the Commission. Oh, I don’t mean the political board; I mean the career scientists.”

“Then what in tarnation is the Commission up to?”

“Building colonies. We think that is worthwhile in itself. The colonies need not be affected by the War. In fact, I don’t think they will be, not much. It will be like America was up to the end of the nineteenth century; European troubles passed her by.

I rather expect that the War, when it comes, will be of such size and duration that interplanetary travel will cease to be for a considerable period. That is why I said this planet has got to be self-sufficient. It takes a high technical culture to maintain interplanetary travel and Earth may not have it– after a bit.”

I think Paul’s ideas were a surprise to everyone present; I know they were to me. Seymour jabbed a finger at him, “If you believe this, then why are you going back to Earth? Tell me that.”

Again Paul spoke softly. “I’m not. I’m going to stay here and become a ‘steader.” Suddenly I knew why he was letting his beard grow.

Seymour answered, “Then you expect it soon.” It was not a question; it was a statement.

“Having gone this far,” Paul said hesitantly, “I’ll give you a direct answer. War is not less than forty Earth years away, not more than seventy.”

You could feel a sigh of relief all around the place. Seymour continued to speak for us, “Forty to seventy, you say. But that’s no reason to

homestead; you probably wouldn’t live to see it. Not but what you’d make a good neighbor.”

“I see this War,” Paul insisted. “I know it’s coming. Should I leave it up to my hypothetical children and grandchildren to outguess it? No. Here I rest. If I marry, I’ll marry here. I’m not raising any kids to be radioactive dust.”

It must have been about here that Hank stuck his head in the tent, for I don’t remember anyone answering Paul. Hank had been outside on business of his own; now he opened the flap and called out, “Hey gents! Europa is up!”

We all trooped out to see. We went partly through embarrassment, I think; Paul had been too nakedly honest. But we probably would have gone anyhow. Sure, we saw Europa every day of our lives at home, but not the way we were seeing it now.

Since Europa goes around Jupiter inside Ganymede’s orbit, it never gets very far away from Jupiter, if you call 39 degrees “not very far.” Since we were 113 west longitude, Jupiter was 23 degrees below our eastern horizon–which meant that Europa, when it was furthest west of Jupiter, would be a maximum of 16 degrees above the true horizon.

Excuse the arithmetic. Since we had a row of high hills practically sitting on us to the east, what all this means is that, once a week, Europa would rise above the hills, just peeking over, hang there for about a day–then turn around and set in the east, right where it had risen. Up and down like an elevator.

If you’ve never been off Earth, don’t tell me it’s impossible. That’s how it is–Jupiter and its moons do some funny things.

It was the first time it had happened this trip, so we watched it–a little silver boat, riding the hills like waves, with its horns turned up. There was argument about whether or not it was still rising, or starting to set again, and much comparing of watches. Some claimed to be able to detect motion but they weren’t agreed on which way. After a while I got cold and went back in.

But I was glad of the interruption. I had a feeling that Paul had said considerably more than he had intended to and more than he would be happy to recall, come light phase. I blamed it on the sleeping pills. Sleeping pills are all right when necessary, but they tend to make you babble and tell your right name-treacherous things.

4. The Other People

By the end of the second light phase it was clear-to Paul, anyhow–that this second valley would do. It wasn’t the perfect valley and maybe there was a better one just over the ridge–but life is too short. Paul assigned it a score of 92% by some complicated system thought up by the Commission, which was seven points higher than passing. The perfect valley could wait for the colonials to find it … which they would, some day.

We named the valley Happy Valley, Just for luck, and named the mountains south of it the Pauline Peaks, over Paul’s protests. He said it wasn’t official anyway; we said we would see to it that it was made so–and the boss topographer, Abie Finkelstein, marked it so on the map and we all intialed it

We spent the third light phase rounding up the details. We could have gone back then, if there had been any way to get back. There wasn’t, so we had to dope through another dark phase.

Some of them preferred to go back on a more normal schedule instead; there was a round-the-clock poker game, which I stayed out of, having nothing I could afford to lose and no talent for filling straights. There were more dark phase bull sessions but they never got as grave as the first one and nobody ever again asked Paul what he thought about the future prospects of things.

By the end of the third dark phase I was getting more than a little tired of seeing nothing but the inside of our portable range. I asked Paul for some time off.

Hank had been helping me since the start of the third dark phase. He had been working as a topographical assistant; flash contour pictures were on the program at the start of that dark phase. He was supposed to get an open-lens shot across the valley from an elevation on the south just as a sunburst flash was let off from an elevation to the west.

Hank had a camera of his own, just acquired, and he was shutter happy, always pointing it at things. This time he had tried to get a picture of his own as well as the official picture. He had goofed off, missed the official picture entirely, and to top it off had failed to protect his eyes when the sunburst went off. Which put him on the sick list and I got him as kitchen police.

He was all right shortly, but Finkelstein didn’t want him back. So I asked for relief for both of us, so we could take a hike together and do a little

exploring. Paul let us go.

There had been high excitement at the end of the second light phase when lichen had been discovered near the west end of the valley. For a while it looked as if native life had been found on Ganymede. It was a false alarm–careful examination showed that it was not only an Earth type, but a type authorized by the bionomics board.

But it did show one thing–life was spreading, taking hold, at a point thirty-one hundred miles from the original invasion. There was much argument as to whether the spores had been air borne, or had been brought in on the clothing of the crew who had set up the power plant. It didn’t matter, really.

But Hank and I decided to explore off that way and see if we could find more of it. Besides it was away from the way we had come from camp number one. We didn’t tell Paul we were going after lichen because we were afraid he would veto it; the stuff had been found quite some distance from camp. He had warned us not to go too far and to be back by six o’clock Thursday morning, in time to break camp and head back to our landing point, where the Jitterbug was to meet us.

I agreed as I didn’t mean to go far in any case. I didn’t much care whether we found lichen or not; I wasn’t feeling well. But I kept that fact to myself; I wasn’t going to be done out of my one and only chance to see some of the country.

We didn’t find any more lichen. We did find the crystals.

We were trudging along, me as happy as a kid let out of school despite an ache in my side and Hank taking useless photographs of odd rocks and lava flows. Hank had been saying that he thought he would sell out his place and homestead here in Happy Valley. He said, “You know, Bill, they are going to need a few real Ganymede farmers here to give the greenhorns the straight dope. And who knows more about Ganymede-style farming than I do?”

“Almost everybody,” I assured him.

He ignored it. “This place has really got it,” he went on, gazing around at a stretch of country that looked like Armageddon after a hard battle. “Much better than around Leda.”

I admitted that it had possibilities. “But I don’t think it’s for me,” I went on. “I don’t think I’d care to settle anywhere where you can’t see Jupiter.” “Nonsense!” he answered. “Did you come here to stare at the sights or to make a farm?”

“That’s a moot point,” I admitted. “Sometimes I think one thing, sometimes the other. Sometimes I don’t have the foggiest idea.” He wasn’t listening. “See that slot up there?”

“Sure. What about it?”

“If we crossed that little glacier, we could get up to it.” “Why?”

“I think it leads into another valley–which might be even better. Nobody has been up there. I know–I was in the topo gang.”

“I’ve been trying to help you forget that,” I told him. “But why look at all? There must be a hundred thousand valleys on Ganymede that nobody has looked at. Are you in the real estate business?” It didn’t appeal to me. There is something that gets you about virgin soil on Ganymede; I wanted to stay in sight of camp. It was quiet as a library–quieter. On Earth there is always some sound, even in the desert. After a while the stillness and the bare rocks and the ice and the craters get on my nerves.

“Come on! Don’t be a sissyl” he answered, and started climbing.

The slot did not lead to another valley; it led into a sort of corridor in the hills. One wall was curiously flat, as if it had been built that way on purpose. We went along it a way, and I was ready to turn back and had stopped to call to Hank, who had climbed the loose rock on the other side to get a picture. As I turned, my eye caught some color and I moved up to see what it was. It was the crystals.

I stared at them and they seemed to stare back. I called, “Hey! Hank! Come here on the bounce!”

“What’s up?”

“Come here! Here’s something worth taking a picture of.”

He scrambled down and joined me. After a bit he let out his breath and whispered, “Well, I’ll be fried on Friday!”

Hank got busy with his camera. I never saw such crystals, not even stalactites in caves. They were six-sided, except a few that were three-sided and some that were twelve-sided. They came anywhere from little squatty fellows no bigger than a button mushroom up to tall, slender stalks, knee high. Later on and further up we found some chest high.

They were not simple prisms; they branched and budded. But the thing that got you was the colors.

They were all colors and they changed color as you looked at them. We finally decided that they didn’t have any color at all; it was just refraction of light. At least Hank thought so.

He shot a full cartridge of pictures then said, “Come on. Let’s see where they come from.”

I didn’t want to. I was shaky from the climb and my right side was giving me fits every step I took. I guess I was dizzy, too; when I looked at the crystals they seemed to writhe around and I would have to blink my eyes to steady them.

But Hank had already started so I followed. The crystals seemed to keep to what would have been the water bed of the canyon, had it been spring. They seemed to need water. We came to a place where there was a drift of ice across the floor of the corridor –ancient ice, with a thin layer of last winter’s snow on top of it. The crystals had carved a passage right through it, a natural bridge of ice, and had cleared a space of several feet on each side of where they were growing, as well.

Hank lost his footing as we scrambled through and snatched at one of the crystals. It broke off with a sharp, clear note, like a silver bell. Hank straightened up and stood looking at his hand. There were parallel cuts across his palm and fingers. He stared at them stupidly. “That’ll teach you,” I said, and then got out a first-lid kit and bandaged it for him. When I had finished I said, “Now let’s go back.” “Shucks,” he said. “What’s a few little cuts? Come

I said, “Look, Hank, I want to go back. I don’t feel good.” “What’s the matter?”

“Stomach ache.”

“You eat too much; that’s your trouble. The exercise will do you good.” “No, Hank. I’ve got to go back.”

He stared up the ravine and looked fretful. Finally he said, “Bill, I think I see where the crystals come from, not very far up. You wait here and let me take a look. Then I’ll come back and well head for camp. I won’t be gone long; honest I won’t.”

“Okay,” I agreed. He started up; shortly I followed him. I had had it pounded into my head as a Cub not to get separated in a strange country. After a bit I heard him shout. I looked up and saw him standing, facing a great dark hole in the cliff. I called out, “What’s the matter?”

He answered:

“GREAT JUMPING HOLY SMOKE!!!”-like that.

“What’s the matter?” I repeated irritably and hurried along until I was standing beside him.

The crystals continued up the place where we were. They came right to the cave mouth, but did not go in; they formed a solid dense thicket across the threshold. Lying across the floor of the ravine, as if it had been tumbled there by an upheaval like the big quake, was a flat rock, a monolith, Stonehenge size. You could see where it had broken off the cliff, uncovering the hole. The plane of cleavage was as sharp and smooth as anything done by the ancient Egyptians.

But that wasn’t what we were looking at; we were looking into the hole.

It was dark inside, but diffused light, reflected off the canyon floor and the far wall, filtered inside. My eyes began to adjust and I could see what Hank was staring at, what he had exploded about.

There were things in there and they weren’t natural

I couldn’t have told you what sort of things because they were like nothing I had ever seen before in my life, or seen pictures of–or heard of. How can you describe what you’ve never seen before and have no words for? Shucks, you can’t even see a thing properly the first time you see it; your eye doesn’t take in the pattern.

But I could see this: they weren’t rocks, they weren’t plants, they weren’t animals. They were made things, man made–well, maybe not “man” made, but not things that just happen, either.

I wanted very badly to get up close to them and see what they were. For the moment, I forgot I was sick. So did Hank. As usual he said, “Come onl Let’s go!”

But I said, “How?”

“Why, we just–” He stopped and took another look. “Well, let’s see, we go around– No. Hmm … Bill, we will have to bust up some of those crystals and go right through the middle. There’s no other way to get in.”

I said, “Isn’t one chopped up hand enough for you?”

“I’ll bust ’em with a rock. It seems a shame; they are so pretty, but that’s what I’ll have to do.”

“I don’t think you can bust those big ones. Besides that, I’ll give you two to one that they are sharp enough to cut through your boots.”

“I’ll chance it.” He found a chunk of rock and made an experiment; I was right on both counts. Hank stopped and looked the situation over, whistling softly. “Bill–“

“Yeah?”

“See that little ledge over the opening?” “What about it?”

“It comes out to the left further than the crystals do. I’m going to pile rock up high enough for us to reach it, then we can go along it and drop down right in front of the cave mouth. The crystals don’t come that close.”

I looked it over and decided it would work. “But how do we get back?”

“We can pile up some of that stuff we can see inside and shinny up again. At the very worst I can boost you up on my shoulders and then you can reach down your belt to me, or something.”

If I had my wits about me, maybe I would have protested. But we tried it and it worked–worked right up to the point where I was hanging by my fingers from the ledge over the cave mouth.

I felt a stabbing pain in my side and let go.

I came to with Hank shaking me. “Let me alone!” I growled.

“You knocked yourself out,” he said. “I didn’t know you were so clumsy.” I didn’t answer. I just gathered my knees up to my stomach and closed my eyes.

Hank shook me again. “Don’t you want to see what’s in here?”

I kicked at him. “I don’t want to see the Queen of Sheba! Can’t you see I’m sick?” I closed my eyes again.

I must have passed out. When I woke up, Hank was sitting Turk fashion in front of me, with my torch in his hand. “You’ve been asleep a long time, fellow,” he said gently. “Feel any better?”

“Not much.”

‘Try to pull yourself together and come along with me. You’ve got to see this, Bill. You won’t believe it. This is the greatest discovery since–well, since– Never mind; Columbus was a piker. We’re famous, Bill.”

“You may be famous,” I said. “I’m sick.” “Where does it hurt?”

“All over. My stomach is hard as a rock–a rock with a toothache.” “Bill,” he said seriously, “have you ever had your appendix out?” “No.”

“Hmmm … maybe you should have had it out.” “Well, this is a fine time to tell me!”

“Take it easy.”

“Take it easy, my foot!” I got up on one elbow, my head swimming. “Hank, listen to me. You’ve got to get back to camp and tell them. Have them send a tractor for me.”

“Look, Bill,” he said gently, “you know there isn’t anything like a tractor at camp.”

I tried to struggle with the problem but it was too much for me. My brain was fuzzy. “Well, have them bring a stretcher, at least,” I said peevishly and lay down again.

Some time later I felt him fumbling around with my clothes. I tried to push him away, then I felt something very cold on me. I took a wild swing at him; it didn’t connect.

“Steady,” he said. “I have found some ice. Don’t squirm around or you’ll knock off the pack.” “I don’t want it.”

“You’ve got to have it. You keep that ice pack in place until we get out of here and you may live to be hanged, yet.”

I was too feeble to resist. I lay back down and closed my eyes again. When I opened my eyes again, I was amazed to feel better. Instead of feeling ready to die, I merely felt awful. Hank wasn’t around; I called to him. When he didn’t answer at once I felt panicky.

Then he came trotting up, waving the torch. “I thought you had gone,” I said.

“No. To tell the truth, I can’t get out of here. I can’t get back up to the ledge and I can’t get over the crystals. I tried it.” He held up one boot; it was in

shreds and there was blood on it.

“Hurt yourself?” “I’ll live.”

“I wonder,” I answered. “Nobody knows we are here–and you say we can’t get out. Looks like we starve. Not that I give a hoot.” ‘Speaking of that,” he said. “I saved you some of our lunch. I’m afraid I didn’t leave much; you were asleep a long, long time.” “Don’t mention food!” I retched and grabbed at my side.

“Sorry. But look–I didn’t say we couldn’t get out” “But you did.”

“No, I said I couldn’t get out.” “What’s the difference?”

“Uh, never mind. But I think we’ll get out. It was what you said about getting a tractor–” “Tractor? Are you out of your head?”

“Skip it,” Bill answered. “There is a sort of tractor thing back there–or more like a scaffolding, maybe.” “Make up your mind.”

“Call it a wagon. I think I can get it out, at least across the crystals. We could use it as a bridge.” “Well, roll it out.”

“It doesn’t roll. It, uh-well, it walks.”

I tried to get up. “This I got to see.”

“Just move over out of the way of the door.”

I managed to get to my feet, with Hank helping me. “I’m coming along.” “Want the ice pack changed?”

“Later, maybe.” Hank took me back and showed me. I don’t know how to describe the walker wagon-maybe you’ve seen pictures since. If a centipede were a dinosaur and made of metal to boot, it would be a walker wagon. The body of it was a sort of trough and it was supported by thirty-eight legs, nineteen on a side.

“That,” I said, “is the craziest contraption I ever laid eyes on. You’ll never shove it out the door.”

“Wait until you see,” he advised. “And if you think this is crazy, you should see the other things in here.” “Such as?”

“Bill, you know what I think this place is? I think it’s a hangar for a space ship.”

“Huh? Don’t be silly; space ships don’t have hangars.”

“This one has.”

“You mean you sawa space ship in here?”

“Well, I don’t know. It’s not like any I ever saw before, but if it’s not a space ship, I don’t know what it is good for.” I wanted to go see, but Hank objected. “Another time, Bill; we’ve got to get back to camp. We’re late as it is.”

I didn’t put up any fight. My side was paining me again, from the walk. “Okay, what happens next?”

“Like this.” He led me around to the end of the contraption; the trough came nearly down to the floor in back. Hank helped me get inside, told me to lie down, and went up to the other end. ‘The guy that built this,” he said, “must have been a hump-backed midget with four arms. Hang on.”

“Do you know what you’re doing?” I asked.

“I moved it about six feet before; then I lost my nerve. Abracadabra! Hold onto your hat!” He poked a finger deep into a hole.

The thing began to move, silently, gently, without any fuss. When we came out into the sunshine, Hank pulled his finger out of the hole. I sat up. The thing was two thirds out of the cave and the front end was beyond the crystals.

I sighed. “You made it, Hank, Let’s get going. If I had some more ice on my side I think I could walk.” “Wait a second,” he said. “I want to try something. There are holes here I haven’t stuck a finger in yet.” “Leave well enough alone.”

Instead of answering he tried another hole. The machine backed up suddenly. “Woopsl” he said, jerked his finger out, and jabbed it back where it had been before. He left it there until he regained what we had lost.

He tried other holes more cautiously. At last he found one which caused the machine to rear up its front end slightly and swing it to the left, like a caterpillar. “Now we are in business,” he said happily. “I can steer it.” We started down the canyon.

Hank was not entirely correct in thinking he could guide it. It was more like guiding a horse than a machine–or perhaps more like guiding one of those new groundmobiles with the semi-automatic steering.

The walker wagon came to the little natural bridge of ice through which the crystals passed and stopped of itself. Hank tried to get it to go through the opening, which was large enough; it would have none of it. The front end cast around like a dog sniffing, then eased gradually up hill and around the ice.

It stayed level; apparently it could adjust its legs, like the fabulous hillside snee.

When Hank came to the ice flow we had crossed on the way up to the notch, he stopped it and gave me a fresh ice pack. Apparently it did not object to ice in itself, but simply refused to go through holes, for when we started up again, it crossed the little glacier, slowly and cautiously, but steadily.

We headed on toward camp. “This,” Hank announced happily, “is the greatest cross-country, rough-terrain vehicle ever built. I wish I knew what makes it go. If I had the patent on this thing, I’d be rich.”

“It’s yours; you found it.”

“It doesn’t really belong to me.”

“Hank,” I answered, “you don’t really think the owner is going to come back looking for it, do you?”

He got a very odd look. “No, I don’t, Bill. Say, Bill, uh, how long ago do you think this thing was put in there?”

“I wouldn’t even want to guess.”

There was only one tent at the camp site. As we came up to it, somebody came out and waited for us. It was Sergei. “Where have you guys been?” he asked. “And where in Kingdom Come did you steal that?

“And what is it?” he added.

We did our best to bring him up to date, and presently he did the same for us. They had searched for us as long as they could, then Paul had been forced to move back to camp number one to keep the date with the Jitterbug. He had left Sergei behind to fetch us when we showed up. “He left a note for you,” Sergei added, digging it out

It read:

“Dear Pen Pals,

I am sorry to go off and leave you crazy galoots but you know the schedule as well as I do. I would stay behind myself to herd you home, but your pal Sergei insists that it is his privilege. Every time I try to reason with him he crawls further back into his hole, bares his teeth, and growls.

As soon as you get this, get your chubby little legs to moving in the direction of camp number one. Run, do not walk. We’ll hold the Jitterbug, but you knowhowdear old Aunt Hattie feels about keeping her schedule. She isn’t going to like it if you are late.

When I see you, I intend to beat your ears down around your shoulders. Good luck,

P. du M.

P. S. to Doctor Slop: I took care of your accordion.”

When we had finished reading it Sergei said, “I want to hear more about what you found–about eight times more. But not now; we’ve got to tear over to camp number one. Hank, you think Bill can’t walk it?”

I answered for myself, an emphatic “no.” The excitement was wearing off and I was feeling worse again. “Hmm–Hank, do you think that mobile junk yard will carry us over there?”

“I think it will carry us any place.” Hank patted it. “How fast? The Jitterbug has already grounded.” “Are you sure?” asked Hank.

“I saw its trail in the sky at least three hours ago.” “Let’s get going!”

I don’t remember much about the trip. They stopped once in the pass, and packed me with ice again. The next thing I knew I was awakened by hearing Sergei shout, “There’s the Jitterbug! I can see it.”

“Jitterbug, here we come,” answered Hank. I sat up and looked, too.

We were coming down the slope, not five miles from it, when flame burst from its tail and it climbed for the sky. Hank groaned. I lay back down and closed my eyes.

I woke up again when the contraption stopped. Paul was there, hands on his hips, staring at us. “About time you birds got home,” he announced. “But where did you find that?“

“Paul,” Hank said urgently, “Bill is very sick.”

“Oh, oh!” Paul swung up and into the walker and made no more questions then. A moment later he had my belly bared and was shoving a thumb into that spot between the belly button and the hip bone. “Does that hurt?” he asked.

I was too weak to slug him. He gave me a pill.

I took no further part in events for a while, but what had happened was this: Captain Hattie had waited, at Paul’s urgent insistence, for a couple of hours, and then had announced that she had to blast. She had a schedule to keep with the Covered Wagon and she had no intention, she said, of keeping eight thousand people waiting for the benefit of two. Hank and I could play Indian if we liked; we couldn’t play hob with her schedule.

There was nothing Paul could do, so he sent the rest back and waited for us.

But I didn’t hear this at the time. I was vaguely aware that we were in the walker wagon, travelling, and I woke up twice when I was repacked with ice, but the whole episode is foggy. They travelled east, with Hank driving and Paul navigating–by the seat of his pants. Some long dreamy time later they reached a pioneer camp surveying a site over a hundred miles away–and from there Paul radioed for help.

Whereupon the Jitterbug came and got us. I remember the landing back at Leda–that is, I remember somebody saying, “Hurry, there! We’ve got a boy with a burst appendix.”

5. Home

There was considerable excitement over what we had found–and there still is–but I didn’t see any of it. I was busy playing games with the Pearly Gates. I guess I have Dr. Archibald to thank for still being here. And Hank. And Sergei. And Paul. And Captain Hattie. And some nameless party, who lived somewhere, a long time ago, whose shape and race I still don’t know, but who designed the perfect machine for traveling overland through rough country.

I thanked everybody but him. They all came to see me in the hospital, even Captain Hattie, who growled at me, then leaned over and kissed me on the cheek as she left. I was so surprised I almost bit her.

The Schultzes came, of course, and Mama cried over me and Papa gave me an apple and Gretchen could hardly talk, which isn’t like her. And Molly brought the twins down to see me and vice versa.

The Leda daily Planet interviewed me. They wanted to know whether or not we thought the things we found were made by men? Now that is a hard question to answer and smarter people than myself have worked on it since.

What is a man?

The things Hank and I–and the Project Jove scientists who went later–found in that cave couldn’t have been made by men–not men like us. The walker wagon was the simplest thing they found. Most of the things they still haven’t found out the use for. Nor have they figured out what the creatures looked like–no pictures.

That seems surprising, but the scientists concluded they didn’t have eyes–not eyes like ours, anyhow. So they didn’t use pictures.

The very notion of a “picture” seems pretty esoteric when you think it over. The Venetians don’t use pictures, nor the Martians. Maybe we are the only race in the universe that thought up that way of recording things.

So they weren’t “men”–not like us.

But they were men in the real sense of the word, even though I don’t doubt that I would run screaming away if I met one in a dark alley. The important thing, as Mr. Seymour would say, they had–they controlled their environment. They weren’t animals, pushed around and forced to accept what

nature handed them; they took nature and bent it to their will.

I guess they were men.

The crystals were one of the oddest things about it and I didn’t have any opinions on that. Somehow, those crystals were connected with that cave– or space ship hangar, or whatever it was. Yet they couldn’t or wouldn’t go inside the cave.

Here was another point that the follow-up party from Project Jove recorded: that big unwieldly walker wagon came all the way down that narrow canyon-yet it did not step on a single crystal. Hank must be a pretty good driver. He says he’s not that good.

Don’t ask me. I don’t understand everything that goes on in the universe. It’s a big place.

I had lots of time to think before they let me out of the hospital–and lots to think about. I thought about my coming trip to Earth, to go back to school I had missed the Covered Wagon, of course, but that didn’t mean anything; I could take the Mayflower three weeks later. But did I want to go? It was a close thing to decide.

One thing I was sure of: I was going to take those merit badge tests as soon as I was out of bed. I had put it off too long. A close brush with the hereafter reminds you that you don’t have forever to get things done.

But going back to school? That was another matter. For one thing, as Dad told me, the council had lost its suit with the Commission; Dad couldn’t use his Earthside assets.

And there was the matter that Paul had talked about the night he had to let his hair down–the coming war.

Did Paul know what he was talking about? If so, was I letting it scare me out? I honestly didn’t think so; Paul had said that it was not less than forty years away. I wouldn’t be Earthside more than four or five years–and, besides, how could you get scared of anything that far in the future?

I had been through the Quake and the reconstruction; I didn’t really think I’d ever be scared of anything again.

I had a private suspicion that, supposing there was a war, I’d go join up; I wouldn’t be running away from it. Silly, maybe.

No, I wasn’t afraid of the War, but it was on my mind. Why? I finally doped it out. When Paul called I asked him about it. “See here, Paul–this war you were talking about: when Ganymede reaches the state that Earth has gotten into, does that mean war here, too? Not now–a few centuries from now.”

He smiled rather sadly. “By then we may know enough to keep from getting into that shape. At least we can hope.” He got a far-away look and added, “A new colony is always a new hope.”

I liked that way of putting it. “A new hope–” Once I heard somebody call a new baby that.

I still didn’t have the answer about going back when Dad called on me one Sunday night. I put it up to him about the cost of the fare. “I know the land is technically mine, George–but it’s too much of a drain on you two.”

“Contrariwise,” said George, “well get by and that’s what savings are for. Molly is for it. We will be sending the twins back for school, you know.” “Even so, I don’t feel right about it. And what real use is there in it, George? I don’t need a fancy education. I’ve been thinking about Callisto: there’s

a brand new planet not touched yet with great opportunities for a man in on the ground floor. I could get a job with the atmosphere expedition–Paul

would put in a word for me–and grow up with the project. I might be chief engineer of the whole planet some day.”

“Not unless you learn more about thermodynamics than you do now, you won’t be!” “Huh?”

“Engineers don’t just ‘grow up’; they study. They go to school.”

“Don’t I study? Ain’t I attending two of your classes right now? I can get to be an engineer here; I don’t have to drag back half a billion miles for it.”

“Fiddlesticks! It takes discipline to study. You haven’t even taken your merit badge tests. You’ve let your Eagle Scoutship lapse.”

I wanted to explain that taking tests and studying for tests were two different things–that I had studied. But I couldn’t seem to phrase it right.

George stood up. “See here, Son, I’m going to put it to you straight. Never mind about being chief engineer of a planet; these days even a farmer needs the best education he can get. Without it he’s just a country bumpkin, a stumbling peasant, poking seeds into the ground and hoping a miracle will make them grow.

I want you to go back to Earth and get the best that Earth has to offer. I want you to have a degree with prestige behind it–M.I.T., Harvard, the Sorbonne. Some place noted for scholarship. Take the time to do that and then do anything you want to do. Believe me, it will pay.”

I thought about it and answered, “I guess you are right, George.”

Dad stood up. “Well, make up your mind. I’ll have to hurry now for the bus, or I’ll be hoofing it back to the farm. See you tomorrow.” “Good night, George.”

I lay awake and thought about it. After a while, Mrs. Dinsmore, the wing nurse, came in, turned out my light, and said goodnight. But I didn’t go to sleep.

Dad was right, I knew. I didn’t want to be an ignoramus. Furthermore, I had seen the advantage held by men with fancy degrees–first crack at the jobs, fast promotion. Okay, I’d get me one of those sheepskins, then come back and–well, go to Callisto, maybe, or perhaps prove a new parcel of land. I’d go and I’d come back.

Nevertheless I couldn’t get to sleep. After a while I glanced at my new watch and saw that it was nearly midnight–dawn in a few minutes. I decided that I wanted to see it It might be the last time I’d be up and around at midnight Sunday for a long, long time.

I scouted the corridor; Old Lady Dinsmore wasn’t in sight. I ducked outside.

The Sun was just barely below the horizon; north of me I could see its first rays touching the topmost antenna of the power station, miles away on Pride Peak. It was very still and very beautiful. Overhead old Jupiter was in half phase, bulging and orange and grand. To the west of it Io was just coming out of shadow; it passed from black to cherry red to orange as I watched.

I wondered how I would feel to be back on Earth? How would it feel to weigh three times as much as I did now? I didn’t feel heavy; I felt just right. How would it feel to swim in that thick dirty soup they use for air?

How would it feel to have nobody but ground hogs to talk to? How could I talk to a girl who wasn’t a colonial, who had never been off Earth higher than a copter hop? Sissies. Take Gretchen, now–there was a girl who could kill a chicken and have it in the pot while an Earthside girl would still be squealing.

The top of the Sun broke above the horizon and caught the snow on the peaks of the Big Rock Candy Mountains, tinting it rosy against a pale green sky. I began to be able to see the country around me. It was a new, hard, clean place–not like California with its fifty, sixty million people falling over each other. It was my kind’ of a place–it was my place.

The deuce with Caltech and Cambridge and those fancy schools! I’d show Dad it didn’t take ivied halls to get an education. Yes, and I’d pass those tests and be an Eagle again, first thing.

Hadn’t Andrew Johnson, that American President, learned to read while he was working? Even after he was married? Give us time; we’d have as good scientists and scholars here as anywhere.

The long slow dawn went on and the light caught Kneiper’s cut west of me, outlining it. I was reminded of the night we had struggled through it in the storm. As Hank put it, there was one good thing about colonial life–it sorted out the men from the boys.

“I have lived and worked with men.” The phrase rang through my head. Rhysling? Kipling, maybe. I had lived and worked with men!

The Sun was beginning to reach the roof tops. It spread across Laguna Serenidad, turning it from black to purple to blue. This was my planet, this

was my home and I knew that I would never leave it

Mrs. Dinsmore came bustling out to the door and spotted me. “Why, the very idea!” she scolded. “You get back where you belong!” I smiled at her. “I am where I belong. And I’m going to stay!”

The End

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Have spacesuit – will travel (full text) by Robert Heinlein

“Have Spacesuit – Will Travel” is a great story that is in the same class as “Farmer in the Sky”. Which are both fictional stories that are perhaps some of his best. All have a great sense of awe and adventure and excitement about space and exploration that existed back in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Have Spacesuit – Will Travel

Chapter 1

You see, I had this space suit. How it happened was this way:

“Dad,” I said, “I want to go to the Moon.”

“Certainly,” he answered and looked back at his book. It was Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, which he must know by heart. I said, “Dad, please! I’m serious.”

This time he closed the book on a finger and said gently, “I said it was all right. Go ahead.” “Yes … but how?”

“Eh?” He looked mildly surprised. “Why, that’s your problem, Clifford.”

Dad was like that. The time I told him I wanted to buy a bicycle he said, “Go right ahead,” without even glancing up-so I had gone to the money basket in the dining room, intending to take enough for a bicycle. But there had been only eleven dollars and forty-three cents in it, so about a thousand miles of mowed lawns later I bought a bicycle. I hadn’t said anymore to Dad because if money wasn’t in the basket, it wasn’t anywhere; Dad didn’t bother with banks-just the money basket and one next to it marked “UNCLE SAM,” the contents of which he bundled up and mailed to the government once a year. This caused the Internal Revenue Service considerable headache and once they sent a man to remonstrate with him.

First the man demanded, then he pleaded. “But, Dr. Russell, we know your background. You’ve no excuse for not keeping proper records.” “But I do,” Dad told him. “Up here.” He tapped his forehead.

“The law requires written records.”

“Look again,” Dad advised him. “The law can’t even require a man to read and write. More coffee?”

The man tried to get Dad to pay by check or money order. Dad read him the fine print on a dollar bill, the part about “legal tender for all debts, public and private.” In a despairing effort to get something out of the trip he asked Dad please not to fill in the space marked “occupation” with “Spy.”

“Why not?”

“What? Why, because you aren’t-and it upsets people.” “Have you checked with the F.B.I.?”

“Eh? No.”

“They probably wouldn’t answer. But you’ve been very polite. I’ll mark it ‘Unemployed Spy.’ Okay?”

The tax man almost forgot his brief case. Nothing fazed Dad, he meant what he said, he wouldn’t argue and he never gave in. So when he told me I could go to the Moon but the means were up to me, he meant just that. I could go tomorrow-provided I could wangle a billet in a space ship.

But he added meditatively, “There must be a number of ways to get to the Moon, son. Better check ‘em all. Reminds me of this passage I’m reading. They’re trying to open a tin of pineapple and Harris has left the can opener back in London. They try several ways.” He started to read aloud and I sneaked out-I had heard that passage five hundred times. Well, three hundred.

I went to my workshop in the barn and thought about ways. One way was to go to the Air Academy at Colorado Springs-if I got an appointment, if I graduated, if I managed to get picked for the Federation Space Corps, there was a chance that someday I would be ordered to Lunar Base, or at least one of the satellite stations.

Another way was to study engineering, get a job in jet propulsion, and buck for a spot that would get me sent to the Moon. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of engineers had been to the Moon, or were still there-for all sorts of work: electronics, cryogenics, metallurgy, ceramics, air conditioning, as well as rocket engineering.

Oh, yes! Out of a million engineers a handful got picked for the Moon. Shucks, I rarely got picked even playing post office.

Or a man could be an M.D., or a lawyer, or geologist, or toolmaker, and wind up on the Moon at a fat salary-provided they wanted him and nobody else. I didn’t care about salary-but how do you arrange to be number one in your specialty?

And there was the straightforward way: trundle in a wheelbarrow of money and buy a ticket.

This I would never manage-I had eighty-seven cents at that moment -but it had caused me to think about it steadily. Of the boys in our school half admitted that they wanted to space, half pretended not to care, knowing how feeble the chances were-plus a handful of creeps who wouldn’t leave Earth for any reason. But we talked about it and some of us were determined to go. I didn’t break into a rash until American Express and Thos. Cook & Son announced tourist excursions.

I saw their ads in National Geographic while waiting to have my teeth cleaned. After that I never was the same.

The idea that any rich man could simply lay cash on the line and go was more than I could stand. I just had to go. I would never be able to pay for it-or, at least, that was so far in the future there was no use thinking about it. So what could I do to be sent?

You see stories about boys, poor-but-honest, who go to the top because they’re smarter than anyone in the county, maybe the state. But they’re not talking about me. I was in the top quarter of my graduating class but they do not give scholarships to M.I.T. for that-not from Centerville High. I am stating a fact; our high school isn’t very good. It’s great to go to-we’re league champions in basketball and our square-dance team is state runner-up and we have a swell sock hop every Wednesday. Lots of school spirit.

But not much studying.

The emphasis is on what our principal, Mr. Hanley, calls “preparation for life” rather than on trigonometry. Maybe it does prepare you for life; it certainly doesn’t prepare you for CalTech. I didn’t find this out myself. Sophomore year I brought home a questionnaire cooked up by our group project in “Family Living” in social studies. One question read: “How is your family

council organized?”

At dinner I said, “Dad, how is our family council organized?” Mother said, “Don’t disturb your father, dear.”

Dad said, “Eh? Let me see that.”

He read it, then told me to fetch my textbooks. I had not brought them home, so he sent me to school to get them. Fortunately the building was open-rehearsals for the Fall Blow-Out. Dad rarely gave orders but when he did he expected results.

I had a swell course that semester-social study, commercial arithmetic, applied English (the class had picked “slogan writing” which was fun), handicrafts (we were building sets for the Blow-Out), and gym-which was basketball practice for me; I wasn’t tall enough for first team but a reliable substitute gets his varsity letter his senior year. All in all, I was doing well in school and knew it.

Dad read all my textbooks that night; he is a fast reader. In social study I reported that our family was an informal democracy; it got by-the class was arguing whether the chairmanship of a council should rotate or be elective, and whether a grandparent living in the home was eligible. We decided that a grandparent was a member but should not be chairman, then we formed committees to draw up a constitution for an ideal family organization, which we would present to our families as the project’s findings.

Dad was around school a good bit the next few days, which worried me -when parents get overactive they are always up to something.

The following Saturday evening Dad called me into his study. He had a stack of textbooks on his desk and a chart of Centerville High School’s curriculum, from American Folk Dancing to Life Sciences. Marked on it was my course, not only for that semester but for junior and senior years the way my faculty advisor and I had planned it.

Dad stared at me like a gentle grasshopper and said mildly, “Kip, do you intend to go to college?” “Huh? Why, certainly, Dad!”

“With what?”

I hesitated. I knew it cost money. While there had been times when dollar bills spilled out of the basket onto the floor, usually it wouldn’t take long to count what was in it. “Uh, maybe I’ll get a scholarship. Or I could work my way.”

He nodded. “No doubt … if you want to. Money problems can always be solved by a man not frightened by them. But when I said, ‘With what?’ I was talking about up here.” He tapped his skull.

I simply stared. “Why, I’ll graduate from high school, Dad. That’ll get me into college.”

“So it will. Into our State University, or the State Aggie, or State Normal. But, Kip, do you know that they are flunking out 40 per cent of each freshman class?” “I wouldn’t flunk!”

“Perhaps not. But you will if you tackle any serious subject-engineering, or science, or pre-med. You would, that is to say, if your preparation were based on this.” He waved a hand at the curriculum.

I felt shocked. “Why, Dad, Center is a swell school.” I remembered things they had told us in P.T.A. Auxiliary. “It’s run along the latest, most scientific lines, approved by psychologists, and-“

“-and paying excellent salaries,” he interrupted, “for a staff highly trained in modern pedagogy. Study projects emphasize practical human problems to orient the child in democratic social living, to fit him for the vital, meaningful tests of adult life in our complex modern culture. Excuse me, son; I’ve talked with Mr. Hanley. Mr. Hanley is sincere-and to achieve these noble purposes we are spending more per student than is any other state save California and New York.”

“Well … what’s wrong with that?” “What’s a dangling participle?”

I didn’t answer. He went on, “Why did Van Buren fail of re-election? How do you extract the cube root of eighty-seven?”

Van Buren had been a president; that was all I remembered. But I could answer the other one. “If you want a cube root, you look in a table in the back of the book.”

Dad sighed. “Kip, do you think that table was brought down from on high by an archangel?” He shook his head sadly. “It’s my fault, not yours. I should have looked into this years ago-but I had assumed, simply because you liked to read and were quick at figures and clever with your hands, that you were getting an education.”

“You think I’m not?”

“I know you are not. Son, Centerville High is a delightful place, well equipped, smoothly administered, beautifully kept. Not a ‘blackboard jungle,’ oh, no!-I think you kids love the place. You should. But this-” Dad slapped the curriculum chart angrily. “Twaddle! Beetle tracking! Occupational therapy for morons!”

I didn’t know what to say. Dad sat and brooded. At last he said, “The law declares that you must attend school until you are eighteen or have graduated from high school.” “Yes, sir.”

“The school you are in is a waste of time. The toughest course we can pick won’t stretch your mind. But it’s either this school, or send you away.” I said, “Doesn’t that cost a lot of money?”

He ignored my question. “I don’t favor boarding schools, a teen-ager belongs with his family. Oh, a tough prep school back east can drill you so that you can enter Stanford, or Yale, or any of the best-but you can pick up false standards, too-nutty ideas about money and social position and the right tailor. It took me years to get rid of ones I acquired that way. Your mother

and I did not pick a small town for your boyhood unpurposefully. So you’ll stay in Centerville High.”

I looked relieved.

“Nevertheless you intend to go to college. Do you intend to become a professional man? Or will you look for snap courses in more elaborate ways to make bayberry candles? Son, your life is yours, to do with as you wish. But if you have any thought of going to a good university and studying anything of importance, then we must consider how to make best use of your next three years.”

“Why, gosh, Dad, of course I want to go to a good-“ “See me when you’ve thought it over. Good night.”

I did for a week. And, you know, I began to see that Dad was right. Our project in “Family Living” was twaddle. What did those kids know about running a family? Or Miss Finchley?- unmarried and no kids. The class decided unanimously that every child should have a room of his own, and be given an allowance “to teach him to handle money.” Great stuff … but how about the Quinlan family, nine kids in a five-room house? Let’s not be foolish.

Commercial arithmetic wasn’t silly but it was a waste of time. I read the book through the first week; after that I was bored.

Dad switched me to algebra, Spanish, general science, English grammar and composition; the only thing unchanged was gym. I didn’t have it too tough catching up; even those courses were watered down. Nevertheless, I started to learn, for Dad threw a lot of books at me and said, “Clifford, you would be studying these if you were not in overgrown kindergarten. If you soak up what is in them, you should be able to pass College Entrance Board Examinations. Possibly.”

After that he left me alone; he meant it when he said that it was my choice. I almost bogged down-those books were hard, not the predigested pap I got in school. Anybody who thinks that studying Latin by himself is a snap should try it.

I got discouraged and nearly quit-then I got mad and leaned into it. After a while I found that Latin was making Spanish easier and vice versa. When Miss Hernandez, my Spanish teacher, found out I was studying Latin, she began tutoring me. I not only worked my way through Virgil, I learned to speak Spanish like a Mexicano.

Algebra and plane geometry were all the math our school offered; I went ahead on my own with advanced algebra and solid geometry and trigonometry and might have stopped so far as College Boards were concerned-but math is worse than peanuts. Analytical geometry seems pure Greek until you see what they’re driving at-then, if you know algebra, it bursts on you and you race through the rest of the book. Glorious!

I had to sample calculus and when I got interested in electronics I needed vector analysis. General science was the only science course the school had and pretty general it was, too- about Sunday supplement level. But when you read about chemistry and physics you want to do it, too. The barn was mine and I had a chem lab and a darkroom and an electronics bench and, for a while, a ham station. Mother was perturbed when I blew out the windows and set fire to the barn-just a small fire-but Dad was not. He simply suggested that I not manufacture explosives in a frame building.

When I took the College Boards my senior year I passed them.

It was early March my senior year that I told Dad I wanted to go to the Moon. The idea had been made acute by the announcement of commercial flights but I had been “space happy” ever since the day they announced that the Federation Space Corps had established a lunar base. Or earlier. I told Dad about my decision because I felt that he would know the answer. You see. Dad always found ways to do anything he decided to do.

When I was little we lived lots of places-Washington, New York/Los Angeles, I don’t know where-usually in hotel apartments. Dad was always flying somewhere and when he was home

there were visitors; I never saw him much. Then we moved to Centerville and he was always home, his nose in a book or working at his desk. When people wanted to see him they had to come to him. I remember once, when the money basket was empty, Dad told Mother that “a royalty was due.” I hung around that day because I had never seen a king (I was eight) and when a visitor showed up I was disappointed because he didn’t wear a crown. There was money in the basket the next day so I decided that he had been incognito (I was reading The Little Lame Prince) and had tossed Dad a purse of gold-it was at least a year before I found out that a “royalty” could be money from a patent or a book or business stock, and some of the glamour went out of life. But this visitor, though not king, thought he could make Dad do what he wanted rather than what Dad wanted:

“Dr. Russell, I concede that Washington has an atrocious climate. But you will have air-conditioned offices.” “With clocks, no doubt. And secretaries. And soundproofing.”

“Anything you want. Doctor.”

“The point is, Mr. Secretary, I don’t want them. This household has no clocks. Nor calendars. Once I had a large income and a larger ulcer; I now have a small income and no ulcer. I stay here.”

“But the job needs you.”

“The need is not mutual. Do have some more meat loaf.”

Since Dad did not want to go to the Moon, the problem was mine. I got down college catalogs I had collected and started listing engineering schools. I had no idea how I could pay tuition or even eat-but the first thing was to get myself accepted by a tough school with a reputation.

If not, I could enlist in the Air Force and try for an appointment. If I missed, I could become an enlisted specialist in electronics; Lunar Base used radar and astrar techs. One way or another, I was going.

Next morning at breakfast Dad was hidden behind the New York Times while Mother read the Herald-Trib. I had the Centerville Clarion but it’s fit only for wrapping salami. Dad looked over his paper at me. “Clifford, here’s something in your line.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t grunt; that is an uncouth privilege of seniors. This.” He handed it to me. It was a soap ad.

It announced that tired old gimmick, a gigantic super-colossal prize contest. This one promised a thousand prizes down to a last hundred, each of which was a year’s supply of Skyway Soap.

Then I spilled cornflakes in my lap. The first prize was- “-AN ALL-EXPENSE TRIP TO THE MOON!!!”

That’s the way it read, with three exclamation points-only to me there were a dozen, with bursting bombs and a heavenly choir.

Just complete this sentence in twenty-five words or less: “I use Skyway Soap because …” (And send in the usual soap wrapper or reasonable facsimile.)

There was more about”-joint management of American Express and Thos. Cook-” and “-with the cooperation of the United States Air Force-” and a list of lesser prizes. But all I saw, while milk and soggy cereal soaked my pants, was: “-TRIP TO THE MOON!!!”

First I went sky-high with excitement … then as far down with depression. I didn’t win contests-why, if I bought a box of Cracker Jack, I’d get one they forgot to put a prize in. I had been cured of matching pennies. If I ever-

“Stop it,” said Dad. I shut up.

“There is no such thing as luck; there is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe. Do you intend to enter this?” “Do I!”

“I assume that to be affirmative. Very well, make a systematic effort.”

I did and Dad was helpful-he didn’t just offer me more meat loaf. But he saw to it I didn’t go to pieces; I finished school and sent off applications for college and kept my job-I was working after school that semester at Charton’s Pharmacy-soda jerk, but also learning about pharmacy. Mr. Charton was too conscientious to let me touch anything but packaged items, but I learned-materia medica and nomenclature and what various antibiotics were for and why you had to be careful. That led into organic chemistry and biochemistry and he lent me Walker, Boyd and Asimov- biochemistry makes atomic physics look simple, but presently it begins to make sense.

Mr. Charton was an old widower and pharmacology was his life. He hinted that someone would have to carry on the pharmacy someday- some young fellow with a degree in pharmacy and devotion to the profession. He said that he might be able to help such a person get through school. If he had suggested that I could someday run the dispensary at Lunar Base, I might have taken the bait. I explained that I was dead set on spacing, and engineering looked like my one chance.

He didn’t laugh. He said I was probably right-but that I shouldn’t forget that wherever Man went, to the Moon, on Mars, or the farthest stars, pharmacists and dispensaries would go along. Then he dug out books for me on space medicine-Strughold and Haber and Stapp and others. “I once had ideas along that line. Kip,” he said quietly, “but now it’s too late.”

Even though Mr. Charton was not really interested in anything but drugs, we sold everything that drugstores sell, from bicycle tires to home permanent kits. Including soap, of course.

We were selling darned little Skyway Soap; Centerville is conservative about new brands-I’ll bet some of them made their own soap. But when I showed up for work that day I had to tell Mr. Charton about it. He dug out two dust-covered boxes and put them on the counter. Then he phoned his jobber in Springfield.

He really did right by me. He marked Skyway Soap down almost to cost and pushed it-and he almost always got the wrappers before he let the customer go. Me, I stacked a pyramid of Skyway Soap on each end of the fountain and every coke was accompanied by a spiel for good old Skyway, the soap that washes cleaner, is packed with vitamins, and improves your chances of Heaven, not to mention its rich creamy lather, finer ingredients, and refusal to take the Fifth Amendment. Oh, I was shameless! Anybody who got away without buying was deaf or fast on his feet.

If he bought soap without leaving the wrappers with me he was a magician. Adults I talked out of it; kids, if I had to, I paid a penny for each wrapper. If they brought in wrappers from around town, I paid a dime a dozen and threw in a cone. The rules permitted a contestant to submit any number of entries as long as each was written on a Skyway Soap wrapper or reasonable facsimile.

I considered photographing one and turning out facsimiles by the gross, but Dad advised me not to. “It is within the rules, Kip, but I’ve never yet known a skunk to be welcome at a picnic.” So I used soap. And I sent in wrappers with slogans:

“I use Skyway Soap because- it makes me feel so clean.”

highway or byway, there’s no soap like Skyway!” its quality is sky-high.”

it is pure as the Milky Way.”

it is pure as Interstellar Space.”

it leaves me fresh as a rain-swept sky.”

And so on endlessly, until I tasted soap in my dreams. Not just my own slogans either; Dad thought them up, and so did Mother and Mr. Charton. I kept a notebook and wrote them down in school or at work or in the middle of the night. I came home one evening and found that Dad had set up a card file for me and after that I kept them alphabetically to avoid repeating. A good thing, too, for toward the last I sent in as many as a hundred a day. Postage mounted, not to mention having to buy some wrappers.

Other kids in town were in the contest and probably some adults, but they didn’t have the production line I had. I’d leave work at ten o’clock, hurry home with the day’s slogans and wrappers, pick up more slogans from Dad and Mother, then use a rubber stamp on the inside of each wrapper: “I use Skyway Soap because-” with my name and address. As I typed, Dad filled out file cards. Each morning I mailed the bunch on my way to school.

I got laughed at but the adults most inclined to kid me were quickest to let me have their wrappers.

All but one, an oaf called “Ace” Quiggle. I shouldn’t class Ace as an adult; he was an over-age juvenile delinquent. I guess every town has at least one Ace. He hadn’t finished Centerville High, a distinction since Mr. Hanley believed in promoting everybody “to keep age groups together.” As far back as I remember Ace hung around Main Street, sometimes working, mostly not.

He specialized in “wit.” He was at our fountain one day, using up two dollars’ worth of space and time for one thirty-five-cent malt. I had just persuaded old Mrs. Jenkins to buy a dozen cakes and had relieved her of the wrappers. As she left, Ace picked one off my counter display and said, “You’re selling these. Space Cadet?”

“That’s right, Ace. You’ll never find such a bargain again.”

“You expect to go to the Moon, just selling soap, Captain? Or should I say ‘Commodore’? Yuk yuk yukkity yuk!” That’s how Ace laughed, like a comic strip. “I’m trying,” I said politely. “How about some?”

“You’re sure it’s good soap?” “Positive.”

“Well, I’ll tell you. Just to help you out-I’ll buy one bar.”

Aplunger. But this might be the winning wrapper. “Sure thing, Ace. Thanks a lot.” I took his money, he slipped the cake into his pocket and started to leave. “Just a second, Ace. The wrapper. Please?”

He stopped. “Oh, yes.” He took out the bar, peeled it, held up the wrapper. “You want this?” “Yes, Ace. Thanks.”

“Well, I’ll show you how to get the best use of it.” He reached across to the cigar lighter on the tobacco counter and set fire to it, lit a cigarette with it, let the wrapper bum almost to his fingers, dropped it and stepped on it.

Mr. Charton watched from the window of the dispensary.

Ace grinned. “Okay, Space Cadet?”

I was gripping the ice-cream scoop. But I answered, “Perfectly okay, Ace. It’s your soap.” Mr. Charton came out and said, “I’ll take the fountain, Kip. There’s a package to deliver.”

That was almost the only wrapper I missed. The contest ended May 1 and both Dad and Mr. Charton decided to stock up and cleaned out the last case in the store. It was almost eleven before I had them written up, then Mr. Charton drove me to Springfield to get them postmarked before midnight.

I had sent in five thousand seven hundred and eighty-two slogans. I doubt if Centerville was ever so scrubbed.

The results were announced on the Fourth of July. I chewed my nails to the elbows in those nine weeks. Oh, other things happened. I graduated and Dad and Mother gave me a watch and we paraded past Mr. Hanley and got our diplomas. It felt good, even though what Dad had persuaded me to learn beat what I learned at dear old Center six ways from zero. Before that was Sneak Day and Class Honeymoon and Senior Prom and the Class Play and the Junior-Senior Picnic and all the things they do to keep the animals quiet. Mr. Charton let me off early if I asked, but I didn’t ask often as my mind wasn’t on it and I wasn’t going steady anyhow. I had been earlier in the year, but she-Elaine McMurty-wanted to talk boys and clothes and I wanted to talk space and engineering so she put me back into circulation.

After graduation I worked for Mr. Charton full time. I still didn’t know how I was going to college. I didn’t think about it; I just dished sundaes and held my breath until the Fourth of July.

It was to be on television at 8 P.M. We had a TV-a black and white flatimage job-but it hadn’t been turned on in months; after I built it I lost interest. I dug it out, set it up in the living room and tested the picture. I killed a couple of hours adjusting it, then spent the rest of the day chewing nails. I couldn’t eat dinner. By seven-thirty I was in front of the set, not-watching a comedy team and fiddling with my file cards. Dad came in, looked sharply at me, and said, “Take a grip on yourself, Kip. Let me remind you again that the chances are against you.”

I gulped. “I know, Dad.”

“Furthermore, in the long run it won’t matter. Aman almost always gets what he wants badly enough. I am sure you will get to the Moon someday, one way or another.” “Yes, sir. I just wish they would get it over with.”

“They will. Coming, Emma?”

“Right away, dearest,” Mother called back. She came in, patted my hand and sat down. Dad settled back. “Reminds me of election nights.”

Mother said, “I’m glad you’re no longer up to your ears in that.” “Oh, come now, sweetheart, you enjoyed every campaign.” Mother sniffed.

The comics went back where comics go, cigarettes did a cancan, then dived into their packs while a soothing voice assured us that carcinogenous factors were unknown in Coronets, the safe, Safe, SAFE smoke with the true tobacco flavor. The program cut to the local station; we were treated to a thrilling view of Center Lumber & Hardware and I started pulling hairs out of the back of my hand.

The screen filled with soap bubbles; a quartet sang that this was the Skyway Hour, as if we didn’t know. Then the screen went blank and sound cut off and I swallowed my stomach. The screen lighted up with: “Network Difficulty-Do Not Adjust Your Sets.”

I yelped, “Oh, they can’t do that! They can’t!” Dad said, “Stop it, Clifford.”

I shut up. Mother said, “Now, dearest, he’s just a boy.”

Dad said, “He is not a boy; he is a man. Kip, how do you expect to face a firing squad calmly if this upsets you?” I mumbled; he said, “Speak up.” I said I hadn’t really planned on facing one.

“You may need to, someday. This is good practice. Try the Springfield channel; you may get a skip image.” I tried, but all I got was snow and the sound was like two cats in a sack. I jumped back to our local station.

“-jor General Bryce Gilmore, United States Air Force, our guest tonight, who will explain to us, later in this program, some hitherto unreleased pictures of Federation Lunar Base and the infant Luna City, the fastest growing little city on the Moon. Immediately after announcing the winners we will attempt a television linkage with Lunar Base, through the cooperation of the Space Corps of the-“

I took a deep breath and tried to slow my heartbeat, the way you steady down for a free-throw in a tie game. The gabble dragged on while celebrities were introduced, the contest rules were explained, an improbably sweet young couple explained to each other why they always used Skyway Soap. My own sales talks were better.

At last they got to it. Eight girls paraded out; each held a big card over her head. The M.C. said in an awestruck voice: “And now … and now -the winning Skyway slogan for the … FREE TRIP TO THE MOON!”

I couldn’t breathe.

The girls sang, “I like Skyway Soap because-” and went on, each turning her card as a word reached her: “-it … is … as … pure … as … the … sky … itself!”

I was fumbling cards. I thought I recognized it but couldn’t be sure- not after more than five thousand slogans. Then I found it-and checked the cards the girls were holding. “Dad! Mother! I’ve won, I’ve won!”

“Hold it, Kip!” Dad snapped. “Stop it.” Mother said, “Oh, dear!”

I heard the M.C. saying, “-present the lucky winner, Mrs. Xenia Donahue, of Great Falls, Montana… . Mrs. Donahue!”

To a fanfare a little dumpy woman teetered out. I read the cards again. They still matched the one in my hand. I said, “Dad, what happened? That’s my slogan.” “You didn’t listen.”

“They’ve cheated me!” “Be quiet and listen,”

“-as we explained earlier, in the event of duplicate entries, priority goes to the one postmarked first. Any remaining tie is settled by time of arrival at the contest office. Our winning slogan was submitted by eleven contestants. To them go the first eleven prizes. Tonight we have with us the six top winners-for the trip to the Moon, the weekend in a satellite space station, the jet flight around the world, the flight to Antarctica, the-“

“Beaten by a postmark. Apostmark!”

“-sorry we can’t have every one of the winners with us tonight. To the rest this comes as a surprise.” The M.C. looked at his watch. “Right this minute, in a thousand homes across the land … right this second- there is a lucky knock on a lucky door of some loyal friend of Skyway-“

There was a knock on our door.

I fell over my feet. Dad answered. There were three men, an enormous crate, and a Western Union messenger singing about Skyway Soap. Somebody said, “Is this where Clifford Russell lives?”

Dad said, “Yes.”

“Will you sign for this?” “What is it?”

“It just says ‘This Side Up.’ Where do you want it?”

Dad passed the receipt to me and I signed, somehow. Dad said, “Will you put it in the living room, please?” They did and left and I got a hammer and sidecutters. It looked like a coffin and I could have used one.

I got the top off. Alot of packing got all over Mother’s rugs. At last we were down to it. It was a space suit.

Not much, as space suits go these days. It was an obsolete model that Skyway Soap had bought as surplus material-the tenth-to-hundredth prizes were all space suits. But it was a real one, made by Goodyear, with air conditioning by York and auxiliary equipment by General Electric. Its instruction manual and maintenance-and-service log were with it and it had racked up more than eight hundred hours in rigging the second satellite station.

I felt better. This was no phony, this was no toy. It had been out in space, even if I had not. But would!-someday. I’d learn to use it and someday I’d wear it on the naked face of the Moon. Dad said, “Maybe we’d better carry this to your workshop. Eh, Kip?”

Mother said, “There’s no rush, dearest. Don’t you want to try it on, Clifford?”

I certainly did. Dad and I compromised by toting the crate and packing out to the barn. When we came back, a reporter from the Clarion was there with a photographer-the paper had known I was a winner before I did, which didn’t seem right.

They wanted pictures and I didn’t mind.

I had an awful time getting into it-dressing in an upper berth is a cinch by comparison. The photographer said, “Just a minute, kid. I’ve seen ‘em do it at Wright Field. Mind some advice?” “Uh? No. I mean, yes, tell me.”

“You slide in like an Eskimo climbing into a kayak. Then wiggle your right arm in-“

It was fairly easy that way, opening front gaskets wide and sitting down in it, though I almost dislocated a shoulder. There were straps to adjust for size but we didn’t bother; he stuffed me into it, zippered the gaskets, helped me to my feet and shut the helmet.

It didn’t have air bottles and I had to live on the air inside while he got three shots. By then I knew that the suit had seen service; it smelled like dirty socks. I was glad to get the helmet off. Just the same, it made me feel good to wear it. Like a spacer.

They left and presently we went to bed, leaving the suit in the living room. About midnight I cat-footed down and tried it on again.

The next morning I moved it out to my shop before I went to work. Mr. Charton was diplomatic; he just said he’d like to see my space suit when I had time. Everybody knew about it-my picture was on the front page of the Clarion along with the Pikes Peak Hill Climb and the holiday fatalities. The story had been played for laughs, but I didn’t mind. I had never really believed I would win-and I had an honest-to-goodness space suit, which was more than my classmates had.

That afternoon Dad brought me a special delivery letter from Skyway Soap. It enclosed a property title to one suit, pressure, serial number so-and-so, ex-US-AF. The letter started with congratulations and thanks but the last paragraphs meant something:

Skyway Soap realizes that your prize may not be of immediate use to you. Therefore, as mentioned in paragraph 4 (a) of the rules. Skyway offers to redeem it for a cash premium of five hundred dollars ($500.00). To avail yourself of this privilege you should return the pressure suit via express collect to Goodyear Corporation (Special Appliances Division, attn: Salvage), Akron, Ohio, on or before the 15th of September.

Skyway Soap hopes that you have enjoyed our Grand Contest as much as we have enjoyed having you and hopes that you will retain your prize long enough to appear with it on your local television station in a special Skyway Jubilee program. Afee of fifty dollars ($50.00) will be paid for this appearance. Your station manager will be in touch with you. We hope that you will be our guest.

All good wishes from Skyway, the Soap as Pure as the Sky Itself. I handed it to Dad. He read it and handed it back.

I said, “I suppose I should.”

He said, “I see no harm. Television leaves no external scars.”

“Oh, that. Sure, it’s easy money. But I meant I really ought to sell the suit back to them.” I should have felt happy since I needed money, while I needed a space suit the way a pig needs a

pipe organ. But I didn’t, even though I had never had five hundred dollars in my life.

“Son, any statement that starts ‘I really ought to-‘ is suspect. It means you haven’t analyzed your motives.” “But five hundred dollars is tuition for a semester, almost.”

“Which has nothing to do with the case. Find out what you want to do, then do it. Never talk yourself into doing something you don’t want. Think it over.” He said good-bye and left.

I decided it was foolish to burn my bridges before I crossed them. The space suit was mine until the middle of September even if I did the sensible thing-by then I might be tired of it.

But I didn’t get tired of it; a space suit is a marvelous piece of machinery-a little space station with everything miniaturized. Mine was a chrome-plated helmet and shoulder yoke which merged into a body of silicone, asbestos, and glass-fiber cloth. This hide was stiff except at the joints. They were the same rugged material but were “constant volume” -when you bent a knee a bellows arrangement increased the volume over the knee cap as much as the space back of the knee was squeezed. Without this a man wouldn’t be able to move; the pressure inside, which can add up to several tons, would hold him rigid as a statue. These volume compensators were covered with dural armor; even the finger joints had little dural plates over the knuckles.

It had a heavy glass-fiber belt with clips for tools, and there were the straps to adjust for height and weight. There was a back pack, now empty, for air bottles, and zippered pockets inside and out, for batteries and such.

The helmet swung back, taking a bib out of the yoke with it, and the front opened with two gasketed zippers; this left a door you could wiggle into. With helmet clamped and zippers closed it was impossible to open the suit with pressure inside.

Switches were mounted on the shoulder yoke and on the helmet; the helmet was monstrous. It contained a drinking tank, pill dispensers six on each side, a chin plate on the right to switch radio from “receive” to “send,” another on the left to increase or decrease flow of air, an automatic polarizer for the face lens, microphone and earphones, space for radio circuits in a bulge back of the head, and an instrument board arched over the head. The instrument dials read backwards because they were reflected in an inside mirror in front of the wearer’s forehead at an effective fourteen inches from the eyes.

Above the lens or window there were twin headlights. On top were two antennas, a spike for broadcast and a horn that squirted microwaves like a gun-you aimed it by facing the receiving station. The horn antenna was armored except for its open end.

This sounds as crowded as a lady’s purse but everything was beautifully compact; your head didn’t touch anything when you looked out the lens. But you could tip your head back and see reflected instruments, or tilt it down and turn it to work chin controls, or simply turn your neck for water nipple or pills. In all remaining space sponge-rubber padding kept you from banging your head no matter what. My suit was like a fine car, its helmet like a Swiss watch. But its air bottles were missing; so was radio gear except for built-in antennas; radar beacon and emergency radar target were gone, pockets inside and out were empty, and there were no tools on the belt. The manual told what it ought to have-it was like a stripped car.

I decided I just had to make it work right.

First I swabbed it out with Clorox to kill the locker-room odor. Then I got to work on the air system.

It’s a good thing they included that manual; most of what I thought I knew about space suits was wrong.

Aman uses around three pounds of oxygen a day-pounds mass, not pounds per square inch. You’d think a man could carry oxygen for a month, especially out in space where mass has no weight, or on the Moon where three pounds weigh only half a pound. Well, that’s okay for space stations or ships or frogmen; they run air through soda lime to take out carbon dioxide, and breathe it again. But not space suits.

Even today people talk about “the bitter cold of outer space”-but space is vacuum and if vacuum were cold, how could a Thermos jug keep hot coffee hot? Vacuum is nothing-it has no temperature, it just insulates.

Three-fourths of your food turns into heat-a lot of heat, enough each day to melt fifty pounds of ice and more. Sounds preposterous, doesn’t it? But when you have a roaring fire in the furnace, you are cooling your body; even in the winter you keep a room about thirty degrees cooler than your body. When you turn up a furnace’s thermostat, you are picking a more comfortable rate for cooling. Your body makes so much heat you have to get rid of it, exactly as you have to cool a car’s engine.

Of course, if you do it too fast, say in a sub-zero wind, you can freeze- but the usual problem in a space suit is to keep from being boiled like a lobster. You’ve got vacuum all around you and it’s hard to get rid of heat.

Some radiates away but not enough, and if you are in sunlight, you pick up still more-this is why space ships are polished like mirrors. So what can you do?

Well, you can’t carry fifty-pound blocks of ice. You get rid of heat the way you do on Earth, by convection and evaporation-you keep air moving over you to evaporate sweat and cool you off. Oh, they’ll learn to build space suits that recycle like a space ship but today the practical way is to let used air escape from the suit, flushing away sweat and carbon dioxide and excess heat-while wasting most of the oxygen.

There are other problems. The fifteen pounds per square inch around you includes three pounds of oxygen pressure. Your lungs can get along on less than half that, but only an Indian from the high Andes is likely to he comfortable on less than two pounds oxygen pressure. Nine-tenths of a pound is the limit. Any less than nine-tenths of a pound won’t force oxygen into blood-this is about the pressure at the top of Mount Everest.

Most people suffer from hypoxia (oxygen shortage) long before this, so better use two p.s.i. of oxygen. Mix an inert gas with it, because pure oxygen can cause a sore throat or make you drunk or even cause terrible cramps. Don’t use nitrogen (which you’ve breathed all your life) because it will bubble in your blood if pressure drops and cripple you with “bends.” Use helium which doesn’t. It gives you a squeaky voice, but who cares?

You can die from oxygen shortage, be poisoned by too much oxygen, be crippled by nitrogen, drown in or be acid-poisoned by carbon dioxide, or dehydrate and run a killing fever. When I finished reading that manual I didn’t see how anybody could stay alive anywhere, much less in a space suit.

But a space suit was in front of me that had protected a man for hundreds of hours in empty space.

Here is how you beat those dangers. Carry steel bottles on your back; they hold “air” (oxygen and helium) at a hundred and fifty atmospheres, over 2000 pounds per square inch; you draw from them through a reduction valve down to 150 p.s.i. and through still another reduction valve, a “demand” type which keeps pressure in your helmet at three to five pounds per square inch-two pounds of it oxygen. Put a silicone-rubber collar around your neck and put tiny holes in it, so that the pressure in the body of your suit is less, the air movement still faster; then evaporation and cooling will be increased while the effort of bending is decreased. Add exhaust valves, one at each wrist and ankle-these have to pass water as well as gas because you may be ankle deep in sweat.

The bottles are big and clumsy, weighing around sixty pounds apiece, and each holds only about five mass pounds of air even at that enormous pressure; instead of a month’s supply you will have only a few hours-my suit was rated at eight hours for the bottles it used to have. But you will be okay for those hours-if everything works right. You can stretch time, for you don’t die from overheating very fast and can stand too much carbon dioxide even longer-but let your oxygen run out and you die in about seven minutes. Which gets us back where we started-it takes oxygen to stay alive.

To make darn sure that you’re getting enough (your nose can’t tell) you clip a little photoelectric cell to your ear and let it see the color of your blood; the redness of the blood measures the oxygen it carries. Hook this to a galvanometer. If its needle gets into the danger zone, start saying your prayers.

I went to Springfield on my day off, taking the suit’s hose fittings, and shopped. I picked up, second hand, two thirty-inch steel bottles from a welding shop-and got myself disliked by insisting on a pressure test. I took them home on the bus, stopped at Pring’s Garage and arranged to buy air at fifty atmospheres. Higher pressures, or oxygen or helium, I could get from the Springfield airport, but I didn’t need them yet.

When I got home I closed the suit, empty, and pumped it with a bicycle pump to two atmospheres absolute, or one relative, which gave me a test load of almost four to one compared with space conditions. Then I tackled the bottles. They needed to be mirror bright, since you can’t afford to let them pick up heat from the Sun. I stripped and scraped and wire-brushed, and buffed and polished, preparatory to nickel-plating.

Next morning, Oscar the Mechanical Man was limp as a pair of long johns.

Getting that old suit not just airtight but helium-tight was the worst headache. Air isn’t bad but the helium molecule is so small and agile that it migrates right through ordinary rubber-and I wanted this job to be right, not just good enough to perform at home but okay for space. The gaskets were shot and there were slow leaks almost impossible to find.

I had to get new silicone-rubber gaskets and patching compound and tissue from Goodyear; small-town hardware stores don’t handle such things. I wrote a letter explaining what I wanted and why-and they didn’t even charge me. They sent me some mimeographed sheets elaborating on the manual.

It still wasn’t easy. But there came a day when I pumped Oscar full of pure helium at two atmospheres absolute. Aweek later he was still tight as a six-ply tire.

That day I wore Oscar as a self-contained environment. I had already worn him many hours without the helmet, working around the shop, handling tools while hampered by his gauntlets, getting height and size adjustments right. It was like breaking in new ice skates and after a while I was hardly aware I had it on-once I came to supper in it. Dad said nothing and Mother has the social restraint of an ambassador; I discovered my mistake when I picked up my napkin.

Now I wasted helium to the air, mounted bottles charged with air, and suited them. Then I clamped the helmet and dogged the safety catches.

Air sighed softly into the helmet, its flow through the demand valve regulated by the rise and fall of my chest-I could reset it to speed up or slow down by the chin control. I did so, watching the gauge in the mirror and letting it mount until I had twenty pounds absolute inside. That gave me five pounds more than the pressure around me, which was as near as I could come to space conditions without being in space.

I could feel the suit swell and the joints no longer felt loose and easy. I balanced the cycle at five pounds differential and tried to move- And almost fell over. I had to grab the workbench. Suited up, with bottles on my back, I weighed more than twice what I do stripped. Besides that, although the joints were constant-volume, the suit didn’t work as freely under pressure.

Dress yourself in heavy fishing waders, put on an overcoat and boxing gloves and a bucket over your head, then have somebody strap two sacks of cement across your shoulders and

you will know what a space suit feels like under one gravity.

But ten minutes later I was handling myself fairly well and in half an hour I felt as if I had worn one all my life. The distributed weight wasn’t too great (and I knew it wouldn’t amount to much on the Moon). The joints were just a case of getting used to more effort. I had had more trouble learning to swim.

It was a blistering day: I went outside and looked at the Sun. The polarizer cut the glare and I was able to look at it. I looked away; polarizing eased off and I could see around me.

I stayed cool. The air, cooled by semi-adiabatic expansion (it said in the manual), cooled my head and flowed on through the suit, washing away body heat and used air through the exhaust valves. The manual said that heating elements rarely cut in, since the usual problem was to get rid of heat; I decided to get dry ice and force a test of thermostat and heater.

I tried everything I could think of. Acreek runs back of our place and beyond is a pasture. I sloshed through the stream, lost my footing and fell -the worst trouble was that I could never see where I was putting my feet. Once I was down I lay there a while, half floating but mostly covered. I didn’t get wet, I didn’t get hot, I didn’t get cold, and my breathing was as easy as ever even though water shimmered over my helmet.

I scrambled heavily up the bank and fell again, striking my helmet against a rock. No damage, Oscar was built to take it. I pulled my knees under me, got up, and crossed the pasture, stumbling on rough ground but not falling. There was a haystack there and I dug into it until I was buried.

Cool fresh air … no trouble, no sweat.

After three hours I took it off. The suit had relief arrangements like any pilot’s outfit but I hadn’t rigged it yet, so I had come out before my air was gone. When I hung it in the rack I had built, I patted the shoulder yoke. “Oscar, you’re all right,” I told it. “You and I are partners. We’re going places.” I would have sneered at five thousand dollars for Oscar.

While Oscar was taking his pressure tests I worked on his electrical and electronic gear. I didn’t bother with a radar target or beacon; the first is childishly simple, the second is fiendishly expensive. But I did want radio for the space-operations band of the spectrum-the antennas suited only those wavelengths. I could have built an ordinary walkie-talkie and hung it

outside-but I would have been kidding myself with a wrong frequency and gear that might not stand vacuum. Changes in pressure and temperature and humidity do funny things to electronic circuits; that is why the radio was housed inside the helmet.

The manual gave circuit diagrams, so I got busy. The audio and modulating circuits were no problem, just battery-operated transistor circuitry which I could make plenty small enough. But the microwave part- It was a two-headed calf, each with transmitter and receiver-one centimeter wavelength for the horn and three octaves lower at eight centimeters for the spike in a harmonic relationship, one crystal controlling both. This gave more signal on broadcast and better aiming when squirting out the horn and also meant that only part of the rig had to be switched in changing antennas. The output of a variable-frequency oscillator was added to the crystal frequency in tuning the receiver. The circuitry was simple-on paper.

But microwave circuitry is never easy; it takes precision machining and a slip of a tool can foul up the impedance and ruin a mathematically calculated resonance.

Well, I tried. Synthetic precision crystals are cheap from surplus houses and some transistors and other components I could vandalize from my own gear. And I made it work, after the fussiest pray-and-try-again I have ever done. But the consarned thing simply would not fit into the helmet.

Call it a moral victory-I’ve never done better work.

I finally bought one, precision made and embedded in plastic, from the same firm that sold me the crystal. Like the suit it was made for, it was obsolete and I paid a price so low that I merely screamed. By then I would have mortgaged my soul-I wanted that suit to work.

The only thing that complicated the rest of the electrical gear was that everything had to be either “fail-safe” or “no-fail”; a man in a space suit can’t pull into the next garage if something goes wrong-the stuff has to keep on working or he becomes a vital statistic. That was why the helmet had twin headlights; the second cut in if the first failed-even the peanut lights for the dials over my head were twins. I didn’t take short cuts; every duplicate circuit I kept duplicate and tested to make sure that automatic changeover always worked.

Mr. Charton insisted on filling the manual’s list on those items a drugstore stocks-maltose and dextrose and amino tablets, vitamins, dexedrine, dramamine, aspirin, antibiotics, antihistamines, codeine, almost any pill a man can take to help him past a hump that might kill him. He got Doc Kennedy to write prescriptions so that I could stock Oscar without breaking laws.

When I got through Oscar was in as good shape as he had ever been in Satellite Two. It had been more fun than the time I helped Jake Bixby turn his heap into a hotrod.

But summer was ending and it was time I pulled out of my daydream. I still did not know where I was going to school, or how-or if. I had saved money but it wasn’t nearly enough. I had spent a little on postage and soap wrappers but I got that back and more by one fifteen-minute appearance on television and I hadn’t spent a dime on girls since March- too busy. Oscar cost surprisingly little; repairing Oscar had been mostly sweat and screwdriver. Seven dollars out of every ten I had earned was sitting in the money basket.

But it wasn’t enough.

I realized glumly that I was going to have to sell Oscar to get through the first semester. But how would I get through the rest of the year? Joe Valiant the all-American boy always shows up on the campus with fifty cents and a heart of gold, then in the last Chapter is tapped for Skull-and-Bones and has money in the bank. But I wasn’t Joe Valiant, not by eight decimal places. Did it make sense to start if I was going to have to drop out about Christmas? Wouldn’t it be smarter to stay out a year and get acquainted with a pick and shovel?

Did I have a choice? The only school I was sure of was State U. -and there was a row about professors being fired and talk that State U. might lose its accredited standing. Wouldn’t it be comical to spend years slaving for a degree and then have it be worthless because your school wasn’t recognized?

State U. wasn’t better than a “B” school in engineering even before this fracas.

Rensselaer and CalTech turned me down the same day-one with a printed form, the other with a polite letter saying it was impossible to accept all qualified applicants.

Little things were getting my goat, too. The only virtue of that television show was the fifty bucks. Aperson looks foolish wearing a space suit in a television studio and our announcer milked it for laughs, rapping the helmet and asking me if I was still in there. Very funny. He asked me what I wanted with a space suit and when I tried to answer he switched off the mike in my suit and patched in a tape with nonsense about space pirates and flying saucers. Half the people in town thought it was my voice.

It wouldn’t have been hard to live down if Ace Quiggle hadn’t turned up. He had been missing all summer, in jail maybe, but the day after the show he took a seat at the fountain, stared at me and said in a loud whisper, “Say, ain’t you the famous space pirate and television star?”

I said, “What’ll you have, Ace?”

“Gosh! Could I have your autograph? I ain’t never seen a real live space pirate before!” “Give me your order, Ace. Or let someone else use that stool.”

“Achoc malt. Commodore-and leave out the soap.”

Ace’s “wit” went on every time he showed up. It was a dreadfully hot summer and easy to get tempery. The Friday before Labor Day weekend the store’s cooling system went sour, we couldn’t get a repairman and I spent three bad hours fixing it, ruining my second-best pants and getting myself reeking. I was back at the fountain and wishing I could go home for a bath when Ace swaggered in, greeting me loudly with “Why, if it isn’t Commander Comet, the Scourge of the Spaceways! Where’s your blaster gun, Commander? Ain’t you afraid the Galactic Emperor will make you stay in after school for running around bare-nekkid? Yuk yuk yukkity yuk!”

Acouple of girls at the fountain giggled. “Lay off, Ace,” I said wearily. “It’s a hot day.”

“That’s why you’re not wearing your rubber underwear?” The girls giggled again.

Ace smirked. He went on: “Junior, seein’ you got that clown suit, why don’t you put it to work? Run an ad in the Clarion: ‘Have Space Suit-Will Travel.’ Yukkity yuk! Or you could hire out as a scarecrow.”

The girls snickered. I counted ten, then again in Spanish, and in Latin, and said tensely, “Ace, just tell me what you’ll have.” “My usual. And snap it up-I’ve got a date on Mars.”

Mr. Charton came out from behind his counter, sat down and asked me to mix him a lime cooler, so I served him first. It stopped the flow of wit and probably saved Ace’s life. The boss and I were alone shortly after. He said quietly, “Kip, a reverence for life does not require a man to respect Nature’s obvious mistakes.”

“Sir?”

“You need not serve Quiggle again. I don’t want his trade.” “Oh, I don’t mind. He’s harmless.”

“I wonder how harmless such people are? To what extent civilization is retarded by the laughing jackasses, the empty-minded belittlers? Go home; you’ll want to make an early start tomorrow.”

I had been invited to the Lake of the Forest for the long Labor Day weekend by Jake Bixby’s parents. I wanted to go, not only to get away from the heat but also to chew things over with Jake. But I answered, “Shucks, Mr. Charton, I ought not to leave you stuck.”

“The town will be deserted over the holiday; I may not open the fountain. Enjoy yourself. This summer has worn you a bit fine. Kip.” I let myself be persuaded but I stayed until closing and swept up. Then I walked home, doing some hard thinking.

The party was over and it was time to put away my toys. Even the village half-wit knew that I had no sensible excuse to have a space suit. Not that I cared what Ace thought … but I did have no use for it-and I needed money. Even if Stanford and M.I.T. and Carnegie and the rest turned me down, I was going to start this semester. State U. wasn’t the best-but neither was I and I had learned that more depended on the student than on the school.

Mother had gone to bed and Dad was reading. I said hello and went to the barn, intending to strip my gear off Oscar, pack him into his case, address it, and in the morning phone the express office to pick it up. He’d be gone before I was back from the Lake of the Forest. Quick and clean.

He was hanging on his rack and it seemed to me that he grinned hello. Nonsense, of course. I went over and patted his shoulder. “Well, old fellow, you’ve been a real chum and it’s been nice knowing you. See you on the Moon-I hope.”

But Oscar wasn’t going to the Moon. Oscar was going to Akron, Ohio, to “Salvage.” They were going to unscrew parts they could use and throw the rest of him on the junk pile. My mouth felt dry.

(“It’s okay, pal,” Oscar answered.)

See that? Out of my silly head! Oscar didn’t really speak; I had let my imagination run wild too long. So I quit patting him, hauled the crate out and took a wrench from his belt to remove the gas bottles.

I stopped.

Both bottles were charged, one with oxygen, one with oxy-helium. I had wasted money to do so because I wanted, just once, to try a spaceman’s mix. The batteries were fresh and power packs were charged.

“Oscar,” I said softly, “we’re going to take a last walk together. Okay?” (“Swell!”)

I made it a dress rehearsal-water in the drinking tank, pill dispensers loaded, first-aid kit inside, vacuum-proof duplicate (I hoped it was vacuum-proof) in an outside pocket. All tools on belt, all lanyards tied so that tools wouldn’t float away in free fall. Everything.

Then I heated up a circuit that the F.C.C. would have squelched had they noticed, a radio link I had salvaged out of my effort to build a radio for Oscar, and had modified as a test rig for Oscar’s ears and to let me check the aiming of the directional antenna. It was hooked in with an echo circuit that would answer back if I called it-a thing I had bread hoarded out of an old Webcor wire recorder, vintage 1950.

Then I climbed into Oscar and buttoned up. “Tight?” (“Tight!”)

I glanced at the reflected dials, noticed the blood-color reading, reduced pressure until Oscar almost collapsed. At nearly sea-level pressure I was in no danger from hypoxia; the trick was to avoid too much oxygen.

We started to leave when I remembered something. “Just a second, Oscar.” I wrote a note to my folks, telling them that I was going to get up early and catch the first bus to the lake. I could write while suited up now, I could even thread a needle. I stuck the note under the kitchen door.

Then we crossed the creek into the pasture. I didn’t stumble in wading; I was used to Oscar now, sure-footed as a goat.

Out in the field I keyed my talkie and said, “Junebug, calling Peewee. Come in, Peewee.” Seconds later my recorded voice came back: ” ‘Junebug, calling Peewee. Come in, Peewee.’”

I shifted to the horn antenna and tried again. It wasn’t easy to aim in the dark but it was okay. Then I shifted back to spike antenna and went on calling Peewee while moving across the pasture and pretending that I was on Venus and had to stay in touch with base because it was unknown terrain and unbreathable atmosphere. Everything worked perfectly and if it had been Venus, I would have been all right.

Two lights moved across the southern sky, planes I thought, or maybe helis. Just the sort of thing yokels like to report as “flying saucers.” I watched them, then moved behind a little rise that would tend to spoil reception and called Peewee. Peewee answered and I shut up; it gets dull talking to an idiot circuit which can only echo what you say to it.

Then I heard: “Peewee to Junebug! Answer!”

I thought I had been monitored and was in trouble-then decided that some ham had picked me up. “Junebug here. I read you. Who are you?” The test rig echoed my words.

Then the new voice shrilled, “Peewee here! Home me in!”

This was silly. But I found myself saying, “Junebug to Peewee, shift to directional frequency at one centimeter—and keep talking, keep talking!” I shifted to the horn antenna. “Junebug, I read you. Fix me. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven—”

“You’re due south of me, about forty degrees. Who are you?” It must be one of those lights. It had to be.

But I didn’t have time to figure it out. Aspace ship almost landed on me.

Chapter 4

I said “space ship,” not “rocket ship.” It made no noise but a whoosh and there weren’t any flaming jets-it seemed to move by clean living and righteous thoughts.

I was too busy keeping from being squashed to worry about details. Aspace suit in one gravity is no track suit; it’s a good thing I had practiced. The ship sat down where I had just been, occupying more than its share of pasture, a big black shape.

The other one whooshed down, too, just as a door opened in the first. Light poured through the door; two figures spilled out and started to run. One moved like a cat; the other moved clumsily and slowly-handicapped by a space suit. S’help me, a person in a space suit does look silly. This one was less than five feet tall and looked like the Gingerbread Man.

Abig trouble with a suit is your limited angle of vision. I was trying to watch both of them and did not see the second ship open. The first figure stopped, waiting for the one in the space suit to catch up, then suddenly collapsed-just a gasping sound, “Eeeah!”-and clunk.

You can tell the sound of pain. I ran to the spot at a lumbering dogtrot, leaned over and tried to see what was wrong, tilting my helmet to bring the beam of my headlight onto the ground. Abug-eyed monster-

That’s not fair but it was my first thought. I couldn’t believe it and would have pinched myself except that it isn’t practical when suited up.

An unprejudiced mind (which mine wasn’t) would have said that this monster was rather pretty. It was small, not more than half my size, and its curves were graceful, not as a girl is but more like a leopard, although it wasn’t shaped like either one. I couldn’t grasp its shape-I didn’t have any pattern to fit it to; it wouldn’t add up.

But I could see that it was hurt. Its body was quivering like a frightened rabbit. It had enormous eyes, open but milky and featureless, as if nictitating membranes were across them. What appeared to be its mouth-

That’s as far as I got. Something hit me in the spine, right between the gas bottles.

I woke up on a bare floor, staring at a ceiling. It took several moments to recall what had happened and then I shied away because it was so darn silly. I had been out for a walk in Oscar

… and then a space ship had landed … and a bug-eyed-

I sat up suddenly as I realized that Oscar was gone. Alight cheerful voice said, “Hi, there!”

I snapped my head around. Akid about ten years old was seated on the floor, leaning against a wall. He-I corrected myself. Boys don’t usually clutch rag dolls. This kid was the age when the difference doesn’t show much and was dressed in shirt, shorts and dirty tennis shoes, and had short hair, so I didn’t have much to go on but the rag dolly.

“Hi, yourself,” I answered. “What are we doing here?” “I’m surviving. I don’t know about you.”

“Huh?”

“Surviving. Pushing my breath in and out. Conserving my strength. There’s nothing else to do at the moment; they’ve got us locked in.”

I looked around. The room was about ten feet across, four-sided but wedge-shaped, and nothing in it but us. I couldn’t see a door; if we weren’t locked, we might as well be. “Who locked us in?”

“Them. Space pirates. And him.” “Space pirates? Don’t be silly!”

The kid shrugged. “Just my name for them. But better not think they’re silly if you want to keep on surviving. Are you ‘Junebug’?”

“Huh? You sound like a junebug yourself. Space pirates, my aunt!” I was worried and very confused and this nonsense didn’t help. Where was Oscar? And where was I? “No, no, not a junebug but ‘Junebug’-a radio call. You see, I’m Peewee.”

I said to myself, Kip old pal, walk slowly to the nearest hospital and give yourself up. When a radio rig you wired yourself starts looking like a skinny little girl with a rag doll, you’ve flipped. It’s going to be wet packs and tranquilizers and no excitement for you-you’ve blown every fuse.

“You’re ‘Peewee’?”

“That’s what I’m called-I’m relaxed about it. You see, I heard, ‘Junebug, calling Peewee,’ and decided that Daddy had found out about the spot I was in and had alerted people to help me land. But if you aren’t ‘Junebug,’ you wouldn’t know about that. Who are you?”

“Wait a minute, I am ‘Junebug.’ I mean I was using that call. But I’m Clifford Russell-‘Kip’ they call me.” “How do you do. Kip?” she said politely.

“And howdy to you, Peewee. Uh, are you a boy or a girl?”

Peewee looked disgusted. “I’ll make you regret that remark. I realize I am undersized for my age but I’m actually eleven, going on twelve. There’s no need to be rude. In another five years I expect to be quite a dish-you’ll probably beg me for every dance.”

At the moment I would as soon have danced with a kitchen stool, but I had things on my mind and didn’t want a useless argument. “Sorry, Peewee. I’m still groggy. You mean you were in that first ship?”

Again she looked miffed. “I was piloting it.”

Sedation every night and a long course of psychoanalysis. At my age. “You were-piloting?”

“You surely don’t think the Mother Thing could? She wouldn’t fit their controls. She curled up beside me and coached. But if you think it’s easy, when you’ve never piloted anything but a Cessna with your Daddy at your elbow and never made any kind of landing, then think again. I did very well!-and your landing instructions weren’t too specific. What have they done with the Mother Thing?”

“The what?”

“You don’t know? Oh, dear!”

“Wait a minute, Peewee. Let’s get on the same frequency. I’m ‘Junebug’ all right and I homed you in-and if you think that’s easy, to have a voice out of nowhere demand emergency landing instructions, you better think again, too. Anyhow, a ship landed and another ship landed right after it and a door opened in the first ship and a guy in a space suit jumped out-“

“That was I.”

“-and something else jumped out-“ “The Mother Thing.”

“Only she didn’t get far. She gave a screech and flopped. I went to see what the trouble was and something hit me. The next thing I know you’re saying, ‘Hi, there.’ ” I wondered if I ought to tell her that the rest, including her, was likely a morphine dream because I was probably lying in a hospital with my spine in a cast.

Peewee nodded thoughtfully. “They must have blasted you at low power, or you wouldn’t be here. Well, they caught you and they caught me, so they almost certainly caught her. Oh, dear! I do hope they didn’t hurt her.”

“She looked like she was dying.”

“As if she were dying,” Peewee corrected me. “Subjunctive. I rather doubt it; she’s awfully hard to kill-and they wouldn’t kill her except to keep her from escaping; they need her alive.” “Why? And why do you call her ‘the Mother Thing’?”

“One at a time, Kip. She’s the Mother Thing because … well, because she is, that’s all. You’ll know, when you meet her. As to why they wouldn’t kill her, it’s because she’s worth more as a hostage than as a corpse-the same reason the kept me alive. Although she’s worth incredibly more than I am-they’d write me off without a blink if I became inconvenient. Or you. But since she was alive when you saw her, then it’s logical that she’s a prisoner again. Maybe right next door. That makes me feel much better.”

It didn’t make me feel better. “Yes, but where’s here?”

Peewee glanced at a Mickey Mouse watch, frowned and said, “Almost halfway to the Moon, I’d say.” “What?!”

“Of course I don’t know. But it makes sense that they would go back to their nearest base; that’s where the Mother Thing and I scrammed from.” “You’re telling me we’re in that ship?”

“Either the one I swiped or the other one. Where did you think you were, Kip? Where else could you be?” “Amental hospital.”

She looked big-eyed and then grinned. “Why, Kip, surely your grip on reality is not that weak?” “I’m not sure about anything. Space pirates-Mother Things.”

She frowned and bit her thumb. “I suppose it must be confusing. But trust your ears and eyes. My grip on reality is quite strong, I assure you- you see, I’m a genius.” She made it a statement, not a boast, and somehow I was not inclined to doubt the claim, even though it came from a skinny-shanked kid with a rag doll in her arms.

But I didn’t see how it was going to help.

Peewee went on: ” ‘Space pirates’ … mmm. Call them what you wish. Their actions are piratical and they operate in space-you name them. As for the Mother Thing … wait until you meet her.”

“What’s she doing in this hullabaloo?”

“Well, it’s complicated. She had better explain it. She’s a cop and she was after them-“ “Acop?”

“I’m afraid that is another semantic inadequacy. The Mother Thing knows what we mean by cop and I think she finds the idea bewildering if not impossible. But what would you call a person who hunts down miscreants? Acop, no?”

“Acop, yes, I guess.”

“So would I.” She looked again at her watch. “But right now I think we had better hang on. We ought to be at halfway point in a few minutes- and a skew-flip is disconcerting even if you are strapped down.”

I had read about skew-flip turn-overs, but only as a theoretical maneuver; I had never heard of a ship that could do one. If this was a ship. The floor felt as solid as concrete and as motionless. “I don’t see anything to hang on to.”

“Not much, I’m afraid. But if we sit down in the narrowest part and push against each other, I think we can brace enough not to slide around. But let’s hurry; my watch might be slow.” We sat on the floor in the narrow part where the angled walls were about five feet apart. We faced each other and pushed our shoes against each other, each of us bracing like an

Alpinist inching his way up a rock chimney-my socks against her tennis shoes, rather, for my shoes were still on my workbench, so far as I knew. I wondered if they had simply dumped

Oscar in the pasture and if Dad would find him.

“Push hard, Kip, and brace your hands against the deck.”

I did so. “How do you know when they’ll turn over, Peewee?”

“I haven’t been unconscious-they just tripped me and carried me inside-so I know when we took off. If we assume that the Moon is their destination, as it probably is, and if we assume one gravity the whole jump -which can’t be far off; my weight feels normal. Doesn’t yours?”

I considered it. “I think so.”

“Then it probably is, even though my own sense of weight may be distorted from being on the Moon. If those assumptions are correct, then it is almost exactly a three-and-a-half-hour trip and-” Peewee looked at her watch. “-E.T.A. should be nine-thirty in the morning and turn-over at seven-forty-five. Any moment now.”

“Is it that late?” I looked at my watch. “Why, I’ve got a quarter of two.”

“You’re on your zone time. I’m on Moon time-Greenwich time, that is. Oh, oh! Here we go!”

The floor tilted, swerved, and swooped like a roller coaster, and my semicircular canals did a samba. Things steadied down as I pulled out of acute dizziness. “You all right?” asked Peewee.

I managed to focus my eyes. “Uh, I think so. It felt like a one-and-a-half gainer into a dry pool.”

“This pilot does it faster than I dared to. It doesn’t really hurt, after your eyes uncross. But that settles it. We’re headed for the Moon. We’ll be there in an hour and three quarters.”

I still couldn’t believe it. “Peewee? What kind of a ship can gun at one gee all the way to the Moon? They been keeping it secret? And what were you doing on the Moon anyhow? And why were you stealing a ship?”

She sighed and spoke to her doll. “He’s a quiz kid, Madame Pompadour. Kip, how can I answer three questions at once? This is a flying saucer, and-“ “Flying saucer! Now I’ve heard everything.”

“It’s rude to interrupt. Call it anything you like; there’s nothing official about the term. Actually it’s shaped more like a loaf of pumpernickel, an oblate spheroid. That’s a shape defined-“

“I know what an oblate spheroid is,” I snapped. I was tired and upset from too many things, from a cranky air conditioner that had ruined a good pair of pants to being knocked out while on an errand of mercy. Not to mention Ace Quiggle. I was beginning to think that little girls who were geniuses ought to have the grace not to show it.

“No need to be brisk,” she said reprovingly. “I am aware that people have called everything from weather balloons to street lights ‘flying saucers.’ But it is my considered opinion-by Occam’s Razor-that-“

“Whose razor?”

“Occam’s. Least hypothesis. Don’t you know anything about logic?” “Not much.”

“Well … I suspected that about every five-hundredth ‘saucer sighting’ was a ship like this. It adds up. As for what I was doing on the Moon-” She stopped and grinned. “I’m a pest.”

I didn’t argue it.

“Along time ago when my Daddy was a boy, the Hayden Planetarium took reservations for trips to the Moon. It was just a publicity gag, like that silly soap contest recently, but Daddy got his name on the list. Now, years and years later, they are letting people go to the Moon-and sure enough, the Hayden people turned the list over to American Express- and American Express notified the applicants they could locate that they would be given preference.”

“So your father took you to the Moon?”

“Oh, heavens, no! Daddy filled out that form when he was only a boy. Now he is just about the biggest man at the Institute for Advanced Study and hasn’t time for such pleasures. And Mama wouldn’t go if you paid her. So I said I would. Daddy said ‘No!’ and Mama said Good gracious, no!’ … and so I went. I can be an awful nuisance when I put my mind on it,” she said proudly. “I have talent for it. Daddy says I’m an amoral little wretch.”

“Uh, do you suppose he might be right?”

“Oh, I’m sure he is. He understands me, whereas Mama throws up her hands and says she can’t cope. I was perfectly beastly and unbearable for two whole weeks and at last Daddy said ‘For Blank’s sake let her go! -maybe we’ll collect her insurance!’ So I did.”

“Mmmmm … that still doesn’t explain why you are here.”

“Oh, that. I was poking around where I shouldn’t, doing things they told us not to. I always get around; it’s very educational. So they grabbed me. They would rather have Daddy but they hope to swap me for him. I couldn’t let that happen, so I had to escape.”

I muttered, ” The butler did it.’ “ “What?”

“Your story has as many holes as the last Chapter of most whodunits.” “Oh. But I assure you it is the simple-oh, oh! here we go again!”

All that happened was that the lighting changed from white to blue. There weren’t any light fixtures; the whole ceiling glowed. We were still sprawled on the floor. I started to get up-and found I couldn’t.

I felt as if I had just finished a cross-country race, too weak to do anything but breathe. Blue light can’t do that; it’s merely wavelengths 4300 to 5100 angstroms and sunlight is loaded with it. But whatever they used with the blue light made us as limp as wet string.

Peewee was struggling to tell me something. “If … they’re coming for us … don’t resist … and … above all-“ The blue light changed to white. The narrow wall started to slide aside.

Peewee looked scared and made a great effort. “-above all … don’t antagonize … him.”

Two men came in, shoved Peewee aside, strapped my wrists and ankles and ran another strap around my middle, binding my arms. I started to come out of it-not like flipping a switch, as I still didn’t have energy enough to lick a stamp. I wanted to bash their heads but I stood as much chance as a butterfly has of hefting a bar bell.

They carried me out. I started to protest. “Say, where are you guys taking me? What do you think you’re doing? I’ll have you arrested. I’ll—”

“Shaddap,” said one. He was a skinny runt, fifty or older, and looked as if he never smiled. The other was fat and younger, with a petulant babyish mouth and a dimple in his chin; he looked as if he could laugh if he weren’t worried. He was worrying now.

“Tim, this can get us in trouble. We ought to space him-we ought to space both of ‘em-and tell him it was an accident. We can say they got out and tried to escape through the lock. He won’t know the dif-“

“Shaddap,” answered Tim with no inflection. He added, “You want trouble with him? You want to chew space?” “But-“

“Shaddap.”

They carried me around a curved corridor, into an inner room and dumped me on the floor.

I was face up but it took time to realize this must be the control room. It didn’t look like anything any human would design as a control room, which wasn’t surprising as no human had. Then I saw him.

Peewee needn’t have warned me; I didn’t want to antagonize him.

The little guy was tough and dangerous, the fat guy was mean and murderous; they were cherubs compared with him. If I had had my strength I would have fought those two any way they liked; I don’t think I’m too afraid of any human as long as the odds aren’t impossible.

But not him.

He wasn’t human but that wasn’t what hurt. Elephants aren’t human but they are very nice people. He was built more like a human than an elephant is but that was no help-I mean he stood erect and had feet at one end and a head at the other. He was no more than five feet tall but that didn’t help either; he dominated us the way a man dominates a horse. The torso part was as long as mine; his shortness came from very squat legs, with feet (I guess you would call them feet) which bulged out, almost disc-like. They made squashy, sucking sounds when he moved. When he stood still a tail, or third leg, extruded and turned him into a tripod-he didn’t need to sit down and I doubt if he could.

Short legs did not make him slow. His movements were blurringly fast, like a striking snake. Does this mean a better nervous system and more efficient muscles? Or a native planet with higher gravity?

His arms looked like snakes-they had more joints than ours. He had two sets, one pair where his waist should have been and another set under his head. No shoulders. I couldn’t count his fingers, or digit tendrils; they never held still. He wasn’t dressed except for a belt below and above the middle arms which carried whatever such a thing carries in place of money and keys. His skin was purplish brown and looked oily.

Whatever he was, he was not the same race as the Mother Thing.

He had a faint sweetish musky odor. Any crowded room smells worse on a hot day, but if I ever whiff that odor again, my skin will crawl and I’ll be tongue-tied with fright.

I didn’t take in these details instantly; at first all I could see was his face. A“face” is all I can call it. I haven’t described it yet because I’m afraid I’ll get the shakes. But I will, so that if you ever see one, you’ll shoot first, before your bones turn to jelly.

No nose. He was an oxygen breather but where the air went in and out I couldn’t say-some of it through the mouth, for he could talk. The mouth was the second worst part of him; in place of jawbone and chin he had mandibles that opened sideways as well as down, gaping in three irregular sides. There were rows of tiny teeth but no tongue that I could see; instead the mouth was rimmed with cilia as long as angleworms. They never stopped squirming.

I said the mouth was “second worst”; he had eyes. They were big and bulging and protected by horny ridges, two on the front of his head, set wide apart. They scanned. They scanned like radar, swinging up and down and back and forth. He never looked at you and yet was always looking at you.

When he turned around, I saw a third eye in back. I think he scanned his whole surroundings at all times, like a radar warning system.

What kind of brain can put together everything in all directions at once? I doubt if a human brain could, even if there were any way to feed in the data. He didn’t seem to have room in his head to stack much of a brain, but maybe he didn’t keep it there. Come to think of it, humans wear their brains in an exposed position; there may be better ways.

But he certainly had a brain. He pinned me down like a beetle and squeezed out what he wanted. He didn’t have to stop to brainwash me; he questioned and I gave, for an endless time- it seemed more like days than hours. He spoke English badly but understandably. His labials were all alike-“buy” and “pie” and “vie” sounded the same. His gutturals were harsh and his dentals had a clucking quality. But I could usually understand and when I didn’t, he didn’t threaten or punish; he just tried again. He had no expression in his speech.

He kept at it until he had found out who I was and what I did and as much of what I knew as interested him. He asked questions about how I happened to be where I was and dressed the way I was when I was picked up. I couldn’t tell whether he liked the answers or not.

He had trouble understanding what a “soda jerk” was and, while he learned about the Skyway Soap contest, he never seemed to understand why it took place. But I found that there were a lot of things I didn’t know either-such as how many people there are on Earth and how many tons of protein we produce each year.

After endless time he had all he wanted and said, “Take it out.” The stooges had been waiting. The fat boy gulped and said, “Space him?”

He acted as if killing me or not were like saving a piece of string. “No. It is ignorant and untrained, but I may have use for it later. Put it back in the pen.” “Yes, boss.”

They dragged me out. In the corridor Fatty said, “Let’s untie his feet and make him walk.” Skinny said, “Shaddap.”

Peewee was just inside the entrance panel but didn’t move, so I guess she had had another dose of that blue-light effect. They stepped over her and dumped me. Skinny chopped me on the side of the neck to stun me. When I came to, they were gone, I was unstrapped, and Peewee was sitting by me. She said anxiously, “Pretty bad?”

“Uh, yeah,” I agreed, and shivered. “I feel ninety years old.”

“It helps if you don’t look at him-especially his eyes. Rest a while and you’ll feel better.” She glanced at her watch. “It’s only forty-five minutes till we land. You probably won’t be disturbed before then.”

“Huh?” I sat up. “I was in there only an hour?” “Alittle less. But it seems forever. I know.”

“I feel like a squeezed orange.” I frowned, remembering something. “Peewee, I wasn’t too scared when they came for me. I was going to demand to be turned loose and insist on explanations. But I never asked him a question, not one.”

“You never will. I tried. But your will just drains out. Like a rabbit in front of a snake.” “Yes.”

“Kip, do you see why I had to take just any chance to get away? You didn’t seem to believe my story-do you believe it now?” “Uh, yes. I believe it.”

“Thanks. I always say I’m too proud to care what people think, but I’m not, really. I had to get back to Daddy and tell him … because he’s the only one in the entire world who would simply believe me, no matter how crazy it sounded.”

“I see. I guess I see. But how did you happen to wind up in Centerville?” “Centerville?”

“Where I live. Where ‘Junebug’ called ‘Peewee.’ “

“Oh. I never meant to go there. I meant to land in New Jersey, in Princeton if possible, because I had to find Daddy.” “Well, you sure missed your aim.”

“Can you do better? I would have done all right but I had my elbow joggled. Those things aren’t hard to fly; you just aim and push for where you want to go, not like the complicated things they do about rocket ships. And I had the Mother Thing to coach me. But I had to slow down going into the atmosphere and compensate for Earth’s spin and I didn’t know quite how. I found myself too far west and they were chasing me and I didn’t know what to do … and then I heard you on the space-operations band and thought everything was all right-and there I was.” She spread her hands. “I’m sorry, Kip.”

“Well, you landed it. They say any landing you walk away from is a good one.” “But I’m sorry I got you mixed up in it.”

“Uh … don’t worry about that. It looks like somebody has to get mixed up in it. Peewee … what’s he up to?” “They, you mean.”

“Huh? I don’t think the other two amount to anything. He is the one.”

“I didn’t mean Tim and Jock-they’re just people gone bad. I meant them-him and others like him.”

I wasn’t at my sharpest-I had been knocked out three times and was shy a night’s sleep and more confusing things had happened than in all my life. but until Peewee pointed it out I hadn’t considered that there could be more than one like him-one seemed more than enough.

But if there was one, then there were thousands-maybe millions or billions. I felt my stomach twist and wanted to hide. “You’ve seen others?” “No. Just him. But the Mother Thing told me.”

“Ugh! Peewee … what are they up to?”

“Haven’t you guessed? They’re moving in on us.” My collar felt tight, even though it was open. “How?” “I don’t know.”

“You mean they’re going to kill us off and take over Earth?” She hesitated. “It might not be anything that nice.”

“Uh … make slaves of us?”

“You’re getting warmer. Kip-I think they eat meat.”

I swallowed. “You have the jolliest ideas, for a little girl.” “You think I like it? That’s why I had to tell Daddy.”

There didn’t seem to be anything to say. It was an old, old fear for human beings. Dad had told me about an invasion-from-Mars radio broadcast when he was a kid-pure fiction but it had scared people silly. But people didn’t believe in it now; ever since we got to the Moon and circled Mars and Venus everybody seemed to agree that we weren’t going to find life anywhere.

Now here it was, in our laps. “Peewee? Are these things Martians? Or from Venus?”

She shook her head. “They’re not from anywhere close. The Mother Thing tried to tell me, but we ran into a difficulty of understanding.”

“Inside the Solar System?”

“That was part of the difficulty. Both yes and no.” “It can’t be both.”

“You ask her.”

“I’d like to.” I hesitated, then blurted, “I don’t care where they’re from -we can shoot them down … if we don’t have to look at them!” “Oh, I hope so!”

“It figures. You say these are flying saucers … real saucer sightings, I mean; not weather balloons. If so, they have been scouting us for years. Therefore they aren’t sure of themselves, even if they do look horrible enough to curdle milk. Otherwise they would have moved in at once the way we would on a bunch of animals. But they haven’t. That means we can kill them-if we go about it right.”

She nodded eagerly. “I hope so. I hoped Daddy would see a way. But-” She frowned. “-we don’t know much about them … and Daddy always warned me not to be cocksure when data was incomplete. ‘Don’t make so much stew from one oyster, Peewee,’ he always says.”

“But I’ll bet we’re right. Say, who is your Daddy? And what’s your full name?”

“Why, Daddy is Professor Reisfeld. And my name is Patricia Wynant Reisfeld. Isn’t that awful? Better call me Peewee.” “Professor Reisfeld- What does he teach?”

“Huh? You don’t know? You don’t know about Daddy’s Nobel Prize? Or anything?” “I’m just a country boy, Peewee. Sorry.”

“You must be. Daddy doesn’t teach anything. He thinks. He thinks better than anybody … except me, possibly. He’s the synthesist. Everybody else specializes. Daddy knows everything and puts the pieces together.”

Maybe so, but I hadn’t heard of him. It sounded like a good idea … but it would take an awfully smart man-if I had found out anything, it was that they could print it faster than I could study it. Professor Reisfeld must have three heads. Five.

“Wait till you meet him,” she added, glancing at her watch. “Kip, I think we had better get braced. We’ll be landing in a few minutes … and he won’t care how he shakes up passengers.” So we crowded into the narrow end and braced each other. We waited. After a bit the ship shook itself and the floor tilted. There was a slight bump and things got steady and suddenly I

felt very light. Peewee pulled her feet under her and stood up. “Well, we’re on the Moon.”

Chapter 5

When I was a kid, we used to pretend we were making the first landing on the Moon. Then I gave up romantic notions and realized that I would have to go about it another way. But I never thought I would get there penned up, unable to see out, like a mouse in a shoe box.

The only thing that proved I was on the Moon was my weight. High gravity can be managed anywhere, with centrifuges. Low gravity is another matter; on Earth the most you can squeeze out is a few seconds going off a high board, or by parachute delay, or stunts in a plane.

If low gravity goes on and on, then wherever you are, you are not on Earth. Well, I wasn’t on Mars; it had to be the Moon.

On the Moon I should weigh a little over twenty-five pounds. It felt about so-I felt light enough to walk on a lawn and not bend the grass.

For a few minutes I simply exulted in it, forgetting him and the trouble we were in, just heel-and-toe around the room, getting the wonderful feel of it, bouncing a little and bumping my head against the ceiling and feeling how slowly, slowly, slowly I settled back to the floor. Peewee sat down, shrugged her shoulders and gave a little smile, an annoyingly patronizing one. The “Old Moon-Hand”-all of two weeks more of it than I had had.

Low gravity has its disconcerting tricks. Your feet have hardly any traction and they fly out from under you. I had to learn with muscles and reflexes what I had known only intellectually: that when weight goes down, mass and inertia do not. To change direction, even in walking, you have to lean the way you would to round a turn on a board track- and even then if you don’t have traction (which I didn’t in socks on a smooth floor) your feet go out from under you.

Afall doesn’t hurt much in one-sixth gravity but Peewee giggled. I sat up and said, “Go and laugh, smartie. You can afford to-you’ve got tennis shoes.” “I’m sorry. But you looked silly, hanging there like a slow-motion picture and grabbing air.”

“No doubt. Very funny.”

“I said I was sorry. Look, you can borrow my shoes.”

I looked at her feet, then at mine, and snorted. “Gee, thanks!”

“Well … you could cut the heels out, or something. It wouldn’t bother me. Nothing ever does. Where are your shoes. Kip?” “Uh, about a quarter-million miles away-unless we got off at the wrong stop.”

“Oh. Well, you won’t need them much, here.”

“Yeah.” I chewed my lip, thinking about “here” and no longer interested in games with gravity. “Peewee? What do we do now?” “About what?”

“About him.”

“Nothing. What can we do?” “Then what do we do?” “Sleep.”

“Huh?”

“Sleep. ‘Sleep, that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care.’ ‘Tired Nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep.’ ‘Blessings on him who invented sleep, the mantle that covers all human thoughts.’ “ “Quit showing off and talk sense!”

“I am talking sense. At the moment we’re as helpless as goldfish. We’re simply trying to survive-and the first principle of survival is not to worry about the impossible and concentrate on what’s possible. I’m hungry and thirsty and uncomfortable and very, very tired … and all I can do about it is sleep. So if you will kindly keep quiet, that’s what I’ll do.”

“I can take a hint. No need to snap at me.”

“I’m sorry. But I get cross as two sticks when I’m tired and Daddy says I’m simply frightful before breakfast.” She curled up in a little ball and tucked that filthy rag doll under her chin. “G’night, Kip.”

“Good night, Peewee.”

I thought of something and started to speak … and saw that she was asleep. She was breathing softly and her face had smoothed out and no longer looked alert and smart-alecky. Her upper lip pooched out in a baby pout and she looked like a dirty-faced cherub. There were streaks where she had apparently cried and not wiped it away. But she had never let me see her crying.

Kip, I said to myself, you get yourself into the darndest things; this is much worse than bringing home a stray pup or a kitten. But I had to take care of her … or die trying.

Well, maybe I would. Die trying, I mean. It didn’t look as if I were any great shakes even taking care of myself.

I yawned, then yawned again. Maybe the shrimp had more sense than I had, at that. I was more tired than I had ever been, and hungry and thirsty and not comfortable other ways. I thought about banging on the door panel and trying to attract the fat one or his skinny partner. But that would wake Peewee-and it might antagonize him.

So I sprawled on my back the way I nap on the living-room rug at home. I found that a hard floor does not require any one sleeping position on the Moon; one-sixth gravity is a better mattress than all the foam rubber ever made-that fussy princess in Hans Christian Andersen’s story would have had no complaints.

I want to sleep at once.

It was the wildest space opera I had ever seen, loaded with dragons and Arcturian maidens and knights in shining space armor and shuttling between King Arthur’s Court and the Dead Sea Bottoms of Barsoom. I didn’t mind that but I did mind the announcer. He had the voice of Ace Quiggle and the face of him. He leaned out of the screen and leered, those wormy cilia writhing. “Will Beowulf conquer the Dragon? Will Tristan return to Iseult? Will Peewee find her dolly? Tune in this channel tomorrow night and in the meantime, wake up and hurry to your neighborhood druggist for a cake of Skyway’s Kwikbrite Armor Polish, the better polish used by the better knights sans peur et sans reproche. Wake up!” He shoved a snaky arm out of the screen and grabbed my shoulder.

I woke up.

“Wake up,” Peewee was saying, shaking my shoulder. “Please wake up, Kip.” “Lea’ me alone!”

“You were having a nightmare.”

The Arcturian princess had been in a bad spot. “Now I’ll never know how it came out. Wha’ did y’ want to wake me for? I thought the idea was to sleep?” “You’ve slept for hours-and now perhaps there is something we can do.”

“Breakfast, maybe?”

She ignored that. “I think we should try to escape.”

I sat up suddenly, bounced off the floor, settled back. “Wups! How?”

“I don’t know exactly. But I think they have gone away and left us. If so, we’ll never have a better chance.” “They have? What makes you think so?”

“Listen. Listen hard.”

I listened. I could hear my heart beat, I could hear Peewee breathing, and presently I could hear her heart beating. I’ve never heard deeper silence in a cave.

I took my knife, held it in my teeth for bone conduction and pushed it against a wall. Nothing. I tried the floor and the other walls. Still nothing. The ship ached with silence-no throb, no thump, not even those vibrations you can sense but not hear. “You’re right, Peewee.”

“I noticed it when the air circulation stopped.” I sniffed. “Are we running out of air?”

“Not right away. But the air stopped-it comes out of those tiny holes up there. You don’t notice it but I missed something when it stopped.” I thought hard. “I don’t see where this gets us. We’re still locked up.”

“I’m not sure.”

I tried the blade of my knife on a wall. It wasn’t metal or anything I knew as plastic, but it didn’t mind a knife. Maybe the Comte de Monte Cristo could have dug a hole in it-but he had more time. “How do you figure?”

“Every time they’ve opened or closed that door panel, I’ve heard a click. So after they took you out I stuck a wad of bubble gum where the panel meets the wall, high up where they might not notice.”

“You’ve got some gum?”

“Yes. It helps, when you can’t get a drink of water. I-“

“Got any more?” I asked eagerly. I wasn’t fresh in any way but thirst was the worst-I’d never been so thirsty.

Peewee looked upset. “Oh, poor Kip! I haven’t any more … just an old wad I kept parked on my belt buckle and chewed when I felt driest.” She frowned. “But you can have it. You’re welcome.”

“Uh, thanks, Peewee. Thanks a lot. But I guess not.”

She looked insulted. “I assure you, Mr. Russell, that I do not have anything contagious. I was merely trying to-“ “Yes, yes,” I said hastily. “I’m sure you were. But-“

“I assumed that these were emergency conditions. It is surely no more unsanitary than kissing a girl-but then I don’t suppose you’ve ever kissed a girl!”

“Not lately,” I evaded. “But what I want is a drink of clear cold water- or murky warm water. Besides, you used up your gum on the door panel. What did you expect to accomplish?” “Oh. I told you about that click. Daddy says that, in a dilemma, it is helpful to change any variable, then reexamine the problem. I tried to introduce a change with my bubble gum.” “Well?”

“When they brought you back, then closed the door, I didn’t hear a click.”

“What? Then you thought you had bamboozled their lock hours and hour ago-and you didn’t tell me?” “That is correct.”

“Why, I ought to spank you!”

“I don’t advise it,” she said frostily. “I bite.”

I believed her. And scratch. And other things. None of them pleasant. I changed the subject. “Why didn’t you tell me, Peewee?” “I was afraid you might try to get out.”

“Huh? I certainly would have!”

“Precisely. But I wanted that panel closed … as long as he was out there.”

Maybe she was a genius. Compared with me. “I see your point. All right, let’s see if we can get it open.” I examined the panel. The wad of gum was there, up high as she could reach, and from the way it was mashed it did seem possible that it had fouled the groove the panel slid into, but I couldn’t see any crack down the edge.

I tried the point of my big blade on it. The panel seemed to creep to the right an eighth of an inch-then the blade broke. I closed the stub and put the knife away. “Any ideas?”

“Maybe if we put our hands flat against it and tried to drag it?”

“Okay.” I wiped sweat from my hands on my shirt. “Now … easy does it. Just enough pressure for friction.” The panel slid to the right almost an inch-and stopped firmly.

But there was a hairline crack from floor to ceiling.

I broke off the stub of the big blade this time. The crack was no wider. Peewee said, “Oh, dear!” “We aren’t licked.” I backed off and ran toward the door.

“Toward,” not “to”-my feet skidded, I leveled off and did a leisurely bellywhopper. Peewee didn’t laugh.

I picked myself up, got against the far wall, braced one foot against it and tried a swimming racing start.

I got as far as the door panel before losing my footing. I didn’t hit it very hard, but I felt it spring. It bulged a little, then sprang back. “Wait a sec, Kip,” said Peewee. “Take your socks off. I’ll get behind you and push-my tennis shoes don’t slip.”

She was right. On the Moon, if you can’t get rubber-soled shoes, you’re better off barefooted. We backed against the far wall, Peewee behind me with her hands on my hips. “One … two

… three … Go!” We advanced with the grace of a hippopotamus.

I hurt my shoulder. But the panel sprung out of its track, leaving a space four inches wide at the bottom and tapering to the top.

I left skin on the door frame and tore my shirt and was hampered in language by the presence of a girl. But the opening widened. When it was wide enough for my head, I got down flat and peered out. There was nobody in sight-a foregone conclusion, with the noise I had made, unless they were playing cat-and-mouse. Which I wouldn’t put past them. Especially him.

Peewee started to wiggle through; I dragged her back. “Naughty, naughty! I go first.” Two more heaves and it was wide enough for me. I opened the small blade of my knife and handed it

to Peewee. “With your shield or on it, soldier.”

“You take it.”

“I won’t need it. ‘Two-Fisted Death,’ they call me around dark alleys.” This was propaganda, but why worry her? Sans pew et sans reproche- maiden-rescuing done cheaply, special rates for parties.

I eased out on elbows and knees, stood up and looked around. “Come on out,” I said quietly.

She started to, then backed up suddenly. She reappeared clutching that bedraggled dolly. “I almost forgot Madame Pompadour,” she said breathlessly. I didn’t even smile.

“Well,” she said defensively, “I have to have her to get to sleep at night. It’s my one neurotic quirk-but Daddy says I’ll outgrow it.” “Sure, sure.”

“Well, don’t look so smug! It’s not fetishism, not even primitive animism; it’s merely a conditioned reflex. I’m aware that it’s just a doll-I’ve understood the pathetic fallacy for … oh, years and years!”

“Look, Peewee,” I said earnestly, “I don’t care how you get to sleep. Personally I hit myself over the head with a hammer. But quit yakking. Do you know the layout of these ships?” She looked around. “I think this is the ship that chased me. But it looks the same as the one I piloted.”

“All right. Should we head for the control room?” “Huh?”

“You flew the other heap. Can you fly this one?” “Unh … I guess so. Yes, I can.”

“Then let’s go.” I started in the direction they had lugged me.

“But the other time I had the Mother Thing to tell me what to do! Let’s find her.” I stopped. “Can you get it off the ground?”

“Well … yes.”

“We’ll look for her after we’re in the air-‘in space,’ I mean. If she’s aboard we’ll find her. If she’s not, there’s not a thing we can do.” “Well … all right. I see your logic; I don’t have to like it.” She tagged along. “Kip? How many gravities can you stand?”

“Huh? I haven’t the slightest idea. Why?”

“Because these things can go lots faster than I dared try when I escaped before. That was my mistake.” “Your mistake was in heading for New Jersey.”

“But I had to find Daddy!”

“Sure, sure, eventually. But you should have ducked over to Lunar Base and yelled for the Federation Space Corps. This is no job for a popgun; we need help. Any idea where we are?” “Mmm … I think so. If he took us back to their base. I’ll know when I look at the sky.”

“All right. If you can figure out where Lunar Base is from here, that’s where we’ll go. If not- Well, we’ll head for New Jersey at all the push it has.”

The control-room door latched and I could not figure out how to open it. Peewee did what she said should work-which was to tuck her little finger into a hole mine would not enter-and told me it must be locked. So I looked around.

I found a metal bar racked in the corridor, a thing about five feet long, pointed on one end and with four handles like brass knucks on the other. I didn’t know what it was-the hobgoblin equivalent of a fire ax, possibly -but it was a fine wrecking bar.

I made a shambles of that door in three minutes. We went in.

My first feeling was gooseflesh because here was where I had been grilled by him. I tried not to show it. If he turned up, I was going to let him have his wrecking bar right between his grisly eyes. I looked around, really seeing the place for the first time. There was sort of a nest in the middle surrounded by what could have been a very fancy coffee maker or a velocipede for an octopus; I was glad Peewee knew which button to push. “How do you see out?”

“Like this.” Peewee squeezed past and put a finger into a hole I hadn’t noticed.

The ceiling was hemispherical like a planetarium. Which was what it was, for it lighted up. I gasped.

It was suddenly not a floor we were on, but a platform, apparently out in the open and maybe thirty feet in the air. Over me were star images, thousands of them, in a black “sky”-and facing toward me, big as a dozen full moons and green and lovely and beautiful, was Earth!

Peewee touched my elbow. “Snap out of it, Kip.”

I said in a choked voice, “Peewee, don’t you have any poetry in your soul?”

“Surely I have. Oodles. But we haven’t time. I know where we are, Kip -back where I started from. Their base. See those rocks with long jagged shadows? Some of them are ships, camouflaged. And over to the left- that high peak, with the saddle?-a little farther left, almost due west, is Tombaugh Station, forty miles away. About two hundred miles farther is Lunar Base and beyond is Luna City.”

“How long will it take?”

“Two hundred, nearly two hundred and fifty miles? Uh, I’ve never tried a point-to-point on the Moon-but it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.” “Let’s go! They might come back any minute.”

“Yes, Kip.” She crawled into that jackdaw’s nest and bent over a sector.

Presently she looked up. Her face was white and thin and very little-girlish. “Kip … we aren’t going anywhere. I’m sorry.” I let out a yelp. “What! What’s the matter? Have you forgotten how to run it?”

“No. The ‘brain’ is gone.” “The which?”

“The ‘brain.’ Little black dingus about the size of a walnut that fits in this cavity.” She showed me. “We got away before because the Mother Thing managed to steal one. We were locked in an empty ship, just as you and I are now. But she had one and we got away.” Peewee looked bleak and very lost. “I should have known that he wouldn’t leave one in the control room-I guess I did and didn’t want to admit it. I’m sorry.”

“Uh … look, Peewee, we won’t give up that easily. Maybe I can make something to fit that socket.”

“Like jumping wires in a car?” She shook her head. “It’s not that simple. Kip. If you put a wooden model in place of the generator in a car, would it run? I don’t know quite what it does, but I called it the ‘brain’ because it’s very complex.”

“But-” I shut up. If a Borneo savage had a brand-new car, complete except for spark plugs, would he get it running? Echo answers mournfully. “Peewee, what’s the next best thing? Any ideas? Because if you haven’t, I want you to show me the air lock. I’ll take this-” I shook my wrecking bar “-and bash anything that comes through.”

“I’m stumped,” she admitted. “I want to look for the Mother Thing. If she’s shut up in this ship, she may know what to do.”

“All right. But first show me the air lock. You can look for her while I stand guard.” I felt the reckless anger of desperation. I didn’t see how we were ever going to get out and I was beginning to believe that we weren’t -but there was still a reckoning due. He was going to learn that it wasn’t safe to push people around. I was sure-I was fairly sure-that I could sock him before my spine turned to jelly. Splash that repulsive head.

If I didn’t look at his eyes.

Peewee said slowly, “There’s one other thing-“ “What?”

“I hate to suggest it. You might think I was running out on you.” “Don’t be silly. If you’ve got an idea, spill it.”

“Well … there’s Tombaugh Station, over that way about forty miles. If my space suit is in the ship-“

I suddenly quit feeling like Bowie at the Alamo. Maybe the game would go an extra period- “We can walk it!”

She shook her head. “No, Kip. That’s why I hesitated to mention it. I can walk it … if we find my suit. But you couldn’t wear my suit even if you squatted.” “I don’t need your suit,” I said impatiently.

“Kip, Kip! This is the Moon, remember? No air.”

“Yes, yes, sure! Think I’m an idiot? But if they locked up your suit, they probably put mine right beside it and-“ “You’ve got a space suit?” she said incredulously.

Our next remarks were too confused to repeat but finally Peewee was convinced that I really did own a space suit, that in fact the only reason I was sending on the space-operations band twelve hours and a quarter of a million miles back was that I was wearing it when they grabbed me.

“Let’s tear the joint apart!” I said. “No-show me that air lock, then you take it apart.” “All right.”

She showed me the lock, a room much like the one we had been cooped in, but smaller and with an inner door built to take a pressure load. It was not locked. We opened it cautiously. It was empty, and its outer door was closed or we would never been able to open the inner. I said, “If Wormface had been a suspenders-and-belt man, he would have left the outer door open, even though he had us locked up. Then- Wait a second! Is there a way to latch the inner door open?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’ll see.” There was, a simple hook. But to make sure that it couldn’t be unlatched by button-pushing from outside I wedged it with my knife. “You’re sure this is the only air lock?” “The other ship had only one and I’m pretty certain they are alike.”

“We’ll keep our eyes open. Nobody can get at us through this one. Even old Wormface has to use an air lock.” “But suppose he opens the outer door anyhow?” Peewee said nervously. “We’d pop like balloons.”

I looked at her and grinned. “Who is a genius? Sure we would … if he did. But he won’t. Not with twenty, twenty-five tons of pressure holding it closed. As you reminded me, this is the Moon. No air outside, remember?”

“Oh.” Peewee looked sheepish.

So we searched. I enjoyed wrecking doors; Wormface wasn’t going to like me. One of the first things we found was a smelly little hole that Fatty and Skinny lived in. The door was not locked, which was a shame. That room told me a lot about that pair. It showed that they were pigs, with habits as unattractive as their morals. The room also told me that they were not casual prisoners; it had been refitted for humans. Their relationship with Wormface, whatever it was, had gone on for some time and was continuing. There were two empty racks for space suits, several dozen canned rations of the sort sold in military-surplus stores, and best of all, there was drinking water and a washroom of sorts-and something more precious than fine gold or frankincense if we found our suits: two charged bottles of oxy-helium.

I took a drink, opened a can of food for Peewee-it opened with a key; we weren’t in the predicament of the Three Men in a Boat with their tin of pineapple-told her to grab a bite, then search that room. I went on with my giant toad sticker; those charged air bottles had given me an unbearable itch to find our suits-and get out!-before Wormface returned.

I smashed a dozen doors as fast as the Walrus and the Carpenter opened oysters and found all sorts of things, including what must have been living quarters for wormfaces. But I didn’t stop to look-the Space Corps could do that, if and when-I simply made sure that there was not a space suit in any of them.

And found them!-in a compartment next to the one we had been prisoners in.

I was so glad to see Oscar that I could have kissed him. I shouted, “Hi, Pal! Mirabile visu!” and ran to get Peewee. My feet went out from under me again but I didn’t care. Peewee looked up as I rushed in. “I was just going to look for you.”

“Got it! Got it!”

“You found the Mother Thing?” she said eagerly.

“Huh? No, no! The space suits-yours and mine! Let’s go!”

“Oh.” She looked disappointed and I felt hurt. “That’s good … but we have to find the Mother Thing first.”

I felt tried beyond endurance. Here we had a chance, slim but real, to escape a fate-worse-than-death (I’m not using a figure of speech) and she wanted to hang around to search for a bug-eyed monster. For any human being, even a stranger with halitosis, I would have done it. For a dog or cat I would, although reluctantly.

But what was a bug-eyed monster to me? All this one had done was to get me into the worst jam I had ever been in. I considered socking Peewee and stuffing her into her suit. But I said, “Are you crazy? We’re leaving-right now!”

“We can’t go till we find her.”

“Now I know you’re crazy. We don’t even know she’s here … and if we do find her, we can’t take her with us.” “Oh, but we will!”

“How? This is the Moon, remember? No air. Got a space suit for her?”

“But-” That stonkered her. But not for long. She had been sitting on the floor, holding the ration can between her knees. She stood up suddenly, bouncing a little, and said, “Do as you like; I’m going to find her. Here.” She shoved the can at me.

I should have used force. But I am handicapped by training from early childhood never to strike a female, no matter how richly she deserves it. So the opportunity and Peewee both slid past while I was torn between common sense and upbringing. I simply groaned helplessly.

Then I became aware of an unbearably attractive odor. I was holding that can. It contained boiled shoe leather and gray gravy and smelled ambrosial.

Peewee had eaten half; I ate the rest while looking at what she had found. There was a coil of nylon rope which I happily put with the air bottles; Oscar had fifty feet of clothesline clipped to his belt but that had been a penny-saving expedient. There was a prospector’s hammer which I salvaged, and two batteries which would do for headlamps and things.

The only other items of interest were a Government Printing Office publication titled Preliminary Report on Selenology, a pamphlet on uranium prospecting, and an expired Utah driver’s license for “Timothy Johnson”-I recognized the older man’s mean face. The pamphlets interested me but this was no time for excess baggage.

The main furniture was two beds, curved like contour chairs and deeply padded; they told me that Skinny and Fatty had ridden this ship at high acceleration.

When I had mopped the last of the gravy with a finger, I took a big drink, washed my hands-using water lavishly because I didn’t care if that pair died of thirst-grabbed my plunder and headed for the room where the space suits were.

As I got there I ran into Peewee. She was carrying the crowbar and looking overjoyed. “I found her!” “Where?”

“Come on! I can’t get it open, I’m not strong enough.”

I put the stuff with our suits and followed her. She stopped at a door panel farther along the corridor than my vandalism had taken me. “In there!” I looked and I listened. “What makes you think so?”

“I know! Open it!”

I shrugged and got to work with the nutpick. The panel went sprung! and that was that. Curled up in the middle of the floor was a creature.

So far as I could tell, it might or might not have been the one I had seen in the pasture the night before. The light had been poor, the conditions very different, and my examination had ended abruptly. But Peewee was in no doubt. She launched herself through the air with a squeal of joy and the two rolled over and over like kittens play-fighting.

Peewee was making sounds of joy, more or less in English. So was the Mother Thing, but not in English. I would not have been surprised if she had spoken English, since Wormface did and since Peewee had mentioned things the Mother Thing had told her. But she didn’t.

Did you ever listen to a mockingbird? Sometimes singing melodies, sometimes just sending up a joyous noise unto the Lord? The endlessly varied songs of a mockingbird are nearest to the speech of the Mother Thing.

At last they held still, more or less, and Peewee said, “Oh, Mother Thing, I’m so happy!”

The creature sang to her. Peewee answered, “Oh. I’m forgetting my manners. Mother Thing, this is my dear friend Kip.” The Mother Thing sang to me-and I understood.

What she said was: “I am very happy to know you, Kip.” It didn’t come out in words. But it might as well have been English. Nor was this half-kidding self-deception, such as my conversations with Oscar or Peewee’s with Madame Pompadour-when I talk with Oscar I am both sides of the conversation; it’s just my conscious talking to my subconscious, or some such. This was not that.

The Mother Thing sang to me and I understood.

I was startled but not unbelieving. When you see a rainbow you don’t stop to argue the laws of optics. There it is, in the sky.

I would have been an idiot not to know that the Mother Thing was speaking to me because I did understand and understood her every time. If she directed a remark at Peewee alone, it was usually just birdsongs to me-but if it was meant for me, I got it.

Call it telepathy if you like, although it doesn’t seem to be what they do at Duke University. I never read her mind and I don’t think she read mine. We just talked.

But while I was startled, I minded my manners. I felt the way I do when Mother introduces me to one of her older grande-dame friends. So I bowed and said, “We’re very happy that we’ve found you, Mother Thing.”

It was simple, humble truth. I knew, without explanation, what it was that had made Peewee stubbornly determined to risk recapture rather than give up looking for her-the quality that made her “the Mother Thing.”

Peewee has this habit of slapping names on things and her choices aren’t always apt, for my taste. But I’ll never question this one. The Mother Thing was the Mother Thing because she was. Around her you felt happy and safe and warm. You knew that if you skinned your knee and came bawling into the house, she would kiss it well and paint it with merthiolate and everything would be all right. Some nurses have it and some teachers … and, sadly, some mothers don’t.

But the Mother Thing had it so strongly that I wasn’t even worried by Wormface. We had her with us so everything was going to be all right. I logically I knew that she was as vulnerable as we were-I had seen them strike her down. She didn’t have my size and strength, she couldn’t pilot the ship as Peewee had been able to. It didn’t matter.

I wanted to crawl into her lap. Since she was too small and didn’t have a lap, I would gratefully hold her in mine, anytime.

I have talked more about my father but that doesn’t mean that Mother is less important-just different. Dad is active, Mother is passive; Dad talks, Mother doesn’t. But if she died, Dad would wither like an uprooted tree. She makes our world.

The Mother Thing had the effect on me that Mother has, only I’m used to it from Mother. Now I was getting it unexpectedly, far from home, when I needed it. Peewee said excitedly, “Now we can go. Kip. Let’s hurry!”

The Mother Thing sang (“Where are we going, children?”) “To Tombaugh Station, Mother Thing. They’ll help us.”

The Mother Thing blinked her eyes and looked serenely sad. She had great, soft, compassionate eyes-she looked more like a lemur than anything else but she was not a primate-she wasn’t even in our sequence, unearthly. But she had these wonderful eyes and a soft, defenseless mouth out of which music poured. She wasn’t as big as Peewee and her hands were tinier still-six fingers, any one of which could oppose the others the way our thumbs can. Her body-well, it never stayed the same shape so it’s hard to describe, but it was right for her.

She didn’t wear clothes but she wasn’t naked; she had soft, creamy fur, sleek and fine as chinchilla. I thought at first she didn’t wear anything, but presently I noticed a piece of jewelry, a shiny triangle with a double spiral in each corner. I don’t know what made it stick on.

I didn’t take all this in at once. At that instant the expression in the Mother Thing’s eyes brought a crash of sorrow into the happiness I had been feeling. Her answer made me realize that she didn’t have a miracle ready (“How are we to fly the ship? They have guarded me most carefully this time.”)

Peewee explained eagerly about the space suits and I stood there like a fool, with a lump of ice in my stomach. What had been just a question of using my greater strength to force Peewee to behave was now an unsolvable dilemma. I could no more abandon the Mother Thing than I could have abandoned Peewee … and there were only two space suits.

Even if she could wear our sort, which looked as practical as roller skates on a snake.

The Mother Thing gently pointed out that her own vacuum gear had been destroyed. (I’m going to quit writing down all her songs; I don’t remember them exactly anyhow.)

And so the fight began. It was an odd fight, with the Mother Thing gentle and loving and sensible and utterly firm, and Peewee throwing a tearful, bad-little-girl tantrum-and me standing miserably by, not even refereeing.

When the Mother Thing understood the situation, she analyzed it at once to the inevitable answer. Since she had no way to go (and probably couldn’t have walked that far anyhow, even if she had had her sort of space suit) the only answer was for us two to leave at once. If we reached safety, then we would, if possible, convince our people of the danger from Wormface & Co.-in which case she might be saved as well … which would be nice but was not indispensable.

Peewee utterly, flatly, and absolutely refused to listen to any plan which called for leaving the Mother Thing behind. If the Mother Thing couldn’t go, she wouldn’t budge. “Kip! You go get help! Hurry! I’ll stay here.”

I stared at her. “Peewee, you know I can’t do that.”

“You must. You will so! You’ve got to. If you don’t, I’ll … I’ll never speak to you again!”

“If I did, I’d never speak to myself again. Look, Peewee, it won’t wash. You’ll have to go-“ “No!”

“Oh, shut up for a change. You go and I stay and guard the door with the shillelagh. I’ll hold ‘em off while you round up the troops. But tell them to hurry!” “I-” She stopped and looked very sober and utterly baffled. Then she threw herself on the Mother Thing, sobbing: “Oh, you don’t love me any more!”

Which shows how far her logic had gone to pot. The Mother Thing sang softly to her while I worried the thought that our last chance was t trickling away while we argued. Wormface might come back any second- and while I hoped to slug him a final one if he got in, more likely he had resources to outmaneuver me. Either way, we would not escape.

At last I said, “Look we’ll all go.”

Peewee stopped sobbing and looked startled. “You know we can’t.” The Mother Thing sang (“How, Kip?”)

“Uh, I’ll have to show you. Up on your feet, Peewee.” We went where the suits were, while Peewee carried Madame Pompadour and half carried the Mother Thing. Lars Eklund, the rigger who had first worn Oscar according to his log, must have weighed about two hundred pounds; in order to wear Oscar I had to strap him tight to keep from bulging. I hadn’t considered retailoring him to my size as I was afraid I would never get him gas-tight again. Arm and leg lengths were okay; it was girth that was too big.

There was room inside for both the Mother Thing and me.

I explained, while Peewee looked big-eyed and the Mother Thing sang queries and approvals. Yes, she could hang on piggy-back-and she couldn’t fall off, once we were sealed up and the straps cinched.

“All right. Peewee, get into your suit.” I went to get my socks while she started to suit up. When I came back I checked her helmet gauges, reading them backwards through her lens. “We had better give you some air. You’re only about half full.”

I ran into a snag. The spare bottles I had filched from those ghouls had screw-thread fittings like mine-but Peewee’s bottles had bayonet-and-snap joints. Okay, I guess, for tourists, chaperoned and nursed and who might get panicky while bottles were changed unless it was done fast-but not so good for serious work. In my workshop I would have rigged an adapter in twenty minutes. Here, with no real tools-well, that spare air might as well be on Earth for all the good it did Peewee.

For the first time, I thought seriously of leaving them behind while I made a fast forced march for help. But I didn’t mention it. I thought that Peewee would rather die on the way than fall back into his hands-and I was inclined to agree.

“Kid,” I said slowly, “that isn’t much air. Not for forty miles.” Her gauge was scaled in time as well as pressure; it read just under five hours. Could Peewee move as fast as a trotting horse? Even at lunar gravity? Not likely.

She looked at me soberly. “That’s calibrated for full-size people. I’m little-I don’t use much air.” “Uh … don’t use it faster than you have to.”

“I won’t. Let’s go.”

I started to close her gaskets. “Hey!” she objected. “What’s the matter?”

“Madame Pompadour! Hand her to me-please. On the floor by my feet.”

I picked up that ridiculous dolly and gave it to her. “How much air does she take?”

Peewee suddenly dimpled. “I’ll caution her not to inhale.” She stuffed it inside her shirt, I sealed her up. I sat down in my open suit, the Mother Thing crept up my back, singing reassuringly, and cuddled close. She felt good and I felt that I could hike a hundred miles, to get them both safe.

Getting me sealed in was cumbersome, as the straps had to be let out and then tightened to allow for the Mother Thing, and neither Peewee nor I had bare hands. We managed.

I made a sling from my clothesline for the spare bottles. With them around my neck, with Oscar’s weight and the Mother Thing as well, I scaled perhaps fifty pounds at the Moon’s one- sixth gee. It just made me fairly sure-footed for the first time.

I retrieved my knife from the air-lock latch and snapped it to Oscar’s belt beside the nylon rope and the prospector’s hammer. Then we went inside the air lock and closed its inner door. I didn’t know how to waste its air to the outside but Peewee did. It started to hiss out.

“You all right, Mother Thing?”

(“Yes, Kip.”) She hugged me reassuringly.

“Peewee to Junebug,” I heard in my phones: “radio check. Alfa, Bravo, Coca, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot-“ “Junebug to Peewee: I read you. Golf, Hotel, India, Juliette, Kilo-“

“I read you, Kip.” “Roger.”

“Mind your pressure. Kip. You’re swelling up too fast.” I kicked the chin valve while watching the gauge-and kicking myself for letting a little girl catch me in a greenhorn trick. But she had used a space suit before, while I had merely pretended to.

I decided this was no time to be proud. “Peewee? Give me all the tips you can. I’m new to his.” “I will, Kip.”

The outer door popped silently and swung inward-and I looked out over the bleak bright surface of a lunar plain. For a homesick moment I remembered the trip-to-the-Moon games I had played as a kid and wished I were back in Centerville. Then Peewee touched her helmet to mine. “See anyone?”

“No.”

“We’re lucky, the door faces away from the other ships. Listen carefully. We won’t use radio until we are over the horizon-unless it’s a desperate emergency. They listen on our frequencies. I know that for sure. Now see that mountain with the saddle in it? Kip, pay attention!”

“Yes.” I had been staring at Earth. She was beautiful even in that shadow show in the control room-but I just hadn’t realized. There she was, so close I could almost touch her … and so far away that we might never get home. You can’t believe what a lovely planet we have, until you see her from outside … with clouds girdling her waist and polar cap set jauntily, like a spring hat. “Yes. I see the saddle.”

“We head left of there, where you see a pass. Tim and Jock brought me through it in a crawler. Once we pick up its tracks it will be easy. But first we head for those near hills just left of that-that ought to keep this ship between us and the other ships while we get out of sight. I hope.”

It was twelve feet or so to the ground and I was prepared to jump, since it would be nothing much in that gravity. Peewee insisted on lowering me by rope. “You’ll fall over your feet. Look, Kip, listen to old Aunt Peewee. You don’t have Moon legs yet. It’s going to be like your first time on a bicycle.”

So I let her lower me and the Mother Thing while she snubbed the nylon rope around the side of the lock. Then she jumped with no trouble. I started to loop up the line but she stopped me and snapped the other end to her belt, then touched helmets. “I’ll lead. If I go too fast or you need me, tug on the rope. I won’t be able to see you.”

“Aye aye, Cap’n!”

“Don’t make fun of me, Kip. This is serious.” “I wasn’t making fun, Peewee. You’re boss.”

“Let’s go. Don’t look back, it won’t do any good and you might fall. I’m heading for those hills.”

Chapter 6

I should have relished the weird, romantic experience, but I was as busy as Eliza crossing the ice and the things snapping at my heels were worse than bloodhounds. I wanted to look back but I was too busy trying to stay on my feet. I couldn’t see my feet; I had to watch ahead and try to pick my footing-it kept me as busy as a lumberjack in a logrolling contest. I didn’t skid as the ground was rough-dust or fine sand over raw rock- and fifty pounds weight was enough for footing. But I had three hundred pounds mass not a whit reduced by lowered weight; this does things to lifelong reflex habits. I had to lean heavily for the slightest turn, lean back and dig in to slow down, lean far forward to speed up.

I could have drawn a force diagram, but doing it is another matter. How long does it take a baby to learn to walk? This newborn Moon-baby was having to learn while making a forced march, half blind, at the greatest speed he could manage.

So I didn’t have time to dwell on the wonder of it all.

Peewee moved into a brisk pace and kept stepping it up. Every little while my leash tightened and I tried still harder to speed up and not fall down. The Mother Thing warbled at my spine: (“Are you all right. Kip? You seem worried.”)

“I’m … all right! How … about … you?”

(“I’m very comfortable. Don’t wear yourself out, dear.”) “Okay!”

Oscar was doing his job. I began to sweat from exertion and naked Sun, but I didn’t kick the chin valve until I saw from my blood-color gauge that I was short on air. The system worked perfectly and the joints, under a four-pound pressure, gave no trouble; hours of practice in the pasture was paying off. Presently my one worry was to keep a sharp eye for rocks and ruts. We were into those low hills maybe twenty minutes after H-hour. Peewee’s first swerve as we reached rougher ground took me by surprise; I almost fell.

She slowed down and crept forward into a gulch. Afew moments later she stopped; I joined her and she touched helmets with me. “How are you doing?” “Okay.”

“Mother Thing, can you hear me?” (“Yes, dear.”)

“Are you comfortable? Can you breathe all right?” (“Yes, indeed. Our Kip is taking good care of me.”) “Good. You behave yourself, Mother Thing. Hear me?”

(“I will, dear.”) Somehow she put an indulgent chuckle into a birdsong.

“Speaking of breathing,” I said to Peewee, “let’s check your air.” I tried to look into her helmet. She pulled away, then touched again. “I’m all right!”

“So you say.” I held her helmet with both hands, found I couldn’t see the dials-with sunlight around us, trying to see in was like peering into a well. “What does it read-and don’t fib.” “Don’t be nosy!”

I turned her around and read her bottle gauges. One read zero; the other was almost full. I touched helmets. “Peewee,” I said slowly, “how many miles have we come?”

“About three, I think. Why?”

“Then we’ve got more than thirty to go?”

“At least thirty-five. Kip, quit fretting. I know I’ve got one empty bottle; I shifted to the full one before we stopped.” “One bottle won’t take you thirty-five miles.”

“Yes, it will … because it’s got to.”

“Look, we’ve got plenty of air. I’ll figure a way to get it to you.” My mind was trotting in circles, thinking what tools were on my belt, what else I had. “Kip, you know you can’t hook those spare bottles to my suit-so shut up!”

(“What’s the trouble, darlings? Why are you quarreling?”) “We aren’t fighting, Mother Thing. Kip is a worry wart.” (“Now, children-“)

I said, “Peewee, I admit I can’t hook the spares into your suit … but I’ll jigger a way to recharge your bottle.” “But How, Kip?”

“Leave it to me. I’ll touch only the empty; if it doesn’t work, we’re no worse off. If it does, we’ve got it made.” “How long will it take?”

“Ten minutes with luck. Thirty without.” “No,” she decided.

“Now, Peewee, don’t be sil-“

“I’m not being silly! We aren’t safe until we get into the mountains. I can get that far. Then, when we no longer show up like a bug on a plate, we can rest and recharge my empty bottle.” It made sense. “All right.”

“Can you go faster? If we reach the mountains before they miss us, I don’t think they’ll ever find us. If we don’t-“ “I can go faster. Except for these pesky bottles.”

“Oh.” She hesitated. “Do you want to throw one away?”

“Huh? Oh, no, no! But they throw me off balance. I’ve just missed a tumble a dozen times. Peewee, can you retie them so they don’t swing?” “Oh. Sure.”

I had them hung around my neck and down my front-not smart but I had been hurried. Now Peewee lashed them firmly, still in front as my own bottles and the Mother Thing were on my back-no doubt she was finding it as crowded as Dollar Day. Peewee passed clothesline under my belt and around the yoke. She touched helmets. “I hope that’s okay.”

“Did you tie a square knot?”

She pulled her helmet away. Aminute later she touched helmets again. “It was a granny,” she admitted in a small voice, “but it’s a square knot now.” “Good. Tuck the ends in my belt so that I can’t trip, then we’ll mush. Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “I just wish I had salvaged my gum, old and tired as it was. My throat’s awful dry.” “Drink some water. Not too much.”

“Kip! It’s not a nice joke.”

I stared. “Peewee-your suit hasn’t any water?” “What? Don’t be silly.”

My jaw dropped. “But, baby,” I said helplessly, “why didn’t you fill your tank before we left?” “What are you talking about? Does your suit have a water tank?”

I couldn’t answer. Peewee’s suit was for tourists-for those “scenic walks amidst incomparable grandeur on the ancient face of the Moon” that the ads promised. Guided walks, of course, not over a half-hour at a time-they wouldn’t put in a water tank; some tourist might choke, or bite the nipple off and half drown in his helmet, or some silly thing. Besides, it was cheaper.

I began to worry about other shortcomings that cheap-jack equipment might have-with Peewee’s life depending on it. “I’m sorry,” I said humbly. “Look, I’ll try to figure out some way to get water to you.”

“I doubt if you can. I can’t die of thirst in the time it’ll take us to get there, so quit worrying. I’m all right. I just wish I had my bubble gum. Ready?” “Uh … ready.”

The hills were hardly more than giant folds in lava; we were soon through them, even though we had to take it cautiously over the very rough ground. Beyond them the ground looked natter than western Kansas, stretching out to a close horizon, with mountains sticking up beyond, glaring in the Sun and silhouetted against a black sky like cardboard cutouts. I tried to figure how far the horizon was, on a thousand-mile radius and a height of eye of six feet-and couldn’t do it in my head and wished for my slipstick. But it was awfully close, less than a mile.

Peewee let me overtake her, touched helmets. “Okay, Kip? All right, Mother Thing?” “Sure.”

(“All right, dear.”)

“Kip, the course from the pass when they fetched me here was east eight degrees north. I heard them arguing and sneaked a peek at their map. So we go back west eight degrees south-that doesn’t count the jog to these hills but it’s close enough to find the pass. Okay?”

“Sounds swell.” I was impressed. “Peewee, were you an Indian scout once? Or Davy Crockett?”

“Pooh! Anybody can read a map”-she sounded pleased. “I want to check compasses. What bearing do you have on Earth?” I said silently: Oscar, you’ve let me down. I’ve been cussing her suit for not having water-and you don’t have a compass.

(Oscar protested: “Hey, pal, that’s unfair! Why would I need a compass at Space Station Two? Nobody told me I was going to the Moon.”) I said, “Peewee, this suit is for space station work. What use is a compass in space? Nobody told me I was going to the Moon.”

“But- Well, don’t stop to cry about it. You can get your directions by Earth.” “Why can’t I use your compass?”

“Don’t be silly; it’s built into my helmet. Now just a moment-” She faced Earth, moved her helmet back and forth. Then she touched helmets again. “Earth is smacko on northwest … that makes the course fifty three degrees left of there. Try to pick it out. Earth is two degrees wide, you know.”

“I knew that before you were born.”

“No doubt. Some people require a head start.” “Smart aleck!”

“You were rude first!”

“But- Sorry, Peewee. Let’s save the fights for later. I’ll spot you the first two bites.” “I won’t need them! You don’t know how nasty I can-“

“I have some idea.” (“Children! Children!”) “I’m sorry, Peewee.”

“So am I. I’m edgy. I wish we were there.”

“So do I. Let me figure the course.” I counted degrees using Earth as a yardstick. I marked a place by eye, then tried again judging fifty-three degrees as a proportion of ninety. The results didn’t agree, so I tried to spot some stars to help me. They say you can see stars from the Moon even when the Sun is in the sky. Well, you can-but not easily. I had the Sun over my shoulder but was facing Earth, almost three-quarters full, and had the dazzling ground glare as well. The polarizer cut down the glare-and cut out the stars, too.

So I split my guesses and marked the spot. “Peewee? See that sharp peak with sort of a chin on its left profile? That ought to be the course, pretty near.” “Let me check.” She tried it by compass, then touched helmets. “Nice going, Kip. Three degrees to the right and you’ve got it.”

I felt smug. “Shall we get moving?”

“Right. We go through the pass, then Tombaugh Station is due west.”

It was about ten miles to the mountains; we made short work of it. You can make time on the Moon-if it is flat and if you can keep your balance. Peewee kept stepping it up until we were almost flying, long low strides that covered ground like an ostrich-and, do you know, it’s easier fast than slow. The only hazard, after I got the hang of it, was landing on a rock or hole or something and tripping. But that was hazard enough because I couldn’t pick my footing at that speed. I wasn’t afraid of falling; I felt certain that Oscar could take the punishment. But suppose I landed on my back? Probably smash the Mother Thing to jelly.

I was worried about Peewee, too. That cut-rate tourist suit wasn’t as rugged as Oscar. I’ve read about explosive decompression-I never want to see it. Especially not a little girl. But I didn’t dare use radio to warn her even though we were probably shielded from Wormface-and if I tugged on my leash I might make her fall.

The plain started to rise and Peewee let it slow us down. Presently we were walking, then we were climbing a scree slope. I stumbled but landed on my hands and got up-one-sixth gravity has advantages as well as hazards. We reached the top and Peewee led us into a pocket in the rocks. She stopped and touched helmets. “Anybody home? You two all right?”

(“All right, dear.”)

“Sure,” I agreed. “Alittle winded, maybe.” That was an understatement but if Peewee could take it, I could.

“We can rest,” she answered, “and take it easy from here on. I wanted to get us out of the open as fast as possible. They’ll never find us here.”

I thought she was right. Awormface ship flying over might spot us, if they could see down as well as up-probably just a matter of touching a control. But our chances were better now. “This is the time to recharge your empty bottle.”

“Okay.”

None too soon-the bottle which had been almost full had dropped by a third, more like half. She couldn’t make it to Tombaugh Station on that -simple arithmetic. So I crossed my fingers and got to work. “Partner, will you untie this cat’s cradle?”

While Peewee fumbled at knots, I started to take a drink-then stopped, ashamed of myself. Peewee must be chewing her tongue to work up saliva by now-and I hadn’t been able to think of any way to get water to her. The tank was inside my helmet and there was no way to reach it without making me-and Mother Thing-dead in the process.

If I ever lived to be an engineer I’d correct that!

I decided that it was idiotic not to drink because she couldn’t; the lives of all of us might depend on my staying in the best condition I could manage. So I drank and ate three malted milk tablets and a salt tablet, then had another drink. It helped a lot but I hoped Peewee hadn’t noticed. She was busy unwinding clothesline-anyhow it was hard to see into a helmet.

I took Peewee’s empty bottle off her back, making darn sure to close her outside stop valve first-there’s supposed to be a one-way valve where an air hose enters a helmet but I no longer trusted her suit; it might have more cost-saving shortcomings. I laid the empty on the ground by a full one, looked at it, straightened up and touched helmets. “Peewee, disconnect the bottle on the left side of my back.”

“Why, Kip?”

“Who’s doing this job?” I had a reason but was afraid she might argue. My lefthand bottle held pure oxygen; the others were oxy-helium. It was full, except for a few minutes of fiddling last night in Centerville. Since I couldn’t possibly give her bottle a full charge, the next best thing was to give her a half-charge of straight oxygen.

She shut up and removed it.

I set about trying to transfer pressure between bottles whose connections didn’t match. There was no way to do it properly, short of tools a quarter of a million miles away-or over in Tombaugh Station which was just as bad. But I did have adhesive tape.

Oscar’s manual called for two first-aid kits. I didn’t know what was supposed to be in them; the manual had simply given USAF stock numbers. I hadn’t been able to guess what would be useful in an outside kit-a hypodermic needle, maybe, sharp enough to stab through and give a man morphine when he needed it terribly. But since I didn’t know, I had stocked inside and outside with bandage, dressings, and a spool of surgical tape.

I was betting on the tape.

I butted the mismatched hose connections together, tore off a scrap of bandage and wrapped it around the junction-I didn’t want sticky stuff on the joint; it could foul the operation on a suit. Then I taped the junction, wrapping tightly, working very painstakingly and taping three inches on each side as well as around the joint-if tape could restrain that pressure a few moments, there would still be one deuce of a force trying to drag that joint apart. I didn’t want it to pull apart at the first jolt. I used the entire roll.

I motioned Peewee to touch helmets. “I’m about to open the full bottle. The valve on the empty is already open. When you see me start to close the valve on the full one, you close the other one-fast! Got it?”

“Close the valve when you do, quickly. Roger.”

“Stand by. Get your hand on the valve.” I grabbed that lump of bandaged joint in one fist, squeezed as hard as I could, and put my other hand on the valve. If that joint let go, maybe my hand would go with it- but if the stunt failed, little Peewee didn’t have long to live. So I really gripped.

Watching both gauges, I barely cracked the valve. The hose quivered; the needle gauge that read “empty” twitched. I opened the valve wide. One needle swung left, the other right. Quickly they approached half-charge. “Now!” I yelled uselessly and started closing the valve.

And felt that patchwork joint start to give.

The hoses squeezed out of my fist but we lost only a fraction of gas. I found that I was trying to close a valve that was closed tight. Peewee had hers closed. The gauges each showed just short of half full-there was air for Peewee.

I sighed and found I had been holding my breath.

Peewee put her helmet against mine and said very soberly, “Thanks, Kip.”

“Charton Drugs service, ma’am-no tip necessary. Let me tidy this mess, you can tie me and we’ll go.” “You won’t have to carry but one extra bottle now.”

“Wrong, Peewee. We may do this stunt five or six times until there’s only a whisper left”-or until the tape wears out, I added to myself. The first thing I did was to rewrap the tape on its spool-and if you think that is easy, wearing gloves and with the adhesive drying out as fast as you wind it, try it.

In spite of the bandage, sticky stuff had smeared the connections when the hoses parted. But it dried so hard that it chipped off the bayonet-and-snap joint easily. I didn’t worry about the screw-thread joint; I didn’t expect to use it on a suit. We mounted Peewee’s recharged bottle and I warned her that it was straight oxygen. “Cut your pressure and feed from both bottles. What’s your blood color reading?”

“I’ve been carrying it low on purpose.”

“Idiot! You want to keel over? Kick your chin valve! Get into normal range!”

We mounted one bottle I had swiped on my back, tied the other and the oxy bottle on my front, and were on our way.

Earth mountains are predictable; lunar mountains aren’t, they’ve never been shaped by water. We came to a hole too steep to go down other than by rope and a wall beyond I wasn’t sure we could climb. With pitons and snap rings and no space suits it wouldn’t have been hard in the Rockies- but not the way we were. Peewee reluctantly led us back. The scree slope was worse going down-I backed down on hands and knees, with Peewee belaying the line above me. I wanted to be a hero and belay for her-we had a brisk argument. “Oh, quit being big

and male and gallantly stupid, Kip! You’ve got four big bottles and the Mother Thing and you’re top heavy and I climb like a goat.”

I shut up.

At the bottom she touched helmets. “Kip,” she said worriedly, “I don’t know what to do.” “What’s the trouble?”

“I kept a little south of where the crawler came through. I wanted to avoid crossing right where the crawler crossed. But I’m beginning to think there isn’t any other way.” “I wish you had told me before.”

“But I didn’t want them to find us! The way the crawler came is the first place they’ll look.”

“Mmm … yes.” I looked up at the range that blocked us. In pictures, the mountains of the Moon look high and sharp and rugged; framed by the lens of a space suit they look simply impossible.

I touched helmets again. “We might find another way-if we had time and air and the resources of a major expedition. We’ve got to take the route the crawler did. Which way?”

“Alittle way north … I think.”

We tried to work north along the foothills but it was slow and difficult. Finally we backed off to the edge of the plain. It made us jumpy but it was a chance we had to take. We walked, briskly but not running, for we didn’t dare miss the crawler’s tracks. I counted paces and when I reached a thousand I tugged the line; Peewee stopped and we touched helmets. “We’ve come half a mile. How much farther do you think it is? Or could it possibly be behind us?”

Peewee looked up at the mountains. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Everything looks different.” “We’re lost?”

“Uh … it ought to be ahead somewhere. But we’ve come pretty far. Do you want to turn around?” “Peewee, I don’t even know the way to the post office.”

“But what should we do?”

“I think we ought to keep going until you are absolutely certain the pass can’t be any farther. You watch for the pass and I’ll watch for crawler tracks. Then, when you’re certain that we’ve come too far, we’ll turn back. We can’t afford to make short casts like a dog trying to pick up a rabbit’s scent.”

“All right.”

I had counted two thousand more paces, another mile, when Peewee stopped. “Kip? It can’t be ahead of us. The mountains are higher and solider than ever.” “You’re sure? Think hard. Better to go another five miles than to stop too short.”

She hesitated. She had her face pushed up close to her lens while we touched helmets and I could see her frown. Finally she said, “It’s not up ahead. Kip.” “That settles it. To the rear, march! ‘Lay on, Macduff, and curs’d be him who first cries, “Hold, enough!” ‘ “

“King Lear.”

“Macbeth. Want to bet?”

Those tracks were only half a mile behind us-I had missed them. They were on bare rock with only the lightest covering of dust; the Sun had been over my shoulder when we first crossed them, and the caterpillar tread marks hardly showed-I almost missed them going back. They led off the plain and straight up into the mountains.

We couldn’t possibly have crossed those mountains without following the crawler’s trail; Peewee had had the optimism of a child. It wasn’t a road; it was just something a crawler on caterpillar treads could travel. We saw places that even a crawler hadn’t been able to go until whoever pioneered it set a whopping big blast, backed off and waited for a chunk of mountain to get out of the way. I doubt if Skinny and Fatty carved that goat’s path; they didn’t look fond of hard work. Probably one of the exploration parties. If Peewee and I had attempted to break a new trail, we’d be there yet, relics for tourists of future generations.

But where a tread vehicle can go, a man can climb. It was no picnic; it was trudge, trudge, trudge, up and up and up-watch for loose rock and mind where you put your feet. Sometimes we belayed with the line. Nevertheless it was mostly just tedious.

When Peewee had used that half-charge of oxygen, we stopped and I equalized pressure again, this time being able to give her only a quarter charge-like Achilles and the tortoise. I could go on indefinitely giving her half of what was left-if the tape held out. It was in bad shape but the pressure was only half as great and I managed to keep the hoses together until we closed valves.

I should say that I had it fairly easy. I had water, food, pills, dexedrine. The last was enormous help; any time I felt fagged I borrowed energy with a pep-pill. Poor Peewee had nothing but air and courage.

She didn’t even have the cooling I had. Since she was on a richer mix, one bottle being pure oxygen, it did not take as much flow to keep up her blood-color index-and I warned her not to use a bit more than necessary; she could not afford air for cooling, she had to save it to breathe.

“I know, Kip,” she answered pettishly. “I’ve got the needle jiggling the red light right now. Think I’m a fool?” “I just want to keep you alive.”

“All right, but quit treating me as a child. You put one foot in front of the other. I’ll make it.” “Sure you will!”

As for the Mother Thing she always said she was all right and she was breathing the air I had (a trifle used), but I didn’t know what was hard-ship to her. Hanging by his heels all day would kill a man; to a bat it is a nice rest-yet bats are our cousins.

I talked with her as we climbed. It didn’t matter what; her songs had the effect on me that it has to have your own gang cheering. Poor Peewee didn’t even have that comfort, except when we stopped and touched helmets-we still weren’t using radio; even in the mountains we were fearful of attracting attention.

We stopped again and I gave Peewee one-eighth of a charge. The tape was in very poor shape afterwards; I doubted if it would serve again. I said, “Peewee, why don’t you run your oxy- helium bottle dry while I carry this one? It’ll save your strength.”

“I’m all right.”

“Well, you won’t use air so fast with a lighter load.” “You have to have your arms free. Suppose you slip?”

“Peewee, I won’t carry it in my arms, My righthand backpack bottle is empty; I’ll chuck it. Help me make the change and I’ll still be carrying only four-just balanced evenly.” “Sure, I’ll help. But I’ll carry two bottles. Honest, Kip, the weight isn’t anything. But if I run the oxy-helium bottle dry, what would I breathe while you’re giving me my next charge?” I didn’t want to tell her that I had doubts about another charge, even in those ever smaller amounts. “Okay, Peewee.”

She changed bottles for me; we threw the dead one down a black hole and went on. I don’t know how far we climbed nor how long; I know that it seemed like days-though it couldn’t have been, not on that much air. During mile after mile of trail we climbed at least eight thousand feet. Heights are hard to guess-but I’ve seen mountains I knew the heights of. Look it up yourself-the first range east of Tombaugh Station.

There’s a lot of climbing, even at one-sixth gee.

It seemed endless because I didn’t know how far it was nor how long it had been. We both had watches-under our suits. Ahelmet ought to have a built-in watch. I should have read Greenwich time from the face of Earth. But I had no experience and most of the time I couldn’t see Earth because we were deep in mountains-anyhow I didn’t know what time it had been when we left the ship.

Another thing space suits should have is rear-view mirrors. While you are at it, add a window at the chin so that you can see where you step. But of the two, I would take a rear-view mirror. You can’t glance behind you; you have to turn your entire body. Every few seconds I wanted to see if they were following us-and I couldn’t spare the effort. All that nightmare trek I kept imagining them on my heels, expecting a wormy hand on my shoulder. I listened for footsteps which couldn’t be heard in vacuum anyhow.

When you buy a space suit, make them equip it with a rear-view mirror. You won’t have Wormface on your trail but it’s upsetting to have even your best friend sneak up behind you. Yes, and if you are coming to the Moon, bring a sunshade. Oscar was doing his best and York had done an honest job on the air conditioning-but the untempered Sun is hotter than you would believe and I didn’t dare use air just for cooling, any more than Peewee could.

It got hot and stayed hot and sweat ran down and I itched all over and couldn’t scratch and sweat got into my eyes and burned. Peewee must have been parboiled. Even when the trail wound through deep gorges lighted only by reflection off the far wall, so dark that we turned on headlamps, I still was hot-and when we curved back into naked sunshine, it was almost

unbearable. The temptation to kick the chin valve, let air pour in and cool me, was almost too much. The desire to be cool seemed more important than the need to breathe an hour hence.

If I had been alone, I might have done it and died. But Peewee was worse off than I was. If she could stand it, I had to.

I had wondered how we could be so lost so close to human habitation -and how crawly monsters could hide a base only forty miles from Tombaugh Station. Well, I had time to think and could figure it out because I could see the Moon around me.

Compared with the Moon the Arctic is swarming with people. The Moon’s area is about equal to Asia-with fewer people than Centerville. It might be a century before anyone explored that plain where Wormface was based. Arocket ship passing over wouldn’t notice anything even if camouflage hadn’t been used; a man in a space suit would never go there; a man in a crawler would find their base only by accident even if he took the pass we were in and ranged around that plain. The lunar mapping satellite could photograph it and rephotograph, then a technician in London might note a tiny difference on two films. Maybe. Years later somebody might check up-if there wasn’t something more urgent to do in a pioneer outpost where everything is new and urgent.

As for radar sightings-there were unexplained radar sightings before I was born.

Wormface could sit there, as close to Tombaugh Station as Dallas is to Fort Worth, and not fret, snug as a snake under house. Too many square miles, not enough people. Too incredibly many square miles… . Our whole world was harsh bright cliffs and dark shadows and black sky, and endless putting one foot in front of the other.

But eventually we were going downhill oftener than up and at weary last we came to a turn where we could see out over a hot bright plain.

I There were mountains awfully far away; even from our height, up a thousand feet or so, they were beyond the horizon. I looked out over that plain, too dead beat to feel triumphant, then glanced at Earth and tried to estimate due west.

Peewee touched her helmet to mine. “There it is, Kip.” “Where?” She pointed and I caught a glint on a silvery dome. The Mother Thing trilled at my spine (“What is it, children?”) “Tombaugh Station, Mother Thing.”

Her answer was wordless assurance that we were good children and that she had known that we could do it.

The station may have been ten miles away. Distances were hard to judge, what with that funny horizon and never anything for comparison- I didn’t even know how big the dome was. “Peewee, do we dare use radio?”

She turned and looked back. I did also; we were about as alone as could be. “Let’s risk it.” “What frequency?”

“Same as before. Space operations. I think.”

So I tried. “Tombaugh Station. Come in, Tombaugh Station. Do you read me?” Then Peewee tried. I listened up and down the band I was equipped for. No luck. I shifted to horn antenna, aiming at the glint of light. No answer.

“We’re wasting time, Peewee. Let’s start slogging.”

She turned slowly away. I could feel her disappointment-I had trembled with eagerness myself. I caught up with her and touched helmets. Don’t let it throw you, Peewee. They can’t listen all day for us to call. We see it, now we’ll walk it.”

“I know,” she said dully.

As we started down we lost sight of Tombaugh Station, not only from twists and turns but because we dropped it below the horizon. I kept calling as long as there seemed any hope, then shut it off to save breath and battery.

We were about halfway down the outer slope when Peewee slowed and stopped-sank to the ground and sat still. I hurried to her. “Peewee!”

“Kip,” she said faintly, “could you go get somebody? Please? You know the way now. I’ll wait here. Please, Kip?” “Peewee!” I said sharply. “Get up! You’ve got to keep moving.”

“I c- c- can’t!” She began to cry. “I’m so thirsty … and my legs-” She passed out. “Peewee!” I shook her shoulder. “You can’t quit now! Mother Thing! -you tell her!”

Her eyelids fluttered. “Keep telling her, Mother Thing!” I flopped Peewee over and got to work. Hypoxia hits as fast as a jab on the button. I didn’t need to see her blood-color index to know it read DANGER; the gauges on her bottles told me. The oxygen bottles showed empty, the oxy-helium tank was practically so. I closed her exhaust valves, overrode her chin valve with the outside valve and let what was left in the oxy-helium bottle flow into her suit. When it started to swell I cut back the flow and barely cracked one exhaust valve. Not until then did I close stop valves and remove the empty bottle.

I found myself balked by a ridiculous thing.

Peewee had tied me too well; I couldn’t reach the knot! I could feel it with my left hand but couldn’t get my right hand around; the bottle on my front was in the way-and I couldn’t work the knot loose with one hand.

I made myself stop panicking. My knife-of course, my knife! It was an old scout knife with a loop to hang it from a belt, which was where it was. But the map hooks on Oscar’s belt were large for it and I had had to force it on. I twisted it until the loop broke.

Then I couldn’t get the little blade open. Space-suit gauntlets don’t have thumb nails.

I said to myself: Kip, quit running in circles. This is easy. All you have to do is open a knife-and you’ve got to … because Peewee is suffocating. I looked around for a sliver of rock, anything that could pinch-hit for a thumb nail. Then I checked my belt.

The prospector’s hammer did it, the chisel end of the head was sharp enough to open the blade. I cut the clothesline away.

I was still blocked. I wanted very badly to get at a bottle on my back. When I had thrown away that empty and put the last fresh one on my back, I had started feeding from it and saved the almost-half-charge in the other one. I meant to save it for a rainy day and split it with Peewee. Now was the time-she was out of air, I was practically so in one bottle but still had that half- charge in the other-plus an eighth of a charge or less in the bottle that contained straight oxygen (the best I could hope for in equalizing pressures), I had planned to surprise her with a one-quarter charge of oxy-helium, which would last longer and give more cooling. Areal knight-errant plan, I thought. I didn’t waste two seconds discarding it.

I couldn’t get that bottle off my back!

Maybe if I hadn’t modified the backpack for nonregulation bottles I could have done it. The manual says: “Reach over your shoulder with the opposite arm, close stop valves at bottle and helmet, disconnect the shackle-” My pack didn’t have shackles; I had substituted straps. But I still don’t think you can reach over your shoulder in a pressurized suit and do anything effective. I think that was written by a man at a desk. Maybe he had seen it done under favorable conditions. Maybe he had done it, but was one of those freaks who can dislocate both shoulders. But I’ll bet a full charge of oxygen that the riggers around Space Station Two did it for each other as Peewee and I had, or went inside and deflated.

If I ever get a chance, I’ll change that. Everything you have to do in a space suit should be arranged to do in front-valves, shackles, everything, even if it is to affect something in back. We aren’t like Wormface, with eyes all around and arms that bend in a dozen places; we’re built to work in front of us-that goes triple in a space suit.

You need a chin window to let you see what you’re doing, too! Athing can look fine on paper and be utterly crumby in the field. But I didn’t waste time moaning; I had a one-eighth charge of oxygen I could reach. I grabbed it.

That poor, overworked adhesive tape was a sorry mess. I didn’t bother with bandage; if I could get the tape to stick at all I’d be happy. I handled it as carefully as gold leaf, trying to get it tight, and stopped in the middle to close Peewee’s exhaust entirely when it looked as if her suit was collapsing. I finished with trembling fingers.

I didn’t have Peewee to close a valve. I simply gripped that haywired joint in one hand, opened Peewee’s empty bottle with the other, swung over fast and opened the oxygen bottle wide- jerked my hand across and grabbed the valve of Peewee’s bottle and watched those gauges.

The two needles moved toward each other. When they slowed down I started closing her bottle-and the taped joint blew out.

I got that valve closed in a hurry; I didn’t lose much gas from Peewee’s bottle. But what was left on the supply side leaked away. I didn’t stop to worry; I peeled away a scrap of adhesive, made sure the bayonet-and-snap joint was clean, got that slightly recharged bottle back on Peewee’s suit, opened stop valves.

Her suit started to distend. I opened one exhaust valve a crack and touched helmets. “Peewee! Peewee! Can you hear me? Wake up, baby! Mother Thing!-make her wake up!” “Peewee!”

“Yes, Kip?”

“Wake up! On your feet, Champ! Get up! Honey, please get up.” “Huh? Help me get my helmet off … I can’t breathe.”

“Yes, you can. Kick your chin valve-feel it, taste it. Fresh air!”

She tried, feebly; I gave her a quick strong shot, overriding her chin valve from outside. “Oh!” “See? You’ve got air. You’ve got lots of air. Now get up.”

“Oh, please, just let me lie here.”

“No, you don’t! You’re a nasty, mean, spoiled little brat-and if you don’t get up, nobody will love you. The Mother Thing won’t love you. Mother Thing!-tell her!” (“Stand up, daughter!”)

Peewee tried. I helped her, once she was trying. She trembled and clung to me and I kept her from falling. “Mother Thing?” she said faintly. “I did it. You … still love me?” (“Yes, darling!”)

“I’m dizzy … and I don’t think I … can walk.”

“You don’t have to, honey,” I said gently and picked her up in my arms. “You don’t have to walk any farther.” She didn’t weigh anything.

The trail disappeared when we were down out of the foothills but the crawler’s tracks were sharp in the dust and led due west. I had my air trimmed down until the needle of the blood- color indicator hung at the edge of the danger sector. I held it there, kicking my chin valve only when it swung past into DANGER. I figured that the designer must have left some leeway, the way they do with gasoline gauges. I had long since warned Peewee never to take her eyes off her own indicator and hold it at the danger limit. She promised and I kept reminding her. I pressed her helmet against the yoke of mine, so that we could talk.

I counted paces and every half-mile I told Peewee to call Tombaugh Station. It was over the horizon but they might have a high mast that could “see” a long way. The Mother Thing talked to her, too-anything to keep her from slipping away again. It saved my strength to have the Mother Thing talk and was good for all of us.

After a while I noticed that my needle had drifted into the red again. I kicked the valve and waited. Nothing happened. I kicked it again and the needle drifted slowly toward the white. “How you fixed for air, Peewee?”

“Just fine. Kip, just fine.”

Oscar was yelling at me. I blinked and noticed that my shadow had disappeared. It had been stretched out ahead at an angle to the tracks, the tracks were there but my shadow was not. That made me sore, so I turned around and looked for it. It was behind me.

The darn thing had been hiding. Games! (“That better!” said Oscar.)

“It’s hot in here, Oscar.”

(“You think it’s cool out here? Keep your eye on that shadow, bud-and on those tracks.”)

“All right, all right! Quit pestering me.” I made up my mind that I wouldn’t let that shadow get away again. Games it wanted to play, huh? “There’s darn little air in here, Oscar.”

(“Breathe shallow, chum. We can make it.”) “I’m breathing my socks, now.”

(“So breathe your shirt.”)

“Did I see a ship pass over?”

(“How should I know? You’re the one with the blinkers.”) “Don’t get smart. I’m in no mood to joke.”

I was sitting on the ground with Peewee across my knees and Oscar was really shouting-and so was the Mother Thing. (“Get up, you big ape! Get up and try.”) (“Get up, Kip dear! Only a little way now.”)

“I just want to get my wind.”

(“All right, you’ve got it. Call Tombaugh Station.”) I said, “Peewee, call Tombaugh Station.”

She didn’t answer. That scared me and I snapped out of it. “Tombaugh Station,, come in! Come in!” I got to my knees and then to my feet. Tombaugh Station, do you read me? Help! Help!”

Avoice answered, “I read you.”

“Help! M’aidez! I’ve got a little girl dying! Help!”

Suddenly it sprang up in front of my eyes-great shiny domes, tall towers, radio telescopes, a giant Schmidt camera. I staggered toward it. “May Day!”

An enormous lock opened and a crawler came toward me. Avoice in my phones said, “We’re coming. Stay where you are. Over and out.”

Acrawler stopped near me. Aman got out, came over and touched helmets. I gasped: “Help me get her inside.”

I got back: “You’ve given me trouble, bub. I don’t like people who give me trouble.” Abigger, fatter man got out behind him. The smaller man raised a thing like a camera and aimed it at me. That was the last I knew.

Chapter 7

I don’t know if they took us all that weary way back in the crawler, or if Wormface sent a ship. I woke up being slapped and was inside, lying down. The skinny one was slapping me-the man the fat one called “Tim.” I tried to fight back and found that I couldn’t. I was in a straitjacket thing that held me as snugly as a wrapped mummy. I let out a yelp.

Skinny grabbed my hair, jerked my head up, tried to put a big capsule into my mouth. I tried to bite him.

He slapped me harder and offered me the capsule again. His expression didn’t change-it stayed mean.

I heard: “Take it, boy,” and turned my eyes. The fat one was on the other side. “Better swallow it,” he said. “You got five bad days ahead.”

I took it. Not because of the advice but because a hand held my nose and another popped the pill into my mouth when I gasped. Fatty held a cup of water for me to wash it down; I didn’t resist that, I needed it.

Skinny stuck a hypodermic needle big enough for a horse into my shoulder. I told him what I thought of him, using words I hardly ever use. The skinny one could have been deaf; the fat one chuckled. I rolled my eyes at him. “You, too,” I added weakly. “Squared.”

Fatty clucked reprovingly. “You ought to be glad we saved your life.” He added, “Though it wasn’t my idea, you strike me as a sorry team. He wanted you alive.” “Shaddap,” Skinny said. “Strap his head.”

“Let him break his neck. We better fix our ourselves. He won’t wait.” But he started to obey. Skinny glanced at his watch. “Four minutes.”

The fat one hastily tightened a strap across my forehead, then both moved very fast, swallowing capsules, giving each other hypos. I watched as best I could.

I was back in the ship. The ceiling glowed the same way, the walls looked the same. It was the room the two men used; their beds were on each side and I was strapped to a soft couch between them.

Each hurriedly got on his bed, began zipping up a tight wrapping like a sleeping bag. Each strapped his head in place before completing the process. I was not interested in them. “Hey! What did you do with Peewee?”

The fat man chuckled. “Hear that, Tim? That’s a good one.” “Shaddap.”

“You-” I was about to sum up Fatty’s character but my thoughts got fuzzy and my tongue was thick. Besides, I wanted to ask about the Mother Thing, too. I did not get out another word. Suddenly I was incredibly heavy and the couch was rock hard.

For a long, long time I wasn’t awake or truly asleep. At first I couldn’t feel anything but that terrible weight, then I hurt all over and wanted to scream. I didn’t have the strength for it.

Slowly the pain went away and I stopped feeling anything. I wasn’t a body-just me, no attachments. I dreamed a lot and none of it made sense; I seemed to be stuck in a comic book, the sort P.T.A. meetings pass resolutions against, and the baddies were way ahead no matter what I did.

Once the couch gave a twisting lurch and suddenly I had a body, one that was dizzy. After a few ages I realized vaguely that I had gone through a skew-flip turn-over. I had known, during lucid moments, that I was going somewhere, very fast, at terribly high acceleration. I decided solemnly that we must be halfway and tried to figure out how long two times eternity was. It kept coming out eighty-five cents plus sales tax; the cash register rang “NO SALE” and I would start over.

Fats was undoing my head strap. It stuck and skin came away. “Rise and shine, bub. Time’s awastin’.” Acroak was all I managed. The skinny one was unwrapping me. My legs sagged apart and hurt. “Get up!” I tried and didn’t make it. Skinny grabbed one of my legs and started to knead it.

I screamed.

“Here, lemme do that,” said Fatty. “I used to be a trainer.”

Fats did know something about it. I gasped when his thumbs dug into my calves and he stopped. “Too rough?” I couldn’t answer. He went on massaging me and said almost jovially, “Five days at eight gravities ain’t no joy ride. But you’ll be okay. Got the needle, Tim?”

The skinny one jabbed me in my left thigh. I hardly felt it. Fats pulled me to a sitting position and handed me a cup. I thought it was water; it wasn’t and I choked and sprayed. Fats waited, then gave it to me again. “Drink some, this time.” I did.

“Okay, up on your feet. Vacation is over.”

The floor swayed and I had to grab him until it stopped. “Where are we?” I said hoarsely.

Fats grinned, as if he knew an enormously funny joke. “Pluto, of course. Lovely place, Pluto. Asummer resort.” “Shaddap. Get him moving.”

“Shake it up, kid. You don’t want to keep him waiting.”

Pluto! It couldn’t be; nobody could get that far. Why, they hadn’t even attempted Jupiter’s moons yet. Pluto was so much farther that.

My brain wasn’t working. The experience just past had shaken me so badly that I couldn’t accept the fact that the experience itself proved that I was wrong. But Pluto!

I wasn’t given time to wonder; we got into space suits. Although I hadn’t known, Oscar was there, and I was so glad to see him that I forgot everything else. He hadn’t been racked, just tossed on the floor. I bent down (discovering charley horses in every muscle) and checked him. He didn’t seem hurt.

“Get in it,” Fats ordered. “Quit fiddlin’.”

“All right,” I answered almost cheerfully. Then I hesitated. “Say-I haven’t any air.”

“Take another look,” said Fats. I looked. Charged oxy-helium bottles were on the backpack. “Although,” he continued, “if we didn’t have orders from him, I wouldn’t give you a whiff of Limburger. You made us for two bottles-and a rock hammer-and a line that cost four ninety-five, earthside. Sometime,” he stated without rancor, “I’m gonna take it out of your hide.”

“Shaddap,” said Skinny. “Get going.”

I spread Oscar open, wriggled in, clipped on the blood-color reader, and zipped the gaskets. Then I stood up, clamped my helmet, and felt better just to be inside. “Tight?” (“Tight!” Oscar agreed.)

“We’re a long way from home.”

(“But we got air! Chin up, pal.”)

Which reminded me to check the chin valve. Everything was working. My knife was gone and so were the hammer and line, but those were incidentals. We were tight.

I followed Skinny out with Fats behind me. We passed Wormface in the corridor-or a wormface-but while I shuddered, I had Oscar around me and felt that he couldn’t get at me. Another creature joined us in the air lock and I had to look twice to realize that it was a wormface in a space suit. The material was smooth and did not bulge the way ours did. It looked like a dead tree trunk with bare branches and heavy roots, but the supreme improvement was its “helmet”-a glassy smooth dome. One-way glass, I suppose; I couldn’t see in. Cased that way, a wormface was grotesquely ridiculous rather than terrifying. But I stood no closer than I had to.

Pressure was dropping and I was busy wasting air to keep from swelling up. It reminded me of what I wanted most to know: what had happened to Peewee and the Mother Thing. So I keyed my radio and announced: “Radio check. Alfa, Bravo, Coca-“

“Shaddap that nonsense. We want you, we’ll tell you.” The outer door opened and I had my first view of Pluto.

I don’t know what I expected. Pluto is so far out that they can’t get decent photographs even at Luna Observatory. I had read articles in the Scientific American and seen pictures in LIFE, bonestelled to look like photographs, and remembered that it was approaching its summer-if “summer” is the word for warm enough to melt air. I recalled that because they had announced that Pluto was showing an atmosphere as it got closer to the Sun.

But I had never been much interested in Pluto-too few facts and too much speculation, too far away and not desirable real estate. By comparison the Moon was a choice residential suburb. Professor Tombaugh (the one the station was named for) was working on a giant electronic telescope to photograph it, under a Guggenheim grant, but he had a special interest; he discovered Pluto years before I was born.

The first thing I noticed as the door was opening was click … click … click-and a fourth click, in my helmet, as Oscar’s heating units all cut in.

The Sun was in front of me-I didn’t realize what it was at first; it looked no bigger than Venus or Jupiter does from Earth (although much brighter). With no disc you could be sure of, it looked like an electric arc.

Fats jabbed me in the ribs. “Snap out of your hop.”

Adrawbridge joined the door to an elevated roadway that led into the side of a mountain about two hundred yards away. The road was supported on spidery legs two or three feet high up to ten or twelve, depending on the lay of the land. The ground was covered with snow, glaringly white even under that pinpoint Sun. Where the stilts were longest, about halfway, the viaduct crossed a brook.

What sort of “water” was that? Methane? What was the “snow”? Solid ammonia? I didn’t have tables to tell me what was solid, what was liquid, and what was gas at whatever hellish cold Pluto enjoyed in the “summer.” All I knew was that it got so cold in its winter that it didn’t have any gas or liquid-just vacuum, like the Moon.

I was glad to hurry. Awind blew from our left and was not only freezing that side of me in spite of Oscar’s best efforts, it made the footing hazardous-I decided it would be far safer to do that forced march on the Moon again than to fall into that “snow.” Would a man struggle before he shattered himself and his suit, or would he die as he hit?

Adding to hazard of wind and no guard rail was traffic, space-suited wormfaces. They moved at twice our speed and shared the road the way a dog does a bone. Even Skinny resorted to fancy footwork and I had three narrow squeaks.

The way continued into a tunnel; ten feet inside a panel snapped out of the way as we got near it. Twenty feet beyond was another; it did the same and closed behind us. There were about two dozen panels, each behaving like fast-acting gate valves, and the pressure was a little higher after each. I couldn’t see what operated them although it was light in the tunnel from glowing ceilings. Finally we passed through a heavy-duty air lock, but the pressure was already taken care of and its doors stood open. It led into a large room.

Wormface was inside. The Wormface, I think, because he spoke in English: “Come!” I heard it through my helmet. But I couldn’t be sure it was he as there were others around and I would have less trouble telling wart hogs apart.

Wormface hurried away. He was not wearing a space suit and I was relieved when he turned because I could no longer see his squirming mouth; but it was only a slight improvement as it brought into sight his rearview eye.

We were hard put to keep up. He led us down a corridor, to the right through another open double set of doors, and finally stopped suddenly just short of a hole in the floor about like a sewer manhole. “Undress it!” he commanded.

Fats and Skinny had their helmets open, so I knew it was safe, in one way. But in every other way I wanted to stay inside Oscar-as long as Wormface was around. Fats undamped my helmet. “Out of that skin, bub. Snap it up!” Skinny loosened my belt and they quickly had the suit off even though I hindered.

Wormface waited. As soon as I was out of Oscar he pointed at the hole. “Down!” I gulped. That hole looked as deep as a well and less inviting.

“Down,” he repeated. “Now.”

“Do it, bub,” Fats advised. “Jump or be pushed. Get down that hole before he gets annoyed.” I tried to run.

Wormface was around me and chivvying me back before I was well started. I slammed on the brakes and backed up-glanced behind just in time to turn a fall into a clumsy jump.

It was a long way to the bottom. Landing did not hurt the way it would have on Earth, but I turned an ankle. That didn’t matter; I wasn’t going anywhere; the hole in the ceiling was the only exit.

My cell was about twenty feet square. It was, I suppose, carved out of solid rock, although there was no way to tell as the walls and floor and ceiling were the same elephant hide used in the ship. Alighting panel covered half the ceiling and I could have read if I’d had anything to read. The only other detail was a jet of water that splashed out of a hole in the wall, landed in a depression the size of a washtub, and departed for parts unknown.

The place was warm, which was well as there was nothing resembling bed or bedclothes. I had already concluded that I might be here quite a while and was wondering about eating and sleeping.

I decided I was tired of this nonsense. I had been minding my own business, out back of my own house. Everything else was Wormface’s fault! I sat down on the floor and thought about slow ways to kill him.

I finally gave up that foolishness and wondered about Peewee and the Mother Thing. Were they here? Or were they dead somewhere between the mountains and Tombaugh Station? Thinking it over glumly, I decided that poor little Peewee was best off if she had never wakened from that second coma. I wasn’t sure about the Mother Thing because I didn’t know enough about her-but in Peewee’s case I was sure.

Well, there was a certain appropriateness to the fix I was in; a knight-errant usually lands in a dungeon at some point. But by rights, the maiden fair ought to be imprisoned in a tower in the same castle. Sorry, Peewee; as a knight-errant, I’m a good soda jerk. Or jerk. “His strength is as the strength of ten because his heart is pure.”

It wasn’t funny.

I got tired of punishing myself and looked to see what time it was-not that it mattered. But a prisoner is traditionally expected to scratch marks on the wall, tallying the days he’s been in, so I thought I might as well start. My watch was on my wrist but not running and I couldn’t start it. Maybe eight gees was too much for it, even though it was supposed to be shockproof, waterproof, magnetism-proof, and immune to un-American influences.

After a while I lay down and went to sleep. I was awakened by a clatter.

It was a ration can hitting the floor and the fall hadn’t helped it, but the key was on it and I got it open-corned beef hash and very good, too. I used the empty can to drink from-the water

might be poisoned, but did I have a choice?-and then washed the can so that it wouldn’t smell.

The water was warm. I took a bath.

I doubt if many American citizens during the past twenty years have ever needed a bath as much as I did. Then I washed my clothes. My shirt, shorts, and socks were wash-and-wear synthetics; my slacks were denim and took longer to dry, but I didn’t mind; I just wished that I had one of the two hundred bars of Skyway Soap that were home on the floor of my closet. If I had known I was coming to Pluto, I would have brought one.

Washing clothes caused me to take inventory. I had a handkerchief, sixty-seven cents in change, a dollar bill so sweat-soaked and worn that it was hard to make out Washington’s picture, a mechanical pencil stamped “Jay’s Drive-In-the thickest malts in town!”-Acanard; I make the thickest-and a grocery list I should have taken care of for Mother but hadn’t because of that silly air conditioner in Charton’s Drugstore. It wasn’t as bedraggled as the dollar bill because it had been in my shirt pocket.

I lined up my assets and looked at them. They did not look like a collection that could be reworked into a miracle weapon with which I would blast my way out, steal a ship, teach myself to pilot it, and return triumphantly to warn the President and save the country. I rearranged them and they still didn’t.

I was correct. They weren’t.

I woke up from a terrible nightmare, remembered where I was, and wished I were back in the nightmare. I lay there feeling sorry for myself and presently tears started welling out of my eyes while my chin trembled. I had never been badgered “not to be a crybaby”; Dad says there is nothing wrong with tears; it’s just that they are socially not acceptable- he says that in some cultures weeping is a social grace. But in Horace Mann Grammar School being a crybaby was no asset; I gave it up years ago. Besides, it’s exhausting and gets you nowhere. I shut off the rain and took stock.

My action list ran like this:

Escape from this cell.
Find Oscar, suit up.
Go outdoors, steal a ship, head home-if I could figure out how to gun it.

Figure out a weapon or stratagem to fight off the wormfaces or keep them busy while I sneaked out and grabbed a ship. Nothing to it. Any superman capable of teleportation and other assorted psionic tricks could do it. Just be sure the plan is foolproof and that your insurance is paid up.

Crash priority: make sure, before bidding farewell to the romantic shores of exotic Pluto and its friendly colorful natives, that neither Peewee nor the Mother Thing is here-if they are, take them along-because, contrary to some opinions, it is better to be a dead hero than a live louse. Dying is messy and inconvenient but even a louse dies someday no matter what he will do to stay alive and he is forever having to explain his choice. The gummed-up spell that I had had at the hero business had shown that it was undesirable work but the alternative was still less attractive.

The fact that Peewee knew how to gun those ships, or that the Mother Thing could coach me, did not figure. I can’t prove that, but I know.

Footnote: after I learned to run one of their ships, could I do so at eight gravities? That may simply call for arch supports for a wormface but I knew what eight gees did to me. Automatic pilot? If so, would it have directions on it, in English? (Don’t be silly, Clifford!)

Subordinate footnote: how long would it take to get home at one gravity? The rest of the century? Or just long enough to starve to death?

Occupational therapy for the lulls when I went stale on the problems. This was important in order to avoid coming apart at the seams. 0. Henry wrote stories in prison, St. Paul turned out his strongest epistles incarcerated in Rome, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in jail-next time I would bring a typewriter and paper. This time I could work out magic squares and invent chess problems. Anything was better than feeling sorry for myself. Lions put up with zoos and wasn’t I smarter than a lion? Some, anyhow?

And so to work- One: how to get out of this hole? I came up with a straight-forward answer: there wasn’t any way. The cell was twenty feet on a side with a ceiling twelve feet high; the walls were as smooth as a baby’s cheek and as impervious as a bill collector. The other features were the hole in the ceiling, which ran about six feet still higher, the stream of water and its catch basin, and a glowing area in the ceiling. For tools I had the stuff previously listed (a few ounces of nothing much, nothing sharp, nor explosive, nor corrosive), my clothes, and an empty tin can.

I tested how high I could jump. Even a substitute guard needs springs in his legs-I touched the ceiling. That meant a gravity around one-half gee-I hadn’t been able to guess, as I had spent an endless time under one-sixth gravity followed by a few eons at eight gees; my reflexes had been mistreated.

But, although I could touch the ceiling, I could neither walk on it nor levitate. I could get that high, but there was nothing a mouse could cling to.

Well, I could rip my clothes and braid a rope. Was there anything near the hole on which to catch it? All I could recall was smooth floor. But suppose it did catch? What next? Paddle around in my skin until Wormface spotted me and herded me back down, this time with no clothes? I decided to postpone the rope trick until I worked out that next step which would confound Wormface and his tribe.

I sighed and looked around. All that was left was that jet of water and the floor basin that caught it.

There is a story about two frogs trapped in a crock of cream. One sees how hopeless it is, gives up and drowns. The other is too stupid to know he’s licked; he keeps on paddling. In a few hours he has churned so much butter that it forms an island, on which he floats, cool and comfortable, until the milkmaid comes and chucks him out.

That water spilled in and ran out. Suppose it didn’t run out?

I explored the bottom of the catch basin. The drain was large by our standards, but I thought I could plug it. Could I stay afloat while the room filled up, filled the hole above, and pushed me out the spout? Well, I could find out, I had a can.

The can looked like a pint and a “pint’s a pound the world ‘round” and a cubic foot of water weighs (on Earth) a little over sixty pounds. But I had to be sure. My feet are eleven inches long; they’ve been that size since I was ten-I took a lot of ribbing until I grew up to them. I marked eleven inches on the floor with two pennies. It turns out that a dollar bill is two and a half inches wide and quarter is a smidgeon under an inch. Shortly I knew the dimensions of room and can pretty accurately.

I held the can under the stream, letting it fill and dumping it fast, while I ticked off cans of water on my left hand and counted seconds. Eventually I calculated how long it would take to fill the room. I didn’t like the answer, so I did it over.

It would take fourteen hours to fill the room and the hole above, plus an hour to allow for crude methods. Could I stay afloat that long? You’re darn tootin’ I could!-if I had to. And I had to. There isn’t any limit to how long a man can float if he doesn’t panic.

I balled my slacks and stuffed them in the drain. I almost lost them, so I wrapped them around the can and used the bundle as a cork. It stayed put and I used the rest of my clothes to caulk it. Then I waited, feeling cocky. Maybe the flood would create the diversion I needed for the rest of the caper. Slowly the basin filled.

The water got about an inch below floor level and stopped.

Apressure switch, I suppose. I should have known that creatures who could build eight-gee, constant-boost ships would design plumbing to “fail-safe.” I wish we could. I recovered my clothes, all but one sock, and spread them to dry. I hoped the sock would foul a pump or something but I doubted it; they were good engineers.

I never really believed that story about the frogs.

Another can was tossed down-roast beef and soggy potatoes. It was filling but I began to long for peaches. The can was stenciled “Available for subsidized resale on Luna” which made it possible that Skinny and Fatty had come by this food honestly. I wondered how they liked sharing their supplies? No doubt they did so only because Wormface had twisted their arms. Which made me wonder why Wormface wanted me alive? I was in favor of it but couldn’t see why he was. I decided to call each can a “day” and let the empties be my calendar.

Which reminded me that I had not worked out how long it would take to get home on a one-gee boost, if it turned out that I could not arrange automatic piloting at eight gees. I was stymied on getting out of the cell, I hadn’t even nibbled at what I would do if I did get out (correction: when I got out), but I could work ballistics.

I didn’t need books. I’ve met people, even in this day and age, who can’t tell a star from a planet and who think of astronomical distances simply as “big.” They remind me of those primitives who have just four numbers: one, two, three, and “many.” But any tenderfoot Scout knows the basic facts and a fellow bitten by the space bug (such as myself) usually knows a number of figures.

“Mother very thoughtfully made a jelly sandwich under no protest.” Could you forget that after saying it a few times? Okay, lay it out so: Mother MERCURY$.39

Very VENUS $.72 Thoughtfully TERRA$1.00 Made MARS $1.50

AASTEROIDS (assorted prices, unimportant) Jelly JUPITER $5.20

Sandwich SATURN $9.50 Under URANUS $19.00 No NEPTUNE $30.00

Protest PLUTO $39.50

The “prices” are distances from the Sun in astronomical units. An A.U. is the mean distance of Earth from Sun, 93,000,000 miles. It is easier to remember one figure that everybody knows and some little figures than it is to remember figures in millions and billions. I use dollar signs because a figure has more flavor if I think of it as money-which Dad considers deplorable. Some way you must remember them, or you don’t know your own neighborhood.

Now we come to a joker. The list says that Pluto’s distance is thirty-nine and a half times Earth’s distance. But Pluto and Mercury have very eccentric orbits and Pluto’s is a dilly; its distance varies almost two billion miles, more than the distance from the Sun to Uranus. Pluto creeps to the orbit of Neptune and a hair inside, then swings way out and stays there a couple of centuries-it makes only four round trips in a thousand years.

But I had seen that article about how Pluto was coming into its “summer.” So I knew it was close to the orbit of Neptune now, and would be for the rest of my life-my life expectancy in Centerville; I didn’t look like a preferred risk here. That gave an easy figure-30 astronomical units.

Acceleration problems are simple s=1/2 at2; distance equals half the acceleration times the square of elapsed time. If astrogation were that simple any sophomore could pilot a rocket ship-the complications come from gravitational fields and the fact that everything moves fourteen directions at once. But I could disregard gravitational fields and planetary motions; at the speeds a wormface ship makes neither factor matters until you are very close. I wanted a rough answer.

I missed my slipstick. Dad says that anyone who can’t use a slide rule is a cultural illiterate and should not be allowed to vote. Mine is a beauty- a K&E 20” Log-log Duplex Decitrig. Dad surprised me with it after I mastered a ten-inch polyphase. We ate potato soup that week-but Dad says you should always budget luxuries first. I knew where it was. Home on my desk.

No matter. I had figures, formula, pencil and paper.

First a check problem. Fats had said “Pluto,” “five days,” and “eight gravities.”

It’s a two-piece problem; accelerate for half time (and half distance); do a skew-flip and decelerate the other half time (and distance). You can’t use the whole distance in the equation, as “time” appears as a square-it’s a parabolic. Was Pluto in opposition? Or quadrature? Or conjunction? Nobody looks at Pluto-so why remember where it is on the ecliptic? Oh, well, the average distance was 30 A.U.s-that would give a close-enough answer. Half that distance, in feet, is: 1/2 x 30 x 93,000,000 x 5280. Eight gravities is: 8 x 32.2 ft./sec./sec.-speed increases by 258 feet per second every second up to skew-flip and decreases just as fast thereafter.

So- 1/2 x 30 x 93,000,000 x 5280 = 1/2 x 8 x 32.2 x t2 -and you wind up with the time for half the trip, in seconds. Double that for full trip. Divide by 3600 to get hours; divide by 24 and you have days. On a slide rule such a problem takes forty seconds, most of it to get your decimal point correct. It’s as easy as computing sales tax.

It took me at least an hour and almost as long to prove it, using a different sequence-and a third time, because the answers didn’t match (I had forgotten to multiply by 5280, and had “miles” on one side and “feet” on the other-a no-good way to do arithmetic)-then a fourth time because my confidence was shaken. I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls.

But I got a proved answer. Five and a half days. I was on Pluto. Or maybe Neptune-

No, on Neptune I would not be able to jump to a twelve-foot ceiling; Pluto alone matched all facts. So I erased and computed the trip at one gravity, with turnover. Fifteen days.

It seemed to me that it ought to take at least eight times as long at one gee as at eight-more likely sixty-four. Then I was glad I had bulled my way through analytical geometry, for I made a rough plot and saw the trouble. Squared time cut down the advantage-because the more boost, the shorter the trip, and the shorter the trip the less time in which to use the built-up speed. To cut time in half, you need four times as much boost; to cut it to a quarter, you need sixteen times the boost, and so on. This way lies bankruptcy.

To learn that I could get home in about two weeks at one gravity cheered me. I couldn’t starve in two weeks. If I could steal a ship. If I could run it. If I could climb out of this hole. If- Not “if,” but “when!” I was too late for college this year; fifteen more days wouldn’t matter.

I had noticed, in the first problem, the speed we had been making at skew-flip. More than eleven thousand miles per second. That’s a nice speed, even in space. It made me think. Consider the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, four and three-tenths light-years away, the distance you hear so often on quiz shows. How long at eight gees?

The problem was the same sort but I had to be careful about decimal points; the figures mount up. Alightyear is-I had forgotten. So multiply 186,000 miles per second (the speed of light) by the seconds in a year (365.25 x 24 x 3600) and get-5,880,000,000,000 miles -multiply that by 4.3 and get- 25,284,000,000,000 Call it twenty-five trillion miles. Whew!

It works out to a year and five months-not as long as a trip around the Horn only last century. Why, these monsters had star travel!

I don’t know why I was surprised; it had been staring me in the face. I had assumed that Wormface had taken me to his home planet, that he was a Plutonian, or Plutocrat, or whatever the word is. But he couldn’t be.

He breathed air. He kept his ship warm enough for me. When he wasn’t in a hurry, he cruised at one gee, near enough. He used lighting that suited my eyes. Therefore he came from the sort of planet I came from.

Proxima Centauri is a double star, as you know if you do crossword puzzles, and one is a twin for our own Sun-size, temperature, special pattern. Is it a fair guess that it has a planet like Earth? I had a dirty hunch that I knew Wormface’s home address.

I knew where he didn’t come from. Not from a planet that runs a couple of centuries in utter airlessness with temperatures pushing absolute zero, followed by a “summer” in which some gases melt but water is solid rock and even Wormface has to wear a space suit. Nor from anywhere in our system, for I was sure as taxes that Wormface felt at home only on a planet like ours. Never mind the way he looked; spiders don’t look like us but they like the things we like-there must be a thousand spiders in our houses for every one of us.

Wormface and his kin would like Earth. My fear was that they liked it too much.

I looked at that Proxima Centauri problem and saw something else. The turn-over speed read 1,110,000 miles per second, six times the speed of light. Relativity theory says that’s impossible.

I wanted to talk to Dad about it. Dad reads everything from The Anatomy of Melancholy to Acta Mathematica and Paris-Match and will sit on a curbstone separating damp newspapers wrapped around garbage in order to see continued-on-page-eight. Dad would haul down a book and we’d look it up. Then he would try four or five more with other opinions. Dad doesn’t hold with the idea that it-must-be-true-or-they-wouldn’t-have-printed-it; he doesn’t consider any opinion sacred-it shocked me the first time he took out a pen and changed something in one of my math books.

Still, even if speed-of-light was a limit, four or five years wasn’t impossible, or even impractical. We’ve been told for so long that star trips, even to the nearest stars, would take generations that we may have a wrong slant. Amile of lunar mountains is a long way but a trillion miles in empty space may not be.

But what was Wormface doing on Pluto?

If you were invading another solar system, how would you start? I’m not joking; a dungeon on Pluto is no joke and I never laughed at Wormface. Would you just barge in, or toss your hat in first? They seemed far ahead of us in engineering but they couldn’t have known that ahead of time. Wouldn’t it be smart to build a supply base in that system in some spot nobody ever visited?

Then you could set up advance bases, say on an airless satellite of a likely-looking planet, from which you could scout the surface of the target planet. If you lost your scouting base, you would pull back to main base and work out a new attack.

Remember that while Pluto is a long way off to us, it was only five days from Luna for Wormface. Think about World War II, back when speeds were slow. Main Base is safely out of reach (U.S.A./Pluto) but only about five days from advance base (England/The Moon) which is three hours from theater-of-operations (France-Germany/Earth). That’s a slow way to operate but it worked for the Allies in World War II.

I just hoped it would not work for Wormface’s gang. Though I didn’t see anything to prevent it.

Somebody chucked down another can-spaghetti and meat balls. If it had been canned peaches, I might not have had the fortitude to do what I did next, which was to use it for a hammer before I opened it. I beat an empty can into a flat narrow shape and beat a point on it, which I sharpened on the edge of the catch basin. When I was through, I had a dagger -not a good one, but it made me feel less helpless.

Then I ate. I felt sleepy and went to sleep in a warm glow. I was still a prisoner but I had a weapon of sorts and I believed that I had figured out what I was up against. Getting a problem analyzed is two-thirds of solving it. I didn’t have nightmares.

The next thing tossed down the hole was Fats.

Skinny landed on him seconds later. I backed off and held my dagger ready. Skinny ignored me, picked himself up, looked around, went to the water spout and got a drink. Fats was in no shape to do anything; his breath was knocked out.

I looked at him and thought what a nasty parcel he was. Then I thought, oh, what the deuce!-he had massaged me when I needed it. I heaved him onto his stomach and began artificial respiration. In four or five pushes his motor caught and he was able to breathe. He gasped, “That’s enough!”

I backed off, got my knife out. Skinny was sitting against a wall, ignoring us. Fats looked at my feeble weapon and said, “Put that away, kid. We’re bosom buddies now.” “We are?”

“Yeah. Us human types had better stick together.” He sighed wretchedly. “After all we done for him! That’s gratitude.” “What do you mean?” I demanded.

“Huh?” said Fats. “Just what I said. He decided he could do without us. So Annie doesn’t live here any more.” “Shaddap,” the skinny one said flatly.

Fats screwed his face into a pout. “You shaddap,” he said peevishly. “I’m tired of that. It’s shaddap here, shaddap there, all day long-and look where we are.” “Shaddap, I said.”

Fats shut up. I never did find out what had happened, because Fats seldom gave the same explanation twice. The older man never spoke except for that tiresome order to shut up, or in monosyllables even less helpful. But one thing was clear: they had lost their jobs as assistant gangsters, or fifth columnists, or whatever you call a human being who would stooge against his own race. Once Fats said, “Matter of fact, it’s your fault.”

“Mine?” I dropped my hand to my tin-can knife.

“Yours. If you hadn’t butted in, he wouldn’t have got sore.” “I didn’t do anything.”

“Says you. You swiped his two best prizes, that’s all, and held him up when he planned to high-tail it back here.” “Oh. But that wasn’t your fault.” “So I told him. You try telling him. Take your hand away from that silly nail file.” Fats shrugged. “Like I always say, let bygones be bygones.”

I finally learned the thing I wanted most to know. About the fifth time I brought up the matter of Peewee, Fats said, “What d’you want to know about the brat for?” “I just want to know whether she’s alive or dead.”

“Oh, she’s alive. Leastwise she was last time I seen her.” “When was that?”

“You ask too many questions. Right here.” “She’s here?” I said eagerly.

“That’s what I said, wasn’t it? Around everywhere and always underfoot. Living like a princess, if you ask me.” Fats picked his teeth and frowned. “Why he should make a pet out of her and treat us the way he did, beats me. It ain’t right.”

I didn’t think so, either, but for another reason. The idea that gallant little Peewee was the spoiled darling of Wormface I found impossible to believe. There was some explanation-or Fats was lying. “You mean he doesn’t have her locked up?”

“What’s it get him? Where’s she gonna go?”

I pondered that myself. Where could you go?-when to step outdoors was suicide. Even if Peewee had her space suit (and that, at least, was probably locked up), even if a ship was at hand and empty when she got outside, even if she could get into it, she still wouldn’t have a “ship’s brain,” the little gadget that served as a lock. “What happened to the Mother Thing?”

“The what?”

“The-” I hesitated. “Uh, the non-human who was in my space suit with me. You must know, you were there. Is she alive? Is she here?” But Fats was brooding. “Them bugs don’t interest me none,” he said sourly and I could get no more out of him.

But Peewee was alive (and a hard lump in me was suddenly gone). She was here! Her chances, even as a prisoner, had been enormously better on the Moon; nevertheless I felt almost ecstatic to know that she was near. I began thinking about ways to get a message to her.

As for Fats’ insinuation that she was playing footy with Wormface, it bothered me not at all. Peewee was unpredictable and sometimes a brat and often exasperating, as well as conceited, supercilious, and downright childish. But she would be burned alive rather than turn traitor. Joan of Arc had not been made of sterner stuff.

We three kept uneasy truce. I avoided them, slept with one eye open, and tried not to sleep unless they were asleep first, and I always kept my dagger at hand. I did not bathe after they joined me; it would have put me at a disadvantage. The older one ignored me, Fats was almost friendly. I pretended not to be afraid of my puny weapon, but I think he was. The reason I think so comes from the first time we were fed. Three cans dropped from the ceiling; Skinny picked up one, Fats got one, but when I circled around to take the third, Fats snatched it.

I said, “Give me that, please.”

Fats grinned. “What makes you think this is for you, sonny boy?” “Uh, three cans, three people.”

“So what? I’m feeling a mite hungry. I don’t hardly think I can spare it.” “I’m hungry, too. Be reasonable.”

“Mmmm-” He seemed to consider it. “Tell you what. I’ll sell it to you.”

I hesitated. It had a shifty logic; Wormface couldn’t walk into Lunar Base commissary and buy these rations; probably Fats or his partner had bought them. I wouldn’t mind signing I.O.U.s-a hundred dollars a meal, a thousand, or a million; money no longer meant anything. Why not humor him?

No! If I gave in, if I admitted I had to dicker with him for my prison rations, he would own me. I’d wait on him hand and foot, do anything he told me, just to eat. I let him see my tin dagger. “I’ll fight you for it.”

Fats glanced at my hand and grinned broadly. “Can’t you take a joke?”

He tossed me the can. There was no trouble at feeding times after that, We lived like that “Happy Family” you sometimes see in traveling zoos: a lion caged with a lamb. It is a startling exhibit but the lamb has to be replaced frequently. Fats liked to talk and I learned things from him, when I could sort out truth from lies. His name-so he said-was Jacques de Barre de Vigny (“Call me ‘Jock.’ “) and the older man was Timothy Johnson-but I had a hunch that their real names could be learned only by inspecting post office bulletin boards. Despite Jock’s pretense of knowing everything, I soon decided that he knew nothing about Wormface’s origin and little about his plans and purposes. Wormface did not seem the sort to discuss things with “lower animals”; he would simply make use of them, as we use horses.

Jock admitted one thing readily. “Yeah, we put the snatch on the brat. There’s no uranium on the Moon; those stories are just to get suckers. We were wasting our time-and a man’s got to eat, don’t he?”

I didn’t make the obvious retort; I wanted information. Tim said, “Shaddap!”

“Aw, what of it, Tim? You worried about the F.B.I.? You think the Man can put the arm on you-here?” “Shaddap, I said.”

“Happens I feel like talking. So blow it.” Jock went on, “It was easy. The brat’s got more curiosity than seven cats. He knew she was coming and when.” Jock looked thoughtful. “He always knows-he’s got lots of people working for him, some high up. All I had to do was be in Luna City and get acquainted-I made the contact because Tim here ain’t the fatherly type, the way I am. I get to talking with her, I buy her a coke, I tell her about the romance of hunting uranium on the Moon and similar hogwash. Then I sigh and say it’s too bad I can’t show her the mine of my partner and I. That’s all it took. When the tourist party visited Tombaugh Station, she got away and sneaked out the lock-she worked that part out her ownself. She’s sly, that one. All we had to do was wait where I told her -didn’t even have to be rough with her until she got worried about taking longer for the crawler to get to our mine than I told her.” Jock grinned. “She fights pretty well for her weight. Scratched me some.”

Poor little Peewee! Too bad she hadn’t drawn and quartered him! But the story sounded true, for it was the way Peewee would behave-sure of herself, afraid of no one, unable to resist any “educational” experience.

Jock went on, “It wasn’t the brat he wanted. He wanted her old man. Had some swindle to get him to the Moon, didn’t work.” Jock grinned sourly. “That was a bad time, things ain’t good when he don’t have his own way. But he had to settle for the brat. Tim here pointed out to him he could trade.”

Tim chucked in one word which I took as a general denial. Jock raised his eyebrows. “Listen to vinegar puss. Nice manners, ain’t he?”

Maybe I should have kept quiet since I was digging for facts, not philosophy. But I’ve got Peewee’s failing myself; when I don’t understand, I have an unbearable itch to know why. I didn’t (and don’t) understand what made Jock tick. “Jock? Why did you do it?”

“Huh?”

“Look, you’re a human being.” (At least he looked like one.) “As you pointed out, we humans had better stick together. How could you bring yourself to kidnap a little girl-and turn her over to him?”

“Are you crazy, boy?” “I don’t think so.”

“You talk crazy. Have you ever tried not doing something he wanted? Try it some time.”

I saw his point. Refusing Wormface would be like a rabbit spitting in a snake’s eye-as I knew too well. Jock went on, “You got to understand the other man’s viewpoint. Live and let live, I always say. We got grabbed while we were messin’ around, lookin’ for carnotite-and after that, we never stood no chance. You can’t fight City Hall, that gets you nowhere. So we made a dicker-we run his errands, he pays us in uranium.”

My faint sympathy vanished. I wanted to throw up. “And you got paid?” “Well … you might say we got time on the books.”

I looked around our cell. “You made a bad deal.”

Jock grimaced, looking like a sulky baby. “Maybe so. But be reasonable, kid. You got to cooperate with the inevitable. These boys are moving in-they got what it takes. You seen that yourself. Well, a man’s got to look out for number one, don’t he? It’s a cinch nobody else will. Now I seen a case like this when I was no older than you and it taught me a lesson. Our town had run quietly for years, but the Big Fellow was getting old and losing his grip … whereupon some boys from St. Louis moved in. Things were confused for a while. Aman had to know which way to jump-else he woke up wearing a wooden overcoat, like as not. Those that seen the handwriting made out; those that didn’t … well, it don’t do no good to buck the current, I always say. That makes sense, don’t it?”

I could follow his “logic”-provided you accepted his “live louse” standard. But he had left out a key point. “Even so. Jock, I don’t see how you could do that to a little girl.” “Huh? I just explained how we couldn’t help it.”

“But you could. Even allowing how hard it is to face up to him and refuse orders, you had a perfect chance to duck out.” “Wha’ d’you mean?”

“He sent you to Luna City to find her, you said so. You’ve got a return-fare benefit-I know you have, I know the rules. All you had to do was sit tight, where he couldn’t reach you-and take the next ship back to Earth. You didn’t have to do his dirty work.”

“But-“

I cut him off. “Maybe you couldn’t help yourself, out in a lunar desert. Maybe you wouldn’t feel safe even inside Tombaugh Station. But when he sent you into Luna City, you had your chance. You didn’t have to steal a little girl and turn her over to a-a bug-eyed monster!”

He looked baffled, then answered quickly. “Kip, I like you. You’re a good boy. But you ain’t smart. You don’t understand.”

“I think I do!”

“No, you don’t.” He leaned toward me, started to put a hand on my knee; I drew back. He went on, “There’s something I didn’t tell you … for fear you’d think I was a-well, a zombie, or something. They operated on us.”

“Huh?”

“They operated on us,” he went on glibly. “They planted bombs in our heads. Remote control, like a missile. Aman gets out of line … he punches a button-blooie! Brains all over the ceiling.” He fumbled at the nape of his neck. “See the scar? My hair’s getting kind o’ long … but if you look close I’m sure you’ll see it; it can’t ‘ave disappeared entirely. See it?”

I started to look. I might even have been sold on it-I had been forced to believe less probable things lately. Tim cut short my suspended judgment with one explosive word. Jock flinched, then braced himself and said, “Don’t pay any attention to him!”

I shrugged and moved away. Jock didn’t talk the rest of that “day.” That suited me.

The next “morning” I was roused by Jock’s hand on my shoulder. “Wake up, Kip! Wake up!”

I groped for my toy weapon. “It’s over there by the wall,” Jock said, “but it ain’t ever goin’ to do you any good now.” I grabbed it. “What do you mean? Where’s Tim?”

“You didn’t wake up?” “Huh?”

“This is what I’ve been scared of. Cripes, boy! I just had to talk to somebody. You slept through it?” “Through what? And where’s Tim?”

Jock was shivering and sweating. “They blue-lighted us, that’s what. They took Tim.” He shuddered. “I’m glad it was him. I thought-well, maybe you’ve noticed I’m a little stout … they like fat.”

“What do you mean? What have they done with him?”

“Poor old Tim. He had his faults, like anybody, but-He’s soup, by now … that’s what.” He shuddered again. “They like soup-bones and all.” “I don’t believe it. You’re trying to scare me.”

“So?” He looked me up and down. “They’ll probably take you next. Son, if you’re smart, you’ll take that letter opener of yours over to that horse trough and open your veins. It’s better that way.”

I said, “Why don’t you? Here, I’ll lend it to you.” He shook his head and shivered. “I ain’t smart.”

I don’t know what became of Tim. I don’t know whether the wormfaces ate people, or not. (You can’t say “cannibal.” We may be mutton, to them.) I wasn’t especially scared because I had long since blown all fuses in my “scare” circuits.

What happens to my body after I’m through with it doesn’t matter to me. But it did to Jock; he had a phobia about it. I don’t think Jock was a coward; cowards don’t even try to become prospectors on the Moon. He believed his theory and it shook him. He halfway admitted that he had more reason to believe it than I had known. He had been to Pluto once before, so he said, and other men who had come along, or been dragged, on that trip hadn’t come back.

When feeding time came-two cans-he said he wasn’t hungry and offered me his rations. That “night” he sat up and kept himself awake. Finally I just had to go to sleep before he did. I awoke from one of those dreams where you can’t move. The dream was correct; sometime not long before, I had surely been blue-lighted.

Jock was gone.

I never saw either of them again.

Somehow I missed them … Jock at least. It was a relief not to have to watch all the time, it was luxurious to bathe. But it gets mighty boring, pacing your cage alone. I have no illusions about them. There must be well over three billion people I would rather be locked up with. But they were people.

Tim didn’t have anything else to recommend him; he was as coldly vicious as a guillotine. But Jock had some slight awareness of right and wrong, or he wouldn’t have tried to justify himself. You might say he was just weak.

But I don’t hold with the idea that to understand all is to forgive all; you follow that and first thing you know you’re sentimental over murderers and rapists and kidnappers and forgetting their victims. That’s wrong. I’ll weep over the likes of Peewee, not over criminals whose victims they are. I missed Jock’s talk but if there were some way to drown such creatures at birth, I’d take my turn as executioner. That goes double for Tim.

If they ended up as soup for hobgoblins, I couldn’t honestly be sorry- even though it might be my turn tomorrow. As soup, they probably had their finest hour.

Chapter 8

I was jarred out of useless brain-cudgeling by an explosion, a sharp crack -a bass rumble-then a whoosh! of reduced pressure. I bounced to my feet-anyone who has ever depended on a space suit is never again indifferent to a drop in pressure.

I gasped, “What the deuce!”

Then I added, “Whoever is on watch had better get on the ball-or we’ll all be breathing thin cold stuff.” No oxygen outside, I was sure-or rather the astronomers were and I didn’t want to test it.

Then I said, “Somebody bombing us? I hope. “Or was it an earthquake?”

This was not an idle remark. That Scientific American article concerning “summer” on Pluto had predicted “sharp isostatic readjustments” as the temperature rose-which is a polite way of saying, “Hold your hats! Here comes the chimney!”

I was in an earthquake once, in Santa Barbara; I didn’t need a booster shot to remember what every Californian knows and others learn in one lesson: when the ground does a jig, get outdoors!

Only I couldn’t.

I spent two minutes checking whether adrenalin had given me the strength to jump eighteen feet instead of twelve. It hadn’t. That was all I did for a half-hour, if you don’t count nail biting. Then I heard my name! “Kip! Oh, Kip!”

“Peewee!” I screamed. “Here! Peewee!”

Silence for an eternity of three heartbeats- “Kip?” “Down HERE!”

“Kip? Are you down this hole?”

“Yes! Can’t you see me?” I saw her head against the light above. “Uh, I can now. Oh, Kip, I’m so glad!”

“Then why are you crying? So am I!”

“I’m not crying,” she blubbered. “Oh Kip … Kip.” “Can you get me out?”

“Uh-” She surveyed that drop. “Stay where you are.” “Don’t go ‘way!” She already had.

She wasn’t gone two minutes; it merely seemed like a week. Then she was back and the darling had a nylon rope! “Grab on!” she shrilled.

“Wait a sec. How is it fastened?” “I’ll pull you up.”

“No, you won’t-or we’ll both be down here. Find somewhere to belay it.” “I can lift you.”

“Belay it! Hurry!”

She left again, leaving an end in my hands. Shortly I heard very faintly: “On belay!”

I shouted, “Testing!” and took up the slack. I put my weight on it-it held. “Climbing!” I yelled, and followed the final “g” up the hole and caught it.

She flung herself on me, an arm around my neck, one around Madame Pompadour, and both of mine around her. She was even smaller and skinnier than I remembered. “Oh, Kip, it’s been just awful.”

I patted her bony shoulder blades. “Yeah, I know. What do we do now? Where’s W-“ I started to say, “Where’s Wormface?” but she burst into tears.

“Kip-I think she’s dead!”

My mind skidded-I was a bit stir-crazy anyhow. “Huh? Who?”

She looked as amazed as I was confused. “Why, the Mother Thing.”

“Oh.” I felt a flood of sorrow. “But, honey, are you sure? She was talking to me all right up to the last-and I didn’t die.” “What in the world are you talk- Oh. I don’t mean then. Kip; I mean now.”

“Huh? She was here?” “Of course. Where else?”

Now that’s a silly question, it’s a big universe. I had decided long ago that the Mother Thing couldn’t be here-because Jock had brushed off the subject. I reasoned that Jock would either have said that she was here or have invented an elaborate lie, for the pleasure of lying. Therefore she wasn’t on his list-perhaps he had never seen her save as a bulge under my suit.

I was so sure of my “logic” that it took a long moment to throw off prejudice and accept fact. “Peewee,” I said, gulping, “I feel like I’d lost my own mother. Are you sure?” ” ‘Feel as if,’ ” she said automatically. “I’m not sure sure … but she’s outside-so she must be dead.”

“Wait a minute. If she’s outside, she’s wearing a space suit? Isn’t she?” “No, no! She hasn’t had one-not since they destroyed her ship.”

I was getting more confused. “How did they bring her in here?”

“They just sacked her and sealed her and carried her in. Kip-what do we do now?”

I knew several answers, all of them wrong-I had already considered them during my stretch in jail. “Where is Wormface? Where are all the wormfaces?”

“Oh. All dead. I think.”

“I hope you’re right.” I looked around for a weapon and never saw a hallway so bare. My toy dagger was only eighteen feet away but I didn’t feel like going back down for it. “What makes you think so?”

Peewee had reason to think so. The Mother Thing didn’t look strong enough to tear paper but what she lacked in beef she made up in brains. She had done what I had tried to do: reasoned out a way to take them all on. She had not been able to hurry because her plan had many factors all of which had to mesh at once and many of them she could not influence; she had to wait for the breaks.

First, she needed a time when there were few wormfaces around. The base was indeed a large supply dump and space port and transfer point, but it did not need a large staff. It had been unusually crowded the few moments I had seen it, because our ship was in.

Second, it also had to be when no ships were in because she couldn’t cope with a ship-she couldn’t get at it.

Third, H-Hour had to be while the wormfaces were feeding. They all ate together when there were few enough not to have to use their mess hall in relays-crowded around one big tub and sopping it up, I gathered -a scene out of Dante. That would place all her enemies on one target, except possibly one or two on engineering or communication watches.

“Wait a minute!” I interrupted. “You said they were all dead?” “Well … I don’t know. I haven’t seen any.”

“Hold everything until I find something to fight with.” “But-“

“First things first, Peewee.”

Saying that I was going to find a weapon wasn’t finding one. That corridor had nothing but more holes like the one I had been down- which was why Peewee had looked for me there; it was one of the few places where she had not been allowed to wander at will. Jock had been correct on one point: Peewee-and the Mother Thing-had been star prisoners, allowed all privileges except freedom … whereas Jock and Tim and myself had been third-class prisoners and/or soup bones. It fitted the theory that Peewee and the Mother Thing were hostages rather than ordinary P.W.s.

I didn’t explore those holes after I looked down one and saw a human skeleton-maybe they got tired of tossing food to him. When I straightened up Peewee said, “What are you shaking about?”

“Nothing. Come on.” “I want to see.”

“Peewee, every second counts and we’ve done nothing but yak. Come on. Stay behind me.”

I kept her from seeing the skeleton, a major triumph over that little curiosity box-although it probably would not have affected her much; Peewee was sentimental only when it suited her. “Stay behind me” had the correct gallant sound but it was not based on reason. I forgot that attack could come from the rear-I should have said:

“Follow me and watch behind us.”

She did anyway. I heard a squeal and whirled around to see a wormface with one of those camera-like things aimed at me. Even though Tim had used one on me I didn’t realize what it was; for a moment I froze.

But not Peewee. She launched herself through the air, attacking with both hands and both feet in the gallant audacity and utter recklessness of a kitten.

That saved me. Her attack would not have hurt anything but another kitten but it mixed him up so that he didn’t finish what he was doing, namely paralyzing or killing me; he tripped over her and went down.

And I stomped him. With my bare feet I stomped him, landing on that lobster-horror head with both feet. His head crunched. It felt awful.

It was like jumping on a strawberry box. It splintered and crunched and went to pieces. I cringed at the feel, even though I was in an agony to fight, to kill. I trampled worms and hopped away, feeling sick. I scooped up Peewee and pulled her back, as anxious to get clear as I had been to Join battle seconds before.

I hadn’t killed it. For an awful moment I thought I was going to have to wade back in. Then I saw that while it was alive, it did not seem aware of us. It flopped like a chicken freshly chopped, then quieted and began to move purposefully.

But it couldn’t see. I had smashed its eyes and maybe its ears-but certainly those terrible eyes.

It felt around the floor carefully, then got to its feet, still undamaged except that its head was a crushed ruin. It stood still, braced tripod-style by that third appendage, and felt the air. I pulled us back farther.

It began to walk. Not toward us or I would have screamed. It moved away, ricocheted off a wall, straightened out, and went back the way we had come. t reached one of those holes they used for prisoners, walked into it and dropped. I sighed, and realized that I had been holding Peewee too tightly to breathe. I put her down.

“There’s your weapon,” she said. “Huh?”

“On the floor. Just beyond where I dropped Madame Pompadour. The gadget.” She went over, picked up her dolly, brushed away bits of ruined wormface, then took the camera-like thing and handed it to me. “Be careful. Don’t point it toward you. Or me.”

“Peewee,” I said faintly, “don’t you ever have an attack of nerves?”

“Sure I do. When I have leisure for it. Which isn’t now. Do you know how to work it?” “No. Do you?”

“I think so. I’ve seen them and the Mother Thing told me about them.” She took it, handling it casually but not pointing it at either of us. “These holes on top-uncover one of them, it stuns. If you uncover them all, it kills. To make it work you push it here.” She did and a bright blue light shot out, splashed against the wall. “The light doesn’t do anything,” she added. “It’s for aiming. I hope there wasn’t anybody on the other side of that wall. No, I hope there was. You know what I mean.”

It looked like a cockeyed 35 mm. camera, with a lead lens-one built from an oral description. I took it, being very cautious where I pointed it, and looked at it. Then I tried it-full power, by mistake.

The blue light was a shaft in the air and the wall where it hit glowed and began to smoke. I shut it off. “You wasted power,” Peewee chided. “You may need it later.”

“Well, I had to try it. Come on, let’s go.”

Peewee glanced at her Mickey Mouse watch-and I felt irked that it had apparently stood up when my fancy one had not. “There’s very little time. Kip. Can’t we assume that only this one escaped?”

“What? We certainly cannot! Until we’re sure that all of them are dead, we can’t do anything else. Come on.”

“But- Well, I’ll lead. I know my way around, you don’t.” “No.”

“Yes!”

So we did it her way; she led and carried the blue-light projector while I covered the rear and wished for a third eye, like a wormface. I couldn’t argue that my reflexes were faster when they weren’t, and she knew more than I did about our weapon.

But it’s graveling, just the same.

The base was huge; half that mountain must have been honeycombed. We did it at a fast trot, ignoring things as complicated as museum exhibits and twice as interesting, simply making sure that no wormface was anywhere. Peewee ran with the weapon at the ready, talking twenty to the dozen and urging me on.

Besides an almost empty base, no ships in, and the wormfaces feeding, the Mother Thing’s plan required that all this happen shortly before a particular hour of the Plutonian night. “Why?” I panted.

“So she could signal her people, of course.”

“But-” I shut up. I had wondered about the Mother Thing’s people but didn’t even know as much about her as I did about Wormface- except that she was everything that made her the Mother Thing. Now she was dead-Peewee said that she was outside without a space suit, so she was surely dead; that little soft warm thing wouldn’t last two seconds in that ultra-arctic weather. Not to mention suffocation and lung hemorrhage. I choked up.

Of course, Peewee might be wrong. I had to admit that she rarely was- but this might be one of the times … in which case we would find her. But if we didn’t find her, she was outside and- “Peewee, do you know where my space suit is?”

“Huh? Of course. Right next to where I got this.” She patted the nylon rope, which she had coiled around her waist and tied with a bow. “Then the second we are sure that we’ve cleaned out the wormfaces I’m going outside and look for her!”

“Yes, yes! But we’ve got to find my suit, too. I’m going with you.”

No doubt she would. Maybe I could persuade her to wait in the tunnel out of that bone-freezing wind. “Peewee, why did she have to send her message at night? To a ship in a rotation- period orbit? Or is there-“

My words were chopped off by a rumble. The floor shook in that loose-bearing vibration that frightens people and animals alike. We stopped dead. “What was that?” Peewee whispered. I swallowed. “Unless it’s part of this rumpus the Mother Thing planned-“

“It isn’t. I think.” “It’s a quake.”

“An earthquake?”

“APluto quake. Peewee, we’ve got to get out of here!”

I wasn’t thinking about where-you don’t in a quake. Peewee gulped. “We can’t bother with earthquakes; we haven’t time. Hurry, Kip, hurry!” She started to run and I followed, gritting my teeth. If Peewee could ignore a quake, so could I-though it’s like ignoring a rattlesnake in bed.

“Peewee … Mother Thing’s people … is their ship in orbit around Pluto?” “What? Oh, no, no! They’re not in a ship.”

“Then why at night? Something about the Heavyside layers here? How far away is their base?” I was wondering how far a man could walk here. We had done almost forty miles on the Moon. Could we do forty blocks here? Or even forty yards? You could insulate your feet, probably. But that wind- “Peewee, they don’t live here, do they?”

“What? Don’t be silly! They have a nice planet of their own. Kip, if you keep asking foolish questions, we’ll be too late. Shut up and listen.”

I shut up. What follows I got in snatches as we ran, and some of it later. When the Mother Thing had been captured, she had lost ship, space clothing, communicator, everything; Wormface had destroyed it all. There had been treachery, capture through violation of truce while parleying. “He grabbed her when they were supposed to be under a King’s ‘X’ ” was Peewee’s indignant description, “and that’s not fair! He had promised.”

Treachery would be as natural in Wormface as venom in a Gila monster; I was surprised that the Mother Thing had risked a palaver with him. It left her a prisoner of ruthless monsters equipped with ships that made ours look like horseless carriages, weapons which started with a “death ray” and ended heaven knows where, plus bases, organization, supplies.

She had only her brain and her tiny soft hands.

Before she could use the rare combination of circumstances necessary to have any chance at all she had to replace her communicator (I think of it as her “radio” but it was more than that) and she had to have weapons. The only way she could get them was to build them.

She had nothing, not a bobby pin-only that triangular ornament with spirals engraved on it. To build anything she had to gain access to a series of rooms which I would describe as electronics labs-not that they looked like the bench where I jiggered with electronics, but electron-pushing has its built-in logic. If electrons are to do what you want them to, components have to look pretty much a certain way, whether built by humans, wormfaces, or the Mother Thing. Awave guide gets its shape from the laws of nature, an inductance has its necessary geometry, no matter who the technician is.

So it looked like an electronics lab-a very good one. It had gear I did not recognize, but which I felt I could understand if I had time. I got only a glimpse.

The Mother Thing spent many, many hours there. She would not have been permitted there, even though she was a prisoner-at-large with freedom in most ways and anything she wanted, including private quarters with Peewee. I think that Wormface was afraid of her, even though she was a prisoner-he did not want to offend her unnecessarily.

She got the run of their shops by baiting their cupidity. Her people had many things that wormfaces had not-gadgets, inventions, conveniences. She began by inquiring why they did a thing this way rather than another way which was so much more efficient? Atradition? Or religious reasons?

When asked what she meant she looked helpless and protested that she couldn’t explain-which was a shame because it was simple and so easy to build, too.

Under close chaperonage she built something. The gadget worked. Then something else. Presently she was in the labs daily, making things for her captors, things that delighted them. She always delivered; the privilege depended on it.

But each gadget involved parts she needed herself.

“She sneaked bits and pieces into her pouch,” Peewee told me. “They never knew exactly what she was doing. She would use five of a thing and the sixth would go into her pouch.” “Her pouch?”

“Of course. That’s where she hid the ‘brain’ the time she and I swiped the ship. Didn’t you know?” “I didn’t know she had a pouch.”

“Well, neither did they. They watched to see she didn’t carry anything out of the shop-and she never did. Not where it showed.”

“Uh, Peewee, is the Mother Thing a marsupial?”

“Huh? Like possums? You don’t have to be a marsupial to have a pouch. Look at squirrels, they have pouches in their cheeks.” “Mmm, yes.”

“She sneaked a bit now and a bit then, and I swiped things, too. During rest time she worked on them in our room.”

The Mother Thing had not slept all the time we had been on Pluto. She worked long hours publicly, making things for wormfaces-a stereo-telephone no bigger than a pack of cigarettes, a tiny beetle-like arrangement that crawled all over anything it was placed on and integrated the volume, many other things. But during hours set apart for rest she worked for herself, usually in darkness, those tiny fingers busy as a blind watch-maker’s.

She made two bombs and a long-distance communicator-and-beacon.

I didn’t get all this tossed over Peewee’s shoulder while we raced through the base; she simply told me that the Mother Thing had managed to build a radio-beacon and had been responsible for the explosion I had felt. And that we must hurry, hurry, hurry!

“Peewee,” I said, panting. “What’s the rush? If the Mother Thing is outside, I want to bring her in-her body, I mean. But you act as if we had a deadline.” “We do!”

The communicator-beacon had to be placed outside at a particular local time (the Plutonian day is about a week-the astronomers were right again) so that the planet itself would not blanket the beam. But the Mother Thing had no space suit. They had discussed having Peewee suit up, go outside, and set the beacon-it had been so designed that Peewee need only trigger it. But that depended on locating Peewee’s space suit, then breaking in and getting it after the wormfaces were disposed of.

They had never located it. The Mother Thing had said serenely, singing confident notes that I could almost hear ringing in my head: (“Never mind, dear. I can go out and set it myself.”) “Mother Thing! You can’t!” Peewee had protested. “It’s cold out there.”

(“I shan’t be long.”)

“You won’t be able to breathe.”

(“It won’t be necessary, for so short a time.”)

That settled it. In her own way, the Mother Thing was as hard to argue with as Wormface.

The bombs were built, the beacon was built, a time approached when all factors would match-no ship expected, few wormfaces, Pluto faced the right way, feeding time for the staff-and they still did not know where Peewee’s suit was-if it had not been destroyed. The Mother Thing resolved to go ahead.

“But she told me, just a few hours ago when she let me know that today was the day, that if she did not come back in ten minutes or so, that she hoped I could find my suit and trigger the beacon-if she hadn’t been able to.” Peewee started to cry. “That was the f- f- first time she admitted that she wasn’t sure she could do it!”

“Peewee! Stop it! Then what?”

“I waited for the explosions-they came, right together-and I started to search, places I hadn’t been allowed to go. But I couldn’t find my suit!

Then I found you and-oh, Kip, she’s been out there almost an hour!” She looked at her watch. “There’s only about twenty minutes left. If the beacon isn’t triggered by then, she’s had all her trouble and died for n- n- nothing! She wouldn’t like that.” “Where’s my suit!”

We found no more wormfaces-apparently there was only one on duty while the others fed. Peewee showed me a door, air-lock type, behind which was the feeding chamber-the bomb may have cracked that section for gas-tight doors had closed themselves when the owners were blown to bits. We hurried past.

Logical as usual, Peewee ended our search at my space suit. It was one of more than a dozen human-type suits-I wondered how much soup those ghouls ate. Well, they wouldn’t eat again! I wasted no time; I simply shouted, “Hi, Oscar!” and started to suit up.

(“Where you been, chum?”)

Oscar seemed in perfect shape. Fats’ suit was next to mine and Tim’s next to it; I glanced at them as I stretched Oscar out, wondering whether they had equipment I could use. Peewee was looking at Tim’s suit. “Maybe I can wear this.”

It was much smaller than Oscar, which made it only nine sizes too big for Peewee. “Don’t be silly! It’d fit you like socks on a rooster. Help me. Take off that rope, coil it and clip it to my belt.”

“You won’t need it. The Mother Thing planned to take the beacon out the walkway about a hundred yards and sit it down. If she didn’t manage it, that’s all you do. Then twist the stud on top.”

“Don’t argue! How much time?” “Yes, Kip. Eighteen minutes.”

“Those winds are strong,” I added. “I may need the line.” The Mother Thing didn’t weigh much. If she had been swept off, I might need a rope to recover her body. “Hand me that hammer off Fats’ suit.”

“Right away!”

I stood up. It felt good to have Oscar around me. Then I remembered how cold my feet got, walking in from the ship. “I wish I had asbestos boots.”

Peewee looked startled. “Wait right here!” She was gone before I could stop her. I went on sealing up while I worried-she hadn’t even stopped to pick up the projector weapon. Shortly I said, “Tight, Oscar?”

(“Tight, boy!”)

Chin valve okay, blood-color okay, radio-I wouldn’t need it-water- The tank was dry. No matter, I wouldn’t have time to grow thirsty. I worked the chin valve, making the pressure low because I knew that pressure outdoors was quite low.

Peewee returned with what looked like ballet slippers for a baby elephant. She leaned close to my face plate and shouted, “They wear these. Can you get them on?” It seemed unlikely, but I forced them over my feet like badly fitting socks. I stood up and found that they improved traction; they were clumsy but not hard to walk in.

Aminute later we were standing at the exit of the big room I had first seen. Its air-lock doors were closed now as a result of the Mother Thing’s other bomb, which she had placed to blow out the gate-valve panels in the tunnel beyond. The bomb in the feeding chamber had been planted by Peewee who had then ducked back to their room. I don’t know whether the Mother Thing timed the two bombs to go off together, or triggered them by remote-control-nor did it matter; they had made a shambles of Wormface’s fancy base.

Peewee knew how to waste air through the air lock. When the inner door opened I shouted, “Time?” “Fourteen minutes.” She held up her watch.

“Remember what I said, just stay here. If anything moves, blue-light it first and ask questions afterwards.” “I remember.”

I stepped in and closed the inner door, found the valve in the outer door, waited for pressure to equalize.

The two or three minutes it took that big lock to bleed off I spent in glum thought. I didn’t like leaving Peewee alone. I thought all wormfaces were dead, but I wasn’t sure. We had searched hastily; one could have zigged when we zagged-they were so fast.

Besides that, Peewee had said, “I remember,” when she should have said, “Okay, Kip, I will.” Aslip of the tongue? That flea-hopping mind made “slips” only when it wanted to. There is a world of difference between “Roger” and “Wilco.”

Besides I was doing this for foolish motives. Mostly I was going out to recover the Mother Thing’s body-folly, because after I brought her in, she would spoil. It would be kinder to leave her in natural deep-freeze.

But I couldn’t bear that-it was cold out there and I couldn’t leave her out in the cold. She had been so little and warm … so alive. I had to bring her in where she could get warm. You’re in bad shape when your emotions force you into acts which you know are foolish.

Worse still, I was doing this in a reckless rush because the Mother Thing had wanted that beacon set before a certain second, now only twelve minutes away, maybe ten. Well, I’d do it, but what sense was it? Say her home star is close by-oh, say it’s Proxima Centauri and the wormfaces came from somewhere farther. Even if her beacon works-it still takes over four years for her S.O.S. to reach her friends!

This might have been okay for the Mother Thing. I had an impression that she lived a very long time; waiting a few years for rescue might not bother her. But Peewee and I were not creatures of her sort. We’d be dead before that speed-of-light message crawled to Proxima Centauri. I was glad that I had seen Peewee again, but I knew what was in store for us. Death, in days, weeks, or months at most, from running out of air, or water, or food-or a wormface ship might land before we died-which meant one unholy sabbat of a fight in which, if we were lucky, we would die quickly.

No matter how you figured, planting that beacon was merely “carrying out the deceased’s last wishes”-words you hear at funerals. Sentimental folly. The outer door started to open. Ave, Mother Thing! Nos morituri.

It was cold out there, biting cold, even though I was not yet in the wind. The glow panels were still working and I could see that the tunnel was a mess; the two dozen fractional-pressure stops had ruptured like eardrums. I wondered what sort of bomb could be haywired from stolen parts, kept small enough to conceal two in a body pouch along with some sort of radio rig, and nevertheless have force enough to blow out those panels. The blast had rattled my teeth, several hundred feet away in solid rock.

The first dozen panels were blown inwards. Had she set it off in the middle of the tunnel? Ablast that big would fling her away like a feather! She must have planted it there, then come inside and triggered it-then gone back through the lock just as I had. That was the only way I could see it.

It got colder every step. My feet weren’t too cold yet, those clumsy mukluks were okay; the wormfaces understood insulation. “Oscar, you got the fires burning?” (“Roaring, chum. It’s a cold night.”)

“You’re telling me!”

Just beyond the outermost burst panel, I found her.

She had sunk forward, as if too tired to go on. Her arms stretched in front of her and, on the floor of the tunnel not quite touched by her tiny fingers, was a small round box about the size ladies keep powder in on dressing tables.

Her face was composed and her eyes were open except that nictitating membranes were drawn across as they had been when I had first seen her in the pasture back of our house, a few days or weeks or a thousand years ago. But she had been hurt then and looked it; now I half expected her to draw back those inner lids and sing a welcome.

I touched her.

She was hard as ice and much colder.

I blinked back tears and wasted not a moment. She wanted that little box placed a hundred yards out on the causeway and the bump on top twisted-and she wanted it done in the next six or seven minutes. I scooped it up. “Righto, Mother Thing! On my way!”

(“Get cracking, chum!”) (“Thank you, dear Kip… .”)

I don’t believe in ghosts. I had heard her sing thank-you so many times that the notes echoed in my head.

Afew feet away at the mouth of the tunnel, I stopped. The wind hit me and was so cold that the deathly chill in the tunnel seemed summery. I closed my eyes and counted thirty seconds to give time to adjust to starlight while I fumbled on the windward side of the tunnel at a slanting strut that anchored the causeway to the mountain, tied my safety line by passing it around the strut and snapping it back on itself. I had known that it was night outside and I expected the causeway to stand out as a black ribbon against the white “snow” glittering under a skyful of stars. I thought I would be safer on that windswept way if I could see its edges-which I couldn’t by headlamp unless I kept swinging my shoulders back and forth-clumsy and likely to throw me off balance or slow me down.

I had figured this carefully; I didn’t regard this as a stroll in the garden -not at night, not on Pluto! So I counted thirty seconds and tied my line while waiting for eyes to adjust to starlight. I opened them.

And I couldn’t see a darned thing!

Not a star. Not even the difference between sky and ground. My back was to the tunnel and the helmet shaded my face like a sunbonnet; I should have been able to see the walkway. Nothing.

I turned the helmet and saw something that accounted both for black sky and the quake we had felt-an active volcano. It may have been five miles away or fifty, but I could not doubt what it was-a jagged, angry red scar low in the sky.

But I didn’t stop to stare. I switched on the headlamp, splashed it on the righthand windward edge, and started a clumsy trot, keeping close to that side, so that if I stumbled I would have the entire road to recover in before the wind could sweep me off. That wind scared me. I kept the line coiled in my left hand and paid it out as I went, keeping it fairly taut. The coil felt stiff in my fingers.

The wind not only frightened me, it hurt. It was a cold so intense that it felt like flame. It burned and blasted, then numbed. My right side, getting the brunt of it, began to go and then my left side hurt more than the right.

I could no longer feel the line. I stopped, leaned forward and got the coil in the light from the headlamp-that’s another thing that needs fixing! the headlamp should swivel.

The coil was half gone, I had come a good fifty yards. I was depending on the rope to tell me; it was a hundred-meter climbing line, so when I neared its end I would be as far out as the Mother Thing had wanted. Hurry, Kip!

(“Get cracking, boy! It’s cold out here.”) I stopped again. Did I have the box?

I couldn’t feel it. But the headlamp showed my right hand clutched around it. Stay there, fingers! I hurried on, counting steps. One! Two! Three! Four! …

When I reached forty I stopped and glanced over the edge, saw that I was at the highest part where the road crossed the brook and remembered that it was about midway. That brook- methane, was it?-was frozen solid, and I knew that the night was cold.

There were a few loops of line on my left arm-close enough. I dropped the line, moved cautiously to the middle of the way, eased to my knees and left hand, and started to put the box down.

My fingers wouldn’t unbend.

I forced them with my left hand, got the box out of my fist. That diabolical wind caught it and I barely saved it from rolling away. With both hands I set it carefully upright. (“Work your fingers, bud. Pound your hands together!”)

I did so. I could tighten the muscles of my forearms, though it was tearing agony to flex fingers. Clumsily steadying the box with my left hand, I groped for the little knob on top. I couldn’t feel it but it turned easily once I managed to close my fingers on it; I could see it turn.

It seemed to come to life, to purr. Perhaps I heard vibration, through gloves and up my suit; I certainly couldn’t have felt it, not the shape my fingers were in. I hastily let go, got awkwardly to my feet and backed up, so that I could splash the headlamp on it without leaning over.

I was through, the Mother Thing’s job was done, and (I hoped) before deadline. If I had had as much sense as the ordinary doorknob, I would have turned and hurried into the tunnel faster than I had come out. But I was fascinated by what it was doing.

It seemed to shake itself and three spidery little legs grew out the bottom. It raised up until it was standing on its own little tripod, about a foot high. It shook itself again and I thought the wind would blow it over. But the spidery legs splayed out, seemed to bite into the road surface and it was rock firm.

Something lifted and unfolded out the top.

It opened like a flower, until it was about eight inches across. Afinger lifted (an antenna?), swung as if hunting, steadied and pointed at the sky.

Then the beacon switched on. I’m sure that is what happened although all I saw was a flash of light-parasitic it must have been, for light alone would not have served even without that volcanic overcast. It was probably some harmless side effect of switching on an enormous pulse of power, something the Mother Thing hadn’t had time, or perhaps equipment or materials, to eliminate or shield. It was about as bright as a peanut photoflash.

But I was looking at it. Polarizers can’t work that fast. It blinded me.

I thought my headlamp had gone out, then I realized that I simply couldn’t see through a big greenish-purple disc of dazzle. (“Take it easy, boy. It’s just an after-image. Wait and it’ll go away.”)

“I can’t wait! I’m freezing to death!”

(“Hook the line with your forearm, where it’s clipped to your belt. Pull on it.”)

I did as Oscar told me, found the line, turned around, started to wind it on both forearms. It shattered.

It did not break as you expect rope to break; it shattered like glass. I suppose that is what it was by then-glass, I mean. Nylon and glass are super-cooled liquids. Now I know what “super-cooled” means.

But all I knew then was that my last link with life had gone. I couldn’t see, I couldn’t hear, I was all alone on a bare platform, billions of miles from home, and a wind out of the depths of a frozen hell was bleeding the last life out of a body I could barely feel-and where I could feel, it hurt like fire.

“Oscar!”

(“I’m here, bud. You can make it. Now-can you see anything?”) “No!”

(“Look for the mouth of the tunnel. It’s got light in it. Switch off your headlamp. Sure, you can-it’s just a toggle switch. Drag your hand back across the right side of our helmet.”) I did.

(“See anything?”) “Not yet.”

(“Move your head. Try to catch it in the corner of your eye-the dazzle stays in front, you know. Well?”) “I caught something that time!”

(“Reddish, wasn’t it? Jagged, too. The volcano. Now we know which way we’re facing. Turn slowly and catch the mouth of the tunnel as it goes by.”) Slowly was the only way I could turn. “There it is!”

(“Okay, you’re headed home. Get down on your hands and knees and crab slowly to your left. Don’t turn-because you want to hang onto that edge and crawl. Crawl toward the tunnel.”)

I got down. I couldn’t feel the surface with my hands but I felt pressure on my limbs, as if all four were artificial. I found the edge when my left hand slipped over it and I almost fell off. But I recovered. “Am I headed right?”

(“Sure you are. You haven’t turned. You’ve just moved sideways. Can you lift your head to see the tunnel?”) “Uh, not without standing up.”

(“Don’t do that! Try the headlamp again. Maybe your eyes are okay now.”)

I dragged my hand forward against the right side of the helmet. I must have hit the switch, for suddenly I saw a circle of light, blurred and cloudy in the middle. The edge of the walkway sliced it on the left.

(“Good boy! No, don’t get up; you’re weak and dizzy and likely to fall. Start crawling. Count ‘em. Three hundred ought to do it.”) I started crawling, counting.

“It’s a long way, Oscar. You think we can make it?”

(“Of course we can! You think I want to be left out here?”) “I’d be with you.”

(“Knock off the chatter. You’ll make me lose count. Thirty-six … thirty-seven … thirty-eight-“) We crawled.

(“That’s a hundred. Now we double it. Hundred one … hundred two … hundred three-“) “I’m feeling better, Oscar. I think it’s getting warmer.”

(“WHAT!”)

“I said I’m feeling a little warmer.”

(“You’re not warmer, you blistering idiot! That’s freeze-to-death you’re feeling! Crawl faster! Work your chin valve. Get more air. Le’ me hear that chin valve click!”) I was too tired to argue; I chinned the valve three or four times, felt a blast blistering my face.

(“I’m stepping up the stroke. Warmer indeed! Hund’d nine … hund’d ten … hun’leven … hun’twelve-pick it up!”)

At two hundred I said I would just have to rest.

(“No, you don’t!”)

“But I’ve got to. Just a little while.”

(“Like that, uh? You know what happens. What’s Peewee goin’ to do? She’s in there, waiting. She’s already scared because you’re late. What’s she goin’ to do? Answer me!”) “Uh … she’s going to try to wear Tim’s suit.”

(“Right! In case of duplicate answers the prize goes to the one postmarked first. How far will she get? You tell me.”) “Uh … to the mouth of the tunnel, I guess. Then the wind will get her.”

(“My opinion exactly. Then we’ll have the whole family together. You, me, the Mother Thing, Peewee. Cozy. Afamily of stiffs.”) “But-“

(“So start slugging, brother. Slug … slug … slug … slug … tw’und’d five … two’und’d six … tw’und’d sev’n’-“)

I don’t remember falling off. I don’t even know what the “snow” felt like. I just remember being glad that the dreadful counting was over and I could rest. But Oscar wouldn’t let me. (“Kip! Kip! Get up! Climb back on the straight and narrow.”)

“Go ‘way.”

(“I can’t go away. I wish I could. Right in front of you. Grab the edge and scramble up. It’s only a little farther now.”)

I managed to raise my head, saw the edge of the walkway in the light of my headlamp about two feet above my head. I sank back. “It’s too high,” I said listlessly. “Oscar, I think we’ve had it.”

He snorted. (“So? Who was it, just the other day, cussed out a little bitty girl who was too tired to get up? ‘Commander Comet,’ wasn’t it? Did I get the name right? The ‘Scourge of the Spaceways’ … the no- good lazy sky tramp. ‘Have Space Suit-Will Travel.’ Before you go to sleep, Commander, can I have your autograph! I’ve never met a real live space pirate before … one that goes around hijacking ships and kidnapping little girls.”)

“That’s not fair!”

(“Okay, okay, I know when I’m not wanted. But just one thing before I leave: she’s got more guts in her little finger than you have in your whole body-you lying, fat, lazy swine! Good-bye. Don’t wait up.”)

“Oscar! Don’t leave me!” (“Eh? You want help?”) “Yes!”

(“Well, if it’s too high to reach, grab your hammer and hook it over the edge. Pull yourself up.”)

I blinked. Maybe it would work. I reached down, decided I had the hammer even though I couldn’t feel it, got it loose. Using both hands I hooked it over the edge above me. I pulled. That silly hammer broke just like the line. Tool steel-and it went to pieces as if it had been cast out of type slugs.

That made me mad. I heaved myself to a sitting position, got both elbows on the edge, and struggled and groaned and burst into fiery sweat -and rolled over onto the road surface. (“That’s my boy! Never mind counting, just crawl toward the light!”)

The tunnel wavered in front of me. I couldn’t get my breath, so I kicked the chin valve. Nothing happened.

“Oscar! The chin valve is stuck!” I tried again.

Oscar was very slow in answering. (“No, pal, the valve isn’t stuck. Your air hoses have frozen up. I guess that last batch wasn’t as dry as it could have been.”) “I haven’t any air!”

Again he was slow. But he answered firmly, (“Yes, you have. You’ve got a whole suit full. Plenty for the few feet left.”) “I’ll never make it.”

(“Afew feet, only. There’s the Mother Thing, right ahead of you. Keep moving.”)

I raised my head and, sure enough, there she was. I kept crawling, while she got bigger and bigger. Finally I said, “Oscar … this is as far as I go.” (“I’m afraid it is. I’ve let you down … but thanks for not leaving me outside there.”)

“You didn’t let me down … you were swell. I just didn’t quite make it.”

(“I guess we both didn’t quite make it … but we sure let ‘em know that we tried! So long, partner.”)

“So long. ‘Hasta la vista, amigo!” I managed to crawl two short steps and collapsed with my head near the Mother Thing’s head. She was smiling. (“Hello, Kip my son.”)

“I didn’t … quite make it, Mother Thing. I’m sorry.” (“Oh, but you did make it!”)

“Huh?”

(“Between us, we’ve both made it.”)

I thought about that for a long time. “And Oscar.” (“And Oscar, of course.”)

“And Peewee.”

(“And always Peewee. We’ve all made it. Now we can rest, dear.”) “G’night … Mother Thing.”

It was a darn short rest. I was just closing my eyes, feeling warm and happy that the Mother Thing thought that I had done all right-when Peewee started shaking my shoulder. She touched helmets. “Kip! Kip! Get up. Please get up.”

“Huh? Why?”

“Because I can’t carry you! I tried, but I can’t do it. You’re just too big!”

I considered it. Of course she couldn’t carry me-where did she get the silly notion that she could? I was twice her size. I’d carry her … just as soon as I caught my breath.

“Kip! Please get up.” She was crying now, blubbering.

“Why, sure, honey,” I said gently, “if that’s what you want.” I tried and had a clumsy bad time of it. She almost picked me up, she helped a lot. Once up, she steadied me. “Turn around. Walk.”

She almost did carry me. She got her shoulders under my right arm and kept pushing. Every time we came to one of those blown-out panels she either helped me step over, or simply pushed me through and helped me up again.

At last we were in the lock and she was bleeding air from inside to fill it. She had to let go of me and I sank down. She turned when the inner door opened, started to say something-then got my helmet off in a hurry.

I took a deep breath and got very dizzy and the lights dimmed. She was looking at me. “You all right now?”

“Me? Sure! Why shouldn’t I be?” “Let me help you inside.”

I couldn’t see why, but she did help and I needed it. She sat me on the floor near the door with my back to the wall-I didn’t want to lie down. “Kip, I was so scared!” “Why?” I couldn’t see what she was worried about. Hadn’t the Mother Thing said that we had all done all right?

“Well, I was. I shouldn’t have let you go out.” “But the beacon had to be set.”

“Oh, but- You set it?”

“Of course. The Mother Thing was pleased.”

“I’m sure she would have been,” she said gravely. “She was.”

“Can I do anything? Can I help you out of your suit?” “Uh … no, not yet. Could you find me a drink of water?” “Right away!”

She came back and held it for me-I wasn’t as thirsty as I had thought; it made me a bit ill. She watched me for some time, then said, “Do you mind if I’m gone a little while? Will you be all right?”

“Me? Certainly.” I didn’t feel well, I was beginning to hurt, but there wasn’t anything she could do.

“I won’t be long.” She began clamping her helmet and I noticed with detached interest that she was wearing her own suit-somehow I had had the impression that she had been wearing Tim’s.

I saw her head for the lock and realized where she was going and why. I wanted to tell her that the Mother Thing would rather not be inside here, where she might … where she might-I didn’t want to say “spoil” even to myself.

But Peewee was gone.

I don’t think she was away more than five minutes. I had closed my eyes and I am not sure. I noticed the inner door open. Through it stepped Peewee, carrying the Mother Thing in her arms like a long piece of firewood. She didn’t bend at all.

Peewee put the Mother Thing on the floor in the same position I had last seen her, then undamped her helmet and bawled. I couldn’t get up. My legs hurt too much. And my arms. “Peewee … please, honey. It doesn’t do any good.”

She raised her head. “I’m all through. I won’t cry any more.” And she didn’t.

We sat there a long time. Peewee again offered to help me out of my suit, but when we tried it, I hurt so terribly, especially my hands and my feet, that I had to ask her to stop. She looked worried. “Kip … I’m afraid you froze them.”

“Maybe. But there’s nothing to do about it now.” I winced and changed the subject. “Where did you find your suit?” “Oh!” She looked indignant, then almost gay. “You’d never guess. Inside Jock’s suit.”

“No, I guess I wouldn’t. The Purloined Letter.’ “ “The what?”

“Nothing. I hadn’t realized that old Wormface had a sense of humor.”

Shortly after that we had another quake, a bad one. Chandeliers would have jounced if the place had had any and the floor heaved. Peewee squealed. “Oh! That was almost as bad as the last one.”

“Alot worse, I’d say. That first little one wasn’t anything.” “No, I mean the one while you were outside.”

“Was there one then?” “Didn’t you feel it?”

“No.” I tried to remember. “Maybe that was when I fell off in the snow.” “You fell off? Kip!”

“It was all right. Oscar helped me.”

There was another ground shock. I wouldn’t have minded, only it shook me up and made me hurt worse. I finally came out of the fog enough to realize that I didn’t have to hurt. Let’s see, medicine pills were on the right and the codeine dispenser was farthest back- “Peewee? Could I trouble you for some water again?”

“Of course!”

“I’m going to take codeine. It may make me sleep. Do you mind?” “You ought to sleep if you can. You need it.”

“I suppose so. What time is it?”

She told me and I couldn’t believe it. “You mean it’s been more than twelve hours?” “Huh? Since what?”

“Since this started.”

“I don’t understand, Kip.” She stared at her watch. “It has been exactly an hour and a half since I found you-not quite two hours since the Mother Thing set off the bombs.” I couldn’t believe that, either. But Peewee insisted that she was right.

The codeine made me feel much better and I was beginning to be drowsy, when Peewee said, “Kip, do you smell anything?” I sniffed. “Something like kitchen matches?”

“That’s what I mean. I think the pressure is dropping, too. Kip … I think I had better close your helmet-if you’re going to sleep.” “All right. You close yours, too?”

“Yes. Uh, I don’t think this place is tight any longer.”

“You may be right.” Between explosions and quakes, I didn’t see how it could be. But, while I knew what that meant, I was too weary and sick- and getting too dreamy from the drug-to worry. Now, or a month from now-what did it matter? The Mother Thing had said everything was okay.

Peewee clamped us in, we checked radios, and she sat down facing me and the Mother Thing. She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then I heard: “Peewee to Junebug-“ “I read you, Peewee.”

“Kip? It’s been fun, mostly. Hasn’t it?”

“Huh?” I glanced up, saw that the dial said I had about four hours of air left. I had had to reduce pressure twice, since we closed up, to match falling pressure in the room. “Yes, Peewee, it’s been swell. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

She sighed. “I just wanted to be sure you weren’t blaming me. Now go to sleep.”

I did almost go to sleep, when I saw Peewee jump up and my phones came to life. “Kip! Something’s coming in the door!”

I came wide awake, realized what it meant. Why couldn’t they have let us be? Afew hours, anyhow? “Peewee. Don’t panic. Move to the far side of the door. You’ve got your blue-light gadget?”

“Yes.”

“Pick them off as they come in.”

“You’ve got to move, Kip. You’re right where they will come!”

“I can’t get up.” I hadn’t been able to move, not even my arms, for quite a while. “Use low power, then if you brush me, it won’t matter. Do what I say! Fast!” “Yes, Kip.” She got where she could snipe at them sideways, raised her projector and waited.

The inner door opened, a figure came in. I saw Peewee start to nail it- and I called into my radio: “Don’t shoot!” But she was dropping the projector and running forward even as I shouted.

They were “mother thing” people.

It took six of them to carry me, only two to carry the Mother Thing. They sang to me soothingly all the time they were rigging a litter. I swallowed another codeine tablet before they lifted me, as even with their gentleness any movement hurt. It didn’t take long to get me into their ship, for they had landed almost at the tunnel mouth, no doubt crushing the walkway-I hoped so.

Once I was safely inside Peewee opened my helmet and unzipped the front of my suit. “Kip! Aren’t they wonderful?” “Yes.” I was getting dizzier from the drug but was feeling better. “When do we raise ship?”

“We’ve already started.”

“They’re taking us home?” I’d have to tell Mr. Charton what a big help the codeine was. “Huh? Oh, my, no! We’re headed for Vega.”

I fainted.

Chapter 9

I had been dreaming that I was home; this awoke me with a jerk. “Mother Thing!” (“Good morning, my son. I am happy to see that you are feeling better.”)

“Oh, I feel fine. I’ve had a good night’s rest-” I stared, then blurted: “-you’re dead!” I couldn’t stop it.

Her answer sounded warmly, gently humorous, the way you correct a child who has made a natural mistake. (“No, dear, I was merely frozen. I am not as frail as you seem to think me.”) I blinked and looked again. “Then it wasn’t a dream?”

(“No, it was not a dream.”)

“I thought I was home and-” I tried to sit up, managed only to raise my head. “I am home!” My room! Clothes closet on the left-hall door behind the Mother Thing-my desk on the right, piled with books and with a Centerville High pennant over it-window beyond it, with the old elm almost filling it-sun-speckled leaves stirring in a breeze.

My slipstick was where I had left it.

Things started to wobble, then I figured it out. I had dreamed only the silly part at the end. Vega-I had been groggy with codeine. “You brought me home.” (“We brought you home … to your other home. My home.”)

The bed started to sway. I clutched at it but my arms didn’t move. The Mother Thing was still singing. (“You needed your own nest. So we prepared it.”) “Mother Thing, I’m confused.”

(“We know that a bird grows well faster in its own nest. So we built yours.”) “Bird” and “nest” weren’t what she sang, but an Unabridged won’t give anything closer.

I took a deep breath to steady down. I understood her-that’s what she was best at, making you understand. This wasn’t my room and I wasn’t home; it simply looked like it. But I was still terribly confused.

I looked around and wondered how I could have been mistaken.

The light slanted in the window from a wrong direction. The ceiling didn’t have the patch in it from the time I built a hide-out in the attic and knocked plaster down by hammering. It wasn’t the right shade, either.

The books were too neat and clean; they had that candy-box look. I couldn’t recognize the bindings. The over-all effect was mighty close, but details were not right. (“I like this room,”) the Mother Thing was singing. (“It looks like you, Kip.”)

“Mother Thing,” I said weakly, “how did you do it?” (“We asked you. And Peewee helped.”)

I thought, “But Peewee has never seen my room either,” then decided that Peewee had seen enough American homes to be a consulting expert. “Peewee is here?” (“She’ll be in shortly.”)

With Peewee and the Mother Thing around things couldn’t be too bad. Except- “Mother Thing, I can’t move my arms and legs.”

She put a tiny, warm hand on my forehead and leaned over me until her enormous, lemur-like eyes blanked out everything else. (“You have been damaged. Now you are growing well. Do not worry.”)

When the Mother Thing tells you not to worry, you don’t. I didn’t want to do handstands anyhow; I was satisfied to look into her eyes. You could sink into them, you could have dived in and swum around. “All right, Mother Thing.” I remembered something else. “Say … you were frozen? Weren’t you?”

(“Yes.”)

“But- Look, when water freezes it ruptures living cells. Or so they say.” She answered primly, (“My body would never permit that!”).

“Well-” I thought about it. “Just don’t dunk me in liquid air! I’m not built for it.”

Again her song held roguish, indulgent humor. (“We shall endeavor not to hurt you.”) She straightened up and grew a little, swaying like a willow. (“I sense Peewee.”)

There was a knock-another discrepancy; it didn’t sound like a knock on a light-weight interior door-and Peewee called out, “May I come in?” She didn’t wait (I wondered if she ever did) but came on in. The bit I could see past her looked like our upper hall; they’d done a thorough job.

(“Come in, dear.”)

“Sure, Peewee. You are in.” “Don’t be captious.”

“Look who’s talking. Hi, kid!” “Hi yourself.”

The Mother Thing glided away. (“Don’t stay long, Peewee. You are not to tire him.”) “I won’t, Mother Thing.”

(” ‘Bye, dears.”)

I said, “What are the visiting hours in this ward?”

“When she says, of course.” Peewee stood facing me, fists on hips. She was really clean for the first time in our acquaintance-cheeks pink with scrubbing, hair fluffy-maybe she would be pretty, in about ten years. She was dressed as always but her clothes were fresh, all buttons present, and tears invisibly mended.

“Well,” she said, letting out her breath, “I guess you’re going to be worth keeping, after all.” “Me? I’m in the pink. How about yourself?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Alittle frost nip. Nothing. But you were a mess.” “I was?”

“I can’t use adequate language without being what Mama calls ‘unladylike.’ “ “Oh, we wouldn’t want you to be that.”

“Don’t be sarcastic. You don’t do it well.”

“You won’t let me practice on you?”

She started to make a Peewee retort, stopped suddenly, smiled and came close. For a nervous second I thought she was going to kiss me. But she just patted the bedclothes and said solemnly, “You bet you can, Kip. You can be sarcastic, or nasty, or mean, or scold me, or anything, and I won’t let out a peep. Why, I’ll bet you could even talk back to the Mother Thing.”

I couldn’t imagine wanting to. I said, “Take it easy, Peewee. Your halo is showing.” “I’d have one if it weren’t for you. Or flunked my test for it, more likely.”

“So? I seem to remember somebody about your size lugging me indoors almost piggy-back. How about that?” She wriggled. “That wasn’t anything. You set the beacon. That was everything.”

“Uh, each to his own opinion. It was cold out there.” I changed the subject; it was embarrassing us. Mention of the beacon reminded me of something else. “Peewee? Where are we?” “Huh? In the Mother Thing’s home, of course.” She looked around and said, “Oh, I forgot. Kip, this isn’t really your-“

“I know,” I said impatiently. “It’s a fake. Anybody can see that.”

“They can?” She looked crestfallen. “I thought we had done a perfect job.” “It’s an incredibly good job. I don’t see how you did it.”

“Oh, your memory is most detailed. You must have a camera eye.” -and I must have spilled my guts, too! I added to myself. I wondered what else I had said-with Peewee listening. I was afraid to ask; a fellow ought to have privacy.

“But it’s still a fake,” I went on. “I know we’re in the Mother Thing’s home. But where’s that?” “Oh.” She looked round-eyed. “I told you. Maybe you don’t remember -you were sleepy.”

“I remember,” I said slowly, “something. But it didn’t make sense. I thought you said we were going to Vega.”

“Well, I suppose the catalogs will list it as Vega Five. But they call it-” She threw back her head and vocalized; it recalled to me the cockcrow theme in Le Coq d’Or. “-but I couldn’t say that. So I told you Vega, which is close enough.”

I tried again to sit up, failed. “You mean to stand there and tell me we’re on Vega? I mean, a ‘Vegan planet’?” “Well, you haven’t asked me to sit down.”

I ignored the Peeweeism. I looked at “sunlight” pouring through the window. “That light is from Vega?”

“That stuff? That’s artificial sunlight. If they had used real, bright, Vega light, it would look ghastly. Like a bare arc light. Vega is ‘way up the Russell diagram, you know.” “It is?” I didn’t know the spectrum of Vega; I had never expected to need to know it.

“Oh, yes! You be careful, Kip-when you’re up, I mean. In ten seconds you can get more burn than all winter in Key West-and ten minutes would kill you.”

I seemed to have a gift for winding up in difficult climates. What star class was Vega? “A,” maybe? Probably “B.” All I knew was that it was big and bright, bigger than the Sun, and looked pretty set in Lyra.

But where was it? How in the name of Einstein did we get here? “Peewee? How far is Vega? No, I mean, ‘How far is the Sun?’ You wouldn’t happen to know?” “Of course,” she said scornfully. “Twenty-seven light-years.”

Great Galloping Gorillas! “Peewee-get that slide rule. You know how to push one? I don’t seem to have the use of my hands.” She looked uneasy. “Uh, what do you want it for?”

“I want to see what that comes to in miles.” “Oh. I’ll figure it. No need for a slide rule.”

“Aslipstick is faster and more accurate. Look, if you don’t know how to use one, don’t be ashamed-I didn’t, at your age. I’ll show you.”

“Of course I can use one!” she said indignantly. “You think I’m a stupe? But I’ll work it out.” Her lips moved silently. “One point five nine times ten to the fourteenth miles.”

I had done that Proxima Centauri problem recently; I remembered the miles in a light-year and did a rough check in my head-uh, call it six times twenty-five makes a hundred and fifty-and where was the decimal point? “Your answer sounds about right.” 159,000,000,000,000 weary miles! Too many zeroes for comfort.

“Of course I’m right!” she retorted. “I’m always right.” “Goodness me! The handy-dandy pocket encyclopedia.” She blushed. “I can’t help being a genius.”

Which left her wide open and I was about to rub her nose in it-when I saw how unhappy she looked.

I remembered hearing Dad say: “Some people insist that ‘mediocre’ is better than ‘best.’ They delight in clipping wings because they themselves can’t fly. They despise brains because they have none. Pfah!”

“I’m sorry, Peewee,” I said humbly. “I know you can’t. And I can’t help not being one … any more than you can help being little, or I can help being big.” She relaxed and looked solemn. “I guess I was being a show-off again.” She twisted a button. “Or maybe I assumed that you understand me-like Daddy.” “I feel complimented. I doubt if I do-but from now on I’ll try.” She went on worrying the button. “You’re pretty smart yourself, Kip. You know that, don’t you?”

I grinned. “If I were smart, would I be here? All thumbs and my ears rub together. Look, honey, would you mind if we checked you on the slide rule? I’m really interested.” Twenty-seven light-years-why, you wouldn’t be able to see the Sun, It isn’t any great shakes as a star.

But I had made her uneasy again. “Uh, Kip, that isn’t much of a slide rule.” “What? Why, that’s the best that money can-”

“Kip, please! It’s part of the desk. It’s not a slide rule.”

“Huh?” I looked sheepish. “I forgot. Uh, I suppose that hall out there doesn’t go very far?”

“Just what you can see. Kip, the slide rule would have been real-if we had had time enough. They understand logarithms. Oh, indeed they do!”

That was bothering me-“time enough” I mean. “Peewee, how long did it take us to get here?” Twenty-seven light-years! Even at speed-of-light-well, maybe the Einstein business would make it seem like a quick trip to me-but not to Centerville. Dad could be dead! Dad was older than Mother, old enough to be my grandfather, really. Another twenty-seven years back- Why, that would make him well over a hundred. Even Mother might be dead.

“Time to get here? Why, it didn’t take any.”

“No, no. I know it feels that way. You’re not any older, I’m still laid up by frostbite. But it took at least twenty-seven years. Didn’t it?”

“What are you talking about, Kip?”

“The relativity equations, of course. You’ve heard of them?”

“Oh, those! Certainly. But they don’t apply. It didn’t take time. Oh, fifteen minutes to get out of Pluto’s atmosphere, about the same to cope with the atmosphere here. But otherwise, pht! Zero.”

“At the speed of light you would think so.”

“No, Kip.” She frowned, then her face lighted up. “How long was it from the time you set the beacon till they rescued us?” “Huh?” It hit me. Dad wasn’t dead! Mother wouldn’t even have gray hair. “Maybe an hour.”

“Alittle over. It would have been less if they had had a ship ready … then they might have found you in the tunnel instead of me. No time for the message to reach here. Half an hour frittered away getting a ship ready-the Mother Thing was vexed. I hadn’t known she could be. You see, a ship is supposed to be ready.”

“Any time she wants one?”

“Any and all the time-the Mother Thing is important. Another half-hour in atmosphere maneuvering-and that’s all. Real time. None of those funny contractions.”

I tried to soak it up. They take an hour to go twenty-seven light-years and get bawled out for dallying. Dr. Einstein must be known as “Whirligig Albert” among his cemetery neighbors. “But how?”

“Kip, do you know any geometry? I don’t mean Euclid-I mean geometry.”

“Mmm … I’ve fiddled with open and closed curved spaces-and I’ve read Dr. Bell’s popular books. But you couldn’t say I know any geometry.”

“At least you won’t boggle at the idea that a straight line is not necessarily the shortest distance between two points.” She made motions as if squeezing a grapefruit in both hands. “Because it’s not. Kip-it all touches. You could put it in a bucket. In a thimble if you folded it so that spins matched.”

I had a dizzying picture of a universe compressed into a teacup, nucleons and electrons packed solidly-really solid and not the thin mathematical ghost that even the uranium nucleus is said to be. Something like the “primal atom” that some cosmogonists use to explain the expanding universe. Well, maybe it’s both packed and expanding. Like the “wavicle” paradox. A particle isn’t a wave and a wave can’t be a particle- yet everything is both. If you believe in wavicles, you can believe in anything-and if you don’t, then don’t bother to believe at all. Not even in yourself, because that’s what you are-wavicles. “How many dimensions?” I said weakly.

“How many would you like?”

“Me? Uh, twenty, maybe. Four more for each of the first four, to give some looseness on the corners.” “Twenty isn’t a starter. I don’t know, Kip; I don’t know geometry, either-I just thought I did. So I’ve pestered them.” “The Mother Thing?”

“Her? Oh, heavens, no! She doesn’t know geometry. Just enough to pilot a ship in and out of the folds.”

“Only that much?” I should have stuck to advanced finger-painting and never let Dad lure me into trying for an education. There isn’t any end- the more you learn, the more you need to learn. “Peewee, you knew what that beacon was for, didn’t you?”

“Me?” She looked innocent. “Well … yes.” “You knew we were going to Vega.”

“Well … if the beacon worked. If it was set in time.” “Now the prize question. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Well-” Peewee was going to twist that button off. “I wasn’t sure how much math you knew and-you might have gone all masculine and common-sensical and father-knows-best. Would you have believed me?”

(“I told Orville and I told Wilbur and now I’m telling you-that contraption will never work!”) “Maybe not, Peewee. But next time you’re tempted not to tell me something ‘for my own good,’ will you take a chance that I’m not wedded to my own ignorance? I know I’m not a genius but I’ll try to keep my mind open-and I might be able to help, if I knew what you were up to. Quit twisting that button.”

She let go hastily. “Yes, Kip. I’ll remember.”

“Thanks. Another thing is fretting me. I was pretty sick?” “Huh? You certainly were!”

“All right. They’ve got these, uh, ‘fold ships’ that go anywhere in no time. Why didn’t you ask them to bounce me home and pop me into a hospital?” She hesitated. “How do you feel?”

“Huh? I feel fine. Except that I seem to be under spinal anesthesia, or something.” “Or something,” she agreed. “But you feel as if you are getting well?”

“Shucks, I feel well.”

“You aren’t. But you’re going to be.” She looked at me closely. “Shall I put it bluntly, Kip?” “Go ahead.”

“If they had taken you to Earth to the best hospital we have, you’d be a ‘basket case.’ Understand me? No arms, no legs. As it is, you are getting completely well. No amputations, not even a toe.”

I think the Mother Thing had prepared me. I simply said, “You’re sure?”

“Sure. Sure both. You’re going to be all right.” Suddenly her face screwed up. “Oh, you were a mess! I saw.” “Pretty bad?”

“Awful. I have nightmares.” “They shouldn’t have let you look.” “They couldn’t stop me. I was next of kin.”

“Huh? You told them you were my sister or something?” “What? I am your next of kin.”

I was about to say she was cockeyed when I tripped over my tongue. We were the only humans for a hundred and sixty trillion miles. As usual, Peewee was right. “So I had to grant permission,” she went on.

“For what? What did they do to me?”

“Uh, first they popped you into liquid helium. They left you there and the past month they have been using me as a guinea pig. Then, three days ago-three of ours-they thawed you out and got to work. You’ve been getting well ever since.”

“What shape am I in now?”

“Uh … well, you’re growing back. Kip, this isn’t a bed. It just looks like it.” “What is it, then?”

“We don’t have a name for it and the tune is pitched too high for me. But everything from here on down-” She patted the spread. “-on into the room below, does things for you. You’re wired like a hi-fi nut’s basement.”

“I’d like to see it.”

“I’m afraid you can’t. You don’t know, Kip. They had to cut your space suit off.”

I felt more emotion at that than I had at hearing what a mess I had been. “Huh? Where is Oscar? Did they ruin him? My space suit, I mean.” “I know what you mean. Every time you’re delirious you talk to ‘Oscar’ -and you answer back, too. Sometimes I think you’re schizoid, Kip.” “You’ve mixed your terms, runt-that’ud make me a split personality. All right, but you’re a paranoid yourself.”

“Oh, I’ve known that for a long time. But I’m a very well adjusted one. You want to see Oscar? The Mother Thing said that you would want him near when you woke up.” She opened the closet.

“Hey! You said he was all cut up!”

“Oh, they repaired him. Good as new. Alittle better than new.” (“Time, dear! Remember what I said.”)

“Coming, Mother Thing! ‘Bye, Kip. I’ll be back soon, and real often.” “Okay. Leave the closet open so I can see Oscar.”

Peewee did come back, but not “real often.” I wasn’t offended, not much. She had a thousand interesting and “educational” things to poke her ubiquitous nose into, all new and fascinating-she was as busy as a pup chewing slippers. She ran our hosts ragged. But I wasn’t bored. I was getting well, a full-time job and not boring if you are happy-which I was.

I didn’t see the Mother Thing often. I began to realize that she had work of her own to do-even though she came to see me if I asked for her, with never more than an hour’s delay, and never seemed in a hurry to leave.

She wasn’t my doctor, nor my nurse. Instead I had a staff of veterinarians who were alert to supervise every heartbeat. They didn’t come in unless I asked them to (a whisper was as good as a shout) but I soon realized that “my” room was bugged and telemetered like a ship in flight test-and my “bed” was a mass of machinery, gear that bore the relation to our own “mechanical hearts” and “mechanical lungs” and “mechanical kidneys” that a Lockheed ultrasonic courier does to a baby buggy.

I never saw that gear (they never lifted the spread, unless it was while I slept), but I know what they were doing. They were encouraging my body to repair itself-not scar tissue but the way it had been. Any lobster can do this and starfish do it so well that you can chop them to bits and wind up with a thousand brand-new starfish.

This is a trick any animal should do, since its gene pattern is in every cell. But a few million years ago we lost it. Everybody knows that science is trying to recapture it; you see articles- optimistic ones in Reader’s Digest, discouraged ones in The Scientific Monthly, wildly wrong ones in magazines whose “science editors” seem to have received their training writing horror movies. But we’re working on it. Someday, if anybody dies an accidental death, it will be because he bled to death on the way to the hospital.

Here I was with a perfect chance to find out about it-and I didn’t.

I tried. Although I was unworried by what they were doing (the Mother Thing had told me not to worry and every time she visited me she looked in my eyes and repeated the injunction), nevertheless like Peewee, I like to know.

Pick a savage so far back in the jungle that they don’t even have installment-plan buying. Say he has an I.Q. of 190 and Peewee’s yen to understand. Dump him into Brookhaven Atomic Laboratories. How much will he learn? With all possible help?

He’ll learn which corridors lead to what rooms and he’ll learn that a purple trefoil means: “Danger!”

That’s all. Not because he can’t; remember he’s a supergenius-but he needs twenty years schooling before he can ask the right questions and understand the answers.

I asked questions and always got answers and formed notions. But I’m not going to record them; they are as confused and contradictory as the notions a savage would form about design and operation of atomic equipment. As they say in radio, when noise level reaches a certain value, no information is transmitted. All I got was “noise.”

Some of it was literally “noise.” I’d ask a question and one of the therapists would answer. I would understand part, then as it reached the key point, I would hear nothing but birdsongs. Even with the Mother Thing as an interpreter, the parts I had no background for would turn out to be a canary’s cheerful prattle.

Hold onto your seats; I’m going to explain something I don’t understand: how Peewee and I could talk with the Mother Thing even though her mouth could not shape English and we couldn’t sing the way she did and had not studied her language. The Vegans-(I’ll call them “Vegans” the way we might be called “Solarians”; their real name sounds like a wind chime in a breeze. The Mother Thing had a real name, too, but I’m not a coloratura soprano. Peewee used it when she wanted to wheedle her -fat lot of good it did her.) The Vegans have a supreme talent to understand, to put themselves in the other person’s shoes. I don’t think it was telepathy, or I wouldn’t have gotten so many wrong numbers. Call it empathy.

But they have it in various degrees, just as all of us drive cars but only a few are fit to be racing drivers. The Mother Thing had it the way Novaes understands a piano. I once read about an actress who could use Italian so effectively to a person who did not understand Italian that she always made herself understood. Her name was “Duce.” No, a “duce” is a dictator. Something like that. She must have had what the Mother Thing had.

The first words I had with the Mother Thing were things like “hello” and “good-bye” and “thank you” and “where are we going?” She could project her meaning with those-shucks, you can talk to a strange dog that much. Later I began to understand her speech as speech. She picked up meanings of English words even faster; she had this great talent, and she and Peewee had talked for days while they were prisoners.

But while this is easy for “you’re welcome” and “I’m hungry” and “let’s hurry,” it gets harder for ideas like “heterodyning” and “amino acid” even when both are familiar with the concept. When one party doesn’t even have the concept, it breaks down. That’s the trouble I had understanding those veterinarians. If we had all spoken English I still would not have understood.

An oscillating circuit sending out a radio signal produces dead silence unless there is another circuit capable of oscillating in the same way to receive it. I wasn’t on the right frequency. Nevertheless I understood them when the talk was not highbrow. They were nice people; they talked and laughed a lot and seemed to like each other. I had trouble telling them apart,

except the Mother Thing. (I learned that the only marked difference to them between Peewee and myself was that I was ill and she wasn’t.) They had no trouble telling each other apart;

their conversations were interlarded with musical names, until you felt that you were caught in Peter and the Wolf or a Wagnerian opera. They even had a leit-motif for me. Their talk was

cheerful and gay, like the sounds of a bright summer dawn.

The next time I meet a canary I’ll know what he is saying even if he doesn’t.

I picked up some of this from Peewee-a hospital bed is not a good place from which to study a planet. Vega Five has Earth-surface gravity, near enough, with an oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water life cycle. The planet would not suit humans, not only because the noonday “sun” would strike you dead with its jolt of ultraviolet but also the air has poisonous amounts of ozone-a trace of ozone is stimulating but a trifle more-well, you might as well sniff prussic acid. There was something else, too, nitrous oxide I think, which was ungood for humans if breathed too long. My quarters were air-conditioned; the Vegans could breathe what I used but they considered it tasteless.

I learned a bit as a by-product of something else; the Mother Thing asked me to dictate how I got mixed up in these things. When I finished, she asked me to dictate everything I knew about Earth, its history, and how we work and live together. This is a tall order-I’m not still dictating because I found out I don’t know much. Take ancient Babylonia-how is it related to early Egyptian civilizations? I had only vague notions.

Maybe Peewee did better, since she remembers everything she has heard or read or seen the way Dad does. But they probably didn’t get her to hold still long, whereas I had to. The Mother Thing wanted this for the reasons we study Australian aborigines and also as a record of our language. There was another reason, too.

The job wasn’t easy but there was a Vegan to help me whenever I felt like it, willing to stop if I tired. Call him Professor Josephus Egghead; “Professor” is close enough and his name can’t be spelled. I called him Joe and he called me the leitmotif that meant “Clifford Russell, the monster with the frostbite.” Joe had almost as much gift for understanding as the Mother Thing. But how do you put over ideas like “tariffs” and “kings” to a person whose people have never had either? The English words were just noise.

But Joe knew histories of many peoples and planets and could call up scenes, in moving stereo and color, until we agreed on what I meant. We jogged along, with me dictating to a silvery ball floating near my mouth and with Joe curled up like a cat on a platform raised to my level, while he dictated to another microphone, making running notes on what I said. His mike had a gimmick that made it a hush-phone; I did not hear him unless he spoke to me.

Then we would stumble. Joe would stop and throw me a sample scene, his best guess of what I meant. The pictures appeared in the air, positioned for my comfort-if I turned my head, the picture moved to accommodate me. The pix were color-stereo-television with perfect life and sharpness-well, give us another twenty years and we’ll have them as realistic. It was a good trick to have the projector concealed and to force images to appear as if they were hanging in air, but those are just gimmicks of stereo optics; we can do them anytime we really want to-after all, you can pack a lifelike view of the Grand Canyon into a viewer you hold in your hand.

The thing that did impress me was the organization behind it. I asked Joe about it. He sang to his microphone and we went on a galloping tour of their “Congressional Library.”

Dad claims that library science is the foundation of all sciences just as math is the key-and that we will survive or founder, depending on how well the librarians do their jobs. Librarians didn’t look glamorous to me but maybe Dad had hit on a not very obvious truth.

This “library” had hundreds, maybe thousands, of Vegans viewing pictures and listening to sound tracks, each with a silvery sphere in front of him. Joe said they were “telling the memory.” This was equivalent to typing a card for a library’s catalog, except that the result was more like a memory path in brain cells-nine-tenths of that building was an electronic brain.

I spotted a triangular sign like the costume jewelry worn by the Mother Thing, but the picture jumped quickly to something else. Joe also wore one (and others did not) but I did not get around to asking about it, as the sight of that incredible “library” brought up the word “cybernetics” and we went on a detour. I decided later that it might be a lodge pin, or like a Phi Beta Kappa key-the Mother Thing was smart even for a Vegan and Joe was not far behind.

Whenever Joe was sure that he understood some English word, he would wriggle with delight like a puppy being tickled. He was very dignified, but this is not undignified for a Vegan. Their bodies are so fluid and mobile that they smile and frown with the whole works. AVegan holding perfectly still is either displeased or extremely worried.

The sessions with Joe let me tour places from my bed. The difference between “primary school” and “university” caused me to be shown examples. A“kindergarten” looked like an adult Vegan being overwhelmed by babies; it had the innocent rowdiness of a collie pup stepping on his brother’s face to reach the milk dish. But the “university” was a place of quiet beauty, strange-looking trees and plants and flowers among buildings of surrealistic charm unlike any architecture I have ever seen-I suppose I would have been flabbergasted if they had looked familiar. Parabolas were used a lot and I think all the “straight” lines had that swelling the Greeks called “entasis”-delicate grace with strength.

Joe showed up one day simply undulating with pleasure. He had another silvery ball, larger than the other two. He placed it in front of me, then sang to his own. (“I want you to hear this, Kip!”)

As soon as he ceased the larger sphere spoke in English: “I want you to hear this. Kip!” Squirming with delight, Joe swapped spheres and told me to say something.

“What do you want me to say?” I asked.

(“What do you want me to say?”) the larger sphere sang in Vegan. That was my last session with Prof Joe.

Despite unstinting help, despite the Mother Thing’s ability to make herself understood, I was like the Army mule at West Point: an honorary member of the student body but not prepared for the curriculum. I never did understand their government. Oh, they had government, but it wasn’t any system I’ve heard of. Joe knew about democracies and representation and voting and courts of law; he could fish up examples from many planets. He felt that democracy was “a very good system, for beginners.” It would have sounded patronizing, except that is not one of their faults.

I never met one of their young. Joe explained that children should not see “strange creatures” until they had learned to feel understanding sympathy. That would have offended me if I hadn’t been learning some “understanding sympathy” myself. Matter of fact, if a human ten-year-old saw a Vegan, he would either run, or poke it with a stick.

I tried to learn about their government from the Mother Thing, in particular how they kept the peace-laws, crimes, punishments, traffic regulations, etc.

It was as near to flat failure as I ever had with her. She pondered a long time, then answered: (“How could one possibly act against one’s own nature?”) I guess their worst vice was that they didn’t have any. This can be tiresome.

The medical staff were interested in the drugs in Oscar’s helmet-like our interest in a witch doctor’s herbs, but that is not idle interest; remember digitalis and curare.

I told them what each drug did and in most cases I knew the Geneva name as well as the commercial one. I knew that codeine was derived from opium, and opium from poppies. I knew that dexedrine was a sulphate but that was all. Organic chemistry and biochemistry are not easy even with no language trouble. We got together on what a benzene ring was, Peewee drawing it and sticking in her two dollars’ worth, and we managed to agree on “element,” “isotope,” “half life,” and the periodic table. I should have drawn structural formulas, using Peewee’s hands- but neither of us had the slightest idea of the structural formula for codeine and couldn’t do it even when supplied with kindergarten toys which stuck together only in the valences of the elements they represented.

Peewee had fun, though. They may not have learned much from her; she learned a lot from them.

I don’t know when I became aware that the Mother Thing was not, or wasn’t quite, a female. But it didn’t matter; being a mother is an attitude, not a biological relation.

If Noah launched his ark on Vega Five, the animals would come in by twelves. That makes things complicated. But a “mother thing” is one who takes care of others. I am not sure that all mother things were the same gender; it may have been a matter of temperament.

I met one “father thing.” You might call him “governor” or “mayor,” but “parish priest” or “scoutmaster” is closer, except that his prestige dominated a continent. He breezed in during a session with Joe, stayed five minutes, urged Joe to do a good job, told me to be a good boy and get well, and left, all without hurrying. He filled me with the warm self-reliance that Dad does-I didn’t need to be told that he was a “father thing.” His visit had a flavor of “royalty visiting the wounded” without being condescending-no doubt it was hard to work me into a busy schedule.

Joe neither mothered nor fathered me; he taught me and studied me- “a professor thing.”

Peewee showed up one day full of bubbles. She posed like a mannequin. “Do you like my new spring outfit?”

She was wearing silvery tights, plus a little hump like a knapsack. She looked cute but not glamorous, for she was built like two sticks and this get-up emphasized it. “Very fancy,” I said. “Are you learning to be an acrobat?”

“Don’t be silly, Kip; it’s my new space suit-a real one.”

I glanced at Oscar, big and bulky and filling the closet and said privately, “Hear that, chum?” (“It takes all kinds to make a world.”)

“Your helmet won’t fit it, will it?”

She giggled. “I’m wearing it.”

“You are? ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’?”

“Pretty close. Kip, disconnect your prejudices and listen. This is like the Mother Thing’s suit except that it’s tailored for me. My old suit wasn’t much good-and that cold cold about finished it. But you’ll be amazed at this one. Take the helmet. It’s there, only you can’t see it. It’s a field. Gas can’t go in or out.” She came close. “Slap me.”

“With what?”

“Oh. I forgot. Kip, you’ve got to get well and up off that bed. I want to take you for a walk.” “I’m in favor. They tell me it won’t be long now.”

“It had better not be. Here, I’ll show you.” She hauled off and slapped herself. Her hand smacked into something inches from her face. “Now watch,” she went on. She moved her hand very slowly; it sank through the barrier, she thumbed her nose at me and giggled.

This impressed me-a space suit you could reach into! Why, I would have been able to give Peewee water and dexedrine and sugar pills when she needed them. “I’ll be darned! What does it?”

“Apower pack on my back, under the air tank. The tank is good for a week, too, and hoses can’t give trouble because there aren’t any.” “Uh, suppose you blow a fuse. There you are, with a lungful of vacuum.”

“The Mother Thing says that can’t happen.”

Hmm-I had never known the Mother Thing to be wrong when she made a flat statement.

“That’s not all,” Peewee went on. “It feels like skin, the joints aren’t clumsy, and you’re never hot or cold. It’s like street clothes.” “Uh, you risk a bad sunburn, don’t you? Unhealthy, you tell me. Unhealthy even on the Moon.”

“Oh, no! The field polarizes. That’s what the field is, sort of. Kip, get them to make you one-we’ll go places!” I glanced at Oscar. (“Please yourself, pal,” he said distantly. “I’m not the jealous type.”)

“Uh, Peewee, I’ll stick to one I understand. But I’d like to examine that monkey suit of yours.” “Monkey suit indeed!”

I woke up one morning, turned over, and realized that I was hungry. Then I sat up with a jerk. I had turned over in bed.

I had been warned to expect it. The “bed” was a bed and my body was back under my control. Furthermore, I was hungry and I hadn’t been hungry the whole time I had been on Vega Five. Whatever that machinery was, it included a way to nourish me without eating.

But I didn’t stop to enjoy the luxury of hunger; it was too wonderful to be a body again, not just a head. I got out of bed, was suddenly dizzy, recovered and grinned. Hands! Feet! I examined those wonderful things. They were unchanged and unhurt.

Then I looked more closely. No, not quite unchanged.

I had had a scar on my left shin where I had been spiked in a close play at second; it was gone. I once had “Mother” tattooed on my left forearm at a carnival. Mother had been distressed and Dad disgusted, but he had said to leave it as a reminder not to be a witling. It was gone. There was not a callus on hand or foot.

I used to bite my nails. My nails were a bit long but perfect. I had lost the nail from my right little toe years ago through a slip with a hatchet. It was back. I looked hastily for my appendectomy scar-found it and felt relieved. If it had been missing, I would have wondered if I was me.

There was a mirror over the chest of drawers. It showed me with enough hair to warrant a guitar (I wear a crew cut) but somebody had shaved me.

On the chest was a dollar and sixty-seven cents, a mechanical pencil, a sheet of paper, my watch, and a handkerchief. The watch was running. The dollar bill, the paper, and the handkerchief had been laundered.

My clothes, spandy clean and invisibly repaired, were on the desk. The socks weren’t mine; the material was more like felt, if you will imagine felted material no thicker than Kleenex which stretches instead of tearing. On the floor were tennis shoes, like Peewee’s even to a “U.S. Rubber” trademark, but in my size. The uppers were heavier felted material. I got dressed.

I was wearing the result when Peewee kicked the door. “Anybody home?” She came in, bearing a tray. “Want breakfast?” “Peewee! Look at me!”

She did. “Not bad,” she admitted, “for an ape. You need a haircut.” “Yes, but isn’t it wonderful! I’m all together again!”

“You never were apart,” she answered, “except in spots-I’ve had daily reports. Where do you want this?” She put the tray on the desk. “Peewee,” I asked, rather hurt, “don’t you care that I’m well?”

“Of course I do. Why do you think I made ‘em let me carry in your breakfast? But I knew last night that they were going to uncork you. Who do you think cut your nails and shaved you? That’ll be a dollar, please. Shaves have gone up.” I got that tired dollar and handed it to her. She didn’t take it. “Aw, can’t you take a joke?” “‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be.’”

“Polonius. He was a stupid old bore. Honest, Kip, I wouldn’t take your last dollar.” “Now who can’t take a joke?”

“Oh, eat your breakfast. That purple juice,” she said, “tastes like orange juice-it’s very nice. The stuff that looks like scrambled eggs is a fair substitute and I had ‘em color it yellow-the eggs here are dreadful, which wouldn’t surprise you if you knew where they get them. The buttery stuff is vegetable fat and I had them color it, too. The bread is bread, I toasted it myself. The salt is salt and it surprises them that we eat it-they think it’s poison. Go ahead; I’ve guinea-pigged everything. No coffee.”

“I won’t miss it.”

“I never touch the stuff-I’m trying to grow. Eat. Your sugar count has been allowed to drop so that you will enjoy it.” The aroma was wonderful. “Where’s your breakfast, Peewee?”

“I ate hours ago. I’ll watch and swallow when you do.”

The tastes were odd but it was just what the doctor ordered-literally, I suppose. I’ve never enjoyed a meal so much. Presently I slowed down to say, “Knife and fork? Spoons?”

“The only ones on-” She vocalized the planet’s name. “I got tired of fingers and I play hob using what they use. So I drew pictures. This set is mine but we’ll order more.”

There was even a napkin, more felted stuff. The water tasted distilled and not aerated. I didn’t mind. “Peewee, how did you shave me? Not even a nick.”

“Little gismo that beats a razor all hollow. I don’t know what they use it for, but if you could patent it, you’d make a fortune. Aren’t you going to finish that toast?” “Uh-” I had thought that I could eat the tray. “No, I’m full.”

“Then I will.” She used it to mop up the “butter,” then announced, “I’m off!” “Where?”

“To suit up. I’m going to take you for a walk!” She was gone.

The hall outside did not imitate ours where it could not be seen from the bed, but a door to the left was a bathroom, just where it should have been. No attempt had been made to make it look like the one at home, and valving and lighting and such were typically Vegan. But everything worked.

Peewee returned while I was checking Oscar. If they had cut him off me, they had done a marvelous job of repairing; even the places I had patched no longer showed. He had been cleaned so thoroughly that there was no odor inside. He had three hours of air and seemed okay in every way. “You’re in good shape, partner.”

(“In the pink! The service is excellent here.”)

“So I’ve noticed.” I looked up and saw Peewee; she was already in her “spring outfit.” “Peewee, do we need space suits just for a walk?”

“No. You could get by with a respirator, sun glasses, and a sun shade.”

“You’ve convinced me. Say, where’s Madame Pompadour? How do you get her inside that suit?” “No trouble at all, she just bulges a little. But I left her in my room and told her to behave herself.” “Will she?”

“Probably not. She takes after me.” “Where is your room?”

“Next door. This is the only part of the house which is Earth-conditioned.” I started to suit up. “Say, has that fancy suit got a radio?”

“All that yours has and then some. Did you notice the change in Oscar?”

“Huh? What? I saw that he was repaired and cleaned up. What else have they done?”

“Just a little thing. One more click on the switch that changes antennas and you can talk to people around you who aren’t wearing radios without shouting.” “I didn’t see a speaker.”

“They don’t believe in making everything big and bulky.”

As we passed Peewee’s room I glanced in. It was not decorated Vegan style; I had seen Vegan interiors through stereo. Nor was it a copy of her own room-not if her parents were sensible. I don’t know what to call it -“Moorish harem” style, perhaps, as conceived by Mad King Ludwig, with a dash of Disneyland.

I did not comment. I had a hunch that Peewee had been given a room “just like her own” because I had one; that fitted the Mother Thing’s behavior-but Peewee had seen a golden chance to let her overfertile imagination run wild. I doubt if she fooled the Mother Thing one split second. She had probably let that indulgent overtone come into her song and had given Peewee what she wanted.

The Mother Thing’s home was smaller than our state capitol but not much; her family seemed to run to dozens, or hundreds-“family” has a wide meaning under their complex interlinkage. We didn’t see any young ones on our floor and I knew that they were being kept away from the “monsters.” The adults all greeted me, inquired as to my health, and congratulated me on my recovery; I was kept busy saying “Fine, thank you! Couldn’t be better.”

They all knew Peewee and she could sing their names.

I thought I recognized one of my therapists, but the Mother Thing, Prof Joe and the boss veterinarian were the only Vegans I was sure of and we did not meet them.

We hurried on. The Mother Thing’s home was typical-many soft round cushions about a foot thick and four in diameter, used as beds or chairs, floor bare, slick and springy, most furniture on the walls where it could be reached by climbing, convenient rods and poles and brackets a person could drape himself on while using the furniture, plants growing unexpectedly here and there as if the jungle were moving in-delightful, and as useful to me as a corset.

Through a series of parabolic arches we reached a balcony. It was not railed and the drop to a terrace below was about seventy-five feet; I stayed back and regretted again that Oscar had no chin window. Peewee went to the edge, put an arm around a slim pillar and leaned out. In the bright outdoor light her “helmet” became an opalescent sphere. “Come see!”

“And break my neck? Maybe you’d like to belay me?” “Oh, pooh! Who’s afraid of heights?”

“I am when I can’t see what I’m doing.”

“Well, for goodness’ sakes, take my hand and grab a post.” I let her lead me to a pillar, then looked out.

It was a city in a jungle. Thick dark green, so tangled that I could not tell trees from vine and bush, spread out all around but was broken repeatedly by buildings as large and larger than the one we were in. There were no roads; their roads are underground in cities and sometimes outside the cities. But there was air traffic-individual fliers supported by contrivances even less substantial than our own one-man ‘copter harnesses or flying carpets. Like birds they launched themselves from and landed in balconies such as the one we stood in.

There were real birds, too, long and slender and brilliantly colored, with two sets of wings in tandem-which looked aerodynamically unsound but seemed to suit them. The sky was blue and fair but broken by three towering cumulous anvils, blinding white in the distance.

“Let’s go on the roof,” said Peewee. “How?”

“Over here.”

It was a scuttle hole reached by staggered slender brackets the Vegans use as stairs. “Isn’t there a ramp?” “Around on the far side, yes.”

“I don’t think those things will hold me. And that hole looks small for Oscar.” “Oh, don’t be a sissy,” Peewee went up like a monkey.

I followed like a tired bear. The brackets were sturdy despite their grace; the hole was a snug fit.

Vega was high in the sky. It appeared to be the angular size of our Sun, which fitted since we were much farther out than Terra is from the Sun, but it was too bright even with full polarization. I looked away and presently eyes and polarizers adjusted until I could see again. Peewee’s head was concealed by what appeared to be a polished chrome basketball. I said, “Hey, are you still there?”

“Sure,” she answered. “I can see out all right. It’s a grand view. Doesn’t it remind you of Paris from the top of the Arc de Triomphe?” “I don’t know, I’ve never done any traveling.”

“Except no boulevards, of course. Somebody is about to land here.”

I turned the way she was pointing-she could see in all directions while I was hampered by the built-in tunnel vision of my helmet. By the time I was turned around the Vegan was coming in beside us.

(“Hello, children!”)

“Hi, Mother Thing!” Peewee threw her arms around her, picking her up.

(“Not so hasty, dear. Let me shed this.”) The Mother Thing stepped out of her harness, shook herself in ripples, folded the flying gear like an umbrella and hung it over an arm. (“You’re looking fit, Kip.”)

“I feel fine, Mother Thing! Gee, it’s nice to have you back.”

(“I wished to be back when you got out of bed. However, your therapists have kept me advised every minute.”) She put a little hand against my chest, growing a bit to do so, and placed her eyes almost against my face plate. (“You are well?”)

“I couldn’t be better.”

“He really is, Mother Thing!”

(“Good. You agree that you are well, I sense that you are, Peewee is sure that you are and, most important, your leader therapist assures me that you are. We’ll leave at once.”) “What?” I asked. “Where, Mother Thing?”

She turned to Peewee. (“Haven’t you told him, dear?”) “Gee, Mother Thing, I haven’t had a chance.”

(“Very well.”) She turned to me. (“Dear Kip, we must now attend a gathering. Questions will be asked and answered, decisions will be made.”) She spoke to us both. (“Are you ready to leave?”)

“Now?” said Peewee. “Why, I guess so-except that I’ve got to get Madame Pompadour.” (“Fetch her, then. And you, Kip?”)

“Uh-” I couldn’t remember whether I had put my watch back on after I washed and I couldn’t tell because I can’t feel it through Oscar’s thick hide. I told her so. (“Very well. You children run to your rooms while I have a ship fetched. Meet me here and don’t stop to admire flowers.”)

We went down by ramp. I said, “Peewee, you’ve been holding out on me again.” “Why, I have not!”

“What do you call it?”

“Kip-please listen! I was told not to tell you while you were ill. The Mother Thing was very firm about it. You were not to be disturbed-that’s what she said!-while you were growing well.” “Why should I feel disturbed? What is all this? What gathering? What questions?”

“Well … the gathering is sort of a court. Acriminal court, you might say.”

“Huh?” I took a quick look at my conscience. But I hadn’t had any chance to do anything wrong-I had been helpless as a baby up to two hours ago. That left Peewee. “Runt,” I said sternly, “what have you done now?”

“Me? Nothing.” “Think hard.”

“No, Kip. Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you at breakfast! But Daddy says never to break any news until after his second cup of coffee and I thought how nice it would be to take a little walk before we had any worries and I was going to tell you”

“Make it march.”

“-as soon as we came down. I haven’t done anything. But there’s old Wormface.” “What? I thought he was dead.”

“Maybe so, maybe not. But, as the Mother Thing says, there are still questions to be asked, decisions to be made. He’s up for the limit, is my guess.”

I thought about it as we wound our way through strange apartments toward the air lock that led to our Earth-conditioned rooms. High crimes and misdemeanors … skulduggery in the spaceways-yes, Wormface was probably in for it. If the Vegans could catch him. “Had caught him” apparently, since they were going to try him. “But where do we come in? As witnesses?”

“I suppose you could call it that.”

What happened to Wormface was no skin off my nose-and it would be a chance to find out more about the Vegans. Especially if the court was some distance away, so that we would travel and see the country.

“But that isn’t all,” Peewee went on worriedly. “What else?”

She sighed. “This is why I wanted us to have a nice sight-see first. Uh …” “Don’t chew on it. Spit it out.”

“Well … we have to be tried, too.” “What?”

“Maybe ‘examined’ is the word. I don’t know. But I know this: we can’t go home until we’ve been judged.” “But what have we done?” I burst out.

“I don’t know!”

My thoughts were boiling. “Are you sure they’ll let us go home then?”

“The Mother Thing refuses to talk about it.”

I stopped and took her arm. “What it amounts to,” I said bitterly, “is that we are under arrest. Aren’t we?” “Yes-” She added almost in a sob, “But, Kip, I told you she was a cop!”

“Great stuff. We pull her chestnuts out of the fire-and now we’re arrested-and going to be tried-and we don’t even know why! Nice place, Vega Five. ‘The natives are friendly.’ ” They had nursed me-as we nurse a gangster in order to hang him.

“But, Kip-” Peewee was crying openly now. “I’m sure it’ll be all right. She may be a cop-but she’s still the Mother Thing.” “Is she? I wonder.” Peewee’s manner contradicted her words. She was not one to worry over nothing. Quite the contrary.

My watch was on the washstand. I ungasketed to put it in an inside pocket. When I came out, Peewee was doing the same with Madame Pompadour. “Here,” I said, “I’ll take her with me. I’ve got more room.”

“No, thank you,” Peewee answered bleakly. “I need her with me. Especially now.” “Uh, Peewee, where is this court? This city? Or another one?”

“Didn’t I tell you? No, I guess I didn’t. It’s not on this planet.” “I thought this was the only inhabited-“

“It’s not a planet around Vega. Another star. Not even in the Galaxy.” “Say that again?”

“It’s somewhere in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.”

Chapter 10

I didn’t put up a fight-a hundred and sixty trillion miles from nowhere, I mean. But I didn’t speak to the Mother Thing as I got into her ship.

It was shaped like an old-fashioned beehive and it looked barely big enough to jump us to the space port. Peewee and I crowded together on the floor, the Mother Thing curled up in front and twiddled a shiny rack like an abacus; we took off, straight up.

In a few minutes my anger grew from sullenness to a reckless need to settle it. “Mother Thing!”

(“One moment, dear. Let me get us out of the atmosphere.”) She pushed something, the ship quivered and steadied. “Mother Thing,” I repeated.

(“Wait until I lower us, Kip.”)

I had to wait. It’s as silly to disturb a pilot as it is to snatch the wheel of a car. The little ship took a buffeting; the upper winds must have been dillies. But she could pilot.

Presently there was a gentle bump and I figured we must be at the space port. The Mother Thing turned her head. (“All right, Kip. I sense your fear and resentment. Will it help to say that you two are in no danger? That I would protect you with my body? As you protected mine?”)

“Yes, but-“

(“Then let be. It is easier to show than it is to explain. Don’t clamp your helmet. This planet’s air is like your own.”) “Huh? You mean we’re there?”

“I told you,” Peewee said at my elbow. “Just poof! and you’re there.” I didn’t answer. I was trying to guess how far we were from home. (“Come, children.”)

It was midday when we left; it was night as we disembarked. The ship rested on a platform that stretched out of sight. Stars in front of me were in unfamiliar constellations; slaunchwise down the sky was a thin curdling which I spotted as the Milky Way. So Peewee had her wires crossed-we were far from home but still in the Galaxy-perhaps we had simply switched to the night side of Vega Five.

I heard Peewee gasp and turned around. I didn’t have strength to gasp.

Dominating that whole side of the sky was a great whirlpool of millions, maybe billions, of stars.

You’ve seen pictures of the Great Nebula in Andromeda?-a giant spiral of two curving arms, seen at an angle. Of all the lovely things in the sky it is the most beautiful. This was like that. Only we weren’t seeing a photograph nor even by telescope; we were so close (if “close” is the word) that it stretched across the sky twice as long as the Big Dipper as seen from home-

so close that I saw the thickening at the center, two great branches coiling around and overtaking each other. We saw it from an angle so that it appeared elliptical, just as M31 in

Andromeda does; you could feel its depth, you could see its shape.

Then I knew I was a long way from home. That was home, up there, lost in billions of crowded stars.

It was some time before I noticed another double spiral on my right, almost as wide-flung but rather lopsided and not nearly as brilliant-a pale ghost of our own gorgeous Galaxy. It slowly penetrated that this second one must be the Greater Magellanic Cloud-if we were in the Lesser and if that fiery whirlpool was our own Galaxy. What I had thought was “The Milky Way”

was simply a milky way, the Lesser Cloud from inside.

I turned and looked at it again. It had the right shape, a roadway around the sky, but it was pale skim milk compared with our own, about as our Milky Way looks on a murky night. I don’t know how it should look, since I’d never seen the Magellanic Clouds; I’ve never been south of the Rio Grande. But I did know that each cloud is a galaxy in its own right, but smaller than ours and grouped with us.

I looked again at our blazing spiral and was homesick in a way I hadn’t been since I was six.

Peewee was huddling to the Mother Thing for comfort. She made herself taller and put an arm around Peewee. (“There, there, dear! I felt the same way when I was very young and saw it for the first time.”)

“Mother Thing?” Peewee said timidly. “Where is home?”

(“See the right half of it, dear, where the outer arm trails into nothingness? We came from a point two-thirds the way out from the center.” “No, no! Not Vega. I want to know where the Sun is!”

(“Oh, your star. But, dear, at this distance it is the same.”)

We learned how far it is from the Sun to the planet Lanador 167,000 light-years. The Mother Thing couldn’t tell us directly as she did not know how much time we meant by a “year”-how long it takes Terra to go around the Sun (a figure she might have used once or not at all and as worth remembering as the price of peanuts in Perth). But she did know the distance from Vega to the Sun and told us the distance from Lanador to Vega with that as a yardstick-six thousand one hundred and ninety times as great. 6190 times 27 light-years gives 167,000 light-years. She courteously gave it in powers of ten the way we figure, instead of using factorial five (1x2x3x4x5 equals 120) which is how Vegans figure. 167,000 light-years is 9.82 x 1017 miles. Round off 9.82 and call it ten. Then -1,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles -is the distance from Vega to Lanador (or from the Sun to Lanador; Vega and the Sun are back-fence neighbors on this scale.)

Athousand million billion miles.

I refuse to have anything to do with such a preposterous figure. It may be “short” as cosmic distances go, but there comes a time when the circuit breakers in your skull trip out from overload.

The platform we were on was the roof of an enormous triangular building, miles on a side. We saw that triangle repeated in many places and always with a two-armed spiral in each corner. It was the design the Mother Thing wore as jewelry.

It is the symbol for “Three Galaxies, One Law.”

I’ll lump here things I learned in driblets: The Three Galaxies are like our Federated Free Nations, or the United Nations before that, or the League of Nations still earlier; Lanador houses their offices and courts and files-the League’s capital, the way the FFN is in New York and the League of Nations used to be in Switzerland. The cause is historical; the people of Lanador are the Old Race; that’s where civilization began.

The Three Galaxies are an island group, like Hawaii State, they haven’t any other close neighbors. Civilization spread through the Lesser Cloud, then through the Greater Cloud and is seeping slowly through our own Galaxy-that is taking longer; there are fifteen or twenty times as many stars in our Galaxy as in the other two.

When I began to get these things straight I wasn’t quite as sore. The Mother Thing was a very important person at home but here she was a minor official-all she could do was bring us in. Still, I wasn’t more than coolly polite for a while-she might have looked the other way while we beat it for home.

They housed us in that enormous building in a part you could call a “transients” hotel,” although “detention barracks” or “jail” is closer. I can’t complain about accommodations but I was getting confoundedly tired of being locked up every time I arrived in a new place. Arobot met us and took us down inside-there are robots wherever you turn on Lanador. I don’t mean

things looking like the Tin Woodman; I mean machines that do things for you, such as this one which led us to our rooms, then hung around like a bellhop expecting a tip. It was a three- wheeled cart with a big basket on top, for luggage if we had any. It met us, whistled to the Mother Thing in Vegan and led us away, down a lift and through a wide and endlessly long corridor.

I was given “my” room again-a fake of a fake, with all errors left in and new ones added. The sight of it was not reassuring; it shrieked that they planned to keep us there as long as-well, as long as they chose.

But the room was complete even to a rack for Oscar and a bathroom outside. Just beyond “my” room was a fake of another kind-a copy of that Arabian Nights horror Peewee had occupied on Vega Five. Peewee seemed delighted, so I didn’t point out the implications.

The Mother Thing hovered around while we got out of space suits. (“Do you think you will be comfortable?”) “Oh, sure,” I agreed unenthusiastically.

(“If you want food or anything, just say so. It will come.”) “So? Is there a telephone somewhere?” (“Simply speak your wishes. You will be heard.”)

I didn’t doubt her-but I was almost as tired of rooms that were bugged as of being locked up; a person ought to have privacy. “I’m hungry now,” Peewee commented. “I had an early breakfast.”

We were in her room. Apurple drapery drew back, a light glowed in the wall. In about two minutes a section of wall disappeared; a slab at table height stuck out like a tongue. On it were dishes and silverware, cold cuts, fruit, bread, butter,, and a mug of steaming cocoa. Peewee clapped and squealed. I looked at it with less enthusiasm.

(“You see?”) the Mother Thing went on with a smile in her voice. (“Ask for what you need. If you need me, I’ll come. But I must go now.”) “Oh, please don’t go, Mother Thing.”

(“I must, Peewee dear. But I will see you soon. By the bye, there are two more of your people here.”) “Huh?” I put in. “Who? Where?”

(“Next door.”) She was gone with gliding swiftness; the bellhop speeded up to stay ahead of her. I spun around. “Did you hear that?”

“I certainly did!”

“Well-you eat if you want to; I’m going to look for those other humans.” “Hey! Wait for me!”

“I thought you wanted to eat.”

“Well …” Peewee looked at the food. “Just a sec.” She hastily buttered two slices of bread and handed one to me. I was not in that much of a hurry; I ate it. Peewee gobbled hers, took a gulp from the mug and offered it to me. “Want some?”

It wasn’t quite cocoa; there was a meaty flavor, too. But it was good. I handed it back and she finished it. “Now I can fight wildcats. Let’s go, Kip.”

“Next door” was through the foyer of our three-room suite and fifteen yards down the corridor, where we came to a door arch. I kept Peewee back and glanced in cautiously. It was a diorama, a fake scene.

This one was better than you see in museums. I was looking through a bush at a small clearing in wild country. It ended in a limestone bank. I could see overcast sky and a cave mouth in the rocks. The ground was wet, as if from rain.

Acave man hunkered down close to the cave. He was gnawing the carcass of a small animal, possibly a squirrel.

Peewee tried to shove past me; I stopped her. The cave man did not appear to notice us which struck me as a good idea. His legs looked short but I think he weighed twice what I do and he was muscled like a weight lifter, with short, hairy forearms and knotty biceps and calves. His head was huge, bigger than mine and longer, but his forehead and chin weren’t much. His teeth were large and yellow and a front one was broken. I heard bones crunching.

In a museum I would have expected a card reading “Neanderthal Man -circa Last Ice Age.” But wax dummies of extinct breeds don’t crack bones. Peewee protested, “Hey, let me look.”

He heard. Peewee stared at him, he stared toward us. Peewee squealed; he whirled and ran into the cave, waddling but making time. I grabbed Peewee. “Let’s get out of here!”

“Wait a minute,” she said calmly. “He won’t come out in a hurry.” She tried to push the bush aside. “Peewee!”

“Try this,” she suggested. Her hand was shoving air. “They’ve got him penned.”

I tried it. Something transparent blocked the arch. I could push it a little but not more than an inch. “Plastic?” I suggested. “Like Lucite but springier?” “Mmm …” said Peewee. “More like the helmet of my suit. Tougher, though-and I’ll bet light passes only one way. I don’t think he saw us.”

“Okay, let’s get back to our rooms. Maybe we can lock them.”

She went on feeling that barrier. “Peewee!” I said sharply. “You’re not listening.” “What were you doing talking,” she answered reasonably, “when I wasn’t listening?” “Peewee! This is no time to be difficult.”

“You sound like Daddy. He dropped that rat he was eating-he might come back.”

“If he does, you won’t be here, because I’m about to drag you-and if you bite, I’ll bite back. I warn you.”

She looked around with a trace of animosity. “I wouldn’t bite you. Kip, no matter what you did. But if you’re going to be stuffy-oh, well, I doubt if he’ll come out for an hour or so. We’ll come back.”

“Okay.” I pulled her away.

But we did not leave. I heard a loud whistle and a shout: “Hey, buster! Over here!”

The words were not English, but I understood-well enough. The yell came from an archway across the corridor and a little farther on. I hesitated, then moved toward it because Peewee did so.

Aman about forty-five was loafing in this doorway. He was no Neanderthal; he was civilized-or somewhat so. He wore a long heavy woolen tunic, belted in at the waist, forming a sort of

kilt. His legs below that were wrapped in wool and he was shod in heavy short boots, much worn. At the belt and supported by a shoulder sling was a short, heavy sword; there was a dagger on the other side of the belt. His hair was short and he was clean-shaven save for a few days’ gray stubble. His expression was neither friendly nor unfriendly; it was sharply watchful.

“Thanks,” he said gruffly. “Are you the jailer?” Peewee gasped. “Why, that’s Latin!”

What do you do when you meet a Legionary? Right after a cave man? I answered: “No, I am a prisoner myself.” I said it in Spanish and repeated it in pretty fair classical Latin. I used Spanish because Peewee hadn’t been quite correct. It was not Latin he spoke, not the Latin of Ovid and Gaius Julius Caesar. Nor was it Spanish. It was in between, with an atrocious accent and other differences. But I could worry out the meaning.

He sucked his lip and answered, “That’s bad. I’ve been trying for three days to attract attention and all I get is another prisoner. But that’s how the die rolls. Say, that’s a funny accent you have.”

“Sorry, amigo, but I have trouble understanding you, too.” I repeated it in Latin, then split the difference. I added, in improvised lingua franca, “Speak slowly, will you?” “I’ll speak as I please. And don’t call me ‘amico’; I’m a Roman citizen -so don’t get gay.”

That’s a free translation. His advice was more vulgar-I think. It was close to a Spanish phrase which certainly is vulgar. “What’s he saying?” demanded Peewee. “It is Latin, isn’t it? Translate!”

I was glad she hadn’t caught it. “Why, Peewee, don’t you know ‘the language of poetry and science’?” “Oh, don’t be a smartie! Tell me.”

“Don’t crowd me, hon. I’ll tell you later. I’m having trouble following it.”

“What is that barbarian grunting?” the Roman said pleasantly. “Talk language, boy. Or will you have ten with the flat of the sword?”

He seemed to be leaning on nothing-so I felt the air. It was solid; I decided not to worry about his threat. “I’m talking as best I can. We spoke to each other in our own language.” “Pig grunts. Talk Latin. If you can.” He looked at Peewee as if just noticing her. “Your daughter? Want to sell her? If she had meat on her bones, she might be worth a half denario.” Peewee clouded up. “I understood that!” she said fiercely. “Come out here and fight!”

“Try it in Latin,” I advised her. “If he understands you, he’ll probably spank you.” She looked uneasy. “You wouldn’t let him?”

“You know I wouldn’t.” “Let’s go back.”

“That’s what I said earlier.” I escorted her past the cave man’s lair to our suite. “Peewee, I’m going back and see what our noble Roman has to say. Do you mind?” “I certainly do!”

“Be reasonable, hon. If we could be hurt by them, the Mother Thing would know it. After all, she told us they were here.” “I’ll go with you.”

“What for? I’ll tell you everything I learn. This may be a chance to find out what this silliness means. What’s he doing here? Have they kept him in deep-freeze a couple of thousand years? How long has he been awake? What does he know that we don’t? We’re in a bad spot; all the data I can dig up we need. You can help by keeping out. If you’re scared, send for the

Mother Thing.”

She pouted. “I’m not scared. All right-if that’s the way you want it.” “I do. Eat your dinner.”

Jo-Jo the dogface boy was not in sight; I gave his door a wide berth. If a ship can go anywhere in no time, could it skip a dimension and go anywhere to any time? How would the math work out? The soldier was still lounging at his door. He looked up. “Didn’t you hear me say to stick around?”

“I heard you,” I admitted, “but we’re not going to get anywhere if you take that attitude. I’m not one of your privates.” “Lucky for you!”

“Do we talk peacefully? Or do I leave?”

He looked me over. “Peace. But don’t get smart with me, barbarian.”

He called himself “Iunio.” He had served in Spain and Gaul, then transferred to the VIth Legion, the “Victrix”-which he felt that even a barbarian should know of. His legion’s garrison was Eboracum, north of Londinium in Britain, but he had been on advance duty as a brevet centurion (he pronounced it “centurio”)-his permanent rank was about like top sergeant. He was smaller than I am but I would not want to meet him in an alley. Nor at the palisades of a castra.

He had a low opinion of Britons and all barbarians including me (“nothing personal-some of my best friends are barbarians”), women, the British climate, high brass, and priests; he thought well of Caesar, Rome, the gods, and his own professional ability. The army wasn’t what it used to be and the slump came from treating auxiliaries like Roman citizens.

He had been guarding the building of a wall to hold back barbarians-a nasty lot who would sneak up and slit your throat and eat you-which no doubt had happened to him, since he was now in the nether regions.

I thought he was talking about Hadrian’s Wall, but it was three days’ march north of there, where the seas were closest together. The climate there was terrible and the natives were bloodthirsty beasts who dyed their bodies and didn’t appreciate civilization-you’d think the Eagles were trying to steal their dinky island. Provincial … like me. No offense meant.

Nevertheless he had bought a little barbarian to wife and had been looking forward to garrison duty at Eboracum-when this happened. Iunio shrugged. “Perhaps if I had been careful with lustrations and sacrifices, my luck wouldn’t have run out. But I figure that if a man does his duty and keeps himself and his weapons clean, the rest is the C.O.’s worry. Careful of that doorway; it’s witched.”

The longer he talked the easier it was to understand him. The “-us” endings turned to “-o” and his vocabulary was not that of De Bello Gallico -“horse” wasn’t “equus”; it was “caballo.” His idioms bothered me, plus the fact that his Latin was diluted by a dozen barbarian tongues. But you can blank out every third word in a newspaper and still catch the gist.

I learned a lot about the daily life and petty politics of the Victrix and nothing that I wanted to know. Iunio did not know how he had gotten where he was nor why-except that he was dead and awaiting disposition in a receiving barracks somewhere in the nether world-a theory which I was not yet prepared to accept.

He knew the year of his “death”-Year Eight of the Emperor and Eight Hundred and Ninety-Nine of Rome. I wrote out the dates in Roman numerals to make sure. But I did not remember when Rome was founded nor could I identify the “Caesar” even by his full name-there have been so many Caesars. But Hadrian’s Wall had been built and Britain was still occupied; that placed lunio close to the third century.

He wasn’t interested in the cave man across the way-it embodied to him the worst vice of a barbarian: cowardice. I didn’t argue but I would be timid, too, if I had saber-toothed tigers yowling at my door. (Did they have sabertooths then? Make it “cave bears.”)

Iunio went back and returned with hard dark bread, cheese, and a cup. He did not offer me any and I don’t think it was the barrier. He poured a little of his drink on the floor and started to chomp. It was a mud floor; the walls were rough stone and the ceiling was supported by wooden beams. It may have been a copy of dwellings during the occupation of Britain, but I’m no

expert.

I didn’t stay much longer. Not only did bread and cheese remind me that I was hungry, but I offended lunio. I don’t know what set him off, but he discussed me with cold thoroughness, my eating habits, ancestry, appearance, conduct, and method of earning a living. Iunio was pleasant as long as you agreed with him, ignored insults, and deferred to him. Many older people demand this, even in buying a thirty-nine-cent can of talcum; you learn to give it without thinking-otherwise you get a reputation as a fresh kid and potential juvenile delinquent. The less respect an older person deserves the more certain he is to demand it from anyone younger. So I left, as lunio didn’t know anything helpful anyhow. As I went back I saw the cave man peering out his cave. I said, “Take it easy, Jo-Jo,” and went on.

I bumped into another invisible barrier blocking our archway. I felt it, then said quietly, “I want to go in.” The barrier melted away and I walked in-then found that it was back in place. My rubber soles made no noise and I didn’t call out because Peewee might be asleep. Her door was open and I peeped in. She was sitting tailor-fashion on that incredible Oriental

divan, rocking Madame Pompadour and crying.

I backed away, then returned whistling, making a racket, and calling to her. She popped out of her door, with smiling face and no trace of tears. “Hi, Kip! It took you long enough.” “That guy talks too much. What’s new?”

“Nothing. I ate and you didn’t come back, so I took a nap. You woke me. What did you find out?” “Let me order dinner and I’ll tell you while I eat.”

I was chasing the last bit of gravy when a bellhop robot came for us. It was like the other one except that it had in glowing gold on its front that triangle with three spirals. “Follow me,” it said in English.

I looked at Peewee. “Didn’t the Mother Thing say she was coming back?” “Why, I thought so.”

The machine repeated, “Follow me. Your presence is required.”

I laid my ears back. I have taken lots of orders, some of which I shouldn’t have, but I had never yet taken orders from a piece of machinery. “Go climb a rope!” I said. “You’ll have to drag me.”

This is not what to say to a robot. It did.

Peewee yelled, “Mother Thing! Where are you? Help us!”

Her birdsong came out of the machine. (“It’s all right, dears. The servant will lead you to me.”)

I quit struggling and started to walk. That refugee from an appliance dealer took us into another lift, then into a corridor whose walls whizzed past as soon as we entered. It nudged us through an enormous archway topped by the triangle and spirals and herded us into a pen near one wall. The pen was not apparent until we moved-more of that annoying solid air.

It was the biggest room I have ever been in, triangular, unbroken by post or pillar, with ceiling so high and walls so distant that I half expected local thunderstorms. An enormous room makes me feel like an ant; I was glad to be near a wall. The room was not empty-hundreds in it-but it looked empty because they were all near the walls; the giant floor was bare.

But there were three wormfaces out in the center-Wormface’s trial was in progress.

I don’t know if our own Wormface was there. I would not have known even if they had not been a long way off as the difference between two wormfaces is the difference between having your throat cut and being beheaded. But, as we learned, the presence or absence of the individual offender was the least important part of a trial. Wormface was being tried, present or not-alive or dead.

The Mother Thing was speaking. I could see her tiny figure, also far out on the floor but apart from the wormfaces. Her birdsong voice reached me faintly but I heard her words clearly-in English; from somewhere near us her translated words were piped to us. The feel of her was in the English translation just as it was in her bird tones.

She was telling what she knew of wormface conduct, as dispassionately as if describing something under a microscope, like a traffic officer testifying: “At 9:17 on the fifth, while on duty at-” etc. The facts. The Mother Thing was finishing her account of events on Pluto. She chopped it off at the point of explosion.

Another voice spoke, in English. It was flat with a nasal twang and reminded me of a Vermont grocer we had dealt with one summer when I was a kid. He was a man who never smiled nor frowned and what little he said was all in the same tone, whether it was, “She is a good woman,” or, “That man would cheat his own son,” or, “Eggs are fifty-nine cents,” cold as a cash register. This voice was that sort.

It said to the Mother Thing: “Have you finished?” “I have finished.”

“The other witnesses will be heard. Clifford Russell-“

I jumped, as if that grocer had caught me in the candy jar. The voice went on: “-listen carefully.” Another voice started.

My own-it was the account I had dictated, flat on my back on Vega Five.

But it wasn’t all of it; it was just that which concerned wormfaces. Adjectives and whole sentences had been cut-as if someone had taken scissors to a tape recording. The facts were there; what I thought about them was missing.

It started with ships landing in the pasture back of our house; it ended with that last wormface stumbling blindly down a hole. It wasn’t long, as so much had been left out-our hike across the Moon, for example. My description of Wormface was left in but had been trimmed so much that I could have been talking about Venus de Milo instead of the ugliest thing in creation.

My recorded voice ended and the Yankee-grocer voice said, “Were those your words?” “Huh? Yes.”

“Is the account correct?” “Yes, but-“

“Is it correct?” “Yes.”

“Is it complete?”

I wanted to say that it certainly was not-but I was beginning to understand the system. “Yes.” “Patricia Wynant Reisfeld-“

Peewee’s story started earlier and covered all those days when she had been in contact with wormfaces while I was not. But it was not much longer, for, while Peewee has a sharp eye and a sharper memory, she is loaded with opinions. Opinions were left out.

When Peewee had agreed that her evidence was correct and complete the Yankee voice stated, “All witnesses have been heard, all known facts have been integrated. The three individuals may speak for themselves.”

I think the wormfaces picked a spokesman, perhaps the Wormface, if he was alive and there. Their answer, as translated into English, did not have the guttural accent with which

Wormface spoke English; nevertheless it was a wormface speaking. That bone-chilling yet highly intelligent viciousness, as unmistakable as a punch in the teeth, was in every syllable.

Their spokesman was so far away that I was not upset by his looks and after the first stomach-twisting shock of that voice I was able to listen more or less judicially. He started by denying that this court had jurisdiction over his sort. He was responsible only to his mother-queen and she only to their queen-groups-that’s how the English came out.

That defense, he claimed, was sufficient. However, if the “Three Galaxies” confederation existed-which he had no reason to believe other than that he was now being detained unlawfully before this hiveful of creatures met as a kangaroo court-if it existed, it still had no jurisdiction over the Only People, first, because the organization did not extend to his part of space; second, because even if it were there, the Only People had never joined and therefore its rules (if it had rules) could not apply; and third, it was inconceivable that their queen-group would associate itself with this improbable “Three Galaxies” because people do not contract with animals.

This defense was also sufficient.

But disregarding for the sake of argument these complete and sufficient defenses, this trial was a mockery because no offense existed even under the so-called rules of the alleged “Three Galaxies.” They (the wormfaces) had been operating in their own part of space engaged in occupying a useful but empty planet, Earth. No possible crime could lie in colonizing land inhabited merely by animals. As for the agent of Three Galaxies, she had butted in; she had not been harmed; she had merely been kept from interfering and had been detained only for the purpose of returning her where she belonged.

He should have stopped. Any of these defenses might have stood up, especially the last one. I used to think of the human race as “lords of creation”-but things had happened to me since. I was not sure that this assemblage would think that humans had rights compared with wormfaces. Certainly the wormfaces were ahead of us in many ways. When we clear jungle to make farms, do we worry if baboons are there first?

But he discarded these defenses, explained that they were intellectual exercises to show how foolish the whole thing was under any rules, from any point of view. He would now make his defense.

It was an attack.

The viciousness in his voice rose to a crescendo of hatred that made every word slam like a blow. How dared they do this? They were mice voting to bell the cat! (I know-but that’s how it came out in translation.) They were animals to be eaten, or merely vermin to be exterminated. Their mercy would be rejected if offered, no negotiation was possible, their crimes would never be forgotten, the Only People would destroy them!

I looked around to see how the jury was taking it. This almost-empty hall had hundreds of creatures around the three sides and many were close to us. I had been too busy with the trial to do more than glance at them. Now I looked, for the wormface’s blast was so disturbing that I welcomed a distraction.

They were all sorts and I’m not sure that any two were alike. There was one twenty feet from me who was as horrible as Wormface and amazingly like him-except that this creature’s grisly appearance did not inspire disgust. There were others almost human in appearance, although they were greatly in the minority. There was one really likely-looking chick as human as I am-except for iridescent skin and odd and skimpy notions of dress. She was so pretty that I would have sworn that the iridescence was just make-up-but I probably would have been wrong. I wondered in what language the diatribe was reaching her? Certainly not English.

Perhaps she felt my stare, for she looked around and unsmilingly examined me, as I might a chimpanzee in a cage. I guess the attraction wasn’t mutual.

There was every gradation from pseudo-wormface to the iridescent girl -not only the range between, but also way out in left field; some had their own private aquaria.

I could not tell how the invective affected them. The girl creature was taking it quietly, but what can you say about a walrus thing with octopus arms? If he twitches, is he angry? Or laughing? Or itches where the twitch is?

The Yankee-voiced spokesman let the wormface rave on.

Peewee was holding my hand. Now she grabbed my ear, tilted her face and whispered, “He talks nasty.” She sounded awed.

The wormface ended with a blast of hate that must have overtaxed the translator for instead of English we heard a wordless scream. The Yankee voice said flatly, “But do you have anything to say in your defense?”

The scream was repeated, then the wormface became coherent. “I have made my defense-that no defense is necessary.” The emotionless voice went on, to the Mother Thing. “Do you speak for them?”

She answered reluctantly, “My lord peers … I am forced to say … that I found them to be quite naughty.” She sounded grieved. “You find against them?”

“I do.”

“Then you may not be heard. Such is the Law.” ” ‘Three Galaxies, One Law.’ I may not speak.”

The flat voice went on, “Will any witness speak favorably?” There was silence.

That was my chance to be noble. We humans were their victims; we were in a position to speak up, point out that from their standpoint they hadn’t done anything wrong, and ask mercy-if they would promise to behave in the future.

Well, I didn’t. I’ve heard all the usual Sweetness and Light that kids get pushed at them-how they should always forgive, how there’s some good in the worst of us, etc. But when I see a black widow, I step on it; I don’t plead with it to be a good little spider and please stop poisoning people. Ablack widow spider can’t help it-but that’s the point.

The voice said to the wormfaces: “Is there any race anywhere which might speak for you? If so, it will be summoned.” The spokesman wormface spat at the idea. That another race might be character witnesses for them disgusted him. “So be it,” answered the Yankee voice. “Are the facts sufficient to permit a decision?”

Almost immediately the voice answered itself: “Yes.” “What is the decision?”

Again it answered itself: “Their planet shall be rotated.”

It didn’t sound like much-shucks, all planets rotate-and the flat voice held no expression. But the verdict scared me. The whole room seemed to shudder.

The Mother Thing turned and came toward us. It was a long way but she reached us quickly. Peewee flung herself on her; the solid air that penned us solidified still more until we three were in a private room, a silvery hemisphere.

Peewee was trembling and gasping and the Mother Thing comforted her. When Peewee had control of herself, I said nervously, “Mother Thing? What did he mean? ‘Their planet shall be rotated.’ “

She looked at me without letting go of Peewee and her great soft eyes were sternly sad. (“It means that their planet is tilted ninety degrees out of the space-time of your senses and mine.”)

Her voice sounded like a funeral dirge played softly on a flute. Yet the verdict did not seem tragic to me. I knew what she meant; her meaning was even clearer in Vegan than in English. If you rotate a plane figure about an axis in its plane-it disappears. It is no longer in a plane and Mr. A. Square of Flatland is permanently out of touch with it.

But it doesn’t cease to exist; it just is no longer where it was. It struck me that the wormfaces were getting off easy. I had halfway expected their planet to be blown up (and I didn’t doubt

that Three Galaxies could do so), or something equally drastic. As it was, the wormfaces were to be run out of town and would never find their way back-there are so many, many dimensions-but they wouldn’t be hurt; they were just being placed in Coventry.

But the Mother Thing sounded as if she had taken unwilling part in a hanging. So I asked her.

(“You do not understand, dear gentle Kip-they do not take their star with them.”) “Oh-” was all I could say.

Peewee turned white.

Stars are the source of life-planets are merely life’s containers. Chop off the star … and the planet gets colder … and colder … and colder-then still colder. How long until the very air freezes? How many hours or days to absolute zero? I shivered and got goose pimples. Worse than Pluto-

“Mother Thing? How long before they do this?” I had a queasy misgiving that I should have spoken, that even wormfaces did not deserve this. Blow them up, shoot them down-but don’t freeze them.

(“It is done,”) she sang in that same dirgelike way. “What?”

(“The agent charged with executing the decision waits for the word … the message goes out the instant we hear it. They were rotated out of our world even before I turned to join you. It is better so.”)

I gulped and heard an echo in my mind: “-‘twere well it were done quickly.”

But the Mother Thing was saying rapidly, (“Think no more on ‘t, for now you must be brave!”) “Huh? What, Mother Thing? What happens now?”

(“You’ll be summoned any moment-for your own trial.”)

I simply stared, I could not speak-I had thought it was all over. Peewee looked still thinner and whiter but did not cry. She wet her lips and said quietly, “You’ll come with us, Mother Thing?”

(“Oh, my children! I cannot. You must face this alone.”)

I found my voice. “But what are we being tried for? We haven’t hurt anybody. We haven’t done a thing.” (“Not you personally. Your race is on trial. Through you.”)

Peewee turned away from her and looked at me-and I felt a thrill of tragic pride that in our moment of extremity she had turned, not to the Mother Thing, but to me, another human being.

I knew that she was thinking of the same thing I was: a ship, a ship hanging close to Earth, only an instant away and yet perhaps uncounted trillion miles in some pocket of folded space, where no DEW line gives warning, where no radar can reach.

The Earth, green and gold and lovely, turning lazily in the warm light of the Sun- Aflat voice- No more Sun.

No stars.

The orphaned Moon would bobble once, then continue around the Sun, a gravestone to the hopes of men. The few at Lunar Base and Luna City and Tombaugh Station would last weeks or even months, the only human beings left alive. Then they would go-if not of suffocation, then of grief and loneliness.

Peewee said shrilly, “Kip, she’s not serious! Tell me she’s not!”

I said hoarsely, “Mother Thing-are the executioners already waiting?”

She did not answer. She said to Peewee, (“It is very serious, my daughter. But do not be afraid. I exacted a promise before I surrendered you. If things go against your race, you two will return with me and be suffered to live out your little lives in my home. So stand up and tell the truth … and do not be afraid.”)

The flat voice entered the closed space: “The human beings are summoned.”

Chapter 11

We walked out onto that vast floor. The farther we went the more I felt like a fly on a plate. Having Peewee with me was a help; nevertheless it was that nightmare where you find yourself not decently dressed in a public place. Peewee clutched my hand and held Madame Pompadour pressed tightly to her. I wished that I had suited-up in Oscar-I wouldn’t have felt quite so under a microscope with Oscar around me.

Just before we left, the Mother Thing placed her hand against my forehead and started to hold me with her eyes. I pushed her hand aside and looked away. “No,” I told her. “No treatments! I’m not going to-oh, I know you mean well but I won’t take an anesthetic. Thanks.”

She did not insist; she simply turned to Peewee. Peewee looked uncertain, then shook her head. “We’re ready,” she piped.

The farther out we got on that great bare floor the more I regretted that I had not let the Mother Thing do whatever it was that kept one from worrying. At least I should have insisted that Peewee take it.

Coming at us from the other walls were two other flies; as they got closer I recognized them: the Neanderthal and the Legionary. The cave man was being dragged invisibly; the Roman covered ground in a long, slow, easy lope. We all arrived at the center at the same time and were stopped about twenty feet apart, Peewee and I at one point of a triangle, the Roman and the cave man each at another.

I called out, “Hail, Iunio!”

“Silence, barbarian.” He looked around him, his eyes estimating the crowd at the walls.

He was no longer in casual dress. The untidy leggings were gone; strapped to his right shin was armor. Over the tunic he wore full cuirass and his head was brave with plumed helmet. All metal was burnished, all leather was clean.

He had approached with his shield on his back, route-march style. But even as we were stopped he unslung it and raised it on his left arm. He did not draw his sword as his right hand held his javelin at the ready carried easily while his wary eyes assessed the foe.

To his left the cave man hunkered himself small, as an animal crouches who has no place to hide.

“Iunio!” I called out. “Listen!” The sight of those two had me still more worried. The cave man I could not talk to but perhaps I could reason with the Roman. “Do you know why we are here?”

“I know,” he tossed over his shoulder. “Today the Gods try us in their arena. This is work for a soldier and a Roman citizen. You’re no help so keep out. No-watch behind me and shout. Caesar will reward you.”

I started to try to talk sense but was cut off by a giant voice from everywhere: “YOU ARE NOW BEING JUDGED!”

Peewee shivered and got closer. I twisted my left hand out of her clutch, substituted my right, and put my left arm around her shoulders. “Head up, partner,” I said softly. “Don’t let them scare you.”

“I’m not scared,” she whispered as she trembled. “Kip? You do the talking.” “Is that the way you want it?”

“Yes. You don’t get mad as fast as I do-and if I lost my temper … well, that’d be awful.” “Okay.”

We were interrupted by that flat, nasal twang. As before, it seemed close by. “This case derives from the one preceding it. The three temporal samples are from a small Lanador-type planet around a star in an out-center part of the Third Galaxy. It is a very primitive area having no civilized races. This race, as you see from the samples, is barbaric. It has been examined twice before and would not yet be up for routine examination had not new facts about it come out in the case which preceded it.”

The voice asked itself: “When was the last examination made?”

It answered itself: “Approximately one half-death of Thorium-230 ago.” It added, apparently to us only: “About eighty thousand of your years.”

Iunio jerked his head and looked around, as if trying to locate the voice. I concluded that he had heard the same figure in his corrupt Latin. Well, I was startled too-but I was numb to that sort of shock.

“Is it necessary again so soon?”

“It is. There has been a discontinuity. They are developing with unexpected speed.” The flat voice went on, speaking to us: “I am your judge. Many of the civilized beings you see around you are part of me. Others are spectators, some are students, and a few are here because they hope to catch me in a mistake.” The voice added, “This they have not managed to do in more than a million of your years.”

I blurted out, “You are more than a million years old?” I did not add that I didn’t believe it.

The voice answered, “I am older than that, but no part of me is that old. I am partly machine, which part can be repaired, replaced, recopied; I am partly alive, these parts die and are replaced. My living parts are more than a dozen dozens of dozens of civilized beings from throughout Three Galaxies, any dozen dozens of which may join with my non-living part to act. Today I am two hundred and nine qualified beings, who have at their instant disposal all knowledge accumulated in my non-living part and all its ability to analyze and integrate.”

I said sharply, “Are your decisions made unanimously?” I thought I saw a loophole-I never had much luck mixing up Dad and Mother but there had been times as a kid when I had managed to confuse issues by getting one to answer one way and the other to answer another.

The voice added evenly, “Decisions are always unanimous. It may help you to think of me as one person.” It addressed everyone: “Standard sampling has been followed. The contemporary sample is the double one; the intermediate sample for curve check is the clothed single sample and was taken by standard random at a spacing of approximately one half-death of Radium-226-” The voice supplemented: “-call it sixteen hundred of your years. The remote curve-check sample, by standard procedure, was taken at two dozen times that distance.”

The voice asked itself: “Why is curve-check spacing so short? Why not at least a dozen times that?” “Because this organism’s generations are very short. It mutates rapidly.”

The explanation appeared to satisfy for it went on, “The youngest sample will witness first.”

I thought he meant Peewee and so did she; she cringed. But the voice barked and the cave man jerked. He did not answer; he simply crouched more deeply into himself. The voice barked again.

It then said to itself, “I observe something.” “Speak.”

“This creature is not ancestor to those others.”

The voice of the machine almost seemed to betray emotion, as if my dour grocer had found salt in his sugar bin. “The sample was properly taken.” “Nevertheless,” it answered, “it is not a correct sample. You must review all pertinent data.”

For a long five seconds was silence. Then the voice spoke: “This poor creature is not ancestor to these others; he is cousin only. He has no future of his own. Let him be returned at once to the space-time whence he came.”

The Neanderthal was dragged rapidly away. I watched him out of sight with a feeling of loss. I had been afraid of him at first. Then I had despised him and was ashamed of him. He was a coward, be was filthy, he stank. Adog was more civilized. But in the past five minutes I had decided that I had better love him, see his good points-for, unsavory as he was, he was human. Maybe he wasn’t my remote grandfather, but I was in no mood to disown even my sorriest relation.

The voice argued with itself, deciding whether the trial could proceed. Finally it stated: “Examination will continue. If enough facts are not developed, another remote sample of correct lineage will be summoned. Iunio.”

The Roman raised his javelin higher. “Who calls Iunio?” “Stand forth and bear witness.”

Just as I feared, lunio told the voice where to go and what to do. There was no protecting Peewee from his language; it echoed back in English-not that it mattered now whether Peewee was protected from “unladylike” influences.

The flat voice went on imperturbably: “Is this your voice? Is this your witnessing?” Immediately another voice started up which I recognized as that of the Roman, answering questions, giving accounts of battle, speaking of treatment of prisoners. This we got only in English but the translation held the arrogant timbre of Iunio’s voice.

Iunio shouted “Witchcraft!” and made horns at them.

The recording cut off. “The voice matches,” the machine said dryly. “The recording will be integrated.”

But it continued to peck at lunio, asking him details about who he was, why he was in Britain, what he had done there, and why it was necessary to serve Caesar. lunio gave short answers, then blew his top and gave none. He let out a rebel yell that bounced around that mammoth room, drew back and let fly his javelin.

It fell short. But I think he broke the Olympic record. I found myself cheering.

Iunio drew his sword while the javelin was still rising. He flung it up in a gladiatorial challenge, shouting, “Hail, Caesar!” and dropped into guard. He reviled them. He told them what he thought of vermin who were not citizens, not even barbarians!

I said to myself, “Oh, oh! There goes the game. Human race, you’ve had it.”

Iunio went on and on, calling on his gods to help him, each way worse than the last, threatening them with Caesar’s vengeance in gruesome detail. I hoped that, even though it was translated, Peewee would not understand much of it. But she probably did; she understood entirely too much.

I began to grow proud of him. That wormface, in diatribe, was evil; Iunio was not. Under bad grammar, worse language, and rough manner, that tough old sergeant had courage, human dignity, and a basic gallantry. He might be an old scoundrel-but he was my kind of scoundrel.

He finished by demanding that they come at him, one at a time-or let them form a turtle and he would take them all on at once. “I’ll make a funeral pyre of you! I’ll temper my blade in your guts! I, who am about to die, will show you a Roman’s grave-piled high with Caesar’s enemies!”

He had to catch his breath. I cheered again and Peewee joined in. He looked over his shoulder and grinned. “Slit their throats as I bring them down, boy! There’s work to do!” The cold voice said: “Let him now be returned to the space-time whence he came.”

Iunio looked startled as invisible hands pulled him along. He called on Mars and Jove and laid about him. The sword clattered to the floor-picked itself up and returned itself to his scabbard. lunio was moving rapidly away; I cupped my hands and yelled, “Good-bye, lunio!”

“Farewell, boy! They’re cowards!” He shook himself. “Nothing but filthy witchcraft!” Then he was gone. “Clifford Russell-“

“Huh? I’m here.” Peewee squeezed my hand. “Is this your voice?”

I said, “Wait a minute-“ “Yes? Speak.”

I took a breath. Peewee pushed closer and whispered, “Make it good, Kip. They mean it.”

“I’ll try, kid,” I whispered, then went on, “What is this? I was told you intend to judge the human race.” “That is correct.”

“But you can’t. You haven’t enough to go on. No better than witchcraft, just as lunio said. You brought in a cave man-then decided he was a mistake. That isn’t your only mistake. You had lunio here. Whatever he was-and I’m not ashamed of him; I’m proud of him-he’s got nothing to do with now. He’s been dead two thousand years, pretty near-if you’ve sent him back, I mean-and all that he was is dead with him. Good or bad, he’s not what the human race is now.”

“I know that. You two are the test sample of your race now.”

“Yes-but you can’t judge from us. Peewee and I are about as far from average as any specimens can be. We don’t claim to be angels, either one of us. If you condemn our race on what we have done, you do a great injustice. Judge us-or judge me, at least-“

“Me, too!”

“-on whatever I’ve done. But don’t hold my people responsible. That’s not scientific. That’s not valid mathematics.” “It is valid.”

“It is not. Human beings aren’t molecules; they’re all different.” I decided not to argue about jurisdiction; the wormfaces had ruined that approach. “Agreed, human beings are not molecules. But they are not individuals, either.”

“Yes, they are!”

“They are not independent individuals; they are parts of a single organism. Each cell in your body contains your whole pattern. From three samples of the organism you call the human race I can predict the future potentialities and limits of that race.”

“We have no limits! There’s no telling what our future will be.”

“It may be that you have no limits,” the voice agreed. “That is to be determined. But, if true, it is not a point in your favor. For we have limits.” “Huh?”

“You have misunderstood the purpose of this examination. You speak of ‘justice.’ I know what you think you mean. But no two races have ever agreed on the meaning of that term, no matter how they say it. It is not a concept I deal with here. This is not a court of justice.”

“Then what is it?”

“You would call it a ‘Security Council.’ Or you might call it a committee of vigilantes. It does not matter what you call it; my sole purpose is to examine your race and see if you threaten our survival. If you do, I will now dispose of you. The only certain way to avert a grave danger is to remove it while it is small. Things that I have learned about you suggest a possibility that you may someday threaten the security of Three Galaxies. I will now determine the facts.”

“But you said that you have to have at least three samples. The cave man was no good.”

“We have three samples, you two and the Roman. But the facts could be determined from one sample. The use of three is a custom from earlier times, a cautious habit of checking and rechecking. I cannot dispense ‘justice’; I can make sure not to produce error.”

I was about to say that he was wrong, even if he was a million years old. But the voice went on, “I continue the examination. Clifford Russell, is this your voice?”

My voice sounded then-and again it was my own dictated account, but this time everything was left in-purple adjectives, personal opinions, comments about other matters, every word and stutter.

I listened to enough of it, held up my hand. “All right, all right, I said it.” The recording stopped. “Do you now confirm it?”

“Eh? Yes.”

“Do you wish to add, subtract, or change?”

I thought hard. Aside from a few wisecracks that I had tucked in later it was a straight-forward account. “No. I stand on it.” “And is this also your voice?”

This one fooled me. It was that endless recording I had made for Prof Joe about-well, everything on Earth … history, customs, peoples, the works. Suddenly I knew why Prof Joe had worn the same badge the Mother Thing wore. What did they call that?-“Planting a stool pigeon.” Good Old Prof Joe, the no-good, had been a stoolie.

I felt sick.

“Let me hear more of it.”

They accommodated me. I didn’t really listen; I was trying to remember, not what I was hearing, but what else I might have said-what I had admitted that could be used against the human race. The Crusades? Slavery? The gas chambers at Dachau? How much had I said?

The recording droned on. Why, that thing had taken weeks to record; we could stand here until our feet went flat. “It’s my voice.”

“Do you stand on this, too? Or do you wish to correct, revise, or extend?” I said cautiously, “Can I do the whole thing over?”

“If you so choose.”

I started to say that I would, that they should wipe the tape and start over. But would they? Or would they keep both and compare them? I had no compunction about lying-“tell the truth and shame the devil” is no virtue when your family and friends and your whole race are at stake.

But could they tell if I lied?

“The Mother Thing said to tell the truth and not to be afraid.” “But she’s not on our side!”

“Oh, yes, she is.”

I had to answer. I was so confused that I couldn’t think. I had tried to tell the truth to Prof Joe … oh, maybe I had shaded things, not included every horrid thing that makes a headline. But it was essentially true.

Could I do better under pressure? Would they let me start fresh and accept any propaganda I cooked up? Or would the fact that I changed stories be used to condemn our race? “I stand on it!”

“Let it be integrated. Patricia Wynant Reisfeld-“

Peewee took only moments to identify and allow to be integrated her recordings; she simply followed my example.

The machine voice said: “The facts have been integrated. By their own testimony, these are a savage and brutal people, given to all manner of atrocities. They eat each other, they starve each other, they kill each other. They have no art and only the most primitive of science, yet such is their violent nature that even with so little knowledge they are now energetically using it to exterminate each other, tribe against tribe. Their driving will is such that they may succeed. But if by some unlucky chance they fail, they will inevitably, in time, reach other stars. It is this possibility which must be calculated: how soon they will reach us, if they live, and what their potentialities will be then.”

The voice continued to us: “This is the indictment against you-your own savagery, combined with superior intelligence. What have you to say in your defense?” I took a breath and tried to steady down. I knew that we had lost-yet I had to try.

I remembered how the Mother Thing had spoken. “My lord peers-“

“Correction. We are not your ‘lords,’ nor has it been established that you are our equals. If you wish to address someone, you may call me the ‘Moderator.’”

“Yes, Mr. Moderator-” I tried to remember what Socrates had said to his judges. He knew ahead of time that he was condemned just as we knew-but somehow, though he had been forced to drink hemlock, he had won and they had lost.

No! I couldn’t use his Apologia-all he had lost was his own life. This was everybody. “-you say we have no art. Have you seen the Parthenon?”

“Blown up in one of your wars.”

“Better see it before you rotate us-or you’ll be missing something. Have you read our poetry? ‘Our revels now are ended: these our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself … itself-yea-all which it

… inherit-shall dissolve-“

I broke down. I heard Peewee sobbing beside me. I don’t know why I picked that one-but they say the subconscious mind never does things “accidentally.” I guess it had to be that one. “As it well may,” commented the merciless voice.

“I don’t think it’s any of your business what we do-as long as we leave you alone-” My stammer was back and I was almost sobbing. “We have made it our business.”

“We aren’t under your government and-“

“Correction. Three Galaxies is not a government; conditions for government cannot obtain in so vast a space, such varied cultures. We have simply formed police districts for mutual protection.”

“But-even so, we haven’t troubled your cops. We were in our own backyards-I was in my own backyard!-when these wormface things came along and started troubling us. We haven’t hurt you.”

I stopped, wondering where to turn. I couldn’t guarantee good behavior, not for the whole human race-the machine knew it and I knew it.

“Inquiry.” It was talking to itself again. “These creatures appear to be identical with the Old Race, allowing for mutation. What part of the Third Galaxy are they from?” It answered itself, naming co-ordinates that meant nothing to me. “But they are not of the Old Race; they are ephemerals. That is the danger; they change too fast.” “Didn’t the Old Race lose a ship out that way a few half-deaths of Thorium-230 ago? Could that account for the fact that the youngest sample failed to match?”

It answered firmly, “It is immaterial whether or not they may be descended from the Old Race. An examination is in progress; a decision must be made.” “The decision must be sure.”

“It will be.” The bodyless voice went on, to us: “Have either of you anything to add in your defense?”

I had been thinking of what had been said about the miserable state of our science. I wanted to point out that we had gone from muscle power to atomic power in only two centuries-but I was afraid that fact would be used against us. “Peewee, can you think of anything?”

She suddenly stepped forward and shrilled to the air, “Doesn’t it count that Kip saved the Mother Thing?” “No,” the cold voice answered. “It is irrelevant.”

“Well, it ought to count!” She was crying again. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves! Bullies! Cowards! Oh, you’re worse than wormfaces!”

I pulled her back. She hid her head against my shoulder and shook. Then she whispered, “I’m sorry, Kip. I didn’t mean to. I guess I’ve ruined it.” “It was ruined anyhow, honey.”

“Have you anything more to say?” old no-face went on relentlessly.

I looked around at the hall. -the cloud-capped towers … the great globe itself- “Just this!” I said savagely. “It’s not a defense, you don’t want a defense. All right, take away our star- You will if you can and I guess you can. Go ahead! We’ll make a star! Then, someday, we’ll come back and hunt you down-all of you!”

“That’s telling ‘em. Kip! That’s telling them!”

Nobody bawled me out. I suddenly felt like a kid who has made a horrible mistake at a party and doesn’t know how to cover it up. But I meant it. Oh, I didn’t think we could do it. Not yet. But we’d try. “Die trying” is the proudest human thing.

“It is possible that you will,” that infuriating voice went on. “Are you through?” “I’m through.” We all were through … every one of us.

“Does anyone speak for them? Humans, will any race speak for you?” We didn’t know any other races. Dogs- Maybe dogs would.

“I speak for them!”

Peewee raised her head with a jerk. “Mother Thing!”

Suddenly she was in front of us. Peewee tried to run to her, bounced off that invisible barrier. I grabbed her. “Easy, hon. She isn’t there-it’s some sort of television.”

“My lord peers … you have the advantage of many minds and much knowledge-” It was odd to see her singing, hear her in English; the translation still held that singing quality.

“-but I know them. It is true that they are violent-especially the smaller one-but they are not more violent than is appropriate to their ages. Can we expect mature restraint in a race whose members all must die in early childhood? And are not we ourselves violent? Have we not this day killed our billions? Can any race survive without a willingness to fight? It is true that these creatures are often more violent than is necessary or wise. But, my peers, they all are so very young. Give them time to learn.”

“That is exactly what there is to fear, that they may learn. Your race is overly sentimental; it distorts your judgment.”

“Not true! We are compassionate, we are not foolish. I myself have been the proximate cause of how many, many adverse decisions? You know; it is in your records-I prefer not to remember. And I shall be again. When a branch is diseased beyond healing, it must be pruned. We are not sentimental; we are the best watchers you have ever found, for we do it without anger. Toward evil we have no mercy. But the mistakes of a child we treat with loving forbearance.”

“Have you finished?”

“I say that this branch need not be pruned! I have finished.”

The Mother Thing’s image vanished. The voice went on, “Does any other race speak for them?”

“I do.” Where she had been now stood a large green monkey. He stared at us and shook his head, then suddenly did a somersault and finished looking at us between his legs. “I’m no friend of theirs but I am a lover of ‘justice’-in which I differ from my colleagues in this Council.” He twirled rapidly several times. “As our sister has said, this race is young. The infants of my own noble race bite and scratch each other-some even die from it. Even I behaved so, at one time.” He jumped into the air, landed on his hands, did a flip from that position. “Yet does anyone here deny that I am civilized?” He stopped, looked at us thoughtfully while scratching. “These are brutal savages and I don’t see how anyone could ever like them-but I say: give them their chance!”

His image disappeared.

The voice said, “Have you anything to add before a decision is reached?”

I started to say: No, get it over with-when Peewee grabbed my ear and whispered. I listened, nodded, and spoke. “Mr. Moderator-if the verdict is against us-can you hold off your hangmen long enough to let us go home? We know that you can send us home in only a few minutes.”

The voice did not answer quickly. “Why do you wish this? As I have explained, you are not personally on trial. It has been arranged to let you live.” “We know. We’d rather be home, that’s all-with our people.”

Again a tiny hesitation. “It shall be done.”

“Are the facts sufficient to permit a decision?” “Yes.”

“What is the decision?”

“This race will be re-examined in a dozen half-deaths of radium. Meanwhile there is danger to it from itself. Against this mischance it will be given assistance. During the probationary period it will be watched closely by Guardian Mother-” the machine trilled the true Vegan name of the Mother Thing “-the cop on that beat, who will report at once any ominous change. In the meantime we wish this race good progress in its long journey upward.

“Let them now be returned forthwith to the space-time whence they came.”

Chapter 12

I didn’t think it was safe to make our atmosphere descent in New Jersey without filing a flight plan. Princeton is near important targets; we might be homed-on by everything up to A- missiles. The Mother Thing got that indulgent chuckle in her song: (“I fancy we can avoid that.”)

She did. She put us down in a side street, sang good-bye and was gone. It’s not illegal to be out at night in space suits, even carrying a rag dolly. But it’s unusual-cops hauled us in. They phoned Peewee’s father and in twenty minutes we were in his study, drinking cocoa and talking and eating shredded wheat.

Peewee’s mother almost had a fit. While we told our story she kept gasping, “I can’t believe it!” until Professor Reisfeld said, “Stop it, Janice. Or go to bed.” I don’t blame her. Her daughter disappears on the Moon and is given up for dead-then miraculously reappears on Earth. But Professor Reisfeld believed us. The way the Mother Thing had “understanding” he had “acceptance.” When a fact came along, he junked theories that failed to match.

He examined Peewee’s suit, had her switch on the helmet, shined a light to turn it opaque, all with a little smile. Then he reached for the phone. “Dario must see this.” “At midnight. Curt?”

“Please, Janice. Armageddon won’t wait for office hours.” “Professor Reisfeld?”

“Yes, Kip?”

“Uh, you may want to see other things first.” “That’s possible.”

I took things from Oscar’s pockets-two beacons, one for each of us, some metal “paper” covered with equations, two “happy things,” and two silvery spheres. We had stopped on Vega Five, spending most of the time under what I suppose was hypnosis while Prof Joe and another professor thing pumped us for what we knew of human mathematics. They hadn’t been learning math from us-oh, no! They wanted the language we use in mathematics, from radicals and vectors to those weird symbols in higher physics, so that they could teach us; the results were on the metal paper. First I showed Professor Reisfeld the beacons. “The Mother Thing’s beat now includes us. She says to use these if we need her. She’ll usually be close by-a thousand light-years at most. But even if she is far away, she’ll come.”

“Oh.” He looked at mine. It was neater and smaller than the one she haywired on Pluto. “Do we dare take it apart?” “Well, it’s got a lot of power tucked in it. It might explode.”

“Yes, it might.” He handed it back, looking wistful.

A“happy thing” can’t be explained. They look like those little abstract sculptures you feel as well as look at. Mine was like obsidian but warm and not hard; Peewee’s was more like jade. The surprise comes when you touch one to your head. I had Professor Reisfeld do so and he looked awed-the Mother Thing is all around you and you feel warm and safe and understood.

He said, “She loves you. The message wasn’t for me. Excuse me.” “Oh, she loves you, too.”

“Eh?”

“She loves everything small and young and fuzzy and helpless. That’s why she’s a ‘mother thing.’ “ I didn’t realize how it sounded. But he didn’t mind. “You say she is a police officer?”

“Well, she’s more of a juvenile welfare officer-this is a slum neighborhood we’re in, backward and pretty tough. Sometimes she has to do things she doesn’t like. But she’s a good cop and somebody has to do nasty jobs. She doesn’t shirk them.”

“I’m sure she wouldn’t.” “Would you like to try it again?” “Do you mind?”

“Oh, no, it doesn’t wear out.”

He did and got that warm happy look. He glanced at Peewee, asleep with her face in her cereal. “I need not have worried about my daughter, between the Mother Thing-and you.” “It was a team,” I explained. “We couldn’t have made it without Peewee. The kid’s got guts.”

“Too much, sometimes.”

“Other times you need that extra. These spheres are recorders. Do you have a tape recorder, Professor?”

“Certainly, sir.” We set it up and let a sphere talk to it. I wanted a tape because the spheres are one-shot-the molecules go random again. Then I showed him the metal paper. I had tried to read it, got maybe two inches into it, then just recognized a sign here and there. Professor Reisfeld got halfway down the first page, stopped. “I had better make those phone calls.”

At dawn a sliver of old Moon came up and I tried to judge where Tombaugh Station was. Peewee was asleep on her Daddy’s couch, wrapped in his bathrobe and clutching Madame Pompadour. He had tried to carry her to bed but she had wakened and become very, very difficult, so he put her down. Professor Reisfeld chewed an empty pipe and listened to my sphere whispering softly to his recorder. Occasionally he darted a question at me and I’d snap out of it.

Professor Giomi and Dr. Bruck were at the other end of the study, filling a blackboard, erasing and filling it again, while they argued over that metal paper. Geniuses are common at the Institute for Advanced Study but these two wouldn’t be noticed anywhere; Bruck looked like a truckdriver and Giomi like an excited Iunio. They both had that Okay-I-get-you that Professor Reisfeld had. They were excited but Dr. Bruck showed it only by a tic in his face-which Peewee’s Daddy told me was a guarantee of nervous breakdowns-not for Bruck, for other physicists.

Two mornings later we were still there. Professor Reisfeld had shaved; the others hadn’t. I napped and once I took a shower. Peewee’s Daddy listened to recordings-he was now replaying Peewee’s tape. Now and then Bruck and Giomi called him over, Giomi almost hysterical and Bruck stolid. Professor Reisfeld always asked a question or two, nodded and came back to his chair. I don’t think he could work that math-but he could soak up results and fit them with other pieces.

I wanted to go home once they were through with me but Professor Reisfeld said please stay; the Secretary General of the Federated Free Nations was coming.

I stayed. I didn’t call home because what was the use in upsetting them? I would rather have gone to New York City to meet the Secretary General, but Professor Reisfeld had invited him here-I began to realize that anybody really important would come if Professor Reisfeld asked him.

Mr. van Duivendijk was slender and tall. He shook hands and said, “I understand that you are Dr. Samuel C. Russell’s son.” “You know my father, sir?”

“I met him years ago, at the Hague.”

Dr. Bruck turned-he had barely nodded at the Secretary General. “You’re Sam Russell’s boy?” “Uh, you know him, too?”

“Of course. On the Statistical Interpretation of Imperfect Data. Brilliant.” He turned back and got more chalk on his sleeve. I hadn’t known that Dad had written such a thing, nor suspected that he knew the top man in the Federation. Sometimes I think Dad is eccentric.

Mr. van D. waited until the double domes came up for air, then said, “You have something, gentlemen?” “Yeah,” said Bruck.

“Superb!” agreed Giomi. “Such as?”

“Well-” Dr. Bruck pointed at a line of chalk. “That says you can damp out a nuclear reaction at a distance.” “What distance?”

“How about ten thousand miles? Or must you do it from the Moon?” “Oh, ten thousand miles is sufficient, I imagine.”

“You could do it from the Moon,” Giomi interrupted, “if you had enough power. Magnificent!” “It is,” agreed van Duivendijk. “Anything else?”

“What do you want?” demanded Bruck. “Egg in your suds?” “Well?”

“See that seventeenth line? It may mean anti-gravity, I ain’t promising. Or, if you rotate ninety degrees, this unstable Latin thinks it’s time travel.” “It is!”

“If he’s right, the power needed is a fair-sized star-so forget it.” Bruck stared at hen’s tracks. “Anew approach to matter conversion-possibly. How about a power pack for your vest pocket that turns out more ergs than the Brisbane reactors?”

“This can be done?”

“Ask your grandson. It won’t be soon.” Bruck scowled. “Dr. Bruck, why are you unhappy?” asked Mr. van D.

Bruck scowled harder. “Are you goin’ to make this Top Secret’? I don’t like classifying mathematics. It’s shameful.”

I batted my ears. I had explained to the Mother Thing about “classified” and I think I shocked her. I said that the FFN had to have secrets for survival, just like Three Galaxies. She couldn’t see it. Finally she had said that it wouldn’t make any difference in the long run. But I had worried because while I don’t like science being “secret,” I don’t want to be reckless, either.

Mr. van D. answered, “I don’t like secrecy. But I have to put up with it.” “I knew you would say that!”

“Please. Is this a U.S. government project?” “Eh? Of course not.”

“Nor a Federation one. Very well, you’ve shown me some equations. I can’t tell you not to publish them. They’re yours.” Bruck shook his head. “Not ours.” He pointed at me. “His.”

“I see.” The Secretary General looked at me. “I am a lawyer, young man. If you wish to publish, I see no way to stop you.” “Me? It’s not mine-I was just-well, a messenger.”

“You seem to have the only claim. Do you wish this published? Perhaps with all your names?” I got the impression that he wanted it published. “Well, sure. But the third name shouldn’t be mine; it should be-” I hesitated. You can’t put a birdsong down as author. “-uh, make it ‘Dr. M. Thing.’” “Who is he?”

“She’s a Vegan. But we could pretend it’s a Chinese name.”

The Secretary General stayed on, asking questions, listening to tapes. Then he made a phone call-to the Moon. I knew it could be done, I never expected to see it. “Van Duivendijk here … yes, the Secretary General. Get the Commanding General … Jim? … This connection is terrible … Jim, you sometimes order practice maneuvers … My call is unofficial but you might check a valley-” He turned to me; I answered quickly. “-a valley just past the mountains east of Tombaugh Station. I haven’t consulted the Security Council; this is between friends. But if you go into that valley I very strongly suggest that it be done in force, with all weapons. It may have snakes in it. The snakes will be camouflaged. Call it a hunch. Yes, the kids are fine and so is Beatrix. I’ll phone Mary and tell her I talked with you.”

The Secretary General wanted my address. I couldn’t say when I would be home because I didn’t know how I would get there-I meant to hitchhike but didn’t say so. Mr. van D.’s eyebrows went up. “I think we owe you a ride home. Eh, Professor?”

“That would not be overdoing it.”

“Russell, I heard on your tape that you plan to study engineering-with a view to space.” “Yes, sir. I mean, ‘Yes, Mr. Secretary.’ “

“Have you considered studying law? Many young engineers want to space-not many lawyers. But the Law goes everywhere. Aman skilled in space law and meta-law would be in a strong position.”

“Why not both?” suggested Peewee’s Daddy. “I deplore this modern overspecialization.” “That’s an idea,” agreed Mr. van Duivendijk. “He could then write his own terms.”

I was about to say I should stick to electronics-when suddenly I knew what I wanted to do. “Uh, I don’t think I could handle both.” “Nonsense!” Professor Reisfeld said severely.

“Yes, sir. But I want to make space suits that work better. I’ve got some ideas.”

“Mmm, that’s mechanical engineering. And many other things, I imagine. But you’ll need an M.E. degree.” Professor Reisfeld frowned. “As I recall your tape, you passed College Boards but hadn’t been accepted by a good school.” He drummed his desk. “Isn’t that silly, Mr. Secretary? The lad goes to the Magellanic Clouds but can’t go to the school he wants.”

“Well, Professor? You pull while I push?”

“Yes. But wait.” Professor Reisfeld picked up his phone. “Susie, get me the President of M.I.T. I know it’s a holiday; I don’t care if he’s in Bombay or in bed; get him. Good girl.” He put down the phone. “She’s been with the Institute five years and on the University switchboard before that. She’ll get him.”

I felt embarrassed and excited. M.I.T.-anybody would jump at the chance. But tuition alone would stun you. I tried to explain that I didn’t have the money. “I’ll work the rest of this school and

next summer-I’ll save it.”

The phone rang. “Reisfeld here. Hi, Oppie. At the class reunion you made me promise to tell you if Bruck’s tic started bothering him. Hold onto your chair; I timed it at twenty-one to the minute. That’s a record… . Slow down; you won’t send anybody, unless I get my pound of flesh. If you start your lecture on academic freedom and ‘the right to know,’ I’ll hang up and call Berkeley. I can do business there-and I know I can here, over on the campus… . Not much, just a four-year scholarship, tuition and fees… . Don’t scream at me; use your discretionary fund-or make it a wash deal in bookkeeping. You’re over twenty-one; you can do arithmetic… . Nope, no hints. Buy a pig in a poke or your radiation lab won’t be in on it. Did I say ‘radiation lab’? I meant the entire physical science department. You can flee to South America, don’t let me sway you… . What? I’m an embezzler, too. Hold it.” Professor Reisfeld said to me, “You applied for M.I.T.?”

“Yes, sir, but-“

“He’s in your application files, ‘Clifford C. Russell.’ Send the letter to his home and have the head of your team fetch my copy… . Oh, a broad team, headed by a mathematical physicist- Farley, probably; he’s got imagination. This is the biggest thing since the apple konked Sir Isaac… . Sure, I’m a blackmailer, and you are a chair warmer and a luncheon speaker. When are you returning to the academic life? … Best to Beulah. ‘Bye.”

He hung up. “That’s settled. Kip, the one thing that confuses me is why those worm-faced monsters wanted me.”

I didn’t know how to say it. He had told me only the day before that he had been correlating odd data-unidentified sightings, unexpected opposition to space travel, many things that did not fit. Such a man is likely to get answers-and be listened to. If he had a weakness, it was modesty-which he hadn’t passed on to Peewee. If I told him that invaders from outer space had grown nervous over his intellectual curiosity, he would have pooh-poohed it. So I said, “They never told us, sir. But they thought you were important enough to grab.”

Mr. van Duivendijk stood up. “Curt, I won’t waste time listening to nonsense. Russell, I’m glad your schooling is arranged. If you need me, call me.” When he was gone, I tried to thank Professor Reisfeld. “I meant to pay my way, sir. I would have earned the money before school opens again.”

“In less than three weeks? Come now. Kip.” “I mean the rest of this year and-“

“Waste a year? No.”

“But I already-” I looked past his head at green leaves in their garden. “Professor … what date is it?” “Why, Labor Day, of course.”

(“-forthwith to the space-time whence they came.”)

Professor Reisfeld flipped water in my face. “Feeling better?” “I-I guess so. We were gone for weeks.”

“Kip, you’ve been through too much to let this shake you. You can talk it over with the stratosphere twins-” He gestured at Giomi and Bruck. “-but you won’t understand it. At least I didn’t. Why not assume that a hundred and sixty-seven thousand light-years leaves room for Tennessee windage amounting to only a hair’s breadth of a fraction of one per cent? Especially when the method doesn’t properly use space-time at all?”

When I left, Mrs. Reisfeld kissed me and Peewee blubbered and had Madame Pompadour say good-bye to Oscar, who was in the back seat because the Professor was driving me to the airport.

On the way he remarked, “Peewee is fond of you.” “Uh, I hope so.”

“And you? Or am I impertinent?”

“Am I fond of Peewee? I certainly am! She saved my life four or five times.” Peewee could drive you nuts. But she was gallant and loyal and smart-and had guts. “You won a life-saving medal or two yourself.”

I thought about it. “Seems to me I fumbled everything I tried. But I had help and an awful lot of luck.” I shivered at how luck alone had kept me out of the soup-real soup. ” ‘Luck’ is a question-begging word,” he answered. “You spoke of the ‘amazing luck’ that you were listening when my daughter called for help. That wasn’t luck.”

“Huh? I mean, ‘Sir’?”

“Why were you on that frequency? Because you were wearing a space suit. Why were you wearing it? Because you were determined to space. When a space ship called, you answered. If that is luck, then it is luck every time a batter hits a ball. Kip, ‘good luck’ follows careful preparation; ‘bad luck’ comes from sloppiness. You convinced a court older than Man himself that you and your kind were worth saving. Was that mere chance?”

“Uh … fact is, I got mad and almost ruined things. I was tired of being shoved around.”

“The best things in history are accomplished by people who get ‘tired of being shoved around.’ ” He frowned. “I’m glad you like Peewee. She is about twenty years old intellectually and six emotionally; she usually antagonizes people. So I’m glad she has gained a friend who is smarter than she is.”

My jaw dropped. “But, Professor, Peewee is much smarter than I am. She runs me ragged.”

He glanced at me. “She’s run me ragged for years-and I’m not stupid. Don’t downgrade yourself, Kip.” “It’s the truth.”

“So? The greatest mathematical psychologist of our time, a man who always wrote his own ticket even to retiring when it suited him-very difficult, when a man is in demand-this man married his star pupil. I doubt if their offspring is less bright than my own child.”

I had to untangle this to realize that he meant me. Then I didn’t know what to Say. How many kids really know their parents? Apparently I didn’t.

He went on, “Peewee is a handful, even for me. Here’s the airport. When you return for school, please plan on visiting us. Thanksgiving, too, if you will-no doubt you’ll go home Christmas.”

“Uh, thank you, sir. I’ll be back.” “Good.”

“Uh, about Peewee-if she gets too difficult, well, you’ve got the beacon. The Mother Thing can handle her.” “Mmm, that’s a thought.”

“Peewee tries to get around her but she never does. Oh-I almost forgot. Whom may I tell? Not about Peewee. About the whole thing.” “Isn’t that obvious?”

“Sir?”

“Tell anybody anything. You won’t very often. Almost no one will believe you.”

I rode home in a courier jet-those things go fast. Professor Reisfeld had insisted on lending me ten dollars when he found out that I had only a dollar sixty-seven, so I got a haircut at the bus station and bought two tickets to Centerville to keep Oscar out of the luggage compartment; he might have been damaged. The best thing about that scholarship was that now I

needn’t ever sell him-not that I would.

Centerville looked mighty good, from elms overhead to the chuckholes under foot. The driver stopped near our house because of Oscar; he’s clumsy to carry. I went to the barn and racked Oscar, told him I’d see him later, and went in the back door.

Mother wasn’t around. Dad was in his study. He looked up from reading. “Hi, Kip.” “Hi, Dad.”

“Nice trip?”

“Uh, I didn’t go to the lake.”

“I know. Dr. Reisfeld phoned-he briefed me thoroughly.”

“Oh. It was a nice trip-on the whole.” I saw that he was holding a volume of the Britannica, open to “Magellanic Clouds.”

He followed my glance. “I’ve never seen them,” he said regretfully. “I had a chance once, but I was busy except one cloudy night.” “When was that. Dad?”

“In South America, before you were born.” “I didn’t know you had been there.”

“It was a cloak-and-daggerish government job-not one to talk about. Are they beautiful?”

“Uh, not exactly.” I got another volume, turned to “Nebulae” and found the Great Nebula of Andromeda. “Here is beauty. That’s the way we look.” Dad sighed. “It must be lovely.”

“It is. I’ll tell you all about it. I’ve got a tape, too.”

“No hurry. You’ve had quite a trip. Three hundred and thirty-three thousand light-years-is that right?” “Oh, no, just half that.”

“I meant the round trip.”

“Oh. But we didn’t come back the same way.” “Eh?”

“I don’t know how to put it, but in these ships, if you make a jump, any jump, the short way back is the long way ‘round. You go straight ahead until you’re back where you started. Well, not ‘straight’ since space is curved-but straight as can be. That returns everything to zero.”

“Acosmic great-circle?”

“That’s the idea. All the way around in a straight line.”

“Mmm-” He frowned thoughtfully. “Kip, how far is it, around the Universe? The red-shift limit?”

I hesitated. “Dad, I asked-but the answer didn’t mean anything.” (The Mother Thing had said, “How can there be ‘distance’ where there is nothing?”) “It’s not a distance; it’s more of a condition. I didn’t travel it; I just went. You don’t go through, you slide past.”

Dad looked pensive. “I should know not to ask a mathematical question in words.”

I was about to suggest that Dr. Bruck could help when Mother sang out: “Hello, my darlings!” For a split second I thought I was hearing the Mother Thing.

She kissed Dad, she kissed me. “I’m glad you’re home, dear.” “Uh-” I turned to Dad.

“She knows.”

“Yes,” Mother agreed in a warm indulgent tone, “and I don’t mind where my big boy goes as long as he comes home safely. I know you’ll go as far as you want to.” She patted my cheek. “And I’ll always be proud of you. Myself, I’ve just been down to the corner for another chop.”

Next morning was Tuesday, I went to work early. As I expected, the fountain was a mess. I put on my white jacket and got cracking. Mr. Charton was on the phone; he hung up and came over. “Nice trip. Kip?”

“Very nice, Mr. Charton.”

“Kip, there’s something I’ve been meaning to say. Are you still anxious to go to the Moon?” I was startled. Then I decided that he couldn’t know.

Well, I hadn’t seen the Moon, hardly, I was still eager-though not as much in a hurry. “Yes, sir. But I’m going to college first.” “That’s what I mean. I- Well, I have no children. If you need money, say so.”

He had hinted at pharmacy school-but never this. And only last night Dad had told me that he had bought an education policy for me the day I was born-he had been waiting to see what I would do on my own. “Gee, Mr. Charton, that’s mighty nice of you!”

“I approve of your wanting an education.”

“Uh, I’ve got things lined up, sir. But I might need a loan someday.” “Or not a loan. Let me know.” He bustled away, plainly fussed.

I worked in a warm glow, sometimes touching the happy thing, tucked away in a pocket. Last night I had let Mother and Dad put it to their foreheads. Mother had cried; Dad said solemnly, “I begin to understand, Kip.” I decided to let Mr. Charton try it when I could work around to it. I got the fountain shining and checked the air conditioner. It was okay.

About midafternoon Ace Quiggle came in, plunked himself down. “Hi, Space Pirate! What do you hear from the Galactic Overlords? Yuk yuk yukkity yuk!” What would he have said to a straight answer? I touched the happy thing and said, “What’ll it be. Ace?”

“My usual, of course, and snap it up!” “Achoc malt?”

“You know that. Look alive. Junior! Wake up and get hep to the world around you.”

“Sure thing, Ace.” There was no use fretting about Ace; his world was as narrow as the hole between his ears, no deeper than his own hog wallow. Two girls came in; I served them cokes while Ace’s malt was in the mixer. He leered at them. “Ladies, do you know Commander Comet here?” One of them tittered; Ace smirked and went on: “I’m his manager. You want

heroing done, see me. Commander, I’ve been thinking about that ad you’re goin’ to run.”

“Huh?”

“Keep your ears open. ‘Have Space Suit-Will Travel,’ that doesn’t say enough. To make money out of that silly clown suit, we got to have oomph. So we add: “Bug-Eyed Monsters Exterminated-World Saving a Specialty-Rates on Request.’ Right?”

I shook my head. “No, Ace.”

“S’matter with you? No head for business?”

“Let’s stick to the facts. I don’t charge for world saving and don’t do it to order; it just happens. I’m not sure I’d do it on purpose-with you in it.” Both girls tittered. Ace scowled. “Smart guy, eh? Don’t you know that the customer is always right?”

“Always?”

“He certainly is. See that you remember it. Hurry up that malt!”

“Yes, Ace.” I reached for it; he shoved thirty-five cents at me; I pushed it back. “This is on the house.” I threw it in his face.

The End

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Rocket Ship Galileo (full text) by Robert Heinlein

Three high school students join forces with an older nuclear physicist to develop their own atomic rocket, solve their own space problems and blast off for the moon in spite of a series of mysterious setbacks.

Robert Heinlein wrote “Rocket Ship Galileo” in 1947 but it remains a good fast read to this day. I liked the period slang the characters throw around to each other. Also in tune with the period are the antagonists, Nazi survivors who establish an atom bomb base on the moon! Wow!

Three young fellas just out of high school spend their summer vacation re-building a transport rocket into a moon ship along with a brilliant scientist. Heinlein uses the teacher-pupil relationship to present nuggets of scientific knowledge to the reader.

“Rocket Ship Galileo” stands at the head of a line of twelve books referred to as “Heinlein Juveniles” in the Heinlein archives. He wrote twelve what we would call “Young Adult” books today, each an independent work not associated with any other. In all of them he has young people standing up and growing up as strong independent young humans. The series ends with “Have Spacesuit-Will Travel” in 1958. Some folks will include “Star Ship Troopers” and “Podkayne of Mars” but they were by different publishers.

As a first try the book has some flaws. The story line is laughable and the characters seem tissue thin to those familiar with Heinlein’s later work. But the underlying theme of self reliance, initiative and the daring needed to accomplish great things are all there to be absorbed along the the story itself. The government is mentioned only as an impediment to the progress of the boys, a reflection of Heinlein’s Libertarian streak. For that reason and the skill with which these themes are inserted into the story we give the high number of stars.

Anyone of the proper age will benefit from this story. Dads’ and Grand Dad’s might gift their young decedents with this book.

Rocket Ship Galileo

Chapter 1 – “LET THE ROCKET ROAR”

“EVERYBODYALL SET?” Young Ross Jenkins glanced nervously at his two chums. “How about your camera, Art? You sure you got the lens cover off this time?”

The three boys were huddled against a thick concrete wall, higher than their heads and about ten feet long. It separated them from a steel stand, anchored to the ground, to which was bolted a black metal shape, a pointed projectile, venomous in appearance and an ugly rocket. There were fittings on each side to which stub wings might be attached, but the fittings were empty; the creature was chained down for scientific examination.

“How about it, Art?” Ross repeated. The boy addressed straightened up to his full five feet three and faced him.

“Look,” Art Mueller answered, “of course I took the cover off, it’s on my check-off list. You worry about your rocket, last time it didn’t fire at all and I wasted twenty feet of film.” “But you forgot it once, okay, how about your lights?”

For answer Art switched on his spot lights; the beams shot straight up, bounced against highly polished stainless-steel mirrors and brilliantly illuminated the model rocket and the framework which would keep it from taking off during the test.

Athird boy, Maurice Abrams, peered at the scene through a periscope which allowed them to look over the reinforced concrete wall which shielded them from the rocket test stand. “Pretty as a picture,” he announced, excitement in his voice. “Ross, do you really think this fuel mix is what we’re looking for?”

Ross shrugged, “I don’t know. The lab tests looked good, we’ll soon know. All right, places everybody! Check-off lists, Art?” “Complete.”

“Morrie?” “Complete.”

“And mine’s complete. Stand by! I’m going to start the clock. Here goes!” He started checking off the seconds until the rocket was fired. “Minus ten . . minus nine … minus eight … minus seven … minus six … minus five … minus four… .”

Art wet his lips and started his camera. “Minus three! Minus two! Minus one! Contact!”

“Let it roar!” Morrie yelled, his voice already drowned by the ear-splitting noise of the escaping rocket gas.

Agreat plume of black smoke surged out the orifice of the thundering rocket when it was first fired, billowed against an earth ramp set twenty feet behind the rocket test stand and filled the little clearing with choking fumes. Ross shook his head in dissatisfaction at this and made an adjustment in the controls under his hand. The smoke cleared away; through the periscope in front of him he could see the rocket exhaust on the other side of the concrete barricade. The flame had cleared of the wasteful smoke and was almost transparent, save for occasional sparks. He could actually see trees and ground through the jet of flame. The images shimmered and shook but the exhaust gases were smoke-free.

“What does the dynamometer read?” he shouted to Morrie without taking his eyes away from the periscope. Morrie studied the instrument, rigged to the test stand itself, by means of a pair of opera glasses and his own periscope. “I can’t read it!” he shouted. “Yes, I can—wait a minute. Fifty-two—no, make it a hundred and fifty-two; it’s second time around. Hunder’ fifty- two, fif’-three, four. Ross, you’ve done it! You’ve done it! That’s more than twice as much thrust as the best we’ve ever had.”

Art looked up from where he was nursing his motion-picture camera. It was a commercial 8-millimeter job, modified by him to permit the use of more film so that every second of a test could be recorded. The modification worked, but was cantankerous and had to be nursed along. “How much more time?,” he demanded.

“Seventeen seconds,” Ross yelled at him. “Stand by, I’m going to give her the works.” He twisted his throttle-monitor valve to the right, wide open. The rocket responded by raising its voice from a deep-throated roar to a higher pitch with an angry overtone almost out of the audible range. It spoke with snarling menace.

Ross looked up to see Morrie back away from his periscope and climb on a box, opera glasses in hand.

“Morrie-get your head down!” The boy did not hear him against the scream of the jet, intent as he was on getting a better view of the rocket. Ross jumped away from the controls and dived at him, tackling him around the waist and dragging him down behind the safety of the barricade. They hit the ground together rather heavily and struggled there. It was not a real fight; Ross was angry, though not fighting mad, while Morrie was merely surprised.

“What’s the idea?,” he protested, when he caught his breath.

“You crazy idiot!” Ross grunted in his ear. “What were you trying to do? Get your head blown off?”

“But I wasn’t-” But Ross was already clambering to his feet and returning to his place at the controls; Morrie’s explanation, if any, was lost in the roar of the rocket.

“What goes on?” Art yelled. He had not left his place by his beloved camera, not only from a sense of duty but at least partly from indecision as to which side of the battle he should join. Ross heard his shout and turned to speak. “This goon,” he yelled bitterly, jerking a thumb at Morrie, “tried to-”

Ross’s version of the incident was lost; the snarling voice of the rocket suddenly changed pitch, then lost itself in a boneshaking explosion. At the same time there was a dazzling flash which would have blinded the boys had they not been protected by the barricade, but which nevertheless picked out every detail of the clearing in the trees with brilliance that numbed the eyes.

They were still blinking at the memory of the ghastly light when billowing clouds of smoke welled up from beyond the barricade, surrounded them, and made them cough. “Well,” Ross said bitterly and looked directly at Morrie, “that’s the last of the Starstrack V.”

“Look, Ross,” Morrie protested, his voice sounding shrill in the strange new stillness, “I didn’t do it. I was only trying to- ”

“I didn’t say you did,” Ross cut him short. “I know you didn’t do it. I had already made my last adjustment. She was on her own and she couldn’t take it. Forget it. But keep your head down after this-you darn near lost it. That’s what the barricade is for.”

“But I wasn’t going to stick my head up. I was just going to try-”

“Both of you forget it,” Art butted in. “So we blew up another one. So what? We’ll build another one. Whatever happened, I got it right here in the can.” He patted his camera. “Let’s take a look at the wreck.” He started to head around the end of the barricade.

“Wait a minute,” Ross commanded. He took a careful look through his periscope, then announced: “Seems okay. Both fuel chambers are split. There can’t be any real danger now. Don’t burn yourselves. Come on.”

They followed him around to the test stand.

The rocket itself was a complete wreck but the test stand was undamaged; it was built to take such punishment. Art turned his attention to the dynamometer which measured the thrust generated by the rocket. “I’ll have to recalibrate this,” he announced. “The loop isn’t hurt, but the dial and the rackand-pinion are shot.”

The other two boys did not answer him; they were busy with the rocket itself. The combustion chamber was split wide open and it was evident that pieces were missing. “How about it, Ross?” Morrie inquired. “Do you figure it was the metering pump going haywire, or was the soup just too hot for it?”

“Hard to tell,” Ross mused absently. “I don’t think it was the pump. The pump might jam and refuse to deliver fuel at all, but I don’t see how it could deliver too much fuel unless it reared back and passed a miracle.”

“Then it must have been the combustion chamber. The throat is all right. It isn’t even pitted much,” he added as he peered at it in the gathering twilight.

“Maybe. Well, let’s throw a tarp over it and look it over tomorrow morning. Can’t see anything now. Come on, Art.”

“Okay. Just a sec while I get my camera.” He detached his camera from its bracket and placed it in its carrying case, then helped the other two drag canvas tarpaulins over all the test gear-one for the test stand, one for the barricade with its controls, instruments, and periscopes. Then the three turned away and headed out of the clearing.

The clearing was surrounded by a barbed wire fence, placed there at the insistence of Ross’s parents, to whom the land belonged, in order to keep creatures, both four-legged and two- legged, from wandering into the line of fire while the boys were experimenting. The gate in this fence was directly behind the barricade and about fifty feet from it.

They had had no occasion to glance in the direction of the gate since the beginning of the test run-indeed, their attentions had been so heavily on the rocket that anything less than an earthquake would hardly have disturbed them.

Ross and Morrie were a little in front with Art close at their heels, so close that, when they stopped suddenly, he stumbled over them and almost dropped his camera. “Hey, watch where you’re going, can’t you?” he protested. “Pick up your big feet!”

They did not answer but stood still, staring ahead and at the ground. “What gives?,” he went on. “Why the trance? Why do-oh!” He had seen it too.

“It” was the body of a large man, crumpled on the ground, half in and half out the gate. There was a bloody wound on his head and blood on the ground. They all rushed forward together, but it was Morrie who shoved them back and kept them from touching the prone figure. “Take it easy!” he ordered.

“Don’t touch him. Remember your first aid. That’s a head wound. If you touch him, you may kill him.” “But we’ve got to find out if he’s alive,” Ross objected.

“I’ll find out. Here-give me those.” He reached out and appropriated the data sheets of the rocket test run from where they stuck out of Ross’s pocket. These he rolled into a tube about an inch in diameter, then cautiously placed it against the back of the still figure, on the left side over the heart. Placing his ear to the other end of the improvised stethoscope he listened. Ross and Art waited breathlessly. Presently his tense face relaxed into a grin. “His motor is turning over,” he announced. “Good and strong. At least we didn’t kill him.”

“We?”

“Who do you think? How do you think he got this way? Take a look around and you’ll probably find the piece of the rocket that konked him.” He straightened up. “But never mind that now. Ross, you shag up to your house and call an ambulance. Make it fast! Art and I will wait here with … with, uh, him. He may come to and we’ll have to keep him quiet.”

“Okay.” Ross was gone as he spoke. Art was staring at the unconscious man. Morrie touched him on the arm. “Sit down, kid. No use getting in a sweat. We’ll have trouble enough later. Even if this guy isn’t hurt much I suppose you realize this about winds up the activities the Galileo Marching-and-Chowder Society, at least the rocketry-and-loud-noises branch of it.”

Art looked unhappy. “I suppose so.”

“‘Suppose’ nothing. It’s certain. Ross’s father took a very dim view of the matter the time we blew all the windows out of his basement—not that I blame him. Now we hand him this. Loss of the use of the land is the least we can expect. We’ll be lucky not to have handed him a suit for damages too. Art agreed miserably. “I guess it’s back to stamp collecting for us,” he assented, but his mind was elsewhere. Law suit. The use of the land did not matter. To be sure the use of the Old Ross Place on the edge of town had been swell for all three of them, what with him and his mother living in back of the store, and Morrie’s folks living in a flat, but-law suit! Maybe Ross’s parents could afford it; but the little store just about kept Art and his mother going, even with the afterschool jobs he had had ever since junior high—a law suit would take the store away from them.

His first feeling of frightened sympathy for the wounded man was beginning to be replaced by a feeling of injustice done him. What was the guy doing there anyhow? It wasn’t just. “Let me have a look at this guy,” he said.

“Don’t touch him,” Morrie warned.

“I won’t. Got your pocket flash?” It was becoming quite dark in the clearing.

“Sure. Here … catch.” Art took the little flashlight and tried to examine the face of their victim-hard to do, as he was almost face down and the side of his face that was visible was smeared with blood.

Presently Art said in an odd tone of voice, “Morrie-would it hurt anything to wipe some of this blood away?”

“You’re dern tootin’ it would! You let him be till the doctor comes.” “All right, all right. Anyhow I don’t need to—I’m sure anyhow. Morrie, I know who he is.” “You do? Who?”

“He’s my uncle.” “Your uncle!”

“Yes, my uncle. You know-the one I’ve told you about. He’s my Uncle Don. Doctor Donald Cargraves, my ‘Atomic Bomb’ uncle.”

Chapter 2 – A MAN-SIZED CHALLENGE

“AT LEAST I’MPRETTYSURE it’s my uncle,” Art went on. “I could tell for certain if I could see his whole face.” “Don’t you know whether or not he’s your uncle? After all, a member of your own family-”

“Nope. I haven’t seen him since he came through here to see Mother, just after the war. That’s been a long time. I was just a kid then. But it looks like him.” “But he doesn’t look old enough,” Morrie said judiciously. “I should think- Here comes the ambulance!”

It was indeed, with Ross riding with the driver to show him the road and the driver cussing the fact that the road existed mostly in Ross’s imagination. They were all too busy for a few minutes, worrying over the stranger as a patient, to be much concerned with his identity as an individual. “Doesn’t look too bad,” the interne who rode with the ambulance announced. “Nasty scalp wound. Maybe concussion, maybe not. Now over with him- easy! -while I hold his head.” When turned face up and lifted into the stretcher, the patient’s eyes flickered; he moaned and seemed to try to say something. The doctor leaned over him.

Art caught Morrie’s eye and pressed a thumb and forefinger together. There was no longer any doubt as to the man’s identity, now that Art had seen his face.

Ross started to climb back in the ambulance but the interne waved him away. “But all of you boys show up at the hospital. We’ll have to make out an accident report on this.” As soon as the ambulance lumbered away Art told Ross about his discovery. Ross looked startled. “Your uncle, eh? Your own uncle. What was he doing here?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t know he was in town.”

“Say, look- I hope he’s not hurt bad, especially seeing as how he’s your uncle—but is this the uncle, the one you were telling us about who has been mentioned for the Nobel Prize?” “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. He’s my Uncle Donald Cargraves.”

“Doctor Donald Cargraves!” Ross whistled. “Jeepers! When we start slugging people we certainly go after big game, don’t we?” “It’s no laughing matter. Suppose he dies? What’ll I tell my mother?”

“I wasn’t laughing. Let’s get over to the hospital and find out how bad he’s hurt before you tell her anything. No use in worrying her unnecessarily.” Ross sighed, “I guess we might as well break the news to my folks. Then I’ll drive us over to the hospital.”

“Didn’t you tell them when you telephoned?,” Morrie asked. “No. They were out in the garden, so I just phoned and then leaned out to the curb to wait for the ambulance. They may have seen it come in the drive but I didn’t wait to find out.”

“I’ll bet you didn’t.”

Ross’s father was waiting for them at the house. He answered their greetings, then said, “Ross-” “Yes, sir?”

“I heard an explosion down toward your private stamping ground. Then I saw an ambulance drive in and drive away. What happened?” “Well, Dad, it was like this: We were making a full-power captive run on the new rocket and-” He sketched out the events.

Mr. Jenkins nodded and said, “I see. Come along, boys.” He started toward the converted stable which housed the family car. “Ross, run tell your mother where we are going. Tell her I said not to worry.” He went on, leaning on his cane a bit as he walked. Mr. Jenkins was a retired electrical engineer, even-tempered and taciturn.

Art could not remember his own father; Morrie’s father was still living but a very different personality. Mr. Abrams ruled a large and noisy, children-cluttered household by combining a loud voice with lavish affection.

When Ross returned, puffing, his father waved away his offer to drive. “No, thank you. I want us to get there.” The trip was made in silence. Mr. Jenkins left them in the foyer of the hospital with an injunction to wait. “What do you think he will do?” Morrie asked nervously.

“I don’t know. Dad’ll be fair about it.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Morrie admitted. “Right now I don’t want justice; I want charity.” “I hope Uncle Don is all right,” Art put in.

“Huh? Oh, yes, indeed! Sorry, Art, I’m afraid we’ve kind of forgotten your feelings. The principal thing is for him to get well, of course.”

“To tell the truth, before I knew it was Uncle Don, I was more worried over the chance that I might have gotten Mother into a law suit than I was over what we might have done to a stranger.”

“Forget it,” Ross advised. “Aperson can’t help worrying over his own troubles. Dad says the test is in what you do, not in what you think. We all did what we could for him.” “Which was mostly not to touch him before the doctor came,” Morrie pointed out.

“Which was what he needed.”

“Yes,” agreed Art, “but I don’t check you, Ross, on it not mattering what you think as long as you act all right. It seems to me that wrong ideas can be just as bad as wrong ways to do things.”

“Easy, now. If a guy does something brave when he’s scared to death is he braver than the guy who does the same thing but isn’t scared?” “He’s less … . no, he’s more… . You’ve got me all mixed up. It’s not the same thing.”

“Not quite, maybe. Skip it.”

They sat in silence for a long time. Then Morrie said, “Anyhow, I hope he’s all right.”

Mr. Jenkins came out with news. “Well, boys, this is your lucky day. Skull uninjured according to the X-ray. The patient woke when they sewed up his scalp. I talked with him and he has decided not to scalp any of you in return.” He smiled.

“May I see him?” asked Art.

“Not tonight. They’ve given him a hypo and he is asleep. I telephoned your mother, Art.” “You did? Thank you, sir.”

“She’s expecting you. I’ll drop you by.”

Art’s interview with his mother was not too difficult; Mr. Jenkins had laid a good foundation. In fact, Mrs. Mueller was incapable of believing that Art could be “bad.” But she did worry about him and Mr. Jenkins had soothed her, not only about Art but also as to the welfare of her brother. Morrie had still less trouble with Mr. Abrams. After being assured that the innocent bystander was not badly hurt, he had shrugged. “So what? So we have lawyers in the family for such things. At fifty cents a week it’ll take you about five hundred years to pay it off. Go to bed.”

“Yes, Poppa.”

The boys gathered at the rocket testing grounds the next morning, after being assured by a telephone call to the hospital that Doctor Cargraves had spent a good night. They planned to call on him that afternoon; at the moment they wanted to hold a post-mortem on the ill-starred Starstruck V.

The first job was to gather up the pieces, try to reassemble them, and then try to figure out what had happened. Art’s film of the event would be necessary to complete the story, but it was not yet ready.

They were well along with the reassembling when they heard a whistle and a shout from the direction of the gate. “Hello there! Anybody home?”

“Coming!” Ross answered. They skirted the barricade to where they could see the gate. Atall, husky figure waited there—a man so young, strong, and dynamic in appearance that the bandage around his head seemed out of place, and still more so in contrast with his friendly grin.

“Uncle Don!” Art yelled as he ran up to meet him.

“Hi,” said the newcomer. “You’re Art. Well, you’ve grown a lot but you haven’t changed much.” He shook hands. “What are you doing out of bed? You’re sick.”

“Not me,” his uncle asserted. “I’ve got a release from the hospital to prove it. But introduce me—are these the rest of the assassins?” “Oh-excuse me. Uncle Don, this is Maurice Abrams and this is Ross Jenkins. . . Doctor Cargraves.”

“How do you do, sir?” “Glad to know you, Doctor.”

“Glad to know you, too.” Cargraves started through the gate, then hesitated. “Sure this place isn’t booby-trapped?”

Ross looked worried. “Say, Doctor-we’re all sorry as can be. I still can’t see how it happened. This gate is covered by the barricade.”

“Ricochet shot probably. Forget it. I’m not hurt. Alittle skin and a little blood-that’s all. If I had turned back at your first warning sign, it wouldn’t have happened.” “How did you happen to be coming here?”

“Afair question. I hadn’t been invited, had I?” “Oh, I didn’t mean that.”

“But I owe you an explanation. When I breezed into town yesterday, I already knew of the Galileo Club; Art’s mother had mentioned it in letters. When my sister told me where Art was and what he was up to, I decided to slide over in hope of getting here in time to watch your test run. Your hired girl told me how to find my way out here.”

“You mean you hurried out here just to see this stuff we play around with?” “Sure. Why not? I’m interested in rockets.”

“Yes, but-we really haven’t got anything to show you. These are just little models.”

“Anew model,” Doctor Cargraves answered seriously, “of anything can be important, no matter who makes it nor how small it is. I wanted to see how you work. May I?”

“Oh, certainly, sir-we’d be honored.” Ross showed their guest around, with Morrie helping out and Art chipping in. Art was pink-faced and happy—this was his uncle, one of the world’s great, a pioneer of the Atomic Age. They inspected the test stand and the control panel. Cargraves looked properly impressed and tut-tutted over the loss of Starstruck V.

As a matter of fact he was impressed. It is common enough in the United States for boys to build and take apart almost anything mechanical, from alarm clocks to hiked-up jaloppies. It is not so common for them to understand the sort of controlled and recorded experimentation on which science is based.

Their equipment was crude and their facilities limited, but the approach was correct and the scientist recognized it.

The stainless steel mirrors used to bounce the spotlight beams over the barricade puzzled Doctor Cargraves. “Why take so much trouble to protect light bulbs?” he asked. “Bulbs are cheaper than stainless steel.”

“We were able to get the mirror steel free,” Ross explained. “The spotlight bulbs take cash money.”

The scientist chuckled. “That reason appeals to me. Well, you fellows have certainly thrown together quite a set-up. I wish I had seen your rocket before it blew up.”

“Of course the stuff we build,” Ross said diffidently, “can’t compare with a commercial unmanned rocket, say like a mailcarrier. But we would like to dope out something good enough to go after the junior prizes.”

“Ever competed?”

“Not yet. Our physics class in high school entered one last year in the novice classification. It wasn’t much—just a powder job, but that’s what got us started, though we’ve all been crazy about rockets ever since I can remember.”

“You’ve got some fancy control equipment. Where do you do your machine-shop work? Or do you have it done?” “Oh, no. We do it in the high-school shop. If the shop instructor okays you, you can work after school on your own.” “It must be quite a high school,” the physicist commented. “The one I went to didn’t have a machine shop.”

“I guess it is a pretty progressive school,” Ross agreed. “It’s a mechanical-arts-and-science high school and it has more courses in math and science and shop work than most. It’s nice to be able to use the shops. That’s where we built our telescope.”

“Astronomers too, eh?”

“Well-Morrie is the astronomer of the three of us.” “Is that so?,” Cargraves inquired, turning to Morrie.

Morrie shrugged. “Oh, not exactly. We all have our hobbies. Ross goes in for chemistry and rocket fuels. Art is a radio ham and a camera nut. You can study astronomy sitting down.”

“I see,” the physicist replied gravely. “Amatter of efficient self-protection. I knew about Art’s hobbies. By the way, Art, I owe you an apology; yesterday afternoon I took a look in your basement. But don’t worry-I didn’t touch anything.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about your touching stuff, Uncle Don,” Art protested, turning pinker, “but the place must have looked a mess.”

“It didn’t look like a drawing room but it did look like a working laboratory. I see you keep notebooks—no, I didn’t touch them, either!” “We all keep notebooks,” Morrie volunteered. “That’s the influence of Ross’s old man.”

“Dad told me he did not care,” Ross explained, “how much I messed around as long as I kept it above the tinker-toy level. He used to make me submit notes to him on everything I tried and he would grade them on clearness and completeness. After a while I got the idea and he quit.”

“Does he help you with your projects?”

“Not a bit. He says they’re our babies and we’ll have to nurse them.”

They prepared to adjourn to their clubhouse, an out-building left over from the days when the Old Ross Place was worked as a farm. They gathered up the forlorn pieces of Starstruck V, while Ross checked each item. “I guess that’s all,” he announced and started to pick up the remains.

“Wait a minute,” Morrie suggested. “We never did search for the piece that clipped Doctor Cargraves.”

“That’s right,” the scientist agreed. “I have a personal interest in that item, blunt instrument, missile, shrapnel, or whatever. I want to know how close I came to playing a harp.” Ross looked puzzled. “Come here, Art,” he said in a low voice.

“I am here. What do you want?”

“Tell me what piece is still missing-”

“What difference does it make?” But he bent over the box containing the broken rocket and checked the items. Presently he too looked puzzled. “Ross-”

“Yeah?”

“There isn’t anything missing.”

“That’s what I thought. But there has to be.”

“Wouldn’t it be more to the point,” suggested Cargraves, “to look around near where I was hit?” “I suppose so.”

They all searched, they found nothing. Presently they organized a system which covered the ground with such thoroughness that anything larger than a medium-small ant should have come to light. They found a penny and a broken Indian arrowhead, but nothing resembling a piece of the exploded rocket.

“This is getting us nowhere,” the doctor admitted. “Just where was I when you found me?” “Right in the gateway,” Morrie told him. “You were collapsed on your face and-”

“Just a minute. On my face?” “Yes. You were-”

“But how did I get knocked on my face? I was facing toward your testing ground when the lights went out. I’m sure of that. I should have fallen backwards.” “Well … I’m sure you didn’t, sir. Maybe it was a ricochet, as you said.”

“Hmm… maybe.” The doctor looked around. There was nothing near the gate which would make a ricochet probable. He looked at the spot where he had lain and spoke to himself. “What did you say, doctor?”

“Uh? Oh, nothing, nothing at all. Forget it. It was just a silly idea I had. It couldn’t be.” He straightened up as if dismissing the whole thing. “Let’s not waste any more time on my vanishing ‘blunt instrument.’ It was just curiosity. Let’s get on back.”

The clubhouse was a one-story frame building about twenty feet square. One wall was filled with Ross’s chemistry workbench with the usual clutter of test-tube racks, bunsen burners, awkward-looking, pretzel-like arrangements of glass tubing, and a double sink which looked as if it had been salvaged from a junk dealer. Ahome-made hood with a hinged glass front occupied one end of the bench. Parallel to the adjacent wall, in a little glass case, a precision balance’ of a good make but of very early vintage stood mounted on its own concrete pillar.

“We ought to have air-conditioning,” Ross told the doctor, “to do really good work.”

“You haven’t done so badly,” Cargraves commented. The boys had covered the rough walls with ply board; the cracks had been filled and the interior painted with washable enamel. The floor they had covered with linoleum, salvaged like the sink, but serviceable. The windows and door were tight. The place was clean.

“Humidity changes could play hob with some of your experiments, however,” he went on. “Do you plan to put in air-conditioning sometime?” “I doubt it. I guess the Galileo Club is about to fold up.”

“What? Oh, that seems a shame.”

“It is and it isn’t. This fall we all expect to go away to Tech.” “I see. But aren’t there any other members?”

“There used to be, but they’ve moved, gone away to school, gone in the army. I suppose we could have gotten new members but we didn’t try. Well . . we work together well and,… you know how it is.”

Cargraves nodded. He felt that he knew more explicitly than did the boy. These three were doing serious work; most of their schoolmates, even though mechanically minded, would be more interested in needling a stripped-down car up to a hundred miles an hour than in keeping careful notes.

“Well, you are certainly comfortable here. It’s a shame you can’t take it with you.” Alow, wide, padded seat stretched from wall to wall opposite the chemistry layout. The other two boys were sprawled on it, listening. Behind them, bookshelves had been built into the wall. Jules Verne crowded against Mark’s Handbook of Mechanical Engineering. Cargraves noted other old friends: H.G. Wells’ Seven Famous Novels, The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, and Smyth’s Atomic Energy for Military Purposes. Jammed in with them, side by side with Ley’s Rockets and Eddington’s Nature of the Physical World, were dozens of puip magazines of the sort with robot men or space ships on their covers.

He pulled down a dog-eared copy of Haggard’s When the Earth Trembled and settled his long body between the boys. He was beginning to feel at home. These boys he knew; he had only to gaze back through the corridors of his mind to recognize himself.

Ross said, “If you’ll excuse me, I want to run up to the house.” Cargraves grunted, “Sure thing,” with his nose still in the book. Ross came back to announce, “My mother would like all of you to stay for lunch.”

Morrie grinned, Art looked troubled. “My mother thinks I eat too many meals over here as it is,” he protested feebly, his eyes on his uncle. Cargraves took him by the arm. “I’ll go your bail on this one, Art,” he assured him; then to Ross, “Please tell your mother that we are very happy to accept.”

At lunch the adults talked, the boys listened. The scientist, his turban bandage looking stranger than ever, hit it off well with his elders. Any one would hit it off well with Mrs. Jenkins, who could have been friendly and gracious at a cannibal feast, but the boys were not used to seeing Mr. Jenkins in a chatty mood.

The boys were surprised to find out how much Mr. Jenkins knew about atomics. They had the usual low opinion of the mental processes of adults; Mr. Jenkins they respected but had subconsciously considered him the anachronism which most of his generation in fact was, a generation as a whole incapable of realizing that the world had changed completely a few years before, at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. Yet Mr. Jenkins seemed to know who Doctor Cargraves was and seemed to know that he had been retained until recently by North American Atomics. The boys listened carefully to find out what Doctor Cargraves planned to do next, but Mr. Jenkins did not ask and Cargraves did not volunteer the information.

After lunch the three and their guest went back to the clubhouse. Cargraves spent most of the afternoon spread over the bunk, telling stories of the early days at Oak Ridge when the prospect of drowning in the inescapable, adhesive mud was more dismaying than the ever-present danger of radioactive poisoning, and the story, old but ever new and eternally exciting, of the black, rainy morning in the New Mexico desert when a great purple-and-golden mushroom had climbed to the stratosphere, proclaiming that man had at last unloosed the power of the suns.

Then he shut up, claiming that he wanted to re-read the old H. Rider Haggard novel he had found. Ross and Morrie got busy at the bench; Art took a magazine. His eyes kept returning to his fabulous uncle. He noticed that the man did not seem to be turning the pages very often.

Quite a while later Doctor Cargraves put down his book. “What do you fellows know about atomics?”

The boys exchanged glances before Morrie ventured to answer. “Not much I guess. High-school physics can’t touch it, really, and you can’t mess with it in a home laboratory.” “That’s right. But you are interested?”

“Oh, my, yes! We’ve read what we could—Pollard and Davidson, and Gamov’s new book. But we don’t have the math for atomics.” “How much math do you have?”

“Through differential equations.”

“Huh?” Cargraves looked amazed. “Wait a minute. You guys are still in high school?” “Just graduated.”

“What kind of high school teaches differential equations? Or am I an old fuddy-duddy?”

Morrie seemed almost defensive in his explanation. “It’s a new approach. You have to pass a test, then they give you algebra through quadratics, plane and spherical trigonometry, plane and solid geometry, and plane and solid analytical geometry all in one course, stirred in together. When you finish that course- and you take it as slow or as fast as you like -you go on.”

Cargraves shook his head. “There’ve been some changes made while I was busy with the neutrons. Okay, Quiz Kids, at that rate you’ll be ready for quantum theory and wave mechanics before long. But I wonder how they go about cramming you this way? Do you savvy the postulational notion in math?”

“Why, I think so.” “Tell me.”

Morrie took a deep breath. “No mathematics has any reality of its own, not even common arithmetic. All mathematics is purely an invention of the mind, with no connection with the world around us, except that we find some mathematics convenient in describing things.”

“Go on. You’re doing fine!”

“Even then it isn’t real- or isn’t ‘true’ -the way the ancients thought of it. Any system of mathematics is derived from purely arbitrary assumptions, called ‘postulates’, the sort of thing the ancients called ‘axioms.’”

“Your jets are driving, kid! How about the operational notion in scientific theory? No … Art-you tell me.”

Art looked embarrassed; Morrie looked pleased but relieved. “Well, uh … the operational idea is, uh, it’s building up your theory in terms of the operations you perform, like measuring, or timing, so that you don’t go reading into the experiments things that aren’t there.”

Cargraves nodded. “That’s good enough—it shows you know what you’re talking about.” He kept quiet for a long time, then he added, “You fellows really interested in rockets?” Ross answered this time, “Why, er, yes, we are. Rockets among other things. We would certainly like to have a go at those junior prizes.”

“That’s all?”

“Well, no, not exactly. I guess we all think, well, maybe some day …” His voice trailed off.

“I think I see.” Cargraves sat up. “But why bother with the competition? After all, as you pointed out, model rockets can’t touch the full-sized commercial jobs. The prizes are offered just to keep up interest in rocketry—it’s like the model airplane meets they used to have when I was a kid. But you guys can do better than that—why don’t you go in for the senior prizes?”

Three sets of eyes were fixed on him. “What do you mean?” Cargraves shrugged. “Why don’t you go to the moon with me?”

Chapter 3 – CUT-RATE COLUMBUS

THE SILENCE THAT FILLED THE clubhouse had a solid quality, as if one could slice it and make sandwiches. Ross recovered his voice first. “You don’t mean it,” he said in a hushed tone.

“But I do,” Doctor Cargraves answered evenly. “I mean it quite seriously. I propose to try to make a trip to the moon. I’d like to have you fellows with me. Art,” he added, “close your mouth. You’ll make a draft.”

Art gulped, did as he was told, then promptly opened it again. “But look,” he said, his words racing, “Uncle Don, if you take us—I mean, how could we-or if we did, what would we use for

—how do you propose-“

“Easy, easy!” Cargraves protested. “All of you keep quiet and I’ll tell you what I have in mind. Then you can think it over and tell me whether or not you want to go for it.” Morrie slapped the bench beside him. “I don’t care,” he said, “I don’t care if you’re going to try to fly there on your own broom—I’m in. I’m going along.”

“So am I,” Ross added quickly, moistening his lips.

Art looked wildly at the other two. “But I didn’t mean that I wasn’t—I was just asking—Oh, shucks! Me, too! You know that.” The young scientist gave the impression of bowing without getting up.

“Gentlemen, I appreciate the confidence you place in me. But you are not committed to anything just yet.” “But-“

“So kindly pipe down,” he went on, “and I’ll lay out my cards, face up. Then we’ll talk. Have you guys ever taken an oath?” “Oh, sure—Scout Oath, anyhow.”

“I was a witness in court once.”

“Fine. I want you all to promise, on your honor, not to spill anything I tell you without my specific permission, whether we do business or not. It is understood that you are not bound thereby to remain silent if you are morally obligated to speak up—you are free to tell on me if there are moral or legal reasons why you should. Otherwise, you keep mum—on your honor. How about it?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Right!”

“Check.”

“Okay,” agreed Cargraves, settling back on his spine. “That was mostly a matter of form, to impress you with the necessity of keeping your lips buttoned. You’ll understand why, later. Now here is the idea: All my life I’ve wanted to see the day when men would conquer space and explore the planets—and I wanted to take part in it. I don’t have to tell you how that feels.” He waved a hand at the book shelves. “Those books show me you understand it; you’ve got the madness yourselves. Besides that, what I saw out on your rocket grounds, what I see here, what I saw yesterday when I sneaked a look in Art’s lab, shows me that you aren’t satisfied just to dream about it and read about it—you want to do something. Right?”

“Right!” It was a chorus.

Cargraves nodded. “I felt the same way. I took my first degree in mechanical engineering with the notion that rockets were mechanical engineering and that I would need the training. I worked as an engineer after graduation until I had saved up enough to go back to school. I took my doctor’s degree in atomic physics, because I had a hunch- oh, I wasn’t the only one! -I had a hunch that atomic power was needed for practical space ships. Then came the war and the Manhattan Project. When the Atomic Age opened up a lot of people predicted that space flight was just around the corner. But it didn’t work out that way-nobody knew how to harness the atom to a rocket. Do you know why?”

Somewhat hesitantly Ross spoke up. “Yes, I think I do.” “Go ahead.”

“Well, for a rocket you need mass times velocity, quite a bit of mass in what the jet throws out and plenty of velocity. But in an atomic reaction there isn’t very much mass and the energy comes out in radiations in all directions instead of 2 nice, lined-up jet. Just the same-“

“‘Just the same’ what?”

“Well, there ought to be a way to harness all that power. Darn it—with so much power from so little weight, there ought to be some way.”

“Just what I’ve always thought,” Cargraves said with a grin. “We’ve built atomic plants that turn out more power than Boulder Dam. We’ve made atomic bombs that make the two used in the war seem like firecrackers. Power to burn, power to throw away. Yet we haven’t been able to hook it to a rocket. Of course there are other problems. An atomic power plant takes a lot of shielding to protect the operators—you know that. And that means weight. Weight is everything in a rocket. If you add another hundred pounds in dead load, you have to pay for it in fuel. Suppose your shield weighed only a ton—how much fuel would that cost you, Ross?”

Ross scratched his head. “I don’t know what kind of fuel you mean nor what kind of a rocket you are talking about—what you want it to do.”

“Fair enough,” the scientist admitted. “I asked you an impossible question. Suppose we make it a chemical fuel and a moon rocket and assume a mass-ratio of twenfy to one. Then for a shield weighing a ton we have to carry twenty tons of fuel.”

Art sat up suddenly. “Wait a minute, Uncle Don.” “Yes?”

“If you use a chemical fuel, like alcohol and liquid oxygen say, then you won’t need a radiation shield.”

“You got me, kid. But that was just for illustration. If you had a decent way to use atomic power, you might be able to hold your mass-ratio down to, let’s say, one-to-one. Then a one-ton shield would only require one ton of fuel to carry it. That suit you better?”

Art wriggled in excitement. “I’ll say it does. That means a real space ship. We could go anywhere in it!”

“But we’re still on earth,” his uncle pointed out dryly. “I said ‘if.’ Don’t burn out your jets before you take off. And there is still a third hurdle: atomic power plants are fussy to control—hard to turn on, hard to turn off. But we can let that one alone till we come to it. I still think we’ll get to the moon.”

He paused. They waited expectantly.

“I think I’ve got a way to apply atomic power to rockets.” Nobody stood up. Nobody cheered. No one made a speech starting, “On this historic occasion-” Instead they held their breaths, waiting for him to go on.

“Oh, I’m not going into details now. You’ll find out all about it, if we work together.” “We will!”

“Sure thing!”

“I hope so. I tried to interest the company I was with in the scheme, but they wouldn’t hold still.” “Gee whillickers! Why not?”

“Corporations are in business to make money; they owe that to their stockholders. Do you see any obvious way to make money out of a flight to the moon?” “Shucks.” Art tossed it off. “They ought to be willing to risk going broke to back a thing like this.”

“Nope. You’re off the beam, kid. Remember they are handling other people’s money. Have you any idea how much it would cost to do the research and engineering development, using the ordinary commercial methods, for anything as big as a trip to the moon?”

“No,” Art admitted. “Agood many thousands, I suppose.” Morrie spoke up. “More like a hundred thousand.”

“That’s closer. The technical director of our company made up a tentative budget of a million and a quarter.” “Whew!”

“Oh, he was just showing that it was not commercially practical. He wanted to adapt my idea to power plants for ships and trains. So I handed in my resignation.” “Good for you!”

Morrie looked thoughtful. “I guess I see,” he said slowly, “why you swore us to secrecy. They own your idea.”

Cargraves shook his head emphatically, “No, not at all. You certainly would be entitled to squawk if I tried to get you into a scheme to jump somebody else’s patent rights—even if they held them by a yellow-dog, brain-picking contract.” Cargraves spoke with vehemence. “My contract wasn’t that sort. The company owns the idea for the purposes for which the research was carried out—power. And I own anything else I see in it. We parted on good terms. I don’t blame them. When the Queen staked Columbus, nobody dreamed that he would come back with the Empire State Building in his pocket.”

“Hey,” said Ross, “these senior prizes—they aren’t big enough. That’s why nobody has made a real bid for the top ones. The prize wouldn’t pay the expenses, not for the kind of budget you mentioned. It’s a sort of a swindle, isn’t it?”

“Not a swindle, but that’s about the size of it,” Cargraves conceded. “With the top prize only $250,000 it won’t tempt General Electric, or du Pont, or North American Atomic, or any other big research corporation. They can’t afford it, unless some other profit can be seen. As a matter of fact, a lot of the prize money comes from those corporations.” He sat up again. “But we can compete for it!”

“How?”

“I don’t give a darn about the prize money. I just want to go!” “Me too!” Ross made the statement; Art chimed in.

“My sentiments exactly. As to how, that’s where you come in. I can’t spend a million dollars, but I think there is a way to tackle this on a shoestring. We need a ship. We need the fuel. We need a lot of engineering and mechanical work. We need overhead expenses and supplies for the trip. I’ve got a ship.”

“You have? Now? Aspace ship?” Art was wide-eyed.

“I’ve got an option to buy an Atlantic freighter-rocket at scrap prices. I can swing that. It’s a good rocket, but they are replacing the manned freighters with the more economical robot- controlled jobs. It’s a V-17 and it isn’t fit to convert to passenger service, so we get it as scrap. But if I buy it, it leaves me almost broke. Under the UN trusteeship for atomics, a senior member of the Global Association of Atomic Scientists—that’s me!” he stuck in, grinning, “can get fissionable material for experimental purposes, if the directors of the Association approve. I can swing that. I’ve picked thorium, rather than uranium-235, or plutonium-never mind why. But the project itself had me stumped, just too expensive. I was about ready to try to promote it by endorsements and lecture contracts and all the other clap- trap it sometimes takes to put over scientific work -when I met you fellows.”

He got up and faced them. “I don’t need much to convert that old V-17 into a space ship. But I do need skilled hands and brains and the imagination to know what is needed and why. You’d be my mechanics and junior engineers and machine-shop workers and instrument men and presently my crew. You’ll do hard, dirty work for long hours and cook your own meals in the bargain. You’ll get nothing but coffee-and-cakes and a chance to break your necks. The ship may never leave the ground. If it does, chances are you’ll never live to tell about it. It won’t be one big adventure. I’ll work you till you’re sick of me and probably nothing will come of it. But that’s the proposition. Think it over and let me know.”

There was the nerve-tingling pause which precedes an earthquake. Then the boys were on their feet, shouting all at once. It was difficult to make out words, but the motion had been passed by acclamation; the Galileo Club intended to go to the moon.

When the buzzing had died down, Cargraves noticed that Ross’s face was suddenly grave. “What’s the matter, Ross? Cold feet already?” “No,” Ross shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s too good to be true.”

“Could be, could be. I think I know what’s worrying you. Your parents?” “Uh, huh. I doubt if our folks will ever let us do it.”

Chapter 4 – THE BLOOD OF PIONEERS

CARGRAVES LOOKED AT THEIR woebegone faces. He knew what they were faced with; a boy can’t just step up to his father and say, “By the way, old man, count me out on those plans we made for me to go to college. I’ve got a date to meet Santa Claus at the North Pole.” It was the real reason he had hesitated before speaking of his plans. Finally he said, “I’m afraid it’s up to each of you. Your promise to me does not apply to your parents, but ask them to respect your confidence. I don’t want our plans to get into the news.”

“But look, Doctor Cargraves,” Morrie put in, “why be so secret about it? It might make our folks feel that it was just a wild-eyed kid’s dream. Why can’t you just go to them and explain where we would fit into it?”

“No,” Cargraves answered, “they are your parents. When and if they want to see me, I’ll go to them and try to give satisfactory answers. But you will have to convince them that you mean business. As to secrecy, the reasons are these: there is only one aspect of my idea that can be patented and, under the rules of the UN Atomics Convention, it can be licensed by any one who wants to use it. The company is obtaining the patent, but not as a rocket device. The idea that I can apply it to a cheap, shoestring venture into space travel is mine and I don’t want any one else to beat me to it with more money and stronger backing. Just before we are ready to leave we will call in the reporters—probably to run a story about how we busted our

necks on the take-off.”

“But I see your point,” he went on. “We don’t want this to look like a mad-scientist-and-secret-laboratory set-up. Well, I’ll try to convince them.”

Doctor Cargraves made an exception in the case of Art’s mother, because she was his own sister. He cautioned Art to retire to his basement laboratory as soon as dinner was over and then, after helping with the dishes, spoke to her. She listened quietly while he explained. “Well, what do you think of it?

She sat very still, her eyes everywhere but on his face, her hands busy twisting and untwisting her handkerchief. “Don, you can’t do this to me.” He waited for her to go on. “I can’t let him go, Don. He’s all I’ve got. With Hans gone… .”

“I know that,” the doctor answered gently. “But Hans has been gone since Art was a baby. You can’t limit the boy on that account.” “Do you think that makes it any easier?” She was close to tears.

“No, I don’t. But it is on Hans’ account that you must not keep his son in cotton batting. Hans had courage to burn. If he had been willing to knuckle under to the Nazis he would have stayed at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. But Hans was a scientist. He wouldn’t trim his notion of truth to fit political gangsters. He-“

“And it killed him!”

“I know, I know. But remember, Grace, it was only the fact that you were an American girl that enabled you to pull enough strings to get him out of the concentration camp.” “I don’t see what that’s got to do with it. Oh, you should have seen him when they let him out!” She was crying now.

“I did see him when you brought him to this country,” he said gently, “and that was bad enough. But the fact that you are American has a lot to do with it. We have a tradition of freedom, personal freedom, scientific freedom. That freedom isn’t kept alive by caution and unwillingness to take risks. If Hans were alive he would be going with me—you know that, Sis. You owe it to his son not to keep him caged. You can’t keep him tied to your apron strings forever, anyhow. Afew more years and you will have to let him follow his own bent.”

Her head was bowed. She did not answer. He patted her shoulder. “You think it over, Sis. I’ll try to bring him back in one piece.” When Art came upstairs, much later, his mother was still sitting, waiting for him. “Arthur?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“You want to go to the moon?” “Yes, Mother.”

She took a deep breath, then replied steadily. “You be a good boy on the moon, Arthur. You do what your uncle tells you to.” “I will, Mother.”

Morrie managed to separate his father from the rest of the swarming brood shortly after dinner. “Poppa, I want to talk to you man to man.” “And how else?”

“Well, this is different. I know you wanted me to come into the business, but you agreed to help me go to Tech.”

His father nodded. “The business will get along. Scientists we are proud to have in the family. Your Uncle Bernard is a fine surgeon. Do we ask him to help with the business?” “Yes, Poppa, but that’s just it-I don’t want to go to Tech.”

“So? Another school?”

“No, I don’t want to go to school.” He explained Doctor Cargraves’ scheme, blurting it out as fast as possible in an attempt to give his father the whole picture before he set his mind. Finished, he waited.

His father rocked back and forth. “So it’s the moon now, is it? And maybe next week the sun. Aman should settle down if he expects to accomplish anything, Maurice.” “But, Poppa, this is what I want to accomplish!”

“When do you expect to start?” “You mean you’ll let me? I can?”

“Not so fast, Maurice. I did not say yes; I did not say no. It has been quite a while since you stood up before the congregation and made your speech, ‘Today I am a man-‘ That meant you were a man, Maurice, right that moment. It’s not for me to let you; it’s for me to advise you. I advise you not to. I think it’s foolishness.”

Morrie stood silent, stubborn but respectful.

“Wait a week, then come back and tell me what you are going to do. There’s a pretty good chance that you will break your neck on this scheme, isn’t there?” “Well … yes, I suppose so.”

“Aweek isn’t too long to make up your mind to kill yourself. In the meantime, don’t talk to Momma about this.” “Oh, I won’t!”

“If you decide to go ahead anyway, I’ll break the news to her. Momma isn’t going to like this, Maurice.”

Doctor Donald Cargraves received a telephone call the next morning which requested him, if convenient, to come to the Jenkins’ home. He did so, feeling, unreasonably he thought, as if he were being called in on the carpet. He found Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins in the drawing room; Ross was not in sight. Mr. Jenkins shook hands with him and offered him a chair.

“Cigarette, Doctor? Cigar?” “Neither, thank you.”

“If you smoke a pipe,” Mrs. Jenkins added, “please do so.” Cargraves thanked her and gratefully stoked up his old stinker.

“Ross tells me a strange story,” Mr. Jenkins started in. “If he were not pretty reliable I’d think his imagination was working overtime. Perhaps you can explain it.”

“I’ll try, sir.”

“Thanks. Is it true, Doctor, that you intend to try to make a trip to the moon.” “Quite true.”

“Well! Is it also true that you have invited Ross and his chums to go with you in this fantastic adventure?” “Yes, it is.” Doctor Cargraves found that he was biting hard on the stem of his pipe.

Mr. Jenkins stared at him. “I’m amazed. Even if it were something safe and sane, your choice of boys as partners strikes me as outlandish.” Cargraves explained why he believed the boys could be competent junior partners in the enterprise. “In any case,” he concluded, “being young is not necessarily a handicap. The great majority of the scientists in the Manhattan Project were very young men.”

“But not boys, Doctor.”

“Perhaps not. Still, Sir Isaac Newton was a boy when he invented the calculus. Professor Einstein himself was only twenty-six when he published his first paper on relativity—and the work had been done when he was still younger. In mechanics and in the physical sciences, calendar age has nothing to do with the case; it’s solely a matter of training and ability.”

“Even if what you say is true, Doctor, training takes time and these boys have not had time for the training you need for such a job. It takes years to make an engineer, still more years to make a toolmaker or an instrument man. Tarnation, I’m an engineer myself. I know what I’m talking about.”

“Ordinarily I would agree with you. But these boys have what I need. Have you looked at their work?” “Some of it.”

“How good is it?”

“It’s good work—within the limits of what they know.”

“But what they know is just what I need for this job. They are rocket fans now. They’ve learned in their hobbies the specialties I need.” Mr. Jenkins considered this, then shook his head. “I suppose there is something in what you say. But the scheme is fantastic. I don’t say that space flight is fantastic; I expect that the engineering problems involved will some day be solved. But space flight is not a back-yard enterprise. When it comes it will be done by the air forces, or as a project of one of the big corporations, not by half-grown boys.”

Cargraves shook his head. “The government won’t do it. It would be laughed off the floor of Congress. As for corporations, I have reason to be almost certain they won’t do it, either.” Mr. Jenkins looked at him quizzically. “Then it seems to me that we’re not likely to see space flight in our lifetimes.”

“I wouldn’t say so,” the scientist countered. “The United States isn’t the only country on the globe. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear some morning that the Russians had done it. They’ve got the technical ability and they seem to be willing to spend money on science. They might do it.”

“Well, what if they do?”

Cargraves took a deep breath. “I have nothing against the Russians; if they beat me to the moon, I’ll take off my hat to them. But I prefer our system to theirs; it would be a sour day for us if it turned out that they could do something as big and as wonderful as this when we weren’t even prepared to tackle it, under our set-up. Anyhow,” he continued, “I have enough pride in my own land to want it to be us, rather than some other country.”

Mr. Jenkins nodded and changed his tack. “Even if these three boys have the special skills you need, I still don’t see why you picked boys. Frankly, that’s why the scheme looks rattlebrained to me. You should have experienced engineers and mechanics and your crew should be qualified rocket pilots.”

Doctor Cargraves laid the whole thing before them, and explained how he hoped to carry out his plans on a slim budget. When he had finished Mr. Jenkins said, “Then as a matter of fact you braced these three boys because you were hard up for cash?”

“If you care to put it that way.”

“I didn’t put it that way; you did. Candidly, I don’t altogether approve of your actions. I don’t think you meant any harm, but you didn’t stop to think. I don’t thank you for getting Ross and his friends stirred up over a matter unsuited to their ages without consulting their parents first.” Donald Cargraves felt his mouth grow tense but said nothing; he felt that he could not explain that he had lain awake much of the night over misgivings of just that sort.

“However,” Mr. Jenkins went on, “I understand your disappointment and sympathize with your enthusiasm.” He smiled briefly. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll hire three mechanics- you pick them -and one junior engineer or physicist, to help you in converting your ship. When the time comes, I’ll arrange for a crew. Hiring will not be needed there, in my opinion—we will be able to pick from a long list of volunteers. Wait a minute,” he said, as Cargraves started to speak, “you’ll be under no obligation to me. We will make it a business proposition of a speculative sort. We’ll draw up a contract under which, if you make it, you assign to me a proper percentage of the prize money and of the profits from exclusive news stories, books, lectures, and so forth. Does that look like a way out?”

Cargraves took a deep breath. “Mr. Jenkins,” he said slowly, “if I had had that proposition last week, I would have jumped at it. But I can’t take it.” “Why not?”

“I can’t let the boys down. I’m already committed.”

“Would it make a difference if I told you there was absolutely no chance of Ross being allowed to go?”

“No. I will have to go looking for just such a backer as yourself, but it can’t be you. It would smack too much of allowing myself to be bought off- No offense intended, Mr. Jenkins! -to welch on the proposition I made Ross.”

Mr. Jenkins nodded. “I was afraid you would feel that way. I respect your attitude, Doctor. Let me call Ross in and tell him the outcome.” He started for the door. “Just a moment, Mr. Jenkins-“

“Yes?”

“I want to tell you that I respect your attitude, too. As I told you, the project is dangerous, quite dangerous. I think it is a proper danger but I don’t deny your right to forbid your son to risk his neck with me.”

“I am afraid you don’t understand me, Doctor Cargraves. It’s dangerous, certainly, and naturally that worries me and Mrs. Jenkins, but that is not my objection. I would not try to keep Ross out of danger. I let him take flying lessons; I even had something to do with getting two surplus army trainers for the high school. I haven’t tried to keep him from playing around with explosives. That’s not the reason.”

“May I asked what it is?”

“Of course. Ross is scheduled to start in at the Technical Institute this fall. I think it’s more important for him to get a sound basic education than for him to be first man on the moon.” He turned away again.

“Wait a minute! If it’s his education you are worried about, would you consider me a competent teacher?” “Eh? Well … yes.”

“I will undertake to tutor the boys in technical and engineering subjects. I will see to it that they do not fall behind.”

Mr. Jenkins hesitated momentarily. “No, Doctor, the matter is settled. An engineer without a degree has two strikes against him to start with. Ross is going to get his degree.” He stepped quickly to the door and called out,

“Ross!”

“Coming, Dad.” The center of the argument ran downstairs and into the room. He looked around, first at Cargraves, then anxiously at his father, and finally at his mother, who looked up from her knitting and smiled at him but did not speak. “What’s the verdict?” he inquired.

His father put it bluntly. “Ross, you start in school in the fall. I cannot okay this scheme.”

Ross’s jaw muscles twitched but he did not answer directly. Instead he said to Cargraves, “How about Art and Morrie?” “Art’s going. Morrie phoned me and said his father didn’t think much of it but would not forbid it.”

“Does that make any difference, Dad?”

“I’m afraid not. I don’t like to oppose you, son, but when it comes right down to cases, I am responsible for you until you are twenty-one. You’ve got to get your degree.”

“But … but … look, Dad. Adegree isn’t everything. If the trip is successful, I’ll be so famous that I won’t need a tag on my name to get a job. And if I don’t come back, I won’t need a degree!”

Mr. Jenkins shook his head. “Ross, my mind is made up.” Cargraves could see that Ross was fighting to keep the tears back. Somehow it made him seem older, not younger. When he spoke again his voice was unsteady. “Dad?”

“Yes, Ross?”

“If I can’t go, may I at least go along to help with the rebuilding job? They’ll need help.”

Cargraves looked at him with new interest. He had some comprehension of what the proposal would cost the boy in heartache and frustration. Mr. Jenkins looked surprised but answered quickly. “You may do that up till the time school opens.”

“Suppose they aren’t through by then? I wouldn’t want to walk out on them.”

“Very well. If necessary you can start school the second semester. That is my last concession.” He turned to Doctor Cargraves. “I shall count on you for some tutoring.” Then to his son, “But that is the end of the matter, Ross. When you are twenty-one you can risk your neck in a space ship if you like. Frankly, I expect that there will still be plenty of chance for you to attempt the first flight to the moon if you are determined to try it.” He stood up.

“Albert.”

“Eh? Yes, Martha?,” he turned deferentially to his wife.

She laid her knitting in her lap and spoke emphatically. “Let him go, Albert!” “Eh? What do you mean, my dear?”

“I mean, let the boy go to the moon, if he can. I know what I said, and you’ve put up a good argument for me. But I’ve listened and learned. Doctor Cargraves is right; I was wrong. We can’t expect to keep them in the nest.”

“Oh, I know what I said,” she went on, “but a mother is bound to cry a little. Just the same, this country was not built by people who were afraid to go. Ross’s great-great-grandfather crossed the mountains in a Conestoga wagon and homesteaded this place. He was nineteen, his bride was seventeen. It’s a matter of family record that their parents opposed the move.” She stirred suddenly and one of her knitting needles broke.

“I would hate to think that I had let the blood run thin.” She got up and went quickly from the room.

Mr. Jenkins’ shoulders sagged. “You have my permission, Ross,” he said presently. “Doctor, I wish you good luck. And now, if you will excuse me. He followed his wife.

Chapter 5 – GROWING PAINS

“HOW MUCH FARTHER?” The noise of the stripped-down car combined with desert wind caused Art to shout. “Look at the map,” Ross said, his hands busy at the wheel in trying to avoid a jack rabbit. “It’s fifty-three miles from Route 66 to the turn-off, then seven miles on the turn-off.”

“We left Highway 66 about thirty-nine, forty miles back,” Art replied. “We oughtto be in sight of the turn-off before long.” He squinted out across bare, colorful New Mexico countryside. “Did you ever see so much wide-open, useless country? Cactus and coyotes—what’s it good for?”

“I like it,” Ross answered. “Hang on to your hat.” There was a flat, straight stretch ahead, miles along; Ross peeled off and made the little car dig … seventy … eighty … ninety … ninety- five. The needle quivered up toward three figures.”

“Hey, Ross?”

“Yeah?”

“This rig ain’t young any more. Why crack us up?” “Sissy,” said Ross, but he eased up on the gas.

“Not at all,” Art protested. “If we kill ourselves trying to get to the moon, fine—we’re heroes. But if we bust our fool necks before we start, we’ll just look silly.” “Okay, okay—is that the turn-off?”

Adirt road swung off to the right and took out over the desert. They followed it about a quarter of a mile, then pulled up at a steel gate barring the road. Astrong fence, topped by barbed wire, stretched out in both directions. There was a sign on the gate:

DANGER

Unexploded Shells

Enter this area at your own risk. Disturb nothing – report all suspicious objects to the District Forester.

“This is it,” Ross stated. “Got the keys?” The area beyond was an abandoned training ground of the war, part of more than 8,000,000 acres in the United States which had been rendered useless until decontaminated by the hazardous efforts of army engineer specialists. This desert area was not worth the expense and risk of decontamination, but it was ideal for Cargraves; it assured plenty of room and no innocent bystanders—and it was rent free, loaned to the Association of Atomic Scientists, on Cargraves’ behalf.

Art chucked Ross some keys. Ross tried them, then said, “You’ve given me the wrong keys.” “I don’t think so. Nope,” he continued, “those are the keys Doc sent.”

“What do we do?” “Bust the lock, maybe.”

“Not this lock. Do we climb it?”

“With the rig under one arm? Be your age.”

Acar crawled toward them, its speed lost in the vastness of the desert. It stopped near them and a man in a military Stetson stuck his head out. “Hey, there!” Art muttered, “Hey, yourself,” then said, “Good morning.”

“What are you trying to do?” “Get inside.”

“Don’t you see the sign? Wait a minute—either one of you named Jenkins?” “He’s Ross Jenkins. I’m Art Mueller.”

“Pleased to know you. I’m the ranger hereabouts. Name o’ Buchanan. I’ll let you in, but I don’t rightly know as I should.” “Why not?” Ross’s tone was edgy. He felt that they were being sized up as youngsters.

“Well … we had a little accident in there the other day. That’s why the lock was changed.” “Accident?”

“Man got in somehow—no break in the fence. He tangled with a land mine about a quarter of a mile this side of your cabin.” “Did it … kill him?”

“Deader ‘n a door nail. I spotted it by the buzzards. See here—I’ll let you in; I’ve got a copy of your permit. But don’t go exploring. You stay in the marked area around the cabin, and stay on the road that follows the power line.”

Ross nodded. “We’ll be careful.”

“Mind you are. What are you young fellows going to do in there, anyway? Raise jack-rabbits?” “That’s right. Giant jack-rabbits, eight feet tall.”

“So? Well, keep ‘em inside the marked area, or you’ll have jack-rabbit hamburger.”

“We’ll be careful,” Ross repeated. “Any idea who the man was that had the accident? Or what he was doing here?”

“None, on both counts. The buzzards didn’t leave enough to identify. Doesn’t make sense. There was nothing to steal in there; it was before your stuff came.” “Oh, it’s here!”

“Yep. You’ll find the crates stacked out in the open. He wasn’t a desert man,” the Ranger went on. “You could tell by his shoes. Must ‘a’ come by car, but there was no car around. Doesn’t make sense.” “No, it doesn’t seem to,” Ross agreed, “but he’s dead, so that ends it.” “Correct. Here are your keys. Oh, yes-” He put his hand back in his pocket. “Almost forgot. Telegram for you.”

“For us? Oh, thanks!”

“Better put up a mail box out at the highway,” Buchanan suggested. “This reached you by happenstance.” “We’ll do that,” Ross agreed absently, as he tore open the envelope.

“So long.” Buchanan kicked his motor into life. “So long, and thanks again.”

“For Heaven’s sake, what does it say?,” Art demanded.

“Read it:”

PASSED FINAL TESTS TODAY. LEAVING SATURDAY. PLEASE PROVIDE BRASS BAND, DANCING GIRLS, AND TWO FATTED CALVES—ONE RARE, ONE MEDIUM. (signed) DOC AND MORRIE.

Ross grinned. “Imagine that! Old Morrie a rocket pilot! I’ll bet his hat doesn’t fit him now.” “I’ll bet it doesn’t. Darn! We all should have taken the course.”

“Relax, relax. Don’t be small about it—we’d have wasted half the summer.” Ross dismissed the matter.

Art himself did not understand his own jealousy. Deep inside, it was jealousy of the fact that Morrie had been able to go to Spaatz Field in the company of Art’s idolized uncle, rather than the purpose of the trip. All the boys had had dual-control airplane instruction; Morrie had gone on and gotten a private license. Under the rules- out of date, in Art’s opinion -an airplane pilot could take a shortened course for rocket pilot. Doctor Cargraves held a slightly dusty aircraft license some fifteen years old. He had been planning to qualify for rocket operation; when he found that Morrie was eligible it was natural to include him.

This had left Ross and Art to carry out numerous chores for the enterprise, then to make their own way to New Mexico to open up the camp.

The warning to follow the power line had been necessary; the boys found the desert inside pock-marked by high explosive and criss-crossed with tracks, one as good as another, carved years before by truck and tank and mobile carrier. The cabin itself they found to be inside a one-strand corral a quarter of a mile wide and over a mile long. Several hundred yards beyond the corral and stretching away for miles toward the horizon was an expanse which looked like a green, rippling lake—the glassy crater of the atom bomb test of 1951, the UN’s Doomsday Bomb.

Neither the cabin nor the piled-up freight could hold their attention until they had looked at it. Ross drove the car to the far side of the enclosure and they stared. Art gave a low respectful whistle. “How would you like to have been under that?” Ross inquired in a hushed voice.

“Not any place in the same county—or the next county. How would you like to be in a city when one of those things goes off?”

Ross shook his head. “I want to zig when it zags. Art, they better never have to drop another one, except in practice. If they ever start lobbing those things around, it ‘ud be the end of civilization.”

“They won’t,” Art assured him. “What d’you think the UN police is for? Wars are out. Everybody knows that.” “You know it and I know it. But I wonder if everybody knows it?”

“It’ll be just too bad if they don’t.” “Yeah—too bad for us.”

Art climbed out of the car. “I wonder if we can get down to it? “Well, don’t try. We’ll find out later.”

“There can’t be any duds in the crater or anywhere in the area—not after that.”

“Don’t forget our friend that the buzzards ate. Duds that weren’t exposed to the direct blast might not go off. This bomb was set off about five miles up.” “Huh? I thought-“

“You were thinking about the test down in Chihuahua. That was a ground job. Come on. We got work to do.” He trod on the starter.

The cabin was pre-fab, moved in after the atom bomb test to house the radioactivity observers. It had not been used since and looked it. “Whew! What a mess,” Art remarked. “We should have brought a tent.”

“It’ll be all right when we get it fixed up. Did you see kerosene in that stuff outside?” “Two drums of it.”

“Okay. I’ll see if I can make this stove work. I could use some lunch.” The cabin was suitable, although dirty. It had drilled well; the water was good, although it had a strange taste. There were six rough bunks needing only bedding rolls. The kitchen was the end of the room, the dining room a large pine table, but there were shelves, hooks on the walls, windows, a tight roof overhead. The stove worked well, even though it was smelly; Ross produced scrambled eggs, coffee, bread and butter, German-fried potatoes, and a bakery apple pie with only minor burns and mishaps.

It took all day to clean the cabin, unload the car, and uncrate what they needed at once. By the time they finished supper, prepared this time by Art, they were glad to crawl into their sacks. Ross was snoring gently before Art closed his eyes. Between Ross’s snores and the mournful howls of distant coyotes Art was considering putting plugs in his ears, when the morning sun woke him up.

“Get up, Ross!”

“Huh? What? Wassamatter?”

“Show a leg. We’re burning daylight.”

“I’m tired,” Ross answered as he snuggled back into the bedding. “I think I’ll have breakfast in bed.” “You and your six brothers. Up you come—today we pour the foundation for the shop.”

“That’s right.” Ross crawled regretfully out of bed. “Wonderful weather—I think I’ll take a sun bath.” “I think you’ll get breakfast, while I mark out the job.”

“Okay, Simon Legree.”

The machine shop was a sheet metal and stringer affair, to be assembled. They mixed the cement with the sandy soil of the desert, which gave them a concrete good enough for a temporary building. It was necessary to uncrate the power tools and measure them before the fastening bolts could be imbedded in the concrete. Ross watched as Art placed the last bolt. “You sure we got ‘em all?”

“Sure. Grinder, mill, lathe-” He ticked them off. “Drill press, both saws-“

They had the basic tools needed for almost any work. Then they placed bolts for the structure itself, matching the holes in the metal sills to the bolts as they set them in the wet concrete. By nightfall they had sections of the building laid out, each opposite its place, ready for assembly. “Do you think the power line will carry the load?” Art said anxiously, as they knocked off.

Ross shrugged. “We won’t be running all the tools at once. Quit worrying, or we’ll never get to the moon. We’ve got to wash dishes before we can get supper.”

By Saturday the tools had been hooked up and tested, and Art had rewound one of the motors. The small mountain of gear had been stowed and the cabin was clean and reasonably orderly. They discovered in unpacking cases that several had been broken open, but nothing seemed to have been hurt. Ross was inclined to dismiss the matter, but Art was worried. His precious radio and electronic equipment had been gotten at.

“Quit fretting,” Ross advised him. “Tell Doc about it when he comes. The stuff was insured.” “It was insured in transit,” Art pointed out. “By the way, when do you think they will get here?”

“I can’t say,” Ross answered. “If they come by train, it might be Tuesday or later. If they fly to Albuquerque and take the bus, it might be tomorrow—what was that?” He glanced up.

“Where?” asked Art.

“There. Over there, to your left. Rocket.”

“So it is! It must be a military job; we’re off the commercial routes. Hey, he’s turned on his nose jets!” “He’s going to land. He’s going to land here!”

“You don’t suppose?”

“I don’t know. I thought—there he comes! It can’t-” His words were smothered when the thunderous, express-train roar reached them, as the rocket decelerated. Before the braking jets had been applied, it was traveling ahead of its own din, and had been, for them, as silent as thought. The pilot put it down smoothly not more than five hundred yards from them, with a last blast of the nose and belly jets which killed it neatly.

They began to run.

As they panted up to the sleek, gray sides of the craft, the door forward of the stub wings opened and a tall figure jumped down, followed at once by a smaller man. “Doc! Morrie!”

“Hi, sports!” Cargraves yelled. “Well, we made it. Is lunch ready?”

Morrie was holding himself straight, almost popping with repressed emotion. “I made the landing,” he announced.

“You did?” Art seemed incredulous.

“Sure. Why not? I got my license. Want to see it?”

“‘Hot Pilot Abrams,’ it says here,” Ross alleged, as they examined the document. “But why didn’t you put some glide on it? You practically set her down on her jets.” “Oh, I was practicing for the moon landing.”

“You were, huh? Well, Doc makes the moon landing or I guarantee I don’t go.”

Cargraves interrupted the kidding. “Take it easy. Neither one of us will try an airless landing.”

Morrie looked startled. Ross said, “Then who-“ “Art will make the moon landing.”

Art gulped and said, “Who? Me?”

“In a way. It will have to be a radar landing; we can’t risk a crack-up on anything as hard as an all jet landing when there is no way to walk home. Art will have to modify the circuits to let the robot-pilot do it. But Morrie will be the stand-by,” he went on, seeing the look on Morrie’s face. “Morrie’s reaction time is better than mine. I’m getting old. Now how about lunch? I want to change clothes and get to work.”

Morrie was dressed in a pilot’s coverall, but Cargraves was wearing his best business suit. Art looked him over. “How come the zoot suit, Uncle? You don’t look like you expected to come by rocket. For that matter, I thought the ship was going to be ferried out?”

“Change in plans. I came straight from Washington to the field and Morrie took off as soon as I arrived. The ship was ready, so we brought it out ourselves, and saved about five hundred bucks in ferry pilot charges.” “Everything on the beam in Washington?” Ross asked anxiously.

“Yes, with the help of the association’s legal department. Got some papers for each of you to sign. Let’s not stand here beating our gums. Ross, you and I start on the shield right away. After we eat.”

“Good enough.”

Ross and the doctor spent three days on the hard, dirty task of tearing out the fuel system to the tail jets. The nose and belly jets, used only in maneuvering and landing, were left unchanged. These operated on aniline and nitric fuel; Cargraves wanted them left as they were, to get around one disadvantage of atomic propulsion-the relative difficulty in turning the power off and on when needed.

As they worked, they brought each other up to date. Ross told him about the man who had tangled with a dud land mine. Cargraves paid little attention until Ross told him about the crates that had been opened. Cargraves laid down his tools and wiped sweat from his face. “I want the details on that,” he stated.

“What’s the matter, Doc? Nothing was hurt.”

“You figure the dead man had been breaking into the stuff?”

“Well, I thought so until I remembered that the Ranger had said flatly that this bozo was already buzzard meat before our stuff arrived.” Cargraves looked worried and stood up. “Where to, Doc?”

“You go ahead with the job,” the scientist answered absently. “I’ve got to see Art.” Ross started to speak, thought better of it, and went back to work.

“Art,” Cargraves started in, “what are you and Morrie doing now?”

“Why, we’re going over his astrogation instruments. I’m tracing out the circuits on the acceleration integrator. The gyro on it seems to be off center, by the way.” “It has to be. Take a look in the operation manual. But never mind that. Could you rig an electric-eye circuit around this place?”

“I could if I had the gear.”

“Never mind what you might do ‘if’—what can you do with the stuff you’ve got?”

“Wait a minute, Uncle Don,” the younger partner protested. “Tell me what you want to do—I’ll tell you if I can wangle it.” “Sorry. I want a prowler circuit around the ship and cabin. Can you do it?”

Art scratched his ear. “Let me see. I’d need photoelectric cells and an ultraviolet light. The rest I can piece together. I’ve got two light meters in my photo kit; I could rig them for the cells, but I don’t know about UVlight. If we had a sun lamp, I could filter it. How about an arc? I could jimmy up an arc.”

Cargraves shook his head. “Too uncertain. You’d have to stay up all night nursing it. What else can you do?”

“Mmmm… . Well, we could use thermocouples maybe. Then I could use an ordinary floodlight and filter it down to infra-red.” “How long would it take? Whatever you do, it’s got to be finished by dark, even if it’s only charging the top wire of the fence.” “Then I’d better do just that,” Art agreed, “if that—Say!”

“Say what?”

“Instead of giving the fence a real charge and depending on shocking anybody that touches it, I’ll just push a volt or two through it and hook it back in through an audio circuit with plenty of gain. I can rig it so that if anybody touches the fence it will howl like a dog. How’s that?”

“That’s better. I want an alarm right now. Get hold of Morrie and both of you work on it.” Cargraves went back to his work, but his mind was not on it. The misgivings which he had felt at the time of the mystery of the missing ‘blunt instrument’ were returning. Now more mysteres—his orderly mind disliked mysteries.

He started to leave the rocket about an hour later to see how Art was making out. His route led him through the hold into the pilot compartment. There he found Morrie. His eyebrows went up. “Hi, sport,” he said. “I thought you were helping Art.”

Morrie looked sheepish. “Oh, that!” he said. “Well, he did say something about it. But I was busy.” He indicated the computer, its cover off. “Did he tell you I wanted you to help him?”

“Well, yes—but he didn’t need my help. He can do that sort of work just as well alone.”

Cargraves sat down. “Morrie,” he said slowly, “I think we had better have a talk. Have you stopped to think who is going to be second-in-command of this expedition?” Morrie did not answer. Cargraves went on. “It has to be you, of course. You’re the other pilot. If anything happens to me the other two will have to obey you. You realize that?” “Art won’t like that.” Morrie’s voice was a mutter.

“Not as things stand now. Art’s got his nose out of joint. You can’t blame him—he was disappointed that he didn’t get to take pilot training, too.” “But that wasn’t my fault.”

“No, but you’ve got to fix it. You’ve got to behave so that, if the time comes, they’ll want to take your orders. This trip is no picnic. There will be times when our lives may depend on instant obedience. I put it to you bluntly, Morrie—if I had had a choice I would have picked Ross for my second-incommand—he’s less flighty than you are. But you’re it, and you’ve got to live up to it. Otherwise we don’t take off.”

“Oh, we’ve got to take off! We can’t give up now!”

“We’ll make it. The trouble is, Morrie,” he went on, “American boys are brought up loose and easy. That’s fine. I like it that way. But there comes a time when loose and easy isn’t enough, when you have to be willing to obey, and do it wholeheartedly and without argument. See what I’m driving at?”

“You mean you want me to get on back to the shop and help Art.”

“Correct.” He swung the boy around and faced him toward the door, slapped him on the back and said, “Now git!” Morrie “got.” He paused at the door and flung back over his shoulder,

“Don’t worry about me, Doc. I can straighten out and fly right.” “Roger!” Cargraves decided to have a talk with Art later.

Chapter 6 – DANGER IN THE DESERT

THE SPACE SUITS WERE delivered the next day, causing another break in the work, to Cargraves’ annoyance. However, the boys were so excited over this evidence that they were actually preparing to walk on the face of the moon that he decided to let them get used to the suits.

The suits were modified pressurized stratosphere suits, as developed for the air forces. They looked like diving suits, but were less clumsy. The helmets were “goldfish bowls” of Plexiglas, laminated with soft polyvinyl-butyral plastic to make them nearly shatter-proof. There were no heating arrangements. Contrary to popular belief, vacuum of outer space has no temperature; it is neither hot nor cold. Man standing on the airless moon would gain or lose heat only by radiation, or by direct contact with the surface of the moon. As the moon was believed to vary from extreme sub-zero to temperatures hotter than boiling water, Cargraves had ordered thick soles of asbestos for the shoes of the suits and similar pads for the seats of the pants of each suit, so that they could sit down occasionally without burning or freezing. Overgloves of the same material completed the insulation against contact. The suits were so well insulated, as well as air-tight, that body heat more than replaced losses through radiation. Cargraves would have preferred thermostatic control, but such refinements could be left to the pioneers and colonists who would follow after. Each suit had a connection for an oxygen bottle much larger and heavier than the jump bottle of an aviator, a bottle much too heavy to carry on earth but not too heavy for the surface of the moon, where weight is only one-sixth that found on earth.

The early stratosphere suits tended to starfish and become rigid, which made the simplest movements an effort. In trying on his own suit, Cargraves was pleased to find that these suits were easy to move around in, even when he had Ross blow him up until the suit was carrying a pressure of three atmospheres, or about forty-five pounds to the square inch. The constant-volume feature, alleged for the de-Camp joints, appeared to be a reality.

Cargraves let them experiment, while seeing to it that as many field tests as possible were made to supplement the manufacturer’s laboratory tests. Then the suits were turned over to Art for installation of walky-talky equipment.

The following day the doctor turned all the boys to work on the conversion of the drive mechanism. He was expecting delivery of the atomic fission element thorium; the anti-radiation shield had to be ready. This shield was constructed of lead, steel, and organic plastic, in an arrangement which his calculations indicated would be most effective in screening the alpha, beta, and gamma radiations and the slippery neutrons, from the forward part of the rocket.

Of these radiations, the gamma are the most penetrating and are much like X-rays. Alpha particles are identical with the nuclei of helium atoms; beta particles are simply electrons moving at extremely high speeds. Neutrons are the electrically uncharged particles which make up much of the mass of most atomic nuclei and are the particles which set off or trigger the mighty explosions of atomic bombs.

All of these radiations are dangerous to health and life.

The thorium drive unit was to be shielded only on the forward side, as radiations escaping to outer space could be ignored. Morrie had landed the rocket with one side facing the cabin, inside the corral. It was now necessary to jack the rocket around until the tubes pointed away from the cabin, so that radiations, after the thorium was in place, would go harmlessly out across the crater of the Doomsday Bomb and, also, so that the rocket would be in position for a captive test run with the exhaust directed away from the cabin.

The jacking-around process was done with hydraulic jacks, muscle, and sweat, in sharp contrast to the easy-appearing, powered manipulation of rockets by dolly and cradle and mobile sling, so familiar a sight on any rocket field. It took all of them until late afternoon. When it was over Cargraves declared a holiday and took them on a long-promised trip into the DoomsdayCrater.

This bomb site has been pictured and described so much and the boys were so used to seeing it in the distance that the thrill of being in it was limited. Nevertheless the desolation, the utter deadness, of those miles and miles of frozen, glassy waste made their flesh creep. Cargraves marched ahead, carrying a Geiger radiation counter, of the sort used to prospect for uranium in Canada during the war. This was largely to impress the boys with the necessity for unsleeping watchfulness in dealing with radioactive elements. He did not really expect to hear the warning rattle of danger in the ear phones; the test had been made so long before that the grim lake was almost certainly as harmless as the dead streets of Hiroshima.

But it put them in the mood for the lecture he had in mind. “Now, listen, sports,” he started in when they got back, “day after tomorrow the thorium arrives. From then on the holiday is over. This stuff is poison. You’ve got to remember that all the time.”

“Sure,” agreed Morrie. “We all know that.”

“You know it at the tops of your minds. I want you to know it every minute, way down in your guts. We’ll stake out the unshielded area between the ship and the fence. If your hat blows into that stretch, let it stay there, let it rot—but don’t go after it.”

Ross looked perturbed. “Wait a second, Doc. Would it really hurt anything to expose yourself for just a few seconds?”

“Probably not,” Cargraves agreed, “provided that were all the dosage you ever got. But we will all get some dosage all the time, even through the shield. Radioactivity accumulates its poisonous effect. Any exposure you can possibly avoid, you must avoid. It makes your chances better when you get a dose of it accidentally. Art!”

“Uh? Yes, sir!”

“From now on you are the medical officer. You must see to it that everybody wears his X-ray film all the time- and I mean all the time -and his electroscope. I want you to change the films and develop them and check the electroscopes according to the dose in the manual. Complete charts on everything, and report to me each Friday morning—oftener if you find anything outside the limits. Got me?”

“Got you, Doc.”

“Besides that, you arrange for blood counts once a week for everybody, over in town.” “I think I could learn to do a blood count myself,” Art offered.

“You let the regular medic do it. You’ve got enough to worry about to keep all the electronic equipment purring along properly. One more thing.” He looked around him, waiting to get their full attention. “If any one shows the possibility of overdosage of radiation, by film or by blood count or whatever, I will have to send him home for treatment. It won’t be a case of ‘just one more chance.’ You are dealing with hard facts herd—not me, but natural laws. If you make a mistake, out you go and we’ll have to find somebody to take your place.”

They all nodded solemnly. Art said, “Doc?” “Suppose it’s your film that shows the overdosage?”

“Me? Not likely! If it does you can kick me all the way to the gate—I’m afraid of that stuff!

“Just the same,” he went on more seriously, “you run the same checks on me as on everybody else. Now let’s have supper. I want you and Morrie to do the KP tonight, so that Ross can start his study period right after supper. Ross, you and I are getting up at five, so let’s hit the sack early.” “Okay. What’s cookin’?”

“Trip into Albuquerque—shopping.” He was reluctant to explain. The place had no firearms. They had seemed a useless expense—many a man has spent years in the desert without shooting off anything but his mouth, he had reasoned. As for the dreamed of trip, what could one shoot on the moon? But signs of prowlers, even in this fenced and forbidding area, had him nervous. Art’s watch-dog fence was tested each night and Art slept with the low power-hum of the hot circuit in his ears; thus far there had been no new alarm. Still he was nervous.

Cargraves was awakened about three A.M. to find Art shaking his shoulder and light pouring in his eyes. “Doc! Doc! Wake up!” “Huh? Wassamatter?”

“I got a squawk over the loudspeaker.”

Cargraves was out of bed at once. They bent over the speaker. “I don’t hear anything.”

“I’ve got the volume low, but you’d hear it. There it is again—get it?” There had been an unmistakable squawk from the box. “Shall I wake the others?” “Mmmm … no. Not now. Why did you turn on the light?”

“I guess I wanted it,” Art admitted.

“I see.” Cargraves hauled on trousers and fumbled with his shoes. “I want you to turn out the lights for ten seconds. I’m going out that window. If I’m not back in twenty minutes, or if you hear anything that sounds bad, wake the boys and come get me. But stay together. Don’t separate for any reason.” He slipped a torch in his pocket. “Okay.”

“You ought not to go by yourself.”

“Now, Art. I thought we had settled such matters.” “Yes, but—oh, well !” Art posted himself at the switch.

Cargraves was out the window and had cat-footed it around behind the machine shop before the light came on again. He lurked in the shadow and let his eyes get used to the darkness.

It was a moonless night, clear and desert sharp. Orion blazed in the eastern sky. Cargraves soon was able to pick out the sage bushes, the fence posts, the gloomy bulk of the ship a hundred yards away.

The padlock on the machine shop was undisturbed and the shop’s windows were locked. Doing his best to take advantage of the scanty cover, he worked his way down to the ship. The door was ajar. He could not remember whether he or Ross had been last man out. Even if it had been Ross, it was not like Ross to fail to lock the door.

He found that he was reluctant to enter the craft. He wished that he had not put off buying guns; a forty-five in his hand would have comforted him. He swung the door open and scrambled in fast, ducking quickly away from the door, where his silhouette would make a target. He crouched in the darkness, listening and trying to slow his pounding heart. When he was sure he could hear nothing, he took the flashlight, held it at arm’s length away from him and switched it on.

The piloting compartment was empty. Somewhat relieved, he sneaked back through the hold, empty also, and into the drive compartment. Empty. Nothing seemed disturbed.

He left the ship cautiously, this time making sure that the door was locked. He made a wide sweep around the cabin and machine shop and tried to assure himself that no one was inside the corral. But in the starlight, fifty men might have hidden in the sage, simply by crouching down and holding still.

He returned to the cabin, whistling to Art as he approached. “About time you got back,” Art complained. “I was just about to roust out the others and come and get you. Find anything?” “No. Anything more out of the squawk box?”

“Not a peep.”

“Could it have been a coyote brushing against the wire?”

“How would a coyote get through the outer fence?” Art wanted to know. “Dig under it. There are coyotes in here. We’ve heard them.”

“You can’t tell how far a coyote is from you by its howl.”

“Listen to the old desert rat! Well, leave the light on, but go back to bed. I’ll be awake. I’ve got to be up in another hour in any case. Crawl in the sack.” Cargraves settled down to a pipe and some thought.

Cargraves was too busy on the trip to Albuquerque to worry about the preceding night. Ross’s style of herding his hot rod left little time to think about anything but the shortness of life and the difficulty of hanging on to his hat. But Ross poured them into the city with plenty of time for shopping.

Cargraves selected two Garand rifles, Army surplus stock at a cheap price, and added a police thirty-eight special, on a forty-five frame. His mouth watered at a fancy sporting rifle with telescopic sights, but money was getting short; a few more emergency purchases or any great delay in starting would bankrupt the firm.

He ordered a supply of army-style C-rations and K-rations for the trip. Ross remarked privately, while the clerk wrote up the order, “In most stories about space travel, they just eat pills of concentrated food. Do you think it will ever come to that?”

“Not with my money,” the physicist answered. “You guys can eat pills if you want to. I want food I can get my teeth in.” “Check,” said Ross.

They stopped at a nursery where Cargraves ordered three dozen young rhubarb plants. He planned to use a balanced oxygen-carbon-dioxide air-refreshing system during the stay on the moon, if possible, and the plants were to supply the plantlife half of the cycle. Enough liquid oxygen would be carted along for breathing throughout the round trip, but a “balanced aquarium” arrangement for renewing their air supply would enable them to stay on the moon as long as their food lasted.

The chemical fertilizers needed for hydroponic farming of the rhubarb were ordered also. This done, they grabbed a chocolate malt and a hamburger apiece and high-tailed it for the camp.

Morrie and Art swarmed out of the machine shop as they arrived. “Hi, Doc! Hi, Ross! What’s the good word?”

Ross showed them the guns. Art was eager to try them and Cargraves okayed it. Morrie hung back and said, “By the way, Doc, the CAB inspector was here today.” “The what?”

“The Civil Aeronautics inspector. He had a letter from you.” “From me? What did it say?”

“Why, it requested them to send an inspector to go over the rebuilt parts of the rocket and approve it for flight. I told him it wasn’t ready.” “What else did you say? Did you tell him it was atomic-powered?”

“No, but he seemed to know it. He knew that we planned a space flight, too. What’s the pitch, Doc? I thought you were going to keep it quiet a while longer?” “So did I,” Cargraves said bitterly. “What did you tell him?”

“Nothing—so help me. I decided you ought to handle it, so I played stupid. I tipped Art and he did the same. Did we do wrong?” he went on anxiously. “I know he was CAB, but it seemed to me he ought to talk to you. Do you suppose we offended him?”

“I hope you gave him apoplexy,” Cargraves said savagely. “He was no CAB inspector, Morrie. He was a phony.” “Huh? Why… . But he had your letter.”

“Faked. I’ll bet he’s been holed up somewhere outside the gate, waiting for me to be away. Did you leave him alone at any time?”

“No. Wait a minute—only once, for about five minutes. We were down at the ship and he sent me back for a flashlight. I’m sorry.” The boy looked miserable. “Forget it. It was the natural, polite thing to do. You didn’t know he was phony. I wonder how he got through the gate? Did he come in a car?”

“Yes. I … Was the gate locked?”

“Yes, but he might have bulldozed the forester into letting him in.” They had been moving down toward the ship as they talked. Cargraves made a quick examination of the ship, but found nothing amiss. It seemed likely that the intruder had not found what he was looking for, probably because the drive was not yet installed.

He still worried about the matter of the locked gate. “I’m going to run down to the gate,” he announced, heading for the car. “Tell the boys.” “I’ll drive you.” None of the boys approved the way Cargraves drove a car; it was one respect in which they did not look up to him. Privately, they considered his style stuffy.

“Okay. Snap it up.”

Morrie ran down toward where the other two were wasting ammunition on innocent tin cans and bellowed at them. Seconds later he had the engine revved up and was ready to gun the rig when Cargraves slid into the seat beside him.

The padlock was intact, but one link of the bullchain had been hack-sawed away and replaced with wire. “So that’s that,” Cargraves dismissed the matter. “Hadn’t we better put on a new chain?” inquired Morrie.

“Why bother? He’s still got the hacksaw.”

The trip back was gloomy. Cargraves was worried. Morrie felt responsible for not having unmasked and made prisoner the impostor. In retrospect he could think of a dozen dramatic ways to have done it. Cargraves told him to keep his lip buttoned until after supper. When the dishes were out of the way, he brought the others up to date on the ominous happenings. Art and Ross took it with grave faces but without apparent excitement. “So that’s how it is,” Ross said. “Seems like somebody doesn’t like us.”

“Why that dirty so-and-so,” Art said softly. “I thought he was too smooth. I’d like to have him on the other end of one of those Garands.”

“Maybe you will,” Cargraves answered him soberly. “I might as well admit, fellows, that I’ve been worried… .” “Shucks, we knew that when you ordered that watch-dog hook-up.”

“I suppose so. I can’t figure out why anybody would do this. Simple curiosity I can understand, once the fact leaked out- as it seems to have done -that we are after space flight. But whoever it is has more than curiosity eating him, considering the lengths he is willing to go to.”

“I’ll bet he wants to steal your space drive, Uncle Don.”

“That would make a swell adventure yarn, Art; but it doesn’t make sense. If he knows I’ve got a rocket drive, all he has to do is apply for a license to the commission and use it.” “Maybe he thinks you are holding out some secrets on the commission?”

“If he thinks so, he can post a bond for the costs and demand an examination. He wouldn’t have to fake letters, or bust open gates. If he proves it on me, I go to jail.” “The point is,” Morrie asserted, “not why he’s snooping but what we can do to stop him. I think we ought to stand watches at night.” He glanced at the two rifles. “No,” Cargraves disagreed. “Art’s squawk circuit is better than a guard. You can’t see enough at night. I found that out.”

“Say,” put in Art. “Look—I could take the pilot radar and mount it on the roof of the cabin. With it set to scan for a landing it’ll pick up anything in the neighborhood.”

“No,” Cargraves answered, “I wouldn’t want to risk jimmying up the equipment. It’s more important to have it just right for the moon landing than it is to use it for prowlers.” “Oh, I won’t hurt it!”

“I still think,” insisted Morrie, “that getting a shot at him is the best medicine.”

“So much the better,” Art pointed out. “I’ll spot him in the scope. You wear phones with about a thousand feet of cord and I’ll coach you right up to him, in the dark. Then you got ‘im.” “Sounds good,” Morrie agreed.

“Take it easy,” Cargraves cautioned. “You fellows may think this is the Wild West but you will find that a judge will take a very sour attitude if you plug a man engaged in simple trespassing. You boys’ve read too many comic books.”

“I never touch the things,” Art denied fiercely. “Anyhow. Not often,” he amended. “If we can’t shoot, then why did you buy the guns?” Ross wanted to know.

“Fair enough. You can shoot—but you have to be certain it’s self-defense; I’ll take those guns back to the shop before I’ll have a bunch of wild men running around with blood in their eyes and an itch in their trigger fingers. The other use for the guns is to throw a scare into any more prowlers. You can shoot, but shoot where he isn’t—unless he shoots first.”

“Okay.”

“Suits.”

“I hope he shoots first!” “Any other ideas?”

“Just one,” Art answered. “Suppose our pal cut our power line. We’ve got everything on it—light, radio, even the squawk box. He could cut the line after we went to sleep and loot the whole place without us knowing it.”

Cargraves nodded. “I should have thought of that.” He considered it. “You and I will string a temporary line right now from the ship’s batteries to your squawk box. Tomorrow we’ll hook up an emergency lighting circuit.” He stood up. “Come on, Art. And you guys get busy. Study hour.”

“Study hour?” Ross protested. “Tonight? We can’t keep our minds on books—not tonight.”

“You can make a stab at it,” the doctor said firmly. “Guys have been known to write books while waiting to be hanged.”

The night passed quietly. Ross and Doc were down at the ship early the next morning, leaving Art and Morrie to work out an emergency lighting circuit from the battery of the car. Doc planned to have everything ready for the thorium when it arrived. He and Ross climbed into the rocket and got cheerfully to work. Cargraves started laying out tools, while Ross, whistling merrily off key, squeezed himself around the edge of the shield. Cargraves looked up just in time to see a bright, bright flash, then to be hit in the face by a thunderous pressure which threw him back against the side of the ship.

Chapter 7 – “WE’LL GO IF WE HAVE TO WALK”

ART WAS SHAKING HIS SHOULDER. “Doc!” he was pleading. “Doc! Wake up-are you hurt bad?” “Ross …” Cargraves said vaguely. “It’s not Ross; it’s Art.”

“But Ross—how’s Ross? Did it, did it kill him?” “I don’t know. Morrie’s with him.”

“Go find out.” “But you’re-“

“Go find out, I said!” Whereupon he passed out again.

When he came to a second time, Art was bending over him. “Uncle,” he said, “the thorium has come. What do we do?” Thorium. Thorium? His head ached, the word seemed to have no meaning.

“Uh, I’ll be out in a … what about Ross? Is he dead?” “No, he’s not dead.”

“How bad is he hurt?”

“It seems to be his eyes, mostly. He isn’t cut up any, but he can’t see. What’ll I tell them about the thorium, Uncle?” “Oh, hang the thorium! Tell them to take it back.”

“What?”

He tried to get up, but he was too dizzy, too weak. He let his head fall back and tried to collect his spinning thoughts.

“Don’t be a dope, Art,” he muttered peevishly. “We don’t need thorium. The trip is off, the whole thing was a mistake. Send it back—it’s poison.” His eyes were swimming; he closed them. “Ross …” he said.

He was again brought back to awareness by the touch of hands on his body. Morrie and Art were gently but firmly going over him. “Take it easy, Doc,” Morrie warned him. “How’s Ross?” “Well …” Morrie wrinkled his brow. “Ross seems all right, except for his eyes. He says he’s all right.”

“But he’s blind?” “Well, he can’t see.”

“We’ve got to get him to a hospital.” Cargraves sat up and tried to stand up. “Ow!” He sat down suddenly. “It’s his foot,” said Art.

“Let’s have a look at it. Hold still, Doc.” They took his left shoe off gently and peeled back the sock. Morrie felt it over. “What do you think, Art?” Art examined it. “It’s either a sprain or a break. We’ll have to have an X-ray.”

“Where’s Ross?” Cargraves persisted. “We’ve got to get him to a hospital.”

“Sure, sure,” Morrie agreed. “We’ve got to get you to one, too. We moved Ross up to the cabin.” “I want to see him.”

“Comin’ up! Have a seet, while I get the car.”

With Art’s help Cargraves managed to get up on his good foot and hobble to the door. Getting down from the ship’s door was painful, but he made it, and fell thankfully into the seat of the car.

“Who’s there?” Ross called out, as they came in with Cargraves leaning on the two boys. “All of us,” Art told him.

Cargraves saw that Ross was lying in his bunk with his eyes covered with a handkerchief. Cargraves hobbled over to him. “How is it, kid?” he said huskily. “Oh, it’s you, Doc. I’ll get by. It’ll take more than that to do me in. How are you?”

“I’m all right. How about your eyes?”

“Well,” Ross admitted, “to tell the truth, they don’t work too well. All I see is purple and green lights.” He kept his voice steady, almost cheerful, but the pulse in his neck was throbbing visibly. Cargraves started to remove the bandage. Morrie stopped him.

“Let the bandage alone, Doc,” he said firmly. “There’s nothing to see. Wait till we get him to a hospital.” “But … Okay, okay. Let’s get on with it.”

“We were just waiting for you. Art will drive you.” “What are you going to do?”

“I,” said Morrie, “am going to climb up on the roof of this shack with a load of sandwiches and a gun. I’ll still be there when you get back.” “But-” Cargraves shrugged and let the matter pass.

Morrie scrambled down when they got back and helped Cargraves hobble into the cabin. Ross was led in by Art; his eyes were bandaged professionally and a pair of dark glasses stuck out of his shirt pocket. “What’s the score?” Morrie demanded of all of them, but his eyes were fastened on Ross.

“It’s too early to tell,” Cargraves said heavily, as he eased into a chair. “No apparent damage, but the optic nerve seems paralyzed.”

Morrie clucked and said nothing. Ross groped at a chair and sat down.

“Relax,” he advised Morrie. “I’ll be all right. The flash produced a shock in the eyes. The doctor told me all about it. Sometimes a case like this goes on for three months or so, then it’s all right.”

Cargraves bit his lip. The doctor had told him more than he had told Ross; sometimes it was not all right; sometimes it was permanent. “How about you, Doc?”

“Sprain, and a wrenched back. They strapped me up.”

“Nothing else?”

“No. Anti-tetanus shots for both of us, but that was just to be on the safe side.”

“Well,” Morrie announced cheerfully, “it looks to me as if the firm would be back in production in short order.”

“No,” Cargraves denied. “No, it won’t be. I’ve been trying to tell these goons something ever since we left the hospital, but they wouldn’t listen. We’re through. The firm is busted.” None of the boys said anything. He went on, raising his voice. “There won’t be any trip to the moon. Can’t you see that?”

Morrie looked at him impassively. “You said, ‘The firm is busted.’ You mean you’re out of money?” “Well, not quite, but that’s a factor. What I meant-“

“I’ve got some E-bonds,” Ross announced, turning his bandaged head.

“That’s not the point,” Cargraves answered, with great gentleness. “I appreciate the offer; don’t think I don’t. And don’t think I want to give up. But I’ve had my eyes opened. It was foolish, foolish from the start, sheer folly. But I let my desires outweigh my judgment. I had no business getting you kids into this. Your father was right, Ross. Now I’ve got to do what I can to make amends.”

Ross shook his head. Morrie glanced at Art and said, “How about it, medical officer?”

Art looked embarrassed, started to speak, and changed his mind. Instead he went to the medicine cabinet, and took out a fever thermometer. He came back to Cargraves. “Open your mouth, Uncle.”

Cargraves started to speak. Art popped the tube in his mouth. “Don’t talk while I’m taking your temperature,” he warned, and glanced at his wrist watch. “Why, what the-“

“Keep your mouth closed!”

Cargraves subsided, fuming. Nobody said anything until Art reached again for the thermometer. “What does it say?” Morrie demanded. “Atenth over a hundred.”

“Let me see that,” Cargraves demanded. Art held it away from him. The doctor stood up, absent-mindedly putting his weight on his injured foot. He then sat down quite suddenly. Art shook down the thermometer, cleaned it and put it away.

“It’s like this,” Morrie said firmly. “You aren’t boss; I’m boss.” “Huh? What in the world has got into you, Morrie?”

Morrie said, “How about it, Art?”

Art looked embarrassed but said stubbornly, “That’s how it is, Uncle.” “Ross?”

“I’m not sure of the pitch,” Ross said slowly, “but I see what they are driving at. I’m stringing along with Art and Morrie.”

Cargraves’ head was beginning to ache again. “I think you’ve all gone crazy. But it doesn’t make any difference; we’re washed up anyhow.”

“No,” Morrie said, “we’re not crazy, and it remains to be seen whether or not we’re washed up. The point is: you are on the sick list. That puts me in charge; you set it up that way yourself. You can’t give any orders or make any decisions for us until you are off the sick list.”

“But-” He stopped and then laughed, his first laugh in hours. “This is nuts. You’re hijacking me, with a technicality. You can’t put me on the sick list for a little over a degree of temperature.”

“You weren’t put on the sick list for that; you are being kept on the sick list for it. Art put you on the sick list while you were unconscious. You stay there until he takes you off—you made him medical officer.”

“Yes, but- Look here, Art -you put me on the sick list earlier? This isn’t just a gag you thought up to get around me?”

“No, Uncle,” Art assured him, “when I told Morrie that you said not to accept the thorium, he tried to check with you. But you were out like a light. We didn’t know what to do, until Morrie pointed out that I was medical officer and that I had to decide whether or not you were in shape to carry out your job. So-“

“But you don’t have… . Anyway, all this is beside the point. I sent the thorium back; there isn’t going to be any trip; there isn’t any medical officer; there isn’t any second-in-command. The organization is done with.” “But that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Uncle. We didn’t send the thorium back.”

“Huh?”

“I’ve signed for it,” Morrie explained, “as your agent.”

Cargraves rubbed his forehead. “You kids—you beat me! However, it doesn’t make any difference. I have made up my mind that the whole idea was a mistake. I am not going to the moon and that puts the kibosh on it. Wait a minute, Morrie! I’m not disputing that you are in charge, temporarily—but I can talk, can’t I?”

“Sure. You can talk. But nothing gets settled until your temperature is down and you’ve had a night’s sleep.” “Okay. But you’ll see that things settle themselves. You have to have me to build the space drive. Right?” “Mmmm … yes.”

“No maybes about it. You kids are learning a lot about atomics, fast. But you don’t know enough. I haven’t even told you, yet, how the drive is supposed to work.” “We could get a license on your patent, even without your permission,” Ross put in. “We’re going to the moon.”

“Maybe you could—if you could get another nuclear physicist to throw in with you. But it wouldn’t be this enterprise. Listen to me, kids. Never mind any touch of fever I’ve got. I’m right in the head for the first time since I got banged on the head at your rocket test. And I want to explain some things. We’ve got to bust up, but I don’t want you sore at me.”

“What do you mean: ‘since you got banged in the head’?”

Cargraves spoke very soberly. “I knew at that time, after we looked over the grounds, that that ‘accident’ was no accident. Somebody put a slug on me, probably with a blackjack. I couldn’t see why then and I still don’t see why. I should have seen the light when we started having prowlers. But I couldn’t believe that it was really serious. Yesterday I knew it was. Nobody impersonates a federal inspector unless he’s playing for high stakes and willing to do almost anything. It had me worried sick. But I still didn’t see why anybody would want anything we’ve got and I certainly didn’t think they would try to kill us.”

“You think they meant to kill us?” asked Ross.

“Obviously. The phony inspector booby-trapped us. He planted some sort of a bomb.” “Maybe he meant to wreck the ship rather than to kill us.”

“What for?”

“Well,” said Art, “maybe they’re after the senior prizes.”

“Wrecking our ship won’t win him any prize money.” “No, but it could keep us from beating him.”

“Maybe. It’s far-fetched but it’s as good an answer as any. But the reason doesn’t matter. Somebody is out to get us and he’s willing to go to any lengths. This desert is a lonely place. If I could afford a squadron of guards around the place we might bull it through. But I can’t. And I can’t let you kids get shot or bombed. It’s not fair to you, nor to your parents.”

Art looked stubborn and unhappy.

Morrie’s face was an impassive mask. Finally he said, “If that’s all you’ve got to say, Doc, I suggest we eat and adjourn until tomorrow.” “All right.”

“Not just yet.” Ross had stood up. He groped for the back of his chair and tried to orient himself. “Where are you, Doc?” “I’m here—to your left.”

“All right. Now I’ve got some things to say. I’m going to the moon. I’m going to the moon, somehow, whether you want to go or not. I’m going to the moon even if I never get back the use of my eyes. I’m going to the moon even if Morrie or Art has to lead me around. You can do as you please.”

“But I’m surprised at you, Doc,” he went on. “You’re afraid to take the responsibility for us, aren’t you? That’s the size of it?” “Yes, Ross, that’s the size of it.”

“Yet you were willing to take the responsibility of leading us on a trip to the moon. That’s more dangerous than anything that could happen here, isn’t it? Isn’t it?” Cargraves bit his lip. “It’s different.”

“I’ll tell you how it’s different. If we get killed trying to make the jump, Einety-nine chances out of a hundred we all get killed together. You don’t have to go back and explain anything to our parents. That’s how it’s different!”

“Now, Ross!”

“Don’t ‘Now, Ross’ me. Want the deuce, Doc?” he went on bitterly. “Suppose it had happened on the moon; would you be twittering around, your morale all shot? Doc, I’m surprised at you. If you are going to have an attack of nerves every time the going gets a little tough, I vote for Morrie for permanent captain.”

“That’s about enough, Ross,” Morrie put in quietly. “Okay. I was through, anyway.” Ross sat down.

There was an uncomfortable silence. Morrie broke it by saying, “Art, let’s you and me throw together some food. Study hour will be late as it is.” Cargraves looked surjrised. Morrie saw his expression and continued, “Sure. Why not? Art and I can take turns reading aloud.”

Cargraves pretended to be asleep that night long before he was. Thus he was able to note that Morrie and Art stood alternate watches all night, armed and ready. He refrained from offering any advice.

The boys both went to bed at sunrise. Cargraves got painfully but quietly out of bed and dressed. Leaning on a stick he hobbled down to the ship. He wanted to inspect the damage done by the bomb, but he noticed first the case containing the thorium, bulking large because of its anti-radiation shipping shield. He saw with relief that the seal of the atomics commission was intact. Then he hunched himself inside the ship and made his way slowly to the drive compartment.

The damage was remarkably light. Alittle welding, he thought, some swaging, and some work at the forge would fix it. Puzzled, he cautiously investigated further.

He found six small putty-like pieces of a plastic material concealed under the back part of the shield. Although there were no primers and no wiring attached to these innocentappearing little objects he needed no blueprint to tell him what they were. It was evident that the saboteur had not had time to wire more than one of his deadly little toys in the few minutes he had been alone. His intentions had certainly been to wreck the drive compartment—and kill whoever was unlucky enough to set off the trap.

With great care, sweating as he did so, he removed the chunks of explosive, then searched carefully for more. Satisfied, he slipped them into his shirt pocket and went outside. The scramble, hampered by his game leg, out of the door of the rocket, made him shaky; he felt like a human bomb. Then he limped to the corral fence and threw them as far as he could out into the already contaminated fields. He took the precaution of removing them all from his person before throwing the first one, as he wanted to be ready to fall flat. But there was no explosion; apparently the stuff was relatively insensitive to shock. Finished, he turned away, content to let sun and rain disintegrate the stuff.

He found Ross outside the cabin, turning his bandaged face to the morning sun. “That you, Doc?” the young man called out. “Yes. Good morning, Ross.”

“Good morning, Doc.” Ross moved toward the scientist, feeling the ground with his feet. “Say, doc—I said some harsh things last night. I’m sorry. I was upset, I guess.” “Forget it. We were all upset.” He found the boy’s groping hand and pressed it. “How are your eyes?”

Ross’s face brightened. “Coming along fine. I slipped a peek under the bandage when I got up. I can see-“ “Good!”

“I can see, but everything’s fuzzy and I see double, or maybe triple. But the light hurt my eyes so I put the bandage back.” “It sounds as if you were going to be all right,” Cargraves ventured. “But take it easy.”

“Oh, I will. Say, Doc …” “Yes, Ross?”

“Nnnn … Oh, nothing. Never mind.”

“I think I know, Ross. I’ve changed my mind. I changed my mind last night before I got to sleep. We’re going through with it.” “Good!”

“Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s bad. I don’t know. But if that’s the way you fellows feel about it, I’m with you. We’ll go if we have to walk.”

Chapter 8 – SKYWARD!

“THAT SOUNDS MORE LIKE you, Doc!”

“Thanks. Are the others up yet?”

“Not yet. They didn’t get much sleep.”

“I know. Let’s let them sleep. We’ll sit out in the car. Take my arm.”

When they had settled themselves Ross asked, “Doc, how much longer will it take to get ready?” “Not long. Why?”

“Well, I think the key to our problems lies in how fast we can get away. If these attempts to stop us keep up, one of them is going to work. I wish we would leave today.”

“We can’t do that,” Cargraves answered, “but it shouldn’t be long. First I’ve got to install the drive, but it’s really just a matter of fitting the parts together. I had almost everything prepared before I ever laid eyes on you guys.”

“I wish my blinkers weren’t on the fritz.”

“It’s one job I’ll have to do myself. Not that I am trying to keep you out of it, Ross,” he added hastily, seeing the boy’s expression. “I’ve never explained it because I thought it would be easier when we had all the gear in front of us.”

“Well, how does it work?”

“You remember Heron’s turbine in elementary physics? Little boiler on the bottom and a whirligig like a lawn sprinkler on top? You heat the boiler, steam comes up through the whirligig, and makes it whirl around. Well, my drive works like that. Instead of fire, I use a thorium atomic power pile; instead of water, I use zinc. We boil the zinc, vaporize it, get zinc ‘steam.’ We let the ‘steam’ exhaust through the jet. That’s the works.”

Ross whistled. “Simple—and neat. But will it work?”

“I know it’ll work. I was trying for a zinc ‘steam’ power plant when I hit on it. I got the hard, hot jet I wanted, but I couldn’t get a turbine to stand up under it. Broke all the blades. Then I realized I had a rocket drive.”

“It’s slick, Doc! But say—why don’t you use lead? You’d get more mass with less bulk.”

“Agood point. Concentrated mass means a smaller rocket motor, smaller tanks, smaller ship, less dead weight all around. But mass isn’t our main trouble; what we’ve got to have is a high-velocity jet. I used zinc because it has a lower boiling point than lead. I want to superheat the vapor so as to get a good, fast jet, but I can’t go above the stable limit of the moderator I’m using.”

“Carbon?”

“Yes, carbon-graphite. We use carbon to moderate the neutron flow and cadmium inserts to control the rate of operation. The radiations get soaked up in a bath of liquid zinc. The zinc boils and the zinc ‘steam’ goes whizzing out the jet as merry as can be.”

“I see. But why don’t you use mercury instead of zinc? It’s heavier than lead and has a lower boiling point than either one of them.” “I’d like to, but it’s too expensive. This is strictly a cut-rate show.” Doc broke off as Morrie stuck his head out the cabin door.

“Hi, there! Come to breakfast, or we’ll throw it out!”

“Don’t do that!” Cargraves slipped a leg over the side of the car- the wrong leg- touched the ground and said, “Ouch!” “Wait a minute, and lean on me,” Ross suggested.

They crept back, helping each other. “Aside from the pile,” Cargraves went on, “there isn’t much left. The thorium is already imbecided in the graphite according to my calculations. That leaves just two major jobs: the air lock and a test-stand run.”

The rocket, although it had operated on the trans-Atlantic run above the atmosphere, had no air lock, since it’s designers had never intended it to be opened up save on the ground. If they were to walk the face of the moon, an air lock, a small compartment with two doors, was necessary. Cargraves planned to weld a steel box around the inside of the present door frame, with a second air-tight door, opening inward.

“I can weld the lock,” Ross offered, “while you rig the pile. That is, if my eyes clear up in time.” “Even if they do, I don’t think it would be smart to stare at a welding arc. Can’t the others weld?” “Well, yes, but just between us chickens, I run a smoother seam.”

“We’ll see …”

At breakfast Cargraves told the other two of his decision to go ahead. Art turned pink and got his words twisted. Morrie said gravely, “I thought your temperature would go down over night. What are the plans?”

“Just the same, only more so. How’s your department?”

“Shucks, I could leave this afternoon. The gyros are purring like kittens; I’ve calculated Hohmann orbits and S-trajectories till I’m sick of ‘em; the computer and me are like that.” He held out two fingers.

“Fine. You concentrate on getting the supplies in, then. How about you, Art?”

“Who, me? Why, I’ve got everything lined up, I guess. Both radars are right on the beam. I’ve got a couple wrinkles I’d like to try with the FMcircuit.” “Is it all right the way it is?”

“Good enough, I guess.”

“Then don’t monkey with the radios. I can keep you busy.” “Oh, sure.”

“How about the radar screen Art was going to rig?” Morrie inquired.

“Eh? Oh, you mean the one for our friend the prowler. Hm… .,” Cargraves studied the matter. “Ross thinks and I agree that the best way to beat the prowler is to get out of here as fast as we can. I don’t want that radar out of the ship. It would waste time and always with the chance of busting a piece of equipment we can’t afford to replace and can’t get along without.”

Morrie nodded. “Suits. I still think that a man with a gun in his hands is worth more than a gadget anyhow. See here—there are four of us. That’s two hours a’ night. Let’s stand guard.” Cargraves agreed to this. Various plans were offered to supplement the human guard and the charged fence, but all were voted down as too time-consuming, too expensive or

impractical. It was decided to let the matter stand, except that lights would be left burning at night, including a string to be rigged around the ship. All of these lines were to be wired to cut

over automatically to the ship’s batteries.

Cargraves sat down to lunch on Wednesday of the following week with a feeling of satisfaction. The thorium power pile was in place, behind the repaired shield. This in itself was good; he disliked the finicky, ever-dangerous work of handling the radioactive element, even though he used body shields and fished at it with tongs.

But the pile was built; the air lock had been welded in place and tested for air-tightness; almost all the supplies were aboard. Acceleration hammocks had been built for Art and Ross (Cargraves and Morrie would ride out the surges of power in the two pilot seats). The power pile had been operated at a low level; all was well, he felt, and the lights on the board were green.

The phony inspector had not showed up again, nor were the night watches disturbed. Best of all, Ross’s eyesight had continued to improve; the eye specialist had pronounced him a cure on Monday, subject to wearing dark glasses for a couple of weeks.

Cargraves’ sprain still made him limp, but he had discarded his stick. Nothing bothered him. He tackled Aggregate a la Galileo (hash to ordinary mortals) with enthusiasm, while thinking about a paper he would write for the Physical Review. Some Verified Experimental Factors in Space Flight seemed like a good title—by Doctor Donald Morris Cargraves, B.S., Sc.D., LL.D., Nobel Prize, Nat. Acad., Fr. Acad., etc. The honors were not yet his—he was merely trying them on for size.

The car ground to a stop outside and Art came in with the mail. “Santa Claus is here!” he greeted them. “One from your folks, Ross, and one from that synthetic blonde you’re sweet on.” “I’m not sweet on her and she’s a natural blonde,” Ross answered emphatically.

“Have it your own way—you’ll find out. Three for you, Morrie—all business. The rest are yours, Doc,” he finished, holding back the one from his mother. “Hash again,” he added. “It’s to soften you up for what you’re going to eat on the moon,” said the cook. “Say, Doc-“

“Yes, Morrie?”

“The canned rations are at the express office in town, it says here. I’ll pick ‘em up this afternoon. The other two are bills. That finishes my check-off list.”

“Good,” he answered absently, as he tore open a letter. “You can help Ross and me on the test stand. That’s the only big job left.” He unfolded the letter and read it. Then he reread it. Presently Ross noticed that he had stopped eating and said, “What’s the matter, Doc?”

“Well, nothing much, but it’s awkward. The Denver outfit can’t supply the dynamometers for the test stand run.” He tossed the letter to Ross. “How bad off does that leave us?” asked Morrie.

“I don’t know, yet. I’ll go with you into town. Let’s make it right after lunch; I have to call the East Coast and I don’t want to get boxed in by the time difference.” “Can do.”

Ross handed the letter back. “Aren’t there plenty of other places to buy them?”

“Hardly ‘plenty.’ Half-a-million-pound dynamometers aren’t stock items. We’ll try Baldwin Locomotives.” “Why don’t we make them?” asked Art. “We made our own for the Starstruck series.”’

Cargraves shook his head. “High as my opinion is of you lugs as good, all-around jack-leg mechanics and pretzel benders, some jobs require special equipment. But speaking of the Starstruck series,” he went on, intentionally changing the subject, “do you guys realize we’ve never named the ship? How does Starstruck VI appeal to you?”

Art liked it. Morrie objected that it should be Moonstruck. But Ross had another idea. “Starstruck was a good enough name for our model rockets, but we want something with a little more

—oh, I don’t know; dignity, I guess-for the moon ship.”

“The Pioneer?” “Corny.”

“The Thor—for the way she’s powered.” “Good, but not enough.”

“Let’s call it Einstein.”

“I see why you want to name it for Doctor Einstein,” Cargraves put in, “but maybe I’ve got another name that will symbolize the same thing to you. How about the Galileo?”

There was no dissension; the members of the Galileo Club again were unanimous. The man who had first seen and described the mountains of the moon, the man whose very name had come to stand for steadfast insistence on scientific freedom and the freely inquiring mind—his name was music to them.

Cargraves wondered whether or not their own names would be remembered after more than three centuries. With luck, with lots of luck—Columbus had not been forgotten. If the luck ran out, well, a rocket crash was a fast clean death.

The luck appeared to be running out, and with nothing as gallant and spectacular as a doomed and flaming rocket. Cargraves sweated in a phone booth until after five o’clock, East Coast time, and then another hour until it was past five in Chicago as well before he admitted that dynamometers of the size he needed were not to be had on short notice.

He blamed himself for having slipped up, while neglecting to credit himself with having planned to obtain the instruments from the Denver firm for reasons of economy; he had expected to get them second-hand. But blaming himself comforted him.

Morrie noted his long face as he climbed into the heavily loaded little car. “No soap, eh?” “No soap. Let’s get back to camp.”

They sped along the desert road in worried silence for several minutes. Finally Morrie spoke up. “How about this, Doc? Make a captive run on the ground with the same yoke and frame you planned to use, but without dynamometers.”

“What good would that do? I have to know what the thrust is.”

“I’m getthig to that. We put a man inside. He watches the accelerometer—the pendulum accelerometer of course; not the distance-integrating one. It reads in g’s. Figure the number of gravities against the gross weight of the ship at the time and you come out with your thrust in pounds.”

Cargraves hesitated. The boy’s mistake was so obvious and yet so easy to make that he wished to point it out without hurting his pride. “It’s a clever plan, except that I would want to use remote control—there’s always the chance that a new type of atomic-fission power plant will blow up. But that’s not the hitch; if the ship is anchored to the ground, it won’t be accelerating no matter how much thrust is developed.”

“Oh!” said Morrie. “Hmm. I sure laid an egg on that one, Doc.” “Natural mistake.”

After another five miles Morrie spoke again. “I’ve got it, Doc. The Galileo has to be free to move to show thrust on the accelerometer. Right? Okay, I’ll test-fly it. Hold it, hold it,” he went on quickly, “I know exactly what you are going to say: you won’t let any one take a risk if you can help it. The ship might blow up, or it might crash. Okay, so it might. But it’s my job. I’m not essential to the trip; you are. You have to have Ross as flight engineer; you have to have Art for the radar and radio; you don’t have to have a second pilot. I’m elected.”

Cargraves tried to make his voice sound offhand. “Morrie, your analysis does your heart credit, but not your head. Even if what you said is true, the last part doesn’t quite add up. I may be essential, if the trip is made. But if the test flight goes wrong, if the power pile blows, or if the ship won’t handle and crashes, then there won’t be any trip and I’m not essential.”

Morrie grinned. “You’re sharp as a tack, Doc.”

“Tried to frame me, eh? Well, I may be old and feeble but I’m not senile. Howsoever, you’ve given me the answer.

“We skip the captive run and test-fly it. I test-fly it.” Morrie whistled, “When?”

“Just as soon as we get back.”

Morrie pushed the accelerator down to the floor boards; Cargraves wished that he had kept quiet until they reached the camp.

Forty minutes later he was handing out his final instructions. “Drive outside the reservation and find some place at least ten miles away where you can see the camp and where you can huddle down behind a road cut or something. If you see a Hiroshima mushroom, don’t try to come back. Drive on into town and report to the authorities.” He handed Ross a briefcase. “In case I stub my toe, give this stuff to your father. He’ll know what to do with it. Now get going. I’ll give you twenty minutes. My watch says seven minutes past five.”

“Just a minute, Doc.”

“What is it, Morrie?” His tones showed nervous irritability. “I’ve polled the boys and they agree with me. The Galileo is expendable but you aren’t. They want you left around to try it again.” “That’s enough on that subject, Morrie.”

“Well, I’ll match you for it.” “You’re on thin ice, Morrie!”

“Yes, sir.” He climbed in the car. The other two squeezed in beside him. “So long!”

“Good luck!”

He waved back at them as they drove away, then turned toward the open door of the Galileo. He was feeling suddenly very lonely.

The boys found such a spot and crouched down behind a bank, like soldiers in a trench. Morrie had a small telescope; Art and Ross were armed with the same opera glasses they had used in their model rocket tests. “He’s closed the door,” announced Morrie.

“What time is it?”

“I’ve got five twenty-five.”

“Any time now. Keep your eyes peeled.” The rocket was tiny even through the opera glasses; Morrie’s view was slightly better. Suddenly he yelled, “That’s it! Geronimo!”

The tail jet, bright silver even in the sun light, had flared out. The ship did not move. “There go his nose jets!” Red and angry, the aniline-and-nitric reached out in front. The Galileo, being equipped with nose and belly maneuvering jets, could take off without a launching platform or catapult. He brought his belly jets into play now; the bow of the Galileo reared up, but the opposing nose and tail jets kept her nailed to one spot.

“He’s off!” The red plumes from the nose were suddenly cut and the ship shot away from the ground. It was over their heads almost before they could catch their breaths. Then it was beyond them and shooting toward the horizon. As it passed over the mountains, out of sight, the three exhaled simultaneously. “Gosh!” said Art, very softly.

Ross started to run. “Hey, where y’ going?”

“Back to the camp! We want to be there before he is!” “Oh!” They tore after him.

Ross set a new high in herding the rig back to the camp site, but his speed did not match their urgency. Nor were they ahead of time. The Galileo came pouring back over the horizon and was already braking on her nose jets when the car slammed to a stop.

She came in at a steep dive, with the drive jet already dead. The nose jets splashed the ground on the very spot where she had taken off. He kicked her up with the belly jets and she pancaked in place. Morrie shook his head. “What a landing!” he said reverently.

Cargraves fell out of the door into a small mob. The boys yelled and pounded him on the back. “How did she behave? How did she handle?”

“Right on the button! The control of the drive jet is laggy, but we expected that. Once she’s hot she doesn’t want to cool off. You have to get rid of your head of ‘steafli.’(<— SeaGull/Zopharnal – Is this right?) I was half way to Oklahoma City before I could slow down enough to turn and come back.”

“Boy, oh boy! What a ship!” “When do we start?”

Cargraves’ face sobered. “Does staying up all night to pack suit you?” “Does it! Just try us!”

“It’s a deal. Art, get in the ship and get going with the radio. Get the Associated Press station at Salt Lake. Get the United Press. Call up the radio news services. Tell them to get some television pick-ups out here. The lid is off now. Make them realize there is a story here.”

“On my way!” He scrambled up into the ship, then paused in the door. “Say—what if they don’t believe me?”

“Make them believe you. Tell them to call Doctor Larksbee at the commission for confirmation. Tell them that if they miss they’ll be scooped on the biggest story since the war. And say— call up Mr. Buchanan on the forestry frequency. He’s kept his mouth shut for us; he ought to be in on it.”

By midnight the job was practically complete and Cargraves insisted that they take turns lying down, two at a time, not to sleep, but just to keep from starting the trip completely tired out. The fuel tanks for the belly and nose jets were topped off and the specially installed reserve tanks were filled. The tons of zinc which served the main drive were already aboard as well as an equal weight of powdered reserve. The food was aboard; the carefully rationed water was aboard. (Water was no problem; the air-conditioner would scavenge the vapor of their own exhalations.) The liquid oxygen tanks were full. Cargraves himself had carried aboard the two Garands, excusing it to himself on the pretext that they might land in some wild spot on the return trip … that, despite the fact they had ripped the bindings from their few books in order to save space and weight.

He was tired. Only the carefully prepared lists enabled him to be sure that the ship was in all respects ready—or would be soon.

The boys were tired, confused, and excited. Morrie had worked the problem of their departure trajectory three times and then had gotten nerves over it, although it had checked to the last decimal each time. He was gnawed by fear that he had made some silly and fatal mistake and was not satisfied until Cargraves had gotten the same answer, starting with a clear board.

Mr. Buchanan, the Ranger, showed up about one o’clock, “Is this the Central New Mexico Insane Asylum?” he inquired pleasantly.

Cargraves admitted it. “I’ve wondered what you folks were up to,” the Ranger went on. “Of course I saw your ship, but your message surely surprised me. I hope you don’t mind me thinking you’re crazy; I wish you luck just the same.”

“Thanks.” Cargraves showed him the ship, and explained their plans. The moon was full and an hour past its greatest elevation. They planned to take off shortly after daybreak, as it was sinking in the west. This would lose them the earth’s spin, but, after the trial run, Cargraves did not care; he had power to throw away. Waiting twelve hours to save a difference of about 1600 miles per hour was more than his nerves could stand.

He had landed the rocket faced west; it would save jacking her around as well.

Buchanan looked the layout over and asked where the jets would splash. Cargraves showed him. Whereupon Buchanan asked, “Have you arranged for any guards?”

In truth, Cargraves had forgotten it. “Never mind,” said Buchanan, “I’ll call Captain Taylor and get some state police over.”

“Never mind calling; we’ll radio. Art!”

The press started showing up at four; by the time the state police arrived, Cargraves knew that he had been saved real grief. The place was crowded. Escorts were necessary from the outer gate to the corral to make sure that no one drove on the danger-studded mock-battle fields. Once in the corral it took the firm hand of the state police to keep them there—and to keep them from swarming over the ship.

At five they ate their last breakfast in the camp, with a guard at the door to give them some peace. Cargraves refused to be interviewed; he had prepared a typed hand-out and given copies to Buchanan to distribute. But the boys were buttonholed whenever his back was turned. Finally Captain Taylor assigned a bodyguard to each.

They marched in a hollow square of guards to the ship. Flash guns dazzled their eyes and television scanners followed their movements. It seemed impossible that this was the same lonely spot where, only hours before, they had worried about silent prowlers in the dark.

Cargraves had the boys climb in, then turned to Buchanan and Captain Taylor. “Ten minutes, gentlemen. Are you sure you can keep everybody clear? Once I get in the seat I can’t see the ground near me.”

“Don’t worry, Captain Cargraves,” Taylor assured him. “Ten minutes it is.”

Buchanan stuck out his hand. “Good luck, Doctor. Bring me back some green cheese.” ‘ Aman came puffing up, dodged past a guard, and thrust a folded paper in Cargraves’ hand. “Here, what’s this?” demanded Taylor. “Get back where you belong.”

The man shrugged. “It’s a court order.” “Eh? What sort?”

“Temporary injunction against flying this ship. Order to appear and show cause why a permanent injunction should not be issued to restrain him from willfully endangering the lives of minors.”

Cargraves stared. It felt to him as if the world were collapsing around him. Ross and Art appeared at the door behind him. “Doc, what’s up?”

“Hey, there! You boys-come down out of there,” yelled the stranger, and then said to Captain Taylor, “I’ve got another paper directing me to take them in charge on behalf of the court.” “Get back in the ship,” Cargraves ordered firmly, and opened the paper. It seemed in order. State of New Mexico and so forth. The stranger began to expostulate. Taylor took him by the

arm.

“Take it easy,” he said.

“Thanks,” said Cargraves. “Mr. Buchanan, can I have a word with you? Captain, will you hang on to this character?” “Now, I don’t want any beef,” protested the stranger. “I’m just carrying out my duty.”

“I wonder,” Cargraves said thoughtfully. He led Buchanan around the nose of the craft and showed him the paper. “It seems to be in order,” Buchanan admitted.

“Maybe. This says it’s the order of a state court. This is federal territory, isn’t it? As a matter of fact, Captain Taylor and his men are here only by your invitation and consent. Isn’t that right?” “Hmmm… yes. That’s so.” Buchanan suddenly jammed the paper in his pocket. “I’ll fix his clock!”

“Just a minute.” Cargraves told him rapidly about the phony inspector, and the prowlers, matters which he had kept to himself, save for a letter to the Washington CAB office. “This guy may be a phony, or a stooge of a phony. Don’t let him get away until you check with the court that supposedly issued this order.”

“I won’t!”

They went back, and Buchanan called Taylor aside. Cargraves took the stranger by the arm, not gently. The man protested. “How would you like a poke in the eye?” Cargraves inquired. Cargraves was six inches taller, and solid. The man shut up. Taylor and Buchanan came back in a moment or two. The state policeman said, “You are due to take off in three minutes,

Captain. I had better be sure the crowd is clear.” He turned and called out, “Hey! Sergeant Swanson!”

“Yes, sir!’

“Take charge of this guy.” It was the stranger, not Cargraves, whom he indicated.

Cargraves climbed in the ship. As he turned to close the door a cheer, ragged at first but growing to a solid roar, hit him. He clamped the door and locked it, then turned. “Places, men.” Art and Ross trotted to their hammocks, directly behind the pilots’ seats. These hammocks were vertical, more like stretchers braced upright than garden hammocks. They snapped

safety belts across their knees and chests.

Morrie was already in his chair, legs braced, safety belts buckled, head back against the shock pad. Cargraves slipped into the seat beside him, favoring his bad foot as he did so. “All set, Morrie.” His eyes glanced over the instrument board, particularly noticing the temperature of the zinc and the telltale for position of the cadmium damping plates.

“All set, Captain. Give her the gun when you are ready.”

He buckled himself in and glanced out the quartz glass screen ahead of him. The field was clear as far as he could see. Staring straight at him, round and beautiful, was their destination. Under his right hand, mounted on the arm rest, was a large knurled knob. He grasped it. “Art?”

“Ready sir.” “Ross?”

“Ready, Captain.” “Co-pilot?”

“Ready, Captain. Time, six-oh-one.”

He twisted the knob slowly to the right. Back behind him, actuated by remote control, cadmium shields slowly withdrew from between lattices of graphite and thorium; uncountable millions of neutrons found it easier to seek atoms of thorium to destroy. The tortured nuclei, giving up the ghost, spent their energy in boiling the molten zinc.

The ship began to tremble.

With his left hand he cut in the nose rockets, balancing them against the increasing surge from the rear. He slapped in the belly jets; the ship reared. He let the nose jets die. The Galileo leaped forward, pressing them back into their pads.

They were headed skyward, out and far.

Chapter 9 – INTO THE LONELY DEPTHS

TO ROSS AND ART THE WORLD seemed to rotate dizzily through ninety degrees. They had been standing up, strapped to their upright hammocks, and staring straight forward past Cargraves and Morrie out through the conning port at the moon and the western horizon.

When the rocket took off it was as if they had been suddenly forced backwards, flat on their backs and pushed heavily into the cushions and springs. Which, in a way, was exactly what had happened to them. It was the powerful thrust of the jet which had forced them back against the springs and held them there. The force of the drive made the direction they were traveling “up.”

But the moon still stared back at them, dead ahead through the port; “up” was also “west.” From where they lay, flat on their backs, Cargraves and Morrie were above them and were kept from falling on them by the heavy steel thrust members which supported the piloting chairs.

The moon shimmered and boiled under the compression waves of air. The scream of the frantic molecules of air against the skin of the craft was louder and even more nerve-racking than steady thunder of the jet below them. The horizon dropped steadily away from the disk of the moon as they shot west and gained altitude. The sky, early morning gray as they took off, turned noonday blue as their flat climb took them higher and higher into the sunlight.

The sky started to turn purple and the stars came out. The scream of the air was less troublesome. Cargraves cut in his gyros and let Joe the Robot correct his initial course; the moon swung gently to the right about half its width and steadied. “Everybody all right?,” he called out, his attention free of the controls for a moment.

“Swell!” Art called back.

“Somebody’s sitting on my chest,” Ross added. “What’s that?”

“I say, somebody’s sitting on my chest!” Ross shouted. “Well, wait a bit. His brother will be along in a minute.” “What did you say?”

“Never mind!” Cargraves shouted. “It wasn’t important. Copilot!” “Yes, Captain!”

“I’m going into full automatic. Get ready to check our course.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Morrie clamped his octant near his face and shifted his head a little so that he could see the scope of the belly radar easily. He dug his head into the pads and braced his arms and hands; he knew what was coming. “Astrogator ready!”

The sky was black now and the stars were sharp. The image of the moon had ceased to shake and the unearthly scream of the air had died away, leaving only the tireless thunder of the jet. They were above the atmosphere, high above—free.

Cargraves yelled, “Hang on to your hats, boys! Here we go! He turned full control over to Joe the Robot pilot. That mindless, mechanical-and-electronic worthy figuratively shook his non- existent head and decided he did not like the course. The image of the moon swung “down” and toward the bow, in terms of the ordinary directions in the ship, until the rocket was headed in a direction nearly forty degrees further east than was the image of the moon.

Having turned the ship to head for the point where the moon would be when the Galileo met it, rather than headed for where it now was, Joe turned his attention to the jet. Thee cadmium plates were withdrawn a little farther; the rocket really bit in and began to dig.

Ross found that there was indeed a whole family on his chest. Breathing was hard work and his eyes seemed foggy.

If Joe had had feelings he need have felt no pride in what he had just done, for his decisions had all been made for him before the ship left the ground. Morrie had selected, with Cargraves’ approval, one of several three-dimensional cams and had installed it in Joe’s innards. The cam “told” Joe what sort of a course to follow to the moon, what course to head first, how fast to gun the rocket and how long to keep it up. Joe could not see the moon- Joe had never heard of the moon -but his electronic senses could perceive how the ship was headed in relation to the steady, unswerving spin of the gyros and then head the ship in the direction called for by the cam in his tummy.

The cam itself had been designed by a remote cousin of Joe’s, the gteat “Eniac” computer at the University of Pennsylvania. By means of the small astrogation computer in the ship either Morrie or Cargraves could work out any necessary problem and control the Galileo by hand, but Joe, with the aid of his cousin, could do the same thing better, faster, more accurately and with unsleeping care—provided the human pilot knew what to ask of him and how to ask it.

Joe had not been invented by Cargraves; thousands of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians had contributed to his existence. His grandfathers had guided the Nazi V-2 rockets in the horror-haunted last days of World War II. His fathers had been developed for the deadly, ocean-spanning guidedmissiles of the UN world police force. His brothers and sisters were found in every rocket ship, private and commercial, passenger-carrying or unmanned, that cleft the skies of earth.

Trans-Atlantic hop or trip to the moon, it was all one to Joe. He did what his cam told him to do. He did not care, he did not even know. Cargrave called out, “How you making out down there?”

“All right, I guess,” Ross answered, his voice laboring painfully. “I feel sick,” Art admitted with a groan.

“Breathe through your mouth. Take deep breaths.” “I can’t.”

“Well, hang on. It won’t be long.”

In fact it was only fifty-five seconds at full drive until Joe, still advised by his cam, decided that they had had enough of full drive. The cadmium plates slid farther back into the power pile, thwarting the neutrons; the roar of the rocket drive lessened.

The ship did not slow down; it simply ceased to accelerate so rapidly. It maintained all the speed it had gained and the frictionless vacuum of space did nothing to slow its headlong plunge. But the acceleration was reduced to one earth-surface gravity, one g, enough to overcome the powerful tug of the earth’s mighty weight and thereby permit the ship to speed ahead unchecked—a little less than one g, in fact, as the grasp of the earth was already loosening and would continue to drop off to the change-over, more than 200,000 miles out in space, where the attraction of the moon and that of the earth are equal.

For the four in the ship the reduction in the force of the jet had returned them to a trifle less than normal weight, under an artificial gravity produced by the drive of the jet. This false “gravity” had nothing to do with the pull of the earth; the attraction of the earth can be felt only when one is anchored to it and supported by it, its oceans, or it’s air.

The attraction of the earth exists out in space but the human body has no senses which can perceive it. If a man were to fall from a tremendous height, say fifty thousand miles, it would not seem to him that he was falling but rather that the earth was rushing up to meet him.

After the tremendous initial drive had eased off, Cargraves called out again to Art. “Feeling any better, kid?” “I’m all right now,” Art replied.

“Fine. Want to come up here where you can see better?”

“Sure!” responded both Art and Ross, with one voice.

“Okay. Watch your step.”

“We will.” The two unstrapped themselves and climbed up to the control station by means of hand and toe holds welded to the sides of the ship. Once there they squatted on the supporting beams for the pilots’ chairs, one on each side. They looked out.

The moon had not been visible to them from their hammock positions after the change in course. From their new positions they could see it, near the “lower” edge of the conning port. It was full, silver white and so dazzling bright that it hurt their eyes, although not sufficiently nearer to produce any apparent increase in size. The stars around it in the coalblack sky were hard bright diamonds, untwinkling.

“Look at that,” breathed Ross. “Look at old Tycho shining out like a searchlight. Boy!”

“I wish we could see the earth,” said Art. “This bucket ought to have more than one view port.” “What do you expect for a dollar-six-bits?” asked Ross. “Chimes? The Galileo was a freighter.”

“I can show it to you in the scope,” Morrie offered, and switched on the piloting radar in the belly. The screen lit up after a few seconds but the picture was disappointing. Art could read it well enough- it was his baby -but esthetically it was unsatisfying. It was no more than a circular plot reading in bearing and distance; the earth was simply a vague mass of light on that edge of the circle which represented the astern direction.

“That’s not what I want,” Art objected. “I want to see it. I want to see it shape up like a globe and see the continents and the oceans.” “You’ll have to wait until tomorrow, then, when we cut the drive and swing ship. Then you can see the earth and the sun, too.”

“Okay. How fast are we going? Never mind—I see,” he went on, peering at the instrument board. “3,300 miles per hour.” “You’re looking at it wrong,” Ross corrected him. “It says 14,400 miles per hour.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Like fun. Your eyes have gone bad.”

“Easy, boys, easy,” Cargraves counseled. “You are looking at different instruments. What kind of speed do you want?” “I want to know how fast we’re going,” Art persisted.

“Now, Art, I’m surprised at you. After all you’ve had every one of these instruments apart. Think what you’re saying.”

Art stared at the instrument board again, then looked sheepish. “Sure, I forgot. Let’s see now—we’ve gained 14,000 and some, close to 15,000 now, miles per hour in free fall—but we’re not falling.”

“We’re always falling,” Morrie put in, smug for the moment in his status as a pilot. “You fall all the time from the second you take off, but you drive to beat the fall.” “Yes, yes, I know,” Art cut him off. “I was just mixed up for a moment. Thirty-three hundred is the speed I want — 3310 flow.”

‘Speed’ in space is a curiously slippery term, as it is relative to whatever point you select as ‘fixed’—but the points in space are never fixed. The speed Art settled for was the speed of the Galileo along a line from the earth to their meeting place with the moon. This speed was arrived at deep inside Joe the Robot by combining by automatic vector addition three very complicated figures: first was the accumulated acceleration put on the ship by its jet drive, second the motions imposed on the ship by its closeness to the earth—its ‘free fall’ speed of which Art had spoken. And lastly, there was the spin of the earth itself, considered both in amount and direction for the time of day of the take-off and the latitude of the camp site in New Mexico. The last was subtracted, rather than added, insofar as the terms of ordinary arithmetic apply to this sort of figuring.

The problem could be made vastly more complicated. The Galileo was riding with the earth and the moon in their yearly journey around the sun at a speed of about 19 miles per second or approximately 70,000 miles per hour as seen from outer space. In addition, the earth-moon line was sweeping around the earth once each month as it followed the moon—but Joe the Robot had compensated for that when he set them on a course to where the moon would be rather than where it was.

There were also the complicated motions of the sun and its planets with reference to the giddily whirling ‘fixed’ stars, speeds which could be nearly anything you wanted, depending on which types of stars you selected for your reference points, but all of which speeds are measured in many miles per second.

But Joe cared nothing for these matters. His cam and his many circuits told him how to get them from the earth to the moon; he knew how to do that and Doctor Einstein’s notions of relativity worried him not. The mass of machinery and wiring which made up his being did not have worry built into it. It was, however, capable of combining the data that came to it to show that the Galileo was now moving somewhat more than 3300 miles per hour along an imaginary line which joined earth to the point where the moon would be when they arrived.

Morrie could check this figure by radar observations for distance, plus a little arithmetic. If the positions as observed did not match what Joe computed them to be, Morrie could feed Joe the corrections and Joe would accept them and work them into his future calculations as placidly and as automatically as a well-behaved stomach changes starch into sugar.

“Thirty-three hundred miles per hour,” said Art. “That’s not so much. The V-2 rockets in the war made more than that. Let’s open her up wide and see what she’ll do. How about it, Doc?” “Sure,” agreed Ross, “we’ve got a clear road and plenty of room. Let’s bust some space.”

Cargraves sighed. “See here,” he answered, “I did not try to keep you darned young speed demons from risking your necks in that pile of bailing wire you call an automobile, even when I jeopardized my own life by keeping quiet. But I’m going to run this rocket my way. I’m in no hurry.”

“Okay, okay, just a suggestion,” Ross assured him. He was quiet for a moment, then added, “But there’s one thing that bothers me …” “What?”

“Well, if I’ve read it once, I’ve read it a thousand times, that you have to go seven miles per second to get away from the earth. Yet here we are going only 3300 miles per hour.” “We’re moving, aren’t we?”

“Yeah, but-“

“As a matter of fact we are going to build up a lot more speed before we start to coast. We’ll make the first part of the trip much faster than the last part. But suppose we just held our present speed—how long would it take to get to the moon?”

Ross did a little fast mental arithmetic concerning the distance of the moon from the earth, rounding the figure off to 240,000 miles. “About three days.”

“What’s wrong with that? Never mind,” Cargraves went on. “I’m not trying to be a smart-Aleck. The misconception is one of the oldest in the book, and it keeps showing up again, every time some non-technical man decides to do a feature story on the future of space travel. It comes from mixing up shooting with rocketry. If you wanted to fire a shot at the moon, the way Jules Verne proposed, it would have to go seven miles per second when it left the gun or it would fall back. But with a rocket you could make the crossing at a slow walk if you had enough power and enough fuel to keep on driving just hard enough to keep from falling back. Of course it would raise Cain with your mass-ratio. But we’re doing something of that sort right now. We’ve got tower to spare; I don’t see why we should knock ourselves out with higher acceleration than we have to just to get there a little sooner. The moon will wait. It’s waited a long time.

“Anyhow,” he added, “no matter what you say and no matter how many physics textbooks are written and studied, people still keep mixing up gunnery and rocketry. It reminds me of that other old chestnut—about how a rocket can’t work out in empty space, because it wouldn’t have anything to push on.”

“Go ahead and laugh!” Cargraves continued, seeing their expressions, “It strikes you as funny as a The-World-Is-Flat theory. But I heard an aeronautical engineer, as late as 1943, say just that.”

“No! Not really!”

“I certainly did. He was a man with twenty-five years of professional experience and he had worked for both Wright Field and the Navy. But he said that in it. Next year the Nazis were bombing London with V-2s. Yet according to him it couldn’t be done!”

“I’d think any man who had ever felt the kick of a shotgun would understand how a rocket works,” Ross commented.

“It doesn’t work out that way. Mostly it has no effect on his brain cells; it just gives him a sore shoulder.” He started to lift himself out of his semi-reclining position in his pilot’s chair. “Come on. Let’s eat. Wow! My foot’s gone to sleep. I want to stock up and then get some sleep. Breakfast wasn’t much good for me—too many people staring down our necks.”

“Sleep?” said Art. “Did you say ‘sleep’? I can’t sleep; I’m too excited. I don’t suppose I’ll sleep the whole trip.”

“Suit yourself. Me, I’m going to soak up shut-eye just as soon as we’ve eaten. There’s nothing to see now, and won’t be until we go into free fall. You’ve had better views of the moon through a telescope.”

“It’s not the same thing,” Art pointed out.

“No, it’s not,” Cargraves conceded. “Just the same, I intend to reach the moon rested up instead of worn out. Morrie, where did you stow the can openers?”

“I-” Morrie stopped and a look of utter consternation came over his face. “I think I left them behind. I put them down on the sink shelf and then some female reporter started asking me some fool question and-“

“Yeah, I saw,” Ross interrupted him. “You were practically rolling over and playing dead for her. It was cute.”

Cargraves whistled tunelessly. “I hope that we find out that we haven’t left behind anything really indispensable. Never mind the can openers, Morrie. The way I feel I could open a can with my bare teeth.”

“Oh, you won’t have to do that, Doc,” Morrie said eagerly. “I’ve got a knife with a gadget for-” He was feeling in his pocket as he talked. His expression changed abruptly and he withdrew his hand. “Here are the can openers, Doc.”

Ross looked at him innocently. “Did you get her address, Morrie?”

Supper, or late breakfast, as the case may be, was a simple meal, eaten from ration cans. Thereafter Cargraves got out his bedding roll and spread it on the bulkhead- now a deck – which separated the pilot compartment from the hold. Morrie decided to sleep in his co-pilot’s chair. It, with its arm rests, head support, and foot rest, was not unlike an extremely well- padded barber’s chair for the purpose, one which had been opened to a semi-reclining position. Cargraves let him try it, cautioning him only to lock his controls before going to sleep.

About an hour later Morrie climbed down and spread his roll beside Cargraves. Art and Ross slept on their acceleration hammocks, which were very well adapted to the purpose, as long as the occupant was not strapped down.

Despite the muted roar of the jet, despite the excitement of being in space, they all were asleep in a few minutes. They were dead tired and needed it. During the ‘night’ Joe the Robot slowly reduced the drive of the jet as the pull of the earth grew less.

Art was first to awaken. He had trouble finding himself for a moment or two and almost fell from his hammock on to the two sleepers below before he recollected his surroundings. When he did it brought him wide awake with a start. Space! He was out in space! — Headed for the moon!

Moving with unnecessary quiet, since he could hardly have been heard above the noise of the jet in any case and since both Ross and Cargraves were giving very fair imitations of rocket motors themselves, he climbed out of the hammock and monkey-footed up to the pilots’ seats. He dropped into Morrie’s chair, feeling curiously but pleasantly light under the much reduced acceleration.

The moon, now visibly larger and almost painfully beautiful, hung in the same position in the sky, such that he had to let his gaze drop as he lay in the chair in order to return its stare. This bothered him for a moment—how were they ever to reach the moon if the moon did not draw toward the point where they were aiming?

It would not have bothered Morrie, trained as he was in a pilot’s knowledge of collision bearings, interception courses, and the like. But, since it appeared to run contrary to common sense, Art worried about it until he managed to visualize the situation somewhat thus: if a car is speeding for a railroad crossing and a train is approaching from the left, so that their combined speeds will bring about a wreck, then the bearing of the locomotive from the automobile will not change, right up to the moment of the collision.

It was a simple matter of similar triangles, easy to see with a diagram but hard to keep straight in the head. The moon was speeding to their meeting place at about 2000 miles an hour, yet she would never change direction; she would simply grow and grow and grow until she filled the whole sky.

He let his eyes rove over her face, naming the lovely names in his mind, Mare Tranquilitatis, Oceanus Procellarum, the lunar Apennines, LaGrange, Ptolemous, Mare Imbrium, Catharina. Beautiful words, they rolled on the tongue.

He was not too sure of the capitals of all the fifty-one United States and even naming the United Nations might throw him, but the geography- or was it lunography? -of the moon was as familiar to him as the streets of his home town.

This face of the moon, anyway—he wondered what the other face was like, the face the earth has never seen.

The dazzle of the moon was beginning to hurt his eyes; he looked up and rested them on the deep, black velvet of space, blacker by contrast with the sprinkle of stars.

There were few of the really bright stars in the region toward which the Galileo was heading. Aldebaran blazed forth, high and aft, across the port from the moon. The right-hand frame of the port slashed through the Milky Way and a small portion of that incredible river of stars was thereby left visible to him. He picked out the modest lights of Aries, and near mighty Aldebaran hung the ghostly, fairy Pleiades, but dead ahead, straight up, were only faint stars and a black and lonely waste.

He lay back, staring into this remote and solitary depth, vast and remote beyond human comprehension, until he was fascinated by it, drawn into it. He seemed to have left the warmth and safety of the ship and to be plunging deep into the silent blackness ahead.

He blinked his eyes and shivered, and for the first time felt himself wishing that he had never left the safe and customary and friendly scenes of home. He wanted his basement lab, his mother’s little shop, and the humdrum talk of ordinary people, people who stayed home and did not worry about the outer universe.

Still, the black depths fascinated him. He fingered the drive control under his right hand. He had only to unlock it, twist it all the way to the right, and they would plunge ahead, nailed down by unthinkable acceleration, and speed on past the moon, too early for their date in space with her. On past the moon, away from the sun and the earth behind them, on an on and out and out, until the thorium burned itself cold or until the zinc had boiled away, but not to stop even then, but to continue forever into the weary years and the bottomless depths.

He blinked his eyes and then closed them tight, and gripped both arms of the chair.

Chapter 10 – THE METHOD OF SCIENCE

“ARE YOU ASLEEP?” THE VOICE in his ear made Art jump; he had still had his eyes closed—it startled him. But it was only Doc, climbing up behind him. “Oh! Good morning, Doc. Gee, I’m glad to see you. This place was beginning to give me the jim-jams.”

“Good morning to you, if it is morning. I suppose it is morning, somewhere.” He glanced at his watch. “I’m not surprised that you got the willies, up here by yourself. How would you like to make this trip by yourself?”

“Not me.”

“Not me, either. The moon will be just about as lonely but it will feel better to have some solid ground underfoot. But I don’t suppose this trip will be really popular until the moon has some nice, noisy night clubs and a bowling alley or two.” He settled himself down in his chair.

“That’s not very likely, is it?”

“Why not? The moon is bound to be a tourists’ stop some day—and have you ever noticed how, when tourists get somewhere new, the first thing they do is to look up the same kind of entertainments they could find just as easily at home?”

Art nodded wisely, while tucking the notion away in his mind. His own experience with tourists and travel was slight—until now! “Say, Uncle, do you suppose I could get a decent picture of the moon through the port?”

Cargraves squinted up at it. “Might. But why waste film? They get better pictures of it from the earth. Wait until we go into a free orbit and swing ship. Then you can get some really unique pics—the earth from space. Or wait until we swing around the moon.”

“That’s what I really want! Pictures of the other side of the moon.”

“That’s what I thought.” Cargraves paused a moment and then added, “But how do you know you can get any?” “But—Oh, I see’. what you mean. It’ll be dark on that side.”

“That’s not exactly what I meant, although that figures in, too, since the moon will be only about three days past ‘new moon’ — ‘new moon,’ that is, for the other side. We’ll try to time it to get all the pics you want on the trip back. But that isn’t what I mean: how do you know there is any back side to the moon? You’ve never seen it. Neither has any one else, for that matter.”

“But- there has to -I mean, you can see …”

“Did I hear you say there wasn’t any other side to the moon, Doc?” It was Ross, whose head had suddenly appeared beside Cargraves’. “Good morning, Ross. No, I did not say, there was no other side to the moon. I had asked Art to tell me what leads him to think there is one.” Ross smiled. “Don’t let him pull your leg, Art. He’s just trying to rib you.”

Cargraves grinned wickedly. “Okay, Aristotle, you picked it. Suppose you try to prove to me that there is a far side to the moon.” “It stands to reason.”

“What sort of reason? Have you ever been there? Ever seen it?” “No, but-“

“Ever met anybody who’s ever seen it? Ever read any accounts by anybody who claimed to have seen it?” “No, I haven’t, but I’m sure there is one.”

“Why?”

“Because I can see the front of it.”

“What does that prove? Isn’t your experience, up to now, limited to things you’ve seen on earth? For that matter I can name a thing you’ve seen on earth that hasn’t any back side.” “Huh? What sort of a thing? What are you guys talking about?” It was Morrie this time, climbing up on the other side.

Art said, “Hi, Morrie. Want your seat?”

“No, thanks. I’ll just squat here for the time being.” He settled himself, feet dangling. “What’s the argument?” “Doc,” Ross answered, “is trying to prove there isn’t any other side to the moon.”

“No, no, no,” Cargraves hastily denied. “And repeat ‘no.’ I was trying to get you to prove your assertion that there was one. I was saying that there was a phenomenon even on earth which hasn’t any back side, to nail down Ross’s argument from experience with other matters—even allowing that earth experience necessarily applies to the moon, which I don’t.”

“Whoops! Slow up! Take the last one first. Don’t natural laws apply anywhere in the universe?” “Pure assumption, unproved.”

“But astronomers make predictions, eclipses and such, based on that assumption—and they work out.”

“You’ve got it backwards. The Chinese were predicting eclipses long before the theory of the invariability of natural law was popular. Anyhow, at the best, we notice certain limited similarities between events in the sky and events on earth. Which has nothing to do with the question of a back side of the moon which we’ve never seen and may not be there.”

“But we’ve seen a lot of it,” Morrie pointed out.

“I get you,” Cargraves agreed. “Between librations and such—the eccentricity of the moon’s orbit and its tilt, we get to peek a little way around the edges from time to time and see about 6o per cent of its surface—if the surface is globular. But I’m talking about that missing 40 per cent that we’ve never seen.”

“Oh,” said Ross, “you mean the side we can’t see might just be sliced off, like an apple with a piece out of it. Well, you may be right, but I’ll bet you six chocolate malts, payable when we get back, that you’re all wet.”

“Nope,” Cargrave answered, “this is a scientific discussion and betting is inappropriate. Besides, I might lose. But I did not mean anything of the slice-out-of-an-apple sort. I meant just what I said: no back side at all. The possibility that when we swing around the moon to look at the other side, we won’t find anything at all, nothing, just empty space-that when we try to look at the moon from behind it, there won’t be any moon to be seen—not from that position. I’m not asserting that that is what we will find; I’m asking you to prove that we will find anything.”

“Wait a minute,” Morrie put in, as Art glanced wildly at the moon as if to assure himself that it was still there—it was! “You mentioned something of that sort on earth—a thing with no back. What was it? I’m from Missouri.”

“Arainbow. You can see it from just one side, the side that faces the sun. The other side does not exist.” “But you can’t get behind it.”

“Then try it with a garden spray some sunny day. Walk around it. When you get behind it, it ain’t there.”

“Yes, but Doc,” Ross objected, “you’re just quibbling. The cases aren’t parallel. Arainbow is just light waves; the moon is something substantial.”

“That’s what I’m trying to get you to prove, and you haven’t proved it yet. How do you know the moon is substantial? All you have ever seen of it is just light waves, as with the rainbow.” Ross thought about this. “Okay, I guess I see what you’re getting at. But we do know that the moon is substantial; they bounced radar off it, as far back as ‘46.”

“Just light waves again, Ross. Infra-red light, or ultra-shortwave radio, but the same spectrum. Come again.” “Yes, but they bounced.”

“You are drawing an analogy from earth conditions again. I repeat, we know nothing of moon conditions except through the insubstantial waves of the electromagnetic spectrum.” “How about tides?”

“Tides exist, certainly. We have seen them, wet our feet in them. But that proves nothing about the moon. The theory that the moon causes the tides is a sheer convenience, pure theory. We change theories as often as we change our underwear. Next year it may be simpler to assume that the tides cause the moon. Got any other ideas?”

Ross took a deep breath. “You’re trying to beat me down with words. All right, so I haven’t seen the other side of the moon. So I’ve never felt the moon, or taken a bite out of it. By the way, you can hang on to the theory that the moon is made of green cheese with that line of argument.”

“Not quite,” said Cargraves. “There is some data on that, for what it’s worth. An astronomer fellow made a spectrograph of green cheese and compared it with a spetcrograph of the moon. No resemblance.”

Art chortled. “He didn’t, really?” “Fact. You can look it up.”

Ross shrugged. “That’s no better than the radar data,” he said correctly. “But to get on with my proof. Granted that there is a front side to the moon, whatever it’s nature, just as long as it isn’t so insubstantial that it won’t even reflect radar, then there has to be some sort of a back, flat, round, square, or wiggly. That’s a matter of certain mathematical deduction.”

Morrie snorted.

Cargraves limited himself to a slight smile. “Now, Ross. Think it over. What is the content of mathematics?” “The content of mathe-” He collapsed suddenly. “Oh.”

“I guess I finally get it. Mathematics doesn’t have any content. If we found there wasn’t any other side, then we would just have to invent a new mathematics.”

“That’s the idea. Fact of the matter is, we won’t know that there is another side to the moon until we get there. I was just trying to show you,” he went on, “just how insubstantial a ‘common sense’ idea can be when you pin it down. Neither ‘common sense’ nor ‘logic’ can prove anything. Proof comes from experiment, or to put it another way, from experience, and from nothing else. Short lecture on the scientific method—you can count it as thirty minutes on today’s study time. Anybody else want breakfast but me? Or has the low weight made you queasy?” He started to climb out of his chair.

Ross was very thoughtful while they made preparations for breakfast. This was to be a proper meal, prepared from their limited supply of non-canned foods. The Galileo had been fitted with a galley of sorts, principally a hot plate and a small refrigerator. Dishes and knives, forks, and spoons could be washed, sparingly, with the water which accumulated in the dump of the air-conditioner, and then sterilized on the hot plate. The ship had everything necessary to life, even a cramped but indispensable washroom. But every auxiliary article, such as dishes, was made of zinc-reserve mass for the hungry jet.

They sat, or rather squatted, down to a meal of real milk, cereal, boiled eggs, rolls, jam, and coffee. Cargraves sighed contentedly when it had been tucked away. “We won’t get many like that,” he commented, as he filled his pipe. “Space travel isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, not yet.”

“Mind the pipe, Skipper!” Morrie warned.

Cargraves looked startled. “I forgot,” he admitted guiltily. He stared longingly at the pipe. “Say, Ross,” he inquired, “do you think the air-conditioner would clean it out fast enough?” “Go ahead. Try it,” Ross urged him. “One pipeful won’t kill us. But say, Doc-“

“Yes?”

“Well, uh, look—don’t you really believe there is another side to the moon?” “Huh? Still on that, eh? Of course I do.”

“But it’s just my opinion. I believe it because all my assumptions, beliefs, prejudices, theories, superstitions, and so forth, tend that way. It’s part of the pattern of fictions I live by, but that doesn’t prove it’s right. So if it turns out to be wrong I hope I am sufficiently emotionally braced not to blow my top.”

“Which brings us right back to study time,” he went on. “You’ve all got thirty minutes credit, which gives you an hour and a half to go. Better get busy.” Art looked dumfounded. “I thought you were kidding Uncle. You don’t mean to run such a schedule on the moon, do you?”

“Unless circumstances prevent. Now is a good time to work up a little reserve, for that matter, while there is nothing to see and no work to do.”

Art continued to look astonished, then his race cleared. “I m afraid we can’t, Uncle. The books are all packed down so far that we can’t get at them till we land.”

“So? Well, we won’t let that stop us. Aschool,” he quoted, “is a log with a pupil on one end and a teacher on the other. We’ll have lectures and quizzes—starting with a review quiz. Gather round, victims.”

They did so, sitting cross-legged in a circle on the hold bulkhead. Cargraves produced a pencil and a reasonably clean piece of paper from his always bulging pockets. “You first, Art. Sketch and describe a cyclotron. Basic review—let’s see how much you’ve forgotten.”

Art commenced outlining painfully the essential parts of a cyclotron. He sketched two hollow half-cylinders, with their open sides facing each other, close together. “These are made of copper,” he stated, “and each one is an electrode for a very high frequency, high voltage power source. It’s actually a sort of short-wave radio transmitter—I’ll leave it out of the sketch. Then you have an enormously powerful electromagnet with its field running through the opening between the dees, the half-cylinders, and vertical to them. The whole thing is inside a big vacuum chamber. You get a source of ions-“

“What sort of ions?”

“Well, maybe you put a little hydrogen in the vacuum chamber and kick it up with a hot filament at the center point of the two dees. Then you get hydrogen nuclei-protons.” “Go ahead.”

“The protons have a positive charge, of course. The alternating current would keep them kicking back and forth between the two electrodes—the dees. But the magnetic field, since the protons are charged particles, tends to make them whirl around in circles. Between the two of them, the protons go whirling around in a spiral, gaining speed each revolution until they finally fly out a little thin, metal window in the vacuum chamber, going to beat the band.”

“But why bother?”

“Well, if you aim this stream of high-speed protons at some material, say a piece of metal, things begin to happen. It can knock electrons off the atoms, or it can even get inside and stir up the nuclei and cause transmutations or make the target radioactive—things like that.”

“Good enough,” Cargraves agreed, and went on to ask him several more questions to bring out details. “Just one thing,” he said afterwards. “You know the answers, but just between ourselves, that sketch smells a bit. It’s sloppy.”

“I never did have any artistic talent,” Art said defensively. “I’d rather take a photograph any day.”

“You’ve taken too many photographs, maybe. As for artistic talent, I haven’t any either, but I learned to sketch. Look, Art- the rest of you guys get this, too -if you can’t sketch, you can’t see. If you really see what you’re looking at, you can put it down on paper, accurately. If you really remember what you have looked at, you can sketch it accurately from memory.”

“But the lines don’t go where I intend them to.”

“Apencil will go where you push it. It hasn’t any life of its own. The answer is practice and more practice and thinking about what you are looking at. All of you lugs want to be scientists. Well, the ability to sketch accurately is as necessary to a scientist as his slipstick. More necessary, you can get along without a slide rule. Okay, Art. You’re next, Ross. Gimme a quick tell on the protoactinium radioactive series.”

Ross took a deep breath. “There are three families of radioactive isotopes: the uranium family, the thorium family, and the protoactinium family. The last one starts with isotope U-235 and-” They kept at it for considerably longer than an hour and a half, for Cargraves had the intention of letting them be as free as possible later, while still keeping to the letter and spirit of his contract with Ross’s father.

At last he said, “I think we had better eat again. The drive will cut out before long. It’s been cutting down all the time—notice how light you feel?” “How about a K-ration?” inquired Morrie, in his second capacity as commissary steward.

“No, I don’t think so,” Cargraves answered slowly. “I think maybe we had better limit this meal to some amino acids and some gelatine.” He raised his eyebrows.

“Umm—I see,” Morrie agreed, glancing at the other two. “Maybe you are right.” Morrie and Cargraves, being pilots, had experienced free fall in school. The stomachs of Ross and Art were still to be tried.

“What’s the idea?” Art demanded.

Ross looked disgusted. “Oh, he thinks we’ll toss our cookies. Why, we hardly weigh anything now. What do you take us for, Doc? Babies?” “No,” said Cargraves, “but I still think you might get dropsick. I did. I think predigested foods are a good idea.”

“Oh, shucks. My stomach is strong. I’ve never been air sick.” “Ever been seasick?”

“I’ve never been to sea.”

“Well, suit yourself,” Cargraves told him. “But one thing I insist on. Wear a sack over your face. I don’t want what you lose in the air-conditioner.” He turned away and started preparing some gelatine for himself by simply pouring the powder into water, stirring, and drinking.

Ross made a face but he did not dig out a K-ration. Instead he switched on the hot plate, preparatory to heating milk for amino-acid concentrates. Alittle later Joe the Robot awoke from his nap and switched off the jet completely.

They did not bounce up to the ceiling. The rocket did not spin wildly. None of the comic-strip things happened to them. They simply gradually ceased to weigh anything as the thrust died away. Almost as much they noticed the deafening new silence. Cargraves had previously made a personal inspection of the entire ship to be sure that everything was tied, clamped, or stored firmly so that the ship would not become cluttered ‘up with loosely floating bric-a-brac.

Cargraves lifted himself away from his seat with one hand, turned in the air like a swimmer, and floated gently down, rather across- up and down had ceased to exist -to where Ross and Art floated, loosely attached to their hammocks by a single belt as an added precaution. Cargraves checked his progress with one hand and steadied himself by grasping Art’s hammock. “How’s everybody?”

“All right, I guess,” Art answered, gulping. “It feels like a falling elevator.” He was slightly green. “You, Ross?”

“I’ll get by,” Ross declared, and suddenly gagged. His color was gray rather than green.

Space sickness is not a joke, as every cadet rocket pilot knows. It is something like seasickness, like the terrible, wild retching that results from heavy pitching of a ship at sea — except that the sensation of everything dropping out from under one does not stop!

But the longest free-flight portions of a commercial rocket flight from point to point on earth last only a few minutes, with the balance of the trip on thrust or in glide, whereas the course Cargraves had decided on called for many hours of free fall. He could have chosen, with the power at his disposal, to make the whole trip on the jet, but that would have prevented them from turning ship, which he proposed to do now, until the time came to invert and drive the jet toward the moon to break their fall.

Only by turning the ship would they be able to see the earth from space; Cargraves wanted to do so before the earth was too far away. “Just stay where you are for a while,” he cautioned them.. “I’m about to turn ship.”

“I want to see it,” Ross said stoutly. “I’ve been looking forward to it.” He unbuckled his safety belt, then suddenly he was retching again. Saliva overflowed and drooled out curiously, not down his chin but in large droplets that seemed undecided where to go.

“Use your handkerchief,” Cargraves advised him, feeling none too well himself. “Then come along if you feel like it.” He turned to Art. Art was already using his handkerchief.

Cargraves turned away and floated back to the pilot’s chair. He was aware that there was nothing that he could do for them, and his own stomach was doing flip-flops and slow, banked turns. He wanted to strap his safety belt across it. Back in his seat, he noticed that Morrie was doubled up and holding his stomach, but he said nothing and gave his attention to turning the ship. Morrie would be all right.

Swinging the ship around was a very simple matter. Located at the center of gravity of the ship was a small, heavy, metal wheel. He had controls on the panel in front of him whereby he could turn this wheel to any axis, as it was mounted freely on gymbals, and then lock the gymbals. An electric motor enabled him to spin it rapidly in either direction and to stop it afterwards.

This wheel by itself could turn the ship when it was in free fall and then hold it in the new position. (It must be clearly understood that this turning had no effect at all on the course or speed of the Galileo, but simply on its attitude, the direction it faced, just as a fancy diver may turn and twist in falling from a great height, without thereby disturbing his fall.)

The little wheel was able to turn the huge vessel by a very simple law of physics, but in an application not often seen on the earth. The principle was the conservation of momentum, in this case angular momentum or spin. Ice skaters understand the application of this law; some of their fanciest tricks depend on it.

As the little wheel spun rapidly in one direction the big ship spun slowly in the other direction. When the wheel stopped, the ship stopped and just as abruptly.

“Dark glasses, boys!” Cargraves called out belatedly as the ship started to nose over and the stars wheeled past the port. In spite of their wretched nausea they managed to find their goggles, carried on their persons for this event, and get them on.

They needed them very soon. The moon slid away out of sight. The sun and the earth came in to view. The earth was a great shining crescent like a moon, two days past new. At this distance- one-fourth the way to the moon -it appeared sixteen times as wide as the moon does from the earth and many times more magnificent. The horns of the crescent were blue- white from the polar ice caps. Along its length showed the greenish blue of sea and the deep greens and sandy browns of ocean and forest and field … for the line of light and dark ran through the heart of Asia and down into the Indian Ocean. This they could plainly see, as easily as if it had been a globe standing across a school room from them. The Indian Ocean was partly obscured by a great cloud bank, stormy to those underneath it perhaps, but blazing white as the polar caps to those who watched from space.

In the arms of the crescent was the nightside of earth, lighted dimly but plainly by the almost full moon behind them. But- and this is never seen on the moon when the new moon holds the old moon in her arms -the faintly lighted dark face was picked out here and there with little jewels of light, the cities of earth, warm and friendly and beckoning!

Halfway from equator to northern horn were three bright ones, not far apart—London, and Paris, and reborn Berlin. Across the dark Atlantic, at the very edge of the disk, was one

especially bright and rosy light, the lights of Broadway and all of Greater New York.

All three of the boys were seeing New York for the first time, not to mention most of the rest of the great globe.

But, although it was their home, although they were it from a glorious vantage point new to mankind, their attention was torn away from the earth almost at once. There was a still more breath-taking object in the sky—the sun.

Its apparent width was only one-sixteenth that of the mighty crescent earth, but it brooked no competition. It hung below the earth- below when referred to the attitude of the Galileo, not in the sense of “up” or “down” -and about four times the width of the earth away. It was neither larger nor smaller than it appears from the earth and not appreciably brighter than it is on a clear, dry desert noon. But the sky was black around it in the airless space; its royal corona shone out; its prominences could be seen; its great infernal storms showed on its face.

“Don’t look too directly at it,” Cargraves warned, “even when you have the polarizer turned to maximum interference.” He referred to the double lenses the boys wore, polaroid glass with thick outer lens that were rotatable.

“I gotta have a picture of this!” Art declared, and turned and swam away. He had forgotten that he was space sick.

He was back shortly with his Contax and was busy fitting his longest lens into it. The camera was quite old, being one of the few things his mother had managed to bring out of Germany, and was his proudest possession. The lens in place, he started to take his Weston from its case. Cargraves stopped him.

“Why burn out your light meter?” he cautioned.

Art stopped suddenly. “Yes, I guess I would,” he admitted. “But how am I going to get a picture?”

“Maybe you won’t. Better use your slowest film, your strongest filter, your smallest stop, and your shortest exposure. Then pray.”

Seeing that the boy looked disappointed, he went on, “I wouldn’t worry too much about pictures of the sun. We can be sure that to the astronomers who will follow us after we’ve blazed the trail. But you ought to be able to get a swell picture of the earth. Waste a little film on the sun first, then we will try it. I’ll shade your lens from the sunlight with my hand.”

Art did so, then prepared to photograph the earth. “I can’t get a decent light reading on it, either,” he complained. “Too much interference from the sun.”

“Well, you know how much light it is getting—the works. Why not assume it’s about like desert sunlight, then shoot a few both above and below what that calls for?”

When Art had finished Cargraves said, “Mind the sunburn, boys.” He touched the plastic inner layer of the quartz port. “This stuff is supposed to filter out the worst of it—but take it easy.” “Shucks, we’re tanned.” And so they were; New Mexico sun had left its mark.

“I know, but that’s the brightest sunshine you ever saw. Take it easy.”

“How much chance is there,” asked Morrie, “that this pure stuff is dangerous? I mean aside from bad sunburn.”

“You read the same papers I did. We’re getting more cosmic radiation, too. Maybe it’ll knock us down dead. Maybe it’ll cause your children to have long green tendrils. That’s one of the chances we take.”

“Well, Columbus took a chance.” “And look how far he got!” put in Art.

“Yeah, thrown in the hoosegow for his trouble.”

“Be that as it may,” said Cargraves, “I’m going to turn the ship again so that the sun doesn’t shine in so directly. This tub is getting too hot.” It was no trouble to keep the Galileo warm enough, but how to get rid of unwanted heat was another matter. Her polished sides reflected most of the heat that struck them, but sunshine pouring directly in the view port produced a most uncomfortable greenhouse effect. Refrigeration, in the ordinary sense, was no answer; the ship was a closed system and could lose heat only by radiation to outer space. At the moment she was absorbing radiant heat from the sun much faster than she was radiating it.

“I want to take some more pictures,” Art protested.

“I’ll keep the earth in sight,” Cargraves promised, and set the controls of the spinning wheel to suit his purpose. Then he floated back to the view port and joined the others, who were swimming in front of it like goldfish in a bowl.

Ross touched the transparent wall with a finger tip; the light contact pushed him back from the port. “Doc, what do you think would happen if a meteor hit this port?”

“I don’t like to think about it. However, I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Ley has calculated that the chance of being hit by a meteor on a trip out to the moon and back is about one in a half a million. I figure I was in much graver danger every time I climbed into that alleged automobile you guys drive.

“That’s a good car.”

“I’ll admit it performs well.” He turned away with a motion much like that of a sprint swimmer turning on the side of a pool. “Art, when you are through snapping that Brownie, I’ve got something better for you to do. How about trying to raise earth?”

“Just one more of—Huh? What did you say?”

“How about heating up your tubes and seeing if there is anybody on the air-or lack-of-air, as the case may be?”

No attempt had been made to use the radios since blasting off. Not only did the jet interfere seriously, but also the antenna were completely retracted, even spike antenna, during the passage through the atmosphere. But now that the jet was silent an attempt at communication seemed in order.

True, the piloting radar had kept them in touch by radio, in a manner of speaking, during the early part of the journey, but they were now beyond the range of the type of equipment used for piloting. It bore little resemblance to the giant radars used to bounce signals against the moon. The quartz windows through which it operated would have been quite inadequate for the large antenna used to fling power from the earth to the moon.

Art got busy at once, while stating that he thought the chances of picking up anything were slim. “It would have to be beamed tight as a, as a, well—tight. And why would anybody be beaming stuff out this way?”

“At us, of course,” Ross offered.

“They can’t find us. Radar won’t pick up anything as small as this ship at this distance—too little mirror cross section.” Art spoke authoritatively. “Not the radars they’ve got so far. Maybe some day, if—hey!”

“What have you got?”

“Keep quiet!” Art stared ahead with that look of painful, unseeing concentration found only under a pair of earphones. He twiddled his dials carefully, then fumbled for pencil and paper. Writing, he found, was difficult without gravity to steady himself and his hand. But he scribbled.

“Get a load of this,” he whispered a few minutes later. He read: RADIO PARIS CALLING ROCKET SHIP GALILEO RADIO PARIS CALLING ROCKET SHIP GALILEO RADIO PARIS CALLING ROCKET SHIP GALILEO

DOCTOR DONALD CARGRAVES ARTHUR MUELLER MAURICE ABRAMS ROSS JENKINS GREETINGS YOUR

FLIGHT FOLLOWED UNTIL OH ONE ONE THREE

GREENWICH TIME SEPTEMBER TWENTYFIFTH CONTACT LOST WILL CONTINUE TO CALL YOU ON THIS BEAMAND FREQUENCYFOLLOWING PROB- ABLE TRAJECTORYGOOD LUCK TO YOU RADIO PARIS CALLING ROCKET SHIP GALILEO RADIO PARIS-

“And then they repeat. It’s a recording.” His voice was shaky. “Gosh!” Ross had no other comment.

“Well, boys, it looks like we’re celebrities.” Cargraves tried to make his words sound casual. Then he found that he was holding a piece of his pipe in each hand; he had broken it in two without knowing it. Shrugging, he let the pieces float away from him.

“But how did they find us?” persisted Art.

“The message shows it,” Morrie pointed out. “See that time? That’s the time we went into free fall. They followed the jet.” “How? By telescope?”

“More likely,” Cargraves put in, “by anti-rocket radiation tracer.” “Huh? But the UN patrol are the only ones with that sort of gear.”

Cargraves permitted himself a grin. “And why shouldn’t the UN be interested in us? See here, kid—can you squirt anything back at them?” “I’ll sure try!”

Chapter 11 – ONE ATOM WAR TOO MANY?

ART GOT BUSYAT HIS TASK, but nothing came back which would tell him whether or not his attempts had been successful. The recording continued to come in whenever he listened for it, between attempts to send, for the next three and a half hours. Then it faded out—they were off the beam.

Nevertheless, it was the longest direct communication of record in human history.

The Galileo continued her climb up from the earth, toward that invisible boundary where the earth ceased to claim title and the lesser mass of the moon took charge. Up and up, out and farther out, rising in free flight, slowing from the still effective tug of the earth but still carried on by the speed she had attained under the drive of the jet, until at last the Galileo slipped quietly over the border and was in the moon’s back yard. From there on she accelerated slowly as she fell toward the silvery satellite.

They ate and slept and ate again. They stared at the receding earth. And they slept again.

While they slept, Joe the Robot stirred, consulted his cam, decided that he had had enough of this weightlessness, and started the jet. But first he straightened out the ship so that the jet faced toward the moon, breaking their fall, while the port stared back at earth.

The noise of the jet woke them up. Cargraves had had them strap themselves down in anticipation of weight. They unstrapped and climbed up to the control station. “Where’s the moon?” demanded Art.

“Under us, of course,” Morrie informed him.

“Better try for it with radar, Morrie,” Cargraves directed.

“Cheek!” Morrie switched on the juice, waited for it to warm, then adjusted it. The moon showed as a large vague mass on one side of the scope. “About fifteen thousand miles,” he declared. “We’d better do some checking, Skipper.”

They were busy for more than an hour, taking sights, taking readings, and computing. The bearing and distance of the moon, in relation to the ship, were available by radar. Direct star sights out the port established the direction of drive of the ship. Successive radar readings established the course and speed of the ship for comparison with the courses and speeds as given by the automatic instruments showing on the board. All these factors had to be taken into consideration in computing a check on the management of Joe the Robot.

Minor errors were found and the corrections were fed to the automatic pilot. Joe accepted the changes in his orders without comment.

While Morrie and Cargraves did this, Art and Ross were preparing the best meal they could throw together. It was a relief to have weight under their feet and it was a decided relief to their stomachs. Those organs had become adjusted to free fall, but hardly reconciled. Back on firm footing they hollered for solid food.

The meal was over and Cargraves was thinking sadly of his ruined pipe, when the control alarm sounded. Joe the Robot had completed his orders, his cam had run out, he called for relief.

They all scrambled up to the control station. The moon, blindingly white and incredibly huge was shouldering its way into one side of the port. They were so close to it now that their progress was visible, if one looked closely, by sighting across the frame of the port at some fixed object, a crater or a mountain range.

“Whee!” Art yelled.

“Kinda knocks your eyes out, doesn’t it?” Ross said, gazing in open wonder.

“It does,” agreed Cargraves. “But we’ve got work to do. Get back and strap yourselves down and stand by for maneuvering.”

While he complied, he strapped himself into his chair and then flipped a switch which ordered Joe to go to sleep; he was in direct, manual command of the rocket. With Morrie to coach him by instrument, he put the ship through a jockeying series of changes, gentle on the whole and involving only minor changes in course at any one time, but all intended to bring the ship from the flat conoid trajectory it had been following into a circular orbit around the moon.

“How’m I doin’?” he demanded, a long time later.

“Right in the groove,” Morrie assured him, after a short delay. “Sure enough of it for me to go automatic and swing ship?”

“Let me track her a few more minutes.” Presently Morrie assured him as requested. They had already gone into free flight just before Cargraves asked for a check. He now called out to Art and Ross that they could unstrap. He then started the ship to swinging so that the port faced toward the moon and switched on a combination which told Joe that he must get back to work; it was now his business to watch the altitude by radar and to see to it that altitude and speed remained constant.

Art was up at the port, with his camera, by the time he and Morrie had unstrapped.

“Goshawmighty,” exclaimed Art, “this is something!” He unlimbered his equipment and began snappihg frantically, until Ross pointed out that his lens cover was still on. Then he steadied down.

Ross floated face down and stared out at the desolation. They were speeding silently along, only two hundred miles above the ground, and they were approaching the sunrise line of light and darkness. The shadows were long on the barren wastes below them, the mountain peaks and the great gaping craters more horrendous on that account. “It’s scary,” Ross decided. “I’m not sure I like it.”

“Want off at the next corner?” Cargraves inquired. “No, but I’m not dead certain I’m glad I came.”

Morrie grasped his arm, to steady himself apparently, but quite as much for the comfort of solid human companionship. “You know what I think, Ross,” he began, as he stared out at the endless miles of craters. “I think I know how it got that way. Those aren’t volcanic craters, that’s certain—and it wasn’t done by meteors. They did it themselves!”

“Huh? Who?”

“The moon people. They did it. They wrecked themselves. They ruined themselves. They had one atomic war too many.”

“Huh? What the-” Ross stared, then looked back at the surface as if to read the grim mystery there. Art stopped taking pictures. “How about it, Doc?”

Cargraves wrinkled his brow. “Could be,” he admitted. “None of the other theories for natural causes hold water for one reason or another. It would account for the relatively smooth parts we call ‘seas.’ They really were seas; that’s why they weren’t hit very hard.”

“And that’s why they aren’t seas any more,” Morrie went on. “They blew their atmosphere off and the seas boiled away at Tycho. That’s where they set off the biggest ammunition dump on the planet. It cracked the whole planet. I’ll bet somebody worked out a counter-weapon that worked too well. It set off every atom bomb on the moon all at once and it ruined them! I’m

sure of it.”

“Well,” said Cargraves, “I’m not sure of it, but I admit the theory is attractive. Perhaps we’ll find out when we land. That notion of setting off all the bombs at once-there are strong theoretical objections to that. Nobody has any idea how to do it.”

“Nobody knew how to make an atom bomb a few years ago,” Morrie pointed out.

“That’s true.” Cargraves wanted to change the subject; it was unpleasantly close to horrors that had haunted his dreams since the beginning of World War II. “Ross, how do you feel about the other side of the moon now?”

“We’ll know pretty soon,” Ross chuckled. “Say—this is the Other Side!”

And so it was. They had leveled off in their circular orbit near the left limb of the moon as seen from the earth and were coasting over the mysterious other face. Ross scanned it closely. “Looks about the same.”

“Did you expect anything different?”

“No, I guess not. But I had hoped.” Even as he spoke they crossed the sunrise line and the ground below them was dark, not invisible, for it was still illuminated by faint starlight— starlight only, for the earthshine never reached this face. The suncapped peaks receded rapidly in the distance. At the rate they were traveling, a speed of nearly 4000 miles per hour necessary to maintain them in a low-level circular orbit, the complete circuit of the planet would take a little over an hour and a half.

“No more pictures, I guess,” Art said sadly. “I wish it was a different time of the month.”

“Yes,” agreed Ross, still peering out, “it’s a dirty shame to be this close and not see anything.”

“Don’t be impatient,” Cargraves told him; “When we start back in eight or nine days, we swing around again and you can stare and take pictures till you’re cross-eyed.” “Why only eight or nine days? We’ve got more food than that.”

“Two reasons. The first is, if we take off at new moon we won’t have to stare into the sun on the way back. The second is, I’m homesick and I haven’t even landed yet.” He grinned. In utter seriousness he felt that it was not wise to stretch their luck by sticking around too long.

The trip across the lighted and familiar face of the moon was delightful, but so short that it was like window shopping in a speeding car. The craters and the “seas” were old familiar friends, yet strange and new. It reminded them of the always strange experience of seeing a famous television star on a personal appearance tour-recognition with an odd feeling of unreality.

Art shifted over to the motion-picture camera once used to record the progress of the Starstruck series, and got a complete sequence from Mare Fecunditatis to the crater Kepler, at which point Cargraves ordered him emphatically to stop at once and strap himself down.

They were coming into their landing trajectory. Cargraves and Morrie had selected a flat, unnamed area beyond Oceanus Procellarum for the landing because it was just on the border between the earth side and the unknown side, and thereby fitted two plans: to attempt to establish radio contact with earth, for which direct line-of-sight would be necessary, and to permit them to explore at least a portion of the unknown side.

Joe the Robot was called again and told to consult a second cam concealed in his dark insides, a cam which provided for the necessary braking drive and the final ticklish contact on maneuvering jets and radar. Cargraves carefully leveled the ship at the exact altitude and speed Joe would need for the approach and flipped over to automatic when Morrie signaled that they were at the exact, precalculated distance necessary for the landing.

Joe took over. He ffipped the ship over, using the maneuvering rockets, then started backing in to a landing, using the jet in the tail to kill their still tremendous speed. The moon was below them now and Cargraves could see nothing but the stars, the stars and the crescent of the earth—a quarter of a million miles away and no help to him now.

He wondered if he would ever set foot on it again.

Morrie was studying the approach in the radar scope. “Checking out to nine zeros, Captain,” he announced proudly and with considerable exaggeration. “It’s in the bag.” The ground came up rapidly in the scope. When they were close and no longer, for the moment, dropping at all, Joe cut the main jet and flipped them over.

When he had collected, himself from the wild gyration of the somersault, Cargraves saw the nose jets reach out and splash in front of them and realized that the belly jets were in play, too, as the surge of power pushed the seat of the chair up against him. He felt almost as if he could land it himself, it seemed so much like his first wild landing on the New Mexico desert.

Then for one frantic second he saw the smooth, flat ground ahead of the splash of the plowing nose jets give way to a desolation of rocky ridges, sharp crevasses, loose and dangerous cosmic rubble … soil from which, if they landed without crashing, they could not hope to take off.

The sunlight had fooled them. With the sun behind them the badlands had cast no shadows they could see; the flat plain had appeared to stretch to the mountains ahead. These were no mountains, but they were quite sufficient to wreck the Galileo.

The horrible second it took him to size up the situation was followed by frantic action. With one hand he cut the automatic pilot; with the other he twisted violently on the knob controlling the tail jet. He slapped the belly jets on full.

Her nose lifted.

She hung there, ready to fall, kept steady on her jets only by her gyros. Then slowly, slowly, slowly the mighty tail jet reached out—so slowly that he knew at that moment that the logy response of the atoumatic pilot would never serve him for what he had to do next, which was to land her himself.

The Galileo pulled away from the surface of the moon. “That was close,” Morrie said mildly.

Cargrave swiped the sweat from his eyes and shivered.

He knew what was called for now, in all reason. He knew that he should turn the ship away from the moon, head her in the general direction of the earth and work out a return path, a path to a planet with an atmosphere to help a pilot put down his savage ship. He knew right then that he was not the stuff of heroes, that he was getting old and knew it.

But he hated to tell Morrie.

“Going to put her down on manual?” the boy inquired. “Huh?”

“That’s the only way we’ll get her down on a strange field. I can see that now you’ve got to be able to see your spot at the last half minute—nose jet,and no radar.” “I can’t do it, Morrie.”

The younger man said nothing. He simply sat and stared ahead without expression. “I’m going to head her back to earth, Morrie.”

The boy gave absolutely no sign of having heard him. There was neither approval nor disapproval on his face, nor any faint suggestion.

Cargraves thought of the scene when Ross, blind and bandaged, had told him oft. Of Art, quelling his space sickness to get his pictures. He thought, too, of the hot and tiring days when he and Morrie had qualified for piloting together.

The boy said nothing, neither did he look at him.

These kids, these damn kids! How had he gotten up here, with a rocket under his hand and a cargo of minors to be responsible for? He was a laboratory scientist, not a superman. If it had been Ross, if Ross were a pilot—even where he now was, he shivered at the recollection of Ross’s hair-raising driving. Art was about as bad. Morrie was worse.

He knew he would never be a hot pilot—not by twenty years. These kids, with their casual ignorance, with their hot rod rigs, it was for them; piloting was their kind of a job. They were too young and too ignorant to care and their reflexes were not hobbled by second thoughts. He remembered Ross’s words: “I’ll go to the moon if I have to walk!”

“Land her, Morrie.” “Aye, aye, sir!”

The boy never looked, at him. He flipped her up on her tail, then let her drop slowly by easing off on the tail jet. Purely by the seat of his pants, by some inner calculation- for Cargraves could see nothing through the port but stars, and neither could the boy -he flipped her over again, cutting the tail jet as he did so.

The ground was close to them and coming up fast.

He kicked her once with the belly jets, placing them thereby over a smooth stretch of land, and started taking her down with quick blasts of the nose jets, while sneaking a look between blasts.

When he had her down so close that Cargraves was sure that he was going to land her on her nose, crushing in the port and killing them, he gave her one more blast which made her rise a trifle, kicked her level and brought her down on the belly jets, almost horizontal, and so close to the ground that Cargraves could see it ahead of them, out the port.

Glancing casually out the port, Morrie gave one last squirt with the belly jets and let her settle. They grated heavily and were stopped. The Galileo sat on the face of the moon. “Landed, sir. Time: Oh-eight-three-four.”

Cargraves drew in a breath. “Abeautiful, beautiful landing, Morrie.” “Thanks, Captain.”

Chapter 12 – THE BARE BONES

ROSS AND ART WERE ALREADYout of their straps and talking loudly about getting out the space suits when Cargraves climbed shakily out of his chair—and then nearly fell. The lowered gravitation, one-sixth earth-normal, fooled him. He was used to weightlessness by now, and to the chest-binding pressure of high acceleration; the pseudo-normal weight of a one-g drive was no trouble, and maneuvering while strapped down was no worse than stunting in an airplane.

This was different and required a little getting used to, he decided. It reminded him a little of walking on rubber, or the curiously light-footed feeling one got after removing snow shoes or heavy boots.

Morrie remained at his post for a few moments longer to complete and sign his log. He hesitated over the space in the log sheet marked ‘position’. They had taught him in school to enter here the latitude and longitude of the port of arrival—but what were the latitude and longitude of this spot?

The moon had its north and south poles just as definitely as the earth, which gave any spot a definite latitude, nor was longitude uncertain once a zero meridian was selected. That had been done; Tycho was to be the Greenwich of the moon.

But his navigation tables were tables for the earth.

The problem could be solved; he knew that. By spherical trigonometry the solutions of celestial triangles on which all navigation was based could be converted to the special conditions of Luna, but it would require tedious calculation, not at all like the precalculated short cuts used by all pilots in the age of aircraft and rocket. He would have to go back to the Marc St. Hilaire method, obsolete for twenty years, after converting laboriously each piece of data from earth reference terms to moon reference terms.

Well, he could do it later, he decided, and get Cargraves to check him. The face of the moon called him.

He joined the little group huddled around the port. In front of them stretched a dun and lifeless floor, breaking into jagged hills a few miles beyond them. It was hot, glaring hot, under the oblique rays of the sun, and utterly still. The earth was not in sight; they had dropped over the rim into the unknown side in the last minutes of the impromptu landing.

Instead of the brassy sky one might expect over such a scene of blistering desert desolation, a black dome of night, studded brilliantly with stars, hung over it. At least, thought Morrie, his mind returning to his problem in navigation, it would be hard to get lost here. Aman could set a course by the stars with no trouble.

“When are we going out?” demanded Art.

“Keep your shirt on,” Ross told him and turned to Cargraves. “Say, Doc, that was sure a slick landing. Tell me- was that first approach just a look around on manual, or did you feed that into the automatic pilot, too?”

“Neither one, exactly.” He hesitated. It had been evident from their first remarks that neither Ross nor Art had been aware of the danger, nor of his own agonizing indecision. Was it necessary to worry them with it now? He was aware that, if he did not speak, Morrie would never mention it.

That decided him. The man- man was the word, he now knew, not “boy” -was entitled to public credit. “Morrie made that landing,” he informed them. “We had to cut out the robot and Morrie put her down.”

Ross whistled.

Art said, “Huh? What did you say? Don’t tell me that radar cut out—I checked it six ways.”

“Your gadgets all stood up,” Cargraves assured him, “but there are some things a man can do that a gadget can’t. This was one of them.” He elaborated what had happened.

Ross looked Morrie up and down until Morrie blushed. “Hot Pilot I said, and Hot Pilot it is,” Ross told him. “But I’m glad I didn’t know.” He walked aft, whistling Danse Macabre, off key again, and began to fiddle with his space suit.

“When do we go outside?,” Art persisted. “Practically at once, I suppose.” “Whoopee!”

“Don’t get in a hurry. You might be the man with the short straw and have to stay with the ship.” “But … Look, Uncle, why does anybody have to stay with the ship? Nobody’s going to steal it.”

Cargraves hesitated. With automatic caution, he had intended always to keep at least one man in the ship, as a safety measure. On second thought there seemed no reason for it. A man inside the ship could do nothing for a man outside the ship without first donning a pressure suit and coming outside. “We’ll compromise,” he said. “Morrie and I—no, you and I.” He realized that he could not risk both pilots at once.

“You and I will go first. If it’s okay, the others can follow us. All right, troops,” he said, turning. “Into your space suits!”

They helped each other into them, after first applying white sunburn ointment liberally over the skin outside their goggles. It gave them an appropriate out-of-this-world appearance. Then Cargraves had them cheek their suits at twice normal pressure while he personally inspected their oxygen-bottle back packs. All the while they were checking their walky-talkies; ordinary conversation could be heard, but only faintly, through the helmets as long as they were in the air of the ship; the radios were louder.

“Okay, sports,” he said at last. “Art and I will go into the lock together, then proceed around to the front, where you can see us. When I give you the high sign, come on out. One last word: stay together. Don’t get more than ten yards or so away from me. And remember this. When you get out there, every last one of you is going to want to see how high you can jump; I’ve heard you talking about it. Well, you can probably jump twenty-five or thirty feet high if you try. But don t do it.

“Why not?” Ross’s voice was strange, through the radio.

“Because if you land on your head and crack your helmet open, we’ll bury you right where you fall! Come on, Morrie. No, sorry—I mean ‘Art’.”

They crowded into the tiny lock, almost filling it. The motor which drove the impeller to scavenge the air from the lock whirred briefly, so little was the space left unoccupied by their bodies, then sighed and stopped. The scavenger valve clicked into place and Cargraves unclamped the outer door.

He found that he floated, rather than jumped, to the ground. Art came after him, landing on his hands and knees and springing lightly up. “Okay, kid?”

“Swell!”

They moved around to the front, boots scuffing silently in the loose soil. He looked at it and picked up a handful to see if it looked like stuff that had been hit by radioactive blast. He was thinking of Morrie’s theory. They were on the floor of a crater; that was evident, for the wall of hills extended all around them. Was it an atomic bomb crater?

He could not tell. The moon soil did have the boiled and bubbly look of atom-scorched earth, but that might have been volcanic action, or, even, the tremendous heat of the impact of a giant meteor. Well, the problem could wait.

Art stopped suddenly. “Say! Uncle, I’ve got to go back.” “What’s the matter?”

“I forgot my camera!”

Cargraves chuckled. “Make it next time. Your subject won’t move.” Art’s excitement had set a new high, he decided; there was a small school of thought which believed he bathed with his camera.

Speaking of baths, Cargraves mused, I could stand one. Space travel had its drawbacks. He was beginning to dislike his own smell, particularly when it was confined in a space suit!

Ross and Morrie were waiting for them, not patiently, at the port. Their radio voices, blanked until now by the ship’s sides, came clearly through the quartz. “How about it, Doc?,” Ross sang out, pressing his nose to the port.

“Seems all right,” they heard him say. “Then here we come!”

“Wait a few minutes yet. I want to be sure.”

“Well—okay.” Ross showed his impatience, but discipline was no longer a problem. Art made faces at them, then essayed a little dance, staying close to the ground but letting each step carry him a few feet into the air—or, rather, vacuum. He floated slowly and with some grace. It was like a dance in slow motion, or a ballet under water.

When he started rising a little higher and clicking his boot heels together as he sailed, Cargraves motioned for him to stop. “Put down your flaps, chum,” he cautioned, “and land. You aren’t Nijinsky.”

“Who’s Nijinsky?”

“Never mind. Just stay planted. Keep at least one foot on the ground. Okay, Morrie,” he called out, “come on out. You and Ross.” The port was suddenly deserted.

When Morrie set foot on the moon and looked around him at the flat and unchanging plain and at the broken crags beyond he felt a sudden overwhelming emotion of tragedy and of foreboding welling up inside him. “It’s the bare bones,” he muttered, half to himself, “the bare bones of a dead world.”

“Huh?” said Ross. “Are you coming, Morrie?” “Right behind you.”

Cargraves and Art had joined them. “Where to?” asked Ross, as the captain came up.

“Well, I don’t want to get too far from the ship this first time,” Cargraves declared. “This place might have some dirty tricks up its sleeve that we hadn’t figured on. How much pressure you guys carrying?”

“Ship pressure.”

“You can cut it down to about half that without the lower pressure bothering you. It’s oxygen, you know.”

“Let’s walk over to those hills,” Morrie suggested. He pointed astern where the rim of the crater was less than half a mile from the ship. It was the sunward side and the shadows stretched from the rim to within a hundred yards or so of the ship.

“Well, part way, anyhow. That shade might feel good. I’m beginning to sweat.”

“I think,” said Morrie, “if I remember correctly, we ought to be able to see earth from the top of the rim. I caught a flash of it, just as we inverted. We aren’t very far over on the back side.” “Just where are we?”

“I’ll have to take some sights before I can report,” Morrie admitted. “Some place west of Ocean us Procellarum and near the equator.” “I know that.”

“Well, if you’re in a hurry, Skipper, you had better call up the Automobile Club.”

“I’m in no hurry. Injun not lost—wigwam lost. But I hope the earth is visible from there. It would be a good spot, in that case, to set up Art’s antenna, not too far from the ship. Frankly, I’m opposed to moving the ship until we head back, even if we miss a chance to try to contact earth.”

They were in the shadows now, to Cargraves’ relief. Contrary to popular fancy, the shadows were not black, despite the lack of air-dispersed sunlight. The dazzle of the floor behind them and the glare of the hills beyond all contrived to throw quite a lot of reflected light into the shadows.

When they had proceeded some distance farther toward the hills, Cargraves realized that he was not keeping his party together too well. He had paused to examine a place, discovered by Ross, where the base rock pushed up through the waste of the desert floor, and was trying in the dim light to make out its nature, when he noticed that Morrie was not with them.

He restrained his vexation; it was entirely possible that Morrie, who was in the lead, had not seen them stop. But he looked around anxiously. Morrie was about a hundred yards ahead, where the first folds of the hills broke through. “Morrie!”

The figure stood up, but no answer came over the radio. He noticed then that Morrie was veering, weaving around. “Morrie! Come back here! Are you all right?” “All right? Sure, I’m all right.” He giggled.

“Well, come back here.”

“Can’t come back. I’m busy—I’ve found it!” Morrie took a careless step, bounded high in the air, came down, and staggered. “Morrie! Stand still.” Cargraves was hurrying toward him.

But he did not stand still. He began bounding around, leaping higher and higher. “I’ve found it!” he shrieked. “I’ve found it!” He gave one last bound and while he floated lazily down, he shouted, “I’ve found … the bare bones-” His voice trailed off. He lit feet first, bounced through a complete forward flip and collapsed.

Cargraves was beside him almost as he fell, having himself approached in great flying leaps.

First the helmet—no, it was not cracked. But the boy’s eyes stared out sightlessly. His head lolled, his face was gray.

Cargraves gathered him up in his arms and began to run toward the Galileo. He knew the signs though he had seen it only in the low-pressure chamber used for pilot training—anoxia! Something had gone wrong; Morrie was starved for oxygen. He might die before he could be helped, or, still worse, he might live with his brain permanently damaged, his fine clear intellect gone.

It had happened before that way, more than once during the brave and dangerous days when man was conquering high-altitude flying.

The double burden did not siow him down. The two together, with their space suits, weighed less than seventy pounds. It was just enough to give him stability.

He squeezed them into the lock, holding Morrie close to his chest and waited in agonizing impatience as the air hissed through the valve. All his strength would not suffice to force that door open until the pressure equalized.

Then he was in and had laid him on the deck. Morrie was still out. He tried to remove the suit with trembling, glove-hampered fingers, then hastily got out of his own suit and un-clamped Morrie’s helmet. No sign of life showed as the fresh air hit the patient.

Cussing bitterly he tried to give the boy oxygen directly from his suit but found that the valve on Morrie’s suit, for some reason, refused to respond. He turned then to his own suit, disconnected the oxygen line and fed the raw oxygen directly to the boy’s face while pushing rhythmically on his chest.

Morrie’s eyes flickered and he gasped.

“What happened? Is he all right?” The other two had come through the lock while he worked.

“Maybe he is going to be all right. I don’t know.”

In fact he came around quickly, sat up and blinked his eyes. “Whassa matter?” he wanted to know. “Lie down,” Cargraves urged and put a hand on his shoulder.

“All right … hey! I’m inside.”

Cargraves explained to him what had happened. Morrie blinked. “Now that’s funny. I was all right, except that I was feeling exceptionally fine-“ “That’s a symptom.”

“Yes, I remember. But it didn’t occur to me then. I had just picked up a piece of metal with a hole in it, when-“ “Awhat? You mean worked metal? Metal that some one made-“

“Yes, that’s why I was so ex-” He stopped and looked puzzled. “But it couldn’t have been.” “Possible. This planet might have been inhabited … or visited.

“Oh, I don’t mean that.” Morrie shrugged it off, as if it were of no importance. “I was looking at it, realizing what it meant, when a little bald-headed short guy came up and . . but it couldn’t have been.”

“No,” agreed Cargraves, after a short pause, “it couldn’t have been. I am afraid you were beginning to have anoxia dreams by then. But how about this piece of metal?”

Morrie shook his head. “I don’t know,” he admitted “I remember holding it and looking at it, just as clearly as I remember anything, ever. But I remember the little guy just as well. He was standing there and there were others behind him and I knew that they were the moon people. There were buildings and trees.” He stopped. “I guess that settles it.”

Cargraves nodded, and turned his attention to Morrie’s oxygen pack. The valve worked properly now. There was no way to tell what had been wrong, whether it had frosted inside when Morrie walked on into the deeper shadows, whether a bit of elusive dirt had clogged it, or whether Morrie himself had shut it down too far when he had reduced pressure at Cargraves’ suggestion and thereby slowly suffocated himself. But it must not happen again. He turned to Art.

“See here, Art. I want to rig these gimmicks so that you can’t shut them off below a certain limit. Mmmm . . no, that isn’t enough. We need a warning signal too—something to warn the wearer if his supply stops. See what you can dream up.”

Art got the troubled look on his face that was habitual with him whenever his gadget-conscious mind was working at his top capacity. “I’ve got some peanut bulbs among the instrument spares,” he mused. “Maybe I could mount one on the neck ring and jimmy it up so that when the flow stopped it would-” Cargraves stopped listening; he knew that it was only a matter of time until some unlikely but perfectly practical new circuit would be born.

Chapter 13 – SOMEBODY IS NUTS!

THE TOP OF THE RING OF HILLS showed them the earth, as Morrie had thought. Cargraves, Art, and Ross did the exploring, leaving Morrie back to recuperate and to work on his celestial navigation problem. Cargraves made a point of going along because he did not want the two passengers to play mountain goat on the steep crags—a great temptation under the low gravity conditions.

Also, he wanted to search over the spot where Morrie had had his mishap. Little bald men, no; a piece of metal with a hole in it—possible. If it existed it might be the first clue to the greatest discovery since man crawled up out of the darkness and became aware of himself.

But no luck—the spot was easy to find; footprints were new to this loose soil! But search as they might, they found nothing. Their failure was not quite certain, since the gloom of the crater’s rim still hung over the spot. In a few days it would be daylight here; he planned to search again.

But it seemed possible that Morrie might have flung it away in his anoxia delirium, if it ever existed. It might have carried two hundred yards before it fell, and then buried itself in the loose soil.

The hill top was more rewarding. Cargraves told Art that they would go ahead with the attempt to try to beam a message back to earth … and then had to restrain him from running back to the ship to get started. Instead they searched for a place to install the “Dog House”.

The Dog House was a small pre-fab building, now resting in sections fitting snugly to the curving walls of the Galileo. It had been Ross’s idea and was one of the projects he and Art had worked on during the summer while Cargraves and Morrie were training. It was listed as a sheet-metal garage, with a curved roof, not unlike a Quonset hut, but it had the special virtue that each panel could be taken through the door of the Galileo.

It was not their notion simply to set it up on the face of the moon; such an arrangement would have been alternately too hot and then too cold. Instead it was to be the frame for a sort of tailor-made cave.

They found a place near the crest, between two pinnacles of rock with a fairly level floor between and of about the right size. The top of one of the crags was easily accessible and had a clear view of earth for line-of-sight, beamed transmission. There being no atmosphere, Art did not have to worry about horizon effects; the waves would go where he headed them. Having settled on the location, they returned for tools and supplies.

Cargraves and Ross did most of the building of the Dog House. It would not have been fair to Art to require him to help; he was already suffering agonies of indecision through a desire to spend all his time taking pictures and an equally strong desire to get his set assembled with which he hoped to raise earth. Morrie, at Cargraves’ request, stayed on light duty for a few days, cooking, working on his navigation, and refraining from the strain of space-suit work.

The low gravitational pull made light work of moving the building sections, other materials, and tools to the spot. Each could carry over five hundred pounds, earth-weight, of the total each trip, except on the steeper portions of the trail where sheer bulk and clumsiness required them to split the loads.

First they shoveled the sandy soil about in the space between the two rocks until the ground was level enough to receive the metal floor, then they assembled the little building in place. The work went fast; wrenches alone were needed for this and the metal seemed light as cardboard. When that was done, they installed the “door,” a steel drum, barrel-sized, with an air- tight gasketed head on each end.

Once the door was in place they proceeded to shovel many earth-tons of lunar soil down on top of the roof, until the space between the rock walls was filled, some three feet higher than the roof of the structure. When they were finished, nothing showed of the Dog House but the igloo-style door, sticking out between the rocky spires. The loose soil of Luna, itself a poor conductor of heat, and the vacuum spaces in it, would be their insulation.

But it was not yet air-tight. They installed portable, temporary lights, then dragged in sealed canisters and flat bales. From the canisters came sticky, tacky sheets of a rubbery plastic. This they hung like wallpaper, working as rapidly as possible in order to finish before the volatiles boiled out of the plastic. They covered ceiling, walls and floor, then from the bales they removed aluminum foil, shiny as mirrors, and slapped it on top of the plastic, all except the floor, which was covered with heavier duraluminum sheets.

It was ready for a pressure test. There were a few leaks to patch and they were ready to move in. The whole job had taken less than two ‘days’.

The Dog House was to be Art’s radio shack, but that was not all. It was to be also a storeroom for everything they could possibly spare from the ship, everything not necessary to the brief trip back. The cargo space would then be made available for specimens to take back to earth, even if the specimens were no more than country rock, lunar style.

But to Cargraves and to the three it was more than a storeroom, more than a radio shack. They were moving their personal gear into it, installing the hydroponic tank for the rhubarb plants to make the atmosphere self-refreshing, fitting it out as completely as possible for permanent residence.

To them it was a symbol of man’s colonization of this planet, his intention to remain permanently, to fit it to his needs, and wrest a living from it.

Even though circumstances required them to leave it behind them in a few days, they were declaring it to be their new home, they were hanging up their hats.

They celebrated the completion of it with a ceremony which Cargraves had deliberately delayed until the Dog House was complete. Standing in a semicircle in front of the little door, they were addressed by Cargraves:

“As commander of this expedition, duly authorized by a commission of the United Nations and proceeding in a vessel of United States registry, I take possession of this planet as a colony, on behalf of the United Nations of earth in accordance with the laws thereof and the laws of the United States. Run ‘em up, Ross!”

On a short and slender staff the banner of the United Nations and the flag of the United States whipped to the top. No breeze disturbed them in that airless waste—but Ross had taken the forethought to stiffen the upper edges of each with wire; they showed their colors.

Cargraves found himself gulping as he watched the flag and banner hoisted. Privately he thought of this little hole in the ground as the first building of Luna City. He imagined that in a year or so there would be dozens of such cave dwellings, larger and better equipped, clustered around this spot. In them would live prospectors, scientists, and tough construction workers. Workers who would be busy building the permanent Luna City down under the floor of the crater, while other workers installed a great rocket port up on the surface.

Nearby would be the beginnings of the Cargraves Physical Laboratory, the Galileo Lunar Observatory.

He found that tears were trickling down his cheeks; he tried futilely to wipe them away through his helmet. He caught Ross’s eye and was embarrassed. “Well, sports,” he said with forced heartiness, “let’s get to work. Funny,” he added, looking at Ross, “what effect a few little symbols can have on a man.”

Ross looked from Cargraves to the bits of gay bunting. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “Aman isn’t a collection of chemical reactions; he is a collection of ideas.” Cargraves stared. His “boys” were growing up!

“When do we start exploring?” Morrie wanted to know. “Any reason why we shouldn’t get going, now that the Dog House is finished?”

“Before long, I think,” Cargraves answered uncomfortably. He had been stalling Morrie’s impatience for the last couple of days; Morrie was definitely disappointed that the rocket ship was not to be used, as originally planned, for point to point exploration. He felt confident that he could repeat his remarkable performance in making the first landing.

Cargraves, on the other hand, was convinced that a series of such landings would eventually result in a crash, leaving them marooned to starve or suffocate even if they were not killed in the crash. Consequently he had not budged from his decision to limit exploradon to trips on foot, trips which could not be more than a few hours in duration.

“Let’s see how Art is getting on,” he suggested. “I don’t want to leave him behind—he’ll want to take pictures. On the other hand, he needs to get on with his radio work. Maybe we can rally around and furnish him with some extra hands.”

“Okay.” They crawled through the air lock and entered the Dog House. Art and Ross had already gone inside.

“Art,” Cargraves inquired when he had taken off his clumsy suit, “how long will it be until you are ready to try out your Earth sender?”

“Well, I don’t know, Uncle. I never did think we could get through with the equipment we’ve got. If we had been able to carry the stuff I wanted-“

“You mean if we had been able to afford it,” put in Ross. “Well … anyhow, I’ve got another idea. This place is an electronics man’s dream—all that vacuum! I’m going to try to gimmick up some really big power tubes—only they won’t be tubes. I can just mount the elements out in the open without having to bother with glass. It’s the easiest way to do experimental tube design anybody ever heard of.”

“But even so,” Morrie pointed out, “that could go on indefinitely. Doc, you’ve got us scheduled to leave in less than ten earth-days. Feel like stretching the stay?” he added hopefully.

“No, I don’t,” Cargraves stated. “Hmmm … Art, let’s skip the transmitter problem for a moment. After all, there isn’t any law that says we’ve got to establish radio contact with the earth. But how long would it take to get ready to receive from the earth?”

“Oh, that!” said Art. “They have to do all the hard work for that. Now that I’ve got everything up here I can finish that hook-up in a couple of hours.” “Fine! We’ll whip up some lunch.”

It was nearer three hours when Art announced he was ready to try. “Here goes,” he said. “Stand by.” They crowded around. “What do you expect to get?” Ross asked eagerly.

Art shrugged. “Maybe nothing. NAA, or Berlin Sender, if they are beamed on us. I guess Radio Paris is the best bet, if they are still trying for us.” He adjusted his controls with the vacant stare that always came over him.

They all kept very quiet. If it worked, it would be a big moment in history, and they all knew it. He looked suddenly startled.

“Got something?”

He did not answer for a moment. Then he pushed a phone off one ear and said bitterly, “One of you guys left the power on your walky-talky.” Cargraves checked the suits himself. “No, Art, they are all dead.”

Art looked around the little room. “But … but . . there’s nothing else it could be. Somebody is nuts!” “What’s the matter?”

“What’s the matter? I’m getting a power hum from somewhere and it’s from somewhere around here … close!”

Chapter 14 – NO CHANCE AT ALL!

“ARE YOU sure?,” CARGRAVES demanded. “Of course I’m sure!”

“It’s probably Radio Paris,” Ross suggested. “You don’t know how far away it is.”

Art looked indignant. “Suppose you sit down here and try your luck, Mr. de Forrest. It was close. It couldn’t have been an earth station.” “Feed back?”

“Don’t be silly!” He tried fiddling with his dials a bit more. “It’s gone now.”

“Just a minute,” said Cargraves. “We’ve got to be sure about this. Art, can you get any sort of a transmitter rigged?”

“Not very easy, but yes, I can, too. The homing set is all set to go.” The homing set was a low-power transmitter intended simply for communication between the Dog House and any member of the party outside in a suit.

“Gimme half a second to hook it up.” It took more than half a second but shortly he was leaning toward the microphone, shouting, “Hello! Hello! Is there anybody there! Hello!” “He must have been dreaming,” Morrie said quietly to Cargraves. “There couldn’t be anybody out there.”

“Shut up,” Art said over his shoulder and went back to calling, “Hello! Hello, hello.” His expression suddenly went blank, then he said sharply, “Speak English! Repeat!” “What was it?” demanded Cargraves, Ross, and Art.

“Quiet … please!” Then, to the mike, “Yes, I hear you.

“Who is this? What? Say that again? … This is the Space Ship Galileo, Arthur Mueller transmitting. Hold on a minute.” Art flipped a switch on the front of the panel. “Now go ahead. Repeat who you are.”

Aheavy, bass voice came out of the transmitter: “This is Lunar Expedition Number One,” the voice said. “Will you be pleased to wait one minute while I summon our leader?” “Wait a minute,” yelled Art. “Don’t go away!” But the speaker did not answer.

Ross started whistling to himself. “Stop that whistling,” Art demanded. “Sorry,” Ross paused, then added, “I suppose you know what this means?” “Huh? I don’t know what anything means!”

“It means that we are too late for the senior prizes. Somebody has beaten us to it.” “Huh? How do you figure that?”

“Well, it’s not certain, but it’s likely.” “I’ll bet we landed first.”

“We’ll see. Listen!” It was the speaker again, this time a different voice, lighter in timbre, with a trace of Oxford accent. “Are you there? This is Captain James Brown of the First Lunar Expedition. Is this the Rocket Ship Galileo?”

Cargraves leaned over to the mike. “Rocket Ship Galileo, Captain Cargraves speaking. Where are you?” “Some distance away, old chap. But don’t worry. We are locating you. Keep sending, please.”

“Let us know where we are in reference to you.”

“Do not worry about that. We will come to you. Just remain where you are and keep sending.” “What is your lunar latitude and longitude?”

The voice seemed to hesitate, then went on, “We have you located now. We can exchange details later. Good-by.”

Thereafter Art shouted “hello” until he was hoarse, but there was no answer. “Better stay on the air, Art,” Cargraves decided. “Ross and I will go back to the ship. That’s what they will see. I don’t know, though. They might not show up for a week.” He mused. “This presents a lot of new problems.”

“Somebody ought to go to the ship,” Morrie pointed out, “without waiting. They may be just coming in for a landing. They may show up any time.” “I don’t think it was ship transmission,” said Art, then turned back to his microphone.

Nevertheless it was decided that Cargraves and Ross would go back to the ship. They donned their suits and crawled through the air lock, and had no more than started down the steep and rocky slope when Ross saw the rocket.

He did not hear it, naturally, but he had glanced back to see if Cargraves was behind him. “Look!” he called into his helmet mike, and pointed.

The ship approached them from the west, flying low and rather slowly. The pilot was riding her on her jet, for the blast shot more downward than to the stern. “We had better hurry!” Ross shouted, and went bounding ahead.

But the rocket did not come in for a landing. It nosed down, forward jets driving hard against the fall, directly toward the Galileo. At an altitude of not more than five hundred feet the pilot kicked her around, belly first, and drove away on his tail jet.

Where the Galileo lay, there was a flash, an utterly silent explosion, and a cloud of dust which cleared rapidly away in the vacuum. The sound reached them through their feet, after a long time—it seemed to them.

The Galileo lay on her side, a great gaping hole in her plates. The wound stretched from shattered view port to midships.

Cargraves stood perfectly still, staring at the unbelievable. Ross found his voice first. “They gave us no chance,” he said, shaking both fists at the sky. “No chance at all!”

Chapter 15 – WHAT POSSIBLE REASON?

HE TURNED AND STUMBLED back up the slope to where Cargraves still stood forlorn and motionless. “Did you see that, Doc?” he demanded. “Did you see that? The dirty rats bombed us—they bombed us. Why? Why, Doc? Why would they do such a thing?”

Tears were streaming down his face. Cargraves patted him clumsily. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “I don’t know,” he repeated, still trying to readjust himself to the shock. “Oh, I want to kill somebody!”

“So do I.” Cargraves turned away suddenly. “Maybe we will. Come on—we’ve got to tell the others.” He started up the slope.

But Art and Morrie were already crawling out of the lock when they reached it. “What happened?” Morrie demanded. “We felt a quake.” Cargraves did not answer directly. “Art, did you turn off your transmitter?”

“Yes, but what happened?”

“Don’t turn it on again. It will lead them to us here.” He waved a hand out at the floor of the crater. “Look!”

It took a minute or two for what they saw to sink in. Then Art turned helplessly to Cargraves. “But, Uncle,” he pleaded, “what happened? Why did the ship blow up?” “They blitzed us,” Cargraves said savagely. “They bombed us out. If we had been aboard they would have killed us. That’s what they meant to do.”

“But why?”

“No possible reason. They didn’t want us here.” He refrained from saying what he felt to be true: that their unknown enemy had failed only temporarily in his intent to kill. Aquick death by high explosive would probably be a blessing compared with what he felt was in store for them marooned … on a dead and airless planet.

How long would they last? Amonth? Two months? Better by far if the bomb had hit them. Morrie turned suddenly back toward the lock. “What are you doing, Morrie?”

“Going to get the guns!” “Guns are no good to us.”

But Morrie had not heard him. His antenna was already shielded by the metal drum. Ross said, “I’m not sure that guns are no good, Doc.”

“Huh? How do you figure?”

“Well, what are they going to do next? Won’t they want to see what they’ve done? They didn’t even see the bomb hit; they were jetting away.” “If they land we’ll hijack their ship!”

Art came up closer. “Huh? Hey, Ross, that’s tellin’ ‘em! We’ll get them! We’ll show them! Murderers!” His words tumbled over one another, squeaking and squawking in their radios.

“We’ll try!” Cargraves decided suddenly. “We’ll try. If they land we won’t go down without a fight. We can’t be any worse off than we are.” He was suddenly unworried; the prospect of a gun fight, something new to his experience, did not upset him further. It cheered him. “Where do you think we ought to hide, Ross? In the Galileo?”

“If we have to—There they come!” The rocket had suddenly appeared over the far rim. “Where’s Morrie?”

“Here.” He came up from behind them, burdened with the two rifles and the revolver. “Here, Ross, you take … hey!” He had caught sight of the strangers’ rocket. “We’ve got to hurry,” he said.

But the rocket did not land. It came down low, dipping below the level of the crater’s rim, then scooted on its tail across near the wreckage of the Galileo, up, out, and away. “And we didn’t even get a crack at them,” Morrie said bitterly.

“Not yet,” Ross answered, “but I think they’ll be back. This was a second bombing run, sure as anything, in case they missed the first time. They’ll still come back to see what they’ve done. How about it, Doc?”

“I think they will,” Cargraves decided. “They will want to look over our ship and to kill us off if they missed any of us. But we don’t go to the Galileo.” “Why not?”

“We haven’t time. They will probably turn as fast as they can check themselves, come back and land. We might be caught out in the open.” “That’s a chance we’ll have to take.”

It was decided for them. The rocket appeared again from the direction it had gone. This time it was plainly a landing trajectory. “Come on!” shouted Cargraves, and went careening madly down the slope.

The rocket landed about halfway between the Galileo and the shadows, now close to the foot of the hills, for the sun had climbed four ‘days’ higher in the sky. The ship was noticeably smaller than the Galileo even at that distance.

Cargraves did not notice such details. His immediate intent was to reach the door of the craft before it opened, to be ready to grapple with them as they came out.

But his good sense came to his aid before he was out in the sunlight. He realized he had no gun. Morrie had kept one, Ross had the other, and Art was waving the revolver around. He paused just short of the dazzling, sunlighted area. “Hold it,” he ordered. “I don’t think they have seen us. I don’t think they will—yet.”

“What are your plans?” Morrie demanded.

“Wait for them to get out, then rush the ship—after they get well away from it. Wait for my signal.” “Can’t they hear us?”

“Maybe. If they are on this frequency, we’re goners. Switch off your talkies, everybody.” He did so himself; the sudden silence was chilling.

The rocket was almost tail towards them. He now saw three suit-clad figures pile out from a door that swung out from the side. The first looked around briefly, but he appeared not to see them. Since it was almost certain that he was wearing sun goggles, it was doubtful if he could see much inside the shadows.

He motioned to the other two and moved toward the Galileo, using a long, loping gallop that the Galileo’s crew had learned was the proper way to walk on the moon. That alone was enough to tell Cargraves that these men, their enemies, were not grounding on the moon for the first time.

Cargraves let them get all the way to the Galileo, and, in fact, to disappear behind it, before he got up from where he had been crouching. “Come on!” he yelled into a dead microphone, and slammed ahead in great leaps that took him fifty feet at a stride.

The outer door of the lock stood open. He swarmed into it and closed it after him. It clamped by means of a wheel mounted in its center; the operation was obvious. That done he looked around. The tiny lock was dimly illuminated by a pane of glass set in the inner door. In this feeble light he looked and felt for what he needed next—the spill valve for air.

He found it and heard the air hissing into the compartment. He leaned his weight against the inner door and waited. Suddenly it gave way; he was in the rocket and blinking his eyes.

There was a man still seated in the pilot’s chair. He turned his head, and appeared to say something. Cargraves could not hear it through his helmet and was not interested. Taking all advantage of the low gravity he dived at the man and grappled him about the head and shoulders.

The man was too surprised to put up much of a fight—not that it would have mattered; Cargraves felt ready to fight anything up to and including tigers.

He found himself banging the man’s head against the soft padding of the acceleration chair. That, he realized, was no good. He drew back a gauntleted fist and buried it in the pit of the man’s stomach.

The man grunted and seemed to lose interest. Cargraves threw a short jab straight to the unguarded chin. No further treatment was needed. Cargraves pushed him down to the floor, noticing without interest that the belt of his victim carried a holster with what appeared to be a heavy-caliber Mauser, and then stood on him. He looked out the conning port.

There was a figure collapsed on the ground near the broken bow of the Galileo, whether friend or foe it was impossible to say. But another was standing over him and concerning him there was no doubt. It was not alone the unfamiliar cut of his space suit, it was the pistol in his hand. He was firing in the direction of the rocket in which Cargraves stood.

He saw the blaze of a shot, but no answering report. Another shot followed it—and this one almost deafened him; it struck the ship containing him, making it ring like a giant bell.

He was in a dilemma. He wanted very urgently to join the fight; the weapon on the person of his disabled opponent offered a way. Yet he could not leave his prisoner inside the ship while he went out, nor did he, even in the heat of fighting, have any stomach for killing an unconscious man.

He had already decided, in the space of a breath, to slug his man heavily and get outside, when the fast drama beyond the port left him no time. The space-suited stranger at the bow of the Galileo was suddenly without a helmet. Around his neck was only a jagged collar.

He dropped his pistol and clutched at his face. He stood there for a moment, as if puzzled by his predicament, took two hesitant steps forward, and sank gently to the ground.

He thrashed around a bit but did not get up. He was still convulsing when a third man appeared around the end of the ship. He did not last long. He appeared confused, unable to comprehend the turn of events, which was quite likely, in view of the ghostly stillness of the gun fight. It was entirely possible that he never knew what hit him, nor why. He was still reaching for his iron when he was struck twice, first in the chest and the second shot lower down.

He bowed forward, until his helmet touched the ground, then collapsed.

Cargraves heard a noise behind him. Snatching the gun he had taken to the ready, and turning, he watched the door of the air lock open.

It was Art, wild-eyed and red. “Any more in here?” the boy called out to him, while swinging his revolver in a wide arc. His voice reached Cargraves faintly, muffled by their two helmets. “No. Turn on your radio,” he shouted back, then realized his own was still off. Switching it on, he repeated his statement.

“Mine is on,” Art replied. “I turned it on while the lock filled. How are they doing outside?”

“All right, it looks like. Here, you guard this guy.” He pointed down at his feet. “I’m going outside.”

But it was unnecessary. The lock opened again and both Ross and Morrie bulged out of it. Cargraves wondered absently how the two had managed to squeeze into that coffin-like space. “Need any help?” demanded Morrie.

“No. It doesn’t look like you guys did, either.”

“We ambushed ‘em,” Ross said jubilantly. “Hid in the shadow of the ship and picked ‘em off as they showed up. All but the second one. He darn near got us before we got him. Do you know,” he went on conversationally, as if he had spent a lifetime shooting it out, “it’s almost impossible to sight a gun when you’re wearing one of these fish bowls over your head?”

“Hmm … You made out all right.”

“Pure luck. Morrie was shooting from the hip.”

“I was not,” Morrie denied. “I aimed and squeezed off every shot.”

Cargraves cautioned them to keep an eye on the prisoner, as he wanted to take a look around outside. “Why,” demanded Art, “bother to guard him? Shoot him and chuck him out, I say.” “Cool down,” Cargraves told him. “Shooting prisoners isn’t civilized.”

Art snorted. “Is he civilized?”

“Shut up, Art. Morrie—take charge.” He shut himself in the air lock.

The examination took little time. Two of the strangers had received wounds which would have been fatal in any case, it seemed to him, but their suits were deflated in any event. The third, whose helmet had been struck, was equally beyond help. His eyes bulged sightlessly at the velvet sky. Blood from his nose still foamed. He was gone—drowned in vacuum.

He went back to the little ship, without even a glance at the dismal pile of junk that had been the sleekly beautiful Galileo. Back in the ship, he threw himself in one of the acceleration chairs and sighed. “Not so bad,” he said. “We’ve got a ship.” “That’s what you think,” Art said darkly. “Take a look at that instrument board.”

Chapter 16 – THE SECRET BEHIND THE MOON

“WHAT?” SAID CARGRAVES and looked where he was pointing.

“This is no space ship,” Art said bitterly. “This thing is a jeep. Look at that.” He indicated two gauges. One was marked SAUERSTOFF, the other ALKOHOL. “Oxygen and alcohol. This thing is just a kiddy wagon.”

“Maybe those are just for the maneuvering jets,” Cargraves answered, not very hopefully.

“Not a chance, Doc,” Ross put in. “I’ve already given her the once-over, with Art translating the Jerry talk for me. Besides, did you notice that this boat hasn’t any wings of any sort? It’s purely a station wagon for the moon. Look, we’ve got company.”

The prisoner had opened his eyes and was trying to sit up. Cargraves grabbed him by a shoulder, yanked him to his feet, and shoved him into the chair he had just vacated. “Now, you,” he snapped. “Talk!”

The man looked dazed and did not answer. “Better try German on him, Uncle,” Art suggested. “The labels are all in German.” Cargraves reached far back into his technical education and shifted painfully to German. “What is your name?”

“My name is Friedrich Lenz, sergeant-technician of the second class. To whom am I speaking?” “Answer the questions you are asked. Why did you bomb our ship?”

“In line of duty. I was ordered.”

“That is not a reason. Why did you bomb a peaceful ship?” The man simply looked sullen. “Very well,” Cargraves went on, still speaking in German. “Get the air lock open, Art. We’ll throw this trash out on the face of the moon.”

The self-styled sergeant-technician suddenly began talking very rapidly. Cargraves wrinkled his forehead. “Art,” he said, returning to English, “you’ll have to help me out. He’s slinging it too fast for me.”

“And translate!” protested Ross. “What does he say?”

“I’ll try,” Art agreed, then shifted to German. “Answer the question over again. Speak slowly.” “Ia-” the man agreed, addressing his words to Cargraves.

“Herr Kapitan!” Art thundered at him.

“Ja, Herr Kapitan,” the man complied respectfully, “I was trying to explain to you-” He went on at length.

Art translated when he paused. “He says that he is part of the crew of this rocket. He says that it was commanded by Lieutenant—I didn’t catch the name; it’s one of the guys we shot— and that they were ordered by their leader to seek out and bomb a ship at this location. He says that it was not a—uh, a wanton attack because it was an act of war.”

“War?” demanded Ross. “What in thunder does he mean, ‘war’? There’s no war. It was sheer attempted murder.” Art spoke with the prisoner again.

“He says that there is a war, that there always has been a war. He says that there will always be war until the National Socialist Reich is victorious.” He listened for a moment. “He says that the Reich will live a thousand years.”

Morrie used some words that Cargraves had never heard him use before. “Ask him how he figures that one.”

“Never mind,” put in Cargraves. “I’m beginning to get the picture.” He addressed the Nazi directly. “How many are there in your party, how long has it been on the moon, and where is your base?”

Presently Art said, “He claims he doesn’t have to answer questions of that sort, under international law.”

“Hummph! You might tell him that the laws of warfare went out when war was abolished. But never mind—tell him that, if he wants to claim prisoner-of-war privileges, we’ll give him his freedom, right now!” He jerked a thumb at the air lock.

He had spoken in English, but the prisoner understood the gesture. After that he supplied details readily.

He and his comrades had been on the moon for nearly three months. They had an underground base about thirteen miles west of the crater in which the shattered Galileo lay. There was one rocket at the base, much larger than the Galileo, and it, too, was atom-powered. He regarded himself as a member of the army of the Nazi Reich. He did not know why the order had been given to blast the Galileo, but he supposed that it was an act of military security to protect their plans.

“What plans?”

He became stubborn again. Cargraves actually opened the inner door of the lock, not knowing himself how far he was prepared to go to force information out of the man, when the Nazi cracked.

The plans were simple—the conquest of the entire earth. The Nazis were few in number, but they represented some of the top military, scientific, and technical brains from Hitler’s crumbled empire. They had escaped from Germany, established a remote mountain base, and there had been working ever since for the redemption of the Reich. The sergeant appeared not to know where the base was; Cargraves questioned him closely. Africa? South America? An island? But all that he could get out of him was that it was a long submarine trip from Germany.

But it was the objective, der Tag, which left them too stunned to worry about their own danger. The Nazis had atom bombs, but, as long as they were still holed up in their secret base on earth, they dared not act, for the UN had them, too, and in much greater quantity.

But when they achieved space flight, they had an answer. They would sit safely out of reach on the moon and destroy the cities of earth one after another by guided missiles launched from the moon, until the completely helpless nations of earth surrendered and pleaded for mercy.

The announcement of the final plan brought another flash of arrogance back into their prisoner. “And you cannot stop it,” he concluded. “You may kill me, but you cannot stop it! Heil dem Fuhrer!”

“Mind if I spit in his eye, Doc?” Morrie said conversationally.

“Don’t waste it,” Cargraves counseled. “Let’s see if we can think ourselves out of this mess. Any suggestions?” He hauled the prisoner out of the chair and made him lie face down on the deck. Then he sat down on him. “Go right ahead,” he urged. “I don’t think he understands two words of English. How about it, Ross?”

“Well,” Ross answered, “it’s more than just saving our necks now. We’ve got to stop them. But the notion of tackling fifty men with two rifles and two pistols sounds like a job for Tarzan or Superman. Frankly, I don’t know how to start.”

“Maybe we can start by scouting them out. Thirteen miles isn’t much. Not on the moon.”

“Look,” said Art, “in a day or two I might have a transmitter rigged that would raise earth. What we need is reinforcements.” “How are they going to get here?” Ross wanted to know. “We had the only space ship—except for the Nazis.”

“Yes, but listen—Doc’s plans are still available. You left full notes with Ross’s father—didn’t you, Doc? They can get busy and rebuild some more and come up here and blast those

skunks out.”

“That might be best,” Cargraves answered. “We can’t afford to miss, that’s sure. They could raid the earth base of the Nazis first thing and then probably bust this up in a few weeks, knowing that our ship did work and having our plans.”

Morrie shook his head. “It’s all wrong. We’ve got to get at them right now. No delay at all, just the way they smashed us. Suppose it takes the UN six weeks to get there. Six weeks might be too long. Three weeks might be too long. Aweek might be too long. An atom war could be all over in a day.”

“Well, let’s ask our pal if he knows when they expect to strike, then,” Ross offered.

Morrie shook his head and stopped Art from doing so. “Useless. We’ll never get a chance to build a transmitter. They’ll be swarming over this crater like reporters around a murder trial. Look—they’ll be here any minute. Don’t you think they’ll miss this rocket?”

“Oh, my gosh!” It was Art. Ross added, “What time is it, Doc?”

To their complete amazement it was only forty minutes from the time the Galileo had been bombed. It had seemed like a full day.

It cheered them up a little but not much. The prisoner had admitted that the rocket they were in was the only utility, short-jump job. And the Nazi space ship- the Wotan, he termed it -would hardly be used for search. Perhaps they had a few relatively free hours.

“But I still don’t see it,” Cargraves admitted. “Two guns and two pistols—four of us. The odds are too long—and we can’t afford to lose. I know you sports aren’t afraid to die, but we’ve got to win.”

“Why,” inquired Ross, “does it have to be rifles?” “What else?”

“This crate bombed us. I’ll bet it carries more than one bomb.”

Cargraves looked startled, then turning to the prisoner, spoke rapidly in German. The prisoner gave a short reply. Cargraves nodded and said, “Morrie, do you think you could fly this clunker?”

“I could sure make a stab at it.”

“Okay. You are it. We’ll make Joe Masterrace here take it off, with a gun in his ribs, and you’ll have to feel her out. You won’t get but one chance and no practice. Now let’s take a look at the bomb controls.”

The bomb controls were simple. There was no bombsight, as such. The pilot drove the ship on a straight diving course and kicked it out just before his blast upwards. There was a gadget to expel the bomb free of the ship; it continued on the ship’s previous trajectory. Having doped it out, they checked with the Nazi pilot who gave them the same answers they had read in the mechanism.

There were two pilot seats and two passenger seats, directly behind the pilot seats. Morrie took one pilot seat; the Nazi the other. Ross sat behind Morrie, while Cargraves sat with Art in his lap, one belt around both. This squeezed Art up close to the back of the Nazi’s chair, which was good, for Art reached around and held a gun in the Nazi’s side.

“All set, Morrie?”

“All set. I make one pass to get my bearings and locate the mouth of their hideaway. Then I come back and give ‘em the works.” “Right. Try not to hit their rocket ship, if you can. it would be nice to go home. Blast off! Achtung! Aufstieg!”

The avengers raised ground.

“How is it going?” Cargraves shouted a few moments later. “Okay!” Morrie answered, raising his voice to cut through the roar. “I could fly her down a chimney. There’s the hill ahead, I think—there!”

The silvery shape of the Wotan near the hill they were shooting towards put a stop to any doubts. It appeared to be a natural upthrust of rock, quite different from the craters, and lay by itself a few miles out in one of the ‘seas’.

They were past it and Morrie was turning, blasting heavily to kill his momentum, and pressing them hard into their seats. Art fought to steady the revolver without firing it.

Morrie was headed back on his bombing run, coming in high for his dive. Cargraves wondered if Morrie had actually seen the air lock of the underground base; he himself had had no glimpse of it.

There was no time left to wonder. Morrie was diving; they were crushed against the pads as he fought a moment later to recover from the dive, kicking her up and blasting. They hung for a second and Cargraves thought that Morrie had played it too fine in his anxiety to get in a perfect shot; he braced himself for the crash.

Then they were up. When he had altitude, Morric kicked her over again, letting his jet die. They dropped, view port down, with the ground staring at them.

They could see the splash of dust and sand still rising. Suddenly there was a whoosh from the middle of it, a mighty blast of air, bits of debris, and more sand. It cleared at once in the vacuum of that plain, and they saw the open wound, a black hole leading downward.

He had blown out the air lock with a bull’s-eye.

Morrie put her down to Cargraves’ plan, behind the Wotan and well away from the hole. “Okay, Doc!”

“Good. Now let’s run over the plan—I don’t want any slipup. Ross comes with me. You and Art stay with the jeep. We will look over the Wotan first, then scout out the base. If we are gone longer than thirty minutes, you must assume that we are dead or captured. No matter what happens, under no circumstances whatever are you to leave this rocket. If any one comes toward you, blast off. Don’t even let us come near you unless we are by ourselves. Blast off. You’ve got one more bomb—you know what to do with it.”

Morrie nodded. “Bomb the Wotan. I hate to do that.” He stared wistfully at the big ship, their one chain to the earth.

“But you’ve got to. You and Art have got to run for it, then, and get back to the Dog House and hole up. It’ll be your business, Art, to manage somehow or other to throw together a set that can get a message back to earth. That’s your only business, both of you. Under no circumstances are you to come back here looking for Ross and me. If you stay holed up, they may not find you for weeks—and that will give you your chance, the earth’s chance. Agreed?”

Morrie hesitated. “Suppose we get a message through to earth. How about it then?”

Cargraves thought for a moment, then replied, “We can’t stand here jawing—there’s work to be done. If you get a message through with a reply that makes quite clear that they believe you and are getting busy, then you are on your own. But I advise you not to take any long chances. If we aren’t back here in thirty minutes, you probably can’t help us.” He paused for a moment and decided to add one more thing—the boy’s personal loyalty had made him doubtful about one point. “You know, don’t you, that when it comes to dropping that bomb, if you do, you must drop it where it has to go, even if Ross and I are standing on your target?”

“I suppose so.”

“Those are orders, Morrie.” “I understand them.” “Morrie!”

“Aye aye, Captain!”

“Very well, sir—that’s better. Art, Morrie is in charge. Come on, Ross.”

Nothing moved on the rocket field. The dust of the bombing, with no air to hold it up, had dissipated completely. The broken air lock showed dark and still across the field; near them the sleek and mighty Wotan crouched silent and untended.

Cargraves made a circuit of the craft, pistol ready in his gloved fist, while Ross tailed him, armed with one of the Garands. Ross kept well back, according to plan.

Like the Galileo, the Wotan had but one door, on the port side just aft the conning compartment. He motioned Ross to stay back, then climbed a little metal ladder or staircase and tried the latch. To his surprise the ship was not locked—then he wondered why he was surprised. Locks were for cities.

While the pressure in the air chamber equalized, he unsnapped from his belt a flashlight he had confiscated from the Nazi jeep rocket and prepared to face whatever lay beyond the door. When the door sighed open, he dropped low and to one side, then shot his light around the compartment. Nothing … nobody.

The ship was empty of men from stem to stern. It was almost too much luck. Even if it had been a rest period, or even if there had been no work to do in the ship, he had expected at least a guard on watch.

However a guard on watch would mean one less pair of hands for work … and this was the moon, where every pair of hands counted for a hundred or a thousand on earth. Men were at a premium here; it was more likely, he concluded, that their watch was a radar, automatic and unsleeping.

Probably with a broad-band radio alarm as well, he thought, remembering how promptly their own call had been answered the very first time they had ever sent anything over the rim of their crater.

He went through a passenger compartment equipped with dozens of acceleration bunks, through a hold, and farther aft. He was looking for the power plant.

He did not find it. Instead he found a welded steel bulkhead with no door of any sort. Puzzled, he went back to the control station. What he found there puzzled him still more. The acceleration chairs were conventional enough; some of the navigational instruments were common types and all of them not too difficult to figure out; but the controls simply did not make sense.

Although this bewildered him, one point was very clear. The Nazis had not performed the nearly impossible task of building a giant space ship in a secret hide-out, any more than he and the boys had built the Galileo singlehanded. In each case it had been a job of conversion plus the installation of minor equipment.

For the Wotan was one of the finest, newest, biggest ships ever to come out of Detroit!

The time was getting away from him. He had used up seven minutes in his prowl through the ship. He hurried out and rejoined Ross. “Empty,” he reported, saving the details for later; “let’s try their rat hole.” He started loping across the plain.

They had to pick their way carefully through the rubble at the mouth of the hole. Since the bomb had not been an atom bomb but simply ordinary high explosive, they were in no danger of contamination, but they were in danger of slipping, sliding, falling, into the darkness.

Presently the rubble gave way to an excellent flight of stairs leading deep into the moon. Ross flashed his torch around.

The walls, steps, and ceiling were covered with some tough lacquer, sprayed on to seal the place. The material was transparent, or nearly so, and they could see that it covered carefully fitted stonework.

“Went to a lot of trouble, didn’t they?” Ross remarked. “Keep quiet!” answered Cargraves.

More than two hundred feet down the steep passageway ended, and they came to another door, not an air lock, but intended apparently as an air-tight safety door. It had not kept the owners safe; the blast followed by a sudden letting up of normal pressure had been too much for it. It was jammed in place but so bulged and distorted that there was room for them to squeeze through.

There was some light in the room beyond. The blast had broken most of the old-fashioned bulbs the Nazis had used, but here and there a light shone out, letting them see that they were in a large hail. Cargraves went cautiously ahead.

Aroom lay to the right from the hall, through an ordinary non-air-tight door, now hanging by one hinge. In it they found the reason why the field had been deserted when they had attacked. The room was a barrack room; the Nazis had died in their bunks. ‘Night’ and ‘day’ were arbitrary terms on the moon, in so far as the working times and eating times and sleeping times

of men are concerned. The Nazis were on another schedule; they had had the bad luck to be sleeping when Morrie’s bomb had robbed them of their air.

Cargraves stayed just long enough in the room to assure himself that all were dead. He did not let Ross come in at all. There was some blood, but not much, being mostly bleeding from mouths and bulging eyes. It was not this that caused his squeamish consideration; it was the expressions which were frozen on their dead faces.

He got out before he got sick.

Ross had found something. “Look here!” he demanded. Cargraves looked. Aportion of the wall had torn away under the sudden drop in pressure and had leaned crazily into the room. It was a metal panel, instead of the rock masonry which made up the rest of the walls. Ross had pulled and pried at it to see what lay behind, and was now playing his light into the darkness behind it.

It was another corridor, lined with carefully dressed and fitted stones. But here the stone had not been covered with the sealing lacquer.

“I wonder why they sealed it off after they built it?” Ross wanted to know. “Do you suppose they have stuff stored down there? Their A-bombs maybe?”

Cargraves studied the patiently fitted stones stretching away into the unfathomed darkness. After a long time he answered softly, “Ross, you haven’t discovered a Nazi storeroom. You have discovered the homes of the people of the moon.”

Chapter 17 – UNTIL WE ROT

FOR ONCE ROSS WAS ALMOST as speech-bound as Art. When he was able to make his words behave he demanded, “Are you sure? Are you sure, Doc?”

Cargraves nodded. “As sure as I can be at this time. I wondered why the Nazis had built such a deep and extensive a base and why they had chosen to use fitted stone masonry. It would be hard to do, working in a space suit. But I assigned it to their reputation for doing things the hard way, what they call ‘efficiency.’ I should have known better.” He peered down the mysterious, gloomy corridor. “Certainly this was not built in the last few months.”

“How long ago, do you think?”

“How long? How long is a million years? How long is ten million years? I don’t know—I have trouble imagining a thousand years. Maybe we’ll never know.”

Ross wanted to explore. Cargraves shook his head. “We can’t go chasing rabbits. This is wonderful, the biggest thing in ages. But it will wait. Right now,” he said, glancing at his watch, “we’ve got eleven minutes to finish the job and get back up to the surface—or things will start happening up there!”

He covered the rest of the layout at a fast trot, with Ross guarding his rear from the central hall. He found the radio ‘shack’, with a man dead in his phones, and noted that the equipment did not appear to have suffered much damage when the whirlwind of escaping air had slammed out of the place. Farther on, an arsenal contained bombs for the jeep, and rifles, but no men.

He found the storeroom for the guided missiles, more than two hundred of them, although the cradles were only half used up. The sight of them should have inspired terror, knowing as he did that each represented a potentially dead and blasted city, but he had no time for it. He rushed on.

There was a smaller room, well furnished, which seemed to be sort of a wardroom or common room for the officers. It was there that he found a Nazi who was not as the others. He was sprawled face down and dressed in a space suit. Although he did not move Cargraves approached him very cautiously.

The man was either dead or unconscious. However, he did not have the grimace of death on his face and his suit was still under pressure. Wondering what to do, Cargraves knelt over him. There was a pistol in his belt; Cargraves took it and stuck it in his own.

He could feel no heart beat through the heavy suit and his own gauntlet, nor could he listen for it, while wearing a helmet himself.

His watch showed five minutes of the agreed time left; whatever he did must be done fast. He grappled the limp form by the belt and dragged it along. “What have you got there?” Ross demanded.

“Souvenir. Let’s get going. No time.” He saved his breath for the climb. The sixty-pound weight that he and his burden made, taken together, flew up the stairs six at a time. At the top his watch still showed two minutes to go. “Leg it out to the jeep,” he commanded Ross. “I can’t take this item there, or Morrie may decide it’s a trap. Meet me in the Wotan. Get going!” Heaving his light burden over one shoulder, he set out for the big ship at a gallop.

Once inside he put his load down and took the man out of his space suit. The body was warm but seemed dead. However, he found he could detect a faint heart-beat. He was starting an artificial respiration when the boys piled out of the lock.

“Hi,” he said, “who wants to relieve me here? I don’t know much about it.” “Why bother?” asked Morrie.

Cargraves paused momentarily and looked at him quizzically. “Well, aside from the customary reasons you have been brought up to believe in, he might be more use to us alive than dead.”

Morrie shrugged. “Okay. I’ll take over.” He dropped to his knees, took Cargraves’ place, and started working. “Did you bring them up to date?,” Cargraves asked Ross.

“I gave them a quick sketch. Told them the place seemed to be ours and I told them what we found—the ruins.” “Not very ruined,” Cargraves remarked.

“Look, Uncle,” demanded Art. “Can I go down there? I’ve got to get some pictures.”

“Pictures can wait,” Cargraves pointed out. “Right now we’ve got to find out how this ship works. As soon as we get the hang of it, we head back. That comes first.” “Well, sure,” Art conceded, “but … after all—I mean. No pictures at all?”

“Well … Let’s put it this way. It may take Ross and Morrie and me, not to mention yourself, quite some time to figure out how they handle this craft. There might be twenty minutes when we could spare you. In the meantime, table the motion. Come on, Ross. By the way, what did you do with the prisoner?”

“Oh, him,” Morrie answered, “we tied him up and left him.” “Huh? Suppose he gets loose? He might steal the rocket.”

“He won’t get loose. I tied him myself and I took a personal interest in it. Anyhow he won’t try to get away—no space suit, no food. That baby knows his chance of living to a ripe old age depends on us and he doesn’t want to spoil it.”

“That’s right, Uncle,” Art agreed. “You should have heard what he promised me.”

“Good enough, I guess,” Cargraves conceded. “Come on, Ross.” Morrie went on with his job, with Art to spell him.

Cargraves returned, with Ross, to the central compartment a few minutes later. “Isn’t that pile of meat showing signs of life yet?,” he asked. “No. Shall I stop?”

“I’ll relieve you. Sometimes they come to after an hour or more. Two of you go over to the jeep with an additional space suit and bring back Sergeant What’s-his-name. Ross and I are as much in the dark as ever,” he explained. “The sergeant bloke is a pilot. We’ll sweat it out of him.”

He had no more than gotten firmly to work when the man under him groaned. Morrie turned back at the lock. “Go ahead,” Cargraves confirthed. “Ross and I can handle this guy.”

The Nazi stirred and moaned. Cargraves turned him over. The man’s eyelids flickered, showing bright blue eyes. He stared up at Cargraves. “How do you do?” he said in a voice like a stage Englishman. “May I get up from here?”

Cargraves backed away and let him up. He did not help him.

The man looked around. Ross stood silently, covering him with a Garand. “That isn’t necessary, really,” the Nazi protested. Ross glanced at Cargraves but continued to cover the prisoner. The man turned to Cargraves. “Whom have I the honor of addressing?” he asked. “Is it Captain Cargraves of the Galileo?”

“That’s right. Who are you?”

“I am Helmut von Hartwick, Lieutenant Colonel, Elite Guard.” He pronounced lieutenant “leftenant.” “Okay, Helmut, suppose you start explaining yourself. Just what is the big idea?”

The self-styled colonel laughed. “Really, old man, there isn’t much to explain, is there? You seem to have eluded us somehow and placed me at a disadvantage. I can see that.”

“You had better see that, but that is not what I mean, and that is not enough.” Cargraves hesitated. The Nazi had him somewhat baffled; he did not act at all like a man who has just come out of a daze. Perhaps he had been playing possum—if so, for how long?

Well, it did not matter, he decided. The Nazi was still his prisoner. “Why did you order my ship bombed?” “Me? My dear chap, why do you think I ordered it?”

“Because you sound just like the phony English accent we heard over our radio. You called yourself ‘Captain James Brown.’ I don’t suppose there is more than one fake Englishman in this crowd of gangsters.”

Von Hartwick raise his eyebrows. “‘Gangsters’ is a harsh term, old boy. Hardly good manners. But you are correct on one point; I was the only one of my colleagues who had enjoyed the questionable advantage of attending a good English school. I’ll ask you not to call my accent ‘phony.’ But, even if I did borrow the name ‘Captain James Brown,’ that does not prove that I ordered your ship bombed. That was done under the standing orders of our Leader—a necessary exigency of war. I was not personally responsible.”

“I think you are a liar on both counts. I don’t think you ever attended an English school; you probably picked up that fake accent from Lord Haw-Haw, or from listening to the talkies. And your Leader did not order us bombed, because he did not know we were there. You ordered it, just as soon as you could trace a bearing on us, as soon as you found out we were here.”

The Nazi spread his. hands, palms down, and looked pained. “Really, you Americans are so ready to jump to conclusions. Do you truly think that I could fuel a rocket, call its crew, and equip it for bombing, all in ten minutes? My only function was to report your location.”

“You expected us, then?”

“Naturally. If a stupid radarman had not lost you when you swung into your landing orbit, we would have greeted you much sooner. Surely you don’t think that we would have established a military base without preparing to defend it? We plan, we plan for everything. That is why we will win.”

Cargraves permitted himself a thin smile. “You don’t seem to have planned for this.” The Nazi tossed it off. “In war there are setbacks. One expects them.”

“Do you call it ‘war’ to bomb an unarmed, civilian craft without even a warning?”

Hartwick looked pained. “Please, my dear fellow! It ill befits you to split hairs. You seemed to have bombed us without warning. I myself would not be alive this minute had I not had the good fortune to be just removing my suit when you struck. I assure you I had no warning. As for your claim to being a civilian, unarmed craft, I think it very strange that the Galileo was able to blast our base if you carried nothing more deadly than a fly swatter. You Americans amaze me. You are always so ready to condemn others for the very things you do yourselves.”

Cargraves was at a loss for words at the blind illogic of the speech. Ross looked disgusted; he seemed about to say something. Cargraves shook his head at him.

“That speech,” he announced, “had more lies, half-truths, and twisted statements per square inch than anything you’ve said yet. But I’ll put you straight on one point: the Galileo didn’t bomb your base; she’s wrecked. But your men were careless. We seized your rocket and turned your own bombs on you-“

“Idioten!”

“They were stupid, weren’t they? The Master Race usually is stupid when it comes to a showdown. But you claimed we bombed you without warning. That is not true; you had all the warning you were entitled to and more. You struck the first blow. It’s merely your own cocksureness that led you to think we couldn’t or wouldn’t strike back.”

Von Hartwick started to speak. “Shut up!” Cargraves said sharply. “I’m tired of your nonsense. Tell me how you happen to have this American ship. Make it good.” “Oh, that! We bought it.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I am not being silly. Naturally we did not walk in and place an order for one military space ship, wrapped and delivered. The transaction passed through several hands and eventually our friends delivered to us what we needed.”

Cargraves thought rapidly. It was possible; something of the sort had to be true. He remembered vaguely an order for twelve such ships as the Wotan had originally been designed to be, remembered it because the newspapers had hailed the order as a proof of post-war recovery, expansion, and prosperity.

He wondered if all twelve of those rockets were actually operating on the run for which they had supposedly been purchased.

“That is the trouble with you stupid Americans,” von Hartwick went on. “You assume that every one shares your silly belief in such rotten things as democracy. But it is not true. We have friends everywhere. Even in Washington, in London, yes, even in Moscow. Our friends are everywhere. That is another reason why we will win.”

“Even in New Mexico, maybe?”

Von Hartwick laughed. “That was a droll comedy, my friend. I enjoyed the daily reports. It would not have suited us to frighten you too much, until it began to appear that you might be successful. You were very lucky, my friend, that you took off as soon as you did.”

“Don’t call me ‘my friend’,” Cargraves said testily. “I’m sick of it.”

“Very well, my dear Captain.” Cargraves let the remark pass. He was getting worried by the extended absence of Art and Morrie. Was it possible that some other of the Nazis were still around, alive and capable of making trouble?

He was beginning to think about tying up the prisoner here present and going to look for them when the lock sighed open. Morrie and Art stepped out, prodding the other prisoner before them. “He didn’t want to come, Uncle,” Art informed him. “We had to convince him a little.” He chuckled. “I don’t think he trusts us.”

“Okay. Get your suits off.”

The other prisoner seemed completely dumfounded by the sight of von Hartwick. Hastily he unclamped his helmet, threw it back, and said in German, “Herr Oberst—it was not my fault. I was-“

“Silence!” shouted the Nazi officer, also in German. “Have you told these pig-dogs anything about the operation of this ship?” “Nein, nein, Herr Oberst—I swear it!”

“Then play stupid or I’ll cut your heart out!”

Cargraves listened to this interesting little exchange with an expressionless face, but it was too much for Art. “Uncle,” he demanded, “did you hear that? Did you hear what he said he’d do?”

Von Hartwick looked from nephew to uncle. “So you understand German?” he said quietly. “I was afraid that you might.” Ross had let the muzzle of his gun wander away from von Hartwick when the boys came in with their prisoner. Cargraves had long since shoved the pistol he had appropriated into his belt.

Von Hartwick glanced from one to another. Morrie and Art were both armed, one with a Garand, the other with revolver, but they had them trained on the Nazi pilot. Von Hartwick lunged suddenly at Cargraves and snatched the pistol from his belt.

Without appearing to stop to take aim he fired once. Then Cargraves was at him, clawing at his hands.

Von Hartwick brought the pistol down on his head, club fashion, and moved in to grapple him about the waist.

The Nazi pilot clasped his hands to his chest, gave a single bubbly moan, and sank to the floor. No one paid him any attention. After a split second of startled inaction, the three boys were milling around, trying to get in a shot at von Hartwick without hitting Cargraves. Cargraves himself had jerked and gone limp when the barrel of the pistol struck his head. Von Hartwick held the doctor’s thirty pounds of moon-weight up with one arm. He shouted, “Silence!”

His order would have had no effect had not the boys seen something else: Von Hartwick was holding the pistol to Cargraves’ head. “Careful, gentlemen,” he said, speaking very rapidly. “I

have no wish to harm your leader and will not do so unless you force me. I am sorry I was forced to strike him; I was forced to do so when he attacked me.”

“Watch out!” commanded Morrie. “Art! Ross! Don’t try to shoot.”

“That is sensible,” von Hartwick commended him. “I have no wish to try to shoot it out with you. My only purpose was to dispose of him.” He indicated the body of the Nazi pilot. Morrie glanced at it. “Why?”

“He was a soft and foolish pig. I could not afford to risk his courage. He would have told you what you want to know.” He paused, and then said suddenly, “And now—I am your prisoner again!” The pistol sailed out of his hand and clanged against the floor.

“Get Doc out of my way,” Ross snapped. “I can’t get a shot in.”

“No!” Morrie thundered. “Art, pick up the pistol. Ross, you take care of Doc.” “What are you talking about?” Ross objected. “He’s a killer. I’ll finish him off.” “No!”

“Why not?”

“Well—Doc wouldn’t like it. That’s reason enough. Don’t shoot. That’s an order, Ross. You take care of Doc. Art, you tie up the mug. Make it good.” “It’ll be good!” promised Art.

The Nazi did not resist and Morrie found himself able to give some attention to what Ross was doing. “How bad is it?” he inquired, bending over Cargraves. “Not too bad, I think. I’ll know better when I get some of this blood wiped away.”

“You will find dressings and such things,” von Hartwick put in casually, as if he were not in the stages of being tied up, “in a kit under the instrument board in the control room.”

“Go look for them, Ross,” Morrie directed. “I’ll keep guard. Not,” he said to von Hartwick, “that it will do you any good if he dies. If he does, out you go, outside, without a suit. Shooting’s too good for you.”

“He won’t die. I hit him very carefully.”

“You had better hope he doesn’t. You won’t outlive him more than a couple of minute.”

Von Hartwick shrugged. “It is hardly possible to threaten me. We are all dead men. You realize that, don’t you?” Morrie looked at him speculatively. “Finished with him, Art? Sure he’s tied up tight?”

“He’ll choke himself to death if he tries to wiggle out of that one.”

“Good. Now you,” he went on to von Hartwick, “you may be a dead man. I wouldn’t know. But we’re not. We are going to fly this ship back to earth. You start behaving yourself and we might take you with us.”

Von Hartwick laughed. “Sorry to disillusion you, dear boy, but none of us is going back to earth. That is why I had to dispose of that precious pilot of mine.”

Morrie turned away, suddenly aware that no one had bothered to find out how badly the sergeant-pilot was wounded. He was soon certain; the man was dead, shot through the heart. “I can’t see that it matters,” he told von Hartwick.. “We’ve still got you. You’ll talk, or I’ll cut your ears off and feed them to you.”

“What a distressing thought,” he was answered, “but it. won’t help you. You see, I am unable to tell you anything; I am not a pilot.” Art stared at him. “He’s kidding you, Morrie.”

“No,” von Hartwick denied. “I am not. Try cutting my ears off and you will see. No, my poor boys, we are all going to stay here a long time, until we rot, in fact. Heil dem Fuhrer!” “Don’t touch him, Art,” Morrie warned. “Doc wouldn’t like it.”

Chapter 18 – TOO LITTLE TIME

CARGRAVES WAS WIDE ENOUGH awake to swear by the time Ross swabbed germicide on the cut in his hair line. “Hold still, Doc I-“ “I am holding still. Take it easy.”

They brought him up to date as they bandaged him. “The stinker thinks he’s put one over on us,” Ross finished. “He thinks we can’t run this boat without somebody to show us.”

“He may be perfectly right,” Cargraves admitted. “So far it’s got us stumped. We’ll see. Throw him in the hold, and we’ll have another look. Morrie, you did right not to let him be shot.” “I didn’t think you would want him killed until you had squeezed him dry.”

Cargraves gave him an odd smile. “That wasn’t your only reason, was it?

“Well—shucks !” Morrie seemed almost embarrassed. “I didn’t want to just shoot him down after he dropped the gun. That’s a Nazi trick.”

Cargraves nodded approvingly. “That’s right. That’s one of the reasons they think we are soft. But we’ll have a little surprise for him.” He got up, went over, and stirred von Hartwick with his toe. “Listen to me, you. If possible, I am going to take you back to earth to stand trial… If not, we’ll try you here.”

Von Hartwick lifted his eyebrows. “For making war on you? How delightfully American!”

“No, not for making war. There isn’t any war, and there hasn’t been any war. The Third Reich disappeared forever in the spring of 1945 and today there is peace between Germany and the United States, no matter how many pipsqueak gangsters may still be hiding out. No, you phony superman, you are going to be tried for the murder of your accomplice—that poor dupe lying over there.” He turned away. “Chuck him in the hold, boys. Come on, Ross.”

Three hours later Cargraves was quite willing to admit that von Hartwick was correct when he said that the operation of the Wotan could not be figured out by a stranger. There were strange controls on the arms of the piloting seats which certainly had to be the flight controls, but no matter what they twisted, turned or moved, nothing happened. And the drive itself was sealed away behind a bulkhead which, from the sound it gave off when pounded, was inches thick.

Cargraves doubted whether he could cut through even with a steel-cutting flame. He was very reluctant to attempt to do so in any case; an effort to solve the mysteries of the ship by such surgery might, as likely as not, result in disabling the ship beyond any hope of repairing it.

There should be an operation manual somewhere. They all searched for it. They opened anything that would open, crawled under anything that could be crawled under, lifted everything that would move. There was no control manual in the ship.

The search disclosed something else. There was no food in the ship. This latter point was becoming important.

“That’s enough, sports,” he announced when he was certain that further search would be useless. “We’ll try their barracks next. We’ll find it. Not to mention food. You come with me, Morrie, and pick out some groceries.”

“Me too!” Art shouted. “I’ll get some pictures. The moon people! Oh, boy!”

Cargraves wished regretfully that he were still young enough for it to be impossible to stay worried. “Well, all right,” he agreed, “but where is your camera?” Art’s face fell. “It’s in the Dog House,” he admitted.

“I guess the pictures will have to wait. But come along; there is more electronic equipment down there than you can run and jump over. Maybe raising earth by radio will turn out to be easy.”

“Why don’t we all go?” Ross wanted to know. “I found the ruins, but I haven’t had a chance to look at them.”

“Sorry, Ross; but you’ve got to stay behind and stand guard over Stinky. He might know more about this ship than he admits. I would hate to come up that staircase and find the ship missing. Stand guard over him. Tell him that if he moves a muscle you’ll slug him. And mean it.”

“Okay. I hope he does move. How long will you be gone?” “If we can’t find it in two hours we’ll come back.”

Cargraves searched the officers’ room first, as it seemed the most likely place. He did not find it, but he did find that some of the Nazis appeared to have some peculiar and unpleasant tastes in books and pictures. The barrack room he took next. It was as depressing a place as it had been earlier, but he was prepared for it. Art he had assigned to the radio and radar room and Morrie to the other spaces; there seemed to be no reason for any one but himself to have to touch the bloating corpses.

He drew a blank in the barrack room. Coming out, he heard Art’s voice in his phones. “Hey, Uncle, look what I’ve found!” “What is it?,” he said, and Morrie’s voice cut in at once.

“Found the manual, Art?”

“No, but look!” They converged in the central hail. ‘It’ was a Graflex camera, complete with flash gun. “There is a complete darkroom off the radio room. I found it there. How about it, Uncle? Pictures?”

“Well, all right. Morrie, you go along—it may be your only chance to see the ruins. Thirty minutes. Don’t go very far, don’t bust your necks, don’t take any chances, and be back on time, or I’ll be after you with a Flit gun.” He watched them go regretfully, more than a little tempted to play hookey himself. If he had not been consumed with the urgency of his present responsibilities—But he was. He forced himself to resume the dreary search.

It was all to no good. If there was an instruction manual in existence he had to admit that he did not know how to find it. But he was still searching when the boys returned.

He glanced at his watch. “Forty minutes,” he said. “That’s more prompt than I thought you would be; I expected to have to go look for you. What did you find? Get any good pictures?” “Pictures? Did we get pictures! Wait till you see!”

“I never saw anything like it, Doc,” Morrie stated impressively. “The place is a city. It goes down and down. Great big arched halls, hundreds of feet across, corridors running every which way, rooms, balconies—I can’t begin to describe it.”

“Then don’t try. Write up full notes on what you saw as soon as we get back.” “Doc, this thing’s tremendous!”

“I realize it. But it’s so big I’m not even going to try to comprehend it, not yet. We’ve got our work cut out for us just to get out of here alive. Art, what did you find in the radio room? Anything you can use to raise earth?”

“Well, Uncle, that’s hard to say, but the stuff doesn’t look promising.”

“Are you sure? We know that they were in communication—at least according to our nasty-nice boy friend.”

Art shook his head. “I thought you said they received from earth. I found their equipment for that but I couldn’t test it out because I couldn’t get the earphones inside my suit. But I don’t see how they could send to earth.”

“Why not? They need two-way transmission.”

“Maybe they need it but they can’t afford to use it. Look, Uncle, they can beam towards the moon from their base on earth—that’s all right; nobody gets it but them. But if the Nazis on this

end try to beam back, they can’t select some exact spot on earth. At that distance the beam would fan out until it covered too much territory—it would be like a broadcast.”

“Oh!” said Cargraves, “I begin to see. Chalk up one for yourself, Art; I should have thought of that. No matter what sort of a code they used, if people started picking up radio from the direction of the moon, the cat would be out of the bag.”

“That’s what I thought, anyhow.”

“I think you’re dead right. I’m disappointed; I was beginning to pin my hopes on getting a message across.” He shrugged. “Well, one thing at a time. Morrie, have you picked out the supplies you want to take up?”

“All lined up.” They followed him into the kitchen space and found he had stacked three piles of tin cans in quantities to make three good-sized loads. As they were filling their arms Morrie said. “How many men were there here, Doc?”

“I counted forty-seven bodies not counting the one von Hartwick shot. Why?”

“Well, I noticed something funny. I’ve sort of acquired an eye for estimating rations since I’ve been running the mess. There isn’t food enough here to keep that many men running two weeks. Does that mean what I think it means?”

“Hunnh … Look, Morrie, I think you’ve hit on something important. That’s why von Hartwick is so cocky. It isn’t just whistling in the dark. He actually expects to be rescued.” “What do you mean, Uncle?” Art wanted to know.

“He is expecting a supply ship, almost any time.”

Art whistled. “He thinks we’ll be caught by surprise!”

“And we would have been. But we won’t be now.” He put down his load of groceries. “Come along.” “Where?”

“I just remembered something.” In digging through the officers’ quarters he had come across many documents, books, manuals, records, and papers of many sorts. He had scanned them very briefly, making certain only that no one of them contained anything which would give a clue to the operation of the Wotan.

One of them was the day book or journal of the task-force commander. Among other things it had given the location of the Nazi base on earth; Cargraves had marked it as something he wanted to study later. Now he decided to do it at once.

It was long. It covered a period of nearly three months with Teutonic thoroughness. He read rapidly, with Art reading over his shoulder. Morrie stood around impatiently and finally pointed out that the time was approaching when they had promised Ross to return.

“Go ahead,” Cargraves said absently. “Take a load of food. Get a meal started.” He read on.

There was a roster of the party. He found von Hartwick listed as executive officer. He noted that as an indication that the Nazi was lying when he claimed not to understand the piloting of the Wotan. Not proof, but a strong indication. But falsehood was all that he expected of the creature.

He was beginning to find what he was looking for. Supply trips had been made each month. If the schedule was maintained- and the state of supplies certainly indicated it -the next ship should be along in six or seven days.

But the most important fact he was not sure of until he had finished the journal: there was more than one big rocket in their possession; the Wotan was not about to leave to get supplies; she would not leave, if the schedule had been followed, until the supply ship landed. Then she would be taken back empty and the other ship would be unloaded. By such an arrangement the party on the moon was never left without a means of escape—or, at least, that was the reason he read into the account.

There were just two and only two Nazi moon rockets—the Wotan and the Thor. The Thor was due in a week, as nearly as he could make out, which meant that she would leave her home base in about five days. The transit times for each trip had been logged in; forty-six hours plus for the earthmoon jump was the way the record read.

Fast time! he thought.

If the Thor ever took off, it might be too late for good intentions, too late for warnings. The Nazis were certainly aware that the techniques of space flight were now an open secret; there was reference after reference to the Galileo including a last entry noting that she had been located. They would certainly strike at the earliest possible moment.

He could see in his mind’s eye the row upon row of A-bomb guided-missiles in a near-by cavern. He could see them striking the defenseless cities of earth. No time to rig a powerful transmitter. No time for anything but drastic measures.

Not time enough, he was afraid!

Chapter 19 – SQUEEZE PLAY

“SOUP’S ON!” MORRIE GREETED him as he came hurrying into the Wotan. Cargraves started shucking off his suit as he answered. “No time for that—no, gimme a couple of those sandwiches.”

Morrie complied.

Ross inquired, “What’s the rush?”

“Got to see the prisoner.” He turned away, then stopped. “No—wait. Come here, guys.” He motioned them into a football huddle. “I’m going to try something.” He whispered urgently for a few minutes. “Now play up. I’ll leave the door open.”

He went into the hold and prodded von Hartwick with his boot. “Wake up, you.” He took a bite of sandwich.

“I am awake.” Von Hartwick turned his head with some difficulty as he was trussed up with his ankles pulled up toward his wrists, which were tied behind him. “Ah, food,” he said cheerfully. “I was wondering when you would remember the amenities in dealing with prisoners.”

“It’s not for you,” Cargraves informed him. “The other sandwich is for me. You won’t need one.” Von Hartwick looked interest but not frightened. “So?”

“Nope,” said Cargraves, wiping his mouth with his sleeve, “you won’t. I had intended to take you to earth for trial, but I find I won’t have time for that. I’ll try you myself—now.”

Von Hartwick shrugged under his bonds. “You are able to do as you like. I’ve no doubt you intend to kill me, but don’t dignify it with the name of a trial. Call it a lynching. Be honest with yourself. In the first place my conduct has been entirely correct. True, I was forced to shoot one of my own men, but it was a necessary emergency military measure-“

“Murder,” put in Cargraves.

“-in defense of the security of the Reich,” von Hartwick went on unhurriedly, “and no concern of yours in any case. It was in my own ship, entirely out of jurisdiction of any silly laws of the corrupt democracies. As for the bombing of your ship, I have explained to you-“

“Shut up,” Cargraves said. “You’ll get a chance to say a few words later. Court’s in session. Just to get it straight in your head, this entire planet is subject to the laws of the United Nations. We took formal possession and have established a permanent base. Therefore-“

“Too late, Judge Lynch. The New Reich claimed this planet three months ago.”

“I told you to keep quiet. You’re in contempt of court. One more peep and we’ll think up a way to keep you quiet. Therefore, as the master of a vessel registered under the laws of the United Nations it is my duty to see that those laws are obeyed. Your so-called claim doesn’t hold water. There isn’t any New Reich, so it can’t claim anything. You and your fellow thugs aren’t a nation; you are merely gangsters. We aren’t bound to recognize any fictions you have thought up and we don’t. Morrie! Bring me another sandwich.”

“Coming up, Captain!”

“Now as master of the Galileo,” Cargraves went on, “I have to act for the government when I’m off by myself, as I am now. Since I haven’t time to take you back to earth for trial, I’m trying you now. Two charges: murder in the first degree and piracy.”

“Piracy? My dear fellow!”

“Piracy. You attacked a vessel of UN register. On your own admission you took part in it, whether you gave the orders or not. All members of a pirate crew are equally guilty, and it’s a capital offense. Murder in the first degree is another one. Thanks for the sandwich, Morrie. Where did you find fresh bread?”

“It was canned.”

“Clever, these Nazis. There was some doubt in my mind as to whether to charge you with first or second degree. But you had to grab the gun away from me first, before you could shoot your pal. That’s premeditation. So you’re charged—piracy and first-degree murder. How do you plead? Guilty or not guilty?”

Von Hartwick hesitated a bit before replying. “Since I do not admit the jurisdiction of this so-called court, I refuse to enter a plea. Even if I concede- which I don’t -that you honestly believe this to be United Nations territory, you still are not a court.”

“Aship’s master has very broad powers in an emergency. Look it up some time. Get a ouija board and look it up.”

Von Hartwick raised his eyebrows. “From the nature of that supposedly humorous remark I can see that I am convicted before the trial starts.”

Cargraves chewed reflectively. “In a manner of speaking, yes,” he conceded. “I’d like to give you a jury, but we don’t really need one. You see, there aren’t any facts to be established because there aren’t any facts in doubt. We were all there. The only question is: What do those facts constitute under the law? This is your chance to speak your piece if you intend to.”

“Why should I bother? You mongrel nations prate of justice and equality under law. But you don’t practice it. You stand there with your hands dripping with the blood of my comrades, whom you killed in cold blood, without giving them a chance—yet you speak to me of piracy and murder!”

“We discussed that once before,” Cargraves answered carefully. “There is a world of difference, under the laws of free men, between an unprovoked attack and striking back in your own defense. If a footpad assaults you in a dark alley, you don’t have to get a court order to fight back. Next. Got any more phony excuses?”

The Nazi was silent. “Go ahead,” Cargraves persisted. “You could still plead not guilty by reason of insanity and you might even convince me. I always have thought a man with a MasterRace complex was crazy as a hoot owl. You might convince me that you were crazy in a legal sense as well.”

For the first time, von Hartwick’s air of aloof superiority seemed to crack. His face got red and he appeared about to explode. Finally he regained a measure of control and said, “Let’s have no more of this farce. Do whatever it is you intend to do and quit playing with me.”

“I assure you that I am not playing. Have you anything more to say in your own defense?” “I find you guilty on both charges. Have you anything to say before sentence is passed?” The accused did not deign to answer.

“Very well. I sentence you to death.”

Art took a quick, gasping breath and backed out of the doorway where he had been huddled, wide-eyed, with Ross and Morrie. There was no other sound. “Have you anything to say before the sentence is executed?”

Von Hartwick turned his face away. “I am not sorry. At least I will have a quick and merciful death. The best you four swine can hope for is a slow and lingering death.” “Oh,” said Cargraves, “I intended to explain to you about that. We aren’t going to die.”

“You think not?” There was undisguised triumph in von Hartwick’s voice. “I’m sure of it. You see, the Thor arrives in six or seven days-“

“What? How did you find that out?” The Nazi seemed stunned for a moment, then muttered, “Not that it matters to the four of you—but I see why you decided to kill me. You were afraid I would escape you.”

“Not at all,” returned Cargraves. “You don’t understand. If it were practical to do so, I would take you back to earth to let you appeal your case before a higher court. Not for your sake-

you’re guilty as sin! -but for my own. However, I do not find it possible. We will be very busy until the Thor gets here and I have no means of making sure that you are securely imprisoned except by standing guard over you every minute. I can’t do that; we haven’t time enough. But I don’t intend to let you escape punishment. I don’t have a cell to put you in. I had intended to drain the fuel from your little rocket and put you in there, without a suit. That way, you would have been safe to leave alone while we worked. But, now that the Thor is coming, we will need the little rocket.”

Von Hartwick smiled grimly. “Think you can run away, eh? That ship will never take you home. Or haven’t you found that out yet?”

“You still don’t understand. Keep quiet and let me explain. We are going to take several of the bombs such as you used on the Galileo and blow up the room containing your guided missiles. It’s a shame, for I see it’s one of the rooms built by the original inhabitants. Then we are going to blow up the Wotan.”

“The Wotan? Why?” Von Hartwick was suddenly very alert.

“To make sure it never flies back to earth. We can’t operate it; I must make sure that no one else does. For then we intend to blow up the Thor.” “The Thor? You can’t blow up the Thor!”

“Oh, yes, we can—the same way you blew up the Galileo. But I can’t chance the possibility of survivors grabbing the Wotan—so she must go first. And that has a strong bearing on why you must die at once. After we blast the Wotan we are going back to our own base- you didn’t know about that, did you? -but it is only one room. No place for prisoners. I had intended, as I said, to keep you in the jeep rocket, but the need to blast the Thor changes that. We’ll have to keep a pilot in it all times, until the Thor lands. And that leaves no place for you. Sorry,” he finished, and smiled.

“Anything wrong with it?” he added.

Von Hartwick was beginning to show the strain. “You may succeed-“ “Oh, we will!”

“But if you do, you are still dead men. Aquick death for me, but a long and slow and lingering death for you. If you blast the Thor, you lose your own last chance. Think of it,” he went on, “starving or suffocating or dying with cold. I’ll make a pact with you. Turn me loose now and I’ll give you my parole. When the Thor arrives, I’ll intercede with the captain on your behalf. I’ll-“

Cargraves cut him off with a gesture. “The word of a Nazi! You wouldn’t intercede for your own grandmother! You haven’t gotten it through your thick head yet that we hold all the aces. After we kill you and take care of your friends, we shall sit tidy and cozy and warm, with plenty of food and air, until we are picked up. We won’t even be lonesome; we were just finishing our earth sender when you picked up one of our local signals. We’ll-“

“You lie!” shouted von Hartwick. “No one will pick you up. Yours was the only ship. I know, I know. We had full reports.”

“Was the only ship.” Cargraves smiled sweetly. “But under a quaint old democratic law which you wouldn’t understand, the plans and drawings and notes for my ship were being studied eagerly the minute we took off. We’ll be able to take our pick of ships before long. I hate to disappoint you but we are going to live. I am afraid I must disappoint you on another score. Your death will not be as clean and pleasant as you had hoped.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I am not going to get this ship all bloodied up again by shooting you. I’m going to-“ “Wait. Adying man is entitled to a last request. Leave me in the Wotan. Let me die with my ship!”

Cargraves laughed full in his face. “Lovely, von Nitwit. Perfectly lovely. And have you take off in her. Not likely!” “I am no pilot—believe me!”

“Oh, I do believe. I would not think of doubting a dying man’s last words. But I won’t risk a mistake. Ross!” “Yes, sir!”

“Take this thing and throw it out on the face of the moon.” “Dee-lighted!”

“And that’s all.” Cargraves had been squatting down; he got up and brushed the crumbs from his hands. “I shan’t even have you untied so that you can die in a comfortable position. You are too handy at grabbing guns. You’ll just have to flop around as you are. It probably won’t take long,” he went on conversationally. “They say it’s about like drowning. In seven or eight minutes you won’t know a thing. Unless your heart ruptures through your lungs and finishes you a little sooner.”

“Swine!”

“Captain Swine, to you.”

Ross was busily zipping his suit into place. “Okay, Doc?”

“Go ahead. No, on second thought,” he added, “I’ll do this job myself. I might be criticized for letting a boy touch it. My suit, Morrie.”

He whistled as they helped him dress. He was still whistling as he picked up von Hartwick like a satchel, by the line which bound his ankles to his wrists, and walked briskly to the lock. He chucked his bundle in ahead of him, stepped in, waved to the boys, said, “Back soon!” and clamped the door.

As the air started whistling out von Hartwick began to gasp. Cargraves smiled at him, and said, “Drafty, isn’t it?” He shouted to make himself heard through the helmet. Von Hartwick’s mouth worked.

“Did you say something?”

The Nazi opened his mouth again, gasped, choked, and sprayed foam out on his chest. “You’ll have to talk louder,” Cargraves shouted. “I can’t hear you.” The air whistled away. “I’m a pilot!”

“What?”

“I’m a pilot! I’ll teach you-“

Cargraves reached up and closed the exhaust valve. “I can’t hear with all that racket. What were you saying?” “I’m a pilot!” gasped von Hartwick.

“Yes? Well, what about it?” “Air. Give me air-“

“Shucks,” said Cargraves. “You’ve got plenty of air. I can still hear you talking. Must be four or five pounds in here.” “Give me air. I’ll tell you how it works.”

“You’ll tell me first,” Cargraves stated. He reached for the exhaust valve again.

“Wait! There is a little plug, in the back of the instrument-” He paused and gasped heavily. “The instrument panel. Starboard side. It’s a safety switch. You wouldn’t notice it; it looks just like a mounting stud. You push it in.” He stopped to wheeze again.

“I think you’d better come show me,” Cargraves said judicially. “If you aren’t lying again, you’ve given me an out to take you back to earth for your appeal. Not that you deserve it.”

He reached over and yanked on the spill valve; the air rushed back into the lock.

Ten minutes later Cargraves was seated in the left-hand pilot’s chair, with his safety belt in place. Von Hartwick was in the right-hand chair. Cargraves held a pistol in his left hand and cradled it over the crook of his right arm, so that it would remain pointed at von Hartwick, even under drive. He called out, “Morrie! Everybody ready?”

“Ready, Captain,” came faintly from the rear of the ship. The boys had been forced to use the acceleration bunks in the passenger compartment. They resented it, especially Morrie, but there was no help for it. The control room could carry just two people under acceleration.

“Okay! Here we go!” He turned again to von Hartwick. “Twist her tail, Swine—Colonel Swine, I mean.” Von Hartwick glared at him. “I don’t believe,” he said slowly, “that you ever intended to go through with it.” Cargraves grinned and rubbed the chair arm. “Want to go back and see?” he inquired.

Von Hartwick swiveled his head around to the front. “Achtung!” he shouted. “Prepare for acceleration! Ready?” Without waiting for a reply he blasted off.

The ship had power to spare with the light load; Cargraves had him hold it at two g’s for five minutes and then go free. By that time, having accelerated at nearly 64 feet per second for each second of the five minutes, even with due allowance for loss of one-sixth g to the pull of the moon at the start, they were making approximately 12,000 miles per hour.

They would have breezed past earth in twenty hours had it not been necessary to slow down in order to land. Cargraves planned to do it in a little less than twenty-four hours.

Once in free fall, the boys came forward and Cargraves required of von Hartwick a detailed lecture on the operation of the craft. When he was satisfied, he said, “Okay. Ross, you and Art take the prisoner aft and lash him to one of the bunks. Then strap yourselves down. Morrie and I are going to practice.”

Von Hartwick started to protest. Cargraves cut him short. “Stow it! You haven’t been granted any pardon; we’ve simply been picking your brains. You are a common criminal, going back to appeal your case.”

They felt out the ship for the next several hours, with time out only to eat. The result of the practice on the course and speed were null; careful check was kept by instrument to see that a drive in one direction was offset by the same amount of drive in the opposite direction. Then they slept.

They needed sleep. By the time they got it they had been awake and active at an unrelenting pace for one full earth-day. When they woke Cargraves called Art. “Think you could raise earth on this Nazi gear, kid?”

“I’ll try. What do you want me to say and who do you want to talk to?”

Cargraves considered. Earth shone gibbous, more than half full, ahead. The Nazi base was not in line-of-sight. That suited him. “Better make it Melbourne, Australia,” he decided, “and tell them this-” Art nodded. Afew minutes later, having gotten the hang of the strange set, he was saying endlessly: “Space Ship City of Detroit calling UN police patrol, Melbourne; Space Ship City of Detroit calling UN police patrol, Melbourne-“

He had been doing this for twenty-five minutes when a querulous voice answered: “Pax, Melbourne; Pax, Melbourne—calling Space Ship City of Detroit. Come in, City of Detroit.” Art pushed up one phone and looked helpless. “You better talk to ‘em, Uncle.”

“Go ahead. You tell them what I told you. It’s your show.” Art shut up and did so.

Morrie let her down carefully and eased her over into a tight circular orbit just outside the atmosphere. Their speed was still nearly five miles per second; they circled the globe in ninety minutes. From that orbit he killed her speed slowly and dipped down cautiously until the stub wings of the City of Detroit’ Wotan, began to bite the tenuous stratosphere in a blood-chilling thin scream.

Out into space again they went and then back in, each time deeper and each time slower. On the second of the braking orbits they heard the broadcast report of the UN patrol raid on the Nazi nest and of the capture of the Thor. On the next lap two chains bid competitively for an exclusive broadcast from space. On the third there was dickering for television rights at the field. On the fourth they received official instructions to attempt to land at the District-of-Columbia Rocket Port.

“Want me to take her down?” Morrie yelled above the scream of the skin friction. “Go right ahead,” Cargraves assured him. “I’m an old I want a chauffeur.”

Morrie nodded and began his approach. They were somewhere over Kansas.

The ground of the rocket port felt strange and solid under the ship. Eleven days- only eleven days? -away from the earth’s massive pull had given them new habits. Cargraves found that he staggered a little in trying to walk. He opened the inner door of the lock and waited for the boys to get beside him. Latching the outer door and broke the inner door open, he stepped to the seal.

As he swung it open, the face, an endless mass of guns flickered like heat “Oh, my gosh!” he said. ‘Want to take the bows?’ a solid wall of sound beat him in of eager eyes looked up at him. Flash lightning. He turned back to Ross. “This is awful! Say—don’t you guys want to take the bows?”

The End

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Coventry (full text) by Robert Heinlein

This is an interesting little story by Robert Heinlein that looks at a utopia where there are no prisons, or death sentences, or punishments. Instead, those that fail to adjust to society and have bad behaviors are sent instead to “Coventry”. Which is a geographical location outside of society where the individual can “do his own thing”.

Exile imposed on those who act to harm others, to a "reservation" where the Covenant is not observed. Coventry is surrounded by a heavily guarded force shield to prevent the exiles from leaving without permission. 

The concept behind this treatment is that the government has no right to "punish" its members, but an individual who is unwilling to abide by society's agreements may be ejected from the society. 

Exiles may re-enter the Covenant if they are willing to submit to psychological reorientation. Most of those entering Coventry expected a complete anarchy, but at least three separate governments had developed inside: New America, nominally a democracy but run as a political machine and dictatorship; Free State, a totalitarian state; and The Angels, the remnants of the Prophet's theocratic reign.

-"Coventry" A Heinlein Concordance

Coventry

“Have you anything to say before sentence is pronounced on you?” The mild eyes of the Senior Judge studied the face of the accused. His question was answered by a sullen silence.

“Very well-the jury has determined that you have violated a basic custom agreed to under the Covenant, and that through this act did damage another free citizen. It is the opinion of the jury and of the court that you did so knowingly, and aware of the probability of damage to a free citizen. Therefore, you are sentenced to choose between the Two Alternatives.”

Atrained observer might have detected a trace of dismay breaking through the mask of indifference with which the young man had faced his trial. Dismay was unreasonable; in view of his offence, the sentence was inevitable-but reasonable men do not receive the sentence.

After waiting a decent interval, the judge turned to the bailiff. “Take him away.”

The prisoner stood up suddenly, knocking over his chair. He glared wildly around at the company assembled and burst into speech.

“Hold on!” he yelled. “I’ve got something to say first!” In spite of his rough manner there was about him the noble dignity of a wild animal at bay. He stared at those around him, breathing heavily, as if they were dogs waiting to drag him down.

“Well?” he demanded, ‘Well? Do I get to talk, or don’t I? It ‘ud be the best joke of this whole comedy, if a condemned man couldn’t speak his mind at the last!”

“You may speak,” the Senior Judge told him, in the same unhurried tones with which he had pronounced sentence, ‘David MacKinnon, as long as you like, and in any manner that you like. There is no limit to that freedom, even for those who have broken the Covenant. Please speak into the recorder.”

MacKinnon glanced with distaste at the microphone near his face. The knowledge that any word he spoke would be recorded and analyzed inhibited him. “I don’t ask for records,” he snapped.

“But we must have them,” the judge replied patiently, ‘in order that others may determine whether, or not, we have dealt with you fairly, and according to the Covenant. Oblige us, please.” “Oh-very well!” He ungraciously conceded the requirement and directed his voice toward the instrument. “There’s no sense in me talking at all-but, just the same, I’m going to talk and

you’re going to listen … You talk about your precious “Covenant” as if it were something holy. I don’t agree to it and I don’t accept it. You act as if it had been sent down from Heaven in a

burst of light. My grandfathers fought in the Second Revolution-but they fought to abolish superstition… not to let sheep-minded fools set up new ones.

“There were men in those days!” He looked contemptuously around him. “What is there left today? Cautious, compromising “safe” weaklings with water in their veins. You’ve planned your whole world so carefully that you’ve planned the fun and zest right out of it. Nobody is ever hungry, nobody ever gets hurt. Your ships can’t crack up and your crops can’t fail. You even have the weather tamed so it rains politely after midnight. Why wait till midnight, I don’t know … you all go to bed at nine o’clock!

“If one of you safe little people should have an unpleasant emotion-perish the thought! -You’d trot right over to the nearest psychodynamics clinic and get your soft little minds readjusted. Thank God I never succumbed to that dope habit. I’ll keep my own feelings, thanks, no matter how bad they taste.

“You won’t even make love without consulting a psychotechnician-Is her mind as flat and insipid as mine? Is there any emotional instability in her family? It’s enough to make a man gag. As for fighting over a woman-if any one had the guts to do that, he’d find a proctor at his elbow in two minutes, looking for the most convenient place to paralyze him, and inquiring with sickening humility, “May I do you a service, sir?”

The bailiff edged closer to MacKinnon. He turned on him. “Stand back, you. I’m not through yet.” He turned and added, ‘You’ve told me to choose between the Two Alternatives. Well, it’s no hard choice for me. Before I’d submit to treatment, before I’d enter one of your little, safe little, pleasant little reorientation homes and let my mind be pried into by a lot of soft-fingered doctors-before I did anything like that, I’d choose a nice, clean death. Oh, no-there is just one choice for me, not two. I take the choice of going to Coventry-and glad of it, too … I hope I never hear of the United States again!

“But there is just one thing I want to ask you before I go-Why do you bother to live anyhow? I would think that anyone of you would welcome an end to your silly, futile lives just from sheer boredom. That’s all.” He turned back to the bailiff. “Come on, you.”

“One moment, David MacKinnon.” The Senior Judge held up a restraining hand. “We have listened to you. Although custom does not compel it, I am minded to answer some of your statements. Will you listen?”

Unwilling, but less willing to appear loutish in the face of a request so obviously reasonable, the younger man consented.

The judge commenced to speak in gentle, scholarly words appropriate to a lecture room. “David MacKinnon, you have spoken in a fashion that doubtless seems wise to you. Nevertheless, your words were wild, and spoken in haste. I am moved to correct your obvious misstatements of fact. The Covenant is not a superstition, but a simple temporal contract entered into by those same revolutionists for pragmatic reasons. They wished to insure the maximum possible liberty for every person.

“You yourself have enjoyed that liberty. No possible act, nor mode of conduct, was forbidden to you, as long as your action did not damage another. Even an act specifically prohibited by law could not be held against you, unless the state was able to prove that your particular act damaged, or caused evident danger of damage, to a particular individual.

“Even if one should willfully and knowingly damage another-as you have done-the state does not attempt to sit in moral judgment, nor to punish. We have not the wisdom to do that, and the chain of injustices that have always followed such moralistic coercion endanger the liberty of all. Instead, the convicted is given the choice of submitting to psychological readjustment to correct his tendency to wish to damage others, or of having the state withdraw itself from him-of sending him to Coventry.

“You complain that our way of living is dull and unromantic, and imply that we have deprived you of excitement to which you feel entitled. You are free to hold and express your esthetic opinion of our way of living, but you must not expect us to live to suit your tastes. You are free to seek danger and adventure if you wish-there is danger still in experimental laboratories; there is hardship in the mountains of the Moon, and death in the jungles of Venus-but you are not free to expose us to the violence of your nature.”

“Why make so much of it?” MacKinnon protested contemptuously. “You talk as if I had committed a murder-I simply punched a man in the nose for offending me outrageously!”

“I agree with your esthetic judgment of that individual,” the judge continued calmly, ‘and am personally rather gratified that you took a punch at him-but your psychometrical tests show that you believe yourself capable of judging morally your fellow citizens and feel justified in personally correcting and punishing their lapses. You are a dangerous individual, David MacKinnon, a danger to all of us, for we can not predict whet damage you may do next. From a social standpoint, your delusion makes you as mad as the March Hare.

“You refuse treatment-therefore we withdraw our society from you, we cast you out, we divorce you. To Coventry with you.” He turned to the bailiff. “Take him away.”

MacKinnon peered out of a forward port of the big transport helicopter with repressed excitement in his heart. There! That must be it-that black band in the distance. The helicopter drew closer, and he became certain that he was seeing the Barrier-the mysterious, impenetrable wall that divided the United States from the reservation known as Coventry.

His guard looked up from the magazine he was reading and followed his gaze. “Nearly there, I see,” he said pleasantly. “Well, it won’t be long now.” “It can’t be any too soon for me!”

The guard looked at him quizzically, but with tolerance. “Pretty anxious to get on with it, eh?”

MacKinnon held his head high. “You’ve never brought a man to the Gateway who was more anxious to pass through!” “Mmm-maybe. They all say that, you know. Nobody goes through the Gate against his own will.”

“I mean it!”

“They all do. Some of them come back, just the same.”

“Say-maybe you can give me some dope as to conditions inside?”

“Sorry,” the guard said, shaking his head, ‘but that is no concern of the United States, nor of any of its employees. You’ll know soon enough.”

MacKinnon frowned a little. “It seems strange-I tried inquiring, but found no one who would admit that they had any notion about the inside. And yet you say that some come out. Surely some of them must talk…”

“That’s simple,” smiled the guard, ‘part of their reorientation is a subconscious compulsion not to discuss their experiences.”

“That’s a pretty scabby trick. Why should the government deliberately conspire to prevent me, and the people like me, from knowing what we are going up against?”

“Listen, buddy,” the guard answered, with mild exasperation, ‘you’ve told the rest of us to go to the devil. You’ve told us that you could get along without us. You are being given plenty of living room in some of the best land on this continent, and you are being allowed to take with you everything that you own, or your credit could buy. What the deuce else do you expect?”

MacKinnon’s face settled in obstinate lines. “What assurance have I that there will be any land left for me?”

“That’s your problem. The government sees to it that there is plenty of land for the population. The divvy-up is something you rugged individualists have to settle among yourselves. You’ve turned down our type of social co-operation; why should you expect the safeguards of our organization?” The guard turned back to his reading and ignored him.

They landed on a small field which lay close under the blank black wall. No gate was apparent, but a guardhouse was located at the side of the field. MacKinnon was the only passenger. While his escort went over to the guardhouse, he descended from the passenger compartment and went around to the freight hold. Two members of the crew were letting down a ramp from the cargo port. When he appeared, one of them eyed him, and said, ‘O.K., there’s your stuff. Help yourself.”

He sized up the job, and said, ‘It’s quite a lot, isn’t it? I’ll need some help. Will you give me a hand with it?”

The crew member addressed paused to light a cigarette before replying, ‘It’s your stuff. If you want it, get it out. We take off in ten minutes.” The two walked around him and reentered the ship.

“Why, you-” MacKinnon shut up and kept the rest of his anger to himself. The surly louts! Gone was the faintest trace of regret at leaving civilization. He’d show them! He could get along without them.

But it was twenty minutes and more before he stood beside his heaped up belongings and watched the ship rise. Fortunately the skipper had not been adamant about the time limit. He turned and commenced loading his steel tortoise. Under the romantic influence of the classic literature of a bygone day he had considered using a string of burros, but had been unable to find a zoo that would sell them to him. It was just as well-he was completely ignorant of the limits, foibles, habits, vices, illnesses, and care of those useful little beasts, and unaware of his own ignorance. Master and servant would have vied in making each other unhappy.

The vehicle he had chosen was not an unreasonable substitute for burros. It was extremely rugged, easy to operate, and almost foolproof. It drew its power from six square yards of sunpower screens on its low curved roof. These drove a constant-load motor, or, when halted, replenished the storage battery against cloudy weather, or night travel. The bearings were ‘everlasting’, and every moving part, other than the caterpillar treads and the controls, were sealed up, secure from inexpert tinkering.

It could maintain a steady six miles per hour on smooth, level pavement. When confronted by hills, or rough terrain, it did not stop, but simply slowed until the task demanded equaled its steady power output.

The steel tortoise gave MacKinnon a feeling of Crusoe-like independence. It did not occur to him his chattel was the end product of the cumulative effort and intelligent co-operation of hundreds of thousands of men, living and dead. He had been used all his life to the unfailing service of much more intricate machinery, and honestly regarded the tortoise as a piece of equipment of the same primitive level as a wood-man’s axe, or a hunting knife. His talents had been devoted in the past to literary criticism rather than engineering, but that did not prevent him from believing that his native intelligence and the aid of a few reference books would be all that he would really need to duplicate the tortoise, if necessary.

Metal ores were necessary, he knew, but saw no obstacle in that, his knowledge of the difficulties of prospecting, mining, and metallurgy being as sketchy as his knowledge of burros. His goods filled every compartment of the compact little freighter. He checked the last item from his inventory and ran a satisfied eye down the list. Any explorer or adventurer of the past

might well be pleased with such equipment, he thought. He could imagine showing Jack London his knockdown cabin. See, Jack, he would say, it’s proof against any kind of weather-

perfectly insulated walls and floor-and can’t rust. It’s so light that you can set it up in five minutes by yourself, yet it’s so strong that you can sleep sound with the biggest grizzly in the world

snuffling right outside your door.

And London would scratch his head, and say, Dave, you’re a wonder. If I’d had that in the Yukon, it would have been a cinch!

He checked over the list again. Enough concentrated and desiccated food and vitamin concentrate to last six months. That would give him time enough to build hothouses for hydroponics, and get his seeds started. Medical supplies-he did not expect to need those, but foresight was always best. Reference books of all sorts. Alight sporting rifle-vintage: last century. His face clouded a little at this. The War Department had positively refused to sell him a portable blaster. When he had claimed the right of common social heritage, they had grudgingly provided him with the plans and specifications, and told him to build his own. Well, he would, the first spare time he got.

Everything else was in order. MacKinnon climbed into the cockpit, grasped the two hand controls, and swung the nose of the tortoise toward the guardhouse. He had been ignored since the ship had landed; he wanted to have the gate opened and to leave.

Several soldiers were gathered around the guardhouse. He picked out a legate by the silver stripe down the side of his kilt and spoke to him. “I’m ready to leave. Will you kindly open the Gate?”

“O.K.,” the officer answered him, and turned to a soldier who wore the plain gray kilt of a private’s field uniform. “Jenkins, tell the power house to dilate-about a number three opening, tell them,” he added, sizing up the dimensions of the tortoise.

He turned to MacKinnon. “It is my duty to tell you that you may return to civilization, even now, by agreeing to be hospitalized for your neurosis.” “I have no neurosis!”

“Very well. If you change your mind at any future time, return to the place where you entered. There is an alarm there with which you may signal to the guard that you wish the gate opened.”

“I can’t imagine needing to know that.”

The legate shrugged. “Perhaps not-but we send refugees to quarantine all the time. If I were making the rules, it might be harder to get out again.” He was cut off by the ringing of an alarm. The soldiers near them moved smartly away, drawing their blasters from their belts as they ran. The ugly snout of a fixed blaster poked out over the top of the guardhouse and pointed toward the Barrier.

The legate answered the question on MacKinnon’s face. “The power house is ready to open up.” He waved smartly toward that building, then turned back. “Drive straight through the center of the opening. It takes a lot of power to suspend the stasis; if you touch the edge, we’ll have to pick up the pieces.”

Atiny, bright dot appeared in the foot of the barrier opposite where they waited. It spread into a half circle across the lampblack nothingness. Now it was large enough for MacKinnon to see the countryside beyond through the arch it had formed. He peered eagerly.

The opening grew until it was twenty feet wide, then stopped. It framed a scene of rugged, barren hills. He took this in, and turned angrily on the legate. “I’ve been tricked!” he exclaimed. “That’s not fit land to support a man.”

“Don’t be hasty,” he told MacKinnon. “There’s good land beyond. Besides-you don’t have to enter. But if you are going, go!”

MacKinnon flushed, and pulled back on both hand controls. The treads bit in and the tortoise lumbered away, straight for the Gateway to Coventry.

When he was several yards beyond the Gate, he glanced back. The Barrier loomed behind him, with nothing to show where the opening had been. There was a little sheet metal shed adjacent to the point where he had passed through. He supposed that it contained the alarm the legate had mentioned, but he was not interested and turned his eyes back to his driving.

Stretching before him, twisting between rocky hills, was a road of sorts. It was not paved and the surface had not been repaired recently, but the grade averaged downhill and the tortoise was able to maintain a respectable speed. He continued down it, not because he fancied it, but because it was the only road which led out of surroundings obviously unsuited to his needs.

The road was untraveled. This suited him; he had no wish to encounter other human beings until he had located desirable land to settle on, and had staked out his claim. But the hills were not devoid of life; several times he caught glimpses of little dark shapes scurrying among the rocks, and occasionally bright, beady eyes stared back into his.

It did not occur to him at first that these timid little animals, streaking for cover at his coming, could replenish his larder-he was simply amused and warmed by their presence. When he did happen to consider that they might be used as food, the thought was at first repugnant to him-the custom of killing for ‘sport” had ceased to be customary long before his time; and

inasmuch as the development of cheap synthetic proteins in the latter half of the preceding century had spelled the economic ruin of the business of breeding animals for slaughter, it is doubtful if he had ever tasted animal tissue in his life.

But once considered, it was logical to act. He expected to live off the country; although he had plenty of food on hand for the immediate future, it would be wise to conserve it by using what the country offered. He suppressed his esthetic distaste and ethical misgivings, and determined to shoot one of the little animals at the first opportunity.

Accordingly, he dug out the rifle, loaded it, and placed it handy. With the usual perversity of the world-as-it-is, no game was evident for the next half hour. He was passing a little shoulder of rocky outcropping when he saw his prey. It peeked at him from behind a small boulder, its sober eyes wary but unperturbed. He stopped the tortoise and took careful aim, resting and steadying the rifle on the side of the cockpit. His quarry accommodated him by hopping out into full view.

He pulled the trigger, involuntarily tensing his muscles and squinting his eyes as he did so. Naturally, the shot went high and to the right.

But he was much too busy just then to be aware of it. It seemed that the whole world had exploded. His right shoulder was numb, his mouth stung as if he had been kicked there, and his ears rang in a strange and unpleasant fashion. He was surprised to find the gun still intact in his hands and apparently none the worse for the incident.

He put it down, clambered out of the car, and rushed up to where the small creature had been. There was no sign of it anywhere. He searched the immediate neighborhood, but did not find it. Mystified, he returned to his conveyance, having decided that the rifle was in some way defective, and that he should inspect it carefully before attempting to fire it again.

His recent target watched his actions cautiously from a vantage point yards away, to which it had stampeded at the sound of the shot. It was equally mystified by the startling events, being no more used to firearms than was MacKinnon.

Before he started the tortoise again, MacKinnon had to see to his upper lip, which was swollen and tender and bleeding from a deep scratch. This increased his conviction that the gun was defective. Nowhere in the romantic literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to which he was addicted, had there been a warning that, when firing a gun heavy enough to drop a man in his tracks, it is well not to hold the right hand in such ~ manner that the recoil will cause the right thumb and thumb nail to strike the mouth.

He applied an antiseptic and a dressing of sorts, and went on his way, somewhat subdued. The arroyo by which he had entered the hills had widened out, and the hills were greener. He passed around one sharp turn in the road, and found a broad fertile valley spread out before him. It stretched away until it was lost in the warm day’s haze.

Much of the valley was cultivated, and he could make out human habitations. He continued toward it with mixed feelings. People meant fewer hardships, but it did not look as if staking out a claim would be as simple as he had hoped. However-Coventry was a big place.

He had reached the point where the road gave onto the floor of the valley, when two men stepped out into his path. They were carrying weapons of some sort at the ready. One of them called out to him:

“Halt!”

MacKinnon did so, and answered him as they came abreast. “What do you want?”

“Customs inspection. Pull over there by the office.” He indicated a small building set back a few feet from the road, which MacKinnon had not previously noticed. He looked from it back to the spokesman, and felt a slow, unreasoning heat spread up from his viscera. It rendered his none too stable judgment still more unsound.

“What the deuce are you talking about?” he snapped. “Stand aside and let me pass.”

The one who had remained silent raised his weapon and aimed it at MacKinnon’s chest. The other grabbed his arm and pulled the weapon out of line. “Don’t shoot the dumb fool, Joe,” he said testily. “You’re always too anxious.” Then to MacKinnon, ‘You’re resisting the law. Come on-be quick about it!”

“The law?” MacKinnon gave a bitter laugh and snatched his rifle from the seat. It never reached his shoulder-the man who had done all the talking fired casually, without apparently taking time to aim. MacKinnon’s rifle was smacked from his grasp and flew into the air, landing in the roadside ditch behind the tortoise.

The man who had remained silent followed the flight of the gun with detached interest, and remarked, ‘Nice shot, Blackie. Never touched him.”

“Oh, just luck,” the other demurred, but grinned his pleasure at the compliment. “Glad I didn’t nick him, though-saves writing out a report.” He reassumed an official manner, spoke again to MacKinnon, who had been sitting dumbfounded, rubbing his smarting hands. “Well, tough guy? Do you behave, or do we come up there and get you?”

MacKinnon gave in. He drove the tortoise to the designated spot, and waited sullenly for orders. “Get out and start unloading,” he was told. He obeyed, under compulsion. As he piled his precious possessions on the ground, the one addressed as Blackie separated the things into two piles, while Joe listed them on a printed form. He noticed presently that Joe listed only the items that went into the first pile. He understood this when Blackie told him to reload the tortoise with the items from that pile, and commenced himself to carry goods from the other pile into the building. He started to protest-Joe punched him in the mouth, coolly and without rancor. MacKinnon went down, but got up again, fighting. He was in such a blind rage that he would have tackled a charging rhino. Joe timed his rush, and clipped him again. This time he could not get up at once.

Blackie stepped over to a washstand in one corner of the office. He came back with a wet towel and chucked it at MacKinnon. “Wipe your face on that, bud, and get back in the buggy. We got to get going.”

MacKinnon had time to do a lot of serious thinking as he drove Blackie into town. Beyond a terse answer of ‘Prize court” to MacKinnon’s inquiry as to their destination, Blackie did not converse, nor did MacKinnon press him, anxious as he was to have information. His mouth pained him from repeated punishment, his head ached, and he was no longer tempted to precipitate action by hasty speech.

Evidently Coventry was not quite the frontier anarchy he had expected it to be. There was a government of sorts, apparently, but it resembled nothing that he had ever been used to. He had visualized a land of noble, independent spirits who gave each other wide berth and practiced mutual respect. There would be villains, of course, but they would be treated to summary, and probably lethal, justice as quickly as they demonstrated their ugly natures. He had a strong, though subconscious, assumption that virtue is necessarily triumphant.

But having found government, he expected it to follow the general pattern that he had been used to all his life-honest, conscientious, reasonably efficient, and invariably careful of a citizen’s rights and liberties. He was aware that government had not always been like that, but he had never experienced it-the idea was as remote and implausible as cannibalism, or chattel slavery.

Had he stopped to think about it, he might have realized that public servants in Coventry would never have been examined psychologically to determine their temperamental fitness for their duties, and, since every inhabitant of Coventry was there-as he was-for violating a basic custom and ref using treatment thereafter, it was a foregone conclusion that most of them would be erratic and arbitrary.

He pinned his hope on the knowledge that they were going to court. All he asked was a chance to tell his story to the judge.

His dependence on judicial procedure may appear inconsistent in view of how recently he had renounced all reliance on organized government, but while he could renounce government verbally, but he could not do away with a lifetime of environmental conditioning. He could curse the court that had humiliated him by condemning him to the Two Alternatives, but he expected courts to dispense justice. He could assert his own rugged independence, but he expected persons he encountered to behave as if they were bound by the Covenant-he had met no other sort. He was no more able to discard his past history than he would have been to discard his accustomed body.

But he did not know it yet.

MacKinnon failed to stand up when the judge entered the court room. Court attendants quickly set him right, but not before he had provoked a glare from the bench. The judge’s appearance and manner were not reassuring. He was a well-fed man, of ruddy complexion, whose sadistic temper was evident in face and mien. They waited while he dealt drastically with several petty offenders. It seemed to MacKinnon, as he listened, that almost everything was against the law.

Nevertheless, he was relieved when his name was called. He stepped up and undertook at once to tell his story. The judge’s gavel cut him short.

“What is this case?” the judge demanded, his face set in grim lines. “Drunk and disorderly, apparently. I shall put a stop to this slackness among the young if it takes the last ounce of strength in my body!” He turned to the clerk. “Any previous offences?”

The clerk whispered in his ear. The judge threw MacKinnon a look of mixed annoyance and suspicion, then told the customs” guard to come forward. Blackie told a clear, straightforward tale with the ease of a man used to giving testimony. MacKinnon’s condition was attributed to resisting an officer in the execution of his duty. He submitted the inventory his colleague had prepared, but failed to mention the large quantity of goods which had been abstracted before the inventory was made.

The judge turned to MacKinnon. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?” “I certainly have, Doctor,” he began eagerly. “There isn’t a word of -,

Bang! The gavel cut him short. Acourt attendant hurried to MacKinnon’s side and attempted to explain to him the proper form to use in addressing the court. The explanation confused him. In his experience, ‘judge” naturally implied a medical man-a psychiatrist skilled in social problems. Nor had he heard of any special speech forms appropriate to a courtroom. But he amended his language as instructed.

“May it please the Honorable Court, this man is lying. He and his companion assaulted and robbed me. I was simply-‘Smugglers generally think they are being robbed when customs officials catch them,” the judge sneered. “Do you deny that you attempted to resist inspection?”

“No, Your Honor, but -“

“That will do. Penalty of fifty percent is added to the established scale of duty. Pay the clerk.” “But, Your Honor, I can’t -“

“Can’t you pay it?”

“I haven’t any money. I have only my possessions.”

“So?” He turned to the clerk. “Condemnation proceedings. Impound his goods. Ten days for vagrancy. The community can’t have these immigrant paupers roaming at large, and preying on law-abiding citizens. Next case!”

They hustled him away. It took the sound of a key grating in a barred door behind him to make him realize his predicament.

“Hi, pal, how’s the weather outside?” The detention cell had a prior inmate, a small, well-knit man who looked up from a game of solitaire to address MacKinnon. He sat astraddle a bench on which he had spread his cards, and studied the newcomer with unworried, bright, beady eyes.

“Clear enough outside-but stormy in the courtroom,” MacKinnon answered, trying to adopt the same bantering tone and not succeeding very well. His mouth hurt him and spoiled his grin.

The other swung a leg over the bench and approached him with a light, silent step. “Say, pal, you must ‘a” caught that in a gear box,” he commented, inspecting MacKinnon’s mouth. “Does it hurt?”

“Like the devil,” MacKinnon admitted.

“We’ll have to do something about that.” He went to the cell door and rattled it. “Hey! Lefty! The house is on fire! Come arunnin’!” The guard sauntered down and stood opposite their cell door. “Wha” d’yuh want, Fader?” he said noncommittally.

“My old school chum has been slapped in the face with a wrench, and the pain is inordinate. Here’s a chance for you to get right with Heaven by oozing down to the dispensary, snagging a dressing and about five grains of neoanodyne.”

The guard’s expression was not encouraging. The prisoner looked grieved. “Why, Lefty,” he said, ‘I thought you would jump at a chance to do a little pure charity like that.” He waited for a moment, then added, ‘Tell you what-you do it, and I’ll show you how to work that puzzle about “How old is Ann?” Is it a go?”

“Show me first.”

“It would take too long. I’ll write it out and give it to you.”

When the guard returned, MacKinnon’s cellmate dressed his wounds with gentle deftness, talking the while. “They call me Fader Magee. What’s your name, pal?” “David MacKinnon. I’m sorry, but I didn’t quite catch your first name.”

“Fader. It isn’t,” he explained with a grin, ‘the name my mother gave me. It’s more a professional tribute to my shy and unobtrusive nature.” MacKinnon looked puzzled. “Professional tribute? What is your profession?”

Magee looked pained. “Why, Dave,” he said, ‘I didn’t ask you that. However,” he went on, ‘it’s probably the same as yours-self-preservation.”

Magee was a sympathetic listener, and MacKinnon welcomed the chance to tell someone about his troubles. He related the story of how he had decided to enter Coventry rather than submit to the sentence of the court, and how he had hardly arrived when he was hijacked and hauled into court. Magee nodded. “I’m not surprised,” he observed. “Aman has to have larceny in his heart, or he wouldn’t be a customs guard.”

“But what happens to my belongings?” “They auction them off to pay the duty.” “I wonder how much there will be left for me?”

Magee stared at him. “Left over? There won’t be anything left over. You’ll probably have to pay a deficiency judgment.” “Huh? What’s that?”

“It’s a device whereby the condemned pays for the execution,” Magee explained succinctly, if somewhat obscurely. “What it means to you is that when your ten days is up, you’ll still be in debt to the court. Then it’s the chain gang for you, my lad-you’ll work it off at a dollar a day.”

“Fader-you’re kidding me.”

“Wait and see. You’ve got a lot to learn, Dave.”

Coventry was an even more complex place than MacKinnon had gathered up to this time. Magee explained to him that there were actually three sovereign, independent jurisdictions. The jail where they were prisoners lay in the so-called New America. It had the forms of democratic government, but the treatment he had already received was a fair sample of the fashion in which it was administered.

“This place is heaven itself compared with the Free State,” Magee maintained. “I’ve been there-” The Free State was an absolute dictatorship; the head man of the ruling clique was designated the ‘Liberator’. Their watchwords were Duty and Obedience; an arbitrary discipline was enforced with a severity that left no room for any freedom of opinion. Governmental theory was vaguely derived from the old functionalist doctrines. The state was thought of as a single organism with a single head, a single brain, and a single purpose. Anything not compulsory was forbidden. “Honest so help me,” claimed Magee, ‘you can’t go to bed in that place without finding one of their damned secret police between the sheets.”

“But at that,” he continued, ‘it’s an easier place to live than with the Angels.” “The Angels?”

“Sure. We still got ‘em. Must have been two or three thousand die-hards that chose to go to Coventry after the Revolution-you know that. There’s still a colony up in the hills to the north, complete with Prophet Incarnate and the works. They aren’t bad hombres, but they’ll pray you into heaven even if it kills you.”

All three states had one curious characteristic in common-each one claimed to be the only legal government of the entire United States, and each looked forward to some future day when they would reclaim the ‘unredeemed” portion; i.e., outside Coventry. To the Angels, this was an event which would occur when the First Prophet returned to earth to lead them again. In New America it was hardly more than a convenient campaign plank, to be forgotten after each election. But in the Free State it was a fixed policy.

Pursuant to this purpose there had been a whole series of wars between the Free State and New America. The Liberator held, quite logically, that New America was an unredeemed section, and that is was necessary to bring it under the rule of the Free State before the advantages of their culture could be extended to the outside.

Magee’s words demolished MacKinnon’s dream of finding an anarchistic utopia within the barrier, but he could not let his fond illusion die without a protest. “But see here, Fader,” he persisted, ‘isn’t there some place where a man can live quietly by himself without all this insufferable interference?”

“No-‘considered Fader, ‘no … not unless you took to the hills and hid. Then you ‘ud be all right, as long as you steered clear of the Angels. But it would be pretty slim pickin’s, living off the country. Ever tried it?”

“No … not exactly-but I’ve read all the classics: Zane Grey, and Emerson Hough, and so forth.”

“Well … maybe you could do it. But if you really want to go off and be a hermit, you ‘ud do better to try it on the Outside, where there aren’t so many objections to it.”

“No’-MacKinnon’s backbone stiffened at once-‘no, I’ll never do that. I’ll never submit to psychological reorientation just to have a chance to be let alone. If I could go back to where I was before a couple of months ago, before I was arrested, it might be all right to go off to the Rockies, or look up an abandoned farm somewhere… But with that diagnosis staring me in the face … after being told I wasn’t fit for human society until I had had my emotions re-tailored to fit a cautious little pattern, I couldn’t face it. Not if it meant going to a sanitarium”

“I see,” agreed Fader, nodding, ‘you want to go to Coventry, but you don’t want the Barrier to shut you off from the rest of the world.” “No, that’s not quite fair … Well, maybe, in a way. Say, you don’t think I’m not fit to associate with, do you?”

“You look all right to me,” Magee reassured him, with a grin, ‘but I’m in Coventry too, remember. Maybe I’m no judge.” “You don’t talk as if you liked it much. Why are you here?”

Magee held up a gently admonishing finger. “Tut! Tut! That is the one question you must never ask a man here. You must assume that he came here because he knew how swell everything is here.”

“Still … you don’t seem to like it.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like it. I do like it; it has flavor. Its little incongruities are a source of innocent merriment. And anytime they turn on the heat I can always go back through the Gate and rest up for a while in a nice quiet hospital, until things quiet down.”

MacKinnon was puzzled again. “Turn on the heat? Do they supply too hot weather here?”

“Huh? Oh. I didn’t mean weather control-there isn’t any of that here, except what leaks over from outside. I was just using an old figure of speech.” “What does it mean?”

Magee smiled to himself. “You’ll find out.”

After supper-bread, stew in a metal dish, a small apple-Magee introduced MacKinnon to the mysteries of cribbage. Fortunately, MacKinnon had no cash to lose. Presently Magee put the cards down without shuffling them. “Dave,” he said, ‘are you enjoying the hospitality offered by this institution?”

“Hardly-Why?” “I suggest that we check out.” “Agood idea, but how?”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking about. Do you suppose you could take another poke on that battered phiz of yours, in a good cause?” MacKinnon cautiously fingered his face. “I suppose so-if necessary. It can’t do me much more harm, anyhow.”

“That’s mother’s little man! Now listen-this guard, Lefty, in addition to being kind o” unbright, is sensitive about his appearance. When they turn out the lights, you -“

“Let me out of here! Let me out of here!” MacKinnon beat on the bars and screamed. No answer came. He renewed the racket, his voice an hysterical falsetto. Lefty arrived to investigate, grumbling.

“What the hell’s eating on you?” he demanded, peering through the bars.

MacKinnon changed to tearful petition. “Oh, Lefty, please let me out of here. Please! I can’t stand the dark. It’s dark in here-please don’t leave me alone.” He flung himself, sobbing, on the bars.

The guard cursed to himself. “Another slugnutty. Listen, you-shut up, and go to sleep, or I’ll come in there, and give you something to yelp for!” He started to leave. MacKinnon changed instantly to the vindictive, unpredictable anger of the irresponsible. “You big ugly baboon! You rat-faced idiot! Where’d you get that nose?”

Lefty turned back, fury in his face. He started to speak. MacKinnon cut him short. “Yah! Yah! Yah!” he gloated, like a nasty little boy, ‘Lefty’s mother was scared by a warthog-The guard swung at the spot where MacKinnon’s face was pressed between the bars of the door. MacKinnon ducked and grabbed simultaneously. Off balance at meeting no resistance, the guard rocked forward, thrusting his forearm between the bars. MacKinnon’s fingers slid along his arm, and got a firm purchase on Lefty’s wrist.

He threw himself backwards, dragging the guard with him, until Lefty was jammed up against the outside of the barred door, with one arm inside, to the wrist of which MacKinnon clung as if welded.

The yell which formed in Lefty’s throat miscarried; Magee had already acted. Out of the darkness, silent as death, his slim hands had snaked between the bars and imbedded themselves in the guard’s fleshy neck. Lefty heaved, and almost broke free, but MacKinnon threw his weight to the right and twisted the arm he gripped in an agonizing, bone-breaking leverage.

It seemed to MacKinnon that they remained thus, like some grotesque game of statues, for an endless period. His pulse pounded in his ears until he feared that it must be heard by others, and bring rescue to Lefty. Magee spoke at last:

“That’s enough,” he whispered. “Go through his pockets.”

He made an awkward job if it, for his hands were numb and trembling from the strain, and it was anything but convenient to work between the bars. But the keys were there, in the last pocket he tried. He passed them to Magee, who let the guard slip to the floor, and accepted them.

Magee made a quick job of it. The door swung open with a distressing creak. Dave stepped over Lefty’s body, but Magee kneeled down, unhooked a truncheon from the guard’s belt, and cracked him behind the ear with it. MacKinnon paused.

“Did you kill him?” he asked.

“Cripes, no,” Magee answered softly, ‘Lefty is a friend of mine. Let’s go.”

They hurried down the dimly lighted passageway between cells toward the door leading to the administrative offices-their only outlet. Lefty had carelessly left it ajar, and light shone through the crack, but as they silently approached it, they heard ponderous footsteps from the far side. Dave looked hurriedly for cover, but the best he could manage was to slink back into the corner formed by the cell block and the wall. He glanced around for Magee, but he had disappeared.

The door swung open; a man stepped through, paused, and looked around. MacKinnon saw that he was carrying a blacklight, and wearing its complement-rectifying spectacles. He realized then that the darkness gave him no cover. The blacklight swung his way; he tensed to spring-He heard a dull ‘clunk!” The guard sighed, swayed gently, then collapsed into a loose pile. Magee stood over him, poised on the balls of his feet, and surveyed his work, while caressing the business end of the truncheon with the cupped fingers of his left hand.

“That will do,” he decided. “Shall we go, Dave?”

He eased through the door without waiting for an answer; MacKinnon was close behind him. The lighted corridor led away to the right and ended in a large double door to the street. On the left wall, near the street door, a smaller office door stood open.

Magee drew MacKinnon to him. “It’s a cinch,” he whispered. “There’ll be nobody in there now but the desk sergeant. We get past him, then out that door, and into the ozone-” He motioned Dave to keep behind him, and crept silently up to the office door. After drawing a small mirror from a pocket in his belt, he lay down on the floor, placed his head near the doorframe, and cautiously extended the tiny mirror an inch or two past the edge.

Apparently he was satisfied with the reconnaissance the improvised periscope afforded, for he drew himself back onto his knees and turned his head so that MacKinnon could see the words shaped by his silent lips. “It’s all right,” he breathed, ‘there is only-Two hundred pounds of uniformed nemesis landed on his shoulders. Aclanging alarm sounded through the corridor. Magee went down fighting, but he was outclassed and caught off guard. He jerked his head free and shouted, ‘Run for it, kid!”

MacKinnon could hear running feet somewhere, but could see nothing but the struggling figures before him. He shook his head and shoulders like a dazed animal, then kicked the larger of the two contestants in the face. The man screamed and let go his hold. MacKinnon grasped his small companion by the scruff of the neck and hauled him roughly to his feet.

Magee’s eyes were still merry. “Well played, my lad,” he commended in clipped syllables, as they burst out the street door, ‘- if hardly cricket! Where did you learn La Savate?” MacKinnon had no time to answer, being fully occupied in keeping up with Magee’s weaving, deceptively rapid progress. They ducked across the street, down an alley, and between two

buildings.

The succeeding minutes, or hours, were confusion to MacKinnon. He remembered afterwards crawling along a roof top and letting himself down to crouch in the blackness of an interior court, but he could not remember how they had gotten on the roof. He also recalled spending an interminable period alone, compressed inside a most unsavory refuse bin, and his terror when footsteps approached the bin and a light flashed through a crack.

Acrash and the sound of footsteps in flight immediately thereafter led him to guess that Fader had drawn the pursuit away from him. But when Fader did return, and open the top of the bin, MacKinnon almost throttled him before identification was established.

When the active pursuit had been shaken off, Magee guided him across town, showing a sophisticated knowledge of back ways and shortcuts, and a genius for taking full advantage of cover. They reached the outskirts of the town in a dilapidated quarter, far from the civic center. Magee stopped. “I guess this is the end of the line,” kid,” he told Dave. “If you follow this street, you’ll come to open country shortly. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

“I suppose so,” MacKinnon replied uneasily, and peered down the street. Then he turned back to speak again to Magee. But Magee was gone. He had faded away into the shadows. There was neither sight nor sound of him.

MacKinnon started in the suggested direction with a heavy heart. There was no possible reason to expect Magee to stay with him; the service Dave had done him with a lucky kick had been repaid with interest-yet he had lost the only friendly companionship he had found in a strange place. He felt lonely and depressed.

He continued along, keeping to the shadows, and watching carefully for shapes that might be patrolmen. He had gone a few hundred yards, and was beginning to worry about how far it might be to open countryside, when he was startled into gooseflesh by a hiss from a dark doorway.

He did his best to repress the panic that beset him, and was telling himself that policemen never hiss, when a shadow detached itself from the blackness and touched him on the arm. “Dave,” it said softly.

MacKinnon felt a childlike sense of relief and well-being. “Fader!”

“I changed my mind, Dave. The gendarmes would have you in tow before morning. You don’t know the ropes … so I came back.” Dave was both pleased and crestfallen. “Hell’s bells, Fader,” he protested, ‘you shouldn’t worry about me. I’ll get along.”

Magee shook him roughly by the arm. “Don’t be a chump. Green as you are, you’d start to holler about your civil rights, or something, and get clipped in the mouth again.

“Now see here,” he went on, ‘I’m going to take you to some friends of mine who will hide you until you’re smartened up to the tricks around here. But they’re on the wrong side of the law, see? You’ll have to be all three of the three sacred monkeys-see no evil, hear no evil, tell no evil. Think you can do it?”

“Yes, but -“

“No “buts” about it. Come along!”

The entrance was in the rear of an old warehouse. Steps led down into a little sunken pit. From this open areaway-foul with accumulated refuse-a door let into the back wall of the building. Magee tapped lightly but systematically, waited and listened. Presently he whispered, ‘Psst! It’s the Fader.”

The door opened quickly, and Magee was encircled by two great, fat arms. He was lifted off his feet, while the owner of those arms planted a resounding buss on his cheek. “Fader!” she exclaimed, ‘are you all right, lad? We’ve missed you.”

“Now that’s a proper welcome, Mother,” he answered, when he was back on his own feet, ‘but I want you to meet a friend of mine. Mother Johnston, this is David MacKinnon.” “May I do you a service?” David acknowledged, with automatic formality, but Mother Johnston’s eyes tightened with instant suspicion.

“Is he stooled?” she snapped.

“No, Mother, he’s a new immigrant-but I vouch for him. He’s on the dodge, and I’ve brought him here to cool.” She softened a little under his sweetly persuasive tones. “Well -“

Magee pinched her cheek. “That’s a good girl! When are you going to marry me?”

She slapped his hand away. “Even if I were forty years younger, I’d not marry such a scamp as you! Come along then,” she continued to MacKinnon, ‘as long as you’re a friend of the Fader-though it’s no credit to you!” She waddled quickly ahead of them, down a flight of stairs, while calling out for someone to open the door at its foot.

The room was poorly lighted and was furnished principally with a long table and some chairs, at which an odd dozen people were seated, drinking and talking. It reminded MacKinnon of prints he had seen of old English pubs in the days before the Collapse.

Magee was greeted with a babble of boisterous welcome. “Fader!’-‘It’s the kid himself!’-‘How d’ja do it this time, Fader? Crawl down the drains?’-‘Set ‘em up, Mother-the Fader’s back!” He accepted the ovation with a wave of his hand and a shout of inclusive greeting, then turned to MacKinnon. “Folks,” he said, his voice cutting through the confusion, ‘I want you to know

Dave-the best pal that ever kicked a jailer at the right moment. If it hadn’t been for Dave, I wouldn’t be here.”

Dave found himself seated between two others at the table and a stein of beer thrust into his hand by a not uncomely young woman. He started to thank her, but she had hurried off to help Mother Johnston take care of the sudden influx of orders. Seated opposite him was a rather surly young man who had taken little part in the greeting to Magee. He looked MacKinnon over with a face expressionless except for a recurrent tic which caused his right eye to wink spasmodically every few seconds.

“What’s your line?” he demanded.

“Leave him alone, Alec,” Magee cut in swiftly, but in a friendly tone. “He’s just arrived inside; I told you that. But he’s all right,” he continued, raising his voice to include the others present, ‘he’s been here less than twenty-four hours, but he’s broken jail, beat up two customs busies, and sassed old Judge Fleishacker right to his face. How’s that for a busy day?”

Dave was the center of approving interest, but the party with the tic persisted. “That’s all very well, but I asked him a fair question: What’s his line? If it’s the same as mine, I won’t stand for it-it’s too crowded now.”

“That cheap racket you’re in is always crowded, but he’s not in it. Forget about his line.”

“Why don’t he answer for himself,” Alec countered suspiciously. He half stood up. “I don’t believe he’s stooled -“

It appeared that Magee was cleaning his nails with the point of a slender knife. “Put your nose back in your glass, Alec,” he remarked in a conversational tone, without looking up, ‘-or must I cut it off and put it there?”

The other fingered something nervously in his hand. Magee seemed not to notice it, but nevertheless told him, ‘If you think you can use a vibrator on me faster than I use steel, go ahead- it will be an interesting experiment.”

The man facing him stood uncertainly for a moment longer, his tic working incessantly. Mother Johnston came up behind him and pushed him down by the shoulders, saying, ‘Boys! Boys! Is that any way to behave?-and in front of a guest, too! Fader, put that toad sticker away-I’m ashamed of you.”

The knife was gone from his hands. “You’re right as always, Mother,” he grinned. “Ask Molly to fill up my glass again.”

An old chap sitting on MacKinnon’s right had followed these events with alcoholic uncertainty, but he seemed to have gathered something of the gist of it, for now he fixed Dave with serum-filled eye, and enquired, ‘Boy, are you stooled to the rogue?” His sweetly sour breath reached MacKinnon as the old man leaned toward him and emphasized his question with a trembling, joint-swollen finger.

Dave looked to Magee for advice and enlightenment. Magee answered for him. “No, he’s not-Mother Johnston knew that when she let him in. He’s here for sanctuary-as our customs provide!”

An uneasy stir ran around the room. Molly paused in her serving and listened openly. But the old man seemed satisfied. “True … true enough,” he agreed, and took another pull at his drink, ‘sanctuary may be given when needed, if-‘His words were lost in a mumble.

The nervous tension slackened. Most of those present were subconsciously glad to follow the lead of the old man, and excuse the intrusion on the score of necessity. Magee turned back to Dave. “I thought that what you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you-or us-but the matter has been opened.”

“But what did he mean?”

“Gramps asked you if you had been stooled to the rogue-whether or not you were a member of the ancient and honorable fraternity of thieves, cutthroats, and pickpockets!”

Magee stared into Dave’s face with a look of sardonic amusement. Dave looked uncertainly from Magee to the others, saw them exchange glances, and wondered what answer was expected of him. Alec broke the pause. “Well,” he sneered, ‘what are you waiting for? Go ahead and put the question to him-or are the great Fader’s friends free to use this club without so much as a by-your-leave?”

“I thought I told you to quiet down, Alec,” the Fader replied evenly. “Besides-you’re skipping a requirement. All the comrades present must first decide whether or not to put the question at all.”

Aquiet little man with a chronic worried look in his eyes answered him. “I don’t think that quite applies, Fader. If he had come himself, or fallen into our hands-in that case, yes. But you brought him here. I think I speak for all when I say he should answer the question. Unless someone objects, I will ask him myself.” He allowed an interval to pass. No one spoke up. “Very well then … Dave, you have seen too much and heard too much. Will you leave us now-or will you stay and take the oath of our guild? I must warn you that once stooled you are stooled for life-and there is but one punishment for betraying the rogue.”

He drew his thumb across his throat in an age-old deadly gesture. Gramps made an appropriate sound effect by sucking air wetly through his teeth, and chuckled. Dave looked around. Magee’s face gave him no help. “What is it that I have to swear to?” he temporized.

The parley was brought to an abrupt ending by the sound of pounding outside. There was a shout, muffled by two closed doors and a stairway, of ‘Open up down there!” Magee got lightly to his feet and beckoned to Dave.

“That’s for us, kid,” he said. “Come along.”

He stepped over to a ponderous, old-fashioned radiophonograph which stood against the wall, reached under it, fiddled for a moment, then swung out one side panel of it. Dave saw that the mechanism had been cunningly rearranged in such a fashion that a man could squeeze inside it. Magee urged him into it, slammed the panel closed, and left him.

His face was pressed up close to the slotted grill which was intended to cover the sound box. Molly had cleared off the two extra glasses from the table, and was dumping one drink so that it spread along the table top and erased the rings their glasses had made.

MacKinnon saw the Fader slide under the table, and reached up. Then he was gone. Apparently he had, in some fashion, attached himself to the underside of the table.

Mother Johnston made a great-to-do of opening up. The lower door she opened at once, with much noise. Then she clumped slowly up the steps, pausing, wheezing, and complaining aloud. He heard her unlock the outer door.

“Afine time to be waking honest people up!” she protested. “It’s hard enough to get the work done and make both ends meet, without dropping what I’m doing every five minutes, and -“ “Enough of that, old girl,” a man’s voice answered, ‘just get along downstairs. We have business with you.”

“What sort of business?” she demanded.

“It might be selling liquor without a license, but it’s not-this time.”

“I don’t-this is a private club. The members own the liquor; I simply serve it to them.”

“That’s as may be. It’s those members I want to talk to. Get out of the way now, and be spry about it.”

They came pushing into the room with Mother Johnston, still voluble, carried along in by the van. The speaker was a sergeant of police; he was accompanied by a patrolman. Following them were two other uniformed men, but they were soldiers. MacKinnon judged by the markings on their kilts that they were corporal and private-provided the insignia in New America were similar to those used by the United States Army.

The sergeant paid no attention to Mother Johnston. “All right, you men,” he called out, ‘line up!”

They did so, ungraciously but promptly. Molly and Mother Johnston watched them, and moved closer to each other. The police sergeant called out, ‘All right, corporal-take charge!” The boy who washed up in the kitchen had been staring round-eyed. He dropped a glass. It bounced around on the hard floor, giving out bell-like sounds in the silence.

The man who had questioned Dave spoke up. “What’s all this?”

The sergeant answered with a pleased grin. “Conscription-that’s what it is. You are all enlisted in the army for the duration.” “Press gang!” It was an involuntary gasp that came from no particular source.

The corporal stepped briskly forward. “Form a column of twos,” he directed. But the little man with the worried eyes was not done. “I don’t understand this,” he objected. “We signed an armistice with the Free State three weeks ago.”

“That’s not your worry,” countered the sergeant, ‘nor mine. We are picking up every able-bodied man not in essential industry. Come along.” “Then you can’t take me.”

“Why not?”

He held up the stump of a missing hand. The sergeant glanced from it to the corporal, who nodded grudgingly, and said, ‘Okay-but report to the office in the morning, and register.”

He started to march them out when Alec broke ranks and backed up to the wall, screaming, ‘You can’t do this to me! I won’t go!” His deadly little vibrator was exposed in his hand, and the right side of his face was drawn up in a spastic wink that left his teeth bare.

“Get him, Steeves,” ordered the corporal. The private stepped forward, but stopped when Alec brandished the vibrator at him. He had no desire to have a vibroblade between his ribs, and there was no doubt as to the uncontrolled dangerousness of his hysterical opponent.

The corporal, looking phlegmatic, almost bored, levelled a small tube at a spot on the wall over Alec’s head. Dave heard a soft pop!, and a thin tinkle. Alec stood motionless for a few

seconds, his face even more strained, as if he were exerting the limit of his will against some unseen force, then slid quietly to the floor. The tonic spasm in his face relaxed, and his features smoothed into those of a tired and petulant, and very bewildered, little boy.

“Two of you birds carry him,” directed the corporal. “Let’s get going.”

The sergeant was the last to leave. He turned at the door and spoke to Mother Johnston. “Have you seen the Fader lately?” “The Fader?” She seemed puzzled. “Why, he’s in jail.”

“Ah, yes… so he is.” He went out.

Magee refused the drink that Mother Johnston offered him.

Dave was surprised to see that he appeared worried for the first time. “I don’t understand it,” Magee muttered, half to himself, then addressed the one-handed man. “Ed-bring me up to date.”

“Not much news since they tagged you, Fader. The armistice was before that. I thought from the papers that things were going to be straightened out for once.”

“So did I. But the government must expect war if they are going in for general conscription.” He stood up. “I’ve got to have more data. Al!” The kitchen boy stuck his head into the room. “What ‘cha want, Fader?”

“Go out and make palaver with five or six of the beggars. Look up their “king”. You know where he makes his pitch?” “Sure-over by the auditorium.”

“Find out what’s stirring, but don’t let them know I sent you., “Right, Fader. It’s in the bag.” The boy swaggered out. “Molly.”

“Yes, Fader?”

“Will you go out, and do the same thing with some of the business girls? I want to know what they hear from their customers.” She nodded agreement. He went on, ‘Better look up that little redhead that has her beat up on Union Square. She can get secrets out of a dead man. Here-” He pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket and handed her several. “You better take this grease … You might have to pay off a cop to get back out of the district.”

Magee was not disposed to talk, and insisted that Dave get some sleep. He was easily persuaded, not having slept since he entered Coventry. That seemed like a lifetime past; he was exhausted. Mother Johnston fixed him a shakedown in a dark, stuffy room on the same underground level. It had none of the hygienic comforts to which he was accustomed-air- conditioning, restful music, hydraulic mattress, nor soundproofing-and he missed his usual relaxing soak and auto-massage, but he was too tired to care. He slept in clothing and under covers for the first time in his life.

He woke up with a headache, a taste in his mouth like tired sin, and a sense of impending disaster. At first he could not remember where he was-he thought he was still in detention Outside. His surrounds were inexplicably sordid; he was about to ring for the attendant and complain, when his memory pieced in the events of the day before. Then he got up and discovered that his bones and muscles were painfully sore, and-which was worse-that he was, by his standards, filthy dirty. He itched.

He entered the common room, and found Magee sitting at the table. He greeted Dave. “Hi, kid. I was about to wake you. You’ve slept almost all day. We’ve got a lot to talk about.” “Okay-shortly. Where’s the ‘fresher?”

“Over there.”

It was not Dave’s idea of a refreshing chamber, but he managed to take a sketchy shower in spite of the slimy floor. Then he discovered that there was no air blast installed, and he was forced to dry himself unsatisfactorily with his handkerchief. He had no choice in clothes. He must put back on the ones he had taken off, or go naked. He recalled that he had seen no nudity anywhere in Coventry, even at sports-a difference in customs, no doubt.

He put his clothes back on, though his skin crawled at the touch of the once-used linen.

But Mother Johnston had thrown together an appetizing breakfast for him. He let coffee restore his courage as Magee talked. It was, according to Fader, a serious situation. New America and the Free State had compromised their differences and had formed an alliance. They quite seriously proposed to break out of Coventry and attack the United States.

MacKinnon looked up at this. “That’s ridiculous, isn’t it? They would be outnumbered enormously. Besides, how about the Barrier?”

“I don’t know-yet. But they have some reason to think that they can break through the Barrier … and there are rumors that whatever it is can be used as a weapon, too, so that a small army might be able to whip the whole United States.”

MacKinnon looked puzzled. “Well,” he observed, ‘I haven’t any opinion of a weapon I know nothing about, but as to the Barrier … I’m not a mathematical physicist, but I was always told that it was theoretically impossible to break the Barrier-that it was just a nothingness that there was no way to touch. Of course, you can fly over it, but even that is supposed to be deadly to life.”

“Suppose they had found some way to shield from the effects of the Barrier’s field?” suggested Magee. “Anyhow, that’s not the point, for us. The point is: they’ve made this combine; the Free State supplies the techniques and most of the officers; and New America, with its bigger population, supplies most of the men. And that means to us that we don’t dare show our faces any place, or we are in the army before you can blink.

“Which brings me to what I was going to suggest. I’m going to duck out of here as soon as it gets dark, and light out for the Gateway, before they send somebody after me who is bright enough to look under a table. I thought maybe you might want to come along.”

“Back to the psychologists?” MacKinnon was honestly aghast.

“Sure-why not? What have you got to lose? This whole damn place is going to be just like the Free State in a couple of days-and a Joe of your temperament would be in hot water all the time. What’s so bad about a nice, quiet hospital room as a place to hide out until things quiet down? You don’t have to pay any attention to the psych boys-just make animal noises at ‘em every time one sticks his nose into your room, until they get discouraged.”

Dave shook his head. “No,” he said slowly, ‘I can’t do that.” “Then what will you do?”

“I don’t know yet. Take to the hills I guess. Go to live with the Angels if it comes to a showdown. I wouldn’t mind them praying for my soul as long as they left my mind alone.”

They were each silent for a while. Magee was mildly annoyed at MacKinnon’s bullheaded stubbornness in the face of what seemed to him a reasonable offer. Dave continued busily to stow away grilled ham, while considering his position. He cut off another bite. “My, but this is good,” he remarked, to break the awkward silence, ‘I don’t know when I’ve had anything taste so good-Say!’-

“What?” inquired Magee, looking up, and seeing the concern written on MacKinnon’s face. “This ham-is it synthetic, or is it real meat?”

“Why, it’s real. What about it?”

Dave did not answer. He managed to reach the refreshing room before that which he had eaten departed from him.

Before he left, Magee gave Dave some money with which he could have purchased for him things that he would need in order to take to the hills. MacKinnon protested, but the Fader cut him short. “Quit being a damn fool, Dave. I can’t use New American money on the Outside, and you can’t stay alive in the hills without proper equipment. You lie doggo here for a few days

while Al, or Molly, picks up what you need, and you’ll stand a chance-unless you’ll change your mind and come with me?”

Dave shook his head at this, and accepted the money.

It was lonely after Magee left. Mother Johnston and Dave were alone in the club, and the empty chairs reminded him depressingly of the men who had been impressed. He wished that Gramps or the one-handed man would show up. Even Alec, with his nasty temper, would have been company-he wondered if Alec had been punished for resisting the draft.

Mother Johnston inveigled him into playing checkers in an attempt to relieve his evident low spirits. He felt obliged to agree to her gentle conspiracy, but his mind wandered. It was all very well for the Senior Judge to tell him to seek adventure in interplanetary exploration, but only engineers and technicians were eligible for such billets. Perhaps he should have gone in for science, or engineering, instead of literature; then he might now be on Venus, contending against the forces of nature in high adventure, instead of hiding from uniformed bullies. It wasn’t fair. No-he must not kid himself; there was no room for an expert in literary history in the raw frontier of the planets; that was not human injustice, that was a hard fact of nature, and he might as well face it.

He thought bitterly of the man whose nose he had broken, and thereby landed himself in Coventry. Maybe he was an ‘upholstered parasite” after all-but the recollection of the phrase brought back the same unreasoning anger that had gotten him into trouble. He was glad that he had socked that so-and-so! What right had he to go around sneering and calling people things like that?

He found himself thinking in the same vindictive spirit of his father, although he would have been at a loss to explain the connection. The connection was not superficially evident, for his father would never have stooped to name-calling. Instead, he would have offered the sweetest of smiles, and quoted something nauseating in the way of sweetness-and light. Dave’s father was one of the nastiest little tyrants that ever dominated a household under the guise of loving-kindness. He was of the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger, this-hurts-me-more-than-it- does-you school, and all his life had invariably been able to find an altruistic rationalization for always having his own way. Convinced of his own infallible righteousness, he had never valued his son’s point of view on anything, but had dominated him in everything-always from the highest moralistic motives.

He had had two main bad effects on his son: the boy’s natural independence, crushed at home, rebelled blindly at every sort of discipline, authority, or criticism which he encountered elsewhere and subconsciously identified with the not-to-be-criticized paternal authority. Secondly, through years of association Dave imitated his father’s most dangerous social vice-that of passing unselfcritical moral judgments on the actions of others.

When Dave was arrested for breaking a basic custom; to wit, atavistic violence; his father washed his hands of him with the statement that he had tried his best to ‘make a man of him’, and could not be blamed for his son’s failure to profit by his instruction.

Afaint knock caused them to put away the checker board in a hurry. Mother Johnston paused before answering. “That’s not our knock,” she considered, ‘but it’s not loud enough to be the noises. Be ready to hide.”

MacKinnon waited by the fox hole where he had hidden the night before, while Mother Johnston went to investigate. He heard her unbar and unlock the upper door, then she called out to him in a low but urgent voice, ‘Dave! Come here, Dave-hurry!”

It was Fader, unconscious, with his own bloody trail behind him.

Mother Johnston was attempting to pick up the limp form. MacKinnon crowded in, and between the two of them they managed to get him downstairs and to lay him on the long table. He came to for a moment as they straightened his limbs. “Hi, Dave,” he whispered, managing to achieve the ghost of his debonair grin. “Somebody trumped my ace.”

“You keep quiet!” Mother Johnston snapped at him, then in a lower voice to Dave, ‘Oh, the poor darling-Dave, we must get him to the Doctor.”

“Can’t … do … that,” muttered the Fader. “Got … to get to the … Gate-” His voice trailed off. Mother Johnston’s fingers had been busy all the while, as if activated by some separate intelligence. Asmall pair of scissors, drawn from some hiding place about her large person, clipped away at his clothing, exposing the superficial extent of the damage. She examined the trauma critically.

“This is no job for me,” she decided, ‘and he must sleep while we move him. Dave, get that hypodermic kit out of the medicine chest in the ‘fresher.” “No, Mother!” It was Magee, his voice strong and vibrant.

“Get me a pepper pill,” he went on. “There’s -, ‘But Fader -“

He cut her short. “I’ve got to get to the Doctor all right, but how the devil will I get there if I don’t walk?” “We would carry you.”

“Thanks, Mother,” he told her, his voice softened. “I know you would-but the police would be curious. Get me that pill.”

Dave followed her into the ‘fresher, and questioned her while she rummaged through the medicine chest. “Why don’t we just send for a doctor?” “There is only one doctor we can trust, and that’s the Doctor. Besides, none of the others are worth the powder to blast them.”

Magee was out again when they came back into the room. Mother Johnston slapped his face until he came around, blinking and cursing. Then she fed him the pill.

The powerful stimulant, improbable offspring of common coal tar, took hold almost at once. To all surface appearance Magee was a well man. He sat up and tried his own pulse, searching it out in his left wrist with steady, sensitive fingers. “Regular as a metronome,” he announced, ‘the old ticker can stand that dosage all right.”

He waited while Mother Johnston applied sterile packs to his wounds, then said good-bye. MacKinnon looked at Mother Johnston. She nodded. “I’m going with you,” he told the Fader.

“What for? It will just double the risk.”

“You’re in no fit shape to travel alone-stimulant, or no stimulant.” “Nuts. I’d have to look after you.”

“I’m going with you.”

Magee shrugged his shoulders and capitulated.

Mother Johnston wiped her perspiring face, and kissed both of them.

Until they were well out of town their progress reminded MacKinnon of their nightmare flight of the previous evening. Thereafter they continued to the north-northwest by a highway which ran toward the foothills, and they left the highway only when necessary to avoid the sparse traffic. Once they were almost surprised by a police patrol car, equipped with blacklight and almost invisible, but the Fader sensed it in time and they crouched behind a low wall which separated the adjacent field from the road.

Dave inquired how he had known the patrol was near. Magee chuckled. “Damned if I know,” he said, ‘but I believe I could smell a cop staked out in a herd of goats.”

The Fader talked less and less as the night progressed. His usually untroubled countenance became lined and old as the effect of the drug wore off. It seemed to Dave as if this unaccustomed expression gave him a clearer insight into the man’s character-that the mask of pain was his true face rather than the unworried features Magee habitually showed the world. He wondered for the ninth time what the Fader had done to cause a court to adjudge him socially insane.

This question was uppermost in his mind with respect to every person he met in Coventry. The answer was obvious in most cases; their types of instability were gross and showed up at once. Mother Johnston had been an enigma until she had explained it herself. She had followed her husband into Coventry. Now that she was a widow, she preferred to remain with the friends she knew and the customs and conditions she was adjusted to, rather than change for -another and possibly less pleasing environment.

Magee sat down beside the road. “It’s no use, kid,” he admitted, ‘I can’t make it.” “The hell we can’t. I’ll carry you.”

Magee grinned faintly. “No, I mean it.” Dave persisted. “How much farther is it?”

“Matter of two or three miles, maybe.”

“Climb aboard.” He took Magee pickaback and started on. The first few hundred yards were not too difficult; Magee was forty pounds lighter than Dave. After that the strain of the additional load began to tell. His arms cramped from supporting Magee’s knees; his arches complained at the weight and the unnatural load distribution; and his breathing was made difficult by the clasp of Magee’s arms around his neck.

Two miles to go-maybe more. Let your weight fall forward, and your foot must follow it, else you fall to the ground. It’s automatic-as automatic as pulling teeth. How long is a mile? Nothing in a rocket ship, thirty seconds in a pleasure car, a ten minute crawl in a steel snail, fifteen minutes to trained troops in good condition. How far is it with a man on your back, on a rough road, when you are tired to start with?

Five thousand, two hundred, and eighty feet-a meaningless figure. But every step takes twenty-four inches off the total. The remainder is still incomprehensible-an infinity. Count them. Count them till you go crazy-till the figures speak themselves outside your head, and the jar! … jar! …jar! … of your enormous, benumbed feet beats in your brain. Count them backwards, subtracting two each time-no, that’s worse; each remainder is still an unattainable, inconceivable figure.

His world closed in, lost its history and held no future. There was nothing, nothing at all, but the torturing necessity of picking up his foot again and placing it forward. No feeling but the heartbreaking expenditure of will necessary to achieve that meaningless act.

He was brought suddenly to awareness when Magee’s arms relaxed from around his neck. He leaned forward, and dropped to one knee to keep from spilling his burden, then eased it slowly to the ground. He thought for a moment that the Fader was dead-he could not locate his pulse, and the slack face and limp body were sufficiently corpse-like, but he pressed an ear to Magee’s chest, and heard with relief the steady flub-dub of his heart.

He tied Magee’s wrists together with his handkerchief, and forced his own head through the encircled arms. But he was unable, in his exhausted condition, to wrestle the slack weight into position on his back. Fader regained consciousness while MacKinnon was struggling. His first words were, ‘Take it easy, Dave. What’s the trouble?”

Dave explained. “Better untie my wrists,” advised the Fader, ‘I think I can walk for a while.”

And walk he did, for nearly three hundred yards, before he was forced to give up again. “Look, Dave,” he said, after he had partially recovered, ‘did you bring along any more of those pepper pills?”

“Yes-but you can’t take any more dosage. It would kill you.”

“Yeah, I know-so they say. But that isn’t the idea-yet. I was going to suggest that you might take one.” “Why, of course! Good grief, Fader, but I’m dumb.”

Magee seemed no heavier than a light coat, the morning star shone brighter, and his strength seemed inexhaustible. Even when they left the highway and started up the cart trail that led to the Doctor’s home in the foothills, the going was tolerable and the burden not too great. MacKinnon knew that the drugs burned the working tissue of his body long after his proper reserves were gone, and that it would take him days to recover from the reckless expenditure, but he did not mind. No price was too high to pay for the moment when he at last arrived at the gate of the Doctor’s home-on his own two feet, his charge alive and conscious.

MacKinnon was not allowed to see Magee for four days. In the meantime, he was encouraged to keep the routine of a semi-invalid himself in order to recover the twenty-five pounds he had lost in two days and two nights, and to make up for the heavy strain on his heart during the last night. Ahigh-caloric diet, sun baths, rest, and peaceful surroundings plus his natural good health caused him to regain weight and strength rapidly, but he ‘enjoyed ill health” exceedingly because of the companionship of the Doctor himself-and Persephone.

Persephone’s calendar age was fifteen. Dave never knew whether to think of her as much older, or much younger. She had been born in Coventry, and had lived her short life in the house of the Doctor, her mother having died in childbirth in that same house. She was completely childlike in many respects, being without experience in the civilized world Outside, and having had very little contact with the inhabitants of Coventry, except when she saw them as patients of the Doctor. But she had been allowed to read unchecked from the library of a sophisticated and protean-minded man of science. MacKinnon was continually being surprised at the extent of her academic and scientific knowledge-much greater than his own. She made him feel as if he were conversing with some aged and omniscient matriarch, then she would come out with some naive concept of the outer world, and he would be brought up sharply with the realization that she was, in fact, an inexperienced child.

He was mildly romantic about her, not seriously, of course, in view of her barely nubile age, but she was pleasant to see, and he was hungry for feminine companionship. He was quite young enough himself to feel continual interest in the delightful differences, mental and physical, between male and female.

Consequently, it was a blow to his pride as sharp as had been the sentence to Coventry to discover that she classed him with the other inhabitants of Coventry as a poor unfortunate who needed help and sympathy because he was not quite right in his head.

He was furious and for one whole day he sulked alone, but the human necessity for self-justification and approval forced him to seek her out and attempt to reason with her. He explained carefully and with emotional candor the circumstances leading up to his trial and conviction, and embellished the account with his own philosophy and evaluations, then confidently awaited her approval.

It was not forthcoming. “I don’t understand your viewpoint,” she said. “You broke his nose, yet he had done you no harm of any sort. You expect me to approve that?” “But Persephone,” he protested, ‘you ignore the fact that he called me a most insulting name.”

“I don’t see the connection,” she said. “He made a noise with his mouth-a verbal label. If the label does not fit you, the noise is meaningless. If the label is true in your case-if you are the thing that the noise refers to, you are neither more, nor less, that thing by reason of some one uttering the verbal label. In short, he did not damage you.

“But what you did to him was another matter entirely. You broke his nose. That is damage. In self-protection the rest of society must seek you out, and determine whether or not you are so unstable as to be likely to damage some one else in the future. If you are, you must be quarantined for treatment, or leave society-whichever you prefer.”

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” he accused.

“Crazy? Not the way you mean it. You haven’t paresis, or a brain tumor, or any other lesion that the Doctor could find. But from the viewpoint of your semantic reactions you are as socially unsane as any fanatic witch burner.”

“Come now-that’s not just!”

“What is justice?” She picked up the kitten she had been playing with. “I’m going in-it’s getting chilly.” Off she went into the house, her bare feet noiseless in the grass.

Had the science of semantics developed as rapidly as psychodynamics and its implementing arts of propaganda and mob psychology, the United States might never have fallen into dictatorship, then been forced to undergo the Second Revolution. All of the scientific principles embodied in the Covenant which marked the end of the revolution were formulated as far back as the first quarter of the twentieth century.

But the work of the pioneer semanticists, C. K. Ogden, Alfred Korzybski, and others, were known to but a handful of students, whereas psycho-dynamics, under the impetus of repeated wars and the frenzy of high-pressure merchandising, progressed by leaps and bounds.

Semantics, ‘the meaning of meaning’, gave a method for the first time of applying the scientific method to every act of everyday life. Because semantics dealt with spoken and written words as a determining aspect of human behavior it was at first mistakenly thought by many to be concerned only with words and of interest only to professional word manipulators, such as advertising copy writers and professors of etymology. Ahandful of unorthodox psychiatrists attempted to apply it to personal human problems, but their work was swept away by the epidemic mass psychoses that destroyed Europe and returned the United States to the Dark Ages.

The Covenant was the first scientific social document ever drawn up by man, and due credit must be given to its principal author, Dr Micah Novak, the same Novak who served as staff psychologist in the revolution. The revolutionists wished to establish maximum personal liberty. How could they accomplish that to a degree of high mathematical probability? First they junked the concept of ‘justice’. Examined semantically ‘justice” has no referent-there is no observable phenomenon in the space-time-matter continuum to which one can point, and say, ‘This is justice.” Science can deal only with that which can be observed and measured. Justice is not such a matter; therefore it can never have the same meaning to one as to another; any ‘noises” said about it will only add to confusion.

But damage, physical or economic, can be pointed to and measured. Citizens were forbidden by the Covenant to damage another. Any act not leading to damage, physical or economic,

to some particular person, they declared to be lawful.

Since they had abandoned the concept of ‘justice’, there could be no rational standards of punishment. Penology took its place with lycanthropy and other forgotten witchcrafts. Yet, since it was not practical to permit a source of danger to remain in the community, social offenders were examined and potential repeaters were given their choice of psychological readjustment, or of having society withdraw itself from them-Coventry.

Early drafts of the Covenant contained the assumption that the socially unsane would naturally be hospitalized and readjusted, particularly since current psychiatry was quite competent to cure all non-lesional psychoses and cure or alleviate lesional psychoses, but Novak set his face against this.

“No!” he protested. “The government must never again be permitted to tamper with the mind of any citizen without his consent, or else we set up a greater tyranny than we had before. Every man must be free to accept, or reject, the Covenant, even though we think him insane!”

The next time David MacKinnon looked up Persephone he found her in a state of extreme agitation. His own wounded pride was forgotten at once. “Why, my dear,” he said, ‘whatever in the world is the matter?”

Gradually he gathered that she had been present at a conversation between Magee and the Doctor, and had heard, for the first time, of the impending military operation against the United States. He patted her hand. “So that’s all it is,” he observed in a relieved voice. “I thought something was wrong with you yourself.”

““That’s all-” David MacKinnon, do you mean to stand there and tell me that you knew about this, and don’t consider it worth worrying about?” “Me? Why should I? And for that matter, what could I do?”

“What could you do? You could go outside and warn them-that’s what you could do … As to why you should-Dave, you’re impossible!” She burst into tears and ran from the room. He stared after her, mouth open, then borrowed from his remotest ancestor by observing to himself that women are hard to figure out.

Persephone did not appear at lunch. MacKinnon asked the Doctor where she was. “Had her lunch,” the Doctor told him, between mouthfuls. “Started for the Gateway.” “What! Why did you let her do that?”

“Free agent. Wouldn’t have obeyed me anyway. She’ll be all right.”

Dave did not hear the last, being already out of the room and running out of the house. He found her just backing her little motorcycle runabout out of its shed. “Persephone!” “What do you want?” she asked with frozen dignity beyond her years.

“You mustn’t do this! That’s where the Fader got hurt!” “I am going. Please stand aside.”

“Then I’m going with you.” “Why should you?”

“To take care of you.”

She sniffed. “As if anyone would dare to touch me.”

There was a measure of truth in what she said. The Doctor, and every member of his household, enjoyed a personal immunity unlike that of anyone else in Coventry. As a natural consequence of the set-up, Coventry had almost no competent medical men. The number of physicians who committed social damage was small. The proportion of such who declined psychiatric treatment was negligible, and this negligible remainder were almost sure to be unreliable bunglers in their profession. The Doctor was a natural healer, in voluntary exile in order that he might enjoy the opportunity to practice his art in the richest available field. He cared nothing for dry research; what he wanted was patients, the sicker the better, that he might make them well again.

He was above custom and above law. In the Free State the Liberator depended on him for insulin to hold his own death from diabetes at arm’s length. In New America his beneficiaries were equally powerful. Even among the Angels of the Lord the Prophet himself accepted the dicta of the Doctor without question.

But MacKinnon was not satisfied. Some ignorant fool, he was afraid, might do the child some harm without realizing her protected status. He got no further chance to protest; she started the little runabout suddenly, and forced him to jump out of its path. When he had recovered his balance, she was far down the lane. He could not catch her.

She was back in less than four hours. He had expected that; if a person as elusive as Fader had not been able to reach the Gate at night, it was not likely that a young girl could do so in daylight.

His first feeling was one of simple relief, then he eagerly awaited an opportunity to speak to her. During her absence he had been turning over the situation in his mind. It was a foregone conclusion that she would fail; he wished to rehabilitate himself in her eyes; therefore, he would help her in the project nearest her heart-he himself would carry the warning to the Outside!

Perhaps she would ask for such help. In fact, it seemed likely. But the time she returned he had convinced himself that she was certain to ask his help. He would agree-with simple dignity-and off he would go, perhaps to be wounded, or killed, but an heroic figure, even if he failed.

He pictured himself subconsciously as a blend of Sydney Carton, the White Knight, the man who carried the message to Garcia and just a dash of d’Artagnan. But she did not ask him-she would not even give him a chance to talk with her.

She did not appear at dinner. After dinner she was closeted with the Doctor in his study. When she reappeared she went directly to her room. He finally concluded that he might as well go to bed himself.

To bed, and then to sleep, and take it up again in the morning-But it’s not as simple as that. The unfriendly walls stared back at him, and the other, critical half of his mind decided to make a night of it. Fool! She doesn’t want your help. Why should she? What have you got that Fader hasn’t got?-and better. To her, you are just one of the screwloose multitude you’ve seen all around you in this place.

But I’m not crazy!-just because I choose not to submit to the dictation of others doesn’t make me crazy. Doesn’t it, though? All the rest of them in here are lamebrains, what’s so fancy about you? Not all of them-how about the Doctor, and-don’t kid yourself, chump, the Doctor and Mother Johnston are here for their own reasons; they weren’t sentenced. And Persephone was born here.

How about Magee?-He was certainly rational-or seemed so. He found himself resenting, with illogical bitterness, Magee’s apparent stability. Why should he be any different from the rest of us?

The rest of us? He had classed himself with the other inhabitants of Coventry. All right, all right, admit it, you fool-you’re just like the rest of them; turned out because the decent people won’t have you-and too damned stubborn to admit that you need treatment. But the thought of treatment turned him cold, and made him think of his father again. Why should that be? He recalled something the Doctor had said to him a couple of days before:

“What you need, son, is to stand up to your father and tell him off. Pity more children don’t tell their parents to go to hell!”

He turned on the light and tried to read. But it was no use. Why should Persephonie care what happened to the people Outside?-She didn’t know them; she had no friends there. If he had no obligations to them, how could she possibly care? No obligations? You had a soft, easy life for many years-all they asked was that you behave yourself. For that matter, where would you be now, if the Doctor had stopped to ask whether or not he owed you anything?

He was still wearily chewing the bitter cud of self-examination when the first cold and colorless light of morning filtered in. He got up, threw a robe around him, and tiptoed down the hall to Magee’s room. The door was ajar. He stuck his head in, and whispered, ‘Fader-Are you awake?”

“Come in, kid,” Magee answered quietly. “What’s the trouble? No can sleep?”

“No -, ‘Neither can I. Sit down, and we’ll carry the banner together.” “Fader, I’m going to make a break for it. I’m going Outside.”

“Huh? When?” “Right away.”

“Risky business, kid. Wait a few days, and I’ll try it with you.” “No, I can’t wait for you to get well. I’m going out to warn the United States!”

Magee’s eyed widened a little, but his voice was unchanged. “You haven’t let that spindly kid sell you a bill of goods, Dave?”

“No. Not exactly. I’m doing this for myself-It’s something I need to do. See here, Fader, what about this weapon? Have they really got something that could threaten the United States?” “I’m afraid so,” Magee admitted. “I don’t know much about it, but it makes blasters look sick. More range-I don’t know what they expect to do about the Barrier, but I saw ‘em stringing

heavy power lines before I got winged. Say, if you do get outside, here’s a chap you might look up; in fact, be sure to. He’s got influence.” Magee scrawled something on a scrap of paper,

folded the scrap, and handed it to MacKinnon, who pocketed it absent-mindedly and went on:

“How closely is the Gate guarded, Fader?”

“You can’t get out the Gate; that’s out of the question. Here’s what you will have to do-” He tore off another piece of paper and commenced sketching and explaining. Dave shook hands with Magee before he left. “You’ll say goodbye for me, won’t you? And thank the Doctor? I’d rather just slide out before anyone is up.” “Of course, kid,” the Fader assured him.

MacKinnon crouched behind bushes and peered cautiously at the little band of Angels filing into the bleak, ugly church. He shivered, both from fear and from the icy morning air. But his need was greater than his fear. Those zealots had food-and he must have it.

The first two days after he left the house of the Doctor had been easy enough. True, he had caught cold from sleeping on the ground; it had settled in his lungs and slowed him down. But he did not mind that now if only he could refrain from sneezing or coughing until the little band of faithful were safe inside the temple. He watched them pass-dour-looking men, women and skirts that dragged the ground and whose work lined faces were framed in shawls-sallow drudges with too many children. The light had gone out of their faces. Even the children were sober.

The last of them filed inside, leaving only the sexton in the churchyard, busy with some obscure duty. After an interminable time, during which MacKinnon pressed a finger against his upper lip in a frantic attempt to forestall a sneeze, the sexton entered the grim building and closed the doors.

McKinnon crept out of his hiding place and hurried to the house he had previously selected, on the edge of the clearing, farthest from the church.

The dog was suspicious, but he quieted him. The house was locked, but the rear door could be forced. He was a little giddy at the sight of food when he found it-hard bread, and strong, unsalted butter made from goat’s milk. Amisstep two days before had landed him in a mountain stream. The mishap had not seemed important until he discovered that his food tablets were a pulpy mess. He had eaten them the rest of the day, then mold had taken them, and he had thrown the remainder away.

The bread lasted him through three more sleeps, but the butter melted and he was unable to carry it. He soaked as much of it as he could into the bread, then licked up the rest, after which he was very thirsty.

Some hours after the last of the bread was gone, he reached his first objective-the main river to which all other streams in Coventry were tributary. Some place, down stream, it dived under the black curtain of the Barrier, and continued seaward. With the gateway closed and guarded, its outlet constituted the only possible egress to a man unassisted.

In the meantime it was water, and thirst was upon him again, and his cold was worse. But he would have to wait until dark to drink; there were figures down there by the bank-some in uniform, he thought. One of them made fast a little skiff to a landing. He marked it for his own and watched it with jealous eyes. It was still there when the sun went down.

The early morning sun struck his nose and he sneezed. He came wide awake, raised his head, and looked around. The little skiff he had appropriated floated in midstream. There were no oars. He could not remember whether or not there had been any oars. The current was fairly strong; it seemed as if he should have drifted clear to the Barrier in the night. Perhaps he had passed under it-no, that was ridiculous.

Then he saw it, less than a mile away, black and ominous-but the most welcome sight he had seen in days. He was too weak and feverish to enjoy it, but it renewed the determination that kept him going.

The little boat scraped against bottom. He saw that the current at a bend had brought him to the bank. He hopped awkwardly out, his congealed joints complaining, and drew the bow of the skiff up onto the sand. Then he thought better of it, pushed it out once more, shoved as hard as he was able and watched it disappear around the meander. No need to advertise where he had landed.

He slept most of that day, rousing himself once to move out of the sun when it grew too hot. But the sun had cooked much of the cold out of his bones, and he felt much better by nightfall. Although the Barrier was only a mile or so away, it took most of the night to reach it by following the river bank. He knew when he had reached it by the clouds of steam that rose from the

water. When the sun came up, he considered the situation. The Barrier stretched across the water, but the juncture between it and the surface of the stream was hidden by billowing

clouds. Someplace, down under the surface of the water-how far down he did not know-somewhere down there, the Barrier ceased, and its raw edge turned the water it touched to

steam.

Slowly, reluctantly and most unheroically, he commenced to strip off his clothes. The time had come and he did not relish it. He came across the scrap of paper that Magee had handed him, and attempted to examine it. But it had been pulped by his involuntary dip in the mountain stream and was quite illegible. He chucked it away. It did not seem to matter.

He shivered as he stood hesitating on the bank, although the sun was warm. Then his mind was made up for him; he spied a patrol on the far bank. Perhaps they had seen him, perhaps not. He dived.

Down, down, as far as his strength would take him. Down and try to touch bottom, to be sure of avoiding that searing, deadly base. He felt mud with his hands. Now to swim under it. Perhaps it was death to pass under it, as well as over it; he would soon know. But which way was it? There was no direction down here.

He stayed down until his congested lungs refused. Then he rose part way, and felt scalding water on his face. For a timeless interval of unutterable sorrow and loneliness he realized that he was trapped between heat and water-trapped under the Barrier.

Two private soldiers gossiped idly on a small dock which lay under the face of the Barrier. The river which poured out from beneath it held no interest for them, they had watched it for many dull tours of guard duty. An alarm clanged behind them and brought them to alertness. “What sector, Jack?”

“This bank. There he is now-see!”

They fished him out and had him spread out on the dock by the time the sergeant of the guard arrived. “Alive, or dead?” he enquired. “Dead, I think,” answered the one who was not busy giving artificial resuscitation.

The sergeant clucked in a manner incongruous to his battered face, and said, ‘Too bad. I’ve ordered the ambulance; send him up to the infirmary anyhow.”

The nurse tried to keep him quiet, but MacKinnon made such an uproar that she was forced to get the ward surgeon. “Here! Here! What’s all this nonsense?” the medico rebuked him, while reaching for his pulse. Dave managed to convince him that he would not quiet down, not accept a soporific until he had told his story. They struck a working agreement that MacKinnon was to be allowed to talk-‘But keep it short, mind you!’-and the doctor would pass the word along to his next superior, and in return Dave would submit to a hypodermic.

The next morning two other men, unidentified, were brought to MacKinnon by the surgeon. They listened to his full story and questioned him in detail. He was transferred to corps area

headquarters that afternoon by ambulance. There he was questioned again. He was regaining his strength rapidly, but he was growing quite tired of the whole rigmarole, and wanted assurance that his warning was being taken seriously. The latest of his interrogators reassured him. “Compose yourself,” he told Dave, ‘you are to see the commanding officer this afternoon.”

The corps area commander, a nice little chap with a quick, birdlike manner and a most unmilitary appearance, listened gravely while MacKinnon recited his story for what seemed to him the fiftieth time. He nodded agreement when David finished. “Rest assured, David MacKinnon, that all necessary steps are being taken.”

“But how about their weapon?”

“That is taken care of-and as for the Barrier, it may not be as easy to break as our neighbors think. But your efforts are appreciated. May I do you some service?”

“Well, no-not for myself, but there are two of my friends in there-‘He asked that something be done to rescue Magee, and that Persephone be enabled to come out, if she wished. “I know of that girl,” the general remarked. “We will get in touch with her. If at any time she wishes to become a citizen, it can be arranged. As for Magee, that is another matter-‘He touched

the stud of his desk visiphone. “Send Captain Randall in.”

Aneat, trim figure in the uniform of a captain of the United States Army entered with a light step. MacKinnon glanced at him with casual, polite interest, then his expression went to pieces. “Fader!” he yelled.

Their mutual greeting was hardly sufficiently decorous for the private office of a commanding general, but the general did not seem to mind. When they had calmed down, MacKinnon had to ask the question uppermost in his mind. “But see here, Fader, all this doesn’t make sense-‘He paused, staring, then pointed a finger accusingly, ‘I know! You’re in the secret service!”

The Fader grinned cheerfully. “Did you think,” he observed, ‘that the United States Army would leave a plague spot like that unwatched?” The general cleared his throat. “What do you plan to do now, David MacKinnon?”

“Eh! Me? Why, I don’t have any plans-‘He thought for a moment, then turned to his friend. “Do you know, Fader, I believe I’ll turn in for psychological treatment after all. You’re on the Outside -“

“I don’t believe that will be necessary,” interrupted the general gently. “No? Why not, sir?”

“You have cured yourself. You may not be aware of it, but four psychotechnicians have interviewed you. Their reports agree. I am authorized to tell you that your status as a free citizen has been restored, if you wish it.”

The general and Captain ‘the Fader” Randall managed tactfully between them to terminate the interview. Randall walked back to the infirmary with his friend. Dave wanted a thousand questions answered at once. “But Fader,” he demanded, ‘you must have gotten out before I did.”

“Aday or two.”

“Then my job was unnecessary!”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Randall contradicted. “I might not have gotten through. As a matter of fact, they had all the details even before I reported. There are others-Anyhow,” he continued, to change the subject, ‘now that you are here, what will you do?”

“Me? It’s too soon to say … It won’t be classical literature, that’s a cinch. If I wasn’t such a dummy in maths, I might still try for interplanetary.”

“Well, we can talk about it tonight,” suggested Fader, glancing at his chrono. “I’ve got to run along, but I’ll stop by later, and we’ll go over to the mess for dinner.” He was out the door with speed reminiscent of the thieves” kitchen. Dave watched him, then said suddenly, ‘Hey! Fader! Why couldn’t I get into the secret ser -, But the Fader was gone-he must ask himself.

The End

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The Door into Summer (full text) by Robert Heinlein

Here is the full text of the wonderful Robert Heinlein science fiction story titled “The door into summer”.

The novel begins in 1970 with Daniel, an engineer and inventor, in a bit of a slump. He has been scammed by his business partner, Miles Gentry, and his fiancée, Belle Darkin, so that he has lost his company, Hired Girl, Inc. Dan’s only friend in the world is his cat, Petronius the Arbiter or “Pete”, who hates going outdoors in the snow.

Left with a large financial settlement, and his remaining Hired Girl stock, he elects to take “cold sleep”, hoping to wake up thirty years later to a brighter future. First he mails his Hired Girl stock certificate to the one person he trusts, Miles’ stepdaughter Frederica “Ricky” Virginia Gentry. However when Dan confronts Miles and Belle, they inject him with an illegal “zombie” drug, and have him committed to cold sleep.

Dan wakes up in the year 2000, with no money to his name, and no idea how to find the people he once knew. He has lost Pete the cat, who fled Miles’ house after Dan was drugged, and has no idea how to find a now middle-aged Ricky.

Nevertheless, Dan begins rebuilding his life…

…

In the hot Summer months, take a moment and enjoy this great science fiction read.

The Door Into Summer

ONE WINTER shortly before the Six Weeks War my tomcat, Petronius the Arbiter, and I lived in an old farmhouse in Connecticut. I doubt if it is there any longer, as it was near the edge of the blast area of the Manhattan near-miss, and those old frame buildings burn like tissue paper. Even if it is still standing it would not be a desirable rental because of the fallout, but we liked it then, Pete and I. The lack of plumbing made the rent low and what had been the dining room had a good north light for my drafting board.

The drawback was that the place had eleven doors to the outside.

Twelve, if you counted Pete’s door. I always tried to arrange a door of his own for Pete—in this case a board fitted into a window in an unused bedroom and in which I had cut a cat strainer just wide enough for Pete’s whiskers. I have spent too much of my life opening doors for cats—I once calculated that, since the dawn of civilization, nine hundred and seventy-eight man-centuries have been used up that way. I could show you figures.

Pete usually used his own door except when he could bully me into opening a people door for him, which he preferred. But he would not use his door when there was snow on the ground.

While still a kitten, all fluff and buzzes, Pete had worked out a simple philosophy. I was in charge of quarters, rations, and weather; he was in charge of everything else. But he held me especially responsible for weather. Connecticut winters are good only for Christmas cards; regularly that winter Pete would check his own door, refuse to go out it because of that unpleasant white stuff beyond it (he was no fool), then badger me to open a people door.

He had a fixed conviction that at least one of them must lead into summer weather. Each time this meant that I had to go around with him to each of eleven doors, hold it open while he satisfied himself that it was winter out that way, too, then go on to the next door, while his criticisms of my mismanagement grew more bitter with each disappointment.

Then he would stay indoors until hydraulic pressure utterly forced him outside. When he returned the ice in his pads would sound like little clogs on the wooden floor and he would glare at me and refuse to purr until he had chewed it all out…whereupon he would forgive me until the next time.

But he never gave up his search for the Door into Summer. On 3 December 1970, I was looking for it too.

My quest was about as hopeless as Pete’s had been in a Connecticut January. What little snow there was in southern California was kept on mountains for skiers, not in downtown Los Angeles—the stuff probably couldn’t have pushed through the smog anyway. But the winter weather was in my heart.

I was not in bad health (aside from a cumulative hangover), I was still on the right side of thirty by a few days, and I was far from being broke. No police were looking for me, nor any husbands, nor any process servers; there was nothing wrong that a slight case of amnesia would not have cured. But there was winter in my heart and I was looking for the door to summer.

If I sound like a man with an acute case of self-pity, you are correct. There must have been well over two billion people on this planet in worse shape than I was. Nevertheless, I was looking for the Door into Summer.

Most of the ones I had checked lately had been swinging doors, like the pair in front of me then—the SANS SOUCI Bar Grill, the sign said. I went in, picked a booth halfway back, placed the overnight bag I was carrying carefully on the seat, slid in by it, and waited for the waiter.

The overnight bag said, “Waarrrh?” I said, “Take it easy, Pete.” “Naaow!”

“Nonsense, you just went. Pipe down, the waiter is coming.”

Pete shut up. I looked up as the waiter leaned over the table, and said to him, “A double shot of your bar Scotch, a glass of plain water, and a split of ginger ale.”

The waiter looked upset. “Ginger ale, sir? With Scotch?” “Do you have it or don’t you?”

“Why, yes, of course. But—”

“Then fetch it. I’m not going to drink it; I just want to sneer at it. And bring a saucer too.”

“As you say, sir.” He polished the tabletop. “How about a small steak, sir? Or the scallops are very good today.”

“Look, mate, I’ll tip you for the scallops if you’ll promise not to serve them. All I need is what I ordered…and don’t forget the saucer.”

He shut up and went away. I told Pete again to take it easy, the Marines had landed. The waiter returned, his pride appeased by carrying the split of ginger ale on the saucer. I had him open it while I mixed the Scotch with the water. “Would you like another glass for the ginger ale, sir?”

“I’m a real buckaroo; I drink it out of the bottle.”

He shut up and let me pay him and tip him, not forgetting a tip for the scallops. When he had gone I poured ginger ale into the saucer and tapped on the top of the overnight bag. “Soup’s on, Pete.”

It was unzipped; I never zipped it with him inside. He spread it with his paws, poked his head out, looked around quickly, then levitated his forequarters and placed his front feet on the edge of the table. I raised my glass and we looked at each other. “Here’s to the female race, Pete— find ’em and forget ’em!”

He nodded; it matched his own philosophy perfectly. He bent his head daintily and started lapping up ginger ale. “If you can, that is,” I added, and took a deep swig. Pete did not answer. Forgetting a female was no effort to him; he was the natural-born bachelor type.

Facing me through the window of the bar was a sign that kept changing. First it would read: WORK WHILE YOU SLEEP. Then it would say: AND DREAM YOUR TROUBLES AWAY. Then it would flash in letters twice as big:

MUTUAL ASSURANCE COMPANY

I read all three several times without thinking about them. I knew as much and as little about suspended animation as everybody else did. I had read a popular article or so when it was first announced and two or three times a week I’d get an insurance-company ad about it in the morning mail; I usually chucked them without looking at them since they didn’t seem to apply to me any more than lipstick ads did.

In the first place, until shortly before then, I could not have paid for cold sleep; it’s expensive. In the second place, why should a man who was enjoying his work, was making money, expected to make more, was in love and about to be married, commit semi-suicide?

If a man had an incurable disease and expected to die anyhow but thought the doctors a generation later might be able to cure him—and he could afford to pay for suspended animation while medical science caught up with what was wrong with him—then cold sleep was a logical bet. Or if his ambition was to make a trip to Mars and he thought that clipping one generation out of his personal movie film would enable him to buy a

ticket, I supposed that was logical too—there had been a news story about a café- society couple who got married and went right straight from city

hall to the sleep sanctuary of Western World Insurance Company with an announcement that they had left instructions not to be called until they could spend their honeymoon on an interplanetary liner…although I had suspected that it was a publicity gag rigged by the insurance company and that they had ducked out the back door under assumed names. Spending your wedding night cold as a frozen mackerel does not have the ring of truth in it.

And there was the usual straightforward financial appeal, the one the insurance companies bore down on: “Work while you sleep.” Just hold still and let whatever you have saved grow into a fortune. If you are fifty-five and your retirement fund pays you two hundred a month, why not sleep away the years, wake up still fifty-five, and have it pay you a thousand a month? To say nothing of waking up in a bright new world which would probably promise you a much longer and healthier old age in which to enjoy the thousand a month? That one they really went to town on, each company proving with incontrovertible figures that its selection of stocks for its trust fund made more money faster than any of the others. “Work while you sleep!”

It had never appealed to me. I wasn’t fifty-five, I didn’t want to retire, and I hadn’t seen anything wrong with 1970.

Until recently, that is to say. Now I was retired whether I liked it or not (I didn’t); instead of being on my honeymoon I was sitting in a second-rate bar drinking Scotch purely for anesthesia; instead of a wife I had one much-scarred tomcat with a neurotic taste for ginger ale; and as for liking right now, I would have swapped it for a case of gin and then busted every bottle.

But I wasn’t broke.

I reached into my coat and took out an envelope, opened it. It had two items in it. One was a certified check for more money than I had ever had before at one time; the other was a stock certificate in Hired Girl, Inc. They were both getting a little mussed; I had been carrying them ever since they were handed to me.

Why not?

Why not duck out and sleep my troubles away? Pleasanter than joining the Foreign Legion, less messy than suicide, and it would divorce me completely from the events and the people who had made my life go sour. So why not?

I wasn’t terribly interested in the chance to get rich. Oh, I had read H. G. Wells’ The Sleeper Awakes, not only when the insurance companies started giving away free copies, but before that, when it was just another classic novel; I knew what compound interest and stock appreciation could do. But I was not sure that I had enough money both to buy the Long Sleep and to set up a trust large enough to be worthwhile. The other argument appealed to me more: go beddy-bye and wake up in a different world. Maybe a lot better world, the way the insurance companies would have you believe…or maybe worse. But certainly different.

I could make sure of one important difference: I could doze long enough to be certain that it was a world without Belle Darkin—or Miles Gentry, either, but Belle especially. If Belle was dead and buried I could forget her, forget what she had done to me, cancel her out…instead of gnawing my heart with the knowledge that she was only a few miles away.

Let’s see, how long would that have to be? Belle was twenty-three—or claimed to be (I recalled that once she had seemed to let slip that she remembered Roosevelt as president). Well, in her twenties anyhow. If I slept seventy years, she’d be an obituary. Make it seventy-five and be safe.

Then I remembered the strides they were making in geriatrics; they were talking about a hundred and twenty years as an attainable “normal” life span. Maybe I would have to sleep a hundred years. I wasn’t certain that any insurance company offered that much.

Then I had a gently fiendish idea, inspired by the warm glow of Scotch. It wasn’t necessary to sleep until Belle was dead; it was enough, more

than enough, and just the fitting revenge on a female to be young when she was old. Just enough younger to rub her nose in it—say about thirty years.

I felt a paw, gentle as a snowflake, on my arm. “Mooorrre!” announced Pete.

“Greedy gut,” I told him, and poured him another saucer of ginger ale. He thanked me with a polite wait, then started lapping it. But he had interrupted my pleasantly nasty chain of thought. What the devil could I do about Pete?

You can’t give away a cat the way you can a dog; they won’t stand for it. Sometimes they go with the house, but not in Pete’s case; to him I had been the one stable thing in a changing world ever since he was taken from his mother nine years earlier…I had even managed to keep him near me in the Army and that takes real wangling.

He was in good health and likely to stay that way even though he was held together with scar tissue. If he could just correct a tendency to lead with his right he would be winning battles and siring kittens for another five years at least.

I could pay to have him kept in a kennel until he died (unthinkable!) or I could have him chloroformed (equally unthinkable)—or I could abandon him. That is what it boils down to with a cat: You either carry out the Chinese obligation you have assumed—or you abandon the poor thing, let it go wild, destroy its faith in the eternal rightness.

The way Belle had destroyed mine.

So, Danny boy, you might as well forget it. Your own life may have gone as sour as dill pickles; that did not excuse you in the slightest from your obligation to carry out your contract to this super-spoiled cat.

Just as I reached that philosophical truth Pete sneezed; the bubbles had gone up his nose. “Gesundheit,” I answered, “and quit trying to drink it so fast.”

Pete ignored me. His table manners averaged better than mine and he knew it. Our waiter had been hanging around the cash register, talking with the cashier. It was the after-lunch slump and the only other customers were at the bar. The waiter looked up when I said “Gesundheit,” and spoke to the cashier. They both looked our way, then the cashier lifted the flap gate in the bar and headed toward us.

I said quietly, “MPs, Pete.”

He glanced around and ducked down into the bag; I pushed the top together. The cashier came over and leaned on my table, giving the seats on both sides of the booth a quick double-O. “Sorry, friend,” he said flatly, “but you’ll have to get that cat out of here.”

“What cat?”

“The one you were feeding out of that saucer.” “I don’t see any cat.”

This time he bent down and looked under the table. “You’ve got him in that bag,” he accused.

“Bag? Cat?” I said wonderingly. “My friend, I think you’ve come down with an acute figure of speech.” “Huh? Don’t give me any fancy language. You’ve got a cat in that bag. Open it up.”

“Do you have a search warrant?” “What? Don’t be silly.”

“You’re the one talking silly, demanding to see the inside of my bag without a search warrant. Fourth Amendment—and the war has been over for years. Now that we’ve settled that, please tell my waiter to make it the same all around—or fetch it yourself.”

He looked pained. “Brother, this isn’t anything personal, but I’ve got a license to consider. ‘No dogs, no cats’—it says so right up there on the

wall. We aim to run a sanitary establishment.”

“Then your aim is poor.” I picked up my glass. “See the lipstick marks? You ought to be checking your dishwasher, not searching your customers.”

“I don’t see no lipstick.”

“I wiped most of it off. But let’s take it down to the Board of Health and get the bacteria count checked.” He sighed. “You got a badge?”

“No.”

“Then we’re even. I don’t search your bag and you don’t take me down to the Board of Health. Now if you want another drink, step up to the bar and have it…on the house. But not here.” He turned and headed up front.

I shrugged. “We were just leaving anyhow.”

As I started to pass the cashier’s desk on my way out he looked up. “No hard feelings?” “Nope. But I was planning to bring my horse in here for a drink later. Now I won’t.”

“Suit yourself. The ordinance doesn’t say a word about horses. But just one more thing—does that cat really drink ginger ale?” “Fourth Amendment, remember?”

“I don’t want to see the animal; I just want to know.”

“Well,” I admitted, “he prefers it with a dash of bitters, but he’ll drink it straight if he has to.” “It’ll ruin his kidneys. Look here a moment, friend.”

“At what?”

“Lean back so that your head is close to where mine is. Now look up at the ceiling over each booth…the mirrors up in the decorations. I knew there was a cat there—because I saw it.”

I leaned back and looked. The ceiling of the joint had a lot of junky decoration, including many mirrors; I saw now that a number of them, camouflaged by the design, were so angled as to permit the cashier to use them as periscopes without leaving his station. “We need that,” he said apologetically. “You’d be shocked at what goes on in those booths…if we didn’t keep an eye on ’em. It’s a sad world.”

“Amen, brother.” I went on out.

Once outside, I opened the bag and carried it by one handle; Pete stuck his head out. “You heard what the man said, Pete. ‘It’s a sad world.’ Worse than sad when two friends can’t have a quiet drink together without being spied on. That settles it.”

“Now?” asked Pete.

“If you say so. If we’re going to do it, there’s no point in stalling.” “Now!” Pete answered emphatically.

“Unanimous. It’s right across the street.”

The receptionist at the Mutual Assurance Company was a fine example of the beauty of functional design. In spite of being streamlined for about Mach Four, she displayed frontal-mounted radar housings and everything else needed for her basic mission. I reminded myself that she would be Whistler’s Mother by the time I was out and told her that I wanted to see a salesman.

“Please be seated. I will see if one of our client executives is free.” Before I could sit down she added, “Our Mr. Powell will see you. This way, please.”

Our Mr. Powell occupied an office which made me think that Mutual did pretty well for itself. He shook hands moistly, sat me down, offered me a cigarette, and attempted to take my bag. I hung onto it. “Now, sir, how can we serve you?”

“I want the Long Sleep.”

His eyebrows went up and his manner became more respectful. No doubt Mutual would write you a camera floater for seven bucks, but the Long Sleep let them get their patty-paws on all of a client’s assets. “A very wise decision,” he said reverently. “I wish I were free to take it myself. But…family responsibilities, you know.” He reached out and picked up a form. “Sleep clients are usually in a hurry. Let me save you time and bother by filling this out for you…and we’ll arrange for your physical examination at once.”

“Just a moment.” “Eh?”

“One question. Are you set up to arrange cold sleep for a cat?” He looked surprised, then pained. “You’re jesting.”

I opened the top of the bag; Pete stuck his head out. “Meet my sidekick. Just answer the question, please. If the answer is ‘no,’ I want to sashay up to Central Valley Liability. Their offices are in this same building, aren’t they?”

This time he looked horrified. “Mister— Uh, I didn’t get your name?” “Dan Davis.”

“Mr. Davis, once a man enters our door he is under the benevolent protection of Mutual Assurance. I couldn’t let you go to Central Valley.” “How do you plan to stop me? Judo?”

“Please!” He glanced around and looked upset. “Our company is an ethical company.” “Meaning that Central Valley is not?”

“I didn’t say that; you did. Mr. Davis, don’t let me sway you—” “You won’t.”

“—but get sample contracts from each company. Get a lawyer, better yet, get a licensed semanticist. Find out what we offer—and actually deliver

—and compare it with what Central Valley claims to offer.” He glanced around again and leaned toward me. “I shouldn’t say this—and I do hope you won’t quote me—but they don’t even use the standard actuarial tables.”

“Maybe they give the customer a break instead.”

“What? My dear Mr. Davis, we distribute every accrued benefit. Our charter requires it…while Central Valley is a stock company.”

“Maybe I should buy some of their— Look, Mr. Powell, we’re wasting time. Will Mutual accept my pal here? Or not? If not, I’ve been here too long already.”

“You mean you want to pay to have that creature preserved alive in hypothermia?”

“I mean I want both of us to take the Long Sleep. And don’t call him ‘that creature’; his name is Petronius.”

“Sorry. I’ll rephrase my question. You are prepared to pay two custodial fees to have both of you, you and, uh, Petronius committed to our sanctuary?”

“Yes. But not two standard fees. Something extra, of course, but you can stuff us both in the same coffin; you can’t honestly charge as much for

Pete as you charge for a man.”

“This is most unusual.”

“Of course it is. But we’ll dicker over the price later…or I’ll dicker with Central Valley. Right now I want to find out if you can do it.”

“Uh…” He drummed on his desktop. “Just a moment.” He picked up his phone and said, “Opal, get me Dr. Berquist.” I didn’t hear the rest of the conversation, for he switched on the privacy guard. But after a while he put down the instrument and smiled as if a rich uncle had died. “Good news, sir! I had overlooked momentarily the fact that the first successful experiments were made on cats. The techniques and critical factors for cats are fully established. In fact there is a cat at the Naval Research Laboratory in Annapolis which is and has been for more than twenty years alive in hypothermia.”

“I thought NRL was wiped out when they got Washington?”

“Just the surface buildings, sir, not the deep vaults. Which is a tribute to the perfection of the technique; the animal was unattended save by automatic machinery for more than two years…yet it still lives, unchanged, unaged. As you will live, sir, for whatever period you elect to entrust yourself to Mutual.”

I thought he was going to cross himself. “Okay, okay, now let’s get on with the dicker.”

There were four factors involved: first, how to pay for our care while we were hibernating; second, how long I wanted us to sleep; third, how I wanted my money invested while I was in the freezer; and last, what happened if I conked out and never woke up.

I finally settled on the year 2000, a nice round number and only thirty years away. I was afraid that if I made it any longer I would be completely out of touch. The changes in the last thirty years (my own lifetime) had been enough to bug a man’s eyes out—two big wars and a dozen little ones, the downfall of communism, the Great Panic, the artificial satellites, the change to atomic power—why, when I was a kid they didn’t even have multimorphs.

I might find 2000 A.D. pretty confusing. But if I didn’t jump that far Belle would not have time to work up a fancy set of wrinkles.

When it came to how to invest my dough I did not consider government bonds and other conservative investments; our fiscal system has inflation built into it. I decided to hang onto my Hired Girl stock and put the cash into other common stocks, with a special eye to some trends I thought would grow. Automation was bound to get bigger. I picked a San Francisco fertilizer firm too; it had been experimenting with yeasts and edible algae— there were more people every year and steak wasn’t going to get any cheaper. The balance of the money I told him to put into the company’s managed trust fund.

But the real choice lay in what to do if I died in hibernation. The company claimed that the odds were better than seven out of ten that I would live through thirty years of cold sleep…and the company would take either end of the bet. The odds weren’t reciprocal and I didn’t expect them to be; in any honest gambling there is a breakage to the house. Only crooked gamblers claim to give the sucker the best of it, and insurance is legalized gambling. The oldest and most reputable insurance firm in the world, Lloyd’s of London, makes no bones about it—Lloyd’s associates will take either end of any bet. But don’t expect better-than-track odds; somebody has to pay for Our Mr. Powell’s tailor-made suits.

I chose to have every cent go to the company trust fund in case I died…which made Mr. Powell want to kiss me and made me wonder just how optimistic those seven-out-of-ten odds were. But I stuck with it because it made me an heir (if I lived) of everyone else with the same option (if they died), Russian roulette with the survivors picking up the chips…and with the company, as usual, raking in the house percentage.

I picked every alternative for the highest possible return and no hedging if I guessed wrong; Mr. Powell loved me, the way a croupier loves a sucker who keeps playing the zero. By the time we had settled my estate he was anxious to be reasonable about Pete; we settled for 15 percent of the human fee to pay for Pete’s hibernation and drew up a separate contract for him.

There remained consent of court and the physical examination. The physical I didn’t worry about; I had a hunch that, once I elected to have the company bet that I would die, they would accept me even in the last stages of the Black Death. But I thought that getting a judge to okay it might be lengthy. It had to be done, because a client in cold sleep was legally in chancery, alive but helpless.

I needn’t have worried. Our Mr. Powell had quadruplicate originals made of nineteen different papers. I signed till I got finger cramps, and a messenger rushed away with them while I went to my physical examination; I never even saw the judge.

The physical was the usual tiresome routine except for one thing. Toward the end the examining physician looked me sternly in the eye and said, “Son, how long have you been on this binge?”

“Binge?”

“Binge.”

“What makes you think that, Doctor? I’m as sober as you are. ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled—’ ” “Knock it off and answer me.”

“Mmm…I’d say about two weeks. A little over.”

“Compulsive drinker? How many times have you pulled this stunt in the past?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I haven’t. You see—” I started to tell him what Belle and Miles had done to me, why I felt the way I did.

He shoved a palm at me. “Please. I’ve got troubles of my own and I’m not a psychiatrist. Really, all I’m interested in is finding out whether or not your heart will stand up under the ordeal of putting you down to four degrees centigrade. Which it will. And I ordinarily don’t care why anyone is nutty enough to crawl into a hole and pull it in after him; I just figure it is one less damn fool underfoot. But some residual tinge of professional conscience prevents me from letting any man, no matter how sorry a specimen, climb into one of those coffins while his brain is sodden with alcohol. Turn around.”

“Huh?”

“Turn around; I’m going to inject you in your left buttock.” I did and he did. While I was rubbing it he went on, “Now drink this. In about twenty minutes you will be more sober than you’ve been in a month. Then, if you have any sense—which I doubt—you can review your position and decide whether to run away from your troubles…or stand up to them like a man.”

I drank it.

“That’s all; you can get dressed. I’m signing your papers, but I’m warning you that I can veto it right up to the last minute. No more alcohol for you at all, a light supper and no breakfast. Be here at noon tomorrow for final check.”

He turned away and didn’t even say good-bye. I dressed and went out of there, sore as a boil. Powell had all my papers ready. When I picked them up he said, “You can leave them here if you wish and pick them up at noon tomorrow…the set that goes in the vault with you, that is.”

“What happens to the others?”

“We keep one set ourselves, then after you are committed we file one set with the court and one in the Carlsbad Archives. Uh, did the doctor caution you about diet?”

“He certainly did.” I glanced at the papers to cover my annoyance. Powell reached for them. “I’ll keep them safe overnight.”

I pulled them back. “I can keep them safe. I might want to change some of these stock selections.”

“Uh, it’s rather late for that, my dear Mr. Davis.”

“Don’t rush me. If I do make any changes I’ll come in early.” I opened the overnight bag and stuck the papers down in a side flap beside Pete. I had kept valuable papers there before; while it might not be as safe as the public archives in the Carlsbad Caverns, they were safer than you might think. A sneak thief had tried to take something out of that flap on another occasion; he must still have the scars of Pete’s teeth and claws.

II

MY CAR WAS parked under Pershing Square where I had left it earlier in the day. I dropped money into the parking attendant, set the bug on arterial-west, got Pete out and put him on the seat, and relaxed.

Or tried to relax. Los Angeles traffic was too fast and too slashingly murderous for me to be really happy under automatic control; I wanted to redesign their whole installation—it was not a really modern “fail safe.” By the time we were west of Western Avenue and could go back on manual control I was edgy and wanted a drink. “There’s an oasis, Pete.”

“Blurrrt?” “Right ahead.”

But while I was looking for a place to park—Los Angeles was safe from invasion; the invaders wouldn’t find a place to park—I recalled the doctor’s order not to touch alcohol.

So I told him emphatically what he could do with his orders.

Then I wondered if he could tell, almost a day later, whether or not I had taken a drink. I seemed to recall some technical article, but it had not been in my line and I had just skimmed it.

Damnation, he was quite capable of refusing to let me cold-sleep. I’d better play it cagey and lay off the stuff. “Now?” inquired Pete.

“Later. We’re going to find a drive-in instead.” I suddenly realized that I didn’t really want a drink; I wanted food and a night’s sleep. Doc was correct; I was more sober and felt better than I had in weeks. Maybe that shot in the fanny had been nothing but B ; if so, it was jet-propelled. So we

found a drive-in restaurant. I ordered chicken in the rough for me and a half pound of hamburger and some milk for Pete and took him out for a short walk while it was coming. Pete and I ate in drive-ins a lot because I didn’t have to sneak him in and out.

A half hour later I let the car drift back out of the busy circle, stopped it, lit a cigarette, scratched Pete under the chin, and thought.

Dan, my boy, the doc was right; you’ve been trying to dive down the neck of a bottle. That’s okay for your pointy head but it’s too narrow for your shoulders. Now you’re cold sober, you’ve got your belly crammed with food and it’s resting comfortably for the first time in days. You feel better.

What else? Was the doc right about the rest of it? Are you a spoiled infant? Do you lack the guts to stand up to a setback? Why are you taking this step? Is it the spirit of adventure? Or are you simply hiding from yourself, like a Section Eight trying to crawl back into his mother’s womb?

But I do want to do it, I told myself—the year 2000. Boy!

Okay, so you want to. But do you have to run off without settling the beefs you have right here?

All right, all right!—but howcan I settle them? I don’t want Belle back, not after what she’s done. And what else can I do? Sue them? Don’t be silly, I’ve got no evidence—and anyhow, nobody ever wins a lawsuit but the lawyers.

Pete said, “Wellll? Y’know!”

I looked down at his waffle-scarred head. Pete wouldn’t sue anybody; if he didn’t like the cut of another cat’s whiskers, he simply invited him to come out and fight like a cat. “I believe you’re right, Pete. I’m going to look up Miles, tear his arm off, and beat him over the head with it until he talks. We can take the Long Sleep afterward. But we’ve got to know just what it was they did to us and who rigged it.”

There was a phone booth back of the stand. I called Miles, found him at home, and told him to stay there; I’d be out.

MY OLD MAN named me Daniel Boone Davis, which was his way of declaring for personal liberty and self-reliance. I was born in 1940, a year when everybody was saying that the individual was on the skids and the future belonged to mass man. Dad refused to believe it; naming me was a note of defiance. He died under brainwashing in North Korea, trying to the last to prove his thesis.

When the Six Weeks War came along I had a degree in mechanical engineering and was in the Army. I had not used my degree to try for a commission because the one thing Dad had left me was an overpowering yen to be on my own, giving no orders, taking no orders, keeping no schedules—I simply wanted to serve my hitch and get out. When the Cold War boiled over, I was a sergeant-technician at Sandia Weapons Center in New Mexico, stuffing atoms in atom bombs and planning what I would do when my time was up. The day Sandia disappeared I was down in Dallas drawing a fresh supply of Schrecklichkeit. The fallout on that was toward Oklahoma City, so I lived to draw my GI benefits.

Pete lived through it for a similar reason. I had a buddy, Miles Gentry, a veteran called back to duty. He had married a widow with one daughter, but his wife had died about the time he was called back. He lived off post with a family in Albuquerque so as to have a home for his stepchild Frederica. Little Ricky (we never called her “Frederica”) took care of Pete for me. Thanks to the cat-goddess Bubastis, Miles and Ricky and Pete were away on a seventy-two that awful weekend—Ricky took Pete with them because I could not take him to Dallas.

I was as surprised as anyone when it turned out we had divisions stashed away at Thule and other places that no one suspected. It had been known since the ’30s that the human body could be chilled until it slowed down to almost nothing. But it had been a laboratory trick, or a last-resort therapy, until the Six Weeks War. I’ll say this for military research: If money and men can do it, it gets results. Print another billion, hire another thousand scientists and engineers, then in some incredible, left-handed, inefficient fashion the answers come up. Stasis, cold sleep, hibernation, hypothermia, reduced metabolism, call it what you will—the logistics-medicine research teams had found a way to stack people like cordwood and use them when needed. First you drug the subject, then hypnotize him, then cool him down and hold him precisely at four degrees centigrade; that is to say, at the maximum density of water with no ice crystals. If you need him in a hurry he can be brought up by diathermy and posthypnotic command in ten minutes (they did it in seven at Nome), but such speed tends to age the tissues and may make him a little stupid from then on. If you aren’t in a hurry two hours minimum is better. The quick method is what professional soldiers call a “calculated risk.”

The whole thing was a risk the enemy had not calculated, so when the war was over I was paid off instead of being liquidated or sent to a slave camp, and Miles and I went into business together about the time the insurance companies started selling cold sleep.

We went to the Mojave Desert, set up a small factory in an Air Force surplus building, and started making Hired Girl, my engineering and Miles’ law and business experience. Yes, I invented Hired Girl and all her kinfolk—Window Willie and the rest—even though you won’t find my name on them. While I was in the service I had thought hard about what one engineer can do. Go to work for Standard, or du Pont, or General Motors? Thirty years later they give you a testimonial dinner and a pension. You haven’t missed any meals, you’ve had a lot of rides in company airplanes. But you are never your own boss. The other big market for engineers is civil service—good starting pay, good pensions, no worries, thirty days’ annual leave, liberal benefits. But I had just had a long government vacation and wanted to be my own boss.

What was there small enough for one engineer and not requiring six million man-hours before the first model was on the market? Bicycle-shop engineering with peanuts for capital, the way Ford and the Wright brothers had started—people said those days were gone forever; I didn’t believe it.

Automation was booming—chemical-engineering plants that required only two gauge-watchers and a guard, machines that printed tickets in one

city and marked the space “sold” in six other cities, steel moles that mined coal while the UMW boys sat back and watched. So while I was on Uncle Sam’s payroll I soaked up all the electronics, linkages, and cybernetics that a “Q” clearance would permit.

What was the last thing to go automatic? Answer: any housewife’s house. I didn’t attempt to figure out a sensible scientific house; women didn’t want one; they simply wanted a better-upholstered cave. But housewives were still complaining about the Servant Problem long after servants had

gone the way of the mastodon. I had rarely met a housewife who did not have a touch of slaveholder in her; they seemed to think there really ought to be strapping peasant girls grateful for a chance to scrub floors fourteen hours a day and eat table scraps at wages a plumber’s helper would scorn.

That’s why we called the monster Hired Girl—it brought back thoughts of the semi-slave immigrant girl whom Grandma used to bully. Basically it was just a better vacuum cleaner and we planned to market it at a price competitive with ordinary suck brooms.

What Hired Girl would do (the first model, not the semi-intelligent robot I developed it into) was to clean floors…any floor, all day long and without supervision. And there never was a floor that didn’t need cleaning.

It swept, or mopped, or vacuum-cleaned, or polished, consulting tapes in its idiot memory to decide which. Anything larger than a BB shot it picked up and placed in a tray on its upper surface, for someone brighter to decide whether to keep or throw away. It went quietly looking for dirt all day long, in search curves that could miss nothing, passing over clean floors in its endless search for dirty floors. It would get out of a room with people in it, like a well-trained maid, unless its mistress caught up with it and flipped a switch to tell the poor thing it was welcome. Around dinnertime it would go to its stall and soak up a quick charge—this was before we installed the everlasting power pack.

There was not too much difference between Hired Girl, Mark One, and a vacuum cleaner. But the difference—that it would clean without supervision—was enough; it sold.

I swiped the basic prowl pattern from the “Electric Turtles” that were written up in Scientific American in the late forties, lifted a memory circuit out of the brain of a guided missile (that’s the nice thing about top-secret gimmicks; they don’t get patented), and I took the cleaning devices and linkages out of a dozen things, including a floor polisher used in army hospitals, a soft-drink dispenser, and those “hands” they use in atomics plants to handle anything “hot.” There wasn’t anything really new in it; it was just the way I put it together. The “spark of genius” required by our laws lay in getting a good patent lawyer.

The real genius was in the production engineering; the whole thing could be built with standard parts ordered out of Sweet’s Catalogue, with the exception of two three-dimensional cams and one printed circuit. The circuit we subcontracted; the cams I made myself in the shed we called our “factory,” using war-surplus automated tools. At first Miles and I were the whole assembly line—bash to fit, file to hide, paint to cover. The pilot model cost $4,317.09; the first hundred cost just over $39 each—and we passed them on to a Los Angeles discount house at $60 and they sold them for $85. We had to let them go on consignment to unload them at all, since we could not afford sales promotion, and we darn near starved before receipts started coming in. Then Life ran a two-page on Hired Girl…and it was a case of having enough help to assemble the monster.

Belle Darkin joined us soon after that. Miles and I had been pecking out letters on a 1908 Underwood; we hired her as a typewriter jockey and bookkeeper and rented an electric machine with executive typeface and carbon ribbon and I designed a letterhead. We were plowing it all back into the business and Pete and I were sleeping in the shop while Miles and Ricky had a nearby shack. We incorporated in self-defense. It takes three to incorporate; we gave Belle a share of stock and designated her secretary-treasurer. Miles was president and general manager; I was chief engineer and chairman of the board…with 51 percent of the stock.

I want to make clear why I kept control. I wasn’t a hog; I simply wanted to be my own boss. Miles worked like a trouper, I give him credit. But better than 60 percent of the savings that got us started were mine and 100 percent of the inventiveness and engineering were mine. Miles could not possibly have built Hired Girl, whereas I could have built it with any of a dozen partners, or possibly without one—although I might have flopped in trying to make money out of it; Miles was a businessman while I am not.

But I wanted to be certain that I retained control of the shop—and I granted Miles equal freedom in the business end…too much freedom, it turned out.

Hired Girl, Mark One, was selling like beer at a ball game and I was kept busy for a while improving it and setting up a real assembly line and putting a shop master in charge, then I happily turned to thinking up more household gadgets. Amazingly little real thought had been given to housework, even though it is at least 50 percent of all work in the world. The women’s magazines talked about “labor saving in the home” and “functional kitchens,” but it was just prattle; their pretty pictures showed living-working arrangements essentially no better than those in Shakespeare’s day; the horse-to-jet-plane revolution had not reached the home.

I stuck to my conviction that housewives were reactionaries. No “machines for living”—just gadgets to replace the extinct domestic servant, that is, for cleaning and cooking and baby tending.

I got to thinking about dirty windows and that ring around the bathtub that is so hard to scrub, as you have to bend double to get at it. It turned out

that an electrostatic device could make dirt go spung! off any polished silica surface, window glass, bathtubs, toilet bowls—anything of that sort. That was Window Willie and it’s a wonder that somebody hadn’t thought of him sooner. I held him back until I had him down to a price that people could not refuse. Do you know what window washing used to cost by the hour?

I held Willie out of production much longer than suited Miles. He wanted to sell it as soon as it was cheap enough, but I insisted on one more thing: Willie had to be easy to repair. The great shortcoming of most household gadgets was that the better they were and the more they did, the more certain they were to get out of order when you needed them most—and then require an expert at five dollars an hour to make them move again. Then the same thing will happen the following week, if not to the dishwasher, then to the air conditioner…usually late Saturday night during a snowstorm.

I wanted my gadgets to work and keep on working and not to cause ulcers in their owners.

But gadgets do get out of order, even mine. Until that great day when all gadgets are designed with no moving parts, machinery will continue to go sour. If you stuff a house with gadgets some of them will always be out of order.

But military research does get results and the military had licked this problem years earlier. You simply can’t lose a battle, lose thousands or millions of lives, maybe the war itself, just because some gadget the size of your thumb breaks down. For military purposes they used a lot of dodges—“fail safe,” stand-by circuits, “tell me three times,” and so forth. But one they used that made sense for household equipment was the plug- in component principle.

It is a moronically simple idea: don’t repair, replace. I wanted to make every part of Window Willie which could go wrong a plug-in unit, then include a set of replacements with each Willie. Some components would be thrown away, some would be sent out for repair, but Willie himself would never break down longer than necessary to plug in the replacement part.

Miles and I had our first row. I said the decision as to when to go from pilot model to production was an engineering one; he claimed that it was a business decision. If I hadn’t retained control Willie would have gone on the market just as maddeningly subject to acute appendicitis as all other

sickly, half-engineered “labor-saving” gadgets.

Belle Darkin smoothed over the row. If she had turned on the pressure I might have let Miles start selling Willie before I thought it was ready, for I was as goofed up about Belle as is possible for a man to be.

Belle was not only a perfect secretary and office manager, she also had personal specs which would have delighted Praxiteles and a fragrance which affected me the way catnip does Pete. With top-notch office girls as scarce as they were, when one of the best turns out to be willing to work for a shoestring company at a below-standard salary, one really ought to ask “why?”—but we didn’t even ask where she had worked last, so happy were we to have her dig us out of the flood of paperwork that marketing Hired Girl had caused.

Later on I would have indignantly rejected any suggestion that we should have checked on Belle, for by then her bust measurement had seriously warped my judgment. She let me explain how lonely my life had been until she came along and she answered gently that she would have to know me better but that she was inclined to feel the same way.

Shortly after she smoothed out the quarrel between Miles and myself she agreed to share my fortunes. “Dan darling, you have it in you to be a great man…and I have hopes that I am the sort of woman who can help you.”

“You certainly are!”

“Shush, darling. But I am not going to marry you right now and burden you with kids and worry you to death. I’m going to work with you and build up the business first. Then we’ll get married.”

I objected, but she was firm. “No, darling. We are going a long way, you and I. Hired Girl will be as great a name as General Electric. But when we marry I want to forget business and just devote myself to making you happy. But first I must devote myself to your welfare and your future. Trust me, dear.”

So I did. She wouldn’t let me buy her the expensive engagement ring I wanted to buy; instead I signed over to her some of my stock as a betrothal present. I went on voting it, of course. Thinking back, I’m not sure who thought of that present.

I worked harder than ever after that, thinking about wastebaskets that would empty themselves and a linkage to put dishes away after the dishwasher was through. Everybody was happy…everybody but Pete and Ricky, that is. Pete ignored Belle, as he did anything he disapproved of but could not change, but Ricky was really unhappy.

My fault. Ricky had been “my girl” since she was a six-year-old at Sandia, with hair ribbons and big solemn dark eyes. I was “going to marry her” when she grew up and we would both take care of Pete. I thought it was a game we were playing, and perhaps it was, with little Ricky serious only to the extent that it offered her eventual full custody of our cat. But how can you tell what goes on in a child’s mind?

I am not sentimental about kids. Little monsters, most of them, who don’t civilize until they are grown and sometimes not then. But little Frederica reminded me of my own sister at that age, and besides, she liked Pete and treated him properly. I think she liked me because I never talked down (I had resented that myself as a child) and took her Brownie activities seriously. Ricky was okay; she had quiet dignity and was not a banger, not a squealer, not a lap climber. We were friends, sharing the responsibility for Pete, and, so far as I knew, her being “my girl” was just a sophisticated game we were playing.

I quit playing it after my sister and mother got it the day they bombed us. No conscious decision—I just didn’t feel like joking and never went back to it. Ricky was seven then; she was ten by the time Belle joined us and possibly eleven when Belle and I became engaged. She hated Belle with an intensity that I think only I was aware of, since it was expressed only by reluctance to talk to her—Belle called it “shyness” and I think Miles thought it was too.

But I knew better and tried to talk Ricky out of it. Did you ever try to discuss with a subadolescent something the child does not want to talk about? You’ll get more satisfaction shouting in Echo Canyon. I told myself it would wear off as Ricky learned how very lovable Belle was.

Pete was another matter, and if I had not been in love I would have seen it as a clear sign that Belle and I would never understand each other. Belle “liked” my cat—oh, sure, sure! She adored cats and she loved my incipient bald spot and admired my choice in restaurants and she liked everything about me.

But liking cats is hard to fake to a cat person. There are cat people and there are others, more than a majority probably, who “cannot abide a harmless, necessary cat.” If they try to pretend, out of politeness or any reason, it shows, because they don’t understand how to treat cats—and cat protocol is more rigid than that of diplomacy.

It is based on self-respect and mutual respect and it has the same flavor as the dignidad de hombre of Latin America which you may offend only at risk to your life.

Cats have no sense of humor, they have terribly inflated egos, and they are very touchy. If somebody asked me why it was worth anyone’s time to cater to them I would be forced to answer that there is no logical reason. I would rather explain to someone who detests sharp cheeses why he “ought to like” Limburger. Nevertheless, I fully sympathize with the mandarin who cut off a priceless embroidered sleeve because a kitten was sleeping on it.

Belle tried to show that she “liked” Pete by treating him like a dog… so she got scratched. Then, being a sensible cat, he got out in a hurry and stayed out a long time—which was well, as I would have smacked him, and Pete has never been smacked, not by me. Hitting a cat is worse than useless; a cat can be disciplined only by patience, never by blows.

So I put iodine on Belle’s scratches, then tried to explain what she had done wrong. “I’m sorry it happened—I’m terribly sorry! But it will happen again if you do that again.”

“But I was just petting him!”

“Uh, yes…but you weren’t cat-petting him; you were dog-petting him. You must never pat a cat, you stroke it. You must never make sudden movements in range of its claws. You must never touch it without giving it a chance to see that you are about to…and you must always watch to see that it likes it. If it doesn’t want to be petted, it will put up with a little out of politeness—cats are very polite—but you can tell if it is merely enduring it and stop before its patience is exhausted.” I hesitated. “You don’t like cats, do you?”

“What? Why, how silly! Of course I like cats.” But she added, “I haven’t been around them much, I suppose. She’s pretty touchy, isn’t she?”

“ ‘He.’ Pete is a he-male cat. No, actually he’s not touchy, since he’s always been well treated. But you do have to learn how to behave with cats. Uh, you must never laugh at them.”

“What? Forevermore, why?”

“Not because they aren’t funny; they’re extremely comical. But they have no sense of humor and it offends them. Oh, a cat won’t scratch you for

laughing; he’ll simply stalk off and you’ll have trouble making friends with him. But it’s not too important. Knowing how to pick up a cat is much more important. When Pete comes back in I’ll show you how.”

But Pete didn’t come back in, not then, and I never showed her. Belle didn’t touch him after that. She spoke to him and acted as if she liked him, but she kept her distance and he kept his. I put it out of my mind; I couldn’t let so trivial a thing make me doubt the woman who was more to me than anything in life.

But the subject of Pete almost reached a crisis later. Belle and I were discussing where we were going to live. She still wouldn’t set the date, but

we spent a lot of time on such details. I wanted a ranchette near the plant; she favored a flat in town until we could afford a Bel-Air estate. I said, “Darling, it’s not practical; I’ve got to be near the plant. Besides, did you ever try to take care of a tomcat in a city apartment?”

“Oh, that! Look, darling, I’m glad you mentioned it. I’ve been studying up on cats, I really have. We’ll have him altered. Then he’ll be much gentler and perfectly happy in a flat.”

I stared at her, unable to believe my ears. Make a eunuch of that old warrior? Change him into a fireside decoration? “Belle, you don’t know what you’re saying!”

She tut-tutted me with the old familiar “Mother knows best,” giving the stock arguments of people who mistake cats for property…how it wouldn’t hurt him, that it was really for his own good, how she knew how much I valued him and she would never think of depriving me of him, how it was really very simple and quite safe and better for everybody.

I cut in on her. “Why don’t you arrange it for both of us?” “What, dear?”

“Me, too. I’d be much more docile and I’d stay home nights and I’d never argue with you. As you pointed out, it doesn’t hurt and I’d probably be a lot happier.”

She turned red. “You’re being preposterous.” “So are you!”

She never mentioned it again. Belle never let a difference of opinion degenerate into a row; she shut up and bided her time. But she never gave up, either. In some ways she had a lot of cat in her…which may have been why I couldn’t resist her.

I was glad to drop the matter. I was up to here in Flexible Frank. Willie and Hired Girl were bound to make us lots of money, but I had a bee in my bonnet about the perfect, all-work household automaton, the general-purpose servant. All right, call it a robot, though that is a much- abused word and I had no notion of building a mechanical man.

I wanted a gadget which could do anything inside the home—cleaning and cooking, of course, but also really hard jobs, like changing a baby’s diaper or replacing a typewriter ribbon. Instead of a stable of Hired Girls and Window Willies and Nursemaid Nans and Houseboy Harrys and Gardener Guses I wanted a man and wife to be able to buy one machine for, oh, say about the price of a good automobile, which would be the equal of the Chinese servant you read about but no one in my generation had ever seen.

If I could do that it would be the Second Emancipation Proclamation, freeing women from their age-old slavery. I wanted to abolish the old saw about how “women’s work is never done.” Housekeeping is repetitious and unnecessary drudgery; as an engineer it offended me.

For the problem to be within the scope of one engineer, almost all of Flexible Frank had to be standard parts and must not involve any new principles. Basic research is no job for one man alone; this had to be development from former art or I couldn’t do it.

Fortunately there was an awful lot of former art in engineering and I had not wasted my time while under a “Q” clearance. What I wanted wasn’t as complicated as the things a guided missile was required to do.

Just what did I want Flexible Frank to do? Answer: any work a human being does around a house. He didn’t have to play cards, make love, eat, or sleep, but he did have to clean up after the card game, cook, make beds, and tend babies—at least he had to keep track of a baby’s breathing and call someone if it changed. I decided he did not have to answer telephone calls, as AT&T was already renting a gadget for that. There was no need for him to answer the door either, as most new houses were being equipped with door answerers.

But to do the multitude of things I wanted him to do, he had to have hands, eyes, ears, and a brain…a good enough brain.

Hands I could order from the atomics-engineering equipment companies who supplied Hired Girl’s hands, only this time I would want the best, with wide-range servos and with the delicate feedback required for microanalysis manipulations and for weighing radioactive isotopes. The same companies could supply eyes—only they could be simpler, since Frank would not have to see and manipulate from behind yards of concrete shielding the way they do in a reactor plant.

The ears I could buy from any of a dozen radio-TV houses—though I might have to do some circuit designing to have his hands controlled simultaneously by sight, sound, and touch feedback the way the human hand is controlled.

But you can do an awful lot in a small space with transistors and printed circuits.

Frank wouldn’t have to use stepladders. I would make his neck stretch like an ostrich and his arms extend like lazy tongs. Should I make him able to go up and down stairs?

Well, there was a powered wheelchair that could. Maybe I should buy one and use it for the chassis, limiting the pilot model to a space no bigger than a wheelchair and no heavier than such a chair could carry— that would give me a set of parameters. I’d tie its power and steering into Frank’s brain.

The brain was the real hitch. You can build a gadget linked like a man’s skeleton or even much better. You can give it a feedback-control system good enough to drive nails, scrub floors, crack eggs—or not crack eggs. But unless it has that stuff between the ears that a man has, it is not a man, it’s not even a corpse.

Fortunately I didn’t need a human brain; I just wanted a docile moron, capable of largely repetitive household jobs.

Here is where the Thorsen memory tubes came in. The intercontinental missiles we had struck back with “thought” with Thorsen tubes, and traffic- control systems in places like Los Angeles used an idiot form of them. No need to go into theory of an electronic tube that even Bell Labs doesn’t understand too well, the point is that you can hook a Thorsen tube into a control circuit, direct the machine through an operation by manual control,

and the tube will “remember” what was done and can direct the operation without a human supervisor a second time, or any number of times. For an automated machine tool this is enough; for guided missiles and for Flexible Frank you add side circuits that give the machine “judgment.” Actually it isn’t judgment (in my opinion a machine can never have judgment); the side circuit is a hunting circuit, the pro- gramming of which says “look for so-and-so within such-and-such limits; when you find it, carry out your basic instruction.” The basic instruction can be as complicated as you can crowd into one Thorsen memory tube—which is a very wide limit indeed!—and you can program so that your “judgment” circuits (moronic back-seat drivers, they are) can interrupt the basic instructions anytime the cycle does not match that originally impressed into the Thorsen tube.

This meant that you need cause Flexible Frank to clear the table and scrape the dishes and load them into the dishwasher only once, and from then on he could cope with any dirty dishes he ever encountered. Better still, he could have an electronically duplicated Thorsen tube stuck into his head and could handle dirty dishes the first time he ever encountered them…and never break a dish.

Stick another “memorized” tube alongside the first one and he could change a wet baby first time, and never, never, never stick a pin in the baby. Frank’s square head could easily hold a hundred Thorsen tubes, each with an electronic “memory” of a different household task. Then throw a guard circuit around all the “judgment” circuits, a circuit which required him to hold still and squawl for help if he ran into something not covered by

his instructions—that way you wouldn’t use up babies or dishes.

So I did build Frank on the framework of a powered wheelchair. He looked like a hat rack making love to an octopus…but, boy, how he could

polish silverware!

MILES LOOKED OVER the first Frank, watched him mix a martini and serve it, then go around emptying and polishing ashtrays (never touching ones that were clean), open a window and fasten it open, then go to my bookcase and dust and tidy the books in it. Miles took a sip of his martini and said, “Too much vermouth.”

“It’s the way I like them. But we can tell him to fix yours one way and mine another; he’s got plenty of blank tubes in him. Flexible.” Miles took another sip. “How soon can he be engineered for production?”

“Uh, I’d like to fiddle with him for about ten years.” Before he could groan I added, “But we ought to be able to put a limited model into production in five.”

“Nonsense! We’ll get you plenty of help and have a Model-T job ready in six months.”

“The devil you will. This is my magnum opus. I’m not going to turn him loose until he is a work of art…about a third that size, everything plug-in replaceable but the Thorsens, and so all-out flexible that he’ll not only wind the cat and wash the baby, he’ll even play ping-pong if the buyer wants to pay for the extra programming.” I looked at him; Frank was quietly dusting my desk and putting every paper back exactly where he found it. “But ping-pong with him wouldn’t be much fun; he’d never miss. No, I suppose we could teach him to miss with a random-choice circuit. Mmm…yes, we could. We will, it would make a nice selling demonstration.”

“One year, Dan, and not a day over. I’m going to hire somebody away from Loewy to help you with the styling.”

I said, “Miles, when are you going to learn that I boss the engineering? Once I turn him over to you, he’s yours…but not a split second before.” Miles answered, “It’s still too much vermouth.”

I PIDDLED ALONG with the help of the shop mechanics until I had Frank looking less like a three-car crash and more like something you might want to brag about to the neighbors. In the meantime I smoothed a lot of bugs out of his control system. I even taught him to stroke Pete and scratch him under his chin in such a fashion that Pete liked it—and, believe me, that takes negative feedback as exact as anything used in atomics labs. Miles didn’t crowd me, although he came in from time to time and watched the progress. I did most of my work at night, coming back after dinner with Belle and taking her home. Then I would sleep most of the day, arrive late in the afternoon, sign whatever papers Belle had for me, see what the shop had done during the day, then take Belle out to dinner again. I didn’t try to do much before then, because creative work makes a man stink like a goat. After a hard night in the lab shop nobody could stand me but Pete.

Just as we were finishing dinner one day Belle said to me, “Going back to the shop, dear?” “Sure. Why not?”

“Good. Because Miles is going to meet us there.” “Huh?”

“He wants a stockholders’ meeting.” “A stockholders’ meeting? Why?”

“It won’t take long. Actually, dear, you haven’t been paying much attention to the firm’s business lately. Miles wants to gather up loose ends and settle some policies.”

“I’ve been sticking close to the engineering. What else am I supposed to do for the firm?” “Nothing, dear. Miles says it won’t take long.”

“What’s the trouble? Can’t Jake handle the assembly line?” “Please, dear. Miles didn’t tell me why. Finish your coffee.”

Miles was waiting for us at the plant and shook hands as solemnly as if we had not met in a month. I said, “Miles, what’s this all about?”

He turned to Belle. “Get the agenda, will you?” This alone should have told me that Belle had been lying when she claimed that Miles had not told her what he had in mind. But I did not think of it—hell, I trusted Belle!—and my attention was distracted by something else, for Belle went to the safe, spun the knob, and opened it.

I said, “By the way, dear, I tried to open that last night and couldn’t. Have you changed the combination?”

She was hauling papers out and did not turn. “Didn’t I tell you? The patrol asked me to change it after that burglar scare last week.” “Oh. You’d better give me the new numbers or some night I’ll have to phone one of you at a ghastly hour.”

“Certainly.” She closed the safe and put a folder on the table we used for conferences. Miles cleared his throat and said, “Let’s get started.”

I answered, “Okay. Darling, if this is a formal meeting, I guess you had better make pothooks…Uh, Wednesday, November eighteenth, 1970, 9:20 P.M., all stockholders present—put our names down—D. B. Davis, chairman of the board and presiding. Any old business?”

There wasn’t any. “Okay, Miles, it’s your show. Any new business?”

Miles cleared his throat. “I want to review the firm’s policies, present a program for the future, and have the board consider a financing proposal.” “Financing? Don’t be silly. We’re in the black and doing better every month. What’s the matter, Miles? Dissatisfied with your drawing account?

We could boost it.”

“We wouldn’t stay in the black under the new program. We need a broader capital structure.” “What new program?”

“Please, Dan. I’ve gone to the trouble of writing it up in detail. Let Belle read it to us.” “Well…okay.”

Skipping the gobbledygook—like all lawyers, Miles was fond of polysyllables—Miles wanted to do three things: (a) take Flexible Frank away from me, hand it over to a production-engineering team, and get it on the market without delay; (b)—but I stopped it at that point. “No!”

“Wait a minute, Dan. As president and general manager, I’m certainly entitled to present my ideas in an orderly manner. Save your comments. Let Belle finish reading.”

“Well…all right. But the answer is still ‘no.’ ”

Point (b) was in effect that we should quit frittering around as a one-horse outfit. We had a big thing, as big as the automobile had been, and we were in at the start; therefore we should at once expand and set up organization for nationwide and worldwide selling and distribution, with production to match.

I started drumming on the table. I could just see myself as chief engineer of an outfit like that. They probably wouldn’t even let me have a drafting table and if I picked up a soldering gun, the union would pull a strike. I might as well have stayed in the Army and tried to make general.

But I didn’t interrupt. Point (c) was that we couldn’t do this on pennies; it would take millions. Mannix Enterprises would put up the dough—what it

amounted to was that we would sell out to Mannix, lock, stock, and Flexible Frank, and become a daughter corporation. Miles would stay on as division manager and I would stay on as chief research engineer, but the free old days would be gone; we’d both be hired hands.

“Is that all?” I said.

“Mmm…yes. Let’s discuss it and take a vote.”

“There ought to be something in there granting us the right to sit in front of the cabin at night and sing spirituals.” “This is no joke, Dan. This is how it’s got to be.”

“I wasn’t joking. A slave needs privileges to keep him quiet. Okay, is it my turn?” “Go ahead.”

I put up a counterproposal, one that had been growing in my mind. I wanted us to get out of production. Jake Schmidt, our production shop master, was a good man; nevertheless I was forever being jerked out of a warm creative fog to straighten out bugs in production—which is like being dumped out of a warm bed into ice water. This was the real reason why I had been doing so much nightwork and staying away from the shop in the daytime. With more war-surplus buildings being moved in and a night shift contemplated I could see the time coming when I would get no peace to create, even though we turned down this utterly unpalatable plan to rub shoulders with General Motors and Consolidated. I certainly was not twins; I couldn’t be both inventor and production manager.

So I proposed that we get smaller instead of bigger—license Hired Girl and Window Willie, let someone else build and sell them while we raked in the royalties. When Flexible Frank was ready we would license him too. If Mannix wanted the licenses and would outbid the market, swell! Meantime, we’d change our name to Davis & Gentry Research Corporation and hold it down to just the three of us, with a machinist or two to help me jackleg new gadgets. Miles and Belle could sit back and count the money as it rolled in.

Miles shook his head slowly. “No, Dan. Licensing would make us some money, granted. But not nearly the money we would make if we did it ourselves.”

“Confound it, Miles, we wouldn’t be doing it ourselves; that’s just the point. We’d be selling our souls to the Mannix people. As for money, how much do you want? You can use only one yacht or one swimming pool at a time…and you’ll have both before the year is out if you want them.”

“I don’t want them.” “What do you want?”

He looked up. “Dan, you want to invent things. This plan lets you do so, with all the facilities and all the help and all the expense money in the world. Me, I want to run a big business. A big business. I’ve got the talent for it.” He glanced at Belle. “I don’t want to spend my life sitting out here in the middle of the Mojave Desert acting as business manager to one lonely inventor.”

I stared at him. “You didn’t talk that way at Sandia. You want out, Pappy? Belle and I would hate to see you go…but if that is the way you feel, I guess I could mortgage the place or something and buy you out. I wouldn’t want any man to feel tied down.” I was shocked to my heels, but if old Miles was restless I had no right to hold him to my pattern.

“No, I don’t want out; I want us to grow. You heard my proposal. It’s a formal motion for action by the corporation. I so move.”

I guess I looked puzzled. “You insist on doing it the hard way? Okay, Belle, the vote is ‘no.’ Record it. But I won’t put up my counterproposal tonight. We’ll talk it over and exchange views. I want you to be happy, Miles.”

Miles said stubbornly, “Let’s do this properly. Roll call, Belle.”

“Very well, sir. Miles Gentry, voting stock shares number—” She read off the serial numbers. “How say you?” “Aye.”

She wrote in her book.

“Daniel B. Davis, voting stock shares number—” She read off a string of telephone numbers again; I didn’t listen to the formality. “How say you?” “No. And that settles it. I’m sorry, Miles.”

“Belle S. Darkin,” she went on, “voting shares number—” She recited figures again. “I vote ‘aye.’ ”

My mouth dropped open, then I managed to stop gasping and say, “But, baby, you can’t do that! Those are your shares, sure, but you know perfectly well that—”

“Announce the tally,” Miles growled.

“The ‘ayes’ have it. The proposal is carried.” “Record it.”

“Yes, sir.”

The next few minutes were confused. First I yelled at her, then I reasoned with her, then I snarled and told her that what she had done was not honest—true, I had assigned the stock to her but she knew as well as I did that I always voted it, that I had had no intention of parting with control of the company, that it was an engagement present, pure and simple. Hell, I had even paid the income tax on it last April. If she could pull a stunt like this when we were engaged, what was our marriage going to be like?

She looked right at me and her face was utterly strange to me. “Dan Davis, if you think we are still engaged after the way you have talked to me, you are even stupider than I’ve always known you were.” She turned to Gentry. “Will you take me home, Miles?”

“Certainly, my dear.”

I started to say something, then shut up and stalked out of there without my hat. It was high time to leave, or I would probably have killed Miles, since I couldn’t touch Belle.

I didn’t sleep, of course. About 4 A.M. I got out of bed, made phone calls, agreed to pay more than it was worth, and by five-thirty was in front of the plant with a pickup truck. I went to the gate, intending to unlock it and drive the truck to the loading dock so that I could run Flexible Frank over the tailgate—Frank weighed four hundred pounds.

There was a new padlock on the gate.

I shinnied over, cutting myself on barbed wire. Once inside, the gate would give me no trouble, as there were a hundred tools in the shop capable of coping with a padlock.

But the lock on the front door had been changed too.

I was looking at it, deciding whether it was easier to break a window with a tire iron, or get the jack out of the truck and brace it between the doorframe and the knob, when somebody shouted, “Hey, you! Hands up!”

I didn’t put my hands up but I turned around. A middle-aged man was pointing a hogleg at me big enough to bombard a city. “Who the devil are you?”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Dan Davis, chief engineer of this outfit.”

“Oh.” He relaxed a little but still aimed the field mortar at me. “Yeah, you match the description. But if you have any identification on you, better let

me see it.”

“Why should I? I asked who you are?”

“Me? Nobody you’d know. Name of Joe Todd, with the Desert Protective & Patrol Company. Private license. You ought to know who we are;

we’ve had you folks as clients for the night patrol for months. But tonight I’m on as special guard.”

“You are? Then if they gave you a key to the place, use it. I want to get in. And quit pointing that blunderbuss at me.”

He still kept it leveled at me. “I couldn’t rightly do that, Mr. Davis. First place, I don’t have a key. Second place, I had particular orders about you. You aren’t to go in. I’ll let you out the gate.”

“I want the gate opened, all right, but I’m going in.” I looked around for a rock to break a window. “Please, Mr. Davis…”

“Huh?”

“I’d hate to see you insist, I really would. Because I couldn’t chance shooting you in the legs; I ain’t a very good shot. I’d have to shoot you in the belly. I’ve got soft-nosed bullets in this iron; it’ud be pretty messy.”

I suppose that was what changed my mind, though I would like to think it was something else; i.e., when I looked again through the window I saw that Flexible Frank was not where I had left him.

As he let me out the gate Todd handed me an envelope. “They said to give this to you if you showed up.” I read it in the cab of the truck. It said:

Dear Mr. Davis,

18 November 1970

At a regular meeting of the board of directors, held this date, it was voted to terminate all your connection (other than as stockholder) with the corporation, as permitted under paragraph three of your contract. It is requested that you stay off company property. Your personal papers and belongings will be forwarded to you by safe means.

The board wishes to thank you for your services and regrets the differences in policy opinion which have forced this step on us.

Sincerely yours, Miles Gentry

Chairman of the Board and General Manager by B. S. Darkin, Sec’y-Treasurer

I read it twice before I recalled that I had never had any contract with the corporation under which to invoke paragraph three or any other paragraph.

Later that day a bonded messenger delivered a package to the motel where I kept my clean underwear. It contained my hat, my desk pen, my other slide rule, a lot of books and personal correspondence, and a number of documents. But it did not contain my notes and drawings for Flexible Frank.

Some of the documents were very interesting. My “contract,” for example—sure enough, paragraph three let them fire me without notice subject to three months’ salary. But paragraph seven was even more interesting. It was the latest form of the yellow-dog clause, one in which the employee agrees to refrain from engaging in a competing occupation for five years by letting his former employers pay him cash to option his services on a first-refusal basis; i.e., I could go back to work any time I wanted to just by going, hat in hand, and asking Miles and Belle for a job—maybe that was why they sent the hat back.

But for five long years I could not work on household appliances without asking them first. I would rather have cut my throat.

There were copies of assignments of all patents, duly registered, from me to Hired Girl, Inc., for Hired Girl and Window Willie and a couple of

minor things. (Flexible Frank, of course, had never been patented—well, I didn’t think he had been patented; I found out the truth later.)

But I had never assigned any patents, I hadn’t even formally licensed their use to Hired Girl, Inc.; the corporation was my own creature and there

hadn’t seemed to be any hurry about it.

The last three items were my stock-shares certificate (those I had not given to Belle), a certified check, and a letter explaining each item of the check—accumulated “salary” less drawing-account disbursements, three months’ extra salary in lieu of notice, option money to invoke “paragraph seven”…and a thousand-dollar bonus to express “appreciation of services rendered.” That last was real sweet of them.

While I reread that amazing collection I had time to realize that I had probably not been too bright to sign everything that Belle put in front of me. There was no possible doubt that the signatures were mine.

I steadied down enough the next day to talk it over with a lawyer, a very smart and money-hungry lawyer, one who didn’t mind kicking and clapper-clawing and biting in the clinches. At first he was anxious to take it on a contingent-fee basis. But after he finished looking over my exhibits and listening to the details he sat back and laced his fingers over his belly and looked sour. “Dan, I’m going to give you some advice and it’s not going to cost you anything.”

“Well?”

“Do nothing. You haven’t got a prayer.” “But you said—”

“I know what I said. They rooked you. But how can you prove it? They were too smart to steal your stock or cut you off without a penny. They gave you exactly the deal you could have reasonably expected if everything had been kosher and you had quit, or had been fired over—as they express it

— a difference of policy opinion. They gave you everything you had coming to you…and a measly thousand to boot, just to show there are no hard feelings.”

“But I didn’t have a contract! And I never assigned those patents!”

“These papers say you did. You admit that’s your signature. Can you prove what you say by anyone else?”

I thought about it. I certainly could not. Not even Jake Schmidt knew anything that went on in the front office. The only witnesses I had were …Miles and Belle.

“Now about that stock assignment,” he went on, “that’s the one chance to break the logjam. If you—”

“But that is the only transaction in the whole stack that really is legitimate. I signed over that stock to her.”

“Yes, but why? You say that you gave it to her as an engagement present in expectation of marriage. Never mind how she voted it; that’s beside

the point. If you can prove that it was given as a betrothal gift in full expectation of marriage, and that she knew it when she accepted it, you can

force her either to marry you or to disgorge. McNulty vs. Rhodes. Then you’re in control again and you kick them out. Can you prove it?” “Damn it, I don’t want to marry her now. I wouldn’t have her.”

“That’s your problem. But one thing at a time. Have you any witnesses or any evidence, letters or anything, which would tend to show that she accepted it, understanding that you were giving it to her as your future wife?”

I thought. Sure, I had witnesses…the same old two, Miles and Belle.

“You see? With nothing but your word against both of theirs, plus a pile of written evidence, you not only won’t get anywhere, but you might wind up committed to a Napoleon factory with a diagnosis of paranoia. My advice to you is to get a job in some other line…or at the very most go ahead and buck their yellow-dog contract by setting up a competitive business—I’d like to see that phraseology tested, as long as I didn’t have to fight it myself. But don’t charge them with conspiracy. They’ll win, then they’ll sue you and clean you out of what they let you keep.” He stood up.

I took only part of his advice. There was a bar on the ground floor of the same building; I went in and had a couple or nine drinks.

I HAD PLENTY of time to recall all this while I was driving out to see Miles. Once we had started making money, he had moved Ricky and himself to a nice little rental in San Fernando Valley to get out of the murderous Mojave heat and had started commuting via the Air Force Slot. Ricky wasn’t there now, I was happy to recall; she was up at Big Bear Lake at Girl Scout camp—I didn’t want to chance Ricky’s being witness to a row between me and her stepdaddy.

I was bumper to bumper in Sepulveda Tunnel when it occurred to me that it would be smart to get the certificate for my Hired Girl stock off my person before going to see Miles. I did not expect any rough stuff (unless I started it), but it just seemed a good idea…like a cat who has had his tail caught in the screen door once, I was permanently suspicious.

Leave it in the car? Suppose I was hauled in for assault and battery; it wouldn’t be smart to have it in the car when the car was towed in and impounded.

I could mail it to myself, but I had been getting my mail lately from general delivery at the GPO, while shifting from hotel to hotel as often as they found out I was keeping a cat.

I had better mail it to someone I could trust. But that was a mighty short list.

Then I remembered someone I could trust. Ricky.

I may seem a glutton for punishment to decide to trust one female just after I had been clipped by another. But the cases are not parallel. I had known Ricky half her life and if there ever was a human being honest as a Jo block, Ricky was she…and Pete thought so too. Besides, Ricky didn’t have physical specifications capable of warping a man’s judgment. Her femininity was only in her face; it hadn’t affected her figure yet.

When I managed to escape from the logjam in Sepulveda Tunnel I got off the throughway and found a drugstore; there I bought stamps and a big and a little envelope and some note paper. I wrote to her:

Dear Rikki-tikki-tavi,

I hope to see you soon but until I do, I want you to

keep this inside envelope for me. It’s a secret, just between you and me.

I stopped and thought. Doggone it, if anything happened to me…oh, even a car crash, or anything that can stop breathing…while Ricky had this, eventually it would wind up with Miles and Belle. Unless I rigged things to prevent it. I realized as I thought about it that I had subconsciously reached a decision about the cold-sleep deal; I wasn’t going to take it. Sobering up and the lecture the doc had read me had stiffened my spine; I wasn’t going to run away, I was going to stay and fight—and this stock certificate was my best weapon. It gave me the right to examine the books; it entitled me to poke my nose into any and all affairs of the company. If they tried again simply to keep me out with a hired guard I could go back next time with a lawyer and a deputy sheriff and a court order.

I could drag them into court with it too. Maybe I couldn’t win but I could make a stink and perhaps cause the Mannix people to shy off from buying them out.

Maybe I shouldn’t send it to Ricky at all.

No, if anything happened to me I wanted her to have it. Ricky and Pete were all the “family” I had. I went on writing:

If by any chance I don’t see you for a year, you’ll know something has happened to me. If that happens, take care of Pete, if you can find him— and without telling anybody take the inside envelope to a branch of the Bank of America, give it to the trust officer and tell him to open it.

Love and kisses, Uncle Danny

Then I took another sheet and wrote: “3 December 1970, Los Angeles, California—For one dollar in hand received and other valuable considerations I assign”—here I listed legal descriptions and serial numbers of my Hired Girl, Inc., stock shares—“to the Bank of America in trust for Frederica Virginia Gentry and to be reassigned to her on her twenty-first birthday,” and signed it. The intent was clear and it was the best I could do on a drugstore counter with a jukebox blaring in my ear. It should make sure that Ricky got the stock if anything happened to me, while making darn sure that Miles and Belle could not grab it away from her.

But if all went well, I would just ask Ricky to give the envelope back to me when I got around to it. By not using the assignment form printed on the back of the certificate, I avoided all the red tape of having a minor assign it back to me; I could just tear up the separate sheet of paper.

I sealed the stock certificate with the note assigning it into the smaller envelope, placed it and the letter to Ricky in the larger envelope, addressed it to Ricky at the Girl Scout camp, stamped it, and dropped it in the box outside the drugstore. I noted that it would be picked up in about forty minutes and climbed back into my car feeling positively lighthearted…not because I had safeguarded the stock but because I had solved my greater problems.

Well, not “solved” them, perhaps, but had decided to face them, not run off and crawl in a hole to play Rip van Winkle…nor try to blot them out again with ethanol in various flavors. Sure, I wanted to see the year 2000, but just by sitting tight I would see it…when I was sixty, and still young enough, probably, to whistle at the girls. No hurry. Jumping to the next century in one long nap wouldn’t be satisfactory to a normal man anyhow—

about like seeing the end of a movie without having seen what goes before. The thing to do with the next thirty years was to enjoy them while they

unfolded; then when I came to the year 2000 I would understand it.

In the meantime I was going to have one lulu of a fight with Miles and Belle. Maybe I wouldn’t win, but I would sure let them know they had been in a scrap—like the times Pete had come home bleeding in six directions but insisting loudly, “You ought to see the other cat!”

I didn’t expect much out of this interview tonight. All it would amount to was a formal declaration of war. I planned to ruin Miles’ sleep… and he could phone Belle and ruin hers.

III

BY THE TIME I got to Miles’ house I was whistling. I had quit worrying about that precious pair and had worked out in my head, in the last fifteen miles, two brand-new gadgets, either one of which could make me rich. One was a drafting machine, to be operated like an electric typewriter. I guessed that there must be easily fifty thousand engineers in the U.S. alone bending over drafting boards every day and hating it, because it gets you in your kidneys and ruins your eyes. Not that they didn’t want to design—they did want to—but physically it was much too hard work.

This gismo would let them sit down in a big easy chair and tap keys and have the picture unfold on an easel above the keyboard. Depress three keys simultaneously and have a horizontal line appear just where you want it; depress another key and you fillet it in with a vertical line; depress two keys and then two more in succession and draw a line at an exact slant.

Cripes, for a small additional cost as an accessory, I could add a second easel, let an architect design in isometric (the only easy way to design), and have the second picture come out in perfect perspective rendering without his even looking at it. Why, I could even set the thing to pull floor plans and elevations right out of the isometric.

The beauty of it was that it could be made almost entirely with standard parts, most of them available at radio shops and camera stores. All but the control board, that is, and I was sure I could breadboard a rig for that by buying an electric typewriter, tearing its guts out, and hooking the keys to operate these other circuits. A month to make a primitive model, six weeks more to chase bugs…

But that one I just tucked away in the back of my mind, certain that I could do it and that it would have a market. The thing that really delighted me was that I had figured out a way to outflex poor old Flexible Frank. I knew more about Frank than anyone else could learn, even if they studied him a year. What they could not know, what even my notes did not show, was that there was at least one workable alternative for every choice I had made

—and that my choices had been constrained by thinking of him as a household servant. To start with, I could throw away the restriction that he had to live in a powered wheelchair. From there on I could do anything, except that I would need the Thorsen memory tubes—and Miles could not keep me from using those; they were on the market for anyone who wanted to design a cybernetic sequence.

The drafting machine could wait; I’d get busy on the unlimited all-purpose automaton, capable of being programmed for anything a man could do, just as long as it did not require true human judgment.

No, I’d rig a drafting machine first, then use it to design Protean Pete. “How about that, Pete? We’re going to name the world’s first real robot after you.”

“Mrrrrarr?”

“Don’t be so suspicious; it’s an honor.” After breaking in on Frank, I could design Pete right at my drafting machine, really refine it, and quickly. I’d make it a killer, a triple-threat demon that would displace Frank before they ever got him into production. With any luck I’d run them broke and have them begging me to come back. Kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, would they?

There were lights on in Miles’ house and his car was at the curb. I parked in front of Miles’ car, said to Pete, “You’d better stay here, fellow, and protect the car. Holler ‘halt’ three times fast, then shoot to kill.”

“Nooo!”

“If you go inside you’ll have to stay in the bag.” “Bleerrrt?”

“Don’t argue. If you want to come in, get in your bag.” Pete jumped into the bag.

Miles let me in. Neither of us offered to shake hands. He led me into his living room and gestured at a chair.

Belle was there. I had not expected her, but I suppose it was not surprising. I looked at her and grinned. “Fancy meeting you here! Don’t tell me you came all the way from Mojave just to talk to little old me?” Oh, I’m a gallus-snapper when I get started; you should see me wear women’s hats at parties.

Belle frowned. “Don’t be funny, Dan. Say what you have to say, if anything, and get out.”

“Don’t hurry me. I think this is cozy… my former partner… my former fiancée. All we lack is my former business.”

Miles said placatingly, “Now, Dan, don’t take that attitude. We did it for your own good…and you can come back to work any time you want to. I’d be glad to have you back.”

“For my own good, eh? That sounds like what they told the horse thief when they hanged him. As for coming back—how about it, Belle? Can I come back?”

She bit her lip. “If Miles says so, of course.”

“It seems like only yesterday that it used to be: ‘If Dan says so, of course.’ But everything changes; that’s life. And I’m not coming back, kids; you can stop fretting. I just came here tonight to find out some things.”

Miles glanced at Belle. She answered, “Such as?”

“Well, first, which one of you cooked up the swindle? Or did you plan it together?” Miles said slowly, “That’s an ugly word, Dan. I don’t like it.”

“Oh, come, come, let’s not be mealymouthed. If the word is ugly, the deed is ten times as ugly. I mean faking a yellow-dog contract, faking patent assignments—that one is a Federal offense, Miles; I think they pipe sunlight to you on alternate Wednesdays. I’m not sure, but no doubt the FBI can tell me. Tomorrow,” I added, seeing him flinch.

“Dan, you’re not going to be silly enough to try to make trouble about this?”

“Trouble? I’m going to hit you in all directions, civil and criminal, on all counts. You’ll be too busy to scratch…unless you agree to do one thing. But I didn’t mention your third peccadillo—theft of my notes and drawings of Flexible Frank…and the working model, too, although you may be able to make me pay for the materials for that, since I did bill them to the company.”

“Theft, nonsense!” snapped Belle. “You were working for the company.”

“Was I? I did most of it at night. And I never was an employee, Belle, as you both know. I simply drew living expenses against profits earned by my shares. What is the Mannix outfit going to say when I file a criminal complaint, charging that the things they were interested in buying—Hired Girl, Willie, and Frank—never did belong to the company but were stolen from me?”

“Nonsense,” Belle repeated grimly. “You were working for the company. You had a contract.”

I leaned back and laughed. “Look, kids, you don’t have to lie now; save it for the witness stand. There ain’t nobody here but just us chickens. What I really want to know is this: Who thought it up? I know how it was done. Belle, you used to bring in papers for me to sign. If more than one copy had to be signed, you would paper-clip the other copies to the first—for my convenience, of course; you were always the perfect secretary—and all I would see of the copies underneath would be the place to sign my name. Now I know that you slipped some jokers into some of those neat piles.

So I know that you were the one who conducted the mechanics of the swindle; Miles could not have done it. Shucks, Miles can’t even type very well.

But who worded those documents you horsed me into signing? You? I don’t think so…unless you’ve had legal training you never mentioned. How about it, Miles? Could a mere stenographer phrase that wonderful clause seven so perfectly? Or did it take a lawyer? You, I mean.”

Miles’ cigar had long since gone out. He took it from his mouth, looked at it, and said carefully, “Dan, old friend, if you think you’ll trap us into admissions, you’re crazy.”

“Oh, come off it; we’re alone. You’re both guilty either way. But I’d like to think that Delilah over there came to you with the whole thing wrapped up, complete, and then tempted you into a moment of weakness. But I know it’s not true. Unless Belle is a lawyer herself, you were both in it, accomplices before and after. You wrote the double talk; she typed it and tricked me into signing. Right?”

“Don’t answer, Miles!”

“Of course I won’t answer,” Miles agreed. “He may have a recorder hidden in that bag.”

“I should have had,” I agreed, “but I don’t.” I spread the top of the bag and Pete stuck his head out. “You getting it all, Pete? Careful what you say, folks; Pete has an elephant’s memory. No, I didn’t bring a recorder—I’m just good old lunkheaded Dan Davis who never thinks ahead. I go stumbling along, trusting my friends…the way I trusted you two. Is Belle a lawyer, Miles? Or did you yourself sit down in cold blood and plan how you could hog-tie me and rob me and make it look legal?”

“Miles!” interrupted Belle. “With his skill, he could make a recorder the size of a pack of cigarettes. It may not be in the bag. It may be on him.” “That’s a good idea, Belle. Next time I’ll have one.”

“I’m aware of that, my dear,” Miles answered. “If he has, you are talking very loosely. Mind your tongue.”

Belle answered with a word I didn’t know she used. My eyebrows went up. “Snapping at each other? Trouble between thieves already?” Miles’ temper was stretching thin, I was happy to see. He answered, “Mind your tongue, Dan…if you want to stay healthy.”

“Tsk, tsk! I’m younger than you are and I’ve had the judo course a lot more recently. And you wouldn’t shoot a man; you’d frame him with some sort of fake legal document. ‘Thieves,’ I said, and ‘thieves’ I meant. Thieves and liars, both of you.” I turned to Belle. “My old man taught me never to call a lady a liar, sugar face, but you aren’t a lady. You’re a liar…and a thief…and a tramp.”

Belle turned red and gave me a look in which all her beauty vanished and the underlying predatory animal was all that remained. “Miles!” she said shrilly. “Are you going to sit there and let him—”

“Quiet!” Miles ordered. “His rudeness is calculated. It’s intended to make us get excited and say things we’ll regret. Which you are almost doing. So keep quiet.” Belle shut up, but her face was still feral. Miles turned to me. “Dan, I’m a practical man always, I hope. I tried to make you see reason before you walked out of the firm. In the settlement I tried to make it such that you would take the inevitable gracefully.”

“Be raped quietly, you mean.”

“As you will. I still want a peaceful settlement. You couldn’t win any sort of suit, but as a lawyer I know that it is always better to stay out of court than to win. If possible. You mentioned a while ago that there was some one thing I could do that would placate you. Tell me what it is; perhaps we can reach terms.”

“Oh, that. I was coming to it. You can’t do it, but perhaps you can arrange it. It’s simple. Get Belle to assign back to me the stock I assigned to her as an engagement present.”

“No!” said Belle. Miles said, “I told you to keep quiet.”

I looked at her and said, “Why not, my former dear? I’ve taken advice on this point, as the lawyers put it, and, since it was given in consideration of the fact that you promised to marry me, you are not only morally but legally bound to return it. It was not a ‘free gift,’ as I believe the expression is, but something handed over for an expected and contracted consideration which I never received, to wit, your somewhat lovely self. So how about coughing up, huh? Or have you changed your mind again and are now willing to marry me?”

She told me where and how I could expect to marry her.

Miles said tiredly, “Belle, you’re only making things worse. Don’t you understand that he is trying to get our goats?” He turned back to me. “Dan, if that is what you came over for, you may as well leave. I stipulate that if the circumstances had been as you alleged, you might have a point. But they were not. You transferred that stock to Belle for value received.”

“Huh? What value? Where’s the canceled check?”

“There didn’t need be any. For services to the company beyond her duties.”

I stared. “What a lovely theory! Look, Miles old boy, if it was for service to the company and not to me personally, then you must have known about it and would have been anxious to pay her the same amount—after all, we split the profits fifty-fifty even if I had…or thought I had…retained control. Don’t tell me you gave Belle a block of stock of the same size?”

Then I saw them glance at each other and I got a wild hunch. “Maybe you did! I’ll bet my little dumpling made you do it, or she wouldn’t play. Is that right? If so, you can bet your life she registered the transfer at once…and the dates will show that I transferred stock to her at the very time we got

engaged—shucks, the engagement was in the Desert Herald—while you transferred stock to her when you put the skids under me and she jilted me—and it’s all a matter of record! Maybe a judge will believe me, Miles? What do you think?”

I had cracked them, I had cracked them! I could tell from the way their faces went blank that I had stumbled on the one circumstance they could

never explain and one I was never meant to know. So I crowded them…and had another wild guess. Wild? No, logical. “How much stock, Belle? As much as you got out of me, just for being ‘engaged’? You did more for him; you should have gotten more.” I stopped suddenly. “Say… I thought it was odd that Belle came all the way over here just to talk to me, seeing how she hates that trip. Maybe you didn’t come all that way; maybe you were here all along. Are you two shacked up? Or should I say ‘engaged’? Or…are you already married?” I thought about it. “I’ll bet you are. Miles, you aren’t as starry-eyed as I am; I’ll bet my other shirt that you would never, never transfer stock to Belle simply on promise of marriage. But you might for a wedding present—provided you got back voting control of it. Don’t bother to answer; tomorrow I’m going to start digging for the facts. They’ll be on record too.”

Miles glanced at Belle and said, “Don’t waste your time. Meet Mrs. Gentry.”

“So? Congratulations, both of you. You deserve each other. Now about my stock. Since Mrs. Gentry obviously can’t marry me, then—”

“Don’t be silly, Dan. I’ve already offset your ridiculous theory. I did make a stock transfer to Belle just as you did. For the same reason, services to the firm. As you say, these things are matters of record. Belle and I were married just a week ago…but you will find the stock registered to her quite some time ago if you care to look it up. You can’t connect them. No, she received stock from both of us, because of her great value to the firm. Then after you jilted her and after you left the employ of the firm, we were married.”

It set me back. Miles was too smart to tell a lie I could check on so easily. But there was something about it that was not true, something more than I had as yet found out.

“When and where were you married?”

“Santa Barbara courthouse, last Thursday. Not that it is your business.”

“Perhaps not. When was the stock transfer?”

“I don’t know exactly. Look it up if you want to know.”

Damn it, it just did not ring true that he had handed stock over to Belle before he had her committed to him. That was the sort of sloppy stunt I pulled; it wasn’t in character for him. “I’m wondering something, Miles. If I put a detective to work on it, might I find that the two of you got married once before a little earlier than that? Maybe in Yuma? Or Las Vegas? Or maybe you ducked over to Reno that time you both went north for the tax hearings? Maybe it would turn out that there was such a marriage recorded, and maybe the date of the stock transfer and the dates my patents were assigned to the firm all made a pretty pattern. Huh?”

Miles did not crack; he did not even look at Belle. As for Belle, the hate in her face could not have been increased even by a lucky stab in the dark. Yet it seemed to fit and I decided to ride the hunch to the limit.

Miles simply said, “Dan, I’ve been patient with you and have tried to be conciliatory. All it’s got me is abuse. So I think it’s time you left. Or I’ll bloody well make a stab at throwing you out—you and your flea-bitten cat!”

“Olé!” I answered. “That’s the first manly thing you’ve said tonight. But don’t call Pete ‘flea-bitten.’ He understands English and he is likely to take a chunk out of you. Okay, ex-pal, I’ll get out…but I want to make a short curtain speech, very short. It’s probably the last word I’ll ever have to say to you. Okay?”

“Well…okay. Make it short.”

Belle said urgently, “Miles, I want to talk to you.”

He motioned her to be quiet without looking at her. “Go ahead. Be brief.”

I turned to Belle. “You probably won’t want to hear this, Belle. I suggest that you leave.”

She stayed, of course. I wanted to be sure she would. I looked back at him. “Miles, I’m not too angry with you. The things a man will do for a larcenous woman are beyond belief. If Samson and Mark Antony were vulnerable, why should I expect you to be immune? By rights, instead of being angry I should be grateful to you. I guess I am, a little. I do know I’m sorry for you.” I looked over at Belle. “You’ve got her now and she’s all your

problem…and all it has cost me is a little money and temporarily my peace of mind. But what will she cost you? She cheated me, she even managed to persuade you, my trusted friend, to cheat me…what day will she team up with a new cat’s-paw and start cheating you? Next week? Next month? As long as next year? As surely as a dog returns to its vomit—”

“Miles!” Belle shrilled.

Miles said dangerously, “Get out!” and I knew he meant it. So I stood up.

“We were just going. I’m sorry for you, old fellow. Both of us made just one mistake originally, and it was as much my fault as yours. But you’ve got to pay for it alone. And that’s too bad…because it was such an innocent mistake.”

His curiosity got him. “What do you mean?”

“We should have wondered why a woman so smart and beautiful and competent and all-around high-powered was willing to come to work for us at clerk-typist’s wages. If we had taken her fingerprints the way the big firms do, and run a routine check, we might not have hired her…and you and I would still be partners.”

Pay dirt again! Miles looked suddenly at his wife and she looked—well, “cornered rat” is wrong; rats aren’t shaped like Belle.

And I couldn’t leave well enough alone; I just had to pick at it. I walked toward her, saying, “Well, Belle? If I took that highball glass sitting beside you and had the fingerprints on it checked, what would I find? Pictures in post offices? The big con? Or bigamy? Marrying suckers for their money, maybe? Is Miles legally your husband?” I reached down and picked up the glass.

Belle slapped it out of my hand. And Miles shouted at me.

And I had finally pushed my luck too far. I had been stupid to go into a cage of dangerous animals with no weapons, then I forgot the first tenet of the animal tamer; I turned my back. Miles shouted and I turned toward him. Belle reached for her purse…and I remember thinking that it was a hell of a time for her to be reaching for a cigarette.

Then I felt the stab of the needle.

I remember feeling just one thing as my knees got weak and I started slipping toward the carpet: utter astonishment that Belle would do such a thing to me. When it came right down to it, I still trusted her.

IV

I NEVER WAS completely unconscious. I got dizzy and vague as the drug hit me—it hits even quicker than morphine. But that was all. Miles yelled something at Belle and grabbed me around the chest as my knees folded. As he dragged me over and let me collapse into a chair, even the dizziness passed.

But while I was awake, part of me was dead. I know now what they used on me: the “zombie” drug, Uncle Sam’s answer to brainwashing. So far as I know, we never used it on a prisoner, but the boys whipped it up in the investigation of brainwashing and there it was, illegal but very effective. It’s the same stuff they now use in one-day psychoanalysis, but I believe it takes a court order to permit even a psychiatrist to use it.

God knows where Belle laid hands on it. But then God alone knows what other suckers she had on the string.

But I wasn’t wondering about that then; I wasn’t wondering about anything. I just lay slumped there, passive as a vegetable, hearing what went on, seeing anything in front of my eyes—but if Lady Godiva had strolled through without her horse I would not have shifted my eyes as she passed out of my vision.

Unless I was told to.

Pete jumped out of his bag, trotted over to where I slouched, and asked what was wrong. When I didn’t answer he started stropping my shins vigorously back and forth while still demanding an explanation. When still I did not respond he levitated to my knees, put his forepaws on my chest, looked me right in the face, and demanded to know what was wrong, right now and no nonsense.

I didn’t answer and he began to wail.

That caused Miles and Belle to pay attention to him. Once Miles had me in the chair he had turned to Belle and had said bitterly, “Now you’ve done it! Have you gone crazy?”

Belle answered, “Keep your nerve, Chubby. We’re going to settle him once and for all.”

“What? If you think I’m going to help in a murder—”

“Stuff it! That would be the logical thing to do…but you don’t have the guts for it. Fortunately it’s not necessary with that stuff in him.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s our boy now. He’ll do what I tell him to. He won’t make any more trouble.” “But…good God, Belle, you can’t keep him doped up forever. Once he comes out of it—”

“Quit talking like a lawyer. I know what this stuff will do; you don’t. When he comes out of it he’ll do whatever I’ve told him to do. I’ll tell him never to sue us; he’ll never sue us. I tell him to quit sticking his nose into our business; okay, he’ll leave us alone. I tell him to go to Timbuktu; he’ll go there. I tell him to forget all this; he’ll forget…but he’ll do it just the same.”

I listened, understanding her but not in the least interested. If somebody had shouted, “The house is on fire!” I would have understood that, too, and I still would not have been interested.

“I don’t believe it.”

“You don’t, eh?” She looked at him oddly. “You ought to.” “Huh? What do you mean?”

“Skip it, skip it. This stuff works, Chubby. But first we’ve got to—”

It was then that Pete started wailing. You don’t hear a cat wail very often; you could go a lifetime and not hear it. They don’t do it when fighting, no matter how badly they are hurt; they never do it out of simple displeasure. A cat does it only in ultimate distress, when the situation is utterly unbearable but beyond its capacity and there is nothing left to do but keen.

It puts one in mind of a banshee. Also it is hardly to be endured; it hits a nerve-racking frequency. Miles turned and said, “That confounded cat! We’ve got to get it out of here.”

Belle said, “Kill it.”

“Huh? You’re always too drastic, Belle. Why, Dan would raise more Cain about that worthless animal than he would if we had stripped him completely. Here—” He turned and picked up Pete’s travel bag.

“I’ll kill it!” Belle said savagely. “I’ve wanted to kill that damned cat for months.” She looked around for a weapon and found one, a poker from the fireplace set; she ran over and grabbed it.

Miles picked up Pete and tried to put him into the bag.

“Tried” is the word. Pete isn’t anxious to be picked up by anyone but me or Ricky, and even I would not pick him up while he was wailing, without very careful negotiation; an emotionally disturbed cat is as touchy as mercury fulminate. But even if he were not upset, Pete certainly would never permit himself without protest to be picked up by the scruff of the neck.

Pete got him with claws in the forearm and teeth in the fleshy part of Miles’ left thumb. Miles yelped and dropped him. Belle shrilled, “Stand clear, Chubby!” and swung at him with the poker.

Belle’s intentions were sufficiently forthright and she had the strength and the weapon. But she wasn’t skilled with her weapon, whereas Pete is very skilled with his. He ducked under that roundhouse swipe and hit her four ways, two paws for each of her legs.

Belle screamed and dropped the poker.

I didn’t see much of the rest of it. I was still looking straight ahead and could see most of the living room, but I couldn’t see anything outside that angle because no one told me to look in any other direction. So I followed the rest of it mostly by sound, except once when they doubled back across my cone of vision, two people chasing a cat—then with unbelievable suddenness, two people being chased by a cat. Aside from that one short scene I was aware of the battle by the sounds of crashes, running, shouts, curses, and screams.

But I don’t think they ever laid a glove on him.

The worst thing that happened to me that night was that in Pete’s finest hour, his greatest battle and greatest victory, I not only did not see all the details, but I was totally unable to appreciate any of it. I saw and I heard but I had no feeling about it; at his supreme Moment of Truth I was numb.

I recall it now and conjure up emotion I could not feel then. But it’s not the same thing; I’m forever deprived, like a narcolept on a honeymoon.

The crashes and curses ceased abruptly, and shortly Miles and Belle came back into the living room. Belle said between gasps, “Who left that censorable screen door unhooked?”

“You did. Shut up about it. It’s gone now.” Miles had blood on his face as well as his hands; he dabbed at the fresh scratches on his face and did them no good. At some point he must have tripped and gone down, for his clothes looked it and his coat was split up the back.

“I will like hell shut up. Have you got a gun in the house?” “Huh?”

“I’m going to shoot that damned cat.” Belle was in even worse shape than Miles; she had more skin where Pete could get at it—legs, bare arms

and shoulders. It was clear that she would not be wearing strapless dresses again soon, and unless she got expert attention promptly she was likely

to have scars. She looked like a harpy after a no-holds-barred row with her sisters. Miles said, “Sit down!”

She answered him briefly and, by implication, negatively. “I’m going to kill that cat.”

“Then don’t sit down. Go wash yourself. I’ll help you with iodine and stuff and you can help me. But forget that cat; we’re well rid of it.”

Belle answered rather incoherently, but Miles understood her. “You too,” he answered, “in spades. Look here, Belle, if I did have a gun—I’m not saying that I have—and you went out there and started shooting, whether you got the cat or not you would have the police here inside of ten minutes, snooping around and asking questions. Do you want that with him on our hands?” He jerked a thumb in my direction. “And if you go outside the house tonight without a gun that beast will probably kill you.” He scowled even more deeply. “There ought to be a law against keeping an animal like

that. He’s a public danger. Listen to him.”

We could all hear Pete prowling around the house. He was not wailing now; he was voicing his war cry—inviting them to choose weapons and come outside, singly or in bunches.

Belle listened to it and shuddered. Miles said, “Don’t worry; he can’t get in. I not only hooked the screen you left open, I locked the door.” “I did not leave it open!”

“Have it your own way.” Miles went around checking the window fastenings. Presently Belle left the room and so did he. Sometime while they were gone Pete shut up. I don’t know how long they were gone; time didn’t mean anything to me.

Belle came back first. Her makeup and hairdo were perfect; she had put on a long-sleeved, high-necked dress and had replaced the ruined stockings. Except for Band-Aid strips on her face, the results of battle did not show. Had it not been for the grim look on her phiz I would have considered her, under other circumstances, a delectable sight.

She came straight toward me and told me to stand up, so I did. She went through me quickly and expertly, not forgetting watch pocket, shirt pockets, and the diagonal one on the left inside of the jacket which most suits do not have. The take was not much—my wallet with a small amount of cash, ID cards, driver’s license, and such, keys, small change, a nasal inhaler against the smog, minor miscellaneous junk, and the envelope containing the certified check which she herself had bought and had sent to me. She turned it over, read the closed endorsement I had made on it, and looked puzzled.

“What’s this, Dan? Buying a slug of insurance?”

“No.” I would have told her the rest, but answering the last question asked of me was the best I could do.

She frowned and put it with the rest of the contents of my pockets. Then she caught sight of Pete’s bag and apparently recalled the flap in it I used for a briefcase, for she picked it up and opened the flap.

At once she found the quadruplicate sets of the dozen and a half forms I had signed for Mutual Assurance Company. She sat down and started to read them. I stood where she had left me, a tailor’s dummy waiting to be put away.

Presently Miles came in wearing bathrobe and slippers and quite a large amount of gauze and adhesive tape. He looked like a fourth-rate middleweight whose manager has let him be outmatched. He was wearing one bandage like a scalp lock, fore and aft on his bald head; Pete must have got to him while he was down.

Belle glanced up, waved him to silence, and indicated the stack of papers she was through with. He sat down and started to read. He caught up with her and finished the last one reading over her shoulder.

She said, “This puts a different complexion on things.”

“An understatement. This commitment order is for December fourth—that’s tomorrow. Belle, he’s as hot as noon in Mojave; we’ve got to get him out of here!” He glanced at a clock. “They’ll be looking for him in the morning.”

“Miles, you always get chicken when the pressure is on. This is a break, maybe the best break we could hope for.” “How do you figure?”

“This zombie soup, good as it is, has one shortcoming. Suppose you dose somebody with it and load him up with what you want him to do. Okay, so he does it. He carries out your orders; he has to. Know anything about hypnosis?”

“Not much.”

“Do you know anything but law, Chubby? You haven’t any curiosity. A posthypnotic command—which is what this amounts to—may conflict, in fact it’s almost certain to conflict, with what the subject really wants to do. Eventually that may land him in the hands of a psychiatrist. If the psychiatrist is any good, he’s likely to find out what the trouble is. It is just possible that Dan here might go to one and get unstuck from whatever orders I give him. If he did, he could make plenty of trouble.”

“Damn it, you told me this drug was sure-fire.”

“Good God, Chubby, you have to take chances with everything in life. That’s what makes it fun. Let me think.”

After a bit she said, “The simplest thing and the safest is to let him go ahead with this sleep jump he is all set to take. He wouldn’t be any more out of our hair if he was dead—and we don’t have to take any risk. Instead of having to give him a bunch of complicated orders and then praying that he won’t come unstuck, all we have to do is order him to go ahead with the cold sleep, then sober him up and get him out of here…or get him out of here and then sober him.” She turned to me. “Dan, when are you going to take the Sleep?”

“I’m not.”

“Huh? What’s all this?” She gestured at the papers from my bag. “Papers for cold sleep. Contracts with Mutual Assurance.”

“He’s nutty,” Miles commented. “Mmm…of course he is. I keep forgetting that they can’t really think when they’re under it. They can hear and talk and answer questions…but it has to be just the right questions. They can’t think.” She came up close and looked me in the eyes. “Dan, I want you to tell me all about this cold-sleep deal. Start at the beginning and tell it all the way through. You’ve got all the papers here to do it; apparently you signed them just today. Now you say you aren’t going to do it. Tell me all about it, because I want to know why you were going to do it and now you say you aren’t.”

So I told her. Put that way, I could answer. It took a long time to tell as I did just what she said and told it all the way through in detail. “So you sat there in that drive-in and decided not to? You decided to come out here and make trouble for us instead?”

“Yes.” I was about to go on, tell about the trip out, tell her what I had said to Pete and what he had said to me, tell her how I had stopped at a drugstore and taken care of my Hired Girl stock, how I had driven then to Miles’ house, how Pete had not wanted to wait in the car, how—

But she did not give me a chance. She said, “You’ve changed your mind again, Dan. You want to take the cold sleep. You’re going to take the cold sleep. You won’t let anything in the world stand in the way of your taking the cold sleep. Understand me? What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to take the cold sleep. I want to take…” I started to sway. I had been standing like a flagpole for more than an hour, I would guess, without moving any muscle, because no one had told me to. I started collapsing slowly toward her.

She jumped back and said sharply, “Sit down!”

So I sat down.

Belle turned to Miles. “That does it. I’ll hammer away at it until I’m sure he can’t miss.” Miles looked at the clock. “He said that doctor wanted him there at noon.”

“Plenty of time. But we had better drive him there ourselves, just to be—No, damn it!” “What’s the trouble?”

“The time is too short. I gave him enough soup for a horse, because I wanted it to hit him fast—before he hit me. By noon he’d be sober enough to convince most people. But not a doctor.”

“Maybe it’ll just be perfunctory. His physical examination is already here and signed.”

“You heard what he said the doctor told him. The doctor’s going to check him to see if he’s had anything to drink. That means he’ll test his reflexes and take his reaction time and peer in his eyes and—oh, all the things we don’t want done. The things we don’t dare let a doctor do. Miles, it won’t work.”

“How about the next day? Call ’em up and tell them there has been a slight delay?” “Shut up and let me think.”

Presently she started looking over the papers I had brought with me. Then she left the room, returned immediately with a jeweler’s loupe, which she screwed into her right eye like a monocle, and proceeded to examine each paper with great care. Miles asked her what she was doing, but she brushed his question aside.

Presently she took the loupe out of her eye and said, “Thank goodness they all have to use the same government forms. Chubby, get me the yellow-pages phone book.”

“What for?”

“Get it, get it. I want to check the exact phrasing of a firm name—oh, I know what it is but I want to be sure.”

Grumbling, Miles fetched it. She thumbed through it, then said, “Yes, ‘Master Insurance Company of California’…and there’s room enough on each of them. I wish it could be ‘Motors’ instead of ‘Master’; that would be a cinch—but I don’t have any connections at ‘Motors Insurance,’ and besides, I’m not sure they even handle hibernation; I think they’re just autos and trucks.” She looked up. “Chubby, you’re going to have to drive me out to the plant right away.”

“Huh?”

“Unless you know of some quicker way to get an electric typewriter with executive typeface and carbon ribbon. No, you go out by yourself and fetch it back; I’ve got telephoning to do.”

He frowned. “I’m beginning to see what you plan to do. But, Belle, this is crazy. This is fantastically dangerous.”

She laughed. “That’s what you think. I told you I had good connections before we ever teamed up. Could you have swung the Mannix deal alone?” “Well…I don’t know.”

“I know. And maybe you don’t know that Master Insurance is part of the Mannix group.” “Well, no, I didn’t. And I don’t see what difference it makes.”

“It means my connections are still good. See here, Chubby, the firm I used to work for used to help Mannix Enterprises with their tax losses …until my boss left the country. How do you think we got such a good deal without being able to guarantee that Danny boy went with the deal? I know all about Mannix. Now hurry up and get that typewriter and I’ll let you watch an artist at work. Watch out for that cat.”

Miles grumbled but started to leave, then returned. “Belle? Didn’t Dan park right in front of the house?” “Why?”

“His car isn’t there now.” He looked worried.

“Well, he probably parked around the corner. It’s unimportant. Go get that typewriter. Hurry!”

He left again. I could have told them where I had parked but, since they did not ask me, I did not think about it. I did not think at all.

Belle went elsewhere in the house and left me alone. Sometime around daylight Miles got back, looking haggard and carrying our heavy typewriter. Then I was left alone again.

Once Belle came back in and said, “Dan, you’ve got a paper there telling the insurance company to take care of your Hired Girl stock. You don’t want to do that; you want to give it to me.”

I didn’t answer. She looked annoyed and said, “Let’s put it this way. You do want to give it to me. You know you want to give it to me. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes. I want to give it to you.”

“Good. You want to give it to me. You have to give it to me. You won’t be happy until you do give it to me. Now where is it? Is it in your car?” “No.”

“Then where is it?” “I mailed it.”

“What?” She grew shrill. “When did you mail it? Who did you mail it to? Why did you do it?”

If she had asked the second question last I would have answered it. But I answered the last question, that being all I could handle. “I assigned it.”

Miles came in. “Where did he put it?”

“He says he’s mailed it…because he has assigned it! You had better find his car and search it—he may just think he actually mailed it. He certainly had it with him at the insurance company.”

“Assigned it!” repeated Miles. “Good Lord! To whom?” “I’ll ask him. Dan, to whom did you assign your stock?”

“To the Bank of America.” She didn’t ask me why or I would have told her about Ricky.

All she did was slump her shoulders and sigh. “There goes the ball game, Chubby. We can forget about the stock. It’ll take more than a nail file to get it away from a bank.” She straightened up suddenly. “Unless he hasn’t really mailed it yet. If he hasn’t I’ll clean that assignment off the back so pretty you’ll think it’s been to the laundry. Then he’ll assign it again…to me.”

“To us,” corrected Miles.

“That’s just a detail. Go find his car.”

Miles returned later and announced, “It’s not anywhere within six blocks of here. I cruised around all the streets, and the alleys too. He must have used a cab.”

“You heard him say he drove his own car.”

“Well, it’s not out there. Ask him when and where he mailed the stock.”

So Belle did and I told them. “Just before I came here. I mailed it at the postbox at the corner of Sepulveda and Ventura Boulevard.”

“Do you suppose he’s lying?” asked Miles.

“He can’t lie, not in the shape he’s in. And he’s too definite about it to be mixed up. Forget it, Miles. Maybe after he’s put away it will turn out that his assignment is no good because he had already sold it to us…at least I’ll get his signature on some blank sheets and be ready to try it.”

She did try to get my signature and I tried to oblige. But in the shape I was in I could not write well enough to satisfy her. Finally she snatched a sheet out of my hand and said viciously, “You make me sick! I can sign your name better than that.” Then she leaned over me and said tensely, “I wish I had killed your cat.”

They did not bother me again until later in the day. Then Belle came in and said, “Danny boy, I’m going to give you a hypo and then you’ll feel a lot better. You’ll feel able to get up and move around and act just like you always have acted. You won’t be angry at anybody, especially not at Miles and me. We’re your best friends. We are, aren’t we? Who are your best friends?”

“You are. You and Miles.”

“But I’m more than that. I’m your sister. Say it.” “You’re my sister.”

“Good. Now we’re going for a ride and then you are going for a long sleep. You’ve been sick and when you wake up you’ll be well. Understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Who am I?”

“You’re my best friend. You’re my sister.” “Good boy. Push your sleeve back.”

I didn’t feel the hypo go in, but it stung after she pulled it out. I sat up and shrugged and said, “Gee, Sis, that stung. What was it?” “Something to make you feel better. You’ve been sick.”

“Yeah, I’m sick. Where’s Miles?”

“He’ll be here in a moment. Now let’s have your other arm. Push back the sleeve.”

I said, “What for?” but I pushed back the sleeve and let her shoot me again. I jumped. She smiled. “That didn’t really hurt, did it?”

“Huh? No, it didn’t hurt. What’s it for?”

“It will make you sleepy on the ride. Then when we get there you’ll wake up.”

“Okay. I’d like to sleep. I want to take a long sleep.” Then I felt puzzled and looked around. “Where’s Pete? Pete was going to sleep with me.” “Pete?” Belle said. “Why, dear, don’t you remember? You sent Pete to stay with Ricky. She’s going to take care of him.”

“Oh yes!” I grinned with relief. I had sent Pete to Ricky; I remembered mailing him. That was good. Ricky loved Pete and she would take good care of him while I was asleep.

They drove me out to the Consolidated Sanctuary at Sawtelle, one that many of the smaller insurance companies used—those that didn’t have their own. I slept all the way but came awake at once when Belle spoke to me. Miles stayed in his car and she took me in. The girl at the desk looked up and said, “Davis?”

“Yes,” agreed Belle. “I’m his sister. Is the representative for Master Insurance here?”

“You’ll find him down in Treatment Room Nine—they’re ready and waiting. You can give the papers to the man from Master.” She looked at me with interest. “He’s had his physical examination?”

“Oh yes!” Belle assured her. “Brother is a therapy-delay case, you know. He’s under an opiate…for the pain.” The receptionist clucked sympathetically. “Well, hurry on in then. Through that door and turn left.”

In Room Nine there was a man in street clothes and one in white coveralls and a woman in a nurse’s uniform. They helped me get undressed and treated me like an idiot child while Belle explained again that I was under a sedative for the pain. Once he had me stripped and up on the table, the man in white massaged my belly, digging his fingers in deeply. “No trouble with this one,” he announced. “He’s empty.”

“He hasn’t had anything to eat or drink since yesterday evening,” agreed Belle.

“That’s fine. Sometimes they come in here stuffed like a Christmas turkey. Some people have no sense.” “True. Very true.”

“Uh-huh. Okay, son, clench your fist tight while I get this needle in.”

I did and things began to get really hazy. Suddenly I remembered something and tried to sit up. “Where’s Pete? I want to see Pete.”

Belle took my head and kissed me. “There, there, Buddy! Pete couldn’t come, remember? Pete had to stay with Ricky.” I quieted down and she said gently to the others, “Our brother Peter has a sick little girl at home.”

I dropped off to sleep. Presently I felt very cold. But I couldn’t move to reach the covers.

V

I WAS COMPLAINING to the bartender about the air conditioning—it was turned too high and we were all going to catch cold. “No matter,” he assured me. “You won’t feel it when you’re asleep. Sleep…sleep… soup of the evening, beautiful sleep.” He had Belle’s face.

“How about a warm drink then?” I wanted to know. “A Tom and Jerry? Or a hot buttered bum?” “You’re a bum!” the doctor answered. “Sleeping’s too good for him; throw the bum out!”

I tried to hook my feet around the brass rail to stop them. But this bar had no brass rail, which seemed funny, and I was flat on my back, which seemed funnier still, unless they had installed bedside service for people with no feet. I didn’t have feet, so how could I hook them under a brass rail? No hands, either. “Look, Maw, no hands!” Pete sat on my chest and wailed.

I was back in basic training…advanced basic, it must have been, for I was at Camp Hale at one of those silly exercises where they throw snow down your neck to make a man of you. I was having to climb the damnedest biggest mountain in all Colorado and it was all ice and I had no feet. Nevertheless, I was carrying the biggest pack anybody ever saw—I remembered that they were trying to find out if GIs could be used instead of pack mules and I had been picked because I was expendable. I wouldn’t have made it at all if little Ricky hadn’t got behind me and pushed.

The top sergeant turned and he had a face just like Belle’s and he was livid with rage. “Come on, you! I can’t afford to wait for you. I don’t care whether you make it or not…but you can’t sleep until you get there.”

My no-feet wouldn’t take me any farther and I fell down in the snow and it was icy warm and I did fall asleep while little Ricky wailed and begged me not to. But I had to sleep.

I woke up in bed with Belle. She was shaking me and saying, “Wake up, Dan! I can’t wait thirty years for you; a girl has to think of her future.” I tried to get up and hand her the bags of gold I had under the bed, but she was gone…and anyhow a Hired Girl with her face had picked all the gold up and put it in its tray on top and scurried out of the room. I tried to run after it but I had no feet, no body at all, I discovered. “I ain’t got no body, and nobody cares for me…” The world consisted of top sergeants and work…so what difference did it make where you worked or how? I let them put the harness back on me and I went back to climbing that icy mountain. It was all white and beautifully rounded and if I could just climb to the rosy tip they would let me sleep, which was what I needed. But I never made it…no hands, no feet, no nothing.

There was a forest fire on the mountain. The snow did not melt, but I could feel the heat in waves beating against me while I kept on struggling. The top sergeant was leaning over me and saying, “Wake up…wake up…wake up.”

HE NO MORE than got me awake before he wanted me to sleep again. I’m vague about what happened then for a while. Part of the time I was on a table which vibrated under me and there were lights and snaky-looking equipment and lots of people. But when I was fully awake I was in a hospital bed and I felt all right except for that listless half-floating feeling you have after a Turkish bath. I had hands and feet again. But nobody would talk to me and every time I tried to ask a question a nurse would pop something into my mouth. I was massaged quite a lot.

Then one morning I felt fine and got out of bed as soon as I woke up. I felt a little dizzy but that was all. I knew who I was, I knew how I had got there, and I knew that all that other stuff had been dreams.

I knew who had put me there. If Belle had given me orders while I was drugged to forget her shenanigans, either the orders had not taken or thirty years of cold sleep had washed out the hypnotic effect. I was blurry about some details but I knew how they had shanghaied me.

I wasn’t especially angry about it. True, it had happened just “yesterday,” since yesterday is the day just one sleep behind you—but the sleep had been thirty years long. The feeling cannot be precisely defined, since it is entirely subjective, but, while my memory was sharp for the events of “yesterday,” nevertheless my feelings about those events were to things far away. You have seen double images in television of a pitcher making his windup while his picture sits as a ghost on top of a long shot of the whole baseball diamond? Something like that…my conscious recollection was a close-up; my emotional reaction was to something long ago and far away.

I fully intended to look up Belle and Miles and chop them into cat meat, but there was no hurry. Next year would do—right now I was eager to have a look at the year 2000.

But speaking of cat meat, where was Pete? He ought to be around somewhere…unless the poor little beggar hadn’t lived through the Sleep. Then—and not until then—did I remember that my careful plans to bring Pete along had been wrecked.

I took Belle and Miles out of the “Hold” basket and moved them over to “Urgent.” Try to kill my cat, would they?

They had done worse than kill Pete; they had turned him out to go wild…to wear out his days wandering back alleys in search of scraps, while his ribs grew thin and his sweet pixie nature warped into distrust of all two-legged beasts.

They had let him die—for he was surely dead by now—let him die thinking that I had deserted him.

For this they would pay…if they were still alive. Oh, how I hoped they were still alive—unspeakable!

I FOUND THAT I was standing by the foot of my bed, grasping the rail to steady myself and dressed only in pajamas. I looked around for some way to call someone. Hospital rooms had not changed much. There was no window and I could not see where the light came from; the bed was high and narrow, as hospital beds had always been in my recollection, but it showed signs of having been engineered into something more than a place to sleep—among other things, it seemed to have some sort of plumbing under it which I suspected was a mechanized bedpan, and the side table was part of the bed structure itself. But, while I ordinarily would have been intensely interested in such gadgetry, right now I simply wanted to find the pear-shaped switch which summons the nurse—I wanted my clothes.

It was missing, but I found what it had been transformed into: a pressure switch on the side of the table that was not quite a table. My hand struck it in trying to find it, and a transparency opposite where my head would have been had I been in bed shone out with: SERVICE CALL. Almost immediately it blinked out and was replaced with: ONE MOMENT, PLEASE.

Very quickly the door silently rolled aside and a nurse came in. Nurses had not changed much. This one was reasonably cute, had the familiar firm manners of a drill sergeant, wore a perky little white hat perched on short orchid-colored hair, and was dressed in a white uniform. It was strangely cut and covered her here and uncovered her there in a fashion different from 1970—but women’s clothes, even work uniforms, were always doing that. She would still have been a nurse in any year, just by her unmistakable manner.

“You get back in that bed!” “Where are my clothes?” “Get back in that bed. Now!”

I answered reasonably, “Look, nurse, I’m a free citizen, over twenty-one, and not a criminal. I don’t have to get back into that bed and I’m not

going to. Now are you going to show me where my clothes are or shall I go out the way I am and start looking?”

She looked at me, then turned suddenly and went out; the door ducked out of her way.

But it would not duck out of my way. I was still trying to study out the gimmick, being fairly sure that if one engineer could dream it up, another could figure it out, when it opened again and a man came in.

“Good morning,” he said. “I’m Dr. Albrecht.”

His clothes looked like a cross between a Harlem Sunday and a picnic to me, but his brisk manner and his tired eyes were convincingly professional; I believed him. “Good morning, Doctor. I’d like to have my clothes.”

He stepped just far enough inside to let the door slide into place behind him, then reached inside his clothes and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He got one out, waved it briskly in the air, placed it in his mouth and puffed on it; it was lighted. He offered me the pack. “Have one?”

“Uh, no, thanks.”

“Go ahead. It won’t hurt you.”

I shook my head. I had always worked with a cigarette smoldering beside me; the progress of a job could be judged by the overflowing ashtrays and the burns on the drafting board. Now I felt a little faint at the sight of smoke and wondered if I had dropped the nicotine habit somewhere in the slept-away years. “Thanks just the same.”

“Okay. Mr. Davis, I’ve been here six years. I’m a specialist in hypnology, resuscitation, and like subjects. Here and elsewhere I’ve helped eight thousand and seventy-three patients make the comeback from hypothermia to normal life—you’re number eight thousand and seventy-four. I’ve seen them do all sorts of odd things when they came out—odd to laymen; not to me. Some of them want to go right back to sleep again and

scream at me when I try to keep them awake. Some of them do go back to sleep and we have to ship them off to another sort of institution. Some of them start weeping endlessly when they realize that it is a one-way ticket and it’s too late to go home to whatever year they started from. And some of them, like you, demand their clothes and want to run out into the street.”

“Well? Why not? Am I a prisoner?”

“No. You can have your clothes. I imagine you’ll find them out of style, but that is your problem. However, while I send for them, would you mind telling me what it is that is so terribly urgent that you must attend to it right this minute…after it has waited thirty years? That’s how long you’ve been at subtemperature—thirty years. Is it really urgent? Or would later today do as well? Or even tomorrow?”

I started to blurt out that it damn well was urgent, then stopped and looked sheepish. “Maybe not that urgent.”

“Then as a favor to me, will you get back into bed, let me check you over, have your breakfast, and perhaps talk with me before you go galloping off in all directions? I might even be able to tell you which way to gallop.”

“Uh, okay, Doctor. Sorry to have caused trouble.” I climbed into bed. It felt good—I was suddenly tired and shaky.

“No trouble. You should see some that we get. We have to pull them down off the ceiling.” He straightened the covers around my shoulders, then leaned over the table built into the bed. “Dr. Albrecht in Seventeen. Send a room orderly with breakfast, uh…menu four-minus.”

He turned to me and said, “Roll over and pull up your jacket; I want to get at your ribs. While I’m checking you, you can ask questions. If you want to.”

I tried to think while he prodded my ribs. I suppose it was a stethoscope he used although it looked like a miniaturized hearing aid. But they had not improved one thing about it; the pickup he pushed against me was as cold and hard as ever.

What do you ask after thirty years? Have they reached the stars yet? Who’s cooking up “The War to End War” this time? Do babies come out of test tubes? “Doc, do they still have popcorn machines in the lobbies of movie theaters?”

“They did the last time I looked. I don’t get much time for such things. By the way, the word is ‘grabbie’ now, not ‘movie.’ ” “So? Why?”

“Try one. You’ll find out. But be sure to fasten your seat belt; they null the whole theater on some shots. See here, Mr. Davis, we’re faced with this same problem every day and we’ve got it down to a routine. We’ve got adjustment vocabularies for each entrance year, and historical and cultural summaries. It’s quite necessary, for malorientation can be extreme no matter how much we lackweight the shock.”

“Uh, I suppose so.”

“Decidedly. Especially in an extreme lapse like yours. Thirty years.” “Is thirty years the maximum?”

“Yes and no. Thirty-five years is the very longest we’ve had experience with, since the first commercial client was placed in subtemperature in December 1965. You are the longest Sleeper I have revived. But we have clients in here now with contract times up to a century and a half. They should never have accepted you for as long as thirty years; they didn’t know enough then. They were taking a great chance with your life. You were lucky.”

“Really?”

“Really. Turn over.” He went on examining me and added, “But with what we’ve learned now I’d be willing to prepare a man for a thousand-year jump if there were any way to finance it…hold him at the temperature you were at for a year just to check, then crash him to minus two hundred in a millisecond. He’d live. I think. Let’s try your reflexes.”

That “crash” business didn’t sound good to me. Dr. Albrecht went on: “Sit up and cross your knees. You won’t find the language problem difficult. Of course I’ve been careful to talk in 1970 vocabulary—I rather pride myself on being able to talk selectively in the entrance speech of any of my patients; I’ve made a hypnostudy of it. But you’ll be speaking contemporary idiom perfectly in a week; it’s really just added vocabulary.”

I thought of telling him that at least four times he had used words not used in 1970, or at least not that way, but I decided it wouldn’t be polite. “That’s all for now,” he said presently. “By the way, Mrs. Schultz has been trying to reach you.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t you know her? She insisted that she was an old friend of yours.”

“ ‘Schultz,’ ” I repeated. “I suppose I’ve known several ‘Mrs. Schultzes’ at one time and another, but the only one I can place was my fourth-grade teacher. But she’d be dead by now.”

“Maybe she took the Sleep. Well, you can accept the message when you feel like it. I’m going to sign a release on you. But if you’re smart, you’ll stay here for a few days and soak up reorientation. I’ll look in on you later. So ‘twenty-three, skiddoo!’ as they used to say in your day. Here comes the orderly with your breakfast.”

I decided that he was a better doctor than a linguist. But I stopped thinking about it when I saw the orderly. It rolled in, carefully avoiding Dr. Albrecht, who walked straight out, paying no attention to it and making no effort himself to avoid it.

It came over, adjusted the built-in bed table, swung it over me, opened it out, and arranged my breakfast on it. “Shall I pour your coffee?” “Yes, please.” I did not really want it poured, as I would rather have it stay hot until I’ve finished everything else. But I wanted to see it poured. For I was in a delighted daze…it was Flexible Frank!

Not the jackleg, breadboarded, jury-rigged first model Miles and Belle had stolen from me, of course not. This one resembled the first Frank the

way a turbospeedster resembles the first horseless carriages. But a man knows his own work. I had set the basic pattern and this was the necessary evolution…Frank’s great-grandson, improved, slicked up, made more efficient—but the same bloodline.

“Will that be all?” “Wait a minute.”

Apparently I had said the wrong thing, for the automaton reached inside itself and pulled out a stiff plastic sheet and handed it to me. The sheet remained fastened to him by a slim steel chain. I looked at it and found printed on it:

Description: C:\Users\asus\Desktop\Books to transcribe\Robert A. Heinlein - The Door Into Summer_files\image001.jpg

The motto appeared on their trademark showing Aladdin rubbing his lamp and a genie appearing.

Below this was a long list of simple orders—STOP, GO, YES, NO, SLOWER, FASTER, COME HERE, FETCH A NURSE, etc. Then there was a shorter list of tasks common in hospitals, such as back rubs, and including some that I had never heard of. The list closed abruptly with the statement: “Routines 87 through 242 may be ordered only by hospital staff members and the order phrases are therefore not listed here.”

I had not voice-coded the first Flexible Frank; you had to punch buttons on his control board. It was not because I had not thought of it, but because the analyzer and telephone exchange for the purpose would have weighed and bulked and cost more than all the rest of Frank, Sr., net. I decided that I would have to learn some new wrinkles in miniaturization and simplification before I would be ready to practice engineering here. But I was anxious to get started on it, as I could see from Eager Beaver that it was going to be more fun than ever—lots of new possibilities. Engineering is the art of the practical and depends more on the total state of the art than it does on the individual engineer. When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before. Look at poor Professor Langley, breaking his heart on a flying machine that should have flown—he had put the necessary genius in it— but he was just a few years too early to enjoy the benefit of collateral art he needed and did not have. Or take the great Leonardo da Vinci, so far out of his time that his most brilliant concepts were utterly unbuildable.

I was going to have fun here—I mean “now.”

I handed back the instruction card, then got out of bed and looked for the data plate. I had halfway expected to see “Hired Girl, Inc.” at the bottom of the notice and I wondered if “Aladdin” was a daughter corporation of the Mannix group. The data plate did not tell me much other than model, serial number, factory, and such, but it did list the patents, about forty of them—and the earliest, I was very interested to see, was in 1970…almost certainly based on my original model and drawings.

I found a pencil and memo pad on the table and jotted down the number of that first patent, but my interest was purely intellectual. Even if it had been stolen from me (I was sure it had been), it had expired in 1987—unless they had changed the patent laws—and only those granted later than 1983 would still be valid. But I wanted to know.

A light glowed on the automaton and he announced: “I am being called. May I leave?” “Huh? Sure. Run along.” It started to reach for the phrase list; I hastily said, “Go!” “Thank you. Good-bye.” It detoured around me.

“Thank you.”

“You are welcome.”

Whoever had dictated the gadget’s sound responses had a very pleasant baritone voice. I got back into bed and ate the breakfast I had let get cold—only it turned out not to be cold. Breakfast four-minus was about enough for a medium-sized bird, but I found that it was enough, even though I had been very hungry. I suppose my stomach had shrunk. It wasn’t until I had finished that I remembered that this was the first food I had eaten in a generation. I noticed it then because they had included a menu—what I had taken for bacon was listed as “grilled yeast strips, country style.”

But in spite of a thirty-year fast, my mind was not on food; they had sent a newspaper in with breakfast: the Great Los Angeles Times, for Wednesday, 13 December 2000.

Newspapers had not changed much, not in format. This one was tabloid size, the paper was glazed instead of rough pulp and the illustrations were either full color, or black-and-white stereo—I couldn’t puzzle out the gimmick on that last. There had been stereo pictures you could look at without a viewer since I was a small child; as a kid I had been fascinated by ones used to advertise frozen foods in the ’50s. But those had required

fairly thick transparent plastic for a grid of tiny prisms; these were simply on thin paper. Yet they had depth.

I gave it up and looked at the rest of the paper. Eager Beaver had arranged it on a reading rack and for a while it seemed as if the front page was all I was going to read, for I could not find out how to open the durned thing. The sheets seemed to have frozen solid.

Finally I accidentally touched the lower right-hand corner of the first sheet; it curled up and out of the way…some surface-charge phenomenon, triggered at that point. The other pages got neatly out of the way in succession whenever I touched that spot.

At least half of the paper was so familiar as to make me homesick— “Your Horoscope Today, Mayor Dedicates New Reservoir, Security Restrictions Undermining Freedom of Press Says N.Y. Solon, Giants Take Double-Header, Unseasonable Warmth Perils Winter Sports, Pakistan Warns India”—et cetera, ad tedium. This is where I came in.

Some of the other items were new but explained themselves: LUNA SHUTTLE STILL SUSPENDED FOR GEMINIDS— Twenty–Four-Hour Station Suffers Two Punctures, No Casualties; FOUR WHITES LYNCHED IN CAPE TOWN—U.N. Action Demanded; HOST-MOTHERS ORGANIZE FOR HIGHER FEES—Demand “Amateurs” Be Outlawed; MISSISSIPPI PLANTER INDICTED UNDER ANTI-ZOMBIE LAW— His

Defense: “Them Boys Hain’t Drugged, They’re Just Stupid!”

I was fairly sure that I knew what that last one meant…from experience.

But some of the news items missed me completely. The “wogglies” were still spreading and three more French towns had been evacuated; the King was considering ordering the area dusted. King? Oh well, French politics might turn up anything, but what was this “Poudre Sanitaire” they were considering using on the “wogglies”?—whatever they were. Radioactive, maybe? I hoped they picked a dead calm day…preferably the thirtieth of February. I had had a radiation overdose myself once, through a mistake by a damn-fool WAC technician at Sandia. I had not reached the point-of-no-return vomiting stage, but I don’t recommend a diet of curies.

The Laguna Beach division of the Los Angeles police had been equipped with Leycoils and the division chief warned all Teddies to get out of town. “My men have orders to nark first and subspeck afterward. This has got to stop!”

I made a mental note to keep clear of Laguna Beach until I found out what the score was. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be subspecked, or subspected, even afterward.

Those are just samples. There were any number of news stories that started out trippingly, then foundered in what was, to me, double talk.

I started to breeze on past the vital statistics when my eye caught some new subheads. There were the old familiar ones of births, deaths, marriages, and divorces, but now there were “commitments” and “withdrawals” as well, listed by sanctuaries. I looked up “Sawtelle Cons. Sanc.” and found my own name. It gave me a warm feeling of “belonging.”

But the most intensely interesting things in the paper were the ads. One of the personals stuck in my mind: “Attractive still-young widow with yen to travel wishes to meet mature man similarly inclined. Object: two-year marriage contract.” But it was the display advertising that got me.

Hired Girl and her sisters and her cousins and her aunts were all over the place—and they were still using the trademark, a husky girl with a broom, that I had designed originally for our letterhead. I felt a twinge of regret that I had been in such a jumping hurry to get rid of my stock in Hired Girl, Inc.; it looked as if it was worth more than all the rest of my portfolio. No, that was wrong; if I had kept it with me at the time, that pair of thieves would have lifted it and faked an assignment to themselves. As it was, Ricky had gotten it—and if it had made Ricky rich, well, it couldn’t happen to a nicer person.

I made a note to track down Ricky first thing, top priority. She was all that was left to me of the world I had known and she loomed very large in my mind. Dear little Ricky! If she had been ten years older I would never have looked at Belle…and wouldn’t have got my fingers burned.

Let’s see, how old would she be now? Forty—no, forty-one. It was hard to think of Ricky as forty-one. Still, that wouldn’t be old in a woman these days—or even those days. From forty feet you frequently couldn’t tell forty-one from eighteen.

If she was rich I’d let her buy me a drink and we would drink to Pete’s dear departed funny little soul.

And if something had slipped and she was poor in spite of the stock I had assigned her, then—by damn, I’d marry her! Yes, I would. It didn’t matter that she was ten years or so older than I was; in view of my established record for flubbing the dub I needed somebody older to look out for me and tell me no—and Ricky was just the girl who could do it. She had run Miles and Miles’ house with serious little-girl efficiency when she was less than ten; at forty she would be just the same, only mellowed.

I felt really warm and no longer lost in a strange land for the first time since I had wakened. Ricky was the answer to everything.

Then deep inside me I heard a voice: “Look, stupid, you can’t marry Ricky, because a girl as sweet as she was going to be would now have been married for at least twenty years. She’ll have four kids…maybe a son bigger than you are…and certainly a husband who won’t be amused by you in the role of good old Uncle Danny.”

I listened and my jaw sagged. Then I said feebly, “All right, all right—so I’ve missed the boat again. But I’m still going to look her up. They can’t do more than shoot me. And, after all, she’s the only other person who really understood Pete.”

I turned another page, suddenly very glum at the thought of having lost both Ricky and Pete. After a while I fell asleep over the paper and slept until Eager Beaver or his twin fetched lunch.

While I was asleep I dreamed that Ricky was holding me on her lap and saying, “It’s all right, Danny. I found Pete and now we’re both here to stay. Isn’t that so, Pete?”

“ Yeeeow!”

THE ADDED VOCABULARIES were a cinch; I spent much more time on the historical summaries. Quite a lot can happen in thirty years, but why put it down when everybody else knows it better than I do? I wasn’t surprised that the Great Asia Republic was crowding us out of the South American trade; that had been in the cards since the Formosan treaty. Nor was I surprised to find India more Balkanized than ever. The notion of England being a province of Canada stopped me for a moment. Which was the tail and which was the dog? I skipped over the panic of ’87; gold was a wonderful engineering material for some uses; I could not regard it as a tragedy to find that it was now cheap and no longer a basis for money, no matter how many people lost their shirts in the change-over.

I stopped reading and thought about the things you could do with cheap gold, with its high density, good conductivity, extreme ductility…and stopped when I realized I would have to read the technical literature first. Shucks, in atomics alone it would be invaluable. The way the stuff could be worked, far better than any other metal, if you could use it in miniaturizing—again I stopped, morally certain that Eager Beaver had had his “head” crammed full of gold. I would just have to get busy and find out what the boys had been doing in the “small back rooms” while I had been away.

The Sawtelle Sanctuary wasn’t equipped to let me read up on engineering, so I told Doc Albrecht I was ready to check out. He shrugged, told me I was an idiot, and agreed. But I did stay one more night; I found that I was fagged just from lying back and watching words chase past in a book scanner.

They brought me modern clothes right after breakfast the next morning …and I had to have help in dressing. They were not so odd in themselves

(although I had never worn cerise trousers with bell bottoms before) but I could not manage the fastenings without coaching. I suppose my

grandfather might have had the same trouble with zippers if he had not been led into them gradually. It was the Sticktite closure seams, of course—I thought I was going to have to hire a little boy to help me go to the bathroom before I got it through my head that the pressure-sensitive adhesion was axially polarized.

Then I almost lost my pants when I tried to ease the waistband. No one laughed at me. Dr. Albrecht asked, “What are you going to do?”

“Me? First I’m going to get a map of the city. Then I’m going to find a place to sleep. Then I’m going to do nothing but professional reading for quite a while…maybe a year. Doc, I’m an obsolete engineer. I don’t aim to stay that way.”

“Mmmm. Well, good luck. Don’t hesitate to call if I can help.”

I stuck out my hand. “Thanks, Doc. You’ve been swell. Uh, maybe I shouldn’t mention this until I talk to the accounting office of my insurance company and see just how well off I am—but I don’t intend to let it go with words. Thanks for the sort of thing you’ve done for me should be more substantial. Understand me?”

He shook his head. “I appreciate the thought. But my fees are covered by my contract with the sanctuary.” “But—”

“No. I can’t take it, so please let’s not discuss it.” He shook hands and said, “Good-bye. If you’ll stay on this slide it will take you to the main offices.” He hesitated. “If you find things a bit tiring at first, you’re entitled to four more days’ recuperation and reorientation here without additional charge under the custodial contract. It’s paid for. Might as well use it. You can come and go as you like.”

I grinned. “Thanks, Doc. But you can bet that I won’t be back—other than to say hello someday.”

I stepped off at the main office and told the receptionist there who I was. It handed me an envelope, which I saw was another phone message from Mrs. Schultz. I still had not called her, because I did not know who she was, and the sanctuary did not permit visits nor phone calls to a revivified client until he wanted to accept them. I simply glanced at it and tucked it in my blouse, while thinking that I might have made a mistake in making Flexible Frank too flexible. Receptionists used to be pretty girls, not machines.

The receptionist said, “Step this way, please. Our treasurer would like to see you.”

Well, I wanted to see him, too, so I stepped that way. I was wondering how much money I had made and was congratulating myself on having plunged in common stocks rather than playing it “safe.” No doubt my stocks had dropped in the Panic of ’87, but they ought to be back up now—in

fact I knew that at least two of them were worth a lot of dough now; I had been reading the financial section of the Times. I still had the paper with me, figuring I might want to look up some others.

The treasurer was a human being, even though he looked like a treasurer. He gave me a quick handshake. “How do you do, Mr. Davis. I’m Mr. Doughty. Sit down, please.”

I said, “Howdy, Mr. Doughty. I probably don’t need to take that much of your time. Just tell me this: Does my insurance company handle its settlements through your office? Or should I go to their home offices?”

“Do please sit down. I have several things to explain to you.”

So I sat. His office assistant (good old Frank again) fetched a file folder for him and he said, “These are your original contracts. Would you like to see them?”

I wanted very much to see them, as I had kept my fingers crossed ever since I was fully awake, wondering if Belle had figured out some way to bite the end off that certified check. A certified check is much harder to play hanky-panky with than is a personal check, but Belle was a clever gal.

I was much relieved to see that she had left my commitments unchanged, except of course that the side contract for Pete was missing and also the one concerning my Hired Girl stock. I supposed that she had just burned those, to keep from raising questions. I examined with care the dozen or more places where she had changed “Mutual Assurance Company” to “Master Insurance Company of California.”

The gal was a real artist, no question. I suppose a scientific criminologist armed with microscope and comparison stereo and chemical tests and so forth could have proved that each of those documents had been altered, but I could not. I wondered how she had coped with the closed endorsement on the back of the certified check, since certified checks are always on paper guaranteed non-erasable. Well, she probably had not used an eraser—what one person can dream up another person can outsmart…and Belle was very smart.

Mr. Doughty cleared his throat. I looked up. “Do we settle my account here?” “Yes.”

“Then I can put it in two words. How much?”

“Mmm…Mr. Davis, before we go into that question, I would like to invite your attention to one additional document…and to one circumstance. This is the contract between this sanctuary and Master Insurance Company of California for your hypothermia, custody, and revivification. You will note that the entire fee is paid in advance. This is both for our protection and for yours, since it guarantees your safe-being while you are helpless. The funds—all such funds—are placed in escrow with the superior-court division handling chancery matters and are paid quarterly to us as earned.”

“Okay. Sounds like a good arrangement.”

“It is. It protects the helpless. Now you must understand clearly that this sanctuary is a separate corporation from your insurance company; the custodial contract with us was a contract entirely separate from the one for the management of your estate.”

“Mr. Doughty, what are you getting at?”

“Do you have any assets other than those you entrusted to Master Insurance Company?”

I thought it over. I had owned a car once…but God alone knew what had become of it. I had closed out my checking account in Mojave early in the binge, and on that busy day when I ended up at Miles’ place—and in the soup—I had started with maybe thirty or forty dollars in cash. Books, clothes, slide rule—I had never been a pack rat—and that minor junk was gone anyhow. “Not even a bus transfer, Mr. Doughty.”

“Then—I am very sorry to have to tell you this—you have no assets of any sort.”

I held still while my head circled the field and came in for a crash landing. “What do you mean? Why, some of the stocks I invested in are in fine shape. I knowthey are. It says so right here.” I held up my breakfast copy of the Times.

He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Davis, but you don’t own any stocks. Master Insurance went broke.” I was glad he had made me sit down; I felt weak. “How did this happen? The Panic?”

“No, no. It was part of the collapse of the Mannix Group…but of course you don’t know about that. It happened after the Panic, and I suppose you could say that it started from the Panic. But Master Insurance would not have gone under if it had not been systematically looted… gutted—‘milked’ is the vulgar word. If it had been an ordinary receiver-ship, something at least would have been salvaged. But it was not. By the time it was discovered there was nothing left of the company but a hollow shell…and the men who had done it were beyond extradition. Uh, if it is any consolation to you, it could not happen under our present laws.”

No, it was no consolation, and besides, I didn’t believe it. My old man claimed that the more complicated the law the more opportunity for

scoundrels.

But he also used to say that a wise man should be prepared to abandon his baggage at any time. I wondered how often I was going to have to do it to qualify as “wise.” “Uh, Mr. Doughty, just out of curiosity, how did Mutual Assurance make out?”

“Mutual Assurance Company? A fine firm. Oh, they took their licking during the Panic along with everybody else. But they weathered it. You have a policy with them, perhaps?”

“No.” I did not offer explanation; there was no use. I couldn’t look to Mutual; I had never executed my contract with them. I couldn’t sue Master Insurance; there is no point in suing a bankrupt corpse.

I could sue Belle and Miles if they were still around—but why be silly? No proof, none.

Besides, I did not want to sue Belle. It would be better to tattoo her all over with “Null and Void”…using a dull needle. Then I’d take up the matter of what she had done to Pete. I hadn’t figured out a punishment to suit the crime for that one yet.

I suddenly remembered that it was the Mannix group that Miles and Belle had been about to sell Hired Girl, Inc., to when they had booted me out. “Mr. Doughty? Are you sure that the Mannix people haven’t any assets? Don’t they own Hired Girl?”

“ ‘Hired Girl?’ Do you mean the domestic autoappliance firm?” “Yes, of course.”

“It hardly seems possible. In fact, it is not possible, since the Mannix empire, as such, no longer exists. Of course I can’t say that there never was any connection between Hired Girl Corporation and the Mannix people. But I don’t believe it could have been much, if any, or I think I would have heard of it.”

I dropped the matter. If Miles and Belle had been caught in the collapse of Mannix, that suited me fine. But, on the other hand, if Mannix had owned and milked Hired Girl, Inc., it would have hit Ricky as hard as it hit them. I didn’t want Ricky hurt, no matter what the side issues were.

I stood up. “Well, thanks for breaking it gently, Mr. Doughty. I’ll be on my way.”

“Don’t go yet. Mr. Davis…we of this institution feel a responsibility toward our people beyond the mere letter of the contract. You understand that yours is by no means the first case of this sort. Now our board of directors has placed a small discretionary fund at my disposal to ease such hardships. It—”

“No charity, Mr. Doughty. Thanks anyhow.”

“Not charity, Mr. Davis. A loan. A character loan, you might call it. Believe me, our losses have been negligible on such loans…and we don’t want you to walk out of here with your pockets empty.”

I thought that one over twice. I didn’t even have the price of a haircut. On the other hand, borrowing money is like trying to swim with a brick in each hand…and a small loan is tougher to pay back than a million. “Mr. Doughty,” I said slowly, “Dr. Albrecht said that I was entitled to four more days of beans and bed here.”

“I believe that is right—I’d have to consult your card. Not that we throw people out even when their contract time is up if they are not ready.” “I didn’t suppose that you did. But what are the rates on that room I had, as hospital room and board?”

“Eh? But our rooms are not for rent in that way. We aren’t a hospital; we simply maintain a recovery infirmary for our clients.” “Yes, surely. But you must figure it, at least for cost accounting purposes.”

“Mmm…yes and no. The figures aren’t allocated on that basis. The subheads are depreciation, overhead, operation, reserves, diet kitchen, personnel, and so forth. I suppose I could make an estimate.”

“Uh, don’t bother. What would equivalent room and board in a hospital come to?”

“That’s a little out of my line. Still…well, you could call it about one hundred dollars per day, I suppose.” “I had four days coming. Will you lend me four hundred dollars?”

He did not answer but spoke in a number code to his mechanical assistant. Then eight fifty-dollar bills were being counted into my hand. “Thanks,” I said sincerely as I tucked it away. “I’ll do my damnedest to see that this does not stay on the books too long. Six percent? Or is money tight?”

He shook his head. “It’s not a loan. Since you put it as you did, I canceled it against your unused time.” “Huh? Now, see here, Mr. Doughty, I didn’t intend to twist your arm. Of course, I’m going to—”

“Please. I told my assistant to enter the charge when I directed it to pay you. Do you want to give our auditors headaches all for a fiddling four hundred dollars? I was prepared to loan you much more than that.”

“Well—I can’t argue it now. Say, Mr. Doughty, how much money is this? How are price levels now?” “Mmm…that is a complex question.”

“Just give me an idea? What does it cost to eat?”

“Food is quite reasonable. For ten dollars you can get a very satisfactory dinner…if you are careful to select moderate-priced restaurants.”

I thanked him and left with a really warm feeling. Mr. Doughty reminded me of a paymaster I used to have in the Army. Paymasters come in only two sizes: One sort shows you where the book says that you can’t have what you’ve got coming to you; the second sort digs through the book until he finds a paragraph that lets you have what you need even if you don’t rate it.

Doughty was the second sort.

The sanctuary faced on the Wilshire Ways. There were benches in front of it and bushes and flowers. I sat down on a bench to take stock and to decide whether to go east or west. I had kept a stiff lip with Mr. Doughty but, honestly, I was badly shaken, even though I had the price of a week’s meals in my jeans.

But the sun was warm and the drone of the Ways was pleasant and I was young (biologically at least) and I had two hands and my brain.

Whistling “Hallelujah, I’m a bum,” I opened the Times to the “Help Wanted” columns.

I resisted the impulse to look through “Professional—Engineers” and turned at once to “Unskilled.”

That classification was darned short. I almost couldn’t find it.

VI

I GOT A JOB the second day, Friday, the fifteenth of December. I also had a mild run-in with the law and had repeated tangles with new ways of doing things, saying things, feeling about things. I discovered that “reorientation” by reading about it is like reading about sex—not the same thing.

I suppose I would have had less trouble if I had been set down in Omsk, or Santiago, or Djakarta. In going to a strange city in a strange land you

know that the customs are going to be different, but in Great Los Angeles I subconsciously expected things to be unchanged even though I could see that they were changed. Of course thirty years is nothing; anybody takes that much change and more in a lifetime. But it makes a difference to take it in one bite.

Take one word I used all in innocence. A lady present was offended and only the fact that I was a Sleeper—which I hastily explained—kept her husband from giving me a mouthful of knuckles. I won’t use the word here—oh yes, I will; why shouldn’t I? I’m using it to explain something. Don’t take my word for it that the word was in good usage when I was a kid; look it up in an old dictionary. Nobody scrawled it in chalk on sidewalks when I was a kid.

The word was “kink.”

There were other words which I still do not use properly without stopping to think. Not taboo words necessarily, just ones with changed meanings. “Host” for example—“host” used to mean the man who took your coat and put it in the bedroom; it had nothing to do with the birth rate.

But I got along. The job I found was crushing new ground limousines so that they could be shipped back to Pittsburgh as scrap. Cadillacs, Chryslers, Eisenhowers, Lincolns—all sorts of great, big, new powerful turbobuggies without a kilometer on their clocks. Drive ’em between the

jaws, then crunch! smash! crash!—scrap iron for blast furnaces.

It hurt me at first, since I was riding the Ways to work and didn’t own so much as a gravJumper. I expressed my opinion of it and almost lost my

job…until the shift boss remembered that I was a Sleeper and really didn’t understand.

“It’s a simple matter of economics, son. These are surplus cars the government has accepted as security against price-support loans. They’re two years old now and they can never be sold…so the government junks them and sells them back to the steel industry. You can’t run a blast furnace just on ore; you have to have scrap iron as well. You ought to know that even if you are a Sleeper. Matter of fact, with high-grade ore so scarce, there’s more and more demand for scrap. The steel industry needs these cars.”

“But why build them in the first place if they can’t be sold? It seems wasteful.”

“It just seems wasteful. You want to throw people out of work? You want to run down the standard of living?”

“Well, why not ship them abroad? It seems to me they could get more for them on the open market abroad than they are worth as scrap.”

“What!—and ruin the export market? Besides, if we started dumping cars abroad we’d get everybody sore at us—Japan, France, Germany, Great Asia, everybody. What are you aiming to do? Start a war?” He sighed and went on in a fatherly tone. “You go down to the public library and draw out some books. You don’t have any right to opinions on these things until you know something about them.”

So I shut up. I didn’t tell him that I was spending all my off time at the public library or at UCLA’s library; I had avoided admitting that I was, or used to be, an engineer—to claim that I was now an engineer would be too much like walking up to du Pont’s and saying, “Sirrah, I am an alchymiste. Hast need of art such as mine?”

I raised the subject just once more because I noticed that very few of the price-support cars were really ready to run. The workmanship was sloppy and they often lacked essentials like instrument dials or air conditioners. But when one day I noticed from the way the teeth of the crusher came down on one that it lacked even a power plant, I spoke up about it.

The shift boss just stared at me. “Great jumping Jupiter, son, surely you don’t expect them to put their best workmanship into cars that are just surplus? These cars had price-support loans against them before they ever came off the assembly line.”

So that time I shut up and stayed shut. I had better stick to engineering; economics is too esoteric for me.

But I had plenty of time to think. The job I had was not really a “job” at all in my book; all the work was done by Flexible Frank in his various disguises. Frank and his brothers ran the crusher, moved the cars into place, hauled away the scrap, kept count, and weighed the loads; my job was to stand on a little platform (I wasn’t allowed to sit) and hang onto a switch that could stop the whole operation if something went wrong. Nothing ever did, but I soon found that I was expected to spot at least one failure in automation each shift, stop the job, and send for a trouble crew.

Well, it paid twenty-one dollars a day and it kept me eating. First things first.

After social security, guild dues, income tax, defense tax, medical plan, and the welfare mutual fund I took home about sixteen of it. Mr. Doughty was wrong about a dinner costing ten dollars; you could get a very decent plate dinner for three if you did not insist on real meat, and I would defy anyone to tell whether a hamburger steak started life in a tank or out on the open range. With the stories going around about bootleg meat that might give you radiation poisoning I was perfectly happy with surrogates.

Where to live had been somewhat of a problem. Since Los Angeles had not been treated to the one-second slum-clearance plan in the Six Weeks War, an amazing number of refugees had gone there (I suppose I was one of them, although I hadn’t thought of myself as such at the time) and apparently none of them had ever gone home, even those that had homes left to go back to. The city—if you can call Great Los Angeles a city; it is more of a condition—had been choked when I went to sleep; now it was as jammed as a lady’s purse. It may have been a mistake to get rid of the smog; back in the ’60s a few people used to leave each year because of sinusitis.

Now apparently nobody left, ever.

The day I checked out of the sanctuary I had had several things on my mind, principally (1) find a job, (2) find a place to sleep, (3) catch up in engineering, (4) find Ricky, (5) get back into engineering—on my own if humanly possible, (6) find Belle and Miles and settle their hash—without going to jail for it, and (7) a slug of things, like looking up the original patent on Eager Beaver and checking my strong hunch that it was really Flexible Frank (not that it mattered now, just curiosity), and looking up the corporate history of Hired Girl, Inc., etc., etc.

I have listed the above in order of priority, as I had found out years ago (through almost flunking my freshman year in engineering) that if you didn’t use priorities, when the music stopped you were left standing. Some of these priorities ran concurrently, of course; I expected to search out Ricky and probably Belle & Co. as well, while I was boning engineering. But first things first and second things second; finding a job came even ahead of hunting for a sack because dollars are the key to everything else …when you haven’t got them.

After getting turned down six times in town I had chased an ad clear out to San Bernardino Borough, only to get there ten minutes too late. I should have rented a flop at once; instead I played it real smart and went back downtown, intending to find a room, then get up very early and be first in line for some job listed in the early edition.

How was I to know? I got my name on four rooming-house waiting lists and wound up in the park. I stayed there, walking to keep warm, until almost midnight, then gave up—Great Los Angeles winters are subtropical only if you accent the “sub.” I then took refuge in a station of Wilshire Ways…and about two in the morning they rounded me up with the rest of the vagrants.

Jails have improved. This one was warm and I think they required the cockroaches to wipe their feet.

I was charged with barracking. The judge was a young fellow who didn’t even look up from his newspaper but simply said, “These all first offenders?”

“Yes, your honor.”

“Thirty days, or take a labor-company parole. Next.” They started to march us out but I didn’t budge. “Just a minute, Judge.” “Eh? Something troubling you? Are you guilty or not guilty?”

“Uh, I really don’t know because I don’t know what it is I have done. You see—”

“Do you want a public defender? If you do you can be locked up until one can handle your case. I understand they are running about six days late right now…but it’s your privilege.”

“Uh, I still don’t know. Maybe what I want is a labor-company parole, though I’m not sure what it is. What I really want is some advice from the Court, if the Court pleases.”

The judge said to the bailiff, “Take the others out.” He turned back to me. “Spill it. But I’ll warrant you won’t like my advice. I’ve been on this job long enough to have heard every phony story and to have acquired a deep disgust toward most of them.”

“Yes, sir. Mine isn’t phony; it’s easily checked. You see, I just got out of the Long Sleep yesterday and—”

But he did look disgusted. “One of those, eh? I’ve often wondered what made our grandparents think they could dump their riffraff on us. The last thing on earth this city needs is more people…especially ones who couldn’t get along in their own time. I wish I could boot you back to whatever year you came from with a message to everybody there that the future they’re dreaming about is not, repeat not, paved with gold.” He sighed. “But it wouldn’t do any good, I’m sure. Well, what do you expect me to do? Give you another chance? Then have you pop up here again a week from

now?”

“Judge, I don’t think I’m likely to. I’ve got enough money to live until I find a job and—” “Eh? If you’ve got money, what were you doing barracking?”

“Judge, I don’t even know what that word means.” This time he let me explain. When I came to how I had been swindled by Master Insurance Company his whole manner changed.

“Those swine! My mother got taken by them after she had paid premiums for twenty years. Why didn’t you tell me this in the first place?” He took out a card, wrote something on it, and said, “Take this to the hiring office at the Surplus & Salvage Authority. If you don’t get a job come back and see me this afternoon. But no more barracking. Not only does it breed crime and vice, but you yourself are running a terrible risk of meeting up with a zombie recruiter.”

That’s how I got a job smashing up brand-new ground cars. But I still think I made no mistake in logic in deciding to job-hunt first. Anywhere is home to the man with a fat bank account—the cops leave him alone.

I found a decent room, too, within my budget, in a part of West Los Angeles which had not yet been changed over to New Plan. I think it had formerly been a coat closet.

I WOULD NOT want anyone to think I disliked the year 2000, as compared with 1970. I liked it and I liked 2001 when it rolled around a couple of weeks after they wakened me. In spite of recurrent spasms of almost unbearable homesickness, I thought that Great Los Angeles at the dawn of the Third Millennium was odds-on the most wonderful place I had ever seen. It was fast and clean and very exciting, even if it was too crowded…and even that was being coped with on a mammoth, venturesome scale. The New Plan parts of town were a joy to an engineer’s heart. If the city government had had the sovereign power to stop immigration for ten years, they could have licked the housing problem. Since they did not have that power, they just had to do their best with the swarms that kept rolling over the Sierras—and their best was spectacular beyond belief and even the failures were colossal.

It was worth sleeping thirty years just to wake up in a time when they had licked the common cold and nobody had a postnasal drip. That meant more to me than the research colony on Venus.

Two things impressed me most, one big, one little. The big one was NullGrav, of course. Back in 1970 I had known about the Babson Institute gravitation research but I had not expected anything to come of it—and nothing had; the basic field theory on which NullGrav is based was developed at the University of Edinburgh. But I had been taught in school that gravitation was something that nobody could ever do anything about, because it was inherent in the very shape of space.

So they changed the shape of space, naturally. Only temporarily and locally, to be sure, but that’s all that’s needed in moving a heavy object. It still has to stay in field relation with Mother Terra, so it’s useless for spaceships—or it is in 2001; I’ve quit making bets about the future. I learned that to make a lift it was still necessary to expend power to overcome the gravity potential, and conversely, to lower something you had to have a power

pack to store all those foot-pounds in, or something would go Phzzt!-Spung! But just to transport something horizontally, say from San Francisco to Great Los Angeles, just lift it once, then float along, no power at all, like an ice skater riding a long edge.

Lovely!

I tried to study the theory of it, but the math starts in where tensor calculus leaves off; it’s not for me. But an engineer is rarely a mathematical physicist and he does not have to be; he simply has to savvy the skinny of a thing well enough to know what it can do in practical applications— know the working parameters. I could learn those.

The “little thing” I mentioned was the changes in female styles made possible by the Sticktite fabrics. I was not startled by mere skin on bathing beaches; you could see that coming in 1970. But the weird things that the ladies could do with Sticktite made my jaw sag.

My grandpappy was born in 1890; I suppose that some of the sights in 1970 would have affected him the same way.

But I liked the fast new world and would have been happy in it if I had not been so bitterly lonely so much of the time. I was out of joint. There were times (in the middle of the night, usually) when I would gladly have swapped it all for one beat-up tomcat, or for a chance to spend an afternoon taking little Ricky to the zoo…or for the comradeship Miles and I had shared when all we had was hard work and hope.

It was still early in 2001 and I wasn’t halfway caught up on my homework, when I began to itch to leave my featherbedded job and get back to the old drawing board. There were so many, many things possible under current art which had been impossible in 1970; I wanted to get busy and design a few dozen.

For example I had expected that there would be automatic secretaries in use—I mean a machine you could dictate to and get back a business letter, spelling, punctuation, and format all perfect, without a human being in the sequence. But there weren’t any. Oh, somebody had invented a machine which could type, but it was suited only to a phonetic language like Esperanto and was useless in a language in which you could say: “Though the tough cough and hiccough plough him through.”

People won’t give up the illogicalities of English to suit the convenience of an inventor. Mohammed must go to the mountain.

If a high-school girl could sort out the cockeyed spelling of English and usually type the right word, how could a machine be taught to do it?

“Impossible” was the usual answer. It was supposed to require human judgment and understanding. But an invention is something that was “impossible” up to then—that’s why governments grant patents.

With memory tubes and the miniaturization now possible—I had been right about the importance of gold as an engineering material—with those two things it would be easy to pack a hundred thousand sound codes into a cubic foot…in other words, to sound-key every word in a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. But that was unnecessary; ten thousand would be ample. Who expects a stenographer to field a word like “kourbash” or “pyrophyllite”? You spell such words for her if you must use them. Okay, we code the machine to accept spelling when necessary. We sound-code for punctuation…and for various formats…and to look up addresses in a file…and for how many copies…and routing…and provide at least a thousand blank word-codings for special vocabulary used in a business or profession—and make it so that the owner-client could put those special words in himself, spell a word like “stenobenthic” with the memory key depressed and never have to spell it again.

All simple. Just a matter of hooking together gadgets already on the market, then smoothing it into a production model.

The real hitch was homonyms. Dictation Daisy wouldn’t even slow up over that “tough cough and hiccough” sentence because each of those words carries a different sound. But choices like “they’re” and “their,” “right” and “write” would give her trouble.

Did the L. A. Public Library have a dictionary of English homonyms? It did…and I began counting the unavoidable homonym pairs and trying to figure how many of these could be handled by information theory through context statistics and how many would require special coding.

I began to get jittery with frustration. Not only was I wasting thirty hours a week on an utterly useless job, but also I could not do real engineering in a public library. I needed a drafting room, a shop where I could smooth out the bugs, trade catalogues, professional journals, calculating machines, and all the rest.

I decided that I would just have to get at least a subprofessional job. I wasn’t silly enough to think that I was an engineer again; there was too much art I had not yet soaked up—repeatedly I had thought of ways to do something, using something new that I had learned, only to find out at the library that somebody had solved the same problem, neater, better, and cheaper than my own first stab at it and ten or fifteen years earlier.

I needed to get into an engineering office and let these new things soak in through my skin. I had hopes that I could land a job as a junior draftsman.

I knew that they were using powered semiautomatic drafting machines now; I had seen pictures of them even though I had not had one under my hands. But I had a hunch that I could learn to play one in twenty minutes, given the chance, for they were remarkably like an idea I had once had myself: a machine that bore the same relation to the old-fashioned drawing-board-and-T-square method that a typewriter did to writing in longhand. I had worked it all out in my head, how you could put straight lines or curves anywhere on an easel just by punching keys.

However, in this case I was just as sure that my idea had not been stolen as I was certain that Flexible Frank had been stolen, because my drafting machine had never existed except in my head. Somebody had had the same idea and had developed it logically the same way. When it’s time to railroad, people start railroading.

The Aladdin people, the same firm that made Eager Beaver, made one of the best drawing machines, Drafting Dan. I dipped into my savings, bought a better suit of clothes and a second-hand briefcase, stuffed the latter with newspapers, and presented myself at the Aladdin salesrooms with a view to “buying” one. I asked for a demonstration.

Then, when I got close to a model of Drafting Dan, I had a most upsetting experience. Déjà vu, the psychologists call it—“I have been here before.” The damned thing had been developed in precisely the fashion in which I would have developed it, had I had time to do so…instead of being kidnapped into the Long Sleep.

Don’t ask me exactly why I felt that way. A man knows his own style of work. An art critic will say that a painting is a Rubens or a Rembrandt by the brushwork, the treatment of light, the composition, the choice of pigment, a dozen things. Engineering is not science, it is an art, and there is always a wide range of choices in how to solve engineering problems. An engineering designer “signs” his work by those choices just as surely as a painter does.

Drafting Dan had the flavor of my own technique so strongly that I was quite disturbed by it. I began to wonder if there wasn’t something to telepathy after all.

I was careful to get the number of its first patent. In the state I was in I wasn’t surprised to see that the date on the first one was 1970. I resolved to find out who had invented it. It might have been one of my own teachers, from whom I had picked up some of my style. Or it might be an engineer with whom I had once worked.

The inventor might still be alive. If so, I’d look him up someday…get acquainted with this man whose mind worked just like mine.

But I managed to pull myself together and let the salesman show me how to work it. He hardly need have bothered; Drafting Dan and I were made for each other. In ten minutes I could play it better than he could. At last I reluctantly quit making pretty pictures with it, got list price, discounts, service arrangements, and so forth, then left saying that I would call him, just as he was ready to get my signature on the dotted line. It was a dirty trick, but all I cost him was an hour’s time.

From there I went to the Hired Girl main factory and applied for a job.

I knew that Belle and Miles were no longer with Hired Girl, Inc. In what time I could spare between my job and the compelling necessity to catch up in engineering I had been searching for Belle and Miles and most especially for Ricky. None of the three was listed in the Great Los Angeles telephone system, nor for that matter anywhere in the United States, for I had paid to have an “information” search made at the national office in Cleveland. A quadruple fee, it was, as I had had Belle searched for under both “Gentry” and “Darkin.”

I had the same luck with the Register of Voters for Los Angeles County.

Hired Girl, Inc., in a letter from a seventeenth vice-president in charge of foolish questions, admitted cautiously that they had once had officers by those names thirty years ago but they were unable to help me now.

Picking up a trail thirty years cold is no job for an amateur with little time and less money. I did not have their fingerprints, or I might have tried the FBI. I didn’t know their social-security numbers. My Country ’Tis of Thee had never succumbed to police-state nonsense, so there was no bureau certain to have a dossier on each citizen, nor was I in a position to tap such a file even if there had been.

Perhaps a detective agency, lavishly subsidized, could have dug through utilities records, newspaper files, and God knows what, and traced them down. But I didn’t have the lavish subsidy, nor the talent and time to do it myself.

I finally gave up on Miles and Belle while promising myself that I would, as quickly as I could afford it, put professionals to tracing Ricky. I had already determined that she held no Hired Girl stock and I had written to the Bank of America to see if they held, or ever had held, a trust for her. I got back a form letter informing me that such things were confidential, so I had written again, saying that I was a Sleeper and she was my only surviving relative. That time I got a nice letter, signed by one of the trust officers and saying that he regretted that information concerning trust beneficiaries could not be divulged even to one in my exceptional circumstances, but he felt justified in giving me the negative information that the bank had not at any time through any of its branches held a trust in favor of one Frederica Virginia Gentry.

That seemed to settle one thing. Somehow those birds had managed to get the stock away from little Ricky. My assignment of the stock would

have had to go through the Bank of America, the way I had written it. But it had not. Poor Ricky! We had both been robbed.

I made one more stab at it. The records office of the Superintendent of Instruction in Mojave did have record of a grade-school pupil named Frederica Virginia Gentry…but the named pupil had taken a withdrawal transcript in 1971. Further deponent sayeth not.

It was some consolation to know that somebody somewhere admitted that Ricky had ever existed. But she might have taken that transcript to any of many, many thousand public schools in the United States. How long would it take to write to each of them? And were their records so arranged as to permit them to answer, even supposing they were willing?

In a quarter of a billion people one little girl can drop out of sight like a pebble in the ocean.

BUT THE FAILURE of my search did leave me free to seek a job with Hired Girl, Inc., now that I knew Miles and Belle were not running it. I could have tried any of a hundred automation firms, but Hired Girl and Aladdin were the big names in appliance automatons, as important in their own field as Ford and General Motors had been in the heyday of the ground automobile. I picked Hired Girl partly for sentimental reasons; I wanted to see what my old outfit had grown into.

On Monday, 5 March 2001, I went to their employment office, got into the line for white-collar help, filled out a dozen forms having nothing to do with engineering and one that did…and was told don’t-call-us- we’ll-call-you.

I hung around and managed to bull myself in to see an assistant hiring flunky. He reluctantly looked over the one form that meant anything and told me that my engineering degree meant nothing, since there had been a thirty-year lapse when I had not used my skill.

I pointed out that I had been a Sleeper.

“That makes it even worse. In any case, we don’t hire people over forty-five.”

“But I’m not forty-five. I’m only thirty.” “You were born in 1940. Sorry.”

“What am I supposed to do? Shoot myself ?”

He shrugged. “If I were you, I’d apply for an old-age pension.”

I got out quickly before I gave him some advice. Then I walked three quarters of a mile around to the front entrance and went in. The general manager’s name was Curtis; I asked for him.

I got past the first two layers simply by insisting that I had business with him. Hired Girl, Inc., did not use their own automatons as receptionists; they used real flesh and blood. Eventually I reached a place several stories up and (I judged) about two doors from the boss, and here I encountered a firm pass-gauge type who insisted on knowing my business.

I looked around. It was a largish office with about forty real people in it, as well as a lot of machines. She said sharply, “Well? State your business and I’ll check with Mr. Curtis’ appointment secretary.”

I said loudly, making sure that everybody heard it, “I want to know what he’s going to do about my wife!” Sixty seconds later I was in his private office. He looked up. “Well? What the devil is this nonsense?”

It took half an hour and some old records to convince him that I did not have a wife and that I actually was the founder of the firm. Then things got chummy over drinks and cigars and I met the sales manager and the chief engineer and other heads of departments. “We thought you were dead,” Curtis told me. “In fact, the company’s official history says that you are.”

“Just a rumor. Some other D. B. Davis.”

The sales manager, Jack Galloway, said suddenly, “What are you doing now, Mr. Davis?” “Not much. I’ve, uh, been in the automobile business. But I’m resigning. Why?”

“ ‘Why?’ Isn’t it obvious?” He swung around toward the chief engineer, Mr. McBee. “Hear that, Mac? All you engineers are alike; you wouldn’t know a sales angle if it came up and kissed you. ‘Why?’ Mr. Davis. Because you’re sales copy, that’s why! Because you’re romance. Founder of Firm Comes Back from Grave to Visit Brain Child. Inventor of the First Robot Servant Views Fruits of His Genius.”

I said hastily, “Now wait a minute—I’m not an advertising model nor a grabbie star. I like my privacy. I didn’t come here for that; I came here for a job…in engineering.”

Mr. McBee’s eyebrows went up but he said nothing.

We wrangled for a while. Galloway tried to tell me that it was my simple duty to the firm I had founded. McBee said little, but it was obvious that he did not think I would be any addition to his department—at one point he asked me what I knew about designing solid circuits. I had to admit that my only knowledge of them was from a little reading of nonclassified publications.

Curtis finally suggested a compromise. “See here, Mr. Davis, you obviously occupy a very special position. One might say that you founded not merely this firm but the whole industry. Nevertheless, as Mr. McBee has hinted, the industry has moved on since the year you took the Long Sleep. Suppose we put you on the staff with the title of…uh, ‘Research Engineer Emeritus.’ ”

I hesitated. “What would that mean?”

“Whatever you made it mean. However, I tell you frankly that you would be expected to cooperate with Mr. Galloway. We not only make these things, we have to sell them.”

“Uh, would I have a chance to do any engineering?”

“That’s up to you. You’d have facilities and you could do what you wished.” “Shop facilities?”

Curtis looked at McBee. The chief engineer answered, “Certainly, certainly…within reason, of course.” He had slipped so far into Glasgow speech that I could hardly understand him.

Galloway said briskly, “That’s settled. May I be excused, B.J.? Don’t go away, Mr. Davis—we’re going to get a picture of you with the very first model of Hired Girl.”

And he did. I was glad to see her…the very model I had put together with my own pinkies and lots of sweat. I wanted to see if she still worked, but McBee wouldn’t let me start her up—I don’t think he really believed that I knew how she worked.

I HAD A GOOD time at Hired Girl all through March and April. I had all the professional tools I could want, technical journals, the indispensable trade catalogues, a practical library, a Drafting Dan (Hired Girl did not make a drafting machine themselves, so they used the best on the market, which was Aladdin’s), and the shoptalk of professionals…music to my ears!

I got acquainted especially with Chuck Freudenberg, components assistant chief engineer. For my money Chuck was the only real engineer

there; the rest were overeducated slipstick mechanics…including McBee, for the chief engineer was, I thought, a clear proof that it took more than a

degree and a Scottish accent to make an engineer. After we got better acquainted Chuck admitted that he felt the same way. “Mac doesn’t really like anything new; he would rather do things the way his grandpa did on the bonnie banks of the Clyde.”

“What’s he doing in this job?”

Freudenberg did not know the details, but it seemed that the present firm had been a manufacturing company which had simply rented the patents (my patents) from Hired Girl, Inc. Then about twenty years ago there had been one of those tax-saving mergers, with Hired Girl stock swapped for stock in the manufacturing firm and the new firm taking the name of the one I had founded. Chuck thought that McBee had been hired at that time. “He’s got a piece of it, I think.”

Chuck and I used to sit over beers in the evening and discuss engineering, what the company needed, and the whichness of what. His original interest in me had been that I was a Sleeper. Too many people, I had found, had a queezy interest in Sleepers (as if we were freaks) and I avoided letting people know that I was one. But Chuck was fascinated by the time jump itself and his interest was a healthy one in what the world had been like before he was born, as recalled by a man who literally remembered it as “only yesterday.”

In return he was willing to criticize the new gadgets that were always boiling up in my head, and set me straight when I (as I did repeatedly) would rough out something that was old hat…in 2001 A.D. Under his friendly guidance I was becoming a modern engineer, catching up fast.

But when I outlined to him one April evening my autosecretary idea he said slowly, “Dan, have you done work on this on company time?” “Huh? No, not really. Why?”

“How does your contract read?”

“What? I don’t have one.” Curtis had put me on the payroll and Galloway had taken pictures of me and had a ghost writer asking me silly questions; that was all.

“Mmm…pal, I wouldn’t do anything about this until you are sure where you stand. This is really new. And I think you can make it work.” “I hadn’t worried about that angle.”

“Put it away for a while. You know the shape the company is in. It’s making money and we put out good products. But the only new items we’ve brought out in five years are ones we’ve acquired by license. I can’t get anything new past Mac. But you can bypass Mac and take this to the big boss. So don’t…unless you want to hand it over to the company just for your salary check.”

I took his advice. I continued to design but I burned any drawings I thought were good—I didn’t need them once I had them in my head. I didn’t feel guilty about it; they hadn’t hired me as an engineer, they were paying me to be a show-window dummy for Galloway. When my advertising value was sucked dry, they would give me a month’s pay and a vote of thanks and let me go.

But by then I’d be a real engineer again and able to open my own office. If Chuck wanted to take a flyer I’d take him with me.

Instead of handing my story to the newspapers Jack Galloway played it slow for the national magazines; he wanted Life to do a spread, tying it in with the one they had done a third of a century earlier on the first production model of Hired Girl. Life did not rise to the bait but he did manage to plant it several other places that spring, tying it in with display advertising.

I thought of growing a beard. Then I realized that no one recognized me and would not have cared if they had.

I got a certain amount of crank mail, including one letter from a man who promised me that I would burn eternally in hell for defying God’s plan for my life. I chucked it, while thinking that if God had really opposed what had happened to me, He should never have made cold sleep possible. Otherwise I wasn’t bothered.

But I did get a phone call, on Thursday, 3 May 2001. “Mrs. Schultz is on the line, sir. Will you take the call?”

Schultz? Damnation, I had promised Doughty the last time I had called him that I would take care of that. But I had put it off because I did not want to; I was almost sure it was one of those screwballs who pursued Sleepers and asked them personal questions.

But she had called several times, Doughty had told me, since I had checked out in December. In accordance with the policy of the sanctuary they had refused to give her my address, agreeing merely to pass along messages.

Well, I owed it to Doughty to shut her up. “Put her on.”

“Is this Danny Davis?” My office phone had no screen; she could not see me. “Speaking. Your name is Schultz?”

“Oh, Danny darling, it’s so good to hear your voice!”

I didn’t answer right away. She went on, “Don’t you knowme?” I knew her, all right. It was Belle Gentry.

I MADE A DATE with her.

My first impulse had been to tell her to go to hell and switch off. I had long since realized that revenge was childish; revenge would not bring Pete back and fitting revenge would simply land me in jail. I had hardly thought about Belle and Miles since I had quit looking for them.

But Belle almost certainly knew where Ricky was. So I made a date.

She wanted me to take her to dinner, but I would not do that. I’m not fussy about fine points of etiquette. But eating is something you do only with friends; I would see her but I had no intention of eating or drinking with her. I got her address and told her I would be there that evening at eight.

It was a cheap rental, a walk-up flat in a part of town (lower La Brea) not yet converted to New Plan. Before I buzzed her door I knew that she had not hung onto what she had bilked me out of, or she would not have been living there.

And when I saw her I realized that revenge was much too late; she and the years had managed it for me.

Belle was not less than fifty-three by the age she had claimed, and probably closer to sixty in fact. Between geriatrics and endocrinology a woman who cared to take the trouble could stay looking thirty for at least thirty extra years, and lots of them did. There were grabbie stars who boasted of being grandmothers while still playing ingénue leads.

Belle had not taken the trouble.

She was fat and shrill and kittenish. It was evident that she still considered her body her principal asset, for she was dressed in a Sticktite negligee which, while showing much too much of her, also showed that she was female, mammalian, overfed, and underexercised.

She was not aware of it. That once-keen brain was fuzzy; all that was left was her conceit and her overpowering confidence in herself. She threw herself on me with squeals of joy and came close to kissing me before I could unwind her.

I pushed her wrists back. “Take it easy, Belle.”

“But, darling! I’m so happy—so excited—and so thrilled to see you!”

“I’ll bet.” I had gone there resolved to keep my temper…just find out what I wanted to know and get out. But I was finding it difficult. “Remember

how you saw me last? Drugged to my eyebrows so that you could stuff me into cold sleep.”

She looked puzzled and hurt. “But, sweetheart, we only did it for your own good! You were so ill.” I think she believed it. “Okay, okay. Where’s Miles? You’re Mrs. Schultz now?”

Her eyes grew wide. “Didn’t you know?”

“Know what?”

“Poor Miles…poor, dear Miles. He lived less than two years, Danny boy, after you left us.” Her expression changed suddenly. “The frallup cheated me!”

“That’s too bad.” I wondered how he had died. Did he fall or was he pushed? Arsenic soup? I decided to stick to the main issue before she jumped the track completely. “What became of Ricky?”

“Ricky?”

“Miles’ little girl. Frederica.”

“Oh, that horrible little brat! How should I know? She went to live with her grandmother.” “Where? And what was her grandmother’s name?”

“Where? Tucson—or Yuma—or some place dull like that. It might have been Indio. Darling, I don’t want to talk about that impossible child— I want

to talk about us.”

“In a moment. What was her grandmother’s name?”

“Danny boy, you’re being very tiresome. Why in the world should I remember something like that?” “What was it?”

“Oh, Hanolon…or Haney…or Heinz. Or it might have been Hinckley. Don’t be dull, dear. Let’s have a drink. Let’s drink a toast to our happy reunion.”

I shook my head. “I don’t use the stuff.” This was almost true. Having discovered that it was an unreliable friend in a crisis, I usually limited myself to a beer with Chuck Freudenberg.

“How very dull, dearest. You won’t mind if I have one.” She was already pouring it—straight gin, the lonely girl’s friend. But before she downed it she picked up a plastic pill bottle and rolled two capsules into her palm. “Have one?”

I recognized the striped casing—euphorion. It was supposed to be nontoxic and non-habit-forming, but opinions differed. There was agitation to class it with morphine and the barbiturates. “Thanks. I’m happy now.”

“How nice.” She took both of them, chased them with gin. I decided if I was to learn anything at all I had better talk fast; soon she would be nothing but giggles.

I took her arm and sat her down on her couch, then sat down across from her. “Belle, tell me about yourself. Bring me up to date. How did you and Miles make out with the Mannix people?”

“Uh? But we didn’t.” She suddenly flared up. “That was your fault!” “Huh? My fault? I wasn’t even there.”

“Of course it was your fault. That monstrous thing you built out of an old wheelchair…that was what they wanted. And then it was gone.” “Gone? Where was it?”

She peered at me with piggy, suspicious eyes. “You ought to know. You took it.”

“Me? Belle, are you crazy? I couldn’t take anything. I was frozen stiff, in cold sleep. Where was it? And when did it disappear?” It fitted in with my own notions that somebody must have swiped Flexible Frank, if Belle and Miles had not made use of him. But out of all the billions on the globe, I was the one who certainly had not. I had not seen Frank since that disastrous night when they had outvoted me. “Tell me about it, Belle. Where was

it? And what made you think I took it?”

“It had to be you. Nobody else knew it was important. That pile of junk! I told Miles not to put it in the garage.”

“But if somebody did swipe it, I doubt if they could make it work. You still had all the notes and instructions and drawings.”

“No, we didn’t either. Miles, the fool, had stuffed them all inside it the night we had to move it to protect it.”

I did not fuss about the word “protect.” Instead I was about to say that he couldn’t possibly have stuffed several pounds of paper into Flexible Frank; he was already stuffed like a goose—when I remembered that I had built a temporary shelf across the bottom of his wheelchair base to hold tools while I worked on him. A man in a hurry might very well have emptied my working files into that space.

No matter. The crime, or crimes, had been committed thirty years ago. I wanted to find out how Hired Girl, Inc., had slipped away from them.

“After the Mannix deal fell through what did you do with the company?”

“We ran it, of course. Then when Jake quit us Miles said we had to shut down. Miles was a weakling…and I never liked that Jake Schmidt. Sneaky. Always asking why you had quit…as if we could have stopped you! I wanted us to hire a good foreman and keep going. The company would have been worth more. But Miles insisted.”

“What happened then?”

“Why, then we licensed to Geary Manufacturing, of course. You know that; you’re working there now.”

I did know that; the full corporate name of Hired Girl was now “Hired Girl Appliances and Geary Manufacturing, Inc.”—even though the signs read simply “Hired Girl.” I seemed to have found out all I needed to know that this flabby old wreck could tell me.

But I was curious on another point. “You two sold your stock after you licensed to Geary?”

“Huh? Whatever put that silly notion in your head?” Her expression broke and she began to blubber, pawing feebly for a handkerchief, then giving up and letting the tears go. “He cheated me! He cheated me! The dirty shiker cheated me…he kinked me out of it.” She snuffled and added meditatively, “You all cheated me…and you were the worst of the lot, Danny boy. After I had been so good to you.” She started to bawl again.

I decided that euphorion wasn’t worth whatever it cost. Or maybe she enjoyed crying. “How did he cheat you, Belle?”

“What? Why, you know. He left it all to that dirty brat of his…after all that he had promised me…after I nursed him when he hurt so. And she wasn’t even his own daughter. That proves it.”

It was the first good news I had had all evening. Apparently Ricky had received one good break, even if they had grabbed my stock away from

her earlier. So I got back to the main point. “Belle, what was Ricky’s grandmother’s name? And where did they live?” “Where did who live?”

“Ricky’s grandmother.” “Who’s Ricky?”

“Miles’ daughter. Try to think, Belle. It’s important.” That set her off. She pointed a finger at me and shrilled, “I know you. You were in love with her, that’s what. That dirty little sneak…her and that horrible cat.”

I felt a burst of anger at the mention of Pete. But I tried to suppress it. I simply grabbed her shoulders and shook her a little. “Brace up, Belle. I want to know just one thing. Where did they live? How did Miles address letters when he wrote to them?”

She kicked at me. “I won’t even talk to you! You’ve been perfectly stinking ever since you got here.” Then she appeared to sober almost instantly and said quietly, “I don’t know. The grandmother’s name was Haneker, or something like that. I only saw her once, in court, when they came to see about the will.”

“When was that?”

“Right after Miles died, of course.” “When did Miles die, Belle?”

She switched again. “You want to know too much. You’re as bad as the sheriffs…questions, questions, questions!” Then she looked up and said pleadingly, “Let’s forget everything and just be ourselves. There’s just you and me now, dear…and we still have our lives ahead of us. A woman isn’t old at thirty-nine…Schultzie said I was the youngest thing he ever saw—and that old goat had seen plenty, let me tell you! We could be so happy, dear. We—”

I had had all I could stand, even to play detective. “I’ve got to go, Belle.” “What, dear? Why, it’s early…and we’ve got all night ahead of us. I thought—” “I don’t care what you thought. I’ve got to leave right now.”

“Oh dear! Such a pity. When will I see you again? Tomorrow? I’m terribly busy but I’ll break my engagements and—” “I won’t be seeing you again, Belle.” I left.

I never did see her again.

As soon as I was home I took a hot bath, scrubbing hard. Then I sat down and tried to add up what I had found out, if anything. Belle seemed to think that Ricky’s grandmother’s name began with an “H”—if Belle’s maunderings meant anything at all, a matter highly doubtful—and that they had lived in one of the desert towns in Arizona, or possibly California. Well, perhaps professional skip-tracers could make something of that.

Or maybe not. In any case it would be tedious and expensive; I’d have to wait until I could afford it. Did I know anything else that signified?

Miles had died (so Belle said) around 1972. If he had died in this county I ought to be able to find the date in a couple of hours of searching, and after that I ought to be able to track down the hearing on his will…if there had been one, as Belle had implied. Through that I might be able to find out where Ricky had lived then. If courts kept such records. (I didn’t know.) If I had gained anything by cutting the lapse down to twenty-eight years and locating the town she had lived in that long ago.

If there was any point in looking for a woman now forty-one and almost certainly married and with a family. The jumbled ruin that had once been Belle Darkin had shaken me; I was beginning to realize what thirty years could mean. Not that I feared that Ricky grown up would be anything but gracious and good…but would she even remember me? Oh, I did not think she would have forgotten me entirely, but wasn’t it likely that I would be just a faceless person, the man she had sometimes called “Uncle Danny” and who had that nice cat?

Wasn’t I, in my own way, living in a fantasy of the past quite as much as Belle was?

Oh well, it couldn’t hurt to try again to find her. At the least, we could exchange Christmas cards each year. Her husband could not very well object to that.

THE NEXT MORNING was Friday, the fourth of May. Instead of going into the office I went down to the county Hall of Records. They were moving everything and told me to come back next month, so I went to the office of the Times and got a crick in my neck from a microscanner. But I did find out that if Miles had died any date between twelve and thirty-six months after I had been tucked in the freezer, he had not done so in Los Angeles County—if the death notices were correct.

Of course there was no law requiring him to die in L. A. County. You can die anyplace. They’ve never managed to regulate that.

Perhaps Sacramento had consolidated state records. I decided I would have to check someday, thanked the Times librarian, went out to lunch, and eventually got back to Hired Girl, Inc.

There were two phone calls and a note waiting, all from Belle. I got as far in the note as “Dearest Dan,” tore it up and told the desk not to accept any calls for me from Mrs. Schultz. Then I went over to the accounting office and asked the chief accountant if there was any way to check up on past ownership of a retired stock issue. He said he would try and I gave him the numbers, from memory, of the original Hired Girl stock I had once held. It took no feat of memory; we had issued exactly one thousand shares to start with and I had held the first five hundred and ten, and Belle’s “engagement present” had come off the front end.

I went back to my cubbyhole and found McBee waiting for me. “Where have you been?” he wanted to know.

“Out and around. Why?”

“That’s hardly a sufficient answer. Mr. Galloway was in twice today looking for you. I was forced to tell him I did not know where you were.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake! If Galloway wants me he’ll find me eventually. If he spent half the time peddling the merchandise on its merits that he does trying to think up cute new angles, the firm would be better off.” Galloway was beginning to annoy me. He was supposed to be in charge of selling, but it seemed to me that he concentrated on kibitzing the advertising agency that handled our account. But I’m prejudiced; engineering is the only part that interests me. All the rest strikes me as paper shuffling, mere overhead.

I knew what Galloway wanted me for and, to tell the truth, I had been dragging my feet. He wanted to dress me up in 1900 costumes and take pictures. I had told him that he could take all the pix he wanted of me in 1970 costumes, but that 1900 was twelve years before my father was born. He said nobody would know the difference, so I told him what the fortuneteller told the cop. He said I didn’t have the right attitude.

These people who deal in fancification to fool the public think nobody can read and write but themselves. McBee said, “You don’t have the right attitude, Mr. Davis.”

“So? I’m sorry.”

“You’re in an odd position. You are charged to my department, but I’m supposed to make you available to advertising and sales when they need you. From here on I think you had better use the time clock like everyone else…and you had better check with me whenever you leave the office during working hours. Please see to it.”

I counted to ten slowly, using binary notation. “Mac, do you use the time clock?” “Eh? Of course not. I’m the chief engineer.”

“So you are. It says so right over on that door. But see here, Mac, I was chief engineer of this bolt bin before you started to shave. Do you really think that I am going to knuckle under to a time clock?”

He turned red. “Possibly not. But I can tell you this: If you don’t, you won’t draw your check.” “So? You didn’t hire me; you can’t fire me.”

“Mmm…we’ll see. I can at least transfer you out of my department and over to advertising where you belong. If you belong anywhere.” He glanced at my drafting machine. “You certainly aren’t producing anything here. I don’t fancy having that expensive machine tied up any longer.” He nodded briskly. “Good day.”

I followed him out. An Office Boy rolled in and placed a large envelope in my basket, but I did not wait to see what it was; I went down to the staff coffee bar and fumed. Like a lot of other triple-ought-gauge minds, Mac thought creative work could be done by the numbers. No wonder the old firm hadn’t produced anything new for years.

Well, to hell with him. I hadn’t planned to stick around much longer anyway.

An hour or so later I wandered back up and found an interoffice mail envelope in my basket. I opened it, thinking that Mac had decided to throw the switch on me at once.

But it was from accounting; it read:

Dear Mr. Davis:

Re: the stock you inquired about.

Dividends on the larger block were paid from first quarter 1971 to second quarter 1980 on the original shares, to a trust held in favor of a party named Heinicke. Our reorganization took place in 1980 and the abstract at hand is somewhat obscure, but it appears that the equivalent shares (after reorganization) were sold to Cosmopolitan Insurance Group, which still holds them. Regarding the smaller block of stock, it was held (as you suggested) by Belle D. Gentry until 1972, when it was assigned to Sierra Acceptances Corporation, who broke it up and sold it piecemeal “over the counter.” The exact subsequent history of each share and its equivalent after reorganization could be traced if needed, but more time would be required.

If this department can be of any further assistance to you, please feel free to call on us.

Y. E. Reuther, Ch. Acct. I called Reuther and thanked him and told him that I had all I wanted. I knew now that my assignment to Ricky had never been effective. Since the

transfer of my stock that did show in the record was clearly fraudulent, the deal whiffed of Belle; this third party could have been either another of her stooges or possibly a fictitious person—she was probably already planning on swindling Miles by then.

Apparently she had been short of cash after Miles’ death and had sold off the smaller block. But I did not care what had happened to any of the stock once it passed out of Belle’s control. I had forgotten to ask Reuther to trace Miles’ stock…that might give a lead to Ricky even though she no longer held it. But it was late Friday already; I’d ask him Monday. Right now I wanted to open the large envelope still waiting for me, for I had spotted the return address.

I had written to the patent office early in March about the original patents on both Eager Beaver and Drafting Dan. My conviction that the original

Eager Beaver was just another name for Flexible Frank had been somewhat shaken by my first upsetting experience with Drafting Dan; I had considered the possibility that the same unknown genius who had conceived Dan so nearly as I had imagined him might also have developed a parallel equivalent of Flexible Frank. The theory was bulwarked by the fact that both patents had been taken out the same year and both patents were held (or had been held until they expired) by the same company, Aladdin.

But I had to know. And if this inventor was still alive I wanted to meet him. He could teach me a thing or four.

I had written first to the patent office, only to get a form letter back that all records of expired patents were now kept in the National Archives in Carlsbad Caverns. So I wrote the Archives and got another form letter with a schedule of fees. So I wrote a third time, sending a postal order (no personal checks, please) for prints of the whole works on both patents—descriptions, claims, drawings, histories.

This fat envelope looked like my answer.

The one on top was 4,307,909, the basic for Eager Beaver. I turned to the drawings, ignoring for the moment both description and claims. Claims aren’t important anyway except in court; the basic notion in writing up claims on an application for patent is to claim the whole wide world in the broadest possible terms, then let the patent examiners chew you down—this is why patent attorneys are born. The descriptions, on the other hand, have to be factual, but I can read drawings faster than I can read descriptions.

I had to admit that it did not look too much like Flexible Frank. It was better than Flexible Frank; it could do more and some of the linkages were simpler. The basic notion was the same—but that had to be true, as a machine controlled by Thorsen tubes and ancestral to Eager Beaver had to be based on the same principles I had used in Flexible Frank.

I could almost see myself developing just such a device…sort of a second-stage model of Frank. I had once had something of the sort in mind— Frank without Frank’s household limitations.

I finally got around to looking up the inventor’s name on the claims and description sheets. I recognized it all right. It was D. B. Davis.

I looked at it while whistling “Time on My Hands” slowly and off key. So Belle had lied again. I wondered if there was any truth at all in that spate of drivel she had fed me. Of course Belle was a pathological liar, but I had read somewhere that pathological liars usually have a pattern, starting from the truth and embellishing it, rather than indulging in complete fancy. Quite evidently my model of Frank had never been “stolen” but had been turned over to some other engineer to smooth up, then the application had been made in my name.

But the Mannix deal had never gone through; that one fact was certain, since I knew it from company records. But Belle had said that their failure to produce Flexible Frank as contracted had soured the Mannix deal.

Had Miles grabbed Frank for himself, letting Belle think that it had been stolen? Or restolen, rather.

In that case…I dropped guessing at it, as hopeless, more hopeless than the search for Ricky. I might have to take a job with Aladdin before I would be able to ferret out where they had gotten the basic patent and who had benefited by the deal. It probably was not worth it, since the patent was expired, Miles was dead, and Belle, if she had gained a dime out of it, had long since thrown it away. I had satisfied myself on the one point important to me, the thing I had set out to prove; i.e., that I myself was the original inventor. My professional pride was salved and who cares about money when three meals a day are taken care of ? Not me.

So I turned to 4,307,910, the first Drafting Dan.

The drawings were a delight. I couldn’t have planned it better myself; this boy really had it. I admired the economy of the linkages and the clever way the circuits had been used to reduce the moving parts to a minimum. Moving parts are like the vermiform appendix; a source of trouble to be done away with whenever possible.

He had even used an electric typewriter for his keyboard chassis, giving credit on the drawing to an IBM patent series. That was smart, that was engineering: never reinvent something that you can buy down the street.

I had to know who this brainy boy was, so I turned to the papers. It was D. B. Davis.

AFTER QUITE A LONG time I phoned Dr. Albrecht. They rounded him up and I told him who I was, since my office phone had no visual. “I recognized your voice,” he answered. “Hi there, son. How are you getting along with your new job?”

“Well enough. They haven’t offered me a partnership yet.”

“Give them time. Happy otherwise? Find yourself fitting back in?”

“Oh, sure! If I had known what a great place here and now is I’d have taken the Sleep earlier. You couldn’t hire me to go back to 1970.”

“Oh, come now! I remember that year pretty well. I was a kid then on a farm in Nebraska. I used to hunt and fish. I had fun. More than I have now.” “Well, to each his own. I like it now. But look, Doc, I didn’t call up just to talk philosophy; I’ve got a little problem.”

“Well, let’s have it. It ought to be a relief; most people have big problems.” “Doc? Is it at all possible for the Long Sleep to cause amnesia?”

He hesitated before replying. “It is conceivably possible. I can’t say that I’ve ever seen a case, as such. I mean unconnected with other causes.” “What are the things that cause amnesia?”

“Any number of things. The commonest, perhaps, is the patient’s own subconscious wish. He forgets a sequence of events, or rearranges them, because the facts are unbearable to him. That’s a functional amnesia in the raw. Then there is the old-fashioned knock on the head— amnesia from trauma. Or it might be amnesia through suggestion… under drugs or hypnosis. What’s the matter, bub? Can’t you find your checkbook?”

“It’s not that. So far as I know, I’m getting along just fine now. But I can’t get some things straight that happened before I took the Sleep…and it’s got me worried.”

“Mmm…any possibility of any of the causes I mentioned?”

“Yes,” I said slowly. “Uh, all of them, except maybe the bump on the head…and even that might have happened while I was drunk.”

“I neglected to mention,” he said dryly, “the commonest temporary amnesia—pulling a blank while under the affluence of incohol. See here, son, why don’t you come see me and we’ll talk it over in detail? If I can’t tag what is biting you—I’m not a psychiatrist, you know—I can turn you over to a hypno-analyst who will peel back your memory like an onion and tell you why you were late to school on the fourth of February your second-grade year. But he’s pretty expensive, so why not give me a whirl first?”

I said, “Cripes, Doc, I’ve bothered you too much already…and you are pretty stuffy about taking money.” “Son, I’m always interested in my people; they’re all the family I have.”

So I put him off by saying that I would call him the first of the week if I wasn’t straightened out. I wanted to think about it anyhow.

Most of the lights went out except in my office; a Hired Girl, scrub-woman type, looked in, twigged that the room was still occupied, and rolled silently away. I still sat there.

Presently Chuck Freudenberg stuck his head in and said, “I thought you left long ago. Wake up and finish your sleep at home.”

I looked up. “Chuck, I’ve got a wonderful idea. Let’s buy a barrel of beer and two straws.”

He considered it carefully. “Well, it’s Friday…and I always like to have a head on Monday; it lets me know what day it is.” “Carried and so ordered. Wait a second while I stuff some things in this briefcase.”

We had some beers, then we had some food, then we had more beers at a place where the music was good, then we moved on to another place where there was no music and the booths had hush linings and they didn’t disturb you as long as you ordered something about once an hour. We talked. I showed him the patent records.

Chuck looked over the Eager Beaver prototype. “That’s a real nice job, Dan. I’m proud of you, boy. I’d like your autograph.” “But look at this one.” I gave him the drafting-machine patent papers.

“Some ways this one is even nicer. Dan, do you realize that you have probably had more influence on the present state of the art than, well, than Edison had in his period? You know that, boy?”

“Cut it out, Chuck; this is serious.” I gestured abruptly at the pile of photostats. “Okay, so I’m responsible for one of them. But I can’t be responsible for the other one. I didn’t do it…unless I’m completely mixed up about my own life before I took the Sleep. Unless I’ve got amnesia.”

“You’ve been saying that for the past twenty minutes. But you don’t seem to have any open circuits. You’re no crazier than is normal in an engineer.”

I banged the table, making the steins dance. “I’ve got to know!” “Steady there. So what are you going to do?”

“Huh?” I pondered it. “I’m going to pay a psychiatrist to dig it out of me.”

He sighed. “I thought you might say that. Now look, Dan, let’s suppose you pay this brain mechanic to do this and he reports that nothing is wrong, your memory is in fine shape, and all your relays are closed. What then?”

“That’s impossible.”

“That’s what they told Columbus. You haven’t even mentioned the most likely explanation.” “Huh? What?”

Without answering he signaled the waiter and told it to bring back the big phone book, extended area. I said, “What’s the matter? You calling the wagon for me?”

“Not yet.” He thumbed through the enormous book, then stopped and said, “Dan, scan this.”

I looked. He had his finger on “Davis.” There were columns of Davises. But where he had his finger there were a dozen “D. B. Davises” —from “Dabney” to “Duncan.”

There were three “Daniel B. Davises.” One of them was me.

“That’s from less than seven million people,” he pointed out. “Want to try your luck on more than two hundred and fifty million?” “It doesn’t prove anything,” I said feebly.

“No,” he agreed, “it doesn’t. It would be quite a coincidence, I readily agree, if two engineers with such similar talents happened to be working on the same sort of thing at the same time and just happened to have the same last name and the same initials. By the laws of statistics we could probably approximate just how unlikely it is that it would happen. But people forget—especially those who ought to know better, such as yourself—

that while the laws of statistics tell you how unlikely a particular coincidence is, they state just as firmly that coincidences do happen. This looks like one. I like that a lot better than I like the theory that my beer buddy has slipped his cams. Good beer buddies are hard to come by.”

“What do you think I ought to do?”

“The first thing to do is not to waste your time and money on a psychiatrist until you try the second thing. The second thing is to find out the first name of this ‘D. B. Davis’ who filed this patent. There will be some easy way to do that. Likely as not his first name will be ‘Dexter.’ Or even ‘Dorothy.’ But don’t trip a breaker if it is ‘Daniel,’ because the middle name might be ‘Berzowski’ with a social-security number different from yours. And the third thing to do, which is really the first, is to forget it for now and order another round.”

So we did, and talked of other things, particularly women. Chuck had a theory that women were closely related to machinery, both utterly unpredictable by logic. He drew graphs on the tabletop in beer to prove his thesis.

Sometime later I said suddenly, “If there were real time travel, I know what I would do.” “Huh? What are you talking about?”

“About my problem. Look, Chuck, I got here—got to ‘now’ I mean— by a sort of half-baked, horse-and-buggy time travel. But the trouble is I can’t go back. All the things that are worrying me happened thirty years ago. I’d go back and dig out the truth…if there were such a thing as real time travel.”

He stared at me. “But there is.” “What?”

He suddenly sobered. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

I said, “Maybe not, but you already have said it. Now you’d better tell me what you meant before I empty this here stein over your head.” “Forget it, Dan. I made a slip.”

“Talk!”

“That’s just what I can’t do.” He glanced around. No one was near us. “It’s classified.”

“Time travel classified? Good God, why?”

“Hell, boy, didn’t you ever work for the government? They’d classify sex if they could. There doesn’t have to be a reason; it’s just their policy. But it

is classified and I’m bound by it. So lay off.”

“But—Quit fooling around about it, Chuck; this is important to me. Terribly important.” When he didn’t answer and looked stubborn I said, “You

can tell me. Shucks, I used to have a ‘Q’ clearance myself. Never suspended, either. It’s just that I’m no longer with the government.” “What’s a ‘Q’ clearance?”

I explained and presently he nodded. You mean an ‘Alpha’ status. You must have been hot stuff, boy; I only rated a ‘Beta.’ ” “Then why can’t you tell me?”

“Huh? You know why. Regardless of your rated status, you don’t have the necessary ‘Need to Know’ qualification.” “The hell I don’t! ‘Need to Know’ is what I’ve got most of.”

But he wouldn’t budge, so finally I said in disgust, “I don’t think there is such a thing. I think you just had a belch back up on you.” He stared at me solemnly for a while, then he said, “Danny.”

“Huh?”

“I’m going to tell you. Just remember your ‘Alpha’ status, boy. I’m going to tell you because it can’t hurt anything and I want you to realize that it

couldn’t possibly be of use to you in your problem. It’s time travel, all right, but it’s not practical. You can’t use it.” “Why not?”

“Give me a chance, will you? They never smoothed the bugs out of it and it’s not even theoretically possible that they ever will. It’s of no practical value whatsoever, even for research. It’s a mere by-product of NullGrav— that’s why they classified it.”

“But, hell, NullGrav is declassified.”

“What’s that got to do with it? If this was commercial, too, maybe they’d unwrap it. But shut up.”

I’m afraid I didn’t, but I’d better tell this as if I had. During Chuck’s senior year at the University of Colorado—Boulder, that is—he had earned extra money as a lab assistant. They had a big cryogenics lab there and at first he had worked in that. But the school had a juicy defense contract concerned with the Edinburgh field theory and they had built a big new physics laboratory in the mountains out of town. Chuck was reassigned there to Professor Twitchell—Dr. Hubert Twitchell, the man who just missed the Nobel Prize and got nasty about it.

“Twitch got the notion that if he polarized around another axis he could reverse the gravitational field instead of leveling it off. Nothing happened. So he fed what he had done back into the computer and got wild-eyed at the results. He never showed them to me, of course. He put two silver dollars into the test cage—they still used hard money around those parts then—after making me mark them. He punched the solenoid button and they disappeared.

“Now that is not much of a trick,” Chuck went on. “Properly, he should have followed up by making them reappear out of the nose of a little boy who volunteers to come up on the stage. But he seemed satisfied, so I was—I was paid by the hour.

“A week later one of those cartwheels reappeared. Just one. But before that, one afternoon while I was cleaning up after he had gone home, a guinea pig showed up in the cage. It didn’t belong in the lab and I hadn’t seen it around before, so I took it over to the bio lab on my way home. They counted and weren’t short any pigs, although it’s hard to be certain with guinea pigs, so I took it home and made a pet out of it.

“After that single silver dollar came back Twitch got so worked up he quit shaving. Next time he used two guinea pigs from the bio lab. One of them looked awfully familiar to me, but I didn’t see it long because he pushed the panic button and they both disappeared.

“When one of them came back about ten days later—the one that didn’t look like mine—Twitch knew for sure that he had it. Then the resident O- in-C for the department of defense came around—a chair-type colonel who used to be a professor himself, of botany. Very military type… Twitch had no use for him. This colonel swore us both to double-dyed secrecy, over and above our ‘status’ oaths. He seemed to think that he had the greatest thing in military logistics since Caesar invented the carbon copy. His idea was that you could send divisions forward or back to a battle you had lost, or were going to lose, and save the day. The enemy would never figure out what had happened. He was crazy in hearts and spades, of course…and he didn’t get the star he was bucking for. But the ‘Critically Secret’ classification he stuck on it stayed, so far as I know, right up to the present. I’ve never seen a disclosure on it.”

“It might have some military use,” I argued, “it seems to me, if you could engineer it to take a division of soldiers at a time. No, wait a minute, I see the hitch. You always had ’em paired. It would take two divisions, one to go forward, one to go back. One division you would lose entirely… I suppose it would be more practical to have a division at the right place at the right time in the first place.”

“You’re right, but your reasons are wrong. You don’t have to use two divisions or two guinea pigs or two anything. You simply have to match the masses. You could use a division of men and a pile of rocks that weighed as much. It’s an action-reaction situation, corollary with Newton’s Third

Law.” He started drawing in the beer drippings again. “MV equals mv…the basic rocket-ship formula. The cognate time-travel formula is MT equals

mt.”

“I still don’t see the hitch. Rocks are cheap.”

“Use your head, Danny. With a rocket ship you can aim the kinkin’ thing. But which direction is last week? Point to it. Just try. You haven’t the slightest idea which mass is going back and which one is going forward. There’s no way to orient the equipment.”

I shut up. It would be embarrassing to a general to expect a division of fresh shock troops and get nothing but a pile of gravel. No wonder the ex- prof never made brigadier. But Chuck was still talking:

“You treat the two masses like the plates of a condenser, bringing them up to the same temporal potential. Then you discharge them on a

damping curve that is effectively vertical. Smacko!—one of them heads for the middle of next year, the other one is history. But you never know which one. But that’s not the worst of it; you can’t come back.”

“Huh? Who wants to come back?”

“Look, what use is it for research if you can’t come back? Or for commerce? Either way you jump, your money is no good and you can’t possibly get in touch with where you started. No equipment—and believe me it takes equipment and power. We took power from the Arco reactors. Expensive…that’s another drawback.”

“You could get back,” I pointed out, “with cold sleep.”

“Huh? If you went to the past. You might go the other way; you never know. If you went a short enough time back so that they had cold sleep…no farther back than the war. But what’s the point of that? You want to know something about 1980, say, you ask somebody or you look it up in old newspapers. Now if there was some way to photograph the Crucifixion…but there isn’t. Not possible. Not only couldn’t you get back, but there isn’t that much power on the globe. There’s an inverse-square law tied up in it too.”

“Nevertheless, some people would try it just for the hell of it. Didn’t anybody ever ride it?” Chuck glanced around again. “I’ve talked too much already.”

“A little more won’t hurt.”

“I think three people tried it. I think. One of them was an instructor. I was in the lab when Twitch and this bird, Leo Vincent, came in; Twitch told me I could go home. I hung around outside. After a while Twitch came out and Vincent didn’t. So far as I know, he’s still in there. He certainly wasn’t teaching at Boulder after that.”

“How about the other two?”

“Students. They all three went in together; only Twitch came out. But one of them was in class the next day, whereas the other one was missing for a week. Figure it out yourself.”

“Weren’t you ever tempted?”

“Me? Does my head look flat? Twitch suggested that it was almost my duty, in the interests of science, to volunteer. I said no, thanks; I’d take a short beer instead…but that I would gladly throw the switch for him. He didn’t take me up on it.”

“I’d take a chance on it. I could check up on what’s worrying me…and then come back again by cold sleep. It would be worth it.”

Chuck sighed deeply. “No more beer for you, my friend; you’re drunk. You didn’t listen to me. One,”—he started making tallies on the tabletop

—“you have no way of knowing that you’d go back; you might go forward instead.”

“I’d risk that. I like now a lot better than I liked then; I might like thirty years from now still better.”

“Okay, so take the Long Sleep again; it’s safer. Or just sit tight and wait for it to roll around; that’s what I’m going to do. But quit interrupting me.

Two, even if you did go back, you might miss 1970 by quite a margin. So far as I know, Twitch was shooting in the dark; I don’t think he had it calibrated. But of course I was just the flunky. Three, that lab was in a stand of pine trees and it was built in 1980. Suppose you come out ten years before it was built in the middle of a western yellow pine? Ought to make quite an explosion, about like a cobalt bomb, huh? Only you wouldn’t know it.”

“But—As a matter of fact, I don’t see why you would come out anywhere near the lab. Why not to the spot in outer space corresponding to where the lab used to be—I mean where it was…or rather—”

“You don’t mean anything. You stay on the world line you were on. Don’t worry about the math; just remember what that guinea pig did. But if you go back before the lab was built, maybe you wind up in a tree. Four, how could you get back to now even with cold sleep, even if you did go the right way, arrive at the right time, and live through it?”

“Huh? I did once, why not twice?”

“Sure. But what are you going to use for money?”

I opened my mouth and closed it. That one made me feel foolish. I had had the money once; I had it no longer. Even what I had saved (not nearly enough) I could not take with me—shucks, even if I robbed a bank (an art I knew nothing about) and took a million of the best back with me, I couldn’t spend it in 1970. I’d simply wind up in jail for trying to shove funny money. They had even changed the shape, not to mention serial numbers, dates, colors, and designs. “Maybe I’d just have to save it up.”

“Good boy. And while you were saving it, you’d probably wind up here and now again without half trying…but minus your hair and your teeth.” “Okay, okay. But let’s go back to that last point. Was there ever a big explosion on that spot? Where the lab was?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Then I wouldn’t wind up in a tree—because I didn’t. Follow me?”

“I’m three jumps ahead of you. The old time paradox again, only I won’t buy it. I’ve thought about theory of time, too, maybe more than you have.

You’ve got it just backward. There wasn’t any explosion and you aren’t going to wind up in a tree…because you aren’t ever going to make the jump. Do you follow me?”

“But suppose I did?”

“You won’t. Because of my fifth point. It’s the killer, so listen closely. You ain’t about to make any such jump because the whole thing is classified and you can’t. They won’t let you. So let’s forget it, Danny. It’s been a very interesting intellectual evening and the FBI will be looking for me in the morning. So let’s have one more round and Monday morning if I’m still out of jail I’ll phone the chief engineer over at Aladdin and find out the first name of this other ‘D. B. Davis’ character and who he was or is. He might even be working there and, if so, we’ll have lunch with him and talk shop. I

want you to meet Springer, the chief over at Aladdin, anyway; he’s a good boy. And forget this time-travel nonsense; they’ll never get the bugs out of it. I should never have mentioned it…and if you ever say I did I’ll look you square in the eye and call you a liar. I might need my classified status again someday.”

So we had another beer. By the time I was home and had taken a shower and had washed some of the beer out of my system I knew he was right. Time travel was about as practical a solution to my difficulties as cutting your throat to cure a headache. More important, Chuck would find out what I wanted to know from Mr. Springer just over chops and a salad, no sweat, no expense, no risk. And I liked the year I was living in.

When I climbed into bed I reached out and got the week’s stack of papers. The Times came to me by tube each morning, now that I was a solid citizen. I didn’t read it very much, because whenever I got my head soaked full of some engineering problem, which was usually, the daily fripperies you find in the news merely annoyed me, either by boring me or, worse still, by being interesting enough to distract my mind from its proper work.

Nevertheless, I never threw out a newspaper until I had at least glanced at the headlines and checked the vital-statistics column, the latter not for births, deaths, and marriages, but simply for “withdrawals,” people coming out of cold sleep. I had a notion that someday I would see the name of someone I had known back then, and then I would go around and say hello, bid him welcome, and see if I could give him a hand. The chances were against it, of course, but I kept on doing it and it always gave me a feeling of satisfaction.

I think that subconsciously I thought of all other Sleepers as my “kinfolk,” the way anybody who once served in the same outfit is your buddy, at least to the extent of a drink.

There wasn’t much in the papers, except the ship that was still missing between here and Mars, and that was not news but a sad lack of it. Nor did I spot any old friends among the newly awakened Sleepers. So I lay back and waited for the light to go out.

ABOUT THREE IN the morning I sat up very suddenly, wide awake. The light came on and I blinked at it. I had had a very odd dream, not quite a nightmare but nearly, of having failed to notice little Ricky in the vital statistics.

I knew I hadn’t. But just the same when I looked over and saw the week’s stack of newspapers still sitting there I was greatly relieved; it had been possible that I had stuffed them down the chute before going to sleep, as I sometimes did.

I dragged them back onto the bed and started reading the vital statistics again. This time I read all categories, births, deaths, marriages, divorces, adoptions, changes of name, commitments, and withdrawals, for it had occurred to me that my eye might have caught Ricky’s name without consciously realizing it, while glancing down the column to the only subhead I was interested in—Ricky might have got married or had a baby or something.

I almost missed what must have caused the distressing dream. It was in the Times for 2 May 2001, Tuesday’s withdrawals listed in Wednesday’s paper: “Riverside Sanctuary…F. V. Heinicke.”

F. V. Heinicke!

“Heinicke” was Ricky’s grandmother’s name…I knew it, I was certain of it! I didn’t know why I knew it. But I felt that it had been buried in my head and had not popped up until I read it again. I had probably seen it or heard it at some time from Ricky or Miles, or it was even possible that I had

met the old gal at Sandia. No matter, the name, seen in the Times, had fitted a forgotten piece of information in my brain and then I knew. Only I still had to prove it. I had to make sure that “F. V. Heinicke” stood for “Frederica Virginia Heinicke.”

I was shaking with excitement, anticipation, and fear. In spite of well-established new habits I tried to zip my clothes instead of sticking the seams together and made a botch of getting dressed. But a few minutes later I was down in the hall where the phone booth was—I didn’t have an instrument in my room or I would have used it; I was simply a supplementary listing for the house phone. Then I had to run back up again when I found that I had forgotten my phone-credit ID card—I was really disorganized.

Then, when I had it, I was trembling so that I could hardly fit it into the slot. But I did and signaled “Service.” “Circuit desired?”

“Uh, I want the Riverside Sanctuary. That’s in Riverside Borough.”

“Searching…holding…circuit free. We are signaling.”

The screen lighted up at last and a man looked grumpily at me. “You must have the wrong phasing. This is the sanctuary. We’re closed for the night.”

I said, “Hang on, please. If this is the Riverside Sanctuary, you’re just who I want.” “Well, what do you want? At this hour?”

“You have a client there, F. V. Heinicke, a new withdrawal. I want to know—”

He shook his head. “We don’t give out information about clients over the phone. And certainly not in the middle of the night. You’d better call after ten o’clock. Better yet, come here.”

“I will, I will. But I want to know just one thing. What do the initials ‘F. V.’ stand for?” “I told you that—”

“Will you listen, please? I’m not just butting in; I’m a Sleeper myself. Sawtelle. Withdrawn just lately. So I know all about the ‘confidential relationship’ and what’s proper. Now you’ve already published this client’s name in the paper. You and I both know that the sanctuaries always give the papers the full names of clients withdrawn and committed…but the papers trim the given names to initials to save space. Isn’t that true?”

He thought about it. “Could be.”

“Then what possible harm is there in telling me what the initials ‘F. V.’ stand for?”

He hesitated still longer. “None, I guess, if that’s all you want. It’s all you’re going to get. Hold on.”

He passed out of the screen, was gone for what seemed like an hour, came back holding a card. “The light’s poor,” he said, peering at it. “ ‘Frances’ —no, ‘Frederica.’ ‘Frederica Virginia.’ ”

My ears roared and I almost fainted. “Thank God!” “You all right?”

“Yes. Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Yes, I’m all right.”

“Hmm. I guess there’s no harm in telling you one more thing. It might save you a trip. She’s already checked out.”

IX

I COULD HAVE saved time by hiring a cab to jump me to Riverside, but I was handicapped by lack of cash. I was living in West Hollywood; the nearest twenty-four-hour bank was downtown at the Grand Circle of the Ways. So first I rode the Ways downtown and went to the bank for cash. One real improvement I had not appreciated up to then was the universal checkbook system; with a single cybernet as clearinghouse for the whole city and radioactive coding on my checkbook, I got cash laid in my palm as quickly there as I could have gotten it at my home bank across from Hired Girl, Inc.

Then I caught the express Way for Riverside. When I reached the sanctuary it was just daylight.

There was nobody there but the night technician I had talked to and his wife, the night nurse. I’m afraid I didn’t make a good impression. I had a day’s beard, I was wild-eyed, I probably had a beer breath, and I had not worked out a consistent framework of lies.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Larrigan, the night nurse, was sympathetic and helpful. She got a photograph out of file and said, “Is this your cousin, Mr. Davis?”

It was Ricky. There was no doubt about it, it was Ricky! Oh, not the Ricky I had known, for this was not a little girl but a mature young woman, twentyish or older, with a grown-up hairdo and a grown-up and very beautiful face. She was smiling.

But her eyes were unchanged and the ageless pixie quality of her face that had made her so delightful a child was still there. It was the same face, matured, filled out, grown beautiful, but unmistakable.

The stereo blurred, my eyes had filled with tears. “Yes,” I managed to choke. “Yes. That’s Ricky.” Mr. Larrigan said, “Nancy, you shouldn’t have showed him that.”

“Pooh, Hank, what harm is there in showing a photograph?”

“You know the rules.” He turned to me. “Mister, as I told you on the phone, we don’t give out information about clients. You come back here at ten o’clock when the administration office opens.”

“Or you could come back at eight,” his wife added. “Dr. Bernstein will be here then.”

“Now, Nancy, you just keep quiet. If he wants information, the man to see is the director. Bernstein hasn’t any more business answering questions than we have. Besides, she wasn’t even Bernstein’s patient.”

“Hank, you’re being fussy. You men like rules just for the sake of rules. If he’s in a hurry to see her, he could be in Brawley by ten o’clock.” She turned to me. “You come back at eight. That’s best. My husband and I can’t really tell you anything anyhow.”

“What’s this about Brawley? Did she go to Brawley?”

If her husband had not been there I think she would have told me more. She hesitated and he looked stern. She answered, “You see Dr. Bernstein. If you haven’t had breakfast, there’s a real nice place just down the street.”

So I went to the “real nice place” (it was) and ate and used their wash-room and bought a tube of Beardgo from a dispenser in the washroom and a shirt from another dispenser and threw away the one I had been wearing. By the time I returned I was fairly respectable.

But Larrigan must have bent Dr. Bernstein’s ear about me. He was a young man, resident in training, and he took a very stiff line. “Mr. Davis, you claim to be a Sleeper yourself. You must certainly know that there are criminals who make a regular business of preying on the gullibility and lack of orientation of a newly awakened Sleeper. Most Sleepers have considerable assets, all of them are unworldly in the world in which they find themselves, they are usually lonely and a bit scared—a perfect setup for confidence men.”

“But all I want to know is where she went! I’m her cousin. But I took the Sleep before she did, so I didn’t know she was going to.” “They usually claim to be relatives.” He looked at me closely. “Haven’t I seen you before?”

“I strongly doubt it. Unless you just happened to pass me on the Ways, downtown.” People are always thinking they’ve seen me before; I’ve got one of the Twelve Standard Faces, as lacking in uniqueness as one peanut in a sackful. “Doctor, how about phoning Dr. Albrecht at Sawtelle Sanctuary and checking on me?”

He looked judicial. “You come back and see the director. He can call the Sawtelle Sanctuary…or the police, whichever he sees fit.”

So I left. Then I may have made a mistake. Instead of coming back to see the director and very possibly getting the exact information I needed (with the aid of Albrecht’s vouching for me), I hired a jumpcab and went straight to Brawley.

It took three days to pick up her trail in Brawley. Oh, she had lived there and so had her grandmother; I found that out quickly. But the grandmother had died twenty years earlier and Ricky had taken the Sleep. Brawley is a mere hundred thousand compared with the seven million of Great Los Angeles; the twenty-year-old records were not hard to find. It was the trail less than a week old that I had trouble with.

Part of the trouble was that she was with someone; I had been looking for a young woman traveling alone. When I found out she had a man with her I thought anxiously about the crooks preying on Sleepers that Bernstein had lectured me about and got busier than ever.

I followed a false lead to Calexico, went back to Brawley, started over, picked it up again, and traced them as far as Yuma.

At Yuma I gave up the chase, for Ricky had gotten married. What I saw on the register at the county clerk’s office there shocked me so much that I dropped everything and jumped a ship for Denver, stopping only to mail a card to Chuck telling him to clear out my desk and pack the stuff in my room.

I STOPPED IN DENVER just long enough to visit a dental-supply house. I had not been in Denver since it had become the capital—after the Six Weeks War, Miles and I had gone straight to California—and the place stunned me. Why, I couldn’t even find Colfax Avenue. I had understood that everything essential to the government was buried back under the Rockies. If that is so, then there must be an awful lot of nonessentials still aboveground; the place seemed even more crowded than Great Los Angeles.

At the dental-supply house I bought ten kilograms of gold, isotope 197, in the form of fourteen-gauge wire. I paid $86.10 a kilogram for it, which was decidedly too much, since gold of engineering quality was selling for around $70 a kilogram, and the transaction mortally wounded my only thousand-dollar bill. But engineering gold comes either in alloys never found in nature, or with isotopes 196 and 198 present, or both, depending on the application. For my purposes I wanted fine gold, undetectable from gold refined from natural ore, and I did not want gold that might burn my pants off if I got cozy with it—the overdose at Sandia had given me a healthy respect for radiation poisoning.

I wound the gold wire around my waist and went to Boulder. Ten kilograms is about the weight of a well-filled weekend bag and that much gold bulks almost exactly the same as a quart of milk. But the wire form of it made it bulk more than it would have solid; I can’t recommend it as a girdle. But gold slugs would have been still harder to carry, and this way it was always with me.

Dr. Twitchell was still living there, though no longer working; he was professor emeritus and spent most of his waking hours in the bar of the faculty club. It took me four days to catch him in another bar, since the faculty club was closed to outlanders like me. But when I did, it turned out to

be easy to buy him a drink.

He was a tragic figure in the classic Greek meaning, a great man—a very great man—gone to ruin. He should have been up there with Einstein and Bohr and Newton; as it was, only a few specialists in field theory were really aware of the stature of his work. Now when I met him his brilliant mind was soured with disappointment, dimmed with age, and soggy with alcohol. It was like visiting the ruins of what had been a magnificent temple after the roof has fallen in, half the columns knocked down, and vines have grown over it all.

Nevertheless, he was brainier on the skids than I ever was at my best. I’m smart enough myself to appreciate real genius when I meet it. The first time I saw him he looked up, looked straight at me and said, “You again.”

“Sir?”

“You used to be one of my students, didn’t you?”

“Why, no, sir, I never had that honor.” Ordinarily when people think they have seen me before, I brush it off; this time I decided to exploit it if I could. “Perhaps you are thinking of my cousin, Doctor—class of ’86. He studied under you at one time.”

“Possibly. What did he major in?”

“He had to drop out without a degree, sir. But he was a great admirer of yours. He never missed a chance to tell people he had studied under you.”

You can’t make an enemy by telling a mother her child is beautiful. Dr. Twitchell let me sit down and presently let me buy him a drink. The greatest weakness of the glorious old wreck was his professional vanity. I had salvaged part of the four days before I could scrape up an acquaintance with him by memorizing everything there was about him in the university library, so I knew what papers he had written, where he had presented them, what earned and honorary degrees he held, and what books he had written. I had tried one of the latter, but I was already out of my depth on page nine, although I did pick up a little patter from it.

I let him know that I was a camp follower of science myself; right at present I was researching for a book: Unsung Geniuses. “What’s it going to be about?”

I admitted diffidently that I thought it would be appropriate to start the book with a popular account of his life and works…provided he would be willing to relax a bit from his well-known habit of shunning publicity. I would have to get a lot of my material from him, of course.

He thought it was claptrap and could not think of such a thing. But I pointed out that he had a duty to posterity and he agreed to think it over. By the next day he simply assumed that I was going to write his biography—not just a chapter, a whole book. From then on he talked and talked and talked and I took notes…real notes; I did not dare try to fool him by faking, as he sometimes asked me to read back.

But he never mentioned time travel.

Finally I said, “Doctor, isn’t it true that if it had not been for a certain colonel who was once stationed here you would have had the Nobel Prize hands down?”

He cursed steadily for three minutes with magnificent style. “Who told you about him?”

“Uh, Doctor, when I was doing research writing for the Department of Defense—I’ve mentioned that, haven’t I?” “No.”

“Well, when I was, I heard the whole story from a young Ph.D. working in another section. He had read the report and he said it was perfectly clear that you would be the most famous name in physics today…if you had been permitted to publish your work.”

“Hrrmph! That much is true.”

“But I gathered that it was classified…by order of this Colonel, uh, Plushbottom.”

“Thrushbotham. Thrushbotham, sir. A fat, fatuous, flatulent, foot-kissing fool incompetent to find his hat with it nailed to his head. Which it should have been.”

“It seems a great pity.”

“What is a pity, sir? That Thrushbotham was a fool? That was nature’s doing, not mine.”

“It seems a pity that the world should be deprived of the story. I understand that you are not allowed to speak of it.” “Who told you that? I say what I please!”

“That was what I understood, sir…from my friend in the Department of Defense.” “Hrrrmph!”

That was all I got out of him that night. It took him a week to decide to show me his laboratory.

Most of the building was now used by other researchers, but his time laboratory he had never surrendered, even though he did not use it now; he fell back on its classified status and refused to let anyone else touch it, nor had he permitted the apparatus to be torn down. When he let me in, the place smelled like a vault that has not been opened in years.

He had had just enough drinks not to give a damn, not so many but what he was still steady. His capacity was pretty high. He lectured me on the mathematics of time theory and temporal displacement (he didn’t call it “time travel”), but he cautioned me not to take notes. It would not have helped if I had, as he would start a paragraph with, “It is therefore obvious—” and go on from there to matters which may have been obvious to him and God but to no one else.

When he slowed down I said, “I gathered from my friend that the one thing you had not been able to do was to calibrate it? That you could not tell the exact magnitude of the temporal displacement?”

“What? Poppycock! Young man, if you can’t measure it, it’s not science.” He bubbled for a bit, like a teakettle, then went on, “Here. I’ll show you.” He turned away and started making adjustments. All that showed of his equipment was what he called the “temporal locus stage” —just a low platform with a cage around it—and a control board which might have served for a steam plant or a low-pressure chamber. I’m fairly sure I could have studied out how to handle the controls had I been left alone to examine them, but I had been told sharply to stay away from them. I could see an eight-point Brown recorder, some extremely heavy-duty solenoid-actuated switches, and a dozen other equally familiar components, but it didn’t mean a thing without the circuit diagrams.

He turned back to me and demanded, “Have you any change in your pocket?”

I reached in and hauled out a handful. He glanced at it and selected two five-dollar pieces, mint new, the pretty green plastic hexagonals issued just that year. I could have wished that he had picked half fives, as I was running low.

“Do you have a knife?” “Yes, sir.”

“Scratch your initials on each of them.”

I did so. He then had me place them side by side on the stage. “Note the exact time. I have set the displacement for exactly one week, plus or minus six seconds.”

I looked at my watch. Dr. Twitchell said, “Five… four… three… two… one… now!”

I looked up from my watch. The coins were gone. I didn’t have to pretend that my eyes bugged out. Chuck had told me about a similar

demonstration—but seeing it was another matter.

Dr. Twitchell said briskly, “We will return here one week from tonight and wait for one of them to reappear. As for the other one—you saw both of them on the stage? You placed them there yourself?”

“Yes, sir.” “Where was I?”

“At the control board, sir.” He had been a good fifteen feet from the nearest part of the cage around the stage and had not approached it since. “Very well. Come here.” I did so and he reached into a pocket. “Here’s one of your bits. You’ll get the other back a week from now.” He handed

me a green five-dollar coin; it had my initials on it.

I did not say anything because I can’t talk very well with my jaw sagging loosely. He went on, “Your remarks last week disturbed me. So I visited this place on Wednesday, something I have not done for—oh, more than a year. I found this coin on the stage, so I knew that I had been… would be…using the equipment again. It took me until tonight to decide to demonstrate it to you.”

I looked at the coin and felt it. “This was in your pocket when we came here tonight?” “Certainly.”

“But how could it be both in your pocket and my pocket at the same time?”

“Good Lord, man, have you no eyes to see with? No brain to reason with? Can’t you absorb a simple fact simply because it lies outside your dull existence? You fetched it here in your pocket tonight—and we kicked it into last week. You saw. A few days ago I found it here. I placed it in my pocket. I fetched it here tonight. The same coin…or, to be precise, a later segment of its space-time structure, a week more worn, a week more dulled—but what the canaille would call the ‘same’ coin. Although no more identical in fact than is a baby identical with the man the baby grows into. Older.”

I looked at it. “Doctor…push me back in time by a week.” He stared angrily. “Out of the question!”

“Why not? Won’t it work with people?” “Eh? Certainly it will work with people.”

“Then why not do it? I’m not afraid. And think what a wonderful thing it would be for the book…if I could testify of my own knowledge that the Twitchell time displacement works.”

“You can report it of your own knowledge. You just saw it.”

“Yes,” I admitted slowly, “but I won’t be believed. That business with the coins…I saw it and I believe it. But anyone simply reading an account of it

would conclude that I was gullible, that you had hoaxed me with some simple legerdemain.” “Damn it, sir!”

“That’s what they would say. They wouldn’t be able to believe that I actually had seen what I reported. But if you were to ship me back just a week, then I could report of my own knowledge—”

“Sit down. Listen to me.” He sat down, but there was no place for me to sit, although he did not seem aware of it. “I have experimented with human beings long ago. And for that reason I resolved never to do it again.”

“Why? Did it kill them?”

“What? Don’t talk nonsense.” He looked at me sharply, added, “You are not to put this in the book.” “As you say, sir.”

“Some minor experiments showed that living subjects could make temporal displacements without harm. I had confided in a colleague, a young fellow who taught drawing and other matters in the school of architecture. Really more of an engineer than a scientist, but I liked him; his mind was alive. This young chap—it can’t hurt to tell you his name: Leonard Vincent—was wild to try it…really try it; he wanted to undergo major displacement, five hundred years. I was weak. I let him.”

“Then what happened?”

“How should I know? Five hundred years, man! I’ll never live to find out.” “But you think he’s five hundred years in the future?”

“Or the past. He might have wound up in the fifteenth century. Or the twenty-fifth. The chances are precisely even. There’s an indeterminacy— symmetrical equations. I’ve sometimes thought…no, just a chance similarity in names.”

I didn’t ask what he meant by this because I suddenly saw the similarity, too, and my hair stood on end. Then I pushed it out of my mind; I had other problems. Besides, a chance similarity was all it could be—a man could not get from Colorado to Italy, not in the fifteenth century.

“But I resolved not to be tempted again. It wasn’t science, it added nothing to the data. If he was displaced forward, well and good. But if he was displaced backward…then possibly I sent my friend to be killed by savages. Or eaten by wild animals.”

Or even possibly, I thought, to become a “Great White God.” I kept the thought to myself. “But you needn’t use so long a displacement with me.” “Let’s say no more about it, if you please, sir.”

“As you wish, Doctor.” But I couldn’t drop it. “Uh, may I make a suggestion?” “Eh? Speak up.”

“We could get almost the same result by a rehearsal.” “What do you mean?”

“A complete dry run, with everything done just exactly as if you were intending to displace a living subject—I’ll act out that part. We’ll do everything precisely as if you meant to displace me, right up to the point where you would push that button. Then I’ll understand the procedure …which I don’t quite, as yet.”

He grumbled a little but he really wanted to show off his toy. He weighed me and set aside metal weights just equal to my hundred and seventy pounds. “These are the same scales I used with poor Vincent.”

Between us we placed them on one side of the stage. “What temporal setting shall we make?” he asked. “This is your show.” “Uh, you said that it could be set accurately?”

“I said so, sir. Do you doubt it?”

“Oh no, no! Well, let’s see, this is the twenty-fourth of May—suppose we…how about, uh, say thirty-one years, three weeks, one day, seven hours, thirteen minutes, and twenty-five seconds?”

“A poor jest, sir. When I said ‘accurate’ I meant ‘accurate to better than one part in one hundred thousand.’ I have had no opportunity to calibrate to one part in nine hundred million.”

“Oh. You see, Doctor, how important an exact rehearsal is to me, since I know so little about it. Uh, suppose we call it thirty-one years and three

weeks. Or is that still too finicky?”

“Not at all. The maximum error should not exceed two hours.” He made his adjustments. “You can take your place on the stage.” “Is that all?”

“Yes. All but the power. I could not actually make this displacement with the line voltage I used on those coins. But since we aren’t actually going to do it, that doesn’t matter.”

I looked disappointed and was. “Then you don’t actually have what is necessary to produce such a displacement? You were speaking theoretically?”

“Confound it, sir, I was not speaking theoretically.” “But if you don’t have the power…?”

“I can get the power if you insist. Wait.” He went to a corner of the lab and picked up a phone. It must have been installed when the lab was new; I hadn’t seen one like it since I was awakened. There followed a brisk conversation with the night superintendent of the university’s powerhouse. Dr. Twitchell was not dependent on profanity; he could avoid it entirely and be more biting than most real artists can be when using plainer words. “I am not in the least interested in your opinions, my man. Read your instructions. I have full facilities whenever I wish them. Or can you read? Shall we

meet with the president at ten tomorrow morning and have him read them to you? Oh? So you can read? Can you write as well? Or have we exhausted your talents? Then write this down: Emergency full power across the bus bars of the Thornton Memorial Laboratory in exactly eight minutes. Repeat that back.”

He replaced the instrument. “People!”

He went to the control board, made some changes, and waited. Presently, even from where I stood inside the cage, I could see the long hands of three sets of meters swing across their dials and a red light came on at the top of the board. “Power,” he announced.

“Now what happens?” “Nothing.”

“That’s just what I thought.” “What do you mean?”

“What I said. Nothing would happen.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand you. I hope I don’t understand you. What I meant is that nothing would happen unless I closed this pilot switch. If I did, you would be displaced precisely thirty-one years, three weeks.”

“And I still say nothing would happen.”

His face grew dark. “I think, sir, you are being intentionally offensive.”

“Call it what you want to. Doctor, I came here to investigate a remarkable rumor. Well, I’ve investigated it. I’ve seen a control board with pretty lights on it; it looks like a set for a mad scientist in a grabbie spectacular. I’ve seen a parlor trick performed with a couple of coins. Not much of a trick, by the way, since you selected the coins yourself and told me how to mark them; any parlor magician could do better. I’ve heard a lot of talk. But talk is cheap. What you claim to have discovered is impossible. By the way, they know that down at the department. Your report wasn’t suppressed; it’s simply filed in the screwball file. They get it out and pass it around now and then for a laugh.”

I thought the poor old boy was going to have a stroke there and then. But I had to stimulate him by the only reflex he had left, his vanity. “Come out of there, sir. Come out. I’m going to thrash you. With my bare hands I’m going to thrash you.”

The rage he was in, I think he might have managed it, despite age and weight and physical condition. But I answered, “You don’t scare me, Pappy. That dummy button doesn’t scare me either. Go ahead and push it.”

He looked at me, looked at the button, but still he didn’t do anything. I snickered and said, “A hoax, just as the boys said it was. Twitch, you’re a pompous old faker, a stuffed shirt. Colonel Thrushbotham was right.”

That did it.

X

EVEN AS HE stabbed at the button I tried to shout at him not to do it. But it was too late; I was already falling. My last thought was an agonized one that I didn’t want to go through with it. I had chucked away everything and tormented almost to death a poor old man who hadn’t done me any harm—and I didn’t even know which way I was going. Worse, I didn’t know that I would get there.

Then I hit. I don’t think I fell more than four feet but I had not been ready for it. I fell like a stick, collapsed like a sack. Then somebody was saying, “Where the devil did you come from?”

It was a man, about forty, bald-headed but well built and lean. He was standing facing me with his fists on his hipbones. He looked competent and shrewd and his face was not unpleasant save that at the moment he seemed sore at me.

I sat up and found that I was sitting on granite gravel and pine needles. There was a woman standing by the man, a pleasant pretty woman somewhat younger than he. She was looking at me wide-eyed but not speaking.

“Where am I?” I said foolishly. I could have said, “When am I?” but that would have sounded still more foolish, and besides, I didn’t think of it. One look at them and I knew when I was not—I was sure it was not 1970. Nor was I still in 2001; in 2001 they kept that sort of thing for the beaches. So I must have gone the wrong way.

Because neither one of them wore anything but smooth coats of tan. Not even Sticktite. But they seemed to find it enough. Certainly they were not embarrassed by it.

“One thing at a time,” he objected. “I asked you how you got here?” He glanced up. “Your parachute didn’t stick in the trees, did it? In any case, what are you doing here? This is posted private property; you’re trespassing. And what are you doing in that Mardi Gras getup?”

I didn’t see anything wrong with my clothes—especially in view of the way they were dressed. But I didn’t answer. Other times, other customs—I could see that I was going to have trouble.

She put a hand on his arm. “Don’t, John,” she said gently. “I think he’s hurt.” He looked at her, glanced back sharply at me. “Are you hurt?”

I tried to stand up, managed it. “I don’t think so. A few bruises, maybe. Uh, what date is today?” “Huh? Why, it’s the first Sunday in May. The third of May, I think. Is that right, Jenny?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Look,” I said urgently, “I got an awful knock on the head. I’m confused. What’s the date? The whole date?” “What?”

I should have kept my mouth shut until I could pick it up off something, a calendar or a paper. But I had to know right then; I couldn’t stand to wait. “What year?”

“Brother, you did get a lump. It’s 1970.” I saw him staring at my clothes again.

My relief was almost more than I could stand. I’d made it, I’d made it! I wasn’t too late. “Thanks,” I said. “Thanks an awful lot. You don’t know.” He still looked as if he wanted to call out the reserves, so I added nervously, “I’m subject to sudden attacks of amnesia. Once I lost, uh—five whole years.”

“I should think that would be upsetting,” he said slowly. “Do you feel well enough to answer my questions?” “Don’t badger him, dear,” she said softly. “He looks like a nice person. I think he’s just made a mistake.” “We’ll see. Well?”

“I feel all right…now. But I was pretty confused for a minute there.” “Okay. How did you get here? And why are you dressed that way?”

“To tell the truth, I’m not sure how I got here. And I certainly don’t know where I am. These spells hit me suddenly. As for how I’m dressed… I guess you could call it personal eccentricity. Uh…like the way you’re dressed. Or not dressed.”

He glanced down at himself and grinned. “Oh, yes. I’m quite aware that the way my wife and I are dressed…or not dressed…would call for explanation under some circumstances. But we prefer to make trespassers do the explaining instead. You see, you don’t belong here, dressed that way or any other, while we do—just as we are. These are the grounds of the Denver Sunshine Club.”

JOHN AND JENNY SUTTON were the sort of sophisticated, unshockable, friendly people who could invite an earthquake in for tea. John obviously was not satisfied with my fishy explanations and wanted to cross-examine me, but Jenny held him back. I stuck to my story about “dizzy spells” and said that the last I remembered was yesterday evening and that I had been in Denver, at the New Brown Palace. Finally he said, “Well, it’s quite interesting, even exciting, and I suppose somebody who’s going into Boulder can drop you there and you can get a bus back into Denver.” He looked at me again. “But if I take you back to the clubhouse, people are going to be mighty, mighty curious.”

I looked down at myself. I had been made vaguely uneasy by the fact that I was dressed and they were not—I mean I felt like the one out of order, not they. “John…would it simplify things if I peeled off my clothes too?” The prospect did not upset me; I had never been in one of the bare-skin camps before, seeing no point in them. But Chuck and I had spent a couple of weekends at Santa Barbara and one at Laguna Beach—at a beach skin makes sense and nothing else does.

He nodded. “It certainly would.”

“Dear,” said Jenny, “he could be our guest.”

“Mmm…yes. My only love, you paddle your sweet self into the grounds. Mix around and manage to let it be known that we are expecting a guest from…where had it better be, Danny?”

“Uh, from California. Los Angeles. I actually am from there.” I almost said “Great Los Angeles” and realized that I was going to have to guard my speech. “Movies” were no longer “grabbies.”

“From Los Angeles. That and ‘Danny’ is all that is necessary; we don’t use last names, unless offered. So, honey, you spread the word, as if it were something everybody already knew. Then in about half an hour you have to meet us down by the gate. But come here instead. And fetch my overnight bag.”

“Why the bag, dear?”

“To conceal that masquerade costume. It’s pretty conspicuous, even for anyone who is as eccentric as Danny said he is.”

I got up and went at once behind some bushes to undress, since I wouldn’t have any excuse for locker-room modesty once Jenny Sutton left us. I had to do it; I couldn’t peel down and reveal that I had twenty thousand dollars’ worth of gold, figured at the 1970 standard of sixty dollars an ounce, wrapped around my waist. It did not take long, as I had made a belt out of the gold, instead of a girdle, the first time I had had trouble getting it off

and on to bathe; I had double-looped it and wired it together in front.

When I had my clothes off I wrapped the gold in them and tried to pretend that it all weighed only what clothes should. John Sutton glanced at the bundle but said nothing. He offered me a cigarette—he carried them strapped to his ankle. They were a brand I had never expected to see again.

I waved it but it didn’t light. Then I let him light it for me. “Now,” he said quietly, “that we are alone, do you have anything you want to tell me? If I’m going to vouch for you to the club, I’m honor-bound to be sure, at the very least, that you won’t make trouble.”

I took a puff. It felt raw in my throat. “John, I won’t make any trouble. That’s the last thing on earth that I want.” “Mmm…probably. Just ‘dizzy spells’ then?”

I thought about it. It was an impossible situation. The man had a right to know. But he certainly would not believe the truth…at least I would not have in his shoes. But it would be worse if he did believe me; it would kick up the very hoorah that I did not want. I suppose that if I had been a real, honest, legitimate time traveler, engaged in scientific research, I would have sought publicity, brought along indisputable proof, and invited tests by scientists.

But I wasn’t; I was a private and somewhat shady citizen, engaged in hanky-panky I didn’t want to call attention to. I was simply looking for my Door into Summer, as quietly as possible.

“John, you wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”

“Mmm…perhaps. Still, I saw a man fall out of empty sky…but he didn’t hit hard enough to hurt him. He’s wearing funny clothes. He doesn’t seem to know where he is or what day it is. Danny, I’ve read Charles Fort, the same as most people. But I never expected to meet a case. But, having met one, I don’t expect the explanation to be as simple as a card trick. So?”

“John, something you said earlier—the way you phrased something— made me think you were a lawyer.” “Yes, I am. Why?”

“Can I make a privileged communication?” “Hmm—are you asking me to accept you as a client?”

“If you want to put it that way, yes. I’m probably going to need advice.” “Shoot. Privileged.”

“Okay. I’m from the future. Time travel.”

He didn’t say anything for several moments. We were lying stretched out in the sun. I was doing it to keep warm; May in Colorado is sunshiny but brisk. John Sutton seemed used to it and was simply lounging, chewing a pine needle.

“You’re right,” he answered. “I don’t believe it. Let’s stick to ‘dizzy spells.’ ” “I told you you wouldn’t.”

He sighed. “Let’s say I don’t want to. I don’t want to believe in ghosts, either, or reincarnation, or any of this ESP magic. I like simple things that I can understand. I think most people do. So my first advice to you is to keep it a privileged communication. Don’t spread it around.”

“That suits me.”

He rolled over. “But I think it would be a good idea if we burned these clothes. I’ll find you something to wear. Will they burn?” “Uh, not very easily. They’ll melt.”

“Better put your shoes back on. We wear shoes mostly, and those will get by. Anybody asks you questions about them, they’re custom-made. Health shoes.”

“They are, both.”

“Okay.” He started to unroll my clothes before I could stop him. “What the devil!”

It was too late, so I let him uncover it. “Danny,” he said in a queer voice, “is this stuff what it appears to be?” “What does it appear to be?”

“Gold.”

“Yes.”

“Where did you get it?” “I bought it.”

He felt it, tried the dead softness of the stuff, sensuous as putty, then hefted it. “Cripes! Danny…listen to me carefully. I’m going to ask you one question, and be damned careful how you answer it. Because I’ve got no use for a client who lies to me. I dump him. And I won’t be a party to a felony. Did you come by this stuff legally?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you haven’t heard of the Gold Reserve Act of 1968?” “

I have. I came by it legally. I intend to sell it to the Denver Mint, for dollars.” “Jeweler’s license, maybe?”

“No. John, I told the simple truth, whether you believe me or not. Where I came from I bought that over the counter, legal as breathing. Now I want to turn it in for dollars at the earliest possible moment. I know that it is against the law to keep it. What can they do to me if I lay it on the counter at the mint and tell them to weigh it?”

“Nothing, in the long run…if you stick to your ‘dizzy spells.’ But they can surely make your life miserable in the meantime.” He looked at it. “I think you had better kick a little dirt over it.”

“Bury it?”

“You don’t have to go that far. But if what you tell me is true, you found this stuff in the mountains. That’s where prospectors usually find gold.” “Well…whatever you say. I don’t mind some little white lies, since it is legitimately mine anyhow.”

“But is it a lie? When did you first lay eyes on this gold? What was the earliest date when it was in your possession?” I tried to think back. It was the same day I left Yuma, which was sometime in May 2001. About two weeks ago… Hunh!

“Put that way, John…the earliest date on which I saw that gold…was today, May third, 1970.” He nodded. “So you found it in the mountains.”

THE SUTTONS WERE staying over until Monday morning, so I stayed over. The other club members were all friendly but remarkably unnosy about my personal affairs, less so than any group I’ve ever been in. I’ve learned since that this constitutes standard good manners in a skin club, but at the time it made them the most discreet and most polite people I had ever met.

John and Jenny had their own cabin and I slept on a cot in the club-house dormitory. It was darn chilly. The next morning John gave me a shirt and

a pair of blue jeans. My own clothes were wrapped around the gold in a bag in the trunk of his car—which itself was a Jaguar Imperator, all I needed

to tell me that he was no cheap shyster. But I had known that by his manner.

I stayed overnight with them and by Tuesday I had a little money. I never laid eyes on the gold again, but in the course of the next few weeks John turned over to me its exact mint value as bullion minus the standard fees of licensed gold buyers. I know that he did not deal with the mint directly, as he always turned over to me vouchers from gold buyers. He did not deduct for his own services and he never offered to tell me the details.

I did not care. Once I had cash again, I got busy. That first Tuesday, 5 May 1970, Jenny drove me around and I rented a small loft in the old commercial district. I equipped it with a drafting table, a workbench, an army cot, and darn little else; it already had 120, 240, gas, running water, and a toilet that stopped up easily. I didn’t want any more and I had to watch every dime.

It was tedious and time-wasting to design by the old compass-and-T-square routine and I didn’t have a minute to spare, so I built Drafting Dan before I rebuilt Flexible Frank. Only this time Flexible Frank became Protean Pete, the all-purpose automaton, so linked as to be able to do almost anything a man can do, provided its Thorsen tubes were properly instructed. I knew that Protean Pete would not stay that way; his descendants would evolve into a horde of specialized gadgets, but I wanted to make the claims as broad as possible.

Working models are not required for patents, merely drawings and descriptions. But I needed good models, models that would work perfectly and anybody could demonstrate, because these models were going to have to sell themselves, show by their very practicality and by the evident economy designed into them for their eventual production engineering that they would not only work but would be a good investment—the patent office is stuffed with things that work but are worthless commercially.

The work went both fast and slow, fast because I knew exactly what I was doing, slow because I did not have a proper machine shop nor any help. Presently I grudgingly dipped into my precious cash to rent some machine tools, then things went better. I worked from breakfast to exhaustion, seven days a week, except for about one weekend a month with John and Jenny at the bare-bottom club near Boulder. By the first of September I had both models working properly and was ready to start on the drawings and descriptions. I designed and sent out for manufacture pretty speckle-lacquer cover plates for both of them and I had the external moving parts chrome-plated; these were the only jobs I farmed out and it hurt me to spend the money, but I felt that it was necessary. Oh, I had made extreme use of catalogue-available standard components; I could not have built them otherwise, nor would they have been commercial when I got through. But I did not like to spend money on custom-made prettiness.

I did not have time to get around much, which was just as well. Once when I was out buying a servo motor I ran into a chap I had known in California. He spoke to me and I answered before I thought. “Hey, Dan! Danny Davis! Imagine bumping into you here. I thought you were in Mojave?”

I shook hands. “Just a quick business trip. I’m going back in a few days.” “I’m going back this afternoon. I’ll phone Miles and tell him I saw you.”

I looked worried and was. “Don’t do that, please.”

“Why not? Aren’t you and Miles still buddy-buddy budding tycoons together?”

“Well…look, Mort, Miles doesn’t know I’m here. I’m supposed to be in Albuquerque on business for the company. But I flew up here on the side, on strictly personal and private business. Get me? Nothing to do with the firm. And I don’t care to discuss it with Miles.”

He looked knowing. “Woman trouble?” “Well…yes.”

“She married?” “You might say so.”

He dug me in the ribs and winked. “I catch. Old Miles is pretty puritanical, isn’t he? Okay, I’ll cover for you and someday you can cover for me. Is she any good?”

I’d like to cover you with a spade, I thought to myself, you fourth-rate frallup. Mort was the sort of no-good traveling salesman who spends more time trying to seduce waitresses than taking care of his customers—besides which, the line he handled was as shoddy as he was, never up to its specs.

But I bought him a drink and treated him to fairy tales about the “married woman” I had invented and listened while he boasted to me of no doubt equally fictitious exploits. Then I shook him.

On another occasion I tried to buy Dr. Twitchell a drink and failed.

I had seated myself beside him at the restaurant counter of a drugstore on Champa Street, then caught sight of his face in the mirror. My first impulse was to crawl under the counter and hide.

Then I caught hold of myself and realized that, out of all the persons living in 1970, he was the one I had least need to worry about. Nothing could go wrong because nothing had…I meant “nothing would.” No— Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations—conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.

In any case, past or future or something else, Twitchell was not a worry to me now. I could relax.

I studied his face in the mirror, wondering if I had been misled by a chance resemblance. But I had not been. Twitchell did not have a general- issue face like mine; he had stern, self-assured, slightly arrogant and quite handsome features which would have looked at home on Zeus. I remembered that face only in ruins, but there was no doubt—and I squirmed inside as I thought of the old man and how badly I had treated him. I wondered how I could make it up to him.

Twitchell caught sight of me eyeing him in the mirror and turned to me. “Something wrong?” “No. Uh…you’re Dr. Twitchell, aren’t you? At the university?”

“Denver University, yes. Have we met?”

I had almost slipped, having forgotten that he taught at the city university in this year. Remembering in two directions is difficult. “No, Doctor, but I’ve heard you lecture. You might say I’m one of your fans.”

His mouth twitched in a half-smile but he did not rise to it. From that and other things I learned that he had not yet acquired a gnawing need for adulation; he was sure of himself at that age and needed only his own self-approval. “Are you sure you haven’t got me mixed up with a movie star?”

“Oh no! You’re Dr. Hubert Twitchell…the great physicist.”

His mouth twitched again. “Let’s just say that I am a physicist. Or try to be.”

We chatted for a while and I tried to hang onto him after he had finished his sandwich. I said it would be an honor if he would let me buy him a drink. He shook his head. “I hardly drink at all and certainly never before dark. Thanks anyway. It’s been nice meeting you. Drop into my lab someday if you are ever around the campus.”

I said I would.

But I did not make many slips in 1970 (second time around) because I understood it and, anyhow, most people who might have recognized me

were in California. I resolved that if I did meet any more familiar faces I would give them the cold stare and the quick brushoff—take no chances.

But little things can cause you trouble too. Like the time I got caught in a zipper simply because I had become used to the more convenient and much safer Sticktite closures. A lot of little things like that I missed very much after having learned in only six months to take them for granted.

Shaving—I had to go back to shaving! Once I even caught a cold. That horrid ghost of the past resulted from forgetting that clothes could get soaked in rain. I wish that those precious esthetes who sneer at progress and prattle about the superior beauties of the past could have been with me—dishes that let food get chilled, shirts that had to be laundered, bathroom mirrors that steamed up when you needed them, runny noses, dirt underfoot and dirt in your lungs—I had become used to a better way of living and 1970 was a series of petty frustrations until I got the hang of it again.

But a dog gets used to his fleas and so did I. Denver in 1970 was a very quaint place with a fine old-fashioned flavor; I became very fond of it. It was nothing like the slick New Plan maze it had been (or would be) when I had arrived (or would arrive) there from Yuma; it still had less than two

million people, there were still buses and other vehicular traffic in the streets—there still were streets; I had no trouble finding Colfax Avenue.

Denver was still getting used to being the national seat of government and was not quite happy in the role, like a boy in his first formal evening

clothes. Its spirit still yearned for high-heeled boots and its western twang even though it knew it had to grow up and be an international metropolis, with embassies and spies and famous gourmet restaurants. The city was being jerry-built in all directions to house the bureaucrats and lobbyists and contact men and clerk-typists and flunkies; buildings were being thrown up so fast that with each one there was hazard of enclosing a cow inside the walls. Nevertheless, the city had extended only a few miles past Aurora on the east, to Henderson on the north, and Littleton on the south

—there was still open country before you reached the Air Academy. On the west, of course, the city flowed into the high country and the Federal bureaus were tunneling back into the mountains.

I liked Denver during its Federal boom. Nevertheless, I was excruciatingly anxious to get back to my own time.

It was always the little things. I had had my teeth worked over completely shortly after I had been put on the staff of Hired Girl and could afford it. I had never expected to have to see a dental plastician again. Nevertheless, in 1970 I did not have anti-caries pills and so I got a hole in a tooth, a painful one or I would have ignored it. So I went to a dentist. So help me, I had forgotten what he would see when he looked into my mouth. He blinked, moved his mirror around, and said, “Great jumping Jehosaphat! Who was your dentist?”

“Kah hoo hank?”

He took his hands out of my mouth. “Who did it? And how?”

“Huh? You mean my teeth? Oh, that’s experimental work they’re doing in…India.” “How do they do it?”

“How would I know?”

“Mmm…wait a minute. I’ve got to get some pictures of this.” He started fiddling with his X-ray equipment. “Oh no,” I objected. “Just clean out that bicuspid, plug it up with anything, and let me out of here.”

“But—”

“I’m sorry, Doctor. But I’m on a dead run.”

So he did as I said, pausing now and again to look at my teeth. I paid cash and did not leave my name. I suppose I could have let him have the pics, but covering up had become a reflex. It couldn’t have hurt anything to let him have them. Nor helped either, as X-rays would not show how regeneration was accomplished, nor could I have told him.

There is no time like the past to get things done. While I was sweating sixteen hours a day on Drafting Dan and Protean Pete I got something else done with my left hand. Working anonymously through John’s law office I hired a detective agency with national branches to dig up Belle’s past. I supplied them with her address and the license number and model of her car (since steering wheels are good places to get fingerprints) and suggested that she might have been married here and there and possibly might have a police record. I had to limit the budget severely; I couldn’t afford the sort of investigation you read about.

When they did not report back in ten days I kissed my money goodbye. But a few days later a thick envelope showed up at John’s office.

Belle had been a busy girl. Born six years earlier than she claimed, she had been married twice before she was eighteen. One of them did not count because the man already had a wife; if she had been divorced from the second the agency had not uncovered it.

She had apparently been married four times since then, although once was doubtful; it may have been the “war-widow” racket worked with the aid of a man who was dead and could not object. She had been divorced once (respondent) and one of her husbands was dead. She might still be “married” to the others.

Her police record was long and interesting but apparently she had been convicted of a felony only once, in Nebraska, and granted parole without doing time. This was established only by fingerprints, as she had jumped parole, changed her name, and had acquired a new social-security number. The agency asked if they were to notify Nebraska authorities.

I told them not to bother; she had been missing for nine years and her conviction had been for nothing worse than lure in a badger game. I wondered what I would have done if it had been dope peddling? Reflexive decisions have their complications.

I RAN BEHIND schedule on the drawings and October was on me before I knew it. I still had the descriptions only half worded, since they had to tie into drawings, and I had done nothing about the claims. Worse, I had done nothing about organizing the deal so that it would hold up; I could not do it until I had a completed job to show. Nor had I had time to make contacts. I began to think that I had made a mistake in not asking Dr. Twitchell to set the controls for at least thirty-two years instead of thirty-one years and a fiddling three weeks; I had underestimated the time I would need and overestimated my own capacity.

I had not shown my toys to my friends, the Suttons, not because I wanted to hide them, but because I had not wanted a lot of talk and useless advice while they were incomplete. On the last Saturday in September I was scheduled to go out to the club camp with them. Being behind schedule, I had worked late the night before, then had been awakened early by the torturing clang of an alarm clock so that I could shave and be ready to go when they came by. I shut the sadistic thing off and thanked God that they had got rid of such horrible devices in 2001, then I pulled myself groggily together and went down to the corner drugstore to phone and say that I couldn’t make it, I had to work.

Jenny answered, “Danny, you’re working too hard. A weekend in the country will do you good.” “I can’t help it, Jenny. I have to. I’m sorry.”

John got on the other phone and said, “What’s all this nonsense?”

“I’ve got to work, John. I’ve simply got to. Say hello to the folks for me.”

I went back upstairs, burned some toast, vulcanized some eggs, sat back down at Drafting Dan. An hour later they banged on my door.

None of us went to the mountains that weekend. Instead I demonstrated both devices. Jenny was not much impressed by Drafting Dan (it isn’t a

woman’s gismo, unless she herself is an engineer), but she was wide-eyed over Protean Pete. She kept house with a Mark II Hired Girl and could see how much more this machine could do.

But John could see the importance of Drafting Dan. When I showed him how I could write my signature, recognizably my own, just by punching keys—I admit I had practiced—his eyebrows stayed up. “Chum, you’re going to throw draftsmen out of work by the thousand.”

“No, I won’t. The shortage of engineering talent in this country gets worse every year; this gadget will just help to fill the gap. In a generation you are going to see this tool in every engineering and architectural office in the nation. They’ll be as lost without it as a modern mechanic would be without power tools.”

“You talk as if you knew.” “I do know.”

He looked over at Protean Pete—I had set him to tidying my work-bench—and back at Drafting Dan. “Danny…sometimes I think maybe you were telling me the truth, you know, the day we met you.”

I shrugged. “Call it second sight…but I do know. I’m certain. Does it matter?” “I guess not. What are your plans for these things?”

I frowned. “That’s the hitch, John. I’m a good engineer and a fair jackleg mechanic when I have to be. But I’m no businessman; I’ve proved that. You’ve never fooled with patent law?”

“I told you that before. It’s a job for a specialist.”

“Do you know an honest one? Who’s smart as a whip besides? It’s reached the point where I’ve got to have one. I’ve got to set up a corporation,

too, to handle it. And work out the financing. But I haven’t got much time; I’m terribly pressed for time.” “Why?”

“I’m going back where I came from.” He sat and said nothing for quite a while. At last he said, “How much time?” “Uh, about nine weeks. Nine weeks from this coming Thursday to be exact.”

He looked at the two machines, looked back at me. “Better revise your schedule. I’d say that you had more like nine months’ work cut out for you. You won’t be in production even then—just lined up to start moving, with luck.”

“John, I can’t!”

“I’ll say you can’t.”

“I mean I can’t change my schedule. That’s beyond my control…now.” I put my face in my hands. I was dead with fatigue, having had less than five hours’ sleep and having averaged not much better for days. The shape I was in, I was willing to believe that there was something, after all, to this “fate” business—a man could struggle against it but never beat it.

I looked up. “Will you handle it?” “Eh? What part of it?”

“Everything. I’ve done all I know how to do.”

“That’s a big order, Dan. I could rob you blind. You know that, don’t you? And this may be a gold mine.” “It will be. I know.”

“Then why trust me? You had better just keep me as your attorney, advice for a fee.”

I tried to think while my head ached. I had taken a partner once before—but, damnation, no matter how many times you get your fingers burned, you have to trust people. Otherwise you are a hermit in a cave, sleeping with one eye open. There wasn’t any way to be safe; just being alive was deadly dangerous…fatal, in the end.

“Cripes, John, you know the answer to that. You trusted me. Now I need your help again. Will you help me?”

“Of course he will,” Jenny put in gently, “though I haven’t heard what you two were talking about. Danny? Can it wash dishes? Every dish you have

is dirty.”

“What, Jenny? Why, I suppose he can. Yes, of course he can.” “Then tell him to, please. I want to see it.”

“Oh. I’ve never programmed him for it. I will if you want me to. But it will take several hours to do it right. Of course after that he’ll always be able to do it. But the first time…well, you see, dishwashing involves a lot of alternate choices. It’s a ‘judgment’ job, not a comparatively simple routine like laying bricks or driving a truck.”

“Goodness! I’m certainly glad to find that at least one man understands housework. Did you hear what he said, dear? But don’t stop to teach him now, Danny. I’ll do them myself.” She looked around. “Danny, you’ve been living like a pig, to put it gently.”

To tell the simple truth, it had missed me entirely that Protean Pete could work for me. I had been engrossed in planning how he could work for other people in commercial jobs, and teaching him to do them, while I myself had simply been sweeping dirt into the corner or ignoring it. Now I began teaching him all the household tasks that Flexible Frank had learned; he had the capacity, as I had installed three times as many Thorsen tubes in him as Frank had had.

I had time to do it, for John took over.

Jenny typed descriptions for us; John retained a patent attorney to help with the claims. I don’t know whether John paid him cash or cut him in on the cake; I never asked. I left the whole thing up to him, including what our shares should be; not only did it leave me free for my proper work, but I figured that if he decided such things he could never be tempted the way Miles had been. And I honestly did not care; money as such is not important. Either John and Jenny were what I thought they were or I might as well find that cave and be a hermit.

I insisted on just two things. “John, I think we ought to call the firm ‘The Aladdin Autoengineering Corporation.’ ” “Sounds pretty fancy. What’s wrong with ‘Davis & Sutton’?”

“That’s how it’s got to be, John.”

“So? Is your second sight telling you this?”

“Could be, could be. We’ll use a picture of Aladdin rubbing his lamp as a trademark, with the genie forming above him. I’ll make a rough sketch. And one other thing: The home office had better be in Los Angeles.”

“What? Now you’ve gone too far. That is, if you expect me to run it. What’s wrong with Denver?”

“Nothing is wrong with Denver, it’s a nice town. But it is not the place to set up the factory. Pick a good site here and some bright morning you wake up and find that the Federal enclave has washed over it and you are out of business until you get reestablished on a new one. Besides that, labor is scarce, raw materials come overland, building materials are all gray-market. Whereas Los Angeles has an unlimited supply of skilled workmen and more pouring in every day, Los Angeles is a seaport, Los Angeles is—”

“How about the smog? It’s not worth it.”

“They’ll lick the smog before long. Believe me. And haven’t you noticed that Denver is working up smog of its own?”

“Now wait a minute, Dan. You’ve already made it clear that I will have to run this while you go kiyoodling off on some business of your own. Okay, I agreed. But I ought to have some choice in working conditions.”

“It’s necessary, John.”

“Dan, nobody in his right mind who lives in Colorado would move to California. I was stationed out there during the war; I know. Take Jenny here; she’s a native Californian, that’s her secret shame. You couldn’t hire her to go back. Here you’ve got winters, changing seasons, brisk mountain air, magnificent—”

Jenny looked up. “Oh, I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’d never go back.” “What’s that, dear?”

Jenny had been quietly knitting; she never talked unless she really had something to say. Now she put down her knitting, a clear sign. “If we did move there, dear, we could join the Oakdale Club; they have outdoor swimming all year round. I was thinking of that just this last weekend when I saw ice on the pool at Boulder.”

I stayed until the evening of 2 December 1970, the last possible minute. I was forced to borrow three thousand dollars from John—the prices I had paid for components had been scandalous—but I offered him a stock mortgage to secure it. He let me sign it, then tore it up and dropped it in a wastebasket. “Pay me when you get around to it.”

“It will be thirty years, John.”

“As long as that?” I pondered it. He had never invited me to tell my whole story since the afternoon, six months earlier, when he had told me frankly that he did not believe the essential part—but was going to vouch for me to their club anyhow.

I told him I thought it was time to tell him. “Shall we wake up Jenny? She’s entitled to hear it too.”

“Mmm…no. Let her nap until just before you have to leave. Jenny is a very uncomplicated person, Dan. She doesn’t care who you are or where you came from as long as she likes you. If it seems a good idea, I can pass it on to her later.”

“As you will.” He let me tell it all, stopping only to fill our glasses—mine with ginger ale; I had a reason not to touch alcohol. When I had brought it up to the point where I landed on a mountainside outside Boulder, I stopped. “That’s it,” I said. “Though I was mixed up on one point. I’ve looked at the contour since and I don’t think my fall was more than two feet. If they had—I mean ‘if they were going to’—bulldoze that laboratory site any deeper, I would have been buried alive. Probably would have killed both of you too—if it didn’t blow up the whole county. I don’t know just what happens when a flat waveform changes back into a mass where another mass already is.”

John went on smoking. “Well?” I said. “What do you think?”

“Danny, you’ve told me a lot of things about what Los Angeles—I mean ‘Great Los Angeles’—is going to be like. I’ll let you know when I see you just how accurate you’ve been.”

“It’s accurate. Subject to minor slips of memory.”

“Mmm…you certainly make it sound logical. But in the meantime I think you are the most agreeable lunatic I’ve ever met. Not that it handicaps you as an engineer…or as a friend. I like you, boy. I’m going to buy you a new straitjacket for Christmas.”

“Have it your own way.”

“I have to have it this way. The alternative is that I myself am stark staring mad…and that would make quite a problem for Jenny.” He glanced at the clock. “We’d better wake her. She’d scalp me if I let you leave without saying good-bye to her.”

“I wouldn’t think of it.”

They drove me to Denver International Port and Jenny kissed me good-bye at the gate. I caught the eleven o’clock shuttle for Los Angeles.

XI

THE FOLLOWING EVENING, 3 December 1970, I had a cabdriver drop me a block from Miles’ house comfortably early, as I did not know exactly what time I had arrived there the first time. It was already dark as I approached his house, but I saw only his car at the curb, so I backed off a hundred yards to a spot where I could watch that stretch of curb and waited.

Two cigarettes later I saw another car pull up there, stop, and its lights go out. I waited a couple of minutes longer, then hurried toward it. It was my own car.

I did not have a key but that was no hurdle; I was always getting ears-deep in an engineering problem and forgetting my keys; I had long ago formed the habit of keeping a spare ditched in the trunk. I got it now and climbed into the car. I had parked on a slight grade heading downhill, so, without turning on lights or starting the engine, I let it drift to the corner and turned there, then switched on the engine but not the lights, and parked again in the alley back of Miles’ house and on which his garage faced.

The garage was locked. I peered through dirty glass and saw a shape with a sheet over it. By its contours I knew it was my old friend Flexible Frank.

Garage doors are not built to resist a man armed with a tire iron and determination—not in southern California in 1970. It took seconds. Carving Frank into pieces I could carry and stuff into my car took much longer. But first I checked to see that the notes and drawings were where I suspected they were—they were indeed, so I hauled them out and dumped them on the floor of the car, then tackled Frank himself. Nobody knew as well as I did how he was put together, and it speeded up things enormously that I did not care how much damage I did; nevertheless, I was as busy as a one- man band for nearly an hour.

I had just stowed the last piece, the wheelchair chassis, in the car trunk and had lowered the turtleback down on it as far as it would go when I heard Pete start to wail. Swearing to myself at the time it had taken to tear Frank apart, I hurried around the garage and into their back yard. Then the commotion started.

I had promised myself that I would relish every second of Pete’s triumph. But I couldn’t see it. The back door was open and light was streaming out the screen door, but while I could hear sounds of running, crashes, Pete’s blood-chilling war cry, and screams from Belle, they never accommodated me by coming into my theater of vision. So I crept up to the screen door, hoping to catch a glimpse of the carnage.

The damned thing was hooked! It was the only thing that had failed to follow the schedule. So I frantically dug into my pocket, broke a nail getting my knife open—and jabbed through and unhooked it just in time to jump out of the way as Pete hit the screen like a stunt motorcyclist hitting a fence.

I fell over a rosebush. I don’t know whether Miles and Belle even tried to follow him outside. I doubt it; I would not have risked it in their spot. But I was too busy getting myself untangled to notice.

Once I was on my feet I stayed behind bushes and moved around to the side of the house; I wanted to get away from that open door and the light pouring out of it. Then it was just a case of waiting until Pete quieted down. I would not touch him then, certainly not try to pick him up. I know cats.

But every time he passed me, prowling for an entrance and sounding his deep challenge, I called out to him softly. “Pete. Come here, Pete. Easy, boy, it’s all right.”

He knew I was there and twice he looked at me, but otherwise ignored me. With cats it is one thing at a time; he had urgent business right now and no time to head-bump with Papa. But I knew he would come to me when his emotions had eased off.

While I squatted, waiting, I heard water running in their bathrooms and guessed that they had gone to clean up, leaving me in the living room. I had a horrid thought then: What would happen if I sneaked in and cut the throat of my own helpless body? But I suppressed it; I wasn’t that curious and suicide is such a final experiment, even if the circumstances are mathematically intriguing.

But I never have figured it out.

Besides, I didn’t want to go inside for any purpose. I might run into Miles—and I didn’t want any truck with a dead man.

Pete finally stopped in front of me about three feet out of reach. “Mrrrowrr?” he said—meaning, “Let’s go back and clean out the joint. You hit ’em high, I’ll hit ’em low.”

“No, boy. The show is over.” “Aw, c’mahnnn!”

“Time to go home, Pete. Come to Danny.” He sat down and started to wash himself. When he looked up, I put my arms out and he jumped into

them. “Kwleert?” (“Where the hell were you when the riot started?”)

I carried him back to the car and dumped him in the driver’s space, which was all there was left. He sniffed the hardware on his accustomed

place and looked around reproachfully. “You’ll have to sit in my lap,” I said. “Quit being fussy.”

I switched on the car’s lights as we hit the street. Then I turned east and headed for Big Bear and the Girl Scout camp. I chucked away enough of Frank in the first ten minutes to permit Pete to resume his rightful place, which suited us both better. When I had the floor clear, several miles later, I stopped and shoved the notes and drawings down a storm drain. The wheelchair chassis I did not get rid of until we were actually in the mountains, then it went down a deep arroyo, making a nice sound effect.

About three in the morning I pulled into a motor court across the road and down a bit from the turnoff into the Girl Scout camp, and paid too much for a cabin—Pete almost queered it by sticking his head up and making a comment when the owner came out.

“What time,” I asked him, “does the morning mail from Los Angeles get up here?” “Helicopter comes in at seven-thirteen, right on the dot.”

“Fine. Give me a call at seven, will you?”

“Mister, if you can sleep as late as seven around here you’re better than I am. But I’ll put you in the book.”

By eight o’clock Pete and I had eaten breakfast and I had showered and shaved. I looked Pete over in daylight and concluded that he had come through the battle undamaged except for possibly a bruise or two. We checked out and I drove into the private road for the camp. Uncle Sam’s truck turned in just ahead of me; I decided that it was my day.

I never saw so many little girls in my life. They skittered like kittens and they all looked alike in their green uniforms. Those I passed wanted to look at Pete, though most of them just stared shyly and did not approach. I went to a cabin marked “Headquarters,” where I spoke to another uniformed scout who was decidedly no longer a girl.

She was properly suspicious of me; strange men who want to be allowed to visit little girls just turning into big girls should always be suspected.

I explained that I was the child’s uncle, Daniel B. Davis by name, and that I had a message for the child concerning her family. She countered with the statement that visitors other than parents were permitted only when accompanied by a parent and, in any case, visiting hours were not until four o’clock.

“I don’t want to visit with Frederica, but I must give her this message. It’s an emergency.”

“In that case you can write it out and I will give it to her as soon as she is through with rhythm games.”

I looked upset (and was) and said, “I don’t want to do that. It would be much kinder to tell the child in person.” “Death in the family?”

“Not quite. Family trouble, yes. I’m sorry, ma’am, but I am not free to tell anyone else. It concerns my niece’s mother.”

She was weakening but still undecided. Then Pete joined the discussion. I had been carrying him with his bottom in the crook of my left arm and his chest supported with my right hand; I had not wanted to leave him in the car and I knew Ricky would want to see him. He’ll put up with being carried that way quite a while but now he was getting bored. “Krrwarr?”

She looked at him and said, “He’s a fine boy, that one. I have a tabby at home who could have come from the same litter.”

I said solemnly, “He’s Frederica’s cat. I had to bring him along because …well, it was necessary. No one to take care of him.”

“Oh, the poor little fellow!” She scratched him under the chin, doing it properly, thank goodness, and Pete accepted it, thank goodness again, stretching his neck and closing his eyes and looking indecently pleased. He is capable of taking a very stiff line with strangers if he does not fancy their overtures.

The guardian of youth told me to sit down at a table under the trees outside the headquarters. It was far enough away to permit a private visit but still under her careful eye. I thanked her and waited.

I didn’t see Ricky come up. I heard a shout, “Uncle Danny!” and another one as I turned, “And you brought Pete! Oh, this is wonderful!”

Pete gave a long bubbling bleerrrt and leaped from my arms to hers. She caught him neatly, rearranged him in the support position he likes best, and they ignored me for a few seconds while exchanging cat protocols. Then she looked up and said soberly, “Uncle Danny, I’m awful glad you’re here.”

I didn’t kiss her; I did not touch her at all. I’ve never been one to paw children and Ricky was the sort of little girl who only put up with it when she could not avoid it. Our original relationship, back when she was six, had been founded on mutual decent respect for the other’s individualism and personal dignity.

But I did look at her. Knobby knees, stringy, shooting up fast, not yet filled out, she was not as pretty as she had been as a baby girl. The shorts and T-shirt she was wearing, combined with peeling sunburn, scratches, bruises, and an understandable amount of dirt, did not add up to feminine glamour. She was a matchstick sketch of the woman she would become, her coltish gawkiness relieved only by her enormous solemn eyes and the pixie beauty of her thin smudged features.

She looked adorable.

I said, “And I’m awful glad to be here, Ricky.”

Trying awkwardly to manage Pete with one arm, she reached with her other hand for a bulging pocket in her shorts. “I’m surprised too. I just this minute got a letter from you—they dragged me away from mail call; I haven’t even had a chance to open it. Does it say that you’re coming today?” She got it out, creased and mussed from being crammed into a pocket too small.

“No, it doesn’t, Ricky. It says I’m going away. But after I mailed it, I decided I just had to come say good-bye in person.” She looked bleak and dropped her eyes. “You’re going away?”

“Yes. I’ll explain, Ricky, but it’s rather long. Let’s sit down and I’ll tell you about it.” So we sat on opposite sides of the picnic table under the ponderosas and I talked. Pete lay on the table between us, making a library lion of himself with his forepaws on the creased letter, and sang a low song like bees buzzing in deep clover, while he narrowed his eyes in contentment.

I was much relieved to find that she already knew that Miles had married Belle—I hadn’t relished having to break that to her. She glanced up, dropped her eyes at once, and said with no expression at all, “Yes, I know. Daddy wrote me about it.”

“Oh. I see.”

She suddenly looked grim and not at all a child. “I’m not going back there, Danny. I won’t go back there.”

“But—Look here, Rikki-tikki-tavi, I know how you feel. I certainly don’t want you to go back there—I’d take you away myself if I could. But how can

you help going back? He’s your daddy and you are only eleven.”

“I don’t have to go back. He’s not my real daddy. My grandmother is coming to get me.” “What? When’s she coming?”

“Tomorrow. She has to drive up from Brawley. I wrote her about it and asked her if I could come live with her because I wouldn’t live with Daddy

anymore with her there.” She managed to put more contempt into one pronoun than an adult could have squeezed out of profanity. “Grandma wrote back and said that I didn’t have to live there if I didn’t want to because he had never adopted me and she was my ‘guardian of record.’ ” She looked up anxiously. “That’s right, isn’t it? They can’t make me?”

I felt an overpowering flood of relief. The one thing I had not been able to figure out, a problem that had worried me for months, was how to keep Ricky from being subjected to the poisonous influence of Belle for—well, two years; it had seemed certain that it would be about two years. “If he never adopted you, Ricky, I’m certain that your grandmother can make it stick if you are both firm about it.” Then I frowned and chewed my lip. “But you may have some trouble tomorrow. They may object to letting you go with her.”

“How can they stop me? I’ll just get in the car and go.”

“It’s not that simple, Ricky. These people who run the camp, they have to follow rules. Your daddy—Miles, I mean—Miles turned you over to them; they won’t be willing to turn you back over to anyone but him.”

She stuck out her lower lip. “I won’t go. I’m going with Grandma.”

“Yes. But maybe I can tell you how to make it easy. If I were you, I wouldn’t tell them that I’m leaving camp; I’d just tell them that your grandmother wants to take you for a ride—then don’t come back.”

Some of her tension relaxed. “All right.”

“Uh…don’t pack a bag or anything or they may guess what you’re doing. Don’t try to take any clothes but those you are wearing at the time. Put any money or anything you really want to save into your pockets. You don’t have much here that you would really mind losing, I suppose?”

“I guess not.” But she looked wistful. “I’ve got a brand-new swimsuit.”

How do you explain to a child that there are times when you just must abandon your baggage? You can’t—they’ll go back into a burning building to save a doll or a toy elephant. “Mmm…Ricky, have your grandmother tell them that she is taking you over to Arrowhead to have a swim with her…and that she may take you to dinner at the hotel there, but that she will have you back before taps. Then you can carry your swimming suit and a towel. But nothing else. Er, will your grandmother tell that fib for you?”

“I guess so. Yes, I’m sure she will. She says people have to tell little white fibs or else people couldn’t stand each other. But she says fibs were meant to be used, not abused.”

“She sounds like a sensible person. You’ll do it that way?”

“I’ll do it just that way, Danny.”

“Good.” I picked up the battered envelope. “Ricky, I told you I had to go away. I have to go away for a very long time.” “How long?”

“Thirty years.”

Her eyes grew wider if possible. At eleven, thirty years is not a long time; it’s forever. I added, “I’m sorry, Ricky. But I have to.” “Why?”

I could not answer that one. The true answer was unbelievable and a lie would not do. “Ricky, it’s much too hard to explain. But I have to. I can’t help it.” I hesitated, then added, “I’m going to take the Long Sleep. The cold sleep—you know what I mean.”

She knew. Children get used to new ideas faster than adults do; cold sleep was a favorite comic-book theme. She looked horrified and

protested, “But, Danny, I’ll never see you again!”

“Yes, you will. It’s a long time but I’ll see you again. And so will Pete. Because Pete is going with me; he’s going to cold-sleep too.”

She glanced at Pete and looked more woebegone than ever. “But—Danny, why don’t you and Pete just come down to Brawley and live with us? That would be ever so much better. Grandma will like Pete. She’ll like you too—she says there’s nothing like having a man around the house.”

“Ricky…dear Ricky…I have to. Please don’t tease me.” I started to tear open the envelope. She looked angry and her chin started to quiver. “I think she has something to do with this!”

“What? If you mean Belle, she doesn’t. Not exactly, anyway.”

“She’s not going to cold-sleep with you?”

I think I shuddered. “Good heavens, no! I’d run miles to avoid her.”

Ricky seemed slightly mollified. “You know, I was so mad at you about her. I had an awful outrage.”

“I’m sorry, Ricky. I’m truly sorry. You were right and I was wrong. But she hasn’t anything to do with this. I’m through with her, forever and forever

and cross my heart. Now about this.” I held up the certificate for all that I owned in Hired Girl, Inc. “Do you know what it is?” “No.”

I explained it to her. “I’m giving this to you, Ricky. Because I’m going to be gone so long I want you to have it.” I took the paper on which I had written an assignment to her, tore it up, and put the pieces in my pocket; I could not risk doing it that way—it would be too easy for Belle to tear up a separate sheet and we were not yet out of the woods. I turned the certificate over and studied the standard assignment form on the back, trying to plan how to word it in the spaces provided. I finally squeezed in an assignment to the Bank of America in trust for—“Ricky, what is your full name?”

“Frederica Virginia. Frederica Virginia Gentry. You know.”

“Is it ‘Gentry’? I thought you said Miles had never adopted you?”

“Oh! I’ve been Ricky Gentry as long as I can remember. But you mean my real name. It’s the same as Grandma’s…the same as my real daddy’s. Heinicke. But nobody ever calls me that.”

“They will now.” I wrote “Frederica Virginia Heinicke” and added “and to be reassigned to her on her twenty-first birthday” while prickles ran down my spine—my original assignment might have been defective in any case.

I started to sign and then noticed our watchdog sticking her head out of the office. I glanced at my wrist, saw that we had been talking an hour; I was running out of minutes.

But I wanted it nailed down tight. “Ma’am!” “Yes?”

“By any chance, is there a notary public around here? Or must I find one in the village?” “I am a notary. What do you wish?”

“Oh, good! Wonderful! Do you have your seal?” “I never go anywhere without it.”

So I signed my name under her eye and she even stretched a point (on Ricky’s assurance that she knew me and Pete’s silent testimony to my respectability as a fellow member of the fraternity of cat people) and used the long form: “—known to me personally as being said Daniel B. Davis

—” When she embossed her seal through my signature and her own I sighed with relief. Just let Belle try to find a way to twist that one!

She glanced at it curiously but said nothing. I said solemnly, “Tragedies cannot be undone but this will help. The kid’s education, you know.”

She refused a fee and went back into the office. I turned back to Ricky and said, “Give this to your grandmother. Tell her to take it to a branch of the Bank of America in Brawley. They’ll do everything else.” I laid it in front of her.

She did not touch it. “That’s worth a lot of money, isn’t it?” “Quite a bit. It will be worth more.”

“I don’t want it.”

“But, Ricky, I want you to have it.”

“I don’t want it. I won’t take it.” Her eyes filled with tears and her voice got unsteady. “You’re going away forever and…and you don’t care about me anymore.” She sniffed. “Just like when you got engaged to her. When you could just as easily bring Pete and come live with Grandma and me. I don’t want your money!”

“Ricky. Listen to me, Ricky. It’s too late. I couldn’t take it back now if I wanted to. It’s already yours.”

“I don’t care. I won’t ever touch it.” She reached out and stroked Pete. “Pete wouldn’t go away and leave me…only you’re going to make him. Now I won’t even have Pete.”

I answered unsteadily, “Ricky? Rikki-tikki-tavi? You want to see Pete …and me again?” I could hardly hear her. “Of course I do. But I won’t.”

“But you can.”

“Huh? How? You said you were going to take the Long Sleep…thirty years, you said.”

“And I am. I have to. But, Ricky, here is what you can do. Be a good girl, go live with your grandmama, go to school—and just let this money pile up. When you are twenty-one—if you still want to see us—you’ll have enough money to take the Long Sleep yourself. When you wake up I’ll be there waiting for you. Pete and I will both be waiting for you. That’s a solemn promise.”

Her expression changed but she did not smile. She thought about it quite a long time, then said, “You’ll really be there?”

“Yes. But we’ll have to make a date. If you do it, Ricky, do it just the way I tell you. You arrange it with the Cosmopolitan Insurance Company and you make sure that you take your Sleep in the Riverside Sanctuary in Riverside…and you make very sure that they have orders to wake you up on the first day of May, 2001, exactly. I’ll be there that day, waiting for you. If you want me to be there when you first open your eyes, you’ll have to leave word for that, too, or they won’t let me farther than the waiting room—I know that sanctuary; they’re very fussy.” I took out an envelope which I had prepared before I left Denver. “You don’t have to remember this; I’ve got it all written out for you. Just save it, and on your twenty-first birthday you

can make up your mind. But you can be sure that Pete and I will be there waiting for you, whether you show up or not.” I laid the prepared

instructions on the stock certificate.

I thought that I had her convinced but she did not touch either of them. She stared at them, then presently said, “Danny?” “Yes, Ricky?”

She would not look up and her voice was so low that I could barely hear her. But I did hear her. “If I do…will you marry me?”

My ears roared and the lights flickered. But I answered steadily and much louder than she had spoken. “Yes, Ricky. That’s what I want. That’s why I’m doing this.”

I HAD JUST ONE more thing to leave with her: a prepared envelope marked “To Be Opened in the Event of the Death of Miles Gentry.” I did not explain it to her; I just told her to keep it. It contained proof of Belle’s varied career, matrimonial and otherwise. In the hands of a lawyer it should make a court fight over his will no contest at all.

Then I gave her my class ring from Tech (it was all I had) and told her it was hers; we were engaged. “It’s too big for you but you can keep it. I’ll have another one for you when you wake up.”

She held it tight in her fist. “I won’t want another one.”

“All right. Now better tell Pete good-bye, Ricky. I’ve got to go. I can’t wait a minute longer.”

She hugged Pete, then handed him back to me, looked me steadily in the eye even though tears were running down her nose and leaving clean streaks. “Good-bye, Danny.”

“Not ‘good-bye,’ Ricky. Just ‘so long.’ We’ll be waiting for you.”

IT WAS A QUARTER of ten when I got back to the village. I found that a helicopter bus was due to leave for the center of the city in twenty-five minutes, so I sought out the only used-car lot and made one of the fastest deals in history, letting my car go for half what it was worth for cash in hand at once. It left me just time to sneak Pete into the bus (they are fussy about airsick cats) and we reached Powell’s office just after eleven o’clock.

Powell was much annoyed that I had canceled my arrangements for Mutual to handle my estate and was especially inclined to lecture me over having lost my papers. “I can’t very well ask the same judge to pass on your committal twice in the same twenty-four hours. It’s most irregular.”

I waved money at him, cash money with convincing figures on it. “Never mind eating me out about it, Sergeant. Do you want my business or don’t you? If not, say so, and I’ll beat it on up to Central Valley. Because I’m going today.”

He still fumed but he gave in. Then he grumbled about adding six months to the cold-sleep period and did not want to guarantee an exact date of awakening. “The contracts ordinarily read ‘plus or minus one month’ to allow for administrative hazards.”

“This one doesn’t. This one reads 27 April 2001. But I don’t care whether it says ‘Mutual’ at the top or ‘Central Valley.’ Mr. Powell, I’m buying and you’re selling. If you don’t sell what I want to buy I’ll go where they do sell it.”

He changed the contract and we both initialed it.

At twelve straight up I was back in for my final check with their medical examiner. He looked at me. “Did you stay sober?” “Sober as a judge.”

“That’s no recommendation. We’ll see.” He went over me almost as carefully as he had “yesterday.” At last he put down his rubber hammer and said, “I’m surprised. You’re in much better shape than you were yesterday. Amazingly so.”

“Doc, you don’t know the half of it.”

I held Pete and soothed him while they gave him the first sedative. Then I lay back myself and let them work on me. I suppose I could have waited another day, or even longer, just as well as not—but the truth was that I was frantically anxious to get back to 2001.

About four in the afternoon, with Pete’s flat head resting on my chest, I went happily to sleep again.

XII

MY DREAMS WERE pleasanter this time. The only bad one I remember was not too bad, but simply endless frustration. It was a cold dream in which I wandered shivering through branching corridors, trying every door I came to, thinking that the next one would surely be the Door into Summer, with Ricky waiting on the other side. I was hampered by Pete, “following me ahead of me,” that exasperating habit cats have of scalloping back and forth between the legs of persons trusted not to step on them or kick them.

At each new door he would duck between my feet, look out it, find it still winter outside, and reverse himself, almost tripping me. But neither one of us gave up his conviction that the next door would be the right one.

I woke up easily this time, with no disorientation—in fact the doctor was somewhat irked that all I wanted was some breakfast, the Great Los Angeles Times, and no chitchat. I didn’t think it was worthwhile to explain to him that this was my second time around; he would not have believed me.

There was a note waiting for me, dated a week earlier, from John:

Dear Dan,

All right, I give up. How did you do it?

I’m complying with your request not to be met, against Jenny’s wishes. She sends her love and hopes that you won’t be too long in looking us up

—I’ve tried to explain to her that you expect to be busy for a while. We are both fine although I tend to walk where I used to run. Jenny is even more beautiful than she used to be.

Hasta la vista, amigo,

John

P.S. If the enclosure is not enough, just phone—there is plenty more where it came from. We’ve done pretty well, I think.

I considered calling John, both to say hello and to tell him about a colossal new idea I had had while asleep—a gadget to change bathing from a chore to a sybaritic delight. But I decided not to; I had other things on my mind. So I made notes while the notion was fresh and then got some sleep, with Pete’s head tucked into my armpit. I wish I could cure him of that. It’s flattering but a nuisance.

On Monday, the thirtieth of April, I checked out and went over to Riverside, where I got a room in the old Mission Inn. They made the predictable fuss about taking a cat into a room and an autobellhop is not responsive to bribes—hardly an improvement. But the assistant manager had more flexibility in his synapses; he listened to reason as long as it was crisp and rustled. I did not sleep well; I was too excited.

I presented myself to the director of the Riverside Sanctuary at ten o’clock the next morning. “Dr. Rumsey, my name is Daniel B. Davis. You have a committed client here named Frederica Heinicke?”

“I suppose you can identify yourself ?”

I showed him a 1970 driver’s license issued in Denver, and my withdrawal certificate from Forest Lawn Sanctuary. He looked them over and me, and handed them back. I said anxiously, “I think she’s scheduled for withdrawal today. By any chance, are there any instructions to permit me to be present? I don’t mean the processing routines; I mean at the last minute, when she’s ready for the final restimulant and consciousness.”

He shoved his lips out and looked judicial. “Our instructions for this client do not read to wake her today.” “No?” I felt disappointed and hurt.

“No. Her exact wishes are as follows: Instead of necessarily being waked today, she wished not to be waked at all until you showed up.” He looked me over and smiled. “You must have a heart of gold. I can’t account for it on your beauty.”

I sighed. “Thanks, Doctor.”

“You can wait in the lobby or come back. We won’t need you for a couple of hours.”

I went back to the lobby, got Pete, and took him for a walk. I had parked him there in his new travel bag and he was none too pleased with it, even though I had bought one as much like his old one as possible and had installed a one-way window in it the night before. It probably didn’t smell right as yet.

We passed the “real nice place,” but I was not hungry even though I hadn’t been able to eat much breakfast—Pete had eaten my eggs and had turned up his nose at yeast strips. At eleven-thirty I was back at the sanctuary. Finally they let me in to see her.

All I could see was her face; her body was covered. But it was my Ricky, grown woman size and looking like a slumbering angel.

“She’s under posthypnotic instruction,” Dr. Rumsey said softly. “If you will stand just there, I’ll bring her up. Uh, I think you had better put that cat outside.”

“No, Doctor.”

He started to speak, shrugged, turned back to his patient. “Wake up, Frederica. Wake up. You must wake up now.”

Her eyelids fluttered, she opened her eyes. They wandered for an instant, then she caught sight of us and smiled sleepily. “Danny…and Pete.” She raised both arms—and I saw that she was wearing my Tech class ring on her left thumb.

Pete chirrlupped and jumped on the bed, started doing shoulder dives against her in an ecstasy of welcome.

DR. RUMSEY WANTED her to stay overnight, but Ricky would have none of it. So I had a cab brought to the door and we jumped to Brawley. Her grandmother had died in 1980 and her social links there had gone by attrition, but she had left things in storage there—books mostly. I ordered them shipped to Aladdin, care of John Sutton. Ricky was a little dazzled by the changes in her old home town and never let go my arm, but she never succumbed to that terrible homesickness which is the great hazard of the Sleep. She merely wanted to get out of Brawley as quickly as possible.

So I hired another cab and we jumped to Yuma. There I signed the county clerk’s book in a fine round hand, using my full name “Daniel Boone Davis,” so that there could be no possible doubt as to which D. B. Davis had designed this magnum opus. A few minutes later I was standing with her little hand in mine and choking over, “I, Daniel, take thee, Frederica…till death us do part.”

Pete was my best man. The witnesses we scraped up in the courthouse.

WE GOT OUT of Yuma at once and jumped to a guest ranch near Tucson, where we had a cabin away from the main lodge and equipped with

our own Eager Beaver to fetch and carry so that we did not need to see anyone. Pete fought a monumental battle with the tom who until then had been boss of the ranch, whereupon we had to keep Pete in or watch him. This was the only shortcoming I can think of. Ricky took to being married as if she had invented it, and me—well, I had Ricky.

THERE ISN’T MUCH more to be said. Voting Ricky’s Hired Girl stock—it was still the largest single block—I had McBee eased upstairs to “Research Engineer Emeritus” and put Chuck in as chief engineer. John is boss of Aladdin but keeps threatening to retire—an idle threat. He and I and Jenny control the company, since he was careful to issue preferred stock and to float bonds rather than surrender control. I’m not on the board of either corporation; I don’t run them and they compete. Competition is a good idea—Darwin thought well of it.

Me, I’m just the “Davis Engineering Company”—a drafting room, a small shop, and an old machinist who thinks I’m crazy but follows my drawings to exact tolerance. When we finish something I put it out for license.

I had my notes on Twitchell recovered. Then I wrote and told him I had made it and returned via cold sleep…and apologized abjectly for having “doubted” him. I asked if he wanted to see the manuscript when I finished. He never answered so I guess he is still sore at me.

But I am writing it and I’ll put it in all major libraries even if I have to publish at my own expense. I owe him that much. I owe him much more; I owe him for Ricky. And for Pete. I’m going to title it Unsung Genius.

Jenny and John look as if they would last forever. Thanks to geriatrics, fresh air, sunshine, exercise, and a mind that never worries, Jenny is

prettier than ever at…well, sixty-three is my guess. John thinks that I am “merely” clairvoyant and does not want to look at the evidence. Well, how did I do it? I tried to explain it to Ricky, but she got upset when I told her that while we were on our honeymoon I was actually and no foolin’ also up at Boulder, and that while I was visiting her at the Girl Scout camp I was also lying in a drugged stupor in San Fernando Valley.

She turned white. So I said, “Let’s put it hypothetically. It’s all logical when you look at it mathematically. Suppose we take a guinea pig—white with brown splotches. We put him in the time cage and kick him back a week. But a week earlier we had already found him there, so at that time we had put him in a pen with himself. Now we’ve got two guinea pigs…although actually it’s just one guinea pig, one being the other one a week older. So when you took one of them and kicked him back a week and—”

“Wait a minute! Which one?”

“Which one? Why, there never was but one. You took the one a week younger, of course, because—”

“You said there was just one. Then you said there were two. Then you said the two was just one. But you were going to take one of the two…when there was just one—”

“I’m trying to explain how two can be just one. If you take the younger—” “How can you tell which guinea pig is younger when they look just alike?”

“Well, you could cut off the tail of the one you are sending back. Then when it came back you would—” “Why, Danny, how cruel! Besides, guinea pigs don’t have tails.”

She seemed to think that proved something. I should never have tried to explain.

But Ricky is not one to fret over things that aren’t important. Seeing that I was upset, she said softly, “Come here, dear.” She rumpled what hair I have left and kissed me. “One of you is all I want, dearest. Two might be more than I could manage. Tell me one thing—are you glad you waited for me to grow up?”

I did my darnedest to convince her that I was.

But the explanation I tried to give does not explain everything. I missed a point even though I was riding the merry-go-round myself and counting the revolutions. Why didn’t I see the notice of my own withdrawal? I mean the second one, in April 2001, not the one in December 2000. I should have; I was there and I used to check those lists. I was awakened (second time) on Friday, 27 April 2001; it should have been in next morning’s

Times. But I did not see it. I’ve looked it up since and there it is: “D. B. Davis,” in the Times for Saturday, 28 April 2001.

Philosophically, just one line of ink can make a different universe as surely as having the continent of Europe missing. Is the old “branching time

streams” and “multiple universes” notion correct? Did I bounce into a different universe, different because I had monkeyed with the setup? Even

though I found Ricky and Pete in it? Is there another universe somewhere (or somewhen) in which Pete yowled until he despaired, then wandered off to fend for himself, deserted? And in which Ricky never managed to flee with her grandmother but had to suffer the vindictive wrath of Belle?

One line of fine print isn’t enough. I probably fell asleep that night and missed reading my own name, then stuffed the paper down the chute next

morning, thinking I had finished with it. I am absent-minded, particularly when I’m thinking about a job.

But what would I have done if I had seen it? Gone there, met myself—and gone stark mad? No, for if I had seen it, I wouldn’t have done the things I did afterward—“afterward” for me—which led up to it. Therefore it could never have happened that way. The control is a negative feedback type, with a built-in “fail safe,” because the very existence of that line of print depended on my not seeing it; the apparent possibility that I might have seen it is one of the excluded “not possibles” of the basic circuit design.

“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” Free will and predestination in one sentence and both true. There is only one real world, with one past and one future. “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen.” Just one…but big enough and complicated enough to include free will and time travel and everything else in its linkages and feedbacks and guard circuits. You’re

allowed to do anything inside the rules…but you come back to your own door.

I’m not the only person who has time-traveled. Fort listed too many cases not explainable otherwise and so did Ambrose Bierce. And there were those two ladies in the gardens of the Trianon. I have a hunch, too, that old Doc Twitchell closed that switch oftener than he admitted…to say nothing of others who may have learned how in the past or future. But I doubt if much ever comes of it. In my case only three people know and two don’t believe me. You can’t do much if you do time-travel. As Fort said, you railroad only when it comes time to railroad.

But I can’t get Leonard Vincent out of my mind. Was he Leonardo da Vinci? Did he beat his way across the continent and go back with Columbus? The encyclopedia says that his life was such-and-such—but he might have revised the record. I know how that is; I’ve had to do a little of it. They didn’t have social-security numbers, ID cards, nor fingerprints in fifteenth-century Italy; he could have swung it.

But think of him, marooned from everything he was used to, aware of flight, of power, of a million things, trying desperately to picture them so that they could be made—but doomed to frustration because you simply can’t do the things we do today without centuries of former art to build on.

Tantalus had it easier.

I’ve thought about what could be done with time travel commercially if it were declassified—making short jumps, setting up machinery to get back, taking along components. But someday you’d make one jump too many and not be able to set up for your return because it’s not time to “railroad.” Something simple, like a special alloy, could whip you. And there is that truly awful hazard of not knowing which way you are going. Imagine winding up at the court of Henry VIII with a load of subflexive fasartas intended for the twenty-fifth century. Being becalmed in the horse

latitudes would be better.

No, you should never market a gadget until the bugs are out of it.

But I’m not worried about “paradoxes” or “causing anachronisms”—if a thirtieth-century engineer does smooth out the bugs and then sets up transfer stations and trade, it will be because the Builder designed the universe that way. He gave us eyes, two hands, a brain; anything we do with them can’t be a paradox. He doesn’t need busybodies to “enforce” His laws; they enforce themselves. There are no miracles and the word “anachronism” is a semantic blank.

But I don’t worry about philosophy any more than Pete does. Whatever the truth about this world, I like it. I’ve found my Door into Summer and I would not time-travel again for fear of getting off at the wrong station. Maybe my son will, but if he does I will urge him to go forward, not back. “Back” is for emergencies; the future is better than the past. Despite the crepehangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands…with tools…with horse sense and science and engineering.

Most of these long-haired belittlers can’t drive a nail nor use a slide rule. I’d like to invite them into Dr. Twitchell’s cage and ship them back to the twelfth century—then let them enjoy it.

But I am not mad at anybody and I like now. Except that Pete is getting older, a little fatter, and not as inclined to choose a younger opponent; all too soon he must take the very Long Sleep. I hope with all my heart that his gallant little soul may find its Door into Summer, where catnip fields abound and tabbies are complacent, and robot opponents are programmed to fight fiercely—but always lose—and people have friendly laps and legs to strop against, but never a foot that kicks.

Ricky is getting fat, too, but for a temporary happier reason. It has just made her more beautiful and her sweet eternal Yea! is unchanged, but it isn’t comfortable for her. I’m working on gadgets to make things easier. It just isn’t very convenient to be a woman; something ought to be done and

I’m convinced that some things can be done. There’s that matter of leaning over, and also the backaches—I’m working on those, and I’ve built her a

hydraulic bed that I think I will patent. It ought to be easier to get in and out of a bathtub than it is too. I haven’t solved that yet.

For old Pete I’ve built a “cat bathroom” to use in bad weather—automatic, self-replenishing, sanitary, and odorless. However, Pete, being a

proper cat, prefers to go outdoors, and he has never given up his conviction that if you just try all the doors one of them is bound to be the Door into Summer.

You know, I think he is right.

The End

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The Intention Experiment (full text) by Lynne McTaggart. In HTML for free access. Part 4 of 4.

This is part 4 of 4.

This is a complete reprint of the book titled “The Intention Experiment” by Lynne McTaggart. It is a non-fiction book, and it is groundbreaking. In this book, the author has compiled all those studies about the reality of ESP, and PSI, and compiled the results. The results are pretty damning. Something is going on, and Newtonian physics cannot explain it. It can only be explained with quantum physics.

What is going on is that quantum physics is working and weaving it’s magic throughout our lives, and rather than discount things as “superstition” and out-dated religion, this book connects actual scientific studies with the quantum physics principles involved. It explains so many thing that have been discounted as pure superstition.

Thus it’s placement in my blog.

This is for those people who want nice and clean answers to what is going on, yet cannot shake off the Newtonian physics that they learned in High School. This book teaches you that there is a deeper reality behind everything and as such, it helps explain some elements of paranormal and religion that are often discounted as primitive nonsense.

Welcome to the world of quantum physics and how all those things about prayer, intention, and spirituality actually does have a scientific foundation that they are based upon.

Summary of this section

This section consists of the links and other related background supporting information assocated with the book. Included herein for those that are interested.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Your Personal Intention Experiments

NOW THAT YOU HAVE PRACTICED ‘powering up’, what can you u intention for in your own everyday life? To help you find out, with the help of my scientists I have designed a series of informal, personal experiments.

The following ‘experiments’ are intended to be read in two ways: as a springboard into ways to incorporate intention into your life, and also as a piece of anecdotal research. Whenever you carry out an intention experiment, I would like you to report it on our website.

To carry out these experiments, all you will need in the way of equipment is a notebook and a calendar. When you are first starting, note the date and times of your intentions. Each intention experiment should be carried out after ‘powering up’ in your intention space, using the programme outlined in chapter 13. Needless to say, if you suffer from a serious illness and are trying to think yourself better, you should augment your own healing intentions with the help of a trained professional healer, whether conventional or alternative.

Make a daily note of any change in the object of your intention, and be specific. If you are trying to heal a condition in yourself or someone else, take a daily ‘temperature’ of change. What does the person feel like, in general? What symptoms have improved? Have any got worse? Have any new ones turned up? (If any situations seriously worsen, immediately consult a professional practitioner, and also examine any subconscious intentions.)

If you are trying to change your relationship with someone who is ordinarily very antagonistic to something more positive, make a daily note of his or her interactions with you, to determine if anything has changed.

To Have Something Manifest in Your Life

Select a goal that has never happened but that you would like to have happen. Choose something that seldom occurs or is particularly unlikely, so that if it does come to pass it is more likely to be the result of your intention.

Here are some possibilities:

receiving flowers from your husband (if he has never bought them for you); having your wife sit down and watch a football match with you (if she usually refuses to do so);

having the boorish neighbour who never gives you the time of day start a cheery conversation with you;

having your child help with the dishes;

having your child wake up on his or her own in the morning and get ready for school without prompting;

improving the weather (30 per cent more or less rain, say); having your child make his or her bed;

having your dog stop barking at night;

stopping your cat from scratching the sofa;having your husband or wife come home from work one hour earlier than usual;

having your child watch television two hours less;

getting someone who can’t stand you at work to say hello and start up a conversation;

achieving 10 per cent higher profits at work; growing your plants or crops 10 per cent faster than usual.

As you begin to manifest, you can try more complicated thoughts. But remember, at first you want one single event to change, something where change can be easily quantified and can probably be attributed to your thoughts.

Retro-intentions

If you still have a medical problem of some sort, cast your mind back to the point where it started. Carry out an intention for it to resolve itself then. See if you are now better.

If you are not getting along with someone, cast your mind back to the point where you first had a disagreement and send your intention to change there.

Remember to be very specific.

Ask your friends and family if you can try a retro-prayer for some of their loved ones who were ill 5 years before. Concentrate on their former illness and see if it improves their current state of health. The idea will seem so ridiculous and therefore so harmless that they probably will agree to it. If you feel bold, you may even try this with a local nursing home. First, be sure to obtain the permission of the patient, as well as those in charge.

Report any results by writing in to The Intention Experiment website: www.theintentionexperiment.com.

Group Intention Exercises

Assemble a group of your friends who are interested in trying out some group intention exercises. Create an intention space where you will meet each time. Select a group target in your community. Here are a few possibilities:

improving the weather; reducing violent crime by 5 per cent;

reducing pollution by 5 per cent;

reducing litter on a particular street in your community; getting your mail delivered one hour earlier;

achieving some form of community activism (such as preventing a mobile phone mast from being built in your area);

decreasing the incidence of local road accidents involving children by 30 per cent;

improving the collective grade point average of the local school by one grade; decreasing abuse of children in your community by 30 per cent;

reducing possessions of knives or illegal weapons by 30 per cent; increasing (or decreasing) local rainfall by 10 per cent; decreasing the number of alcoholics in your area by 25 per cent.

Depending on the nature of your intention, make one member of the group responsible for researching statistics involving your local accident, weather or crime statistics. For these types of statistics, it is a good idea to get hold of reports for the last 5 years in your area and surrounding communities so you have something solid to compare.

Then, when you meet, decide on a group intention statement. When you are ‘powering up’, visualize yourselves as a single entity (say, a giant bubble or any other unified internal image). Once you are all in a collective meditative state, have one member of the group read out the statement. Meet regularly to send the same intentions. Keep a careful reading of statistics for one month before and several months after you have sent the intentions. Note any changes.

Send the results to The Intention Experiment website: www.theintentionexperiment.com.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Group Intention Experiments

YOU ARE NOW INVITED TO PARTICIPATE in massive group intention experiments with many, if not most, of the other readers of this book. If you would like to take part in the largest mind-over-matter experiment in history, read on.

In these group intentions, you will become involved in important new research to further the world’s knowledge about the power of intention. There will be blogs and interactive elements on our website, so that you can correspond with like-minded individuals around the world about our results and the results of individual experiments (chapter 14).

Naturally, it is not compulsory. In fact, I would prefer you not to get involved unless you are passionate about participating. I need committed participants, willing to take the intention experiment seriously. Each experiment might take a few minutes to an hour of your time, although in future we might try experiments that take a little longer.

First, log on to the website (www.theintentionexperiment.com). There you will find information about the dates and objectives of future intention experiments. We will plan those dates to coincide with times of a fair degree of geomagnetic activity. Mark those dates in your diary now; if you intend to participate, it is vital that you don’t forget. We have a number of experiments planned, but as scientific experiments are expensive to carry out and require lengthy analysis, there will be sizable intervals between experiments. If you miss an intention experiment, you will have to wait a few months for another one.

Several days before the experiment, read through the preliminary instructions to familiarize yourself with what to do. The instructions will explain that you need to carry out many of the ‘powering up’ exercises of chapter 13 just before you send your intention. You will find information about the time of the experiment in your own time zone. The website has a running clock (set to US Eastern Standard Time an Greenwich Mean Time) and a countdown to each new experiment, and will specify the equivalent times in different time zones. Readers around the world will be participating, so it is vital that all the readers send intentions at the right time.

As this is a scientific experiment, we need to have committed and knowledgeable participants, who have read and understood the ideas in this book. Consequently, we will try to weed out potential spoilers or the uncommitted by asking every potential participant to supply a password, which will be taken from phrases or ideas in the book and will vary every few months. We will ask you to supply, for example, the fourth word of the third paragraph on page 57 of the US hardback edition (or page 65 of the paperback). We will make sure we specify passwords for every edition published in every country, so your password will work no matter which version of the book you have read. Just follow the instructions. The only way to be part of the experiment is to have read the book and to log on with the

correct password, after which you will be supplied with a private password, to use for future experiments.

Because this is a scientific experiment, we need to know some details about our participants, such as their average age, their gender, their health – or possibly their degree of psychic ability. On the day of the experiment, you will be asked to supply some information about yourself. Several of our scientists have designed short questionnaires for you to fill in. Of course, this information will be kept confidential, under international and national laws of data protection. Once you have filled in our questionnaires, you won’t have to rekey any information you have already supplied for any future experiments.

On the day of the intention experiment, at the particular time specified on the website, you will be asked to send a carefully worded, detailed intention, depending on the target site. The website will walk you through the steps. You will be asked to ‘power up’ into your meditative state, to enter a state of compassion and to send a carefully worded, detailed intention that will be specified on the website.

For instance, let’s say that we are trying to send an intention to have a spider plant grow faster at Fritz-Albert Popp’s lab in Neuss, Germany, on Friday 20 Marc at 8 p.m. GMT. We will have a photograph or web camera image of the spider plant on the website, so you can train your intention on the right subject. The website will instruct you to think or say the following sentence on 20 March at 8 p.m.:

Our intention is to have our spider plant in Neuss grow 10 per cent faster than a control plant.

Or, let’s say that we have a patient with a wound. Our intention might be: Our intention is for Lisa’s wound to heal 10 per cent faster than normal.

Because this is a scientific experiment, we will structure our experiment to test a precise, carefully quantified result: 10 per cent faster or slower, say, or 6°C cooler than normal or than a control. Once finished, the results will be analysed by our scientific team – ideally by a neutral statistician as well – and then published on the website.

I must reiterate that I cannot guarantee that the experiments will work – at first or ever. As scientists and objective researchers, we will be duty-bound to faithfully report the data we have. Whether or not our first experiments are successful, we will continue to refine the design with each new experiment as we learn more about group intention. If the first or second or fifth experiment doesn’t work, we will keep trying and keep learning more with every result. The nature of frontier science requires that you stumble along blindly, feeling your way along the right path.

Do consult the website frequently for announcements of experiments, postings of the individual experiments (chapter 14) and announcements of the date of every future experiment. If you have enjoyed the written portion of this book, the website will continue the experience for you as an open-ended sequel.

www.theintentionexperiment.com

Notes

Preface

N. Hill, Think and Grow Rich: The Andrew Carnegie Formula for Mone Making, New York: Ballantine Books (reissue edn), 1987.
J. Fonda, My Life So Far, London: Ebury Press, 2005: 571.

Introduction

For a complete description of these scientists and their findings, consult L. McTaggart, The Field: the Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe, London: HarperCollins, 2001.
The full title of Newton’s major treatise is Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, a name that offers a nod to its philosophical implications, although it is always referred to reverentially as the Principia.
R. P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: The Fundamentals of Physics Explained

London: Penguin, 1995: 24.

McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.
Eugene Wigner, the Hungarian-born American physicist who received a Nobel Prize for his contribution to the theory of quantum physics, is one of the early pioneers of the central role of consciousness in determining reality and argued, through a thought experiment called ‘Wigner’s friend’, that the observer, ‘the friend’, might collapse Schrödinger’s famous cat into a single state or, like the cat itself, remain in a state of superposition until another ‘friend’ comes into the lab. Other proponents of ‘the observer effect’ include John Eccles and Evan Harris Walker. John Wheeler is credited with espousing the theory that the universe is participatory: it only exists because we happen to be looking at it.
McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.
E. J. Squires, ‘Many views of one world – an interpretation of quantum theory’, European Journal of Physics, 1987; 8: 173.
B. F. Malle et al., Intentions and Intentionality: Foundations of Socia Cognition, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001.
M. Schlitz, ‘Intentionality in healing: mapping the integration of body, mind, and spirit’, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 1995; 1 (5): 119–20.
R. G. Jahn et al., ‘Correlations of random binary sequences with prestated operator intention: a review of a 12-year program’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1997; 11: 345–67.
R. G. Jahn et al., ‘Correlations of random binary sequences’, op. cit.; Dea Radin and Roger Nelson, ‘Evidence for consciousness-related anomalies in random physical systems’, Foundations of Physics, 1989; 19 (12): 1499–514; McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 116–17.

These studies are itemized in great detail in D. Benor, Spiritual Healing,

Volume 1, Southfield, Mich.: Vision Publications, 1992.

Rene Peoc’h, ‘Psychokinetic action of young chicks on the path of a “illuminated source”’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1995; 9 (2): 223; R. Peoc’h, ‘Chicken imprinting and the tychoscope: An Anpsi experiment’, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 1988; 55: 1; R. Peoc’h, ‘Psychokinesis experiments with human and animal subjects upon a robot moving at random’, The Journal of Parapsychology, September 1, 2002.
William G. Braud and Marilyn J. Schlitz, ‘Consciousness interactions wit remote biological systems: anomalous intentionality effects’, Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 1991; 2 (1): 1–27; McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 128–9.
Marilyn Schlitz and William Braud, ‘Distant intentionality and healing assessing the evidence’, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 1997; 3 (6): 62–73.
William Braud and Marilyn Schlitz, ‘A methodology for the objective study of transpersonal imagery’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1989; 3 (1): 43–63.
W. Braud et al., ‘Further studies of autonomic detection of remote staring: replication, new control procedures and personality correlates’, Journal of Parapsychology, 1993; 57: 391–409; M. Schlitz and S. LaBerge, ‘Autonomi detection of remote observation; two conceptual replications’, in D. Bierman (ed.), Proceedings of Presented Papers: 37 Annual Parapsychological Association Convention, Amsterdam, Fairhaven, Mass.: Parapsychological Association, 1994: 465–78.
D. Benor, Spiritual Healing: Scientific Validation of a Healing Revolution, Southfield, Mich.: Vision Publications, 2001.
F. Sicher, E. Targ et al., ‘A randomized double-blind study of the effect of distant healing in a population with advanced AIDS: report of a small scale study’ Western Journal of Medicine, 1998; 168 (6): 356–63. For a full description of the studies, see McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 181–96.
Psychologist Dean Radin conducted a meta-analysis in 1989 at Princeto University of all known dice experiments (73) published between 1930 and 1989. They are recounted in his book Entangled Minds, New York: Paraview, 2006: 148– 51.
J. Hasted, The Metal Benders, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981, as cited in W. Tiller, Science and Human Transformation; Subtle Energies Intentionality and Consciousness, Walnut Creek, Calif.: Pavior Publications, 1997: 13.
McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 199.
W. W. Monafo and M. A. West, ‘Current recommendations for topical burn therapy’, Drugs, 1990; 40: 364–73.

Chapter 1: Mutable Matter

All personal information about Tom Rosenbaum and Sai Ghosh and their

studies have been culled from multiple interviews conducted in February and March 2005.

This was the solution posed by Giorgio Parisi at Rome in 1979.
S. Ghosh et al., ‘Coherent spin oscillations in a disordered magnet’, Science, 2002; 296: 2195–8.
Once again, I am indebted to Danah Zohar for her easy-to-digest descriptio of quantum non-locality, which appears in D. Zohar, The Quantum Self, London: Bloomsbury, 1991: 19–20.
A. Einstein, B. Podolsky and N. Rosen, ‘Can quantum-mechanical descriptio of physical reality be considered complete?’ Physical Review, 1935; 47: 777–80.
A. Aspect et al., ‘Experimental tests of Bell’s inequalities using time-varying analyzers’, Physical Review Letters, 1982; 49: 1804–7; A. Aspect, ‘Bell’s inequality test: more ideal than ever’, Nature, 1999; 398: 189–90.
Science Fact: Scientists achieve ‘Star Trek’-like feat – The Associated Press, December 10, 1997, posted on CNN, http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/9712/10/beam me. up. ap.
Non-locality was considered to be proven by Aspect et al.’ s experiments in Paris in 1982.
J. S. Bell, ‘On the Einstein-Poldolsky-Rosen paradox’,Physics, 1964; 1: 195–200.
S. Ghosh et al., ‘Entangled quantum state of magnetic dipoles’, Nature, 2003; 435: 48–51.
Details of Vedral’s views and experiments the result of multiple interviews, February, October and December 2005.
C. Arnesen et al., ‘Thermal and magnetic entanglement in the 1D Heisenber Model’, Physical Review Letters, 2001; 87: 017901.
V. Vedral, ‘Entanglement hits the big time’, Nature, 2003; 425: 28–9.
T. Durt, interview with author, April 26, 2005.
B. Reznik, ‘Entanglement from the vacuum’, Foundations of Physics, 2003; 33: 167–76; Michael Brooks, ‘Entanglement: The weirdest link’,New Scientist, 2004; 181 (2440): 32.
John D. Barrow, The Book of Nothing, London: Jonathan Cape, 2000: 216.
Erwin Laszlo, The Interconnected Universe: Conceptual Foundations o Transdiscipinary Unified Theory, Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 1995: 28.
A. C. Clarke, ‘When will the real space age begin?’ Ad Astra, May–June 1996; 13–15.
Harold Puthoff, ‘Ground state of hydrogen as a zero-point-fluctuation- determined state’, Physical Review D, 1987; 35: 3266.
B. Haisch, Alfonso Rueda and H. E. Puthoff, ‘Inertia as a zero-point-fiel Lorentz force’, Physical Review A, 1994; 49 (2): 678–94; Bernhard Haisch, Alfonso Rueda and H. E. Puthoff, ‘Physics of the zero-point field: implications for inertia gravitation and mass’, Speculations in Science and Technology, 1997; 20: 99–114.
Various interviews with Hal Puthoff, 1999–2000.

Reznik, ‘Entanglement from the vacuum’, op. cit.
McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 35–6.
J. Resch et al., ‘Distributing entanglement and single photons through an intra-city, free-space quantum channel’, Optics Express, 2005; 13 (1): 202–9; R. Ursin et al., ‘Quantum teleportation across the Danube’, Nature, 2004; 430: 849.
M. Arndt et al., ‘Wave–particle duality of C60 molecules’, Nature, 1999; 401: 680–2; doi: 10.1038/44348.
A. Zeilinger, ‘Probing the limits of the quantum world’, Physics World, March 2005 (online journal: http://www.physicsweb.org/articles/world/18/3/5/1).

Chapter 2: The Human Antenna

All personal details about Gary Schwartz and his discoveries result from multiple interviews with him and the author, March–June 2006.
H. Benson et al., ‘Decreased systolic blood pressure through operan conditioning techniques in patients with essential hypertension’, Science, 1971; 173 (3998): 740–2.
E. E. Green, ‘Copper wall research psychology and psychophysics: subtle energies and energy medicine: emerging theory and practice’, Proceedings, First Annual Conference, International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine (ISSSEEM), Boulder, Colorado, 21–25 June 1991.
This research was eventually published as G. Schwartz and L. Russek ‘Subtle energies – electrostatic body motion registration and the human antenna- receiver effect: a new method for investigating interpersonal dynamical energy system interactions’, Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 1996; 7 (2): 149–84.
E. E. Green et al., ‘Anomalous electrostatic phenomena in exceptiona subjects’, Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 1993; 2: 69; W. A. Tiller et al., ‘Towards explaining anomalously large body voltage surges on exceptional subjects, Part I: The electrostatic approximation’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1995; 9 (3): 331.
William A. Tiller, ‘Subtle energies’, Science & Medicine, 1999, 6 (3): 28–

33.

A. Seto et al., ‘Detection of extraordinary large biomagnetic field strength

from the human hand during external qi emission’, Acupuncture and Electrotherapeutics Research International, 1992; 17: 75–94; J. Zimmerman, ‘New

technologies detect effects in healing hands’, Brain/Mind Bulletin, 1985; 10 (2): 20–

B. Grad, ‘Dimensions in “Some biological effects of the laying on of hands” and their implications’, in H. A. Otto and J. W. Knight (eds.), Dimension in Wholistic Healing: New Frontiers in the Treatment of the Whole Person, Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1979: 199–212.
L. N. Pyatnitsky and V. A. Fonkin, ‘Human consciousness influence on water structure’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1995; 9 (1): 89.
G. Rein and R. McCraty, ‘Structural changes in water and DNA associate

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with new physiologically measurable states’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1994; 8 (3): 438–9.

W. Tiller would eventually write about the effect of shielding psychics in his book Science and Human Transformation, Walnut Creek, Calif.: Pavior Publishing, 1997: 32.
M. Connor, G. Schwartz et al., ‘Oscillation of amplitude as measured by a extra low frequency magnetic field meter as a biophysical measure of intentionality’. Paper presented at the Toward a Science of Consciousness Conference, Tucson Arizona, April 2006.
Sicher, Targ et al., ‘A randomized double-blind study’, op. cit.
See McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 39, for a full description of F.-A. Popp’s earlier work.
S. Cohen and F.-A. Popp, ‘Biophoton emission of the human body’,Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology, 1997; 40: 187–9.
K. Creath and G. E. Schwartz, ‘What biophoton images of plants can tell u about biofields and healing’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2005; 19 (4): 531–

50.

S. N. Bose, ‘Planck’s Gesetz und Lichtquantenhypothese’, Zeitschrift für Physik, 1924; 26: 178–81; A. Einstein, ‘Quantentheorie des einatomigen idealen Gases [Quantum theory of ideal monoatomic gases]’, Sitz. Ber. Preuss. Akad. Wiss. (Berlin), 1925; 23: 3.
C. E. Wieman and E. A. Cornell, ‘Seventy years later: the creation of Bose-Einstein condensate in an ultracold gas’, Lorentz Proceedings, 1999; 52: 3–5.
K. Davis et al., ‘Bose-Einstein condensation in a gas of sodium atoms’

Physical Review Letters, 1995; 75: 3969–73.

M. W. Zwierlein et al., ‘Observation of Bose-Einstein condensation o molecules’, Physical Review Letters, 2003; 91: 250401.
H. Fröhlich, ‘Long range coherence and energy storage in biological systems’, Int. J. Quantum Chem., 1968; II: 641–9.
For this entire example, see Tiller, Science and Human Transformation, op. cit.: 196.
M. Jibu et al., ‘Quantum optical coherence in cytoskeletal microtubules: implications for brain function’, Biosystems, 1994; 32: 195–209; S. R. Hameroff ‘Cytoplasmic gel states and ordered water: possible roles in biological quantum coherence’, Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Advanced Water Sciences Symposium, Dallas, Texas, 1996.

Chapter 3: The Two-Way Street

For all history of Cleve Backster’s discoveries and experiments, interview with Backster, October 2004 and his Primary Perception: Biocommunication with Plants, Living Foods, and Human Cells, Anza, Calif.: White Rose Millennium Press, 2003.
As Obi-Wan Kenobe tells Luke Skywalker, after Alderan has been blown up

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by the Empire in Star Wars part IV: A New Hope: ‘I feel a great disturbance in the Force. As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.’

Presentation given at the Tenth Annual Parapsychology Association meeting in New York City, September 7, 1967. Also published as C. Backster, ‘Evidence of a primary perception in plant life’, International Journal of Parapsychology, 1968; 10 (4): 329–48.
P. Dubrov and V. N. Pushkin, Parapsychology and Contemporary Science, New York and London: Consultants Bureau, 1982.
P. Tompkins and C. Bird, The Secret Life of Plants, New York: Harper & Row, 1973.
‘Boysenberry to Prune, Boysenberry to Prune: Do you read me? Lie detecto expert Cleve Backster reported in the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that he had detected electrical impulses between two containers of yogurt at opposite ends of his laboratory. Backster claims the bacteria in the containers were communicating.’ Esquire, January 1976.
Backster, ‘Evidence of a primary perception’, op. cit.
Backster, Primary Perceptions, op. cit.: 112–13.
Backster, Primary Perceptions. See also Rupert Sheldrake, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals, London: Three Rivers Press, 2000.
This and other personal details of events resulted from interviews with Ingo Swann, New York, July 2005.
See McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 39 for a full description of F.-A. Popp’s earlier work.
All details of these experiments resulted from an interview between the author and Fritz-Albert Popp, January 2006.
R. M. Galle et al., ‘Biophoton emission fromDaphnia magna: A possible factor in the self-regulation of swarming’, Experientia, 1991; 47: 457–60; R. M. Galle, ‘Untersuchungen zum dichte und zeitabhängigen Verhalten der ultraschwachen Photonenemission von pathogenetischen Weibchen des Wasserflohs Daphnia magna.’ Dissertation. Universität Saarbrücken, Fachbereich Zoologie, 1993.
F.-A. Popp et al., ‘Nonsubstantial biocommunication in terms of Dicke’s Theory’, in M. W. Ho, F.-A. Popp and U. Warnke (eds.), Bioelectrodynamics and Biocommunication, Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 1994: 293–317; J. J Chang et al., ‘Research on cell communication of P. elegans by means of photon emission’, Chinese Science Bulletin, 1995; 40: 76–9.
J. J. Chang et al., ‘Communication between Dinoflagellates by means o photon emission’, in L. V. Beloussov and F.-A. Popp (eds.), Proceedings of International Conference on Non-equilibrium and Coherent Systems in Biophysics, Biology and Biotechnology, Sep. 28–Oct. 2 1994, Moscow: Bioinform Services Co., 1995: 318–30.
Interview with Popp, Neuss, Germany, March 1, 2006.

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F.-A. Popp et al., ‘Mechanism of interaction between electromagnetic fields and living organisms’, Science in China (Series C), 2000; 43 (5): 507–18. 18. Ibid.
L. Beloussov and N. N. Louchinskaia, ‘Biophoton emission from developin eggs and embryos: Nonlinearity, wholistic properties and indications of energy transfer’, in J. J. Chang et al. (eds.),Biophotons, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998: 121–40.
K. Creath and G. E. Schwartz, ‘What biophoton images of plants can tell u about biofields and healing’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2005; 19 (4): 531–

50.

A. V. Tschulakow et al., ‘A new approach to the memory of water’,

Homeopathy, 2005; 94: 241–7.

E. P. A. Van Wijk and R. Van Wijk, ‘The development ofa bio-sensor for the state of consciousness in a human intentional healing ritual’, Journal of International Society of Life Information Science (ISLIS), 2002; 20 (2): 694–702.
M. Connor, ‘Baseline testing of energy practitioners: Biophoton imaging results.’ Paper presented at the North American Research in Integrative Medicine conference, Edmonton, Canada, May 2006.
Personal details about K. Korotkov the result of multiple interviews with the author, November–March 2005–2006.
S. D. Kirlian and V. K. Kirlian, ‘Photography and visual observation b means of high frequency currents’, J. Sci. Appl. Photogr., 1964; 6: 397–403.
Korotkov’s most important work on the subject was K. Korotkov, Human E n e rg y Field: Study with GDV Bioelectrography, New Jersey: Backbone Publishing Co., 2002; K. Korotkov, Aura and Consciousness – New Stage o Scientific Understanding, St Petersburg: St Petersburg Division of the Russia Ministry of Culture, State Publishing Unit ‘Kultura’, 1999.
K. Korotkov et al., ‘Assessing biophysical energy transfer mechanisms in living systems: The basis of life processes’, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2004; 10 (1): 49–57.
L. W. Konikiewicz and L. C. Griff,Bioelectrography – A new method for detecting cancer and body physiology, Harrisburg, Va.: Leonard Associates Press, 1982; G. Rein, ‘Corona discharge photography of human breast tumour biopsies’ Acupuncture & Electrotherapeutics Research, 1985; 10: 305–8; K. Korotkov et al., ‘Stress diagnosis and monitoring with new computerized “Crown-TV” device’ Journal of Pathophysiology, 1998; 5: 227.
P. Bundzen et al., ‘New technology of the athletes’ psycho-physical readiness evaluation based on the gas-discharge visualisation method in comparison with battery of tests’, ‘SIS–99’ Proceedings, International Congress St Petersburg, 1999: 19–22; P. V. Bundzen, et al., ‘Psychophysiological correlates of athletic success in athletes training for the Olympics’, Human Physiology, 2005; 31 (3): 316–23; K. Korotkov et al., ‘Assessing biophysical energy transfer mechanisms’, op cit.
Clair A. Francomano and Wayne B. Jonas, in Ronald A. Chez (ed.)

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Proceedings: Measuring the Human Energy Field: State of the Science. The Gerontology Research Center, National Institute of Aging, National Institutes o Health, Baltimore, Maryland, April 17–18, 2002.

S. Kolmakow et al., ‘Gas discharge visualization technique and spectrophotometry in detection of field effects’, Mechanisms of Adaptive Behavior, Abstracts of International Symposium, St Petersburg, 1999: 79.
Interview with K. Korotkov, March 2006.

Chapter 4: Hearts that Beat as One

All details of the Love Study were gleaned from multiple interviews with Dean Radin, Marilyn Schlitz and Jerome Stone, April 2005–June 2006.
F. Sicher, E. Targ et al., ‘A randomized double-blind study of the effect of distant ealing in a population with advanced AIDS: report of a small scale study’ Western ournal of Medicine, 1998; 168 (6): 356–63; also multiple interviews with

E. Targ, 999–2001.

M. Schlitz and W. Braud, ‘Distant intentionality and healing: assessing the evidence’, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 1997; 3 (6): 62–73.
M. Schlitz and S. LaBerge, ‘Autonomic detection of remote observation: tw conceptual replications’, in D. J. Bierman (ed.), Proceedings of Presented Papers, 37t h Annual Parapsychological Association Convention, Amsterdam, Fairhaven, Mass.: Parapsychological Association, 1994: 352–60.
S. Schmidt et al., ‘Distant intentionality and the feeling of being stared at: Two metaanalyses’, British Journal of Psychology, 2004; 95: 235–47, as reported in D. Radin, Entangled Minds, New York: Paraview, 2006: 135.
L. Standish et al., ‘Electroencephalographic evidence of correlated event- related signals between the brains of spatially and sensory isolated human subjects’, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2004; 10 (2): 307–14.
Radin, Entangled Minds, op. cit.: 136.
Charles Tart, ‘Physiological correlates of psi cognition’, International Journal of Parapsychology, 1963: 5; 375–86.
T. D. Duane and T. Behrendt, ‘Extrasensory electroencephalographic induction between identical twins’, Science, 1965; 150: 367.
J. Wackerman et al., ‘Correlations between brain electrical activities of two spatially separated human subjects’, Neuroscience Letters, 2003; 336: 60–4.
J. Grinberg-Zylberbaum et al., ‘The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox in th brain: The transferred potential’, Physics Essays, 1994; 7 (4): 422–28.
J. Grinberg-Zylberbaum and J. Ramos, ‘Patterns of interhemispher correlations during human communication’, International Journal of Neuroscience, 1987; 36: 41–53; J. Grinberg-Zylberbaum et al., ‘Human communication and the electrophysiological activity of the brain,’ Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 1992; 3 (3): 25–43.
L. J. Standish et al., ‘Electroencephalographic evidence of correlated event related signals’, op. cit. 14. L. J., Standish et al., ‘Evidence of correlated functiona

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magnetic resonance imaging signals between distant human brains’, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 2003; 9 (1): 122–5; T. Richards et al., ‘Replicable functional magnetic resonance imaging evidence of correlated brain signals between physically and sensory isolated subjects’, Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2005; 11 (6): 955–63.

M. Kittenis et al., ‘Distant psychophysiological interaction effects between related and unrelated participants’, Proceedings of the Parapsychological Association Convention, 2004: 67–76, as reported in Radin, Entangled Minds, op. cit.: 138–9.
D. I. Radin, ‘Event related EEG correlations between isolated huma subjects’, Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2004; 10: 315–24.
M. Cade and N. Coxhead,The Awakened Mind, 2nd edn, Shaftesbury: Element, 1986.
S. Fahrion et al., ‘EEG amplitude, brain mapping and synchrony in an between a bioenergy practitioner and client during healing’, Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 1992; 3 (1): 19–52.
M. Yamamoto, ‘An experiment on remote action against man in sensory shielding condition, Part 2’, Journal of the International Society of Life Information Sciences, 1996; 14 (2): 228–39, as reported in Larry Dossey, Be Careful What You Pray For … You Just Might Get It: What We Can Do About th Unintentional Effect of Our Thoughts, Prayers, and Wishes, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998: 182–3.
M. Yamamoto et al., ‘An experiment on remote action against man in sense shielding condition’, Journal of the International Society of Life Information Sciences, 1996; 14 (1): 97–9.
D. I. Radin, ‘Unconscious perception of future emotions: An experiment i presentiment’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1997; 11 (2): 163–80. First presented before the annual meeting of the Parapsychological Association in August 1996. For a full description of the Radin experiment, see D. Radin,The Conscious Universe, London: HarperCollins, 1997: 119–24.
R. McCraty et al., ‘Electrophysiological evidence of intuition: Part 2: A system-wide process?’ The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2004; 10 (2): 325–36.
J. Andrew Armour and Jeffrey L. Ardell (eds.), Basic and Clinical Neurocardiology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
R. McCraty et al., ‘The electricity of touch: Detection and measurement o cardiac energy exchange between people’, in Karl H. Pribram (ed.), Brain and Values: Is a Biological Science of Values Possible? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998: 359–79.
M. Gershon, The Second Brain: A Groundbreaking New Understanding o Nervous Disorders of the Stomach and Intestine, London: HarperCollins, 1999.
D. I. Radin and M. J. Schlitz, ‘Gut feelings, intuition, and emotions: A exploratory study’, Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2005; 11

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(5): 85–91.

D. Radin, ‘Event-related electroencephalographic correlations between isolated human subjects’, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2004; 10 (2): 315–23.
Dean Radin has devoted an excellent book to the subject: see D. Radin

Entangled Minds, op cit.

J. Stone, Course Handbook: Training in Compassionate-Loving Intention 2003; J. Stone et al., ‘Effects of a compassionate/loving intention as a therapeutic intervention by partners of cancer patients: A randomized controlled feasibility study’, in press.
M. Murphy et al., The Physiological and Psychological Effects o Meditation: A Review of Contemporary Research with a Comprehensive Bibliography, 1931–1996, Petaluma, Calif.: The Institute of Noetic Sciences, 1997.
E. P. Van Wijk et al., ‘Anatomic characterization of human ultra-weak photon emission in practitioners of Transcendental Meditation™ and control subjects’, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2006; 12 (1): 31–8.
R. McCraty et al., ‘Head-heart entrainment: A preliminary survey’, in Proceedings of the Brain-Mind Applied Neurophysiology EEG Neurofeedbac Meeting. Key West, Florida, 1996.
R. McCraty, ‘Influence of cardiac afferent input on heart-brain synchronization and cognitive performance, Institute of HeartMath, Boulder Creek California’, International Journal of Psychophysiology, 2002; 45 (1–2): 72–3.
G. R. Schmeidler, Parapsychology and Psychology, Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 1988 as cited in J. Stone, Course Handbook, op. cit.; L. Dossey Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993.
D. Radin et al., ‘Effects of motivated distant intention on electrodermal activity.’ Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Parapsychological Association, Stockholm, Sweden, August 2006.

Chapter 5: Entering Hyperspace

H. Benson et al., ‘Body temperature changes during the practice of g tum-mo (heat) yoga’, Nature, 1982; 295: 234–6; H. Benson, ‘Body temperature changes during the practice of g tum-mo yoga (matters arising)’, Nature, 1982; 298: 402.
H. Benson et al., ‘Three case reports of the metabolic and electroencephalographic changes during advanced Buddhist meditation techniques’, Behavioral Medicine, 1990; 16 (2): 90–5.
The most celebrated was the Investigating the Mind conference a Massachusetts Institute of Technology, September 2005, which featured the Dalai Lama.
I am indebted to Stanley Krippner, who supplied me with a list of some 50 healers from a rich variety of traditions. I assembled a questionnaire, which I sent out

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to all 50. Some 15 replied in detail.

Cooperstein’s study eventually was published: M. A. Cooperstein, ‘The myths of healing: A summary of research into transpersonal healing experience’, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1992; 86: 99–133. I am also indebted to him for his in-depth analysis of the commonalities between healers.
Information about Krippner’s vast catalogue of work was also gleaned from numerous interviews between him and the author, April 2005–March 2006 and correspondence, 2005–2006.
S. Krippner, ‘The technologies of shamanic states of consciousness’, in M Schlitz et al. (eds.), Consciousness and Healing: Integral Approaches to Mind Body Medicine, St. Louis, Mo.: Elsevier Churchill Livingstone, 2005: 376–90.
Jilek W. G. Salish, Indian Mental Health and Culture Change Psychohygienic and Therapeutic Aspects of the Guardian Spirit Ceremonial, New York: Hold Rinehart & Winston, 1974.
All information about Bruce Frantzis the result of various interviews, April 2005–March 2006.
B. K. Frantzis, Relaxing Into Your Being: Breathing, Chi and Dissolving the Ego, Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 1998.
Murphy, Meditation, op. cit.
W. Singer, ‘Neuronal synchrony: a versatile code for the definition of relations?’ Neuron, 1999; 24: 49–65; F. Varela et al., Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2001; 2: 229–39, as reported in A. Lutz et al., ‘Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 2004; 101 (46): 16369–73.
O. Paulsen and T. J. Sejnowski, ‘Natural patterns of activity and long-term synaptic plasticity’, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 2000; 10: 172–9, as reported in Lutz, ‘Long-term meditators’, op. cit.
Although the majority of studies carried out on meditation demonstrate that meditation leads to an increase in alpha rhythms (see Murphy, Meditation, op. cit.), the following are just a few that show that during meditation, subjects evidence spurts of high-frequency beta waves of twenty to forty cycles per second, usually during moments of intense concentration or ecstasy: J. P. Banquet, ‘Spectral analysis of the EEG in meditation’, Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 1973; 35: 143–51; P. Fenwick et al., ‘Metabolic and EEG changes durin Transcendental Meditation: An explanation’, Biological Psychology, 1977; 5 (2): 101–18; M. A. West, ‘Meditation and the EEG’,Psychological Medicine, 1980; 10 (2): 369–75; J. C. Corby et al., ‘Psychophysiological correlates of the practice o Tantric Yoga meditation’, Postgraduate Medical Journal, 1985; 61: 301–4.
N. Das and H. Gastaut, ‘Variations in the electrical activity of the brain heart and skeletal muscles during yogic meditation and trance’, Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 1955, Supplement no. 6: 211–19.
Murphy, Meditation, cites 10 studies showing that heart rate accelerates

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during these peak moments of meditation.

W. W. Surwillo and D. P. Hobson, ‘Brain electrical activity during prayer’,

Psychological Reports, 1978; 43 (1): 135–43.

Murphy, Meditation, op. cit.
Lutz et al., ‘Long-term meditators’, op. cit.
Richard J. Davidson et al., ‘Alterations in brain and immune functio produce by mindfulness meditation’, Psychosomatic Medicine, 2003; 65: 564–70.
Krippner, ‘Shamanic states of consciousness’, op. cit.
Murphy, Meditation, op. cit.
L. Bernardi et al., ‘Effect of rosary prayer and yoga mantras on autonomic cardiovascular rhythms: comparative study’, British Medical Journal, 2001; 323: 1446–9.
Fenwick et al., ‘Metabolic and EEG changes during Transcendenta Meditation’, op. cit.
D. Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, London: Bloomsbury Press, 1996.
D. Goleman, ‘Meditation and consciousness: An Asian approach to mental health’, American Journal of Psychotherapy, 1976; 30 (1): 41–54; G. Schwartz, ‘Biofeedback, self-regulation, and the patterning of physiological processes’, American Scientist, 1975; 63 (3): 314–24; D. Goleman, ‘Why the brain blocks daytime dreams’, Psychology Today, 1976; March: 69–71.
P. Williams and M. West, ‘EEG responses to photic stimulation in persons experienced at meditation’, Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 1975; 39 (5): 519–22; B. K. Bagchi and M. A. Wenger, ‘Electrophysiological correlates of some yogi exercises’, Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 1957; (7): 132–49.
D. Brown, M. Forte and M. Dysart, ‘Visual sensitivity and mindfulnes meditation’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1984; 58 (3): 775–84; and ‘Differences in visual sensitivity among mindfulness meditators and non-meditators’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1984; 58 (3): 727–33.
S. W. Lazar et al., ‘Functional brain mapping of the relaxation response and meditation’, NeuroReport, 2000; 11: 1581–5.
C. Alexander et al., ‘EEG and SPECT data of a selected subject during ps tests: The discovery of a neurophysiological correlate’, Journal of Parapsychology, 1998; 62 (2): 102–4.
L. LeShan, The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist: Towards a Theory of the Paranormal, New York: Helios Press, 2003.
Cooperstein, ‘The myths of healing’, op. cit.
S. Krippner, ‘Trance and the Trickster: Hypnosis as a liminal phenomenon’,

International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 2005; 53 (2): 97–

118.

E. Hartmann, Boundaries in the Mind: A New Theory of Personality, New York: Basic Books, 1991, as quoted in Krippner, ‘Trance and the Trickster’, op. cit.
M. J. Schlitz and Charles Honorton, ‘Ganzfeld psi performance within a

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artistically gifted population’, Journal of the American Society for Psychica Research, 1992; 86 (2): 83–98.

S. Krippner et al., ‘Working with Ramtha: Is it a “high risk” procedure?’ Proceedings of Presented Papers: The Parapsychological Association 41st Annua Convention, 1998: 50–63.
The various tests included the Absorption Subscale of the Differential Personality Questionnaire, the Dissociative Experiences Scale and the Boundar Questionnaire.
S. Krippner et al., ‘The Ramtha phenomenon: Psychological phenomenological, and geomagnetic data’, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1998; 92: 1–24.
F. Sicher, E. Targ et al., ‘A randomized double-blind study’, op. cit.
Various conversations and correspondence between E. Targ and the author, October 1999–June 2001.
Interview with E. Targ, California, October 1999; J. Barrett, ‘Going th distance’, Intuition, 1999; June/July: 30–1.
D. J. Benor, Healing Research: Holistic Energy Medicine and Spirituality, 4 vols., Deddington, Oxfordshire: Helix Editions Ltd, 1993.
http://www.wholistichealingresearch.com.
Benor, Healing Research, vol. 1, op. cit.: 54–5.
Cooperstein, ‘The myths of healing’, op. cit.
M. Freedman et al., ‘Effects of frontal lobe lesions on intentionality and random physical phenomena’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2003; 17 (4): 651–

68.

E. d’Aquili and A. Newberg, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, New York: Ballantine Books, 2001.

Chapter 6: In the Mood

All details about M. Krucoff ’s trip to India and decision to study prayer from interviews, August 2006.
R. C. Byrd, ‘Positive therapeutic effects of intercessory prayer in a coronar care unit population’, Southern Medical Journal, 1988; 81 (7): 826–9.
W. Harris et al., ‘A randomised, controlled trial of the effects of remote, intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients admitted to the coronary care unit’, Archives of Internal Medicine, 1999; 159 (19): 2273–8.
M. Krucoff, ‘Integrative noetic therapies as adjuncts to percutaneous intervention during unstable coronary syndromes: Monitoring and Actualization of Noetic Training (MANTRA) feasibility pilot’,American Heart Journal, 2001; 142 (5): 760–7.
M. Krucoff announced the results at the Second Conference on the Integratio of Complementary Medicine into Cardiology, a meeting sponsored by the American College of Cardiology, October 14, 2003.
M. Krucoff et al., ‘Music, imagery, touch and prayer as adjuncts to

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interventional cardiac care: The Monitoring and Actualisation of Noetic Trainings (MANTRA) II randomised study’, The Lancet, 2005; 366: 211–17.

J. M. Aviles et al., ‘Intercessory prayer and cardiovascular disease progression in a coronary care unit population: a randomized controlled trial’, Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 2001; 76 (12): 1192–8.
H. Benson, The Relaxation Response, New York: William Morrow, 1975.
M. Krucoff et al., Editorial: ‘From efficacy to safety concerns: A STE forward or a step back for clinical research and intercessory prayer? The Study of Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP)’,American Heart Journal, 2006; 151; 4: 762.
H. Benson et al., ‘Study of the therapeutic effects of intercessory prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multi-center randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer’, American Heart Journal, 2006; 151 (4): 934–42.
Krucoff et al., ‘A STEP forward’, op. cit.
Editorial: ‘MANTRA II: Measuring the unmeasurable?’The Lancet, 2005; 366 (9481): 178.
Letter to the editor, American Heart Journal, sent to author, 2006.
Krucoff et al., ‘A STEP forward’, op. cit.
B. Greyson, ‘Distance healing of patients with major depression’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1996; 10 (4): 447–65.
L. Dossey, Meaning and Medicine: Lessons from a Doctor’s Tales of Breakthough Healing, London: Bantam, 1991; Dossey, Healing Words, op. cit.
L. Dossey, ‘Prayer experiments: Science or folly? Observations on the Harvard prayer study’, Network Review (UK), 2006; 91: 22–3.
Ibid.
Harris, ‘Effects of remote intercessory prayer’, op. cit.
www.officeofprayerresearch.org.
Benor, Healing Research, op. cit.
J. Astin et al., ‘The efficacy of “distant healing”: A systematic review of randomized trials’, Annals of Internal Medicine, 2000; 132: 903–10.
B. Rubik et al., ‘In vitro effect of Reiki treatment on bacterial cultures: Rol of experimental context and practitioner well-being’, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2006; 12 (1): 7–13.
I. R. Bell et al., ‘Development and validation of a new global well-bein outcomes rating scale for integrative medicine research’, BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 2004; 4: 1.
Ibid.
S. O’Laoire, ‘An experimental study of the effects of distant, intercessor prayer on self-esteem, anxiety and depression’, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 1997; 3 (6): 19–53.
Rubik et al., ‘In vitro effect’, op, cit.
K. Reece et al., ‘Positive well-being changes associated with giving and

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receiving Johrei healing’, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2005; 11 (3): 455–7.

M. Schlitz, ‘Can science study prayer?’ Shift: At the Frontiers of Consciousness, 2006; September–November (12): 38–9.
Dossey, ‘Prayer experiments’, op. cit.
J. Achterberg et al., ‘Evidence for correlations between distant intentionality and brain function in recipients: a functional magnetic resonance imagining analysis’, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2005; 11 (6): 965–71.
Ibid.
K. A. Wientjes, ‘Mind-body techniques in wound healing’, Ostomy/Wound Management, 2002; 48 (11): 62–7.
J. K. Keicolt-Glaser, ‘Hostile marital interactions, proinflammator cytokine production, and wound healing’, Archives of General Psychiatry, 2005; 62 (12): 1377–84.
Krucoff, ‘(MANTRA) II’, op. cit.

Chapter 7: The Right Time

For all details about Michael Persinger’s experiments, interviews and correspondence with Persinger, August 2006 and a member of his neuroscientist team, Todd Murphy, May 23, 2006. Also, J. Hitt, ‘This is your brain on God’,Wired, November 1999; R. Hercz, ‘The God helmet’,SATURDAYNIGHT magazine, October 2002: 40–6; B. Raynes, ‘Interview with Todd Murphy’, Alternative Perceptions M a g a z i n e online April 2004 (No. 78), plus T. Murphy’s website: www.spiritualbrain.com and M. Persinger’s home page at the Laurentian University website: www.laurentian.ca/Neursci/_people/Persinger. htm.
Neuroscientist Todd Murphy developed this theory and successfully demonstrated its validity in Persinger’s laboratory.
The main background of Halberg’s early life is taken from F. Halberg, ‘Transdisciplinary unifying implications of circadian findings in the 1950s’, Journal of Circadian Rhythms, 2003; 1: 2.
G. Cornélissen et al., ‘Is a birth-month-dependence of human longevity influenced by half-yearly changes in geomagnetics?’ ‘Physics of Auroral Phenomena’, Proceedings. XXV Annual Seminar, Apatity: Polar Geophysica Institute, Kola Science Center, Russian Academy of Science, February 26–March 1 2002: 161–6; A. M. Vaiserman et al., ‘Human longevity: related to date of birth?’ Abstract 9, 2nd International Symposium: Workshop on Chronoastrobiology and Chronotherapy, Tokyo Kasei University, Tokyo, Japan, November 2001.
O. N. Larina et al., ‘Effects of spaceflight factors on recombinant protei expression in E. coli producing strains’, in ‘Biomedical Research on the Science/NASA Project’, Abstracts of the Third US/Russian Symposium, Huntsvill Alabama, November 10–13, 1997: 110–11.
D. Hillman et al., ‘About-10 yearly (circadecennian) cosmo-helio

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geomagnetic signatures in Acetabularia’, Scripta Medica (BRNO), 2002; 75 (6) 303–8.

P. A. Kashulin et al., ‘Phenolic biochemical pathway in plants can be used for the bioindication of heliogeophysical factors’, ‘Physics of Auroral Phenomena’, Proceedings. XXV Annual Seminar, Apatity: Polar Geophysical Institute, Kol Science Center, Russian Academy of Science, February 26–March 1, 2002: 153–6.
V. M. Petro et al., ‘An influence of changes of magnetic field of the Earth on the functional state of humans in the conditions of space mission’, Proceedings, International Symposium ‘Computer Electro-Cardiograph on Boundary of Centuries’ Moscow, Russian Federation, 27–30 April, 1999.
K. F. Novikova and B. A. Ryvkin, ‘Solar activity and cardiovascular diseases’, in M. N. Gnevyshev and A. I. Ol (eds.),Effects of Solar Activity on the Earth’s Atmosphere and Biosphere, Academy of Science, USSR (translated from th Russian), Jerusalem: Israel Program for Scientific Translations, 1977: 184–200.
G. Cornélissen et al., ‘Chronomes, time structures, for chronobioengineering for “a full life”’, Biomedical Instrumentation and Technology, 1999; 33 (2): 152–

87.

V. N. Oraevskii et al., ‘Medico-biological effect of natural electromagnetic variations’, Biofizika, 1998; 43 (5): 844–8; V. N. Oraevskii et al., ‘An influence of geomagnetic activity on the functional status of the body’, Biofizika, 1998; 43 (5): 819–26.
I. Gurfinkel et al., ‘Assessment of the effect of a geomagnetic storm on the frequency of appearance of acute cardiovascular pathology’, Biofizika, 1998; 43 (4): 654–8; J. Sitar, ‘The causality of lunar changes on cardiovascular mortality’, Casopis Lekaru Ceskych, 1990; 129: 1425–30.
F. Halberg et al., ‘Cross-spectrally coherent about 10-5- and 21-year biological and physical cycles, magnetic storms and myocardial infarctions’, Neuroendrocrinology Letters, 2000; 21: 233–58.
M. N. Gnevyshev, ‘Essential features of the 11-year solar cycle’, Solar Physics, 1977; 51: 175–82.
G. Cornélissen et al., ‘Non-photic solar associations of heart rate variability and myocardial infarction’, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-terrestrial Physics, 2002; 64: 707–20.
A. R. Allahverdiyev et al., ‘Possible space weather influence on functional activity of the human brain’, Proceedings, Space Weather Workshop: Looking Towards a European Space Weather Programme, December 17–19, 2001.
E. Babayev, ‘Some results of investigations on the space weather influence on functioning of several engineering-technical and communication systems and human health’, Astronomical and Astrophysical Transactions, 2003; 22 (6): 861–7;

G. Y. Mizon and P. G. Mizun, Space and Health, Moscow: ‘Znanie’, 1984.

E. Stoupel, ‘Relationship between suicide and myocardial infarction with regard to changing physical environmental conditions’, International Journal of Biometeorology, 1994; 38 (4): 199–203; E. Stoupel et al., ‘Clinical cosmobiology:

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the Lithuanian study, 1990–1992’, International Journal of Biometeorology, 1995; 38: 204–8; E. Stoupel et al., ‘Suicide-homicide temporal interrelationship, links with other fatalities and environmental physical activity’, Crisis, 2005; 26: 85–9.

Avi Raps et al., ‘Geophysical Variables and Behavior: LXIX. Solar activit and admission of psychiatric inpatients’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1992; 74: 449; H. Friedman et al., ‘Geomagnetic parameters and psychiatric hospital admissions’, Nature, 1963; 200: 626–8.
M. Mikulecky, ‘Lunisolar tidal waves, geomagnetic activity and epilepsy in the light of multivariate coherence’, Brazilian Journal of Medicine, 1996; 29 (8): 1069–72; E. A. McGugan, ‘Sudden unexpected deaths in epileptics – a literature review’, Scottish Medical Journal, 1999; 44 (5): 137–9.
A. Michon et al., ‘Attempts to simulate the association between geomagnetic activity and spontaneous seizures in rats using experimentally generated magnetic fields’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1996; 82 (2): 619–26; Y. Bureau and M. Persinger, ‘Geomagnetic activity and enhanced mortality in rats with acute (epileptic) limbic lability’, International Journal of Biometeorology, 1992; 36: 226–32.
Y. Bureau and M. Persinger, ‘Decreased latencies for limbic seizures induced in rats by lithium-pilocarpine occur when daily average geomagnetic activity exceeds 20 nanotesla’, Neuroscience Letters, 1995; 192: 142–4; A. Michon and M.

A. Persinger, ‘Experimental simulation of the effects of increased geomagnetic activity upon nocturnal seizures in epileptic rats’, Neuroscience Letters, 1997; 224: 53–6.

M. Persinger, ‘Sudden unexpected death in epileptics following sudden, intense, increases in geomagnetic activity: Prevalence of effect and potential mechanisms’, International Journal of Biometeorology, 1995; 38: 180–7; R. P. O’Connor and M. A. Persinger, ‘Geophysical Variables and Behavior: LXXXII. strong association between sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and increments o global geomagnetic activity – possible support for the melatonin hypothesis’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1997; 84: 395–402.
B. McKay and M. Persinger, ‘Geophysical Variables and Behavior LXXXVII. Effects of synthetic and natural geomagnetic patterns on maze learning’ Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1999; 89 (3 pt 1): 1023–4
Radin, Conscious Universe, op. cit.
D. Radin, ‘Evidence for relationship between geomagnetic field fluctuations and skilled physical performance.’ Presentation made at the 11th Annual Meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration, Princeton, New Jersey, June 1992.
S. W. Tromp, Biometeorology, London: Heyden, 1980.
I. Stoilova and T. Zdravev, ‘Influence of the geomagnetic activity on the human functional systems’, Journal of the Balkan Geophysical Society, 2000; 3 (4): 73–6.
J. S. Derr and M. A. Persinger, ‘Geophysical Variables and Behavior: LIV Zeitoun (Egypt) apparitions of the Virgin Mary as tectonic strain-induced

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luminosities’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1989; 68: 123–8.

M. A. Persinger and S. A. Koren, ‘Experiences of spiritual visitation an impregnation: potential induction by frequency-modulated transients from an adjacent clock’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2001; 92 (1): 35–6.
M. A. Persinger et al., ‘Differential entrainment of electroencephalographic activity by weak complex electromagnetic fields’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1997; 84 (2): 527–36.
M. A. Persinger, ‘Increased emergence of alpha activity over the left but not the right temporal lobe within a dark acoustic chamber: Differential response of the left but not the right hemisphere to transcerebral magnetic fields’, International Journal of Psychophysiology, 1999; 34 (2): 163–9.
Interview with Todd Murphy, May 23, 2006.
W. G. Braud and S. P. Dennis, ‘Geophysical Variables and Behavior: LVIII Autonomic activity, hemolysis and biological psychokinesis: Possible relationships with geomagnetic field activity’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1989; 68: 1243–54.
Ibid.
McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 167–8.
M. A. Persinger and S. Krippner, ‘Dream ESP experiments and geomagneti activity’, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1989; 83: 101– 16; S. Krippner and M. Persinger, ‘Evidence for enhanced congruence betwee dreams and distant target material during periods of decreased geomagnetic activity’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1996; 10, (4): 487–93.
M. Ullman et al., Dream Telepathy: Experiments in ESP, Jefferson: McFarland, 1989.
Ibid.
M. A. Persinger, ‘ELF field meditation in spontaneous psi events. Direc information transfer or conditioned elicitation?’ Psychoenergetic Systems, 1975; 3: 155–69; M. A. Persinger, ‘Geophysical Variables and Behavior: XXX. Intens paranormal activities occur during days of quiet global geomagnetic activity’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1985; 61: 320–2.
M. H. Adams, ‘Variability in remote-viewing performance: Possible relationship to the geomagnetic field’, in D. H. Weiner and D. I. Radin (eds.) Research in Parapsychology, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1986: 25. [cf n.19 ch.8]
J. N. Booth et al., ‘Ranking of stimuli that evoked memories in significan others after exposure to circumcerebral magnetic fields: Correlations with ambient geomagnetic activity’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2002; 95(2): 555–8.
M. A. Persinger et al., ‘Differential entrainment of electroencephalographic activity by weak complex electromagnetic fields’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1997; 84 (2): 527–36.
M. A. Persinger, ‘Enhancement of images of possible memories of others during exposure to circumcerebral magnetic fields: Correlations with ambient geomagnetic activity’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2002; 95 (2): 531–43.

S. A. Koren and M. A Persinger, ‘Possible disruption of remote viewing by complex weak magnetic fields around the stimulus site and the possibility of accessing real phase space: A pilot study’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2002; 95 (3 Pt 1): 989–98.
S. Krippner, ‘Possible geomagnetic field effects in psi phenomena.’ Paper presented at international parapsychology conference in Recife, Brazil, November 1997.
Braud and Dennis, ‘Geophysical Variables and Behavior: LVIII’, op. cit.
S. J. P. Spottiswoode, ‘Apparent association between effect size in free response anomalous cognition experiments and local sidereal time’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1997; 11 (2): 109–22.
S. J. P. Spottiswoode and E. May, ‘Evidence that free response anomalous cognitive performance depends upon local sidereal time and geomagnetic fluctuations’, Presentation Abstracts, Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Society fo Scientific Exploration, June 1997: 8.
A. P. Krueger and D. S. Sobel, ‘Air ions and health’, in David S. Sobe ( e d . ) , Wa y s of Health: Holistic Approaches to Ancient and Contemporary Medicine, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.

Chapter 8: The Right Place

William Tiller’s major books on crystallization include: An Introduction to Computer Simulation in Applied Science, New York: Plenum, 1992: The Science of Crystallization: Microscopic Interfacial Phenomena, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991: The Science of Crystallization: Macroscopic Phenomena and Defect Generation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
All personal details about William Tiller have resulted from multiple interviews, April 2005–January 2006.
O. Warburg, New Methods of Cell Physiology Applied to Cancer an Mechanism of X-ray Action, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1962, as quoted in W. Tiller et al., Conscious Acts of Creation: The Emergency of a New Physics, Walnut Creek, Calif.: Pavior Publishing, 2001: 144–6. All description of experiment derived from interview with Dr Tiller, Boulder, Colorado, April 29, 2005, plus information from Conscious Acts and W. Tiller et al., Some Science Adventures with Real Magic, Walnut Creek, Calif.: Pavior Publishing, 2005.
M. J. Kohane, ‘Energy, development and fitness inDrosophila melanogaster’, Proceedings of the Royal Society (B), 1994; 257: 185–91, in Tiller et al., Conscious Acts, op. cit.: 147.
William A. Tiller and Walter E. Dibble, Jr., ‘New experimental data revealing an unexpected dimension to materials science and engineering’, Material Research Innovation, 2001; 5: 21–34.
Tiller and Dibble, ‘New experimental data’, op. cit.
Ibid.
Ibid.

Tiller et al., Conscious Acts, op. cit.: 180.
Tiller et al., Conscious Acts, op. cit.: 175.
Tiller et al., Conscious Acts, op. cit.: 216.
H. Pagels, The Cosmic Code, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.
Tiller et al., Conscious Acts, op. cit.: 216.
Tiller et al., Science Adventures, op. cit.: 34.
Interview with W. Tiller, April 2005.
Tiller et al., Conscious Acts, op. cit.: 182.
Correspondence between Tiller and Michael Kohane, 2005.
Tiller and Dibble, ‘New experimental data’, op. cit.
G. K. Watkins and A. M. Watkins, ‘Possible PK influence on the resuscitation of anesthetized mice’, Journal of Parapsychology, 1971; 35: 257–72;

G. K. Watkins et al., ‘Further studies on the resuscitation of anesthetized mice’, in W.

G. Roll, R. L. Morris and J. Morris (eds.),Research in Parapsychology, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1973: 157–9.

R. Wells and J. Klein, ‘A replication of a “psychic healing” paradigm’,

Journal of Parapsychology, 1972; 36: 144–9.

See McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 205–7.
D. Radin, ‘Beyond belief: Exploring interaction among body and environment’, Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 1992; 2 (3): 1–40; D. Radin, ‘Environmental modulation and statistical equilibrium in mind-matter interaction’, Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 1993; 4 (1): 1–30.
D. Radin et al., ‘Effects of healing intention on cultured cells and truly random events’, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2004; 10: 103–12.
L. P. Semikhina and V. P. Kiselev, ‘Effect of weak magnetic fields on the properties of water and ice’, Zabedenii, Fizika, 1988; 5: 13–17; S. Sasaki et al., ‘Changes of water conductivity induced by non-inductive coil’, Society for Mind- Body Science, 1992; 1: 23; Tiller et al., Conscious Acts, op. cit.: 62.

Chapter 9: Mental Blueprints

All description of Ali’s fighting techniques from N. Mailer, The Fight, London and New York: Penguin, 2000.
Ibid.
A. Richardson, ‘Mental practice: A review and discussion, Part I’, Research Quarterly, 1967; 38: 95–107; A. Richardson, ‘Mental practice: A review and discussion. Part II’, Research Quarterly, 1967; 38: 264–73.
J. Salmon et al., ‘The use of imagery by soccer players’, Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 1994; 6: 116–33.
A. Paivio, Mental Representations: A Dual Coding Approach, New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1986.
B. S. Rushall and L. G. Lippman, ‘The role of imagery in physica performance’, International Journal for Sport Psychology, 1997; 29: 57–72.

A. Paivio, ‘Cognitive and motivational functions of imagery in human performance’, Canadian Journal of Applied Sport Sciences, 1985; 10 (4): 22S–28S.
K. E. Hinshaw, ‘The effects of mental practice on motor skill performance: Critical evaluation and meta-analysis’, Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 1991–2; 11: 3–35.
J. A. Swets and R. A. Bjork, ‘Enhancing human performance: An evaluatio of “New Age” techniques considered by the U. S. Army’, Psychological Science, 1990; 1: 85–96; D. L. Feltz et al., ‘A revised meta-analysis of the mental practice literature on motor skill learning’, in D. Druckman and J. A. Swets (eds.),Enhancing Human Performance: Issues, Theories, and Techniques, Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1988: 274.
R. J. Rotella et al., ‘Cognitions and coping strategies of elite skiers: a exploratory study of young developing athletes’, Journal of Sport Psychology, 1980; 2: 350–4.
R. S. Burhans et al., ‘Mental imagery training: effects on running speed performance’, International Journal of Sport Psychology, 1988; 19: 26–37.
B. S. Rushall, ‘Covert modeling as a procedure for altering an elite athlete’s psychological state’, Sport Psychologist, 1988; 2: 131–40; B. S. Rushall, ‘The restoration of performance capacity by cognitive restructuring and covert positive reinforcement in an elite athlete’, in J. R. Cautela and A. J. Kearney (eds.),Covert Conditioning Casebook. Boston, Mass.: Thomson Brooks/Cole, 1993.
M. Denis, ‘Visual imagery and the use of mental practice in the development of motor skills’, Canadian Journal of Applied Sport Sciences, 1985; 10: 4S–16S.
Paivio, ‘Cognitive and motivational functions of imagery’, op. cit.
J. R. Cautela and A. J. Kearney (eds.),Covert Conditioning Casebook. Boston, Mass.: Thomson Brooks/Cole, 1993: 30–1.
B. Mumford and C. Hall, ‘The effects of internal and external imagery o performing figures in figure skating’, Canadian Journal of Applied Sport Sciences, 1985; 10: 171–7.
K. Barr and C. Hall, ‘The use of imagery by rowers’,International Journal of Sport Psychology, 1992; 23: 243–61.
S. C. Minas, ‘Mental practice of a complex perceptual-motor skill’,Journal of Human Movement Studies, 1978; 4: 102–7.
R. Bleier, Fighting Back, New York: Stein and Day, 1975.
R. L. Wilkes and J. J. Summers, ‘Cognitions, mediating variables an strength performance’, Journal of Sport Psychology, 1984; 6: 351–9.
R. S. Weinberg et al., ‘Effects of visuo-motor behavior rehearsal, relaxation, and imagery on karate performance’, Journal of Sport Psychology, 1981; 3: 228–38.
Cautela and Kearney, Covert Conditioning, op. cit.
J. Pates et al., ‘The effects of hypnosis on flow states and three-poin shooting in basketball players’, The Sport Psychologist, 2002; 16: 34–47; J. Pates and I. Maynard, ‘Effects of hypnosis on flow states and golf performance’

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Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2000; 9: 1057–75.

R. M. Suinn, ‘Imagery rehearsal applications to performance enhancement’

The Behavior Therapist, 1985; 8: 155–9.

L. Baroga, ‘Influence on the sporting result of the concentration of attention process and time taken in the case of weight lifters’, in Proceedings of the 3rd World Congress of the International Society of Sports Psychology, Volume 3. Madrid, Spain: Instituto Nacional de Educacion Fisica Y Deportes, 1973.
A. Fujita, ‘An experimental study on the theoretical basis of mental training’, in Proceedings of the 3rd World Congress of the International Society of Sports Psychology, Volume Abstracts. Madrid, Spain: Instituto Nacional de Educacion Fisica Y Deportes, 1973: 37–8.
Ibid.
Rushall and Lippman, ‘The role of imagery in physical performance’, op

cit.

G. H. Van Gyn et al., ‘Imagery as a method of enhancing transfer from

training to performance’, Journal of Sport and Exercise Science, 1990; 12: 366–75.

G. H. Yue and K. J. Cole, ‘Strength increases from the motor program Comparison of training with maximal voluntary and imagined muscle contractions’, Journal of Neurophysiology, 1992; 67: 114–23; V. K. Ranganathan et al., ‘Increasing muscle strength by training the central nervous system without physical exercise’, Society for Neuroscience Abstracts, 2001; 31: 17; V. K. Ranganathan et al., ‘Level of mental effort determines training-induced strength increases’, Society of Neuroscience Abstracts, 2002; 32: 768; P. Cohen, ‘Mental gymnastics’, New Scientist, November 24, 2001; 172 (2318): 17.
D. Smith et al., ‘The effect of mental practice on muscle strength and EMG activity’, Proceedings of the British Psychological Society annual conference, 1998; 6 (2): 116.
T. X. Barber, ‘Changing “unchangeable” bodily processes by (hypnotic) suggestions: A new look at hypnosis, cognitions, imagining and the mind-body problem’, in A. A. Sheikh (ed.), Imagination and Healing, Farmingdale, NY: Baywood Publishing Co., 1984. Also published in Advances, Spring 1984.
F. M. Luskin et al., ‘A review of mind-body therapies in the treatment of cardiovascular disease, Part 1: Implications for the elderly’, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 1998; 4 (3): 46–61.
F. M. Luskin et al., ‘A review of mind/body therapies in the treatment of musculoskeletal disorders with implications for the elderly’, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine. 2000; 6 (2): 46–56.
V. A. Hadhazy et al., ‘Mind-body therapies for the treatment of fibromyalgia. A systematic review’, Journal of Rheumatology, 2000; 27 (12): 2911–18.
J. A. Astin et al., ‘Mind-body medicine: State of the science: Implications for practice’, Journal of the American Board of Family Practitioners, 2003; 16 (2): 131–47.

J. A. Astin, ‘Mind-body therapies for the management of pain’, Clinical Journal of Pain, 2004; 20 (1): 27–32.
L. S. Eller, ‘Guided imagery interventions for symptom management’

Annual Review of Nursing Research, 1999; 17, 57–84.

J. Achterberg and G. F. Lawlis, Bridges of the Bodymind: Behavioral Approaches for Health Care, Champaign, Ill.: Institute for Personality and Abilit Testing, 1980.
N. E. Miller and L. DiCara, ‘Instrumental learning of heart rate changes i curarized rats: Shaping and specificity to discriminative stimulus’, Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 1967; 63: 12–19; N. E. Miller, ‘Learning of visceral and glandular responses’, Science, 1969; 163: 434–45.
J. V. Basmajian, Muscles Alive: Their Functions Revealed b Electromyography. Baltimore, Md.: Williams and Wilkins, 1967.
E. Green, ‘Feedback technique for deep relaxation’, Psychophysiology, 1969; 6 (3): 371–7; E. Green et al., ‘Self-regulation of internal states’, in J. Ros (ed.), Progress of Cybernetics: Proceedings of the First International Congress of Cybernetics, London, September 1969. London: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1970: 1299–318; E. Green et al., ‘Voluntary control of internal states: Psychological and physiological’, Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 1970; 2: 1–26; D. Satinsky, ‘Biofeedback treatment for headache: A two-year follow-up study’, American Journal of Clinical Biofeedback, 1981; 4 (1): 62–5; B. V. Silver et al., ‘Temperature biofeedback and relaxation training in the treatment of migraine headaches: One-year follow-up’, Biofeedback and Self Regulation, 1979; 4 (4): 359–66.
B. M. Kappes, ‘Sequence effects of relaxation training, EMG, an temperature biofeedback on anxiety, symptom report, and self-concept’, Journal of Clinical Psychology, 1983; 39 (2): 203–8; G. Rose et al., ‘The behavioral treatmen of Raynaud’s disease: A review’, Biofeedback and Self Regulation, 1987; 12 (4): 257–72.
W. T. Tsushima, ‘Treatment of phantom limb pain with EMG and temperature biofeedback: A case study’, American Journal of Clinical Biofeedback, 1982; 5 (2): 150–3.
T. G. Dobie, ‘A comparison of two methods of training resistance to visually-induced motion sickness.’ Paper presented at VII International Man in Spac Symposium: Physiologic adaptation of man in space, Houston, Texas, 1986. Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine, 1987; 58 (9) Sect. 2: 34–41.
A. Ikemi et al., ‘Thermographical analysis of the warmth of the hands during the practice of self-regulation method’, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 1988; 50 (1): 22–8.
J. L. Claghorn, ‘Directional effects of skin temperature self-regulation o regional cerebral blood flow in normal subjects and migraine patients’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 1981; 138 (9): 1182–7.
M. Davis et al., The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook, 5th edn,

Oakland, Calif.: New Harbinge, 2000: 83–90.

J. K. Lashley et al., ‘An empirical account of temperature biofeedbac applied in groups’, Psychological Reports, 1987; 60 (2): 379–88; S. Fahrion et al., ‘Biobehavioral treatment of essential hypertension: A group outcome study’, Biofeedback and Self Regulation, 1986; 11 (4): 257–77.
J. Panksepp, ‘The anatomy of emotions’, in R. Plutchik (ed.),Emotion: Theory, Research and Experience Vol. III. Biological Foundations of Emotions, New York: Academic Press, 1986: 91–124.
J. Panksepp, ‘The neurobiology of emotions: Of animal brains and huma feelings’, in T. Manstead and H. Wagner (eds.), Handbook of Psychophysiology, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1989: 5–26.
C. D. Clemente et al., ‘Postreinforcement EEG synchronization durin alimentary behavior’, Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 1964; 16: 335–65; M. H. Chase et al., ‘Afferent vagal stimulation: Neurographi correlates of induced EEG synchronization and desynchronization’, Brain Research, 1967; 5: 236–49.
M. B. Sterman, ‘Neurophysiological and clinical studies of sensorimoto EEG biofeedback training: Some effects on epilepsy’, Seminars in Psychiatry, 1973;

5 (4): 507–25; M. B. Sterman, ‘Neurophysiological and clinical studies o sensorimotor EEG biofeedback training: Some effects on epilepsy’, in L. Birk (ed.) Biofeedback: Behavioral Medicine. New York: Grune and Stratton, 1973: 147–65;

M. B. Sterman, ‘Epilepsy and its treatment with EEG feedback therapy’,Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 1986; 8: 21–5; M. B. Sterman, ‘The challenge of EEG biofeedback in the treatment of epilepsy: A view from the trenches’, Biofeedback, 1997; 25 (1): 6–7; M. B. Sterman, ‘Basic concepts and clinical findings in the treatment of seizure disorders with EEG operant conditioning’, Clinical Electroencephalography, 2000; 31 (1): 45–55.

E. Peniston and P. J. Kulkosky, ‘Alpha-theta brainwave training and beta- endorphin levels in alcoholics’, Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 1989; 13: 271–9; E. Peniston and P. J. Kulkosky, ‘Alcoholic personality and alpha- theta brainwave training’, Medical Psychotherapy, 1990; 3: 37–55.
J. Kamiya, ‘Operant control of the EEG alpha rhythm’, in C. Tart (ed.) Altered States of Consciousness, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1969, J. Kamiya ‘Conscious control of brain waves’, Psychology Today, April 1968: 7.
N. E. Schoenberger et al., ‘Flexyx neurotherapy system in the treatment o traumatic brain injury: An initial evaluation’, Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation, 2001; 16 (3): 260–74.
C. B. Kidd, ‘Congenital ichthyosiform erythroderma treated by hypnosis’ British Journal of Dermatology, 1966; 78: 101–5, as cited in Barber, ‘Changing “unchangeable” bodily processes’, op. cit.
H. Bennett, ‘Behavioral anesthesia’, Advances, 1985; 2 (4): 11–21, as reported in H. Dienstfrey, ‘Mind and mindlessness in mind-body research’, in M Schlitz et al., Consciousness and Healing: Integral Approaches to Mind-Bod

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Healing, St Louis, Mo.: Elsevier Churchill Livingstone, 2005: 56.

H. Dienstfrey, ‘Mind and mindlessnes’, op cit.: 51–60.
Dr Angel Escudero was featured on the BBC’sYour Life in Their Hands series, May 1991. In the film, Escudero made incisions, sawed, drilled and hammered in order to break and reset the deformed leg of his fully conscious patient using his ‘Noesitherapy’ technique of pain control.
S. M. Kosslyn et al., ‘Hypnotic visual illusion alters color processing in the brain’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 2000; 157: 1279–84; Mark Henderson, ‘Hypnosis really does turn black into white’, The Times, 18 February 2002.
S. H. Simpson et al., ‘A meta-analysis of the association between adherence to drug therapy and mortality’, British Medical Journal, 2006; 333: 15–19.
Raúl de la Fuente-Fernández et al., ‘Expectation and dopamine release Mechanism of the placebo effect in Parkinson’s disease’, Science, 2001; 293 (5532): 1164–6.
J. B. Moseley et al., ‘A controlled trial of arthroscopic surgery for osteoarthritis of the knee’, New England Journal of Medicine, 2002; 347: 81–8.
S. Krippner, ‘Stigmatic phenomenon: An alleged case in Brazil’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2002; 16 (2): 207–24.
L. F. Early and J. E. Kifschutz, ‘A case of stigmata’,Archives of General Psychiatry, 1974; 30: 197–200.
T. Harrison, Stigmatia: A Medieval Mystery in a Modern Age, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994, as referenced in S. Krippner, ‘Stigmatic phenomenon’, op cit.
B. O’Regan and Caryle Hirshberg,Spontaneous Remission: An Annotated Bibliography, Petaluma, Calif.: Institute of Noetic Sciences, 1993.
Ibid.
L. L. LeShan and M. L. Gassmann, ‘Some observations on psychotherap with patients with neoplastic disease’, American Journal of Psychotherapy, 1958; 12: 723.
D. C. Ban Baalen et al., ‘Psychosocial correlates of “spontaneous regression of cancer’, Humane Medicine, April 1987.
R. T. D. Oliver, ‘Surveillance as a possible option for management of metastic renal cell carcinoma’, Seminars in Urology, 1989; 7: 149–52.
P. C. Raud, ‘Psychospiritual dimensions of extraordinary survival’, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 1989; 29: 59–83.
McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 132.
W. Braud and M. Schlitz, ‘Psychokinetic influence on electrodermal activity’, Journal of Parapsychology, 1983; 47 (2): 95–119.
Interview with William Braud, October, 1999.
Benor, Healing Research, op. cit.
S. M. Roney-Dougal and J. Solfvin, ‘Field study of an enhancement effect o lettuce seeds – Replication study’, Journal of Parapsychology, 2003; 67 (2): 279–

98.

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Dr Larry Dossey calls negative diagnoses ‘medical hexing’, and there is anecdotal evidence that patients often live up to their doctor’s gloomy prognosis, even when there is no physical evidence that they should do so. For a potent example see the story of a leukaemia patient who was thriving until he happened to find out what he had. He was dead within a week once his illness had the label of a potentially terminal illness: L. McTaggart, What Doctors Don’t Tell You, London: HarperCollins, 2005: 343.

Chapter 10: The Voodoo Effect

R. A. Blasband and Gottfried Martin, ‘Biophoton emission in “orgon energy” treated cress seeds, seedlings and Acetabularia’, International Consciousness Research Laborary, ICRL Report No 93.6.
Dossey, Be Careful What You Pray For, op. cit.: 171–2.
Ibid.
Benor, Healing Research, op. cit.: 261.
C. O. Simonton et al., Getting Well Again, New York: Bantam, 1980; B. Siegel, Love, Medicine and Miracles: Lessons Learned about Self-Healing from a Surgeon’s Experience with Exceptional Patients, London: HarperCollins, 1990; A Meares, The Wealth Within: Self-Help Through a System of Relaxing Meditation, Melbourne, Australia: Hill of Content, 1990.
For much of the research detailed in this chapter, I am especially indebted to Larry Dossey and Daniel Benor, who have detailed many of these early studies in their respective books, Dossey’s Be Careful What You Pray For … You Just Migh Get It and Benor’s Healing Research, Spiritual Healing and his outstanding, comprehensive website: www.wholistichealingresearch.com.
Benor, Healing Research, op. cit.: 264.
J. Barry, ‘General and comparative study of the psychokinetic effect on a fungus culture’, Journal of Parapsychology, 1968; 32 (94): 237–43.
W. H. Tedder and M. L. Monty, ‘Exploration of a long-distance PK: A conceptual replication of the influence on a biological system’, in W. G. Roll et al. (eds.), Research in Parapsychology, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1981: 90–3 Also see Dossey, Be Careful What You Pray For, op. cit.: 169; Benor, Healing Research, op. cit.: 268–9.
C. B. Nash, ‘Test of psychokinetic control of bacterial mutation’, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1984; 78: 145–52.
Kmetz’s study was described in W. Braud et al., ‘Experiments with Matthew Manning’, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 1979; 50: 199–
While the study was promising, in his review of it in Healing Research, Benor noted the lack of sufficient detail.
1. Dossey, Be Careful What You Pray For, op. cit.: 175–6.
1. Many researchers of alternative medicine maintain the same concerns about studies of Chinese medicine carried out in China. These concerns don’t disregard the strong anecdotal evidence about the effectiveness of Traditional Chinese Medicine,

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only the scientific method of studies of its effectiveness.

S. Sun and C. Tao, ‘Biological effect of emitted qi with tradescantic paludosa micronuclear technique’, First World Conference for Academic Exchange of Medical Qigong. Beijing, China, 1988: 61E.
1. Ibid.
1. Dossey, Be Careful What You Pray For, op. cit.: 176.
1. D. J. Muehsam et al., ‘Effects of Qigong on cell-free myosi phosphorylation: Preliminary experiments’, Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 1994; 5 (1): 93–108, also reported in Dossey, Be Careful What You Pray For, op. cit.: 177–8.
1. Ibid.
1. Benor, Healing Research, op. cit.: 253.
1. G. Rein, Quantum Biology: Healing with Subtle Energy, Palo Alto, Calif.: Quantum Biology Research Labs, 1992; as reported in Benor,Healing Research, op. cit.: 350–2.
1. B. Grad, ‘The “laying on of hands”: Implications for psychotherapy, gentling and the placebo effect’, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 1967; 61 (4): 286–305.
1. C. B. Nash and C. S. Nash, ‘The effect of paranormally conditioned solutio on yeast fermentation’, Journal of Parapsychology, 1967; 31: 314.
1. Radin, The Conscious Universe, op. cit: 130.
1. An entire chapter is devoted to Jacques Benveniste in McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 59.
1. Description of these results from a telephone conversation with Jacques Benveniste, November 10, 2000.
1. J. M. Rebman et al., ‘Remote influence of the autonomic nervous system b focused intention’, Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 1996; 6: 111–34.
1. W. Braud and M. Schlitz, ‘A method for the objective study of transpersonal imagery’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1989; 3 (1): 43–63; W. Braud et al., ‘Further studies of the bio-PK effect: Feedback, blocking specificity/generality’, i

R. White and J. Solfvin (eds.),Research in Parapsychology, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984: 45–8.

C. Watt et al., ‘Exploring the limits of direct mental influence: Two studies comparing “blocking” and “co-operating” strategies’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1999; 13 (3): 515–35.
- J. Diamond, Your Body Doesn’t Lie, New York: HarperCollins, 1979.
- J. Diamond, Life Energy, New South Wales: Angus & Robertson, 1992: 71.

Chapter 11: Praying for Yesterday

L. Leibovici, ‘Effects of remote, retroactive intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients with blood stream infection: Randomized controlled trial’, British Medical Journal, 2001; 323 (7327): 1450–1.
S. Andreassen et al., ‘Using probabilistic and decision-theoretic methods in

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treatment and prognosis modeling’, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 1999; 15 (2): 121–34.

L. Leibovici, ‘Alternative (complementary) medicine: a cuckoo in the nest o empiricist reed warblers’, British Medical Journal, 1999; 319: 1629–32; Leibovici, ‘Effects of remote, retroactive intercessory prayer’, op. cit.
Letters, BMJ Online, December 22, 2003.
L. Dossey, ‘How healing happens: exploring the nonlocal gap’, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 2002; 8 (2): 12–16, 103–10.
B. Oshansky and L. Dossey, ‘Retroactive prayer: A preposterous hypothesis?’ British Medical Journal, 2003; 327: 20–7.
Letters, ‘Effect of retroactive prayer’, British Medical Journal, 2002; 324: 1037.
Correspondence from Liebovici to author, June 28, 2005.
Interview with Jahn and Dunne, July 2005.
R. G. Jahn et al., ‘Correlations of random binary sequences with pre-stated operator intention: a review of a 12-year program’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1997; 11 (3): 345–67.
D. J. Bierman and J. M. Houtkooper, ‘Exploratory PK tests with programmable high speed random number generator’, European Journal of Parapsychology, 1975; 1 (1): 3–14.
R. Broughton, Parapsychology: The Controversial Science, New York: Ballantine Books, 1991: 175–6.
H. Schmidt and H. Stapp, ‘Study of PK with prerecorded random events an the effects of preobservation’, Journal of Parapsychology, 1993; 57: 351.
E. R. Gruber, ‘Conformance behavior involving animal and human subjects’, European Journal of Parapsychology, 1979; 3 (1): 36–50.
E. R. Gruber, ‘PK effects on pre-recorded group behaviour of livin systems’, European Journal of Parapsychology, 1980; 3 (2): 167–75.
F. W. J. J. Snel and P. C. van der Sijde, ‘The effect of retro-active distance healing on Babeia rodhani (rodent malaria) in rats’, European Journal of Parapsychology, 1990; 8: 123–30.
W. Braud, unpublished study, 1993, as reported in W. Braud, ‘Wellness implications of retroactive intentional influence: exploring an outrageous hypothesis’, Alternatives Therapies in Health and Medicine, 2000; 6 (1): 37–48.
H. Schmidt, ‘Random generators and living systems as targets in retro-PK experiments’, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1997; 912 (1): 1–13.
D. Radin et al., ‘Effects of distant healing intention through time and space: Two exploratory studies’, Proceedings of Presented Papers: The 41st Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada Parapsychological Association, 1998: 143–61.
J. R. Stroop, ‘Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions’,Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1935; 18: 643, as cited in D.I. Radin and E. C. May

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‘Evidence for a retrocausal effect in the human nervous system’, Boundary Institute Technical Report 2000–1.

H. Klintman, ‘Is there a paranormal (precognitive) influence in certain types of perceptual sequences? Part I and II’,European Journal of Parapsychology, 1983; 5: 19–49 and 1984; 5: 125–40, as cited in Radin and May, Boundary Institute Technical Report, op. cit.
Radin and May, Boundary Institute Technical Report, op. cit.
Braud, ‘Wellness implications’, op. cit.
See http://www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/bierman-metaanalysis. html.
Radin and May, Boundary Institute Technical Report, op. cit.
G. A. Mourou and D. Umstadter, ‘Extreme light’, in ‘The Edge of Physics’ Special edition of Scientific American, 2003; 13 (1): 77–83 updated from May 2002 issue.
L. H. Ford and T. A. Roman, ‘Negative energy, wormholes and warp drive’ in ‘The Edge of Physics’. Special edition ofScientific American, 2003; 13 (1): 85–

91 updated from January 2000 issue.

J. A. Wheeler and R. P. Reynman, ‘Interaction with the absorber as the mechanism of radiation’, Reviews of Modern Physics, 1945; 17 (2–3): 157–81; J. A. Wheeler and R. P. Reynman, ‘Classical electrodynamics in terms of direc interparticle action’, Reviews of Modern Physics, 1949; 21: 425–33.
E. H. Walker, ‘The nature of consciousness’, Mathematical BioSciences

1970; 7: 131–78.

H. P. Stapp, ‘Theoretical model of a purported empirical violation of the predictions of quantum theory’, Physical Review A, 1994; 50 (1): 18–22.
Braud, ‘Wellness implications’, op. cit.
L. Grover, ‘Quantum computing’, The Sciences, July/August 1999: 24–30.
M. Brooks, ‘The weirdest link’, New Scientist, March 27, 2004; 181

(2440): 32–5.

D. Bierman, ‘Do PSI-phenomena suggest radical dualism?’ in S. Hammerof et al. (ed.), Toward a Science of Consciousness II, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1998: 709–14.
D. I. Radin, ‘Experiments testing models of mind-matter interaction’

Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2006; 20 (3), 375–401.

Interview with William Braud, October 1999.
W. Braud, ‘Transcending the limits of time’, The Inner Edge: A Resource for Enlightened Business Practice, 1999; 2 (6): 16–18.
R. D. Nelson, ‘The physical basis of intentional healing systems’, Technical Report, PEAR 99001, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research, Princeton, Ne Jersey, January 1999.
Braud, interview with author, October 1999.
D. Bierman ‘Does consciousness collapse the wave packet?’ Mind and Matter, 2003; 1 (1): 45–58.
H Schmidt, ‘Additional effect for PK on pre-recorded targets’,Journal of

Parapsychology, 1985; 49: 229–44; ‘PK tests with and without preobservation by animals’, in L. S. Henkel and J. Palmer (eds.),Research in Parapsychology, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1990: 15–19.

Chapter 12: The Intention Experiment

Interview with Fritz-Albert Popp, March 1, 2006.
F.-A. Popp et al., ‘Further analysis of delayed luminescence of plants’,

Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology B: Biology, 2005, 78: 235–44.

For a full description of Popp’s history, see McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.
International Institute of Biophysics, see www.lifescientists.de.
B. J. Dunne, ‘Co-operator experiments with an REG device’, PEA Technical Note 91005, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research, Princeton, New Jersey, December 1991.
R. D. Nelson et al., ‘FieldREG anomalies in group situations’,Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1996; 10 (1): 111–41; R. D. Nelson et al., ‘FieldREGII Consciousness field effects: replications and explorations’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1998; 12 (3): 425–54.
D. I. Radin, ‘For whom the bell tolls: A question of global consciousness’ Noetic Sciences Review, 2003; 63: 8–13 and 44–5; R. D. Nelson et al., ‘Correlatio of continuous random data with major world events’, Foundations of Physics Letters, 2002; 15 (6): 537–50.
D. I. Radin, ‘Exploring relationships between random physical events and mass human attention: Asking for whom the bell tolls’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2002; 16 (4): 533–47.
R. D. Nelson, ‘Coherent consciousness and reduced randomness Correlations on September 11, 2001’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2002; 16

(4): 549–70.

Ibid.
Bryan J. Williams, ‘Exploratory block analysis of field consciousness effects on global RNGs on September 11, 2001’ (http://noosphere.princeton.edu/williams/GCP911. html).
J. D. Scargle, ‘Commentary: Was there evidence of global consciousness on September 11, 2001?’ Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2002; 16 (4): 571–7.
Nelson et al., ‘Correlation of continuous random data’, op. cit.
M. C. Dillbeck et al., ‘The Transcendental Meditation program and crim rate change in a sample of 48 cities’, Journal of Crime and Justice, 1981; 4: 25–45.
J. Hagelin et al., ‘Effects of group practice of the Transcendental Meditatio program on preventing violent crime in Washington, D. C.: Results of the National Demonstration Project, June–July 1993’,Social Indicators Research, 1999; 47 (2):

153–201.

W. Orme-Johnson et al., ‘International peace project in the Middle East: the effects of the Maharishi technology of the unified field’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 1988; 32: 776–812.

K. L. Cavanaugh et al., ‘Consciousness and the quality of economic life empirical research on the macroeconomic effects of the collective practice of Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi program.’ Paper originally presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Management Society, Chicago, Marc 1989, published in R. G. Greenwood (ed.), Proceedings of the Midwest Management Society, Chicago: Midwest Management Society, 1989: 183–90; K. L Cavanaugh et al., ‘A multiple-input transfer function model of Okun’s misery index: An empirical test of the Maharishi Effect.’ Paper presented at the Annual Meeting o the American Statistical Association, Washington D. C., August 6–10, 1989, an abridged version of the paper appears in Proceedings of the American Statistical Association, Business and Economics Statistics Section, Alexandria, Va.: American Statistical Association, 1989: 565–70; K. L. Cavanaugh and K. D. King ‘Simultaneous transfer function analysis of Okun’s misery index: improvements in the economic quality of life through Maharishi’s Vedic Science and technology of consciousness.’ Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Statistical Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, August 22–25, 1988, an abridged version o the paper appears in Proceedings of the American Statistical Association, Business and Economics Statistics Section, Alexandria, Va.: American Statistical Association, 1988: 491–6; K. L. Cavanaugh, ‘Time series analysis of U.S. an Canadian inflation and unemployment: A test of a field-theoretic hypothesis.’ Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Statistical Association, San Francisco, California, August 17–20, 1987, published in Proceedings of the American Statistical Association, Business andEconomics Statistics Section, Alexandria, Va.: American Statistical Association, 1987: 799–804.
Strong rains fall on fire-ravaged Amazon state, March 31, 1998, Web posted at: 6:46 p.m. EST (2346 GMT), Brasilia, Brazil (CNN) http://twm. co. nz/.
R. Nelson, ‘Wishing for good weather: a natural experiment in group consciousness’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1997; 11 (1): 47–58.
M. Emoto, The Hidden Messages in Water, New York: Atria, 2005.
Interview with Dean Radin, May 3, 2006.
Not her real name. I’ve changed her name at her request. Nevertheless, our meditators were shown her real name and photo.
R. Van Wijk and E. P. Van Wijk, ‘The search for a biosensor as a witness of a human laying on of hands ritual’, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 2003; 9 (2): 48–55.

Chapter 13: The Intention Exercises

See C. T. Tart, ‘Initial application of mindfulness extension exercises in a traditional Buddhist meditation retreat setting, 1995’, unpublished (www. paradigmsys. com/cttart).
R. McCraty et al., ‘The electricity of touch: Detection and measurement o cardiac energy exchange between people’, in K. H. Pribram (ed.), Brain and Values: Is a Biological Science of Values Possible? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum

Associates, 1998: 359–79.

S. Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.
S. Rinpoche, as quoted in J. Stone, Instructor’s Training Manual, Cours Syllabus: Training in Compassionate-Loving Intention, 2003.
H. Dienstfrey, Where the Mind Meets the Body, London: HarperCollins 1991: 39.

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Zeilinger, A., ‘Quantum teleportation’, Scientific American, April 2000: 32–41.

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Useful websites

www.biomindsuperpowers.com: Ingo Swann’s Superpowers of the Human Bio-mind

www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/bierman-metaanalysis. html www.laurentian.ca/Neursci/_people/Persinger. htm www.lifescientists.de: official website of the IIB. www.officeofprayerresearch.org www.spiritualbrain.com www.wholistichealingresearch.com

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The Intention Experiment (full text) by Lynne McTaggart. In HTML for free access. Part 3 of 4.

This is part 3 of 4.

Thus it’s placement in my blog.

Welcome to the world of quantum physics and how all those things about prayer, intention, and spirituality actually does have a scientific foundation that they are based upon.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Right Place

IN 1997, WILLIAM TILLER had been helping a Californian company develop product to eliminate electromagnetic pollution. The product contained a quartz crystal, which was why they had consulted him. Tiller, a physicist and professor emeritus of materials science and engineering at Stanford University, had carved out an influential niche for himself in the science of crystallization; he had written three textbooks on the subject and more than 250 scientific papers.1

The product consisted of a simple black box, about the size of a remote control. Inside its casing were three oscillators of 1–10 megahertz, barely a microwatt’s worth of power when the device was turned on. The box also contained an electrically erasable, programmable, read-only memory (EEPROM) component unconventionally connected in the circuit. It seemed to be able to screen incoming electromagnetic energy, possibly through the quartz oscillators also contained inside the box: quartz was thought to modulate quantum information by rotating the direction of waves.

As Tiller examined the equipment, an outrageous idea struck him. Fascinated by evidence that remote influence worked, Tiller had been carrying out a number of his own experiments and had formulated an entire theory about ‘subtle energy’ in living systems. Perhaps the little box he held in his hand might help him put intention to the supreme test. If thoughts were just another form of energy, what if he attempted to ‘charge’ this simple low-tech machine with a human intention and then use it to try to affect a chemical process? His experiment would rest on the unthinkable assumption that thoughts could be imprisoned in a bit of electronic memory and later ‘released’ to affect the physical world.2

This fanciful idea would lead to a bizarre experimental result, offering convincing evidence that there is such a thing as the right place, as well as the right time, for carrying out intentions.

Tiller borrowed some lab space at the Terman Engineering building at Stanford from one of his tolerant colleagues in civil engineering, and some other space in the biology department, made some adjustments to the commercial device, and began designing his experiments.

He wanted to go for broke, to see if this ‘caged’ intention could affect actual live test subjects. He realized he could not yet try his experiments on human beings, because they presented too many random, uncontrollable variables. But he could experiment on what scientists consider the next best thing to a human being: the fruit fly.

In the laboratory among the experimental animal population, the fruit fly is prom queen. Scientists have considered Drosophila melanogaster a model organism for more than a century, largely because its life cycle is so short. Within six days a fruit fly will completely remodel itself from larval grub to six-legged, winged insect and die just two weeks later.

Tiller had in mind an experiment that would speed up their entire developmental process even further. His Stanford colleague Michael Kohane an expert in fruit flies, had been studying the effects of supplements of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) on his fruit fly specimens. An important cofactor for enzymes, NAD helps in energy metabolism within cells by transporting hydrogen which is essential in setting the fly’s built-in timer for larval development. Energy availability also directly affects an organism’s fitness.3

NAD marshals electrons into the pathway needed to maximize energy production and metabolism; low levels of NAD adversely affect the production of adenosine triphosphate (ATP).

Every cell uses oxygen and glucose to convert ADP (adenine diphosphate) and phosphoric acid into ATP, a molecule that slow-drips energy to power most cellular processes. ADP and ATP are the equivalent of chemical energy storage tanks. Each molecule hoards a tiny supply of energy deep within its phosphorus–oxygen bond. Increasing the supply of NAD will increase the ratio of ATP to ADP, causing the cellular processes to work harder and faster, fast- forwarding larval development.

As the fruit fly develops, the higher the ATP/ADP ratio, the more energy available to the cells, and the fitter the fly. The net effect of NAD is to increase a fruit fly’s overall level of health, from cradle to grave.

Electromagnetic fields can have a profound effect on cellular energy metabolism, particularly the synthesis of ATP. 4 Human thoughts could be construed as a similar form of energy, Tiller reasoned. But could the energy of a thought interact with the transport chain of electrons to stoke up the metabolic fire?

To carry out the protocol he had in mind, Tiller needed a second lab. He set up one near the benefactor who was going to fund the studies in a small facility in Minnesota, just north of Excelsior. There he installed Michael Kohane and Wal Dibble, one of his former graduate students.

One morning in early January 1997, Tiller gathered his four participants, including himself, his wife Jean, and two friends, all highly experienced meditators, around a table. He unwrapped the first black box, placed it in the middle of the table and turned it on.

At the signal, Tiller told them all to enter a deep meditative state. After mentally ‘cleansing’ the environment and the equipment itself, he stood before them, a tall, lanky figure with bright, irreverent eyes and a wispy white beard, and read aloud the intention he had scripted earlier:

Our intention is to synergistically influence (a) the availability of oxygen, protons, and ADP (b) the activity of the available concentration of NAD plus (c the activity of the available enzymes, dehydrogenase and ATP-synthase, in the mitochondria so that the production of ATP in the fruit fly larvae is significantly increased (as much as possible without harming the life function of the larvae) and thus the larval development time significantly reduced relative to that with the control device.

Although the intention boiled down to significantly increasing the ratio of the ATP to ADP, Tiller had purposefully made the intention highly specific, so there would be no possible misunderstanding. He suspected that the more specific the thought, the more likely it was to have an effect, and so was careful, with each experiment, to pinpoint its aims. He had added ‘without harming the life function of the larvae’ because he suspected that if they tried to push things too far, they might well kill the tiny creatures.

The meditators held the intention for 15 minutes, before abruptly releasing it, at Tiller’s signal, then they focused for a final 5 minutes on a closing intention, to mentally ‘seal the intention’ into the device.

Tiller had prepared an identical control box that had not been ‘imprinted’ with intention by wrapping it in aluminium foil and placing it in an electrically grounded Faraday cage, in order to screen out electromagnetic frequencies of all magnitudes.

He wrapped the imprinted black box, or the ‘Intention-Imprinted Electronic Device’, as he now called it, in aluminium foil and placed it in another Faraday cage until ready for shipping. On separate days he shipped each box via FedEx to the Minnesota laboratory, some 1500 miles away. He had been careful to blind the experiment so that neither Dibble nor Kohane would know which device contained the intention and which the control when the two devices arrived.

The Excelsior scientists prepared several groups consisting of eight vials of fruit fly larvae and placed three of the groups of vials inside Faraday cages. They then placed both black boxes inside two of the cages with the vials and turned them on.

Over the next eight months, they carried out experiments on 10,000 larvae and 7000 adult flies, in each instance tracking the ATP/ADP ratio. After compiling their data and mapping it on a graph, Tiller and Kohane discovered not only that that the ratio of ATP to ADP had increased, but also that those larvae exposed to the imprinted devices developed 15 per cent faster than normal.5

Furthermore, once the larvae had reached their adult stages they were healthier than normal, as were their descendants.6 The intention not only had a positive effect on the flies themselves; it also appeared to affect the genealogical line.

By that time, Tiller had tried out other black boxes on a great number of other subjects, choosing his experimental targets with care. He needed tests like that of the fruit fly co-enzyme ratio that would show a genuine, measurable change. He decided on two new targets: the pH of water and the increase in the activity of a liver enzyme called alkaline phosphatase (ALP). He chose the pH test because water pH – th measure of acidity or alkalinity in a solution – remains fairly static and tiny changes of one-hundredth or even one-thousandth of a unit on the pH scale can be measured; a change of a full unit or more on the pH scale would represent an enormous shift that was unlikely to be the result of an incorrect measurement. ALP is another ideal test target because its activity proceeds at an unvarying rate.

In both instances, his meditators imprinted intentions into the black boxes to change the pH of water both up and down by a full pH unit and to increase by a ‘significant factor’ the activity of ALP. Tiller then sent off both imprinted and control boxes to Dibble, who made use of a similar study design as the fly experiment. Both experiments were extraordinarily successful.7

In the water experiments, their intentions managed to change the pH up and down by one unit, and the ALP activity was significantly increased.8

Tiller was in the midst of some of his black-box experiments when he noticed something strange. After three months, the results of his studies began to improve; the more he repeated the experiment, the stronger and quicker the effects.

Tiller decided to try to isolate the aspect of the environment that had changed. He took readings of the air temperature, in and outside the Faraday cages, and discovered that the temperature appeared to be going up and down according to a regular rhythm or oscillation, dipping and climbing at regular intervals. He had first taken the temperature readings with an ordinary mercury thermometer. In case these results had something to do with the instrumentation, he switched to a computerized, low-resolution thermistor-based digital thermometer.

Then he tried a high-resolution thermometer. All three recorded the same readings. When he plotted it, he saw that the temperature change was oscillating at a precise rhythm every 45 minutes or so, varying by some 4°C.9

Tiller then measured the pH of water in the lab and measured its capacity to conduct electricity. He observed the same phenomenon as he had with the temperature: periodic oscillations of at least one-quarter of a unit on the pH scale, and regular dips and peaks in the water’s ability to conduct electricity. Tiller was especially intrigued by the changes in pH. The acid/alkaline balance in any substance is highly sensitive to change; if the pH of a person’s blood shifts up or down by just a half a pH unit, it means that they are dying or already dead.

A pattern was developing: as the temperature of the air rose, the pH fell, and vice versa, in near perfect harmonic rhythm. The water’s electrical conductivity showed a similar harmonic cycle.10 Somehow his lab was beginning to manifest different material properties, almost as if it were a specially charged environment.

The effects also continually increased. No matter which experiment he carried out, the longer the imprinted devices were in the room, the larger the rhythmic fluctuations of the temperature and pH.11

These fluctuations remained unaffected by the opening of doors or windows, the operation of air conditioners or heaters, and even the presence or movement of humans or objects around their immediate vicinity. When he compared graphs of air and water temperature readings, they again mapped in perfect harmony.

Every corner of the room that was measured registered the same result. Each aspect of the physical space appeared to be in some sort of rhythmic, energetic harmony.

By this time, Tiller and his colleagues had set up four labs, each separated from the others by between 35 and 280 metres. Once enough experiments had been carried out, every other site also began to evidence these rhythmic fluctuations.

Tiller had never observed these types of ‘organized’ oscillations in his conventional science labs at Stanford. Indeed, they had never been observed anywhere else before. Just to be sure that this phenomenon was not being caused by the boxes themselves, he and his colleagues carried out three control experiments, in which devices that had not been imprinted with intention were placed in the spaces and turned on. In those cases, all the readings of air and water behaved normally.

Tiller still puzzled over the meaning of the effects, and whether they might be due to some physical disturbance. He wondered whether having two large fans in the room would affect the oscillations in the air and water. Ordinarily, forced air convection from a fan should cause oscillations in temperature to disappear. He placed a desk fan and a floor fan in strategic places near a line of temperature probes. Even when the fans were turned up high enough to scatter pieces of paper, the original temperature oscillations remained.

What exactly was going on? This could be a magnetic effect, Tiller thought. Perhaps he should check out the magnetic field of the water. He placed an ordinary bar magnet under a jar of water for three days, with the north pole of the magnet pointing upwards, and measured the water’s pH.

Then he turned the magnet over so that the south pole faced upwards under the jar for the same period. In normal circumstances, when ordinary water is exposed to this kind of weak magnet, which has a field strength of less than 500 gauss, the pH will be the same, no matter which side of the magnet is exposed to the water.

The world as we know it is magnetically symmetrical. Quantum physicists speak in terms of gauge theory and symmetry to explain the relationships between forces and particles, which include electric and magnetic charge. We are believed to exist in a state of electromagnetic U {1}-gauge symmetry – a rather complicated scenario in which magnetic force is proportional to the gradient of the square of the magnetic field. This boils down to a simple truism: no matter where in a given field you measure the electromagnetic property, you get the same reading. The electromagnetic laws of nature are the same wherever you look.

If you raise the electromagnetic pull in one area, you will find you have changed the electromagnetic pull by the same degree everywhere else. In The Cosmic Code,12 Heinz Pagels likens the universe to an infinite piece of paper, painted grey. If you change the colour to a different shade of grey or ‘change the gauge’, you still don’t change the gauge symmetry, because all the rest of the paper will be changed to the exact same shade of grey, so that it is even impossible to distinguish where exactly you are on the paper. A state of symmetrical magnetism is referred to as a magnetic ‘dipole’.

But the pH of the water in Tiller’s lab was significantly different with one polarity as compared with another, with huge differences of 1–1.5 pH units. Exposing the water to the south pole would send the pH soaring upward, while turning the magnet over to the north pole would cause the pH to decrease.

At two of his experimental sites, the pH of the water, when exposed to the south-pole polarity, continued to change with the passage of time, peaking after about six days. When the water was exposed to the north pole of the magnet, however, the rhythmic changes in pH that he had been recording dwindled away.13

Orthodox science maintains that monopoles only exist in electricity (as a positive or negative charge), but not in magnetism, which creates only dipoles from spinning or orbiting electrical charge.14 Governments around the world have spent billions of dollars looking for magnetic monopoles everywhere on earth, without success.15 Somehow, Tiller had managed to access a magnetic monopole in his crude lab. This phenomenon appeared to be a system-wide effect. In any lab of his exposed to the intention-imprinted black boxes, instruments recorded magnetic monopole type of behaviour.

It dawned on Tiller that he was witnessing the most astonishing result of all: human intention captured in his little black boxes were somehow ‘conditioning’ the spaces where the experiments were carried out.

Tiller wondered whether this phenomenon would still be present if he altered anything about the space. When he removed one element, such as a computer, the oscillations disappeared for about 10 hours before returning. The arrival of any new materials in his lab also caused the effects to disappear for several weeks, although, once again, they eventually returned.

It was as though the space had become an exquisitely tuned configuration, and no disturbance or change would destroy this higher state. Even when Tiller shielded the intention-imprinted devices in aluminium foil and Faraday cages, all the vibrations in water and air temperature continued. One of the sites, a converted barn, recorded oscillating air temperatures on and off for six months; in another site, an office lab, for a full year.16

After the imprinted boxes had been turned on for a while, the effect became relatively ‘permanent’; the target, whether water pH, ALP or fruit flies, would continue to be affected even if the device was not in the lab. Tiller decided to see what would happen when he removed all the elements of the experiment.

He dismantled the Faraday cage and the water vessels and removed them from his lab, then recorded the air temperature of the place where the cages had been.

Even though the experimental vessel was no longer there, his thermometers continued to record periodic oscillations in temperature of 2–3°C. Although this influence decayed very slowly over time, Tiller’s laboratories appeared to have undergone some long-term thermodynamic transformation. The energy from intention appeared to ‘charge’ the environment and create a domino effect of order.17

The only other phenomena Tiller could think of that had similar effects on the environment were those of highly complex chemical reactions. But all he was working with was ordinary air and purified water.

According to the laws of conventional thermodynamics, air and water are supposed to exist in a state extraordinarily close to equilibrium, which is to say that they remain more or less static. These types of results had never been recorded in any lab in the world.

He suspected that he had been witnessing a quantum effect. The constant replaying of ordered thoughts seemed to be changing the physical reality of the room, and making the quantum virtual particles of empty space more ‘ordered’. And then, like a domino effect, the ‘order’ of the space appeared to assist the outcome of the experiment. Carrying out the intentions in one particular space appeared to enhance their effects over time.

Somehow, in these charged spaces he and his colleagues had managed to create a SU {2}-gauge space, where electric and magnetic monopoles coexisted – similar to the reality supposedly present in the supersymmetry states of exotic physics. In these conditioned spaces, the very law about the proportion of magnetic force had altered.

A basic property of physics had completely changed. The only way to get such a polarity effect was to produce some element of SU {2}-gauge symmetry.18

This change in the gauge symmetry of the space meant that profound changes had occurred in the ambient Zero Point Field. In a U {1}-gauge symmetry, the random fluctuations of the Field have no effect on the physical universe. However, in SU {2}-gauge symmetry states, the Field has become more ordered and produces changes in the tiniest elements of matter – which add up to a profound alteration in the very fabric of physical reality.

Tiller felt as though he had somehow entered into a twilight zone of higher energy and that he was witness to a system with an extraordinary ability to self- organize. Indeed, the oscillations he had measured had all the hallmarks of a Bose– Einstein condensate – a higher state of coherence. Up until then, scientists had created a Bose–Einstein condensate only in highly controlled environments and at temperatures approaching absolute zero. But he had managed to create the same effects at room temperature, and from a thought process captured in a rudimentary piece of equipment.

Other scientists have witnessed a similar ‘charging’ of intention space. In one series of meticulous studies, for instance, researcher Graham Watkins and his wife Anita recruited human participants, many known for their psychic ability, and asked them to attempt to mentally influence anaesthetized mice to revive more quickly than usual. The experimental mice were drawn from a batch that had demonstrated similar waking times when placed under anaesthesia; the chosen group were divided in two, with half acting as controls.

In the first batch of studies, the experimental group woke up about 4 seconds earlier than the controls, a result considered only slightly significant. However, in subsequent studies the wake-up times of the experimental mice improved, and continued to do so with every study.

The Watkinses repeated their experiment seven times. They discovered that the healing had a ‘linger effect’; if a mouse were simply placed on the spot on a table where another mouse had received a psychic’s intentions, the second one would also revive more quickly than usual. The space appeared to have developed a healing ‘charge’, affecting anything that happened to occupy that space.19

Biologist Bernard Grad at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, observed similar phenomenon during experiments with Hungarian healer Oscar Estabany: once the Hungarian healer touched something – even simple fabric – it appeared to hold a phantom charge. The material could be used successfully for healing in place of Estabany’s healing hands.20

The idea of ‘conditioned space’ was also explored by former PEAR scientis Dr Roger Nelson at sacred sites. Nelson was intrigued by these sacred spaces and whether their special purpose, or even some inherent quality about the site, had ‘charged’ the space with an energetic resonance that might register on a REG machine. He had run a number of experiments suggesting that a ‘field consciousness’ in a highly charged atmosphere, such as an intense gathering, affected the machines and made them more ‘ordered’.

He carried around a portable REG, to register an changes in the randomness in the ambient field at various sites: Wounded Knee, the site of the massacre of an entire Sioux tribe; Devil’s Tower in Wyoming; the Queen’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Nelson registered highly significant evidenc of increased order on REGs at some sites, as if the location itself contained a lingering vortex of coherent energy, from all the people who had prayed or died there.21

Dean Radin used REGs to investigate whether healing can condition the plac where it is carried out. He placed three REGs near a culture of human brain cells then asked a group of healers to send intentions for the culture to grow more quickly, and to engage in traditional space-conditioning meditations.

Any deviation from the random activity of the REGs would indicate the probable presence of greater coherence. Radin also prepared a control batch of cells, which were not to be sent intention.

After three days, there was no overall difference in the growth between the treated cells and the controls. Nevertheless, as the experiment progressed, the treated cells began to grow faster.

On the third day, all three of the REGs began moving away from random activity and became more ordered. The intention of the healers also appeared to have effects on background ionizing radiation.22

Like Nelson’s readings at sacred sites, Radin’s experiment offers tantalizing hints about the nature of the ‘linger’ effect of intention. The REGs’ registering o movement away from randomness to greater order implies that the Zero Point energy of empty space has shifted into a state of greater coherence.

The ‘charge’ of intention may have a domino effect on its environment, causing greater quantum order in empty space, which would enhance the effectiveness of its aim.23 Russian scientists have observed a similar phenomenon in water, which retains a memory of applied electromagnetic fields for hours, even days.24

The effect is like that of a laser; when waves of the ambient Field become more ordered, an intention may ripple through it like one powerful, highly targeted bolt of light.

With magnetic monopoles, Tiller was out on a ledge shared by few of his colleagues, even in consciousness research. His studies needed to be replicated by other, independent laboratories. But if his body of work does stand up over time, it will demonstrate the extent to which the energy of human thought can alter its environment.

The ordering process of intention appears to carry on, perpetuating, possibly even intensifying its charge.

The strange, almost unbelievable events occurring during Tiller’s experiments made me wonder whether setting aside a particular room for carrying out intention might be an important consideration. Perhaps we each need our own ‘temple’ to which we return, if only in our mind’s eye, every time we send a directed thought.

Chapter 8: The Right Place

William Tiller’s major books on crystallization include: An Introduction to Computer Simulation in Applied Science, New York: Plenum, 1992: The Science of Crystallization: Microscopic Interfacial Phenomena, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991: The Science of Crystallization: Macroscopic Phenomena and Defect Generation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
All personal details about William Tiller have resulted from multiple interviews, April 2005–January 2006.
O. Warburg, New Methods of Cell Physiology Applied to Cancer an Mechanism of Xray Action, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1962, as quoted in W. Tiller et al., Conscious Acts of Creation: The Emergency of a New Physics, Walnut Creek, Calif.: Pavior Publishing, 2001: 144–6. All description of experiment derived from interview with Dr Tiller, Boulder, Colorado, April 29, 2005, plus information from Conscious Acts and W. Tiller et al., Some Science Adventures with Real Magic, Walnut Creek, Calif.: Pavior Publishing, 2005.
M. J. Kohane, ‘Energy, development and fitness inDrosophila melanogaster’, Proceedings of the Royal Society (B), 1994; 257: 185–91, in Tiller et al., Conscious Acts, op. cit.: 147.
William A. Tiller and Walter E. Dibble, Jr., ‘New experimental data revealing an unexpected dimension to materials science and engineering’, Material Research Innovation, 2001; 5: 21–34.
Tiller and Dibble, ‘New experimental data’, op. cit.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Tiller et al., Conscious Acts, op. cit.: 180.
Tiller et al., Conscious Acts, op. cit.: 175.
Tiller et al., Conscious Acts, op. cit.: 216.
H. Pagels, The Cosmic Code, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982.
Tiller et al., Conscious Acts, op. cit.: 216.
Tiller et al., Science Adventures, op. cit.: 34.
Interview with W. Tiller, April 2005.
Tiller et al., Conscious Acts, op. cit.: 182.
Correspondence between Tiller and Michael Kohane, 2005.
Tiller and Dibble, ‘New experimental data’, op. cit.
G. K. Watkins and A. M. Watkins, ‘Possible PK influence on the resuscitation of anesthetized mice’, Journal of Parapsychology, 1971; 35: 257–72; G. K. Watkins et al., ‘Further studies on the resuscitation of anesthetized mice’, in W. G. Roll, R. L. Morris and J. Morris (eds.) Research in Parapsychology, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1973: 157–9.
R. Wells and J. Klein, ‘A replication of a “psychic healing” paradigm’, Journal of Parapsychology, 1972; 36: 144–9.
See McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 205–7.
D. Radin, ‘Beyond belief: Exploring interaction among body and environment’, Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 1992; 2 (3): 1–40; D. Radin, ‘Environmental modulation and statistical equilibrium in mind-matter interaction’, Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 1993; 4 (1): 1–30.
D. Radin et al., ‘Effects of healing intention on cultured cells and truly random events’, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2004; 10: 103–12. Notes 301
L. P. Semikhina and V. P. Kiselev, ‘Effect of weak magnetic fields on the properties of water and ice’, Zabedenii, Fizika, 1988; 5: 13–17; S. Sasaki et al., ‘Changes of water conductivity induced by non-inductive coil’, Society for Mind-Body Science, 1992; 1: 23; Tiller et al., Conscious Acts, op. cit.: 62.

PART THREE

The Power of Your Thoughts

Baseball is 90 per cent mental. The other half is physical.
-Yogi Berra

CHAPTER NINE

Mental Blueprints

SEVEN WEEKS BEFORE MUHAMMAD ALI met World Heavywei Champion George Foreman for their ‘rumble in the jungle’ at Kinshasa in 1974, he practised his punches as if he couldn’t care less, taking a few desultory swipes at his sparring partner as if distractedly popping a speed bag. Mostly he would lie against the ropes and allow his opponent to pound away at him from every angle.

In the latter years of his fighting career, Ali spent much of his training time learning how to take punches. He studied how to shift his head by just a hair a microsecond before the connection was made, or where in his body he could mentally deflect the punch, so that it would no longer hurt. He was not training his body to win. He was training his mind not to lose, at the point when deep fatigue sets in around the twelfth round and most boxers cave in.1 The most important work was being done, not in the ring, but in his armchair. He was fighting the fight in his head.

Ali was a master of intention. He developed a set of mental skills that eventually altered his performance in the ring. Before a fight, Ali used every self- motivational technique out there: affirmation; visualization; mental rehearsal; self- confirmation; and perhaps the most powerful epigram of personal worth ever uttered: ‘I am the greatest’. Ali also made public statements of his intentions. His constant barrage of rhyming couplets and quatrains, seemingly so innocuous, were highly specific intentions in disguise:

Archie Moore
Is sure
To hug the floor 
By the end of four
Now Clay swings with a right 
What a beautiful swing
And the punch knocks the Bear Clear out of the ring.

Before a fight, Ali repeated these little rhymes like a mantra – to the press, to his opponent, and even in the ring – until he himself accepted them as fact.

When they met in Kinshasa, Foreman was seven years younger than Ali and among the most savage fighters in the ring. Just two months earlier, he had left Ken Norton for dead with five blows to the head after only two rounds.

Nevertheless, in the weeks before the fight, when reporters pressed Ali about the two-to-one odds against him, Ali had rewritten the history of the Norton–Foreman fight, which he repeated, virtually verbatim, to every journalist who interviewed him. ‘He’s got a hard-push punch but he can’t hit,’ he would say, punching the air in front of the reporter’s nose. ‘Foreman just pushes people down. He just got slow punches, take a year to get there. You think that’s going to bother me? This is going to

be the greatest upset in the history of boxing.’2

Ali’s intention came to pass in the jungle. He also made masterful use of intention to beat Joe Frazier in the Philippines later that year, in perhaps the most brutal and stunning display of boxing of all time.

This time, he created a voodoo doll. Ali turned his ferocious opponent into a tiny rubber gorilla, which he carried around with him in his top pocket, taking a swipe at it with his right from time to time for the television cameras: ‘It’s gonna be a thrilla and a chilla and a killa when I get the gorilla in Manila.’ By the time Frazier entered the ring, he had been reduced in his own mind to something less than human.

Besides these verbalized intentions, Ali carried out mental intentions by rehearsing every moment of the fight in his head: the fatigue in his legs, the sweat pouring off his body, the pain to his kidneys and bruises on his face, the flash of the photographers, the exultant screams of the crowd, even the moment when the referee lifts his arm in victory against Frazier. He sent an intention to his body to win and his body responded by following orders.

To take intention out of the laboratory, I began to sift through the data from people or groups who were using intention successfully in real life. I wanted to study their techniques, the particular thought processes they underwent when sending intention, and would try to extrapolate from their experiences some tools that all the rest of us could use when sending intention. I was also curious about the extent of their mental reach – just how far people had been able to push their intentions.

The most instructive examples came from sports, not only from the greatest athlete of all time, but also from other elite sportsmen and women. Athletes of all varieties now routinely practise what is variously termed ‘mental rehearsals’, ‘implicit practice’3 or even ‘covert rehearsal’. Focused intention is now deemed essential to alter and improve performance. Swimmers, skaters, weightlifters and football players employ intention to enhance their level of performance and consistency. It is even being used in leisure sports, such as golf and rock climbing.

Any modern coach of a competitive sport routinely offers training in some form of mental rehearsal, and often it is touted as the decisive element separating the elite sportsperson from the second-division player.

National-level soccer players, for instance, are more likely to use imagery than those who remain at the provincial or local levels.4

Virtually all Canadian Olympic athletes use mental imagery.

Psychologist Allan Paivio, professor emeritus of the University of Western Ontario, first proposed that the brain uses ‘dual coding’ to process verbal and non- verbal information simultaneously.5

Mental practice has been shown to work just as well as physical practice for patterns and timing.6

Paivio’s model has been largely adapted to help athletes with motivation or in learning or improving a certain skill set.7

The techniques involved in mental rehearsal have been exhaustively studied and written about in scientific literature and popular publications,8 and their credibility was given a further boost in 1990, when the National Academy of Sciences examined all the scientific studies to date on these methods and declared them effective.9

Athletic mental rehearsal has been incorrectly considered synonymous with

visualization. ‘Visualization’ implies that you observe yourself in the situation, as if watching a mental video featuring yourself or seeing yourself through another pair of eyes. Although this may be useful in other areas of life, visualizing oneself from an external perspective in a sports event can hamper athletic performance. Mental rehearsal also differs from positive thinking; happy thoughts on their own do not work in competitive sports.10

The most successful internal rehearsal involves imagining the sports event from the athlete’s perspective as though he or she is actually competing. It amounts to a mental trial run – Ali imagining his right fist at the moment of impact on Frazier’s left eye.

The athlete envisages the future in minute detail as it is unfolding. Champion athletes forecast and rehearse every aspect of the situation, and the steps they should take to overcome any possible setbacks.

Tracy Caulkin used intention to land a third gold medal in the 1984 Olympics. Caulkin had already broken 5 world records and 63 American records, and at the age of 23 was considered the best American swimmer who had ever lived. All she needed to complete her trophy wall was a few Olympic golds.

At the time, electronic touchpads had just replaced stopwatches. Whereas the watch could only distinguish differences of hundredths of a second, the new electronic technology could distinguish the winning lead within a thousandth of a second – 400 times faster than the blink of an eye. In the Olympics relay swimmers are given two-hundredths of a second of grace to leave their block before their previous team mate hits the touchpad. This kind of fine timing is critical; even a single coat of paint on one side of the pool can make a swimmer’s lane one- thousandth of a second longer to swim and give another swimmer the leading edge.

During the four-woman 400-metre relay race, Tracy took the lead by diving in one-hundredth of a second before her returning team mate hit the touchpad.

Although all her competitors had a similar level of fitness, Caulkin had one enormous advantage. She already knew every moment of her swim, from the dive and the cool rush of water past her head to the very moment when she would lunge out in front.

Tracy had practiced that hair’s width lead, the precise moment when she would leave the block a hundredth of a second earlier than her opponents, every night inside her head. The conclusion of the Olympic relay had entirely depended upon the specificity of her intention.

The most successful athletes break down their performances into tiny component parts and work on improving specific aspects. For general mastery of their sport, they imagine a flawless performance.11 They concentrate on the most difficult moments and work out good coping strategies – how to stay in control in the face of adversity, such as a pulled muscle or an umpire’s adverse call.

Different intention is employed, depending on whether they are first learning a skill or simply wishing to reinforce and improve their technique. Like Muhammad Ali, elite athletes learn how to block out images representing doubt. If an image of difficulty pops into their heads, they become extremely adept at changing the internal movie, quickly editing the scene to imagine success.12

Winning depends on how specifically you can mentally rehearse. Seasoned athletes use vivid, highly detailed internal images and run-throughs of the entire performance.13

The most important aspect of the intention is to rehearse the victory, which appears to help secure it. Successful competitors rehearse their own feelings, particularly their elation and emotional response to winning: the reactions of their parents, the medals, the post-match celebration and the residual rewards like sponsorships.14

They imagine that the crowd is cheering for their performance alone.

Experienced athletes engage all their senses in their mental rehearsal. They not only have a visual, internal image of the future event, they also hear it, feel it, smell it and taste it – the ambience, the competitors, the sweat of their bodies, the applause.

Of all the sensations, the most vital for athletes appears to be mentally rehearsing the ‘feel’, or kinaesthetic sensations in their bodies.15

The more experienced the athletes, the better they are at imagining the feel of their bodies when engaged in their sport.16

Champion rowers are most successful when they can forecast the ‘feel’ of every part of the race, from the drag on the oar to the strain on their muscles.17

Some athletes find that it helps to study the actual setting where the sporting event is to take place first and then to imagine themselves there. Those who can combine the knowledge of the sports venue with mental rehearsal tend to be more successful than those who simply use mental rehearsal on its own.18

Rocky Bleier, former running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers, used intention to help the Steelers win the Super Bowl. His technique was to saturate his mind wit the details of specific plays. He carried out mental rehearsals in the morning, before the team meal and last thing before drifting off to sleep every day of the two weeks before a game.

He also found it reassuring to run through the entire catalogue of moves one final time just before play. While sitting on the bench, he again rehearsed some 30 runs and 30 passes. No matter what the field threw up to him that day, he was determined to be ready.19

Techniques differ among the various sports. Those mental rehearsals that work best for sports requiring aerobic ability and fast, coordinated movement tended to fail with strength training. Weight lifters are most successful after carrying out a mental intention that galvanizes them to lift an impossibly heavy object.20

Conventional wisdom has it that the best state for performance is a state of relaxation, but as I found with masters of intention, a relaxed state is not necessarily optimum. In a study of karate, using relaxation techniques before carrying out the intentions did not improve performance.21

It was only useful if the participant was nervous and needed to be calmed down in order to perform better.22

Relaxation and hypnosis used with intention have worked to improve aim – say, for basketball shots or accuracy in chipping in golf.23

But as with Davidson’s Buddhists, the most successful athletes manage to work themselves into peak intensity – a state of calm hyperawareness.

But how can simply thinking about a future performance actually affect the day of the event? Some clues come from intriguing brain research with electromyography (EMG). EMG offers a real-time snapshot of the brain’s instructions to the body when and where it tells it to move – by recording every electrical impulse sent from motor neurons to specific muscles to cause a contraction. Ordinarily, EMG offers doctors a useful tool to diagnose neuromuscular disease and to test whether muscles respond appropriately to stimulation.

But EMG has also been employed to solve an interesting scientific conundrum whether the brain differentiates between a thought and an action. Does the thought of an action create the same pattern in neurotransmission as the action itself? This very question was tested by wiring a group of skiers to EMG equipment while they were carrying out mental rehearsals.

As the skiers mentally rehearsed the downhill runs, the electrical impulses heading to their muscles were just the same as those they used to make turns and jumps actually skiing the run.24 The brain sent the same instructions to the body, whether the skiers were simply thinking of a particular movement or actually carrying it out. Thought produced the same mental instructions as action.

Research with EEGs has shown that the electrical activity produced by the brain is identical, whether we are thinking about doing something or actually doing it. In weightlifters, for instance, EEG patterns in the brain that would be activated to produce the actual motor skills are activated while the skill is simply being simulated mentally.25 Just the thought is enough to produce the neural instructions to carry out the physical act.

Based on this research, scientists have posited some interesting theories of how mental rehearsal works. One school of thought proposes that mental rehearsal creates the neural patterns necessary for the real thing. As though the brain were simply another muscle, these rehearsals train the brain to facilitate the moves more easily during the actual performance.26

When an athlete performs, the nerves that signal to the muscles along a particular pathway are stimulated and the chemicals that have been produced remain there for a short period. Any future stimulation along the same pathways is made easier by the residual effects of the earlier connections. We get better at physical tasks because our signalling from intention to action has already been forged. It is not unlike a train track laid down through wild, inhospitable country. Future performances improve because your brain already knows the route and follows the track already laid down. Because the brain does not distinguish between doing something specific and just thinking about doing it, mental rehearsal lays down the tracks just as well as physical practice does. The nerves and muscles create a pathway just as sound as one produced through repeated practice.

Nevertheless, there are a few important differences between mental and physical practice. With physical practice, when you practise too much, you become fatigued, which causes electrical interference and blockage along the tracks. With mental intention, no road blocks ever appear, no matter how much you practise in your head.

The other difference concerns the size of the effect; the neuromuscular pattern laid down with mental practice may be slightly smaller than that of physical practice. Although both types of practice create the same muscle patterns, the imagined performances have smaller magnitude.27

To derive any benefit, mental rehearsal must replicate the real thing – at normal speed. Although it might seem logical that a rehearsal would work best in slow motion, with particular attention to specific moves, that is not borne out by research.

When skiers monitored by EMGs imagined their performance in slow motion, they produced a different muscle response pattern from that produced when carrying out the skill at an ordinary pace. In fact, the brain–muscle activity of rehearsing at slow motion is identical to the brain–muscle pattern when the skiing itself is carried out in slow motion.

This accords with what scientists understand about the neural patterns involved in slow motion, compared with those of normal speed. The same task carried out in slow motion produces completely different neuromuscular patterning than when it is done at normal speed.28

There is no such thing as cross-training in mental rehearsal; intention facilitates just the type of athletic event that is being mentally rehearsed and is not transferable to other sports, even those involving similar muscle groups.

This was apparent in a fascinating study involving sprinters. The researchers had divided a group of runners into four groups and asked them to do one of four types of preparation: to imagine themselves in a 40-metre sprint; to engage in power training on a stationary bicycle; to combine imagery and power training; or, as the controls, to do no training in any form.

After six weeks of training the athletes were asked to perform two tests – to cycle their hardest while their effort was recorded on a cycle ergometer, which tests for cycling power, and to run a 40-metre sprint. Both activities require much the same motor ability and leg muscles.

In the cycling test, those groups who had used power training alone showed improvement. However, when it came to the sprint, only the groups who had mentally practised sprinting had significantly improved. Specific imagery enhanced only the specific task that had been imagined. It did not simply build muscles generally. The motor neuron training was highly specific, and only affected the actual performance visualized in the mind.29

Beside improving performance, mental intention can produce actual physiological changes, and not only in athletes’ bodies. Guang Yue, an exercise psychologist at Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio, carried out research comparing participants who went to the gym with those who carried out a virtual workout in their heads.

Those who regularly visited the gym were able to increase their muscle strength by 30 per cent. But even those who remained in their armchairs and ran through a mental rehearsal of the weight training in their minds increased muscle power by almost half as much.

Volunteers between 20 and 35 years old imagined flexing one of their biceps as hard as they could during daily training sessions carried out five times a week. After ensuring that the participants were not doing any actual exercise, including tensing their muscles, the researchers discovered an astonishing 13.5 per cent increase in muscle size and strength after just a few weeks, an advantage that remained for three months after the mental training stopped.30

In 1997, Dr David Smith at Chester College came up with similar results participants who worked out could achieve 30 per cent increases in strength, while those who just imagined themselves doing the training achieved a 16 per cent increase.31

Pure directed thought can give you the burn almost as well as any workout.

Thinking of changing an aspect of the body in other ways can also work – which might prove comforting to anyone who is not happy with his or her body shape.

One study demonstrated that, under hypnosis, women increased the dimensions of their breasts simply by visualizing themselves on the beach with the sun’s rays warming their chests.32

The kinds of vivid visualization techniques used by athletes are also highly effective in treating illness. Patients have boosted treatment of an array of acute and chronic conditions, from coronary artery disease33 and high blood pressure to low- back pain and musculoskeletal diseases,34 including fibromyalgia,35 by using mental pictures or metaphoric representations of their bodies fighting the illness. Visualization has also improved postsurgical outcomes,36 helped with pain management37 and minimized the side-effects of chemotherapy.38

Indeed, the outcome of a patient’s illness has been predicted by examining the types of visualizations used to combat them. Psychologist Jeanne Achterberg, who healed herself of a rare cancer of the eye through imagery, went on to study a group of cancer patients who were using visualization to fight their own disease. She predicted with 93 per cent accuracy which patients would completely recover and which would get worse or die, simply by examining their visualizations and rating them. Those who were successful had a greater ability to visualize vividly, with powerful imagery and symbols, and could hold a clear visual intention imagining themselves overpowering the cancer and the medical treatment being effective. The successful patients also practiced their visualizations regularly.39

If the brain cannot distinguish between a thought and an action, would the body follow mental instructions of any sort? If I send my body a mental intention to calm down or speed up, will it necessarily listen to me?

Literature about biofeedback and mind–body medicine indicates that it will. In 1961, Neal Miller, a behavioural neuroscientist at Yale University, first proposed that people can be taught to mentally influence their autonomic nervous system and control mechanisms such as blood pressure and bowel movements, much as a child learns to ride a bicycle.

He conducted a series of remarkable conditioning-and-reward experiments on rats. Miller discovered that, if he stimulated the pleasure centre in the brain, his rats could be trained to decrease their heart rate at will, control the rate at which urine filled their kidneys, even create different dilations in the blood vessels of each ear.40 If relatively simple animals like rats could achieve this remarkable level of internal control, Miller figured, couldn’t human beings, with their greater intelligence, regulate more bodily processes?

After these early revelations, many scientists found that information about the autonomic nervous system could be fed back to a person as ‘biofeedback’ to pinpoint where a person should send intention to his body. In the 1960s, John Basmajian, a professor of medicine at McMaster University in Ontario and a specialist i rehabilitative science, began training people with spinal-cord injuries to use EMG feedback to regain control over single cells in their spinal cords.41

At roughly the same time, psychologist Elmer Green at the Menninger Institute pioneered a method of biofeedback to treat migraine, after discovering that a migraine patient of his could make her headaches go away whenever she practiced a structured form of relaxation. Green went on to use biofeedback to help patients cure their own migraines, and it is now an accepted form of therapy.42

Biofeedback is particularly useful to treat Raynaud’s disease, a vascular condition in which blood vessels are constricted when exposed to cold, causing extremities to grow cold, pale, and even blue.43

During a biofeedback treatment, a patient is hooked up to a computer. Transducers applied to different parts of his or her body send information to a visual display, which registers activities of the autonomic nervous system, such as brain waves, blood pressure and heart rate, or muscle contractions.

The audio or visual information fed back to the patient depends on the condition; in the case of Raynaud’s, as soon as the arteries to the hands constrict, the machines record a drop in skin temperature, a light bulb flashes or a beeper sounds. The feedback prompts the patient to send an intention to his body to adjust the process in question – in the case of Raynaud’s, the patient sends an intention to warm up his hands.

Since those early days, biofeedback has become well established as a therapy for virtually every chronic condition, from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to menopausal hot flushes. Stroke patients and victims of spinal-cor injuries now use biofeedback to rehabilitate or regain the use of paralysed muscles. It has proved invaluable in eliminating the pain felt in a phantom limb.44 Astronauts have even used biofeedback to cure motion sickness while journeying to outer space.45

The more conventional view of biofeedback maintains that it has something to do with relaxation – learning to calm down the fight-or-flight responses of our autonomic nervous systems. However, the sheer breadth of control would argue that the mechanism has more to do with the power of intention. Virtually every bodily process measurable on a machine – even a single nerve cell controlling a muscle fibre – appears to be within an individual’s control. Volunteers in studies have achieved total mental mastery over the temperature in their bodies,46 or even the direction of blood flow to the brain.47

Like biofeedback, Autogenic Training, the technique developed by a German psychiatrist named Johannes Schultz to relax the body and slow the breathing and heart rate, also demonstrates that a wide variety of the body’s functions are under our conscious control. Those who practise the technique are able to lower blood pressure, raise temperature in extremities, and slow heartbeat and breathing. Autogenic Training has also been used to treat many chronic conditions besides stress, such as asthma, gastritis and ulcers, high blood pressure and thyroid problems.48 There is even evidence that Autogenic Training can work effectively in groups.49

For a cat, nirvana is the food bowl just around the corner.

Dr Jaak Panksepp professor emeritus of psychology at Bowling Green University, theorizes that this anticipatory joy has to do with the ‘seeking’ mode of the brain – one of the five primitive emotions that humans share with members of the animal kingdom.50

The seeking system helps animals investigate and work out the meaning of their environment. The seeking circuits are fully engaged when an animal is involved in high anticipation, intense interest or insatiable curiosity. As Panksepp was astonished to discover, the most emotionally arresting part for any animal is the hunt, not the catch.51

When animals are curious, the hypothalamus lights up and the ‘feel-good’ neurotransmitter dopamine is produced. Scientists used to believe that the chemical itself caused the pleasure, until it was discovered that the chemical’s true purpose is to arouse a certain neural pathway. What actually feels good is the activation of the seeking portion of the brain.

Forty years ago, Barry Sterman, professor emeritus of the departments o Neurobiology and Biobehavioral Psychiatry at UCLA, accidentally discovered that this anticipatory emotion sent cats into a meditative state; their brains slowed to an EEG rhythm of 8–13 hertz, corresponding to human alpha brain frequencies, moments before they got their reward.52

Eventually, he was able to get the cats to re-create this state at will, not simply when they were awaiting food. It was tantamount to the animals being able to control their own brain waves.

But could a human being do the same?

To test this, Sterman needed to test someone whose brain waves were so out of the ordinary that any change would be apparent immediately. He located a woman troubled by periodic epileptic seizures, which are caused by the brain firing theta brain waves at inappropriate moments. Sterman constructed a biofeedback EEG machine that would flash a red light in the presence of a theta wave and a green light during an alpha state.

After a while, his patient was able to change her state at will and reduce the amount and intensity of her epileptic fits. Sterman spent the next 10 years of his life studying epileptics and training them to reduce their own fits.53

In the 1980s, two American psychologists, Eugene Peniston and Paul Kulkosky made use of Sterman’s findings to reform alcoholics. With their brain-wave biofeedback, alcoholic patients concentrated on damping down high beta brain waves, which tend to be predominant during moments of craving and dependency, and increasing the alpha and theta wave frequencies, which help one to relax and establish greater brain-wave coherence.

Some 80 per cent of the alcoholics were able to control their cravings and stay off alcohol. The training also seemed to affect their blood chemistry, increasing their levels of beta-endorphin, another ‘feel-good’ brain chemical. Biofeedback, combined with work on their self-image, eventually eliminated much of their dysfunctional behaviour and transformed them into better people.54

Joe Kamiya, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, demonstrated the amazing specificity of brain-wave biofeedback through some remarkable brain research. He attached EEG electrodes to the rear sides of the scalps of several volunteers, over the portion of the brain where alpha brain waves are most prominent. At the sound of a tone, his participants had to guess whether their brains waves were predominantly alpha. After comparing their answers with the information recorded on the EEG machines, Kamiya let them know whether the were right or wrong. By the second day, one of his participants was able to guess correctly two-thirds of the time, and two days after that, virtually all the time. A second participant discovered a means of putting himself into a particular brain- wave state on cue.55

EEG biofeedback has now developed into a sophisticated means of controlling the range and type of frequencies emitted by the brain. It works particularly well with trauma patients suffering from depression,56 helps students concentrate, and enhances creativity and focus. It may well be that intention can be used to control the brain, brain wave by brain wave.

Hypnosis is also a type of intention – an instruction to the brain during an altered state. Hypnotists continually demonstrate that the brain or body is susceptible to the power of directed thought.

One dramatic example of the power of mental suggestion concerned a small group of people with a mysterious congenital illness called ichthyosiform erythroderma, known disparagingly as fish-skin disease because unsightly fish-like scales cover most of the body. In one study, five patients were hypnotized and told to focus on a part of their body and visualize the skin becoming normal. Within just a few weeks, 80 per cent of each patient’s body had completely healed. The skin remained smooth and clear.57

Through hypnotic intention, spinal-surgery patients about to undergo their operations have reduced blood loss by nearly half, simply by directing their blood supply away from the site of the surgery.58

Pregnant women have been able to turn their babies from breech positions, burn victims have sped up their healing; and people suffering haemorrhages in the gastrointestinal tract have willed their bleeding to stop.59

Clearly, during an altered state, roughly corresponding to the hyperalert state of intense meditation, conscious thought can convince the body to endure pain, cure many serious diseases and change virtually any condition.

Surgeon Dr Angel Escudero of Valencia, Spain, has carried out more than 900 cases of complex surgery without anaesthesia. BBC cameras were invited into his operating room and captured on film a woman who was having such an operation without anaesthetic. All she had to do was keep her mouth full of saliva and keep repeating to herself, ‘My leg is anaesthetized.’ An affirmation like hers is another form of intention. A dry mouth is one of the mind’s first warning signals of danger. When the mouth is kept lubricated, the brain relaxes, assumes all is well, and turns off its pain receptors, assured that anaesthetics had been given.60

A fascinating study by David Spiegel, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford University, offers a glimpse of what happens to the brain when an intention is given under hypnosis.

His participants were shown a coloured grid painting, similar to a Mondrian, and were asked to imagine the colour draining from the picture, leaving only black and white. Through the use of positron emission tomography (PET) scans, which record physical activity in the brain, Spiegel showed that blood flow and activity were noticeably diminishing in the part of the brain dealing with the perception of colour, while the areas that process black, white and grey images were being stimulated.

When the experiment was reversed, and the participants in the study were asked to imagine grey images turning into colour, the opposite changes in brain-perception patterns resulted.61

This illustrated another instance in which the brain was the maidservant of thoughts. The brain’s visual cortex, the area responsible for processing images, could not distinguish between a real image and an imagined one. The mental instructions were more important than the actual visual image.

The placebo effect has shown that beliefs are powerful, even when the belief is false. The placebo is a form of intention – an instance of intention trickery. When a doctor gives a patient a placebo, or sugar pill, he or she is counting on the patient’s belief that the drug will work.

It is well documented that belief in a placebo will create the same physiological effects as that of an active agent – so much so that it causes the pharmaceutical industry enormous difficulty when designing drug trials. So many patients receive the same relief and even the same side effects with a placebo as with the drug itself that a placebo is not a true control.

Our bodies do not distinguish between a chemical process and the thought of a chemical process. Indeed, a recent analysis of 46,000 heart patients, half of whom were taking a placebo, made the astonishing discovery that patients taking a placebo fared as well as those on the heart drug. The only factor determining survival seemed to be belief that the therapy will work and a willingness to follow it religiously.

Those who stuck to doctor’s orders to take their drug three times a day fared equally well whether they were taking a drug or just a sugar pill. Patients who tended not to survive were those who had been lax with their regime, regardless of whether they had been given a placebo or an actual drug.62

The power of the placebo was best illustrated by a group of patients treated for Parkinson’s disease, a motor system disorder in which the body’s system for releasing the brain chemical dopamine is faulty. The standard treatment for Parkinson’s is a synthetic form of dopamine.

In a study at the University of British Columbia, a team of doctors demonstrated with PET scanning that, when patients given placebos were told they had received dopamine, their brains substantially increased the release of their own stores of the chemical.63

In another dramatic instance, at Methodist Hospital in Houston, Dr Bruce Moseley, a specialist in orthopaedics, recruited 150 patients with severe osteoarthritis of the knee and divided them into three groups. Two-thirds were either given arthroscopic lavage (which washes out degenerative tissue and debris with the aid of a little viewing tube) or another form of debridement (which sucks it out with a tiny vacuum cleaner).

The third group were given a sham operation: the patients were surgically prepared, placed under anaesthesia and wheeled into the operating room. Incisions were made in their knees, but no procedure carried out.

Over the next two years, during which time none of the patients knew who had received the real operations and who had received the placebo treatment, all three groups reported moderate improvements in pain and function. In fact, the placebo group reported better results than some who had received the actual operation.64 The mental expectation of healing was enough to marshal the body’s healing mechanisms. The intention, brought about by the expectation of a successful operation, produced the physical change.

Extreme instances of intention and expectation can also manifest physically. The phenomenon of stigmata, in which religious fervour produces blood, bruising or wounds on people’s hands, feet and sides that mirror the wounds of Christ during his crucifixion, are a form of intention.

The Association for the Scientific Study o Anomalous Phenomena has recorded at least 350 such instances of stigmata resulting from identification with Christ. Saybrook University psychologist Stanley Krippne and his colleagues witnessed this first hand with Brazilian sensitive Amyr Amiden.

As soon as their talk turned to Jesus Christ, red spots and drops of blood appeared on the backs of each of Amiden’s hands and on his palms and forehead.65 A similar situation occurred during the three weeks before Easter Sunday with a young African- American Baptist girl, who had been profoundly moved by a television movie about the crucifixion and was preoccupied with Christ’s suffering.

She manifested bleeding on the palm of her left hand two to six times a day.66 Krippner knew of three Anglicans who regularly evidenced stigmata.67

Cases of spontaneous cures are an instance of an extreme intention that reverses almost certain death. A person with what is considered a terminal illness defies the textbook description of his disease progression and the prognoses of his doctors and beats it virtually overnight, without the aid of the tools of modern medicine.

The Institute of Noetic Sciences has gathered together all scientifically recorded cases of so-called miracle cures.68 Although the received wisdom is that these cases are rare, a scan of the medical literature is instructive. One in eight skin cancers spontaneously heal, as do nearly one in five of genitourinary cancers.

Virtually all types of illnesses, including diabetes, Addison’s disease and atherosclerosis, where vital organs or body parts are supposedly irretrievably damaged, have spontaneously healed.69 A small body of research concerns terminal cancer patients, who with little or no medical intervention, end up beating the odds.

Although these cases are labelled instances of ‘spontaneous remission’, as though the illness has suddenly decided to go into hiding but might suddenly spring out at any moment, in many instances they represent another example of the body’s ability to self-correct through the power of intention. Case after case of spontaneous remission describes people up against a major road block in their lives: unremitting stress, unresolved trauma, prolonged hostility, marked isolation, profound dissatisfaction or quiet despair.70 They often describe people who have lost their role as the central protagonist in their own life drama.71

Many cases of spontaneous remission seem to occur after someone makes a massive psychological shift, and recreates a life that is engaging and purposeful. In these instances, the patient gets rid of the source of the psychological heartache72 and takes full responsibility for his illness and treatment.73

Some people, this would suggest, get ill because they lose all hope of life ever being good – because they are thinking the wrong thoughts. These cases of spontaneous remission suggested to me that casual thoughts that run through our minds every day together become our life’s intention.

We can use intention to gain control over virtually any bodily process and perhaps even life-threatening illnesses. But can our thoughts about others be as potent as our thoughts about ourselves?

Psychologist William Braud is one of the few scientists who has examined this question. He gathered a group of volunteers and asked them to carry out biofeedback on themselves.

After pairing off the group, he attached one member of each pair to the biofeedback equipment, but asked the other partner to respond to the readings and carry out the sending of mental instructions. According to Braud’s evidence, the results were equivalent to those that occurred when the patients on the equipment used biofeedback on themselves. Somebody else’s good intentions for you may be as powerful as your own.74

Braud’s other studies also suggested that we can most influence others to become more ‘ordered’ when we ourselves are ordered. For instance, in his studies, calm people were the most successful at sending mental influence to calm down highly nervous people, and focused people the best at helping distracted people focus.75

Braud’s work also suggests that the greatest effects occur when the person most needs help.76

Scientific evidence also reveals that we can affect virtually any other living thing as well. The enormous body of research on healing gathered by Dr Daniel Benor shows that thoughts can have powerful effects on a variety of plants, seeds, single-celled organisms such as bacteria and yeast, and insects and other small animals.77

Most recently, a series of double-blind experiments carried out over two years by Dr Serena Roney-Dougal in Somerset showed that lettuce seeds that wer sent intention yielded 10 per cent more crops with significantly less fungal disease than those grown conventionally.78

The evidence convinced me that we can improve our health, enhance our performance in every area of our lives, and possibly even affect the future by consciously using intention. The intention should be a highly specific aim or goal, which you should visualize in your mind’s eye as having already occurred while you are in a state of concentrated focus and hyperawareness. When you imagine this future event, hold a mental picture of it as if it were occurring to you at that moment. Engage all five senses to visualize it in detail. The centrepiece of this mental picture should be the moment you achieve the goal.

A doctor might improve the survival rate of his patients by never giving a negative diagnosis.79 A surgeon could improve his patients’ recovery by mentally rehearsing the surgery before heading into the operating theatre. Indeed, we might no longer need drugs, but simply good intentions.

Since intention has been shown to affect the chemistry in our bodies, we should be able to speed up, slow down or improve any physiological processes. We might develop many more breakthrough medicines by mentally targeting their effectiveness and minimizing their side effects.

We could raise the quality of our daily endeavours just by carrying out a detailed mental rehearsal. At home, we might be able to send intentions to our children to perform better at school or be more loving to their friends. Human intention might be powerful enough to affect every element of our lives.

All of these possibilities suggest that we have an awesome level of responsibility when generating our thoughts. Each of us is a potential Frankenstein, with an extraordinary power to affect the living world around us. How many of us, after all, are sending out mostly positive thoughts?

Notes – Chapter 9: Mental Blueprints

All description of Ali’s fighting techniques from N. Mailer, The Fight, London and New York: Penguin, 2000.
Ibid.
A. Richardson, ‘Mental practice: A review and discussion, Part I’, Research Quarterly, 1967; 38: 95–107; A. Richardson, ‘Mental practice: A review and discussion. Part II’, Research Quarterly, 1967; 38: 264–73
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B. S. Rushall and L. G. Lippman, ‘The role of imagery in physica performance’, International Journal for Sport Psychology, 1997; 29: 57–72.
A. Paivio, ‘Cognitive and motivational functions of imagery in human performance’, Canadian Journal of Applied Sport Sciences, 1985; 10 (4): 22S–28S.
K. E. Hinshaw, ‘The effects of mental practice on motor skill performance: Critical evaluation and meta-analysis’, Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 1991–2; 11: 3–35.
J. A. Swets and R. A. Bjork, ‘Enhancing human performance: An evaluationof “New Age” techniques considered by the U. S. Army’, Psychological Science, 1990; 1: 85–96; D. L. Feltz et al., ‘A revised meta-analysis of the mental practice literature on motor skill learning’, in D. Druckman and J. A Swets (eds.), Enhancing Human Performance: Issues, Theories, and Techniques, Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1988: 274.
R. J. Rotella et al., ‘Cognitions and coping strategies of elite skiers: a exploratory study of young developing athletes’, Journal of Sport Psychology, 1980; 2: 350–4.
R. S. Burhans et al., ‘Mental imagery training: effects on running speed performance’, International Journal of Sport Psychology, 1988; 19: 26–37.
B. S. Rushall, ‘Covert modeling as a procedure for altering an elite athlete’s psychological state’, Sport Psychologist, 1988; 2: 131–40; B. S. Rushall ‘The restoration of performance capacity by cognitive restructuring and covert positive reinforcement in an elite athlete’, in J. R. Cautela and A. J Kearney (eds.), Covert Conditioning Casebook. Boston, Mass.: Thomson Brooks/Cole, 1993.
M. Denis, ‘Visual imagery and the use of mental practice in the development of motor skills’, Canadian Journal of Applied Sport Sciences, 1985; 10: 4S– 16S.
Paivio, ‘Cognitive and motivational functions of imagery’, op. cit.
J. R. Cautela and A. J. Kearney (eds.),Covert Conditioning Casebook. Boston, Mass.: Thomson Brooks/Cole, 1993: 30–1.
B. Mumford and C. Hall, ‘The effects of internal and external imagery o performing figures in figure skating’, Canadian Journal of Applied Spor Sciences, 1985; 10: 171–7.
K. Barr and C. Hall, ‘The use of imagery by rowers’,International Journal of Sport Psychology, 1992; 23: 243–61.
S. C. Minas, ‘Mental practice of a complex perceptual-motor skill’,Journal of Human Movement Studies, 1978; 4: 102–7.
R. Bleier, Fighting Back, New York: Stein and Day, 1975.
R. L. Wilkes and J. J. Summers, ‘Cognitions, mediating variables an strength performance’, Journal of Sport Psychology, 1984; 6: 351–9.
R. S. Weinberg et al., ‘Effects of visuo-motor behavior rehearsal, relaxation, and imagery on karate performance’, Journal of Sport Psychology, 1981; 3: 228–38.
Cautela and Kearney, Covert Conditioning, op. cit.
J. Pates et al., ‘The effects of hypnosis on flow states and three-poin shooting in basketball players’, The Sport Psychologist, 2002; 16: 34–47; J. Pates and I. Maynard, ‘Effects of hypnosis on flow states and gol performance’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2000; 9: 1057–75.
R. M. Suinn, ‘Imagery rehearsal applications to performance enhancement’ The Behavior Therapist, 1985; 8: 155–9.
L. Baroga, ‘Influence on the sporting result of the concentration of attention process and time taken in the case of weight lifters’, in Proceedings of the 3rd World Congress of the International Society of Sports Psychology, Volume 3. Madrid, Spain: Instituto Nacional de Educacion Fisica Y Deportes, 1973.
A. Fujita, ‘An experimental study on the theoretical basis of mental training’, in Proceedings of the 3rd World Congress of the International Society of Sports Psychology, Volume Abstracts. Madrid, Spain: Instituto Nacional de Educacion Fisica Y Deportes, 1973: 37–8.
Ibid.
Rushall and Lippman, ‘The role of imagery in physical performance’, op cit.
G. H. Van Gyn et al., ‘Imagery as a method of enhancing transfer from training to performance’, Journal of Sport and Exercise Science, 1990; 12: 366–75.
G. H. Yue and K. J. Cole, ‘Strength increases from the motor program Comparison of training with maximal voluntary and imagined muscle contractions’, Journal of Neurophysiology, 1992; 67: 114–23; V. K. Ranganathan et al., ‘Increasing muscle strength by training the central nervous system without physical exercise’, Society for Neuroscience Abstracts, 2001; 31: 17; V. K. Ranganathan et al., ‘Level of mental effort determines training-induced strength increases’, Society of Neuroscience Abstracts, 2002; 32: 768; P. Cohen, ‘Mental gymnastics’, New Scientist, November 24, 2001; 172 (2318): 17.
D. Smith et al., ‘The effect of mental practice on muscle strength and EMG activity’, Proceedings of British Psychological Society annual conference, 1998; 6 (2): 116.
T. X. Barber, ‘Changing “unchangeable” bodily processes by (hypnotic) suggestions: A new look at hypnosis, cognitions, imagining and the mind- body problem’, in A. A. Sheikh (ed.), Imagination and Healing, Farmingdale, NY: Baywood Publishing Co., 1984. Also published in Advances, Spring 1984.
F. M. Luskin et al., ‘A review of mind-body therapies in the treatment of cardiovascular disease, Part 1: Implications for the elderly’, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 1998; 4 (3): 46–61.
F. M. Luskin et al., ‘A review of mind/body therapies in the treatment of musculoskeletal disorders with implications for the elderly’, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine. 2000; 6 (2): 46–56.
V. A. Hadhazy et al., ‘Mind-body therapies for the treatment of fibromyalgia. A systematic review’, Journal of Rheumatology, 2000; 27 (12): 2911–18.
J. A. Astin et al., ‘Mind-body medicine: State of the science: Implications for practice’, Journal of the American Board of Family Practitioners, 2003; 16 (2): 131–47.
J. A. Astin, ‘Mind-body therapies for the management of pain’, Clinical Journal of Pain, 2004; 20 (1): 27–32.
L. S. Eller, ‘Guided imagery interventions for symptom management’ Annual Review of Nursing Research, 1999; 17, 57–84.
J. Achterberg and G. F. Lawlis, Bridges of the Bodymind: Behavioral Approaches for Health Care, Champaign, Ill.: Institute for Personality and Ability Testing, 1980.
N. E. Miller and L. DiCara, ‘Instrumental learning of heart rate changes i curarized rats: Shaping and specificity to discriminative stimulus’, Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 1967; 63: 12–19; N. E. Miller, ‘Learning of visceral and glandular responses’, Science, 1969; 163: 434–45.
J. V. Basmajian, Muscles Alive: Their Functions Revealed b Electromyography. Baltimore, Md.: Williams and Wilkins, 1967.
E. Green, ‘Feedback technique for deep relaxation’, Psychophysiology, 1969; 6 (3): 371–7; E. Green et al., ‘Self-regulation of internal states’, in J Rose (ed.), Progress of Cybernetics: Proceedings of the First International Congress of Cybernetics, London, September 1969. London: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1970: 1299–318; E. Green et al., ‘Voluntary control of internal states: Psychological and physiological’, Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 1970; 2: 1–26; D. Satinsky, ‘Biofeedback treatment for headache: A two-year follow-up study’, American Journal of Clinical Biofeedback, 1981; 4 (1): 62–5; B. V. Silver et al., ‘Temperature biofeedback and relaxation training in the treatment of migraine headaches: One-year follow-up’, Biofeedback and Self Regulation, 1979; 4 (4): 359–66.
B. M. Kappes, ‘Sequence effects of relaxation training, EMG, an temperature biofeedback on anxiety, symptom report, and self-concept’, Journal of Clinical Psychology, 1983; 39 (2): 203–8; G. Rose et al., ‘The behavioral treatment of Raynaud’s disease: A review’, Biofeedback and Self Regulation, 1987; 12 (4): 257–72.
W. T. Tsushima, ‘Treatment of phantom limb pain with EMG and temperature biofeedback: A case study’, American Journal of Clinical Biofeedback, 1982; 5 (2): 150–3.
T. G. Dobie, ‘A comparison of two methods of training resistance to visually-induced motion sickness.’ Paper presented at VII International Ma in Space Symposium: Physiologic adaptation of man in space, Houston Texas, 1986. Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine, 1987; 58 (9) Sect. 2: 34–41.
A. Ikemi et al., ‘Thermographical analysis of the warmth of the hands during the practice of self-regulation method’, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 1988; 50 (1): 22–8.
J. L. Claghorn, ‘Directional effects of skin temperature self-regulation o regional cerebral blood flow in normal subjects and migraine patients’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 1981; 138 (9): 1182–7.
M. Davis et al., The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook, 5th edn, Oakland, Calif.: New Harbinge, 2000: 83–90.
J. K. Lashley et al., ‘An empirical account of temperature biofeedbac applied in groups’, Psychological Reports, 1987; 60 (2): 379–88; S. Fahrion et al., ‘Biobehavioral treatment of essential hypertension: A group outcome study’, Biofeedback and Self Regulation, 1986; 11 (4): 257–77.
J. Panksepp, ‘The anatomy of emotions’, in R. Plutchik (ed.),Emotion: Theory, Research and Experience Vol. III. Biological Foundations o Emotions, New York: Academic Press, 1986: 91–124.
J. Panksepp, ‘The neurobiology of emotions: Of animal brains and huma feelings’, in T. Manstead and H. Wagner (eds.), Handbook of Psychophysiology, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1989: 5–26.
C. D. Clemente et al., ‘Postreinforcement EEG synchronization durin alimentary behavior’, Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 1964; 16: 335–65; M. H. Chase et al., ‘Afferent vaga stimulation: Neurographic correlates of induced EEG synchronization and desynchronization’, Brain Research, 1967; 5: 236–49.
M. B. Sterman, ‘Neurophysiological and clinical studies of sensorimoto EEG biofeedback training: Some effects on epilepsy’,Seminars in Psychiatry, 1973; 5 (4): 507–25; M. B. Sterman, ‘Neurophysiological and clinical studies of sensorimotor EEG biofeedback training: Some effects on epilepsy’, in L. Birk (ed.), Biofeedback: Behavioral Medicine. New York: Grune and Stratton, 1973: 147–65; M. B. Sterman, ‘Epilepsy and its treatment with EEG feedback therapy’, Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 1986; 8: 21–5; M. B. Sterman, ‘The challenge of EEG biofeedback in the treatment o epilepsy: A view from the trenches’, Biofeedback, 1997; 25 (1): 6–7; M. B. Sterman, ‘Basic concepts and clinical findings in the treatment of seizure disorders with EEG operant conditioning’, Clinical Electroencephalography, 2000; 31 (1): 45–55.
E. Peniston and P. J. Kulkosky, ‘Alpha-theta brainwave training and beta- endorphin levels in alcoholics’, Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 1989; 13: 271–9; E. Peniston and P. J. Kulkosky, ‘Alcoholic personality and alpha-theta brainwave training’, Medical Psychotherapy, 1990; 3: 37–55.
J. Kamiya, ‘Operant control of the EEG alpha rhythm’, in C. Tart (ed.) Altered States of Consciousness, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1969, J. Kamiya, ‘Conscious control of brain waves’, Psychology Today, April 1968: 7.
N. E. Schoenberger et al., ‘Flexyx neurotherapy system in the treatment o traumatic brain injury: An initial evaluation’, Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation, 2001; 16 (3): 260–74.
C. B. Kidd, ‘Congenital ichthyosiform erythroderma treated by hypnosis’ British Journal of Dermatology, 1966; 78: 101–5, as cited in Barber, ‘Changing “unchangeable” bodily processes’, op. cit.
H. Bennett, ‘Behavioral anesthesia’, Advances, 1985; 2 (4): 11–21, as reported in H. Dienstfrey, ‘Mind and mindlessness in mind-body research’, in M. Schlitz et al., Consciousness and Healing: Integral Approaches to Mind Body Healing, St Louis, Mo.: Elsevier Churchill Livingstone, 2005: 56.
H. Dienstfrey, ‘Mind and mindlessnes’, op cit.: 51–60.
Dr Angel Escudero was featured on the BBC’sYour Life in Their Hands series, May 1991. In the film, Escudero made incisions, sawed, drilled and hammered in order to break and reset the deformed leg of his fully conscious patient using his ‘Noesitherapy’ technique of pain control.
S. M. Kosslyn et al., ‘Hypnotic visual illusion alters color processing in the br ai n’ , American Journal of Psychiatry, 2000; 157: 1279–84; Mark Henderson, ‘Hypnosis really does turn black into white’, The Times, 18 February 2002.
S. H. Simpson et al., ‘A meta-analysis of the association between adherence to drug therapy and mortality’, British Medical Journal, 2006; 333: 15–19.
Raúl de la Fuente-Fernández et al., ‘Expectation and dopamine release Mechanism of the placebo effect in Parkinson’s disease’, Science, 2001; 293 (5532): 1164–6.
J. B. Moseley et al., ‘A controlled trial of arthroscopic surgery for osteoarthritis of the knee’, New England Journal of Medicine, 2002; 347: 81–8.
S. Krippner, ‘Stigmatic phenomenon: An alleged case in Brazil’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2002; 16 (2): 207–24.
L. F. Early and J. E. Kifschutz, ‘A case of stigmata’, Archives of General Psychiatry, 1974; 30: 197–200.
T. Harrison, Stigmatia: A Medieval Mystery in a Modern Age, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994, as referenced in S. Krippner, ‘Stigmatic phenomenon’, op. cit.
B. O’Regan and Caryle Hirshberg,Spontaneous Remission: An Annotated Bibliography, Petaluma, Calif.: Institute of Noetic Sciences, 1993.
Ibid.
L. L. LeShan and M. L. Gassmann, ‘Some observations on psychotherap with patients with neoplastic disease’, American Journal of Psychotherapy, 1958; 12: 723.
D. C. Ban Baalen et al., ‘Psychosocial correlates of “spontaneous regression of cancer’, Humane Medicine, April 1987.
R. T. D. Oliver, ‘Surveillance as a possible option for management of metastic renal cell carcinoma’, Seminars in Urology, 1989; 7: 149–52.
P. C. Raud, ‘Psychospiritual dimensions of extraordinary survival’, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 1989; 29: 59–83.
McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 132.
W. Braud and M. Schlitz, ‘Psychokinetic influence on electrodermal activity’, Journal of Parapsychology, 1983; 47 (2): 95–119.
Interview with William Braud, October, 1999.
Benor, Healing Research, op. cit.
S. M. Roney-Dougal and J. Solfvin, ‘Field study of an enhancement effect o lettuce seeds – Replication study’, Journal of Parapsychology, 2003; 67 (2): 279–98.
Dr Larry Dossey calls negative diagnoses ‘medical hexing’, and there is anecdotal evidence that patients often live up to their doctor’s gloomy prognosis, even when there is no physical evidence that they should do so. For a potent example see the story of a leukaemia patient who was thriving until he happened to find out what he had. He was dead within a week once his illness had the label of a potentially terminal illness: L. McTaggart, What Doctors Don’t Tell You, London: HarperCollins, 2005: 343.

CHAPTER TEN

The Voodoo Effect

DICK BLASBAND WAS DRAWN TO THE IDEA that there might be a way amplify and direct life energy, like holding up a magnifying glass to focus the rays of the sun.

Blasband, a psychologist, was intrigued by the theories of Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian psychiatrist and one-time protégé of Sigmund Freud, who thought it possible to trap ‘orgone’ – the name he gave to what he believed to be omnipresent cosmic energy – in an orgone energy ‘accumulator’. An accumulator, a box-like enclosure of any size, could be made of alternating layers of any metal and non- metallic materials, such as cotton cloth or felt.

Reich believed that atmospheric energy would be first attracted, then instantly repelled by the metal and eventually absorbed by the non-metallic substance. Because the enclosure was layered, orgone energy would continuously flow between the atmosphere and the box, like a current of air, and so constantly ‘accumulate’. Reich had early encouraging results with animals and plants placed in the boxes, which lay the basis for his later claims that accumulated energy had an immense capacity to heal.

It occurred to Blasband that Reich’s ideas about energy fields were not dissimilar to those of his colleague Fritz-Albert Popp and his work on biophotons Perhaps the best means of testing an accumulator was to measure its effect on the emission of these tiny specks of light from a living thing.

In August 1993, Blasband travelled to Popp’s International Institute, then in Kaiserslautern, Germany. He and Popp created a variety of orgone accumulators then chose a number of plants in Popp’s laboratory – cress seeds, cress seedlings and Acetabularia crenulata, a primitive form of marine algae – to be the experimental population. Popp’s photomultipliers would count the light emissions of all the plants inside and outside the orgone boxes and record any differences.

Blasband carried out four experiments – placing the algae in the accumulator first for one hour, and then continuously for two weeks – with no result. Popp’s equipment recorded not the slightest alteration in the light emissions. Blasband wondered if this was because the plants were already so healthy that the boxes could not improve their state of health. Perhaps he would see a larger change in a subject that needed help or improvement. He and Popp decided to try making the Acetabularia ‘ill’ by depriving it of most of its vitamin supply for 24 hours before treatment. It appeared to make no difference. The plants’ biophotons didn’t change. No amount of exposure to an accumulator of any variety seemed to make one bit of difference to the health or well-being of any of the plants.

Blasband and Popp then decided to test whether a mental intention could boost the action of the accumulators. In his new series of experiments, Blasband sent an intention for the energy within the accumulator to be beneficial to certain seedlings and harmful to others. These results were disappointing, too. There was only one significant difference in the number or quality of biophoton emissions before and after treatment of any of the plants: the only effective intention appeared to be the one he had sent to stunt their growth.1 In both experiments, negative intention was more powerful than positive intention. Thoughts to harm had the greatest effect.

Blasband’s little study highlights perhaps the most disturbing consideration of all about intention: that bad thoughts, as well as good ones, can have an effect on the world, and indeed may be the more powerful of the two. After all, in many native cultures, prayer and intention have a shadow component in hexes, voodoo and curses, which are reported to be highly effective forms of negative intention.

Many healers routinely use a negative means to a positive end.

As Dr Larry Dossey, author of Be Careful What You Pray For …2 has noted, negative intention is the very foundation of most healing. Healing from an infectious agent or a rogue cell line such as cancer requires intent to harm.3 It works from a desire to kill something: to inhibit bacterial enzymes, alter cell membrane permeability, or interfere with the nutrition given to the cell or the synthesis of DNA.4 In order for the patient to get better, the offending agent has to die.

Many pioneers of mind–body medicine in the treatment of cancer, such as Dr Bernie Siegel, Dr Carl Simonton, and Australian psychiatrist Ainslie Meares encouraged their patients to use vivid forms of mental imagery – a metaphoric representation of their illness – to enhance their healing.5 The majority of the cancer patients who first made use of visualization techniques imagined a battlefield, on which good (the patient) is pitted against evil (the cancer), with the cancer patient possessing the larger weapon.

Some patients imagined their white blood cells as an army killing the cancer cells or a ‘tap’ containing the blood that feeds the cancer cells, which they can turn off. Some patients visualized themselves as participating in a violent video game. When Simonton first introduced this technique to his patients in the 1970s, Pac-Man was the most popular video game of the time. He encouraged his patients to imagine a little Pac-Man inside their bodies, gobbling up cancer cells in its path. But whatever the particulars of the imagery, the intention itself needed to be murderous; the patient had to want to annihilate the enemy.

Research on negative mental influence presents a number of obstacles to scientists. One basic problem, as Cleve Backster found in his research, is finding a living thing that no one objects to having killed. Many choose to study the most basic life forms, such as paramecia or fungi, or to experiment with seeds or small plants.6

Another problem is avoiding an unintended ‘spray’ effect: what if a healer’s aim is slightly off one day and the negative intent gets sent to the host instead?

The Canadian healer Olga Worrell refused to carry out negative intention on infectious diseases for exactly that reason. She worried that her negative intent might move beyond the bacteria and accidentally target the person she was trying to heal.7

One of the earliest experiments using negative intention was conducted by Jean Barry, president of the Institut Métapsychique International, who studied bacteria and fungi. As insignificant as these lowly organisms appear, Barry, a general practitioner, understood their pivotal role in maintaining health and causing illness. If it could be shown that intention has the power to eliminate these small organisms, humans might be able to exert greater control over their own health.

Barry decided to test the effect of negative intention on a fungus called Rhizoctonia solani. Rhizoctonia, a thready filament and a distant relative of the common mushroom, is an enemy to 500 types of crops. Farmers call it pod rot or root rot, as it commonly attacks the pods and roots, stunting growth and eventually consuming the plant. No one would object to a means of controlling this garden menace.

Barry set up a batch of experimental Petri dishes and matched them with a set of controls of the identical type of fungus growing in the same conditions. He enlisted ten volunteers and assigned five experimental Petri dishes and five controls to each person. At the appointed time, each volunteer was asked to send intentions to slow the growth of the fungi in the experimental Petri dishes. After the experiment, the lab assistant measured the growth of each sample of Rhizoctonia by outlining its boundary on tracing paper. Of the 195 dishes involved in the negative intention, 151, or 77 per cent, were smaller than the average size of the controls.8

Barry’s study was successfully replicated by researchers from the University of Tennessee, although their study also tested the effect of remote influence; this time, the volunteers sending the intention were 15 miles away from the fungus samples.9

Similar research was conducted by Carroll Nash, the director of the parapsychology department at St Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, but on Escherichia coli, microbes with a direct impact on human beings. Millions of these bacteria, which help to digest food and keep hostile bacteria at bay, peacefully reside in the gut. E. coli also metabolizes lactose, the enzyme present in milk. Yet, as with many microbes, E. coli can suddenly turn unfriendly by migrating out of the digestive tract or mutating into a virulent form that causes illness. Many toxic strains are also present in food. E. coli represented an interesting choice for Nash. If humans could control its growth, they might avoid serious E. coli infections and improve their general digestive health.

Nash decided to test whether mental influence could affect the mutation rates of coli bacteria. Usually, an E. coli population starts life unable to ferment lactose (and so is ‘lactose-negative’), but after it mutates, over numerous generations, the new population can do so (at which point it become ‘lactose-positive’). This process ordinarily occurs at a predictable rate. Nash wanted to see whether his volunteers could slow it down or speed it up. To work out the growth rates of these tiny organisms, Nash employed an electrophotometer, which counts the microbes by measuring the slightest differences in the density of the media in which they are suspended.

Each of his 60 student participants received nine test-tubes containing both lactose-negative and lactose-positive strains of E. coli culture. The students were asked to mentally encourage the transformation of the unmutated bacteria in the first three test-tubes from lactose-negative to lactose-positive. With the next three test- tubes, they were to attempt to inhibit the process of mutation. The final three, the controls, would not be exposed to influence of any kind. When he tallied the results, Nash discovered more mutation than normal in the test-tubes that had received the positive intentions to mutate, and fewer than normal in those for which the intentions were to inhibit the process, although the greatest effect occurred with negative intention.

Nash’s study had an interesting coda: he had not stipulated any particular location where the mental influence had to originate; the volunteers were allowed to send their thoughts from the place of their choosing, whether the lab or elsewhere. When Nash examined the differences in the results according to the place from where the intentions had been sent, an interesting pattern emerged. Those students assigned the task of sending positive intentions had the best success if they sent their thoughts while in the lab; those with negative intentions had the best result if they waited until they had left. The Tennessee researchers who replicated Barry’s study also discovered that negative intention was most effective when it was sent from a remote site. Positive intent appeared to work best in the presence of its object, whereas a negative intent worked best when the object of ill will was not anywhere in the line of sight.10

These early studies revealed several important aspects of intention. Thoughts take aim with great accuracy; although their effects on living things can drastically differ depending on the nature of the intention – whether it is positive or negative. Where we position ourselves when sending out a thought might also have a bearing on our success. Being near the target while sending a positive intention or away from the target when sending a negative intention might magnify its effect.

* * *

The next best experimental subject to a live human being is its cells. If you can prove an effect on an essential component of a living thing, it is likely that the same effect will occur with the entire organism. Dr John Kmetz, a colleague of William Braud’s in San Antonio, Texas, decided to test the effect of negative intention on cancer. Although he could not test his theory on a live human being, he settled for a sample of cervical cancer cells, and enlisted Matthew Manning, a gifted British healer.

Manning sent negative intentions either by touching the beaker of cells or from a distance, inside an electromagnetically shielded room. Kmetz then used special equipment to count how many cancer cells were in the culture medium. Ordinarily, a cancer cell, which has a positive charge, will grasp the side of a plastic beaker, attracted to its negative electrostatic charge. An injury to the cell will cause it to drop off the side and into the culture medium. Kmetz’s equipment demonstrated that Manning had fatally injured the culture.11 Manning’s extraordinary healing ability had been turned on its head; in this study he had become a killing machine.

Practitioners of Qigong openly acknowledge that intention has the power to enhance or destroy – indeed, the Chinese term for sending positive Qi, or life energy, through intention translates into English as ‘peaceful mind’, while sending negative Qi is referred to as ‘destroying mind’.12

A host of studies of Qigong carried out in China have been collated on the Qigong Database®, many of which claim to offer evidence that ‘destroying mind’ can kill human cancer cells or tumours in mice, decrease the growth rate of E. coli and inhibit activity of amylase, a digestive enzyme used to help digest carbohydrates.13 Nonetheless, some Western scientists maintain quiet reservations about the database; few of these studies have been replicated in the West.

One study on plants conducted at the First World Conference of Academic Exchange of Medical Qigong, in Beijing in 1988, examined whether sending Qi could affect the growth of a confederate spiderwort plant by concentrating on its process of replication. A Qi master was asked to damage one of the plant’s self- destruct mechanisms, which would cause the plant to live longer than normal.14 The master had to target his negative intention precisely, so that it would injure only one aspect of the plant while the rest would thrive.

To record any subtle effects on the health of the plant samples during the experiment, any increases or decreases in certain cells after replication, the researchers used a micronuclear method developed at Western Illinois State University. During the study, the Qigong master displayed a remarkable ability to send precise instructions to specific parts of the plant, some of which were damaging, some beneficial.15

A similar study was carried out by researchers at the National Yang Ming Medical College and National Research Institute of Chinese Medicine in Taipei Taiwan. In this instance, the Qigong master alternately sent positive and negative intention to boar sperm cells and human fibroblast cells, which make up the connective tissue of the body.

After 2 minutes of negative intention, the growth rates and protein synthesis of the cells decreased dramatically by 22–53 per cent. When the Qigong master reversed his intention and sent 10 minutes of positive intention, all the activity of the cell increased by 5–28 per cent.16 In another well-controlled study by the Mt Sinai School of Medicine, twoQigong masters were able to inhibit the process involved in the contraction of muscles by as much as 23 per cent.17

These studies raise the obvious question: which is more powerful, a positive or a negative thought? In some studies, the will to harm appears to be the stronger of the two intentions, but that makes sense in a study like Blasband’s, where it is probably far easier to damage a healthy system than to make a healthy system even healthier, or indeed to fix something that is broken, or to order a disordered system.18

Nevertheless, effective intention of any variety is likely to require order and deliberately focused thought. How many negative intentions are sent by someone as ordered as a Qigong master?

Although negative intention appears capable of disrupting the most fundamental biological processes when precisely targeted,19 one study suggests that healing does not necessarily require negative intention. Leonard Laskow, an American gynaecologist and healer, was recruited by American biologist Glen Rein to test the most effective healing strategy for inhibiting the growth of cancer cells. In his own practice, Laskow believed in establishing an emotional connectedness with his subject – even with cancer cells – before sending out healing. Rein prepared five different Petri dishes containing identical numbers of cancer cells and then asked Laskow to send out a different intention while holding each one. Laskow’s first intention was that the natural order be reinstated and the cells’ growth rate return to normal.

With the next Petri dish he was to adopt a Taoist visualization that entails imagining that only three of the cancer cells remained in the Petri dish. For the third dish he was not to have an intention, but simply to ask God to have His will flow through Laskow’s hands. He offered unconditional love to the cancer cells of the fourth dish, which involved meditating on a state of love and compassion, much as Davidson’s Buddhists had done. For the final dish of cancer cells, Laskow carried out his only truly destructive intention, by visualizing the cells dematerializing, either going into the light or the ‘void’. Rein gave Laskow a choice of imagery largely because he was uncertain which visualization would be most effective in obliterating something. Was it more effective to release an entity by offering it an endpoint (the light), or simply to give it a full range of potential (the void)? As a yardstick of Laskow’s effectiveness, Rein would measure the amount of radioactive thymidine absorbed by the cancer cells – an indicator of the growth rate of malignant cells.

Laskow’s various intentions had quite different effects. The most powerful were undirected intentions asking the cells to return to the natural order, which inhibited the cancer cells’ growth by 39 per cent. Acquiescing to God’s will with no specific request was about half as effective, inhibiting the cells by 21 per cent, as was the Taoist visualization. An unconditional acceptance of the way things were had no effect either way, nor did imagining the cells dematerializing. In these two instances, the problem may have been that the thought was simply not focused enough.

In a follow-up study, Rein asked Laskow to limit himself to two possibilities, the Taoist visualization and a request for the cells to return to the natural order. This time, he achieved an identical result with both intentions; the cancer cell growth was inhibited by 20 per cent. The strongest effect of all occurred when he combined the two approaches, mixing an intention to return to the natural order while imagining only three cells left; his rate of cell inhibition doubled, to 40 per cent. Clearly the combination of asking the universe to restore order while imagining a specific outcome exerted a powerful effect. Rein asked Laskow to repeat this combined approach, but to target the medium in which the cancer cells grew, rather than the cells themselves. Laskow achieved the same result as when he had focused directly on the cells themselves.

Finally, Rein instructed Laskow to hold each of his five states of mind in turn while grasping one of five vials of water, which would later be used to make up the tissue-culture medium of the cancer cells. The water treated with the ‘natural-order’ intention again had the greatest effect, inhibiting the growth of the cancer cells by 28 per cent. In this case, water apparently ‘stored’ and transferred the intentions to the culture medium and on to the cancer cells.

Laskow’s approach was instructive. The most effective healing intention had been framed as a request, combined with a highly specific visualization of the outcome, but not necessarily a destructive one.20 With healing, the most effective approach may not be to destroy the source of the illness, but, as with other forms of intention, to move aside, let go of the outcome, and allow a greater intelligence to restore order.

* * *

Most research about negative intention concerns a conscious desire to harm something. I wondered about those moments when negative intention is unconscious. Suppose you don’t like someone and harbor an unconscious ill will towards him? Do you unwittingly send out a negative intention? Or, what about those moments when you explode in anger? Is it possible that your momentary anger causes unintentional harm?

An overenthusiastic cleaner of mine once accidentally stripped off all the chrome on every fixture in our bathrooms. When I discovered the damage, a few hours after she had left our house, I was so overwhelmed with anger that I had to lie down. I had only just finished a five-month long renovation project on our newly purchased family home and had lovingly overseen the entire project, which had cost a good deal of hard-earned savings. I later learned, to my horror, that at about the time I had given voice to my fury, she had fallen off the bus and broken her leg. At another time, I was irrationally overwhelmed with anger at our bank manager, after discovering that our bank, now run by computers, had not recorded a deposit and had bounced several of our cheques. Later, I was horrified to learn that at roughly the moment I had vented my spleen, she had tripped on a pavement and broken most of her front teeth.

I had always felt guilty and curious about both these incidents. Was their misfortune my doing? Was it possible to curse people through your thoughts? I considered the effect of the everyday negative thoughts that swim through everyone’s mind every day. A negative thought about yourself (‘I’m untalented and lazy’) or your children (‘He’s such a slob’; ‘She’s lousy at maths’) might ultimately manifest as a physical energy and become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Indeed, moments when you feel an aversion to someone or something that you cannot rationally explain may simply be an instance when you are picking up a negative intention towards you. Even times when you are depressed could have a physical effect on the people and other living things around you.

Bernard Grad, the Canadian biologist, addressed many of these issues in a study that tested the power of a negative frame of mind on the growth of plants. He planted four groups of 18 pots, each containing 20 barley seeds. Each pot was to be watered with 1 per cent saline solution, slightly stronger than the kind used by hospitals when giving intravenous infusions to patients, which can stunt a plant’s growth. Three batches of the plants were to receive watering with the salt water, but only after the water had been held by one of three people for half an hour. The control batch would be watered with the solution that had not been exposed to anyone.

The first vial was held by a healer with green fingers and a passion for plants. The other two vials were held by two depressed patients – a man diagnosed as a psychotic depressive and a woman who was neurotically depressed – chosen from the Canadian hospital where Grad worked. The man was so depressed that he didn’ even ask what was in the bottle, but simply assumed that Grad, who wore a white coat, was just another in the procession of doctors preparing him for periodic electric shock therapy. While holding the bottle, he repeatedly protested that he didn’t need an ECT treatment. The woman, on the other hand, visibly lifted when Grad told her that the bottle was part of an experiment. Half an hour later, when he came to retrieve the bottle from her, he discovered that she had been cradling it as if it were a baby.

This unforeseen turn of events worried Grad, as the woman had been chosen precisely because he believed she would be in a negative state of mind. She had suddenly appeared to regain her joie de vivre, simply at the thought of her involvement in the experiment. After carefully creating a multi-blind system so that he could not know or be influenced by who had done what, Grad poured the water over the seeds.

Several weeks later, he was pleased to see that the result more or less followed his prediction. The plants watered by the man with the psychotic depression grew the slowest, followed by the control plants, whose bottle had not been held by anyone. The fastest growing plants had been watered by the green-fingered healer, followed by those of the depressed woman, which was a surprise. It seemed that her plants had grown faster because of her own enthusiasm about the experiment.21

Carroll Nash tried a similar experiment, asking a group of psychotics to hold individual sealed glass bottles of a solution of dextrose and sodium chloride for half an hour. Nash then removed 6 millilitres of the solutions from each bottle and poured them into fermentation tubes. Similar solutions that had not been ‘charged’ by the psychotics were poured into control test-tubes.

All 24 test-tubes received a suspension of yeast. After two hours Nash measured the amount of carbon dioxide produced in each of the tubes and took periodic measurements for the next six weeks. When he compared the tubes containing the ‘held’ solutions with the controls, he discovered that the solution held by the psychotics had marginally prevented the yeast from growing.22

Even deeply buried feelings might have an effect on people we purport to care about. In 1966, Dr Scott Walker of the University of New Mexico School of Medicine conducted a study of alcoholics in the midst of rehabilitation. He divided the group randomly and had members of the Albuquerque Faith Initiative pray for them each day for six months. Half of the participants (some from the treatment group and some from the controls) knew they were being prayed for by family members.

At the end of the six months, Scott discovered that those in both groups whose relatives and friends were praying for them were drinking more heavily than the others. Prayer from those who supposedly had the patients’ best interests at heart was having the opposite effect.

Scott came up with an interesting interpretation. The across-the-board negative effect of prayer by relatives may reflect their complicated, unconscious feelings towards alcoholics. Although consciously they might wish for their loved one to recover, they might actually wish for them to carry on drinking, if the person praying is a fellow drinker and does not wish to lose a drinking buddy. Or, perhaps the boorish, selfish behaviour of an alcoholic has so hurt the relatives that they unconsciously wish for the alcoholic to die.

All these studies are small, but they carry a huge implication: even your current state of mind carries an intention that has an effect on life around you. The mind continues affecting its surroundings whether or not we are consciously sending an intention. To think is to affect. When we are consciously attempting to affect someone else with our thoughts, we may want to search our hearts about our true feelings to ensure that we are not sending tainted love.

These studies also raise the possibility that the thoughts that spill out of us at every moment also affect inanimate objects within our reach. Some people have a reputation for having a positive or negative effect on electronic equipment – they are either an ‘angel’ or a ‘gremlin’. One of the fathers of quantum theory, the brilliant theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, was widely known to possess a powerfully negative force field. Whenever he arrived at his laboratory, mechanisms would freeze, collapse or even be set alight.23

I am a gremlin of the first order. In those rare moments when I am crashing around in a bad mood, all the computers in our office begin crashing in unison. Once, during a day of extreme agitation, after I had broken my computer and printer at home, I headed off for work and tried to work on a variety of computers around my company’s office. One by one, they died in my hands. When one of our laser copier printers also froze the moment I tried to photocopy a page, my team firmly but politely escorted me off the premises.

The late Jacques Benveniste discovered the gremlin effect first hand when he carried out experiments on electromagnetic signalling between cells. From 1991, after his noted ‘memory of water’ studies, Benveniste understood that the basic signalling between molecules was not chemical but electromagnetic. Within a living cell, molecules communicate, not by chemicals but by electromagnetic signalling at low frequencies, and each molecule has its own signature frequency.24

Until the end of his life in 2005, Benveniste explored the possibility that these molecular signals could be transferred simply by using an amplifier and electromagnetic coils. He demonstrated that it was possible to effect a molecular reaction without the presence of the molecule in question simply by playing the molecule’s unique ‘sound’.

One of Benveniste’s many experiments with cellular signalling concerned the interruption of the coagulation of plasma, the yellowish medium of the blood. Ordinarily caused by the presence of calcium in the liquid, the clotting capacity of plasma can be precisely controlled by first chemically removing all existing calcium in the plasma, then adding back particular amounts of the mineral. By also adding heparin, an anticoagulant drug, the plasma is prevented from clotting, even in the presence of calcium.

In his study Benveniste would remove calcium from the plasma and add calcium to water, but instead of adding the actual heparin to the calcium water, he simply exposed the water containing calcium to the ‘sound’ of heparin transmitted through the digitized electromagnetic frequency of heparin that he had discovered. As with all his other experiments, the signature frequency of heparin worked as though the molecules of heparin itself were there: in its presence, the blood was less able to coagulate.

Benveniste had a robot built to carry out this experiment, largely to silence his critics by eliminating the potential bias of human interference. The robot was a box with an arm that moved in three directions, mechanically exposing the water containing calcium to the heparin in several easy steps.

After hundreds of such experiments, Benveniste discovered that it usually worked well except on days that a certain woman – an otherwise experienced scientist – was present. Benveniste suspected that the woman must be emitting some form of waves that were blocking the signals. He developed a means of testing for this, and discovered that the woman emitted powerful, highly coherent electromagnetic fields that appeared to interfere with the communication signalling of his experiment. Somehow, the woman acted as a frequency scrambler. To test this further, he asked the woman to hold a tube of homeopathic granules in her hand for 5 minutes. When he later tested the tube with his equipment, all molecular signalling had been erased.

Since the problem was likely to be electromagnetic, the obvious next step was to protect the machine from EMFs by building a shield. But once the shield was i place, the machine stopped producing good results. Benveniste pondered this development for some days. Perhaps it had to do with positive effects of the environment, and not simply the absence of negative effects. He opened the shield and asked the man who had been in charge of the lab for many years to stand in front of the robot. Immediately, the robot began again to crank out perfect results. As soon as the man left and the shield was put up, the robot no longer produced decent data. This suggested that, just as some people inhibited equipment, others enhanced it. The shield, originally erected to stop negative influences, had blocked positive ones as well.

Benveniste reasoned that the only substance near the robot capable of picking up positive or negative activity was the tube of water, so he asked the head lab technician to hold the tube in his pocket for two hours. He then put the tube into the machine, removed the man from the room and put up the shield. After that, the robot’s experiments worked virtually 100 per cent of the time.25

These anecdotal stories of the gremlin effect are not so farfetched when you consider the mountains of data generated by the PEAR laboratory, demonstrating tha human intention has the ability to make the random output of computers more orderly even when the intention is not conscious or deliberate. Living consciousness might have a major effect on microprocessor technology, which is now exquisitely sensitive. The tiniest disturbances in a quantum process can be highly disruptive. My own gremlin effect appears to be linked to moments of extreme stress or agitation but for some people it may be the very nature of their thought system.

The idea that we can ‘charge’ an inanimate object with our thoughts is the basis of the dark arts of many native cultures, which infuse effigies and voodoo dolls with negative intention and then use them to target enemies. There is a rich tradition of using effigies, but not much scientific study of them. Dean Radin once designed an experiment to test the effectiveness of voodoo dolls as an instrument of positive intention. He constructed a tiny effigy of a person known to a group of volunteers, who then directed their prayers to the doll. The prayers turned out to have demonstrable effects – an instance of benevolent voodoo.26

If we can be unwitting recipients of negative influence, should we take steps to block it or ward it off? Many psychics recommend using visualization to create a mental image of protection, such as imagining yourself in a giant bubble. Marilyn Schlitz and William Braud tested this idea in a variation on their staring studies with 300 volunteers divided into pairs in separate rooms. One member of each pair (the sender) was asked to use a mixture of imagery and self-regulation techniques like relaxation or Autogenic Training to relax or energize themselves. They were then asked to send an intention to reproduce a similar state in their partner (the receiver) which would be recorded with a polygraph pen. Comparisons of the EDA readings of both senders and receivers showed that the senders had an effect – when they were relaxed or activated, so were their receivers.

The receivers were then asked to visualize a variety of images that would act as a psychological ‘shield’ to block the senders’ influences; any image – a shield, a huge concrete wall, a steel fence, pulsating white light – was suitable, so long as it felt protective. These strategies proved highly successful in blocking one of the unwanted influences.27

Then, other scientists from the University of Edinburgh attempted to replicate the EDA studies under more rigorous conditions. The senders alternately attempted to calm or activate the receivers, who were to be open to being influenced for half the session and then to ‘block’ the influence attempt for the other half, by imagining themsleves wrapped up in a ‘shielding cocoon’ or adopting a stubborn and uncooperative frame of mind. Nevertheless, during the times of attempted influence, the receivers recorded the same EDA readings, regardless of whether they were ‘allowing’ or blocking it. If anything, there was a slightly larger effect during the blocking sessions. This suggests that ordinary mental strategies of isolating or protecting ourselves may not be enough to successfully resist unwanted influence.28

Qigong practitioners undergo lengthy training to learn techniques enabling them to ‘disguise’ or make their energy fields temporarily ‘invisible’ in order to ward off unwanted influence. Creating a psychic shield around yourself to prevent a barrage of negative influences – whether from your boss, a well-meaning but interfering professional, that unfriendly neighbour, even the stranger staring at you in the supermarket queue – is likely to require more than an attitude of resistance or a bit of internal imagery.

Larry Dossey once wrote that the most powerful antidote to negative intention was the line in the Lord’s Prayer: ‘deliver us from evil’. I came across another more

ecumenical instance, from the work of Dr John Diamond, who discovered a simple means of grounding yourself against unwelcome influences. Diamond, a psychiatrist and holistic healer, was inspired by George Goodheart, creator of applied kinesiology, which tests the effect of various substances on the body. Goodheart developed the technique of ‘muscle testing’, now a feature of applied kinesiology. He would ask a patient to stand facing him, with her left arm out, parallel to the floor: he placed his left arm on the patient’s shoulder to steady her, and then asked her to resist with all her strength while he pushed on her arm. In most instances, the arm would spring back and resist the force of Goodheart’s push. However when Goodheart exposed that person to noxious substances, such as food additives or allergens, the person’s left arm would be unable to resist the pressure of Goodheart’s push and easily be overcome.

Diamond applied this muscle testing to toxic thoughts. When a person was exposed to any unpleasant thought, the ‘indicator muscle’ would test weak. Diamond called it ‘behavioral kinesiology’ and has tested it on thousands of subjects over many years as a means of instantly taking stock of a person’s thoughts and most secret desires.29

Diamond discovered one thought that could overcome any sort of negative influence, or debilitating idea or situation. He called it a ‘homing thought’, because it reminded him of his youth in Sydney, Australia, swimming in the surf. Whenever a large wave threatened, he and his friends would dive to the bottom of the water and hold on to the sand with their fingertips. ‘We had learned that as soon as we were faced with this situation of stress, we could dive down, grab on to our securing handhold and hang on to our “rock” until the stress passed,’ he writes.30

The homing thought that each of us can hold on to, Diamond realized, was our ultimate aspiration or purpose in life. He has also referred to it as ‘cantillation’: each person’s special gift or talent that not only gives one a sense of joy but also union with the Absolute. The term ‘homing thought’ also reminded him of the direction finder that lost aeroplane pilots use to find their way home. The homing thought can act as a homing beacon for everyone, particularly during the most difficult moments. ‘It holds us steadfast,’ he once wrote, ‘on our course.’

Diamond’s ideas have not been subjected to scientific scrutiny, but the sheer weight of his anecdotal evidence in using behavioural kinesiology on thousands of patients lends them a certain significance. Whenever we are besieged by the darkest of intentions, we might best protect ourselves when holding on to the thought of what we have been born to do.

Note – Chapter 10: The Voodoo Effect

A. Blasband and Gottfried Martin, ‘Biophoton emission in “orgon energy” treated cress seeds, seedlings and Acetabularia’, International Consciousness Research Laborary, ICRL Report No 93.6.
Dossey, Be Careful What You Pray For, op. cit.: 171–2.
Ibid.
Benor, Healing Research, op. cit.: 261.
C. O. Simonton et al., Getting Well Again, New York: Bantam, 1980; B. Siegel, Love, Medicine and Miracles: Lessons Learned about Self-Healin from a Surgeon’s Experience with Exceptional Patients, London: HarperCollins, 1990; A. Meares, The Wealth Within: Self-Help Through a System of Relaxing Meditation, Melbourne, Australia: Hill of Content 1990.
For much of the research detailed in this chapter, I am especially indebted to Larry Dossey and Daniel Benor, who have detailed many of these early studies in their respective books, Dossey’s Be Careful What You Pray For … You Just Might Get It and Benor’s Healing Research, Spiritual Healing and his outstanding, comprehensive website: www.wholistichealingresearch.com.
Benor, Healing Research, op. cit.: 264.
J. Barry, ‘General and comparative study of the psychokinetic effect on a fungus culture’, Journal of Parapsychology, 1968; 32 (94): 237–43.
W. H. Tedder and M. L. Monty, ‘Exploration of a long-distance PK: A conceptual replication of the influence on a biological system’, in W. G. Roll et al. (eds.), Research in Parapsychology, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1981: 90–3. Also see Dossey, Be Careful What You Pray For, op. cit.: 169; Benor, Healing Research, op. cit.: 268–9.
C. B. Nash, ‘Test of psychokinetic control of bacterial mutation’, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1984; 78: 145–52.
Kmetz’s study was described in W. Braud et al., ‘Experiments with Matthew Manning’, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 1979; 50: 199–223. While the study was promising, in his review of it in Healing Research, Benor noted the lack of sufficient detail.
Dossey, Be Careful What You Pray For, op. cit.: 175–6.
Many researchers of alternative medicine maintain the same concerns about studies of Chinese medicine carried out in China. These concerns don’t disregard the strong anecdotal evidence about the effectiveness of Traditional Chinese Medicine, only the scientific method of studies of its effectiveness.
S. Sun and C. Tao, ‘Biological effect of emitted qi with tradescantic paludosa micronuclear technique’, First World Conference for Academic Exchange of Medical Qigong. Beijing, China, 1988: 61E.
Ibid.
Dossey, Be Careful What You Pray For, op. cit.: 176.
D. J. Muehsam et al., ‘Effects of Qigong on cell-free myosin phosphorylation: Preliminary experiments’, Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 1994; 5 (1): 93–108, also reported in Dossey, Be Careful What You Pray For, op. cit.: 177–8.
Ibid.
Benor, Healing Research, op. cit.: 253.
G. Rein, Quantum Biology: Healing with Subtle Energy, Palo Alto, Calif.: Quantum Biology Research Labs, 1992; as reported in Benor, Healing Research, op. cit.: 350–2.
B. Grad, ‘The “laying on of hands”: Implications for psychotherapy gentling and the placebo effect’, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 1967; 61 (4): 286–305.
C. B. Nash and C. S. Nash, ‘The effect of paranormally conditione solution on yeast fermentation’, Journal of Parapsychology, 1967; 31: 314.
Radin, The Conscious Universe, op. cit: 130.
An entire chapter is devoted to Jacques Benveniste in McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 59.
Description of these results from a telephone conversation with Jacques Benveniste, November 10, 2000.
J. M. Rebman et al., ‘Remote influence of the autonomic nervous system by focused intention’, Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 1996; 6: 111– 34.W. Braud and M. Schlitz, ‘A method for the objective study of transpersonal imagery’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1989; 3 (1): 43–63; W. Braud et al., ‘Further studies of the bio-PK effect: Feedback blocking specificity/generality’, in R. White and J. Solfvin (eds.),Research in Parapsychology, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984: 45–8.
C. Watt et al., ‘Exploring the limits of direct mental influence: Two studies comparing “blocking” and “co-operating” strategies’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1999; 13 (3): 515–35.
J. Diamond, Your Body Doesn’t Lie, New York: HarperCollins, 1979.
J. Diamond, Life Energy, New South Wales: Angus & Robertson, 1992: 71.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Praying for Yesterday

ON THE EVE OF THE MILLENNIUM, Leonard Leibovici, an Israeli profes of internal medicine in Israel and expert on hospital-acquired infections, conducted a study of healing prayer’s effect on nearly 4000 adults who had developed sepsis while in the hospital. He set up a strict protocol, using a random number generator to randomize the participants into two groups, only one of which would be prayed for, and throughout the study maintained impeccable blinding; neither the patients nor the hospital staff knew who was getting treated – or indeed even knew that a study was being carried out. The names of all those in the treatment group were then handed to an individual, who said a short prayer for the well-being and full recovery of the treated group as a whole.

Leibovici was interested in comparing three outcomes between the prayed-for and not-prayed-for groups: the number of deaths in hospital; the overall length of stay in hospital; and the duration of fever. When calculating the results, he was careful to employ several statistical measurements to examine the significance of any differences. As it happened, the group that had been prayed for suffered fewer deaths than the controls (28.1 versus 30.2 per cent), although the difference was not statistically significant. What was scientifically significant, however, were major differences between the prayed-for group and the controls related to the severity of illness and the time it took to heal. Those being prayed for had a far shorter duration of fever and hospital stay and, in general, got better faster than the controls.

The subject of Leibovici’s research – the healing effects of prayer – of course was hardly new. But his study offered one novel twist. The patients had been in the hospital between 1990 and 1996. The praying was carried out in 2000 – between 4 and 10 years later.

The study was meant to be a spoof.

The British Medical Journal had published it in its Christmas 2001 issue,1 which is generally reserved for light-hearted commentary, next to a reindeer-shaped cluster of rogue cells. But Leibovici was not joking. He was trying to make a serious point in the most graphic way he could. Leibovici had a particular affinity for mathematics and statistics, and used them repeatedly in his reviews and meta-analyses when evaluating particular procedures. He had even come to believe that diseases and the success of treatment could be predicted through mathematical models.2

But the scientific method, in his view, was being defiled by its careless application to alternative medicine. Two years before, also in the Christmas issue of the BMJ, he had published an article claiming that alternative medicine masquerading as scientific medicine was like a cuckoo chick nestling in a reed warbler’s nest.3

The begging noises of the interloper chick are indistinguishable from its warbler counterparts; indeed, as it grows, the cries of the cuckoo are so loud that they match the noise of eight little warblers. The warbler parents ignore any clues that they have an impostor in their midst and continue to nourish the cuckoo chick – to the detriment, even death, of their own offspring. Leibovici was convinced that alternative medicine could not accommodate the demands of scientific rigour – and that we had no business wasting precious time and resources on the cuckoo in the nest.

But with that article, it seemed that Leibovici was the one wasting his time and breath. Most of his colleagues had missed the point so thoroughly that his only recourse was to show them. Two years later, almost to the day, his prayer study appeared in the BMJ.

He had intended that the study would illustrate that you simply cannot use the scientific method to explain subjective things like prayer. The problem was that every one had taken the study at face value. Dozens of sceptics derided the study. As one correspondent wrote, if it were possible to violate the arrow of time in this way, it would allow one to go back in time and prevent the Holocaust from happening by murdering Hitler.4

In support of Leibovici, many scientists interested in psychical research claimed that the study offered proof that prayer was effective at any point in time: Larry Dossey, who has also written extensively on ‘non-local’ consciousness and healing,5 commented that, in a stroke, Leibovici had turned ‘conventional notions of time, space, prayer, consciousness and causality’ on their heads. 6

Many others commented that Leibovici had been undone by the very meticulousness of his study design. Leibovici’s study had used only one supplicant to carry out the prayers and had sent the same prayer at the same time for each patient in the treatment group, so many of those in the alternative medicine camp did not believe the study suffered from some of the same problems in design as the other prayer research. To all the correspondents, Leibovici retorted in the BMJ letters section:

The purpose of the article was to ask the following question: Would you believe in a study that looks methodologically correct but tests something that is completely out of people’s frame (or model) of the physical world, for example, retroactive intervention or badly distilled water for asthma?7

It was wrong, he was saying, because it had to be wrong. It was statistics tied up in a knot and gone berserk. So that his motive would be clear, he added:

The article has nothing to do with religion. I believe that prayer is a real comfort and help to a believer. I do not believe it should be tested in controlled trials.

Instead, the true purpose was:

To deny from the beginning that empirical methods can be applied to questions that are completely outside the scientific model of the physical world. Or in a more formal way, if the pre-trial probability is infinitesimally low, the results of the trial will not really change it, and the trial should not be performed.

Although he had intended to use science to prove the absurdity of alternative medicine, he had actually ended up proving to many people that we can pray today to affect something that occurred yesterday. Leibovici appeared to deeply regret his study and refused to discuss it further.8

Despite all his efforts throughout his career to apply reason and logic to medicine, this was the study that he would be most remembered for – a study that demonstrated, in effect, that we can go back and change the past.

One of the most basic assumptions about intention is that it operates according to a generally accepted sense of cause and effect: the cause must always precede the effect.

If A causes B, then A must have happened first.

This assumption reflects one of our deepest beliefs, that time is a one-way, forward-moving progression.

This assumption is reinforced every moment of our ordinary lives.

First we order our coffee, then the waitress delivers it to our table.

First we order a book on Amazon, then it arrives in the mail.

Indeed, the most tangible evidence of time’s arrow is the physical evidence of our own ageing; first we are born, then we grow old and die.

Similarly, we believe that the consequence of our intentions can only occur in the future. What we do today cannot affect what happened yesterday.

However, a sizeable body of the scientific evidence about intention violates these basic assumptions about causation. Research has demonstrated clear instances of time-reversed effects, where effect precedes cause.

Leibovici’s study was unique among prayer research in that it was conducted ‘backward in time’ – the healing intention was meant to affect events that had already occurred.

But to many frontier scientists, this experiment in ‘retro-prayer’ simply represented a true-to-life instance of the time-displacement effects regularly seen in the laboratory.

Indeed, some of the largest effects occur when intention is sent out of strict time sequence.

Studies like Leibovici’s offer up the most challenging idea of all: that thoughts can affect other things no matter when the thought is made and, in fact, may work better when they are not subject to a conventional time sequence of causation.

Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne at PEAR discovered this phenomenon when the investigated time displacement in their REG trials. In some 87,000 of these experiments, volunteers were asked to attempt to mentally influence the ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ random output of REGs in a specific direction anywhere from three days to two weeks after the machines had run.

As a whole, the ‘time-displaced’ experiments achieved even greater effects than the standard experiments.9 Jahn and Dunne had deemed these differences non-significant, only because the number of trials carried out in this manner was tiny compared with the rest of their monumental body of evidence.

Nevertheless, the very idea that intention could work equally well whether ‘backward’, ‘forward’ or in sequence, made Jahn realize that all of our conventional notions of time needed to be discarded.10

The fact that effects were even larger during the time-displaced studies suggested that thoughts have even greater power when their transmission transcends ordinary time and space.

Retro-causation has been explored in great detail by Dutch physicist Dick Bierman and his colleague Joop Houtkooper of the University of Amsterdam,11 and later by Helmut Schmidt, an eccentric physicist at Lockheed Martin who created a elegant variation on time-displaced REG remote influence to determine whether someone’s intention could change a machine’s output after it had been run.

He rewired his REG to connect it to an audio device so that it would randomly set off a click that would be audiotaped and heard through a set of headphones by either the left or right ear.

He then turned on the machine and tape recorded their output, ensuring that no one, even himself, was listening.

After making copies of this master tape (again, with no one listening), he locked the master tape away, to eliminate the possibility of fraud, and gave medical students the copies a day later.

The volunteers were asked to listen to the tape and send an intention to have more clicks in their left ears.

Schmidt also created control tapes by running the audio device but not asking anyone to attempt to influence the left–right clicks. As expected, the right and left clicks of the controls were distributed more or less evenly.

Once the participants had finished their attempts to influence the tapes, Schmidt had his computer analyse both the student tapes and the master tape that had been hidden away to see if there was any deviation from the typical random pattern. In more than 20,000 trials carried out between 1971 and 1975, Schmidt discovered a significant result: on both the copies and the masters, 55 per cent had more left-hand than right-hand clicks. And both sets of tapes matched perfectly.

Schmidt believed he understood the mechanism for his improbable results. It wasn’t that his participants had changed a tape after it had been created; their influence had reached ‘back in time’ and influenced the machine’s output at the moment that it was first recorded.12

They had changed the output of the machine in the same way they might have if they had been present at the time it was being recorded. They did not change the past from what it was; they influenced the past when it was unfolding as the present so that it became what it was.

Schmidt continually refined the design of his ‘retro-PK’ studies over 20 years, eventually involving martial arts students, who are trained in mind-control.

In one study, he used a radioactive-decay counter to generate a visual display of random numbers. The students sat in front of this visual display, and attempted mentally to influence the numbers in a particular statistical distribution. Once again, he achieved a highly significant result, with odds against it being a chance occurrence of 1000 to somehow, the intention of the students had reached ‘back in time’ to affect what occurred in the first place.13

Time-displaced intention has also been successfully applied to living things. German parapsychologist Elmar Gruber, of the Institut für Grenzgebiete de Psychologie und Psychohygiene in Freiburg, carried out a series of ingenious experiments examining whether the movement of animals and humans can be influenced after the fact.

His first series of tests concerned gerbils running in activity wheels and moving about within a large cage. A special counter kept track of the number of revolutions in the activity wheel. A beam of light in the cage also had a recording device to note whenever the gerbil made contact with it. Similarly, he asked a group of human volunteers to walk around an area across which he had placed a photobeam, which was also attached to a recorder to note every instance that the volunteers ran into it.

Gruber then converted each revolution of the wheel or contact with the photobeam into a clicking sound. Tapes were made of the clicks, which were copied and stored, again to eliminate fraud.

Between one and six days later, volunteers were asked to listen to the tapes and attempt to mentally influence the gerbils to run faster than normal, or the people to run into the beam more often than usual.

Success would be measured by a greater number of clicks than usual.

Gruber carried out each type of trial 20 times, and in each instance, compared the volunteers’ tapes with tapes made during sessions when the animals and humans were not subjected to the remote influence.

Four of the six batches of trials achieved significant results, and in three of these, the effect size was larger than 0.44.

An effect size is a statistical figure used in scientific research to demonstrate the size of change or outcome. It is arrived at by a number of factors, usually by comparing two groups, one of which has made the change.

An effect size under 0.3 is considered small, between 0.3 and 0.6 is medium, and anything above 0.6 is considered large. Aspirin, considered one of the most successful heart attack preventives of modern times, has an effect size of just 0.032, more than 10 times smaller than Gruber’s overall effect size.

In the case of the activity-wheel gerbil trial, the effect size was a huge 0.7.14 If his results had concerned a drug, Gruber would have discovered one of the greatest lifesavers of all time.

Gruber carried out six more intriguing experiments. In one study he recorded the number of times that people in a Viennese supermarket crossed a photobeam, and then recorded the number of times a photobeam was crossed by cars passing through various tunnels in Vienna during the rush hour.

These again were converted into clicks, and the tapes made of the clicks were stored for one to two months before being played to volunteers, who were asked to influence the speed of the people on foot or in the cars.

This time, he decided to include among his group of influencers some people with psychic ability. He also created similar tapes as controls, which were not exposed to remote intention.

Once again, when compared with sessions that were not subjected to influence, the results were highly significant; all but one of the automobile–tunnel studies had a significant effect size; in two of the studies, the effect sizes (0.52 and 0.74) were enormous.15

Is it possible to retroactively prevent a disease, after it has infected its host and spread? The Chiron Foundation in the Netherlands designed an intriguing study to tes this seemingly impossible proposition.

A large group of rats was randomly divided in two groups, and one group given a parasitic infection of the blood.

The experiment was blinded so that the experimenters themselves did not know which animals were infected and which were controls until after the study was completed. A healer given photographs of the rats after they had been infected with the disease was asked to attempt to prevent the spread of the parasites.

Measurements of the blood cells were taken at several intervals after the animals had been infected. The study was carried out three times, each involving a large number of rats. Two achieved a medium (0.47) effect size.16

Psychologist William Braud then asked one of the most provocative questions of all: is it possible to ‘edit’ one’s own emotional response to an event? To test this, he designed a batch of studies to test time-displaced influence on nervous activity.

He recorded several tracings of the electrodermal activity (EDA) of volunteers, using standard liedetection equipment – a reasonable gauge of whether a person is calm or agitated. Braud then asked the participants to examine one of their own tracings and to attempt to influence it, by sending an intention either to calm down or activate their own sympathetic nervous system at that earlier point in time.

The other tracings of the participants, which were not exposed to mental influence, were to act as controls. Later, when he compared the tracings with controls, he discovered that those tracings that were exposed to the volunteers’ own retro-influence were calmer than the controls.

Overall, these studies achieved a small, significant effect size (0.37), offering some of the first evidence that human beings might be able to rewrite their own emotional history.17

Helmut Schmidt successfully employed a similar study design to change his own prerecorded breathing rate, demonstrating that it is possible to retroactively change your own physical state as well.18

Dean Radin set up an EDA test similar to Braud’s, but added remote distance to a test of retroactive influence.

Two months after running the tests, Radin sent copies of the electrodermal readouts to healers in Brazil and asked them to attempt to quiet the readings. After 21 such studies Radin achieved a 0.47 effect size, similar to Braud’s.19

Radin also tested the possibility that, under certain conditions, a future event can influence an earlier nervous-system response.

He made ingenious use of a strange psychological phenomenon called the ‘Stroop effect’, named after its discoverer, psychologist John Ridley Stroop,20 originator of a landmark test in cognitive psychology.

The Stroop test uses a list of the names of colours (e.g. ‘green’) printed in different coloured inks. Stroop found that when people are asked to read out the name of a colour as quickly as possible, they take much longer if the name of the colour does not match the colour of the ink used (e.g. if the word ‘green’ is printed in red ink) than they do if the name and the colour of the ink match (e.g. if the word ‘green’ is printed in green ink).

Psychologists believe that this phenomenon has to do with the difference in the time it takes the brain to process an image (the colour itself), compared with the time it takes to process a word (the colour name).

Swedish psychologist Holger Klintman devised a variation on the Stroop test Volunteers were asked first to identify the colour of a rectangle as quickly as they could, then asked whether a colour name matched the colour patch they had just been shown.

A large variation occurred in the time it took his volunteers to identify the colour of the rectangle. Klintman discovered that the identification of the rectangle colour was faster when it matched the colour name shown subsequently.21

The time it took for people to identify the colour of the rectangle seemed to depend on the second task of determining whether the word matched the rectangle colour. Klintman called his effect ‘time-reversed interference’. In other words, the later effect influenced the brain’s reaction to the first stimulus.

Radin created a modern version of Klintman’s study. His participants sat in front of a computer screen and identified the colours of rectangles that flashed up on the screen as quickly as possible by typing in their first letter.

The image on the screen would then be replaced by the name of a colour, and the volunteer would then have to type either ‘y’ (yes) to indicate that the name of the colour matched the colour of the rectangle or ‘n’ (no) to indicate a mismatch. Radin varied the second part of the design, so that, after the participant had identified the colour of the rectangle, he or she would also have to type in the first letter of the actual colour of the letters of the colour’s name.

For instance, if the word ‘green’ flashed up but was coloured blue, he or she would have to type in ‘b’.

In four studies of more than 5000 trials, all four showed a retrocausal effect. A significant correlation was observed in two of the studies, with a third marginally significant.22 Somehow, the time it took to carry out the second task was affecting the time it took to carry out the first one.

Radin concluded that his studies offered evidence of a time displacement in the nervous system. The implications are enormous. Our thoughts about something can affect our past reaction times.

One scientifically accepted way to examine the overall power of an effect is to pool the results of all the studies together into what is called a ‘meta-analysis’. Analysed in this manner, 19 of the retroinfluence studies yielded an extraordinary collective result.23

William Braud calculated that the overall effect size was 0.32. Although that is considered a small effect on its own, it represents ten times the effect size for most prescription drugs, such as the beta-blocker propanolol, that are recognized as extremely effective.

A different type of analysis of all the best studies of time displacement was carried out in 1996 by Dick Bierman. In statistics, the best way to judge an effect is to work out how much it deviates from the mean, or average.

One method popular with statisticians is to work out the chi-square distribution, which entails plotting the square of each individual score. Any deviation from chance, whether positive or negative, will show up as a large positive deviation in bold relief.

Bierman detected an enormous variance in individual studies, but collectively they produced results whose occurrence by chance alone was an extraordinary 630 billion to one.24

One interpretation of the laboratory evidence of retro-influence suggests the unthinkable: intention is capable of reaching back down the time line to influence past events, or emotional or physical responses, at the point when they originally occurred.

The central problem of going ‘back to the future’ and manipulating our own past are the logical knots the mind gets tied up in when considering them. As British philosopher Max Black argued in 1956, if A causes B, but occurs after B, B ofte precludes A. Therefore, A cannot cause B.

This conundrum was overlooked in the movie The Terminator.

If the Schwarzenegger cyborg goes back in time and kills Sarah Connor so that she canno give birth to future rebel John Connor, there would be no future revolution between man and machine.

The Terminator no longer has any need to come back in time or, indeed, no longer any purpose for being created.

British philosopher David Wiggins constructed a similar scenario to illustrate the logical problems inherent in the idea of a time machine. Suppose a young man is the grandson of the cruel leader of a fascist movement. He decides to travel back in time to kill his grandfather, to prevent him from taking control. But if he does so, the young man’s mother may not be born and he of course would cease to exist.

Nevertheless, physicists no longer consider retro-causation inconsistent with the laws of the universe. More than 100 articles in the scientific literature propose ways in which laws of physics can account for time displacement.25

Several scientists have proposed that scalar waves, secondary waves in the Zero Point Field, enable people to engineer changes in space-time. These secondary fields, caused by the motion of subatomic particles interacting with the Zero Point Field, are ripples in space-time – waves that can travel faster than the speed of light.

Scalar Field waves possess astonishing power: a single unit of energy produced by a laser in such a state would represent a larger output than all the world’s power plants combined.26

Certain technologies, such as quantum optics, have made use of laser pulses to squeeze the Zero Point Field to such a degree that it creates negative energy.27

It is well accepted in physics that this negative energy, or exotic matter, is able to bend space-time. Many theoreticians believe that negative energy would allow us to travel through wormholes, travel at warp speed, build time machines and even help human beings to levitate.

When electrons are packed densely together, the density of the spray of virtual particles that are constantly created in the Zero Point Field is increased. These spra densities are organized into electromagnetic waves that flow in two directions, and so may be going ‘back and forward’ in time.28

Physicist Evan Harris Walker first proposed that retro-influence can be explained by quantum physics if we just take account of the observer effect.29

Walker and later Henry Stapp, an elementary particle physicist at the University of California at Berkeley, who acted as an independent monitor of Helmut Schmidt’s final martial arts study, believed that a small tweak in quantum theory, making use of ‘nonlinear quantum theory’, could explain all cases of retro-influence. In a linear system such as current quantum mechanics, the behaviour of a system can be easily described: 2 + 2 = 4. The system’s behaviour is the sum of its parts. In a non-linear system, 2 + 2 may equal 5 or even 8. The system’s behaviour is more than a sum of its parts – by how much more we can’t often predict.

In Walker’s and then Stapp’s view, turning quantum theory into a non-linear system would enable them to include one other element in the equation: the human mind. In Schmidt’s martial arts study, the numbers on the visual display remained in their ‘potential’ state of all possible sets of numbers until they had been observed by the students. At that point, the mental intent of the students and the numbers on the display interacted in a quantum way.

According to Stapp, the physical universe exists as a set of ‘tendencies’ with ‘statistical links’ between mental events.

Even though the tape of the numbers has been generated, they divide into a number of channels of all possible outcomes. When a person looks at the numbers, his brain state will also divide into the same number of channels. His intent will select out a particular channel, and through the numbers ‘collapse’ the channels into a single state.30 Human will – our intention – creates the reality, no matter when.

The other possibility is that all information in the universe is available to us at every moment, and time exists as one giant smeared-out present. Braud has speculated that forebodings of the future might be an act of backward time displacement – a future event somehow reaching back in time to influence a present mind. If you simply reversed presentiment and call it backward influence, so that all future mental activity influences the present, you maintain the same model and results as the retro-causation studies.

All precognition might be evidence of backward- acting influence;31 all future decisions may always influence the past.

There is also the possibility that at the most fundamental layer of our existence there is no such thing as sequential time.

Pure energy as it exists at the quantum level does not have time or space, but exists as a vast continuum of fluctuating charge. We, in a sense, are time and space. When we bring energy to conscious awareness through the act of perception, we create separate objects that exist in space through a measured continuum. By creating time and space, we create our own separateness and indeed our own time.

According to Bierman, what appears to be retro-causation is simply evidence that the present is contingent upon future potential conditions or outcomes, and that non-locality occurs through time as well as space. In a sense, our future actions, choices and possibilities all help to create our present as it unfolds. According to the view, we are constantly being influenced in our present actions and decisions by our future selves.

This explanation was bolstered by a simple thought experiment carried out by Vlatko Vedral and one of his colleagues at the University of Vienna: Caslav Brukner, a Serb who had managed to leave Yugoslavia during the civil war and, like Vedral, spent time at Zeilinger’s Viennese lab.

When Brukner joined Vedral in London during a year-long fellowship at Imperial College, he began thinking about quantum computation, and the fact that it is billions of times faster than classical computing. Once a quantum computer is finally perfected it will enable one to scan every last corner of the Internet in half an hour.32

Could this enormous advantage in speed have some basis in Bell’s inequality, the famous test of non-locality? Bell demonstrated that the remote influence maintained between two quantum subatomic particles, even over vast distances, ‘violates’ our Newtonian view of separation in space.

Could this same test be used to show when temporal constraints – the limits governing time – are also violated? Brukner enlisted Vedral to design a thought experiment with him.

Their experiment rested on a given in science about time: in the evolution of a particle, a measurement taken at a certain point will be utterly independent of a measurement taken later or earlier. In this instance, the ‘inequality’ of Bell’s would refer to the difference between the two measurements when taken at different times.

For their experiment, they no longer needed two particles, and so could utterly eliminate the ‘Bob’ particle and concentrate on the photon, ‘Alice’. The task now was to make theoretical calculations of Alice’s polarization at two points of time. If quantum waves behave like a wriggling skipping rope being shaken at one end, the direction in which the rope is pointed is called polarization. To work out their time sequences mathematically, Brukner and Vedral made use of what is called ‘Hilbert’, or abstract, space.

First they calculated Alice’s polarization, then they measured it moments later. When they had finished their calculations of Alice’s current position, they went back and measured her earlier polarization again. They discovered that, between two points of time, Bell’s inequality indeed had been violated; they got a different measurement of the first polarization the second time around. The very act of measuring Alice at a later time influenced and indeed changed how it was polarized earlier.

The implications of their astonishing discovery were not lost on the scientific community. New Scientist included their discoveries in a dramatic cover story: ‘Quantum entanglement: How the future can influence the past’ and concluded: quantum mechanics seems to be bending the laws of cause and effect … entanglement in time puts space and time on an equal footing in quantum theory … Brukner’s result suggests that we might be missing something important in our understanding of how the world works.33

For me, Brukner’s thought experiment held a significance far greater than a simple theoretical one. It showed that instantaneous cause and effect not only occurs through space but also back and possibly forward through time. It offered the first mathematical proof that the actions of every moment influenced and changed those of our past. It may well be that every action we take, every thought we have in the present, alters our entire history.

Even more significantly, his experiment demonstrated the central role of the observer in creating, and indeed changing, reality. Observing had played an integral part in changing the state of the photon’s polarization.

The very act of measuring an entity at one point of time changed its earlier state. This may mean that every observation of ours changes some earlier state of the physical universe. A deliberate thought to change something in our present could also influence our past. The very act of intention, of making a change in the present, may also affect everything that has led to that moment.

This sort of backward influence resembles the non-local correlations found in the quantum world, as if the connections were always there in some underlying arrangement.34 It may be that our future already exists in some nebulous state that we actualize in the present.

This makes sense since subatomic particles exist in a state of potential until observed or thought about. If consciousness operates at the quantum frequency level, it would naturally reside outside space and time, and we would theoretically have access to information – ‘past’ and ‘future’. If humans are able to influence quantum events, they are also able to affect events or moments other than in the present.

Radin discovered more evidence that our psychokinetic influence is operating ‘backwards’ in an ingenious study examining the possible underlying mechanism of intention on the random bits of an REG machine. Radin first ran five REG studie involving thousands of trials, then analysed the experiments through a process called a ‘Markov chain’, which allowed a mathematical analysis of how the REG machine’s output changed over time.

For this process, he made use of three different models of intention: first, as a forward-time casual influence (the mind ‘pushes’ the REG in one direction throughout the influence); second, as a precognitive influence (the mind intuits the precise moment to hit the REG in its random fluctuations to produce the intended result by ‘looking into the future’ and passively ‘bringing back’ this information to the present); and third, as a true retrocausal influence (the mind first sets the future outcome and applies all the chain of events that will produce it ‘backward’ in time).

Radin’s analysis of the data had one inescapable conclusion: this was not a process running forward in time, in an attempt to hit a particular target, so much as an ‘information’ flow that had travelled back in time.35

But just how much of the past could we change in the sticks-and-stones world of real life? William Braud had pondered this issue at length. He once observed that those moments in the past most open to change might be ‘seed’ moments when nature has not made up its mind – perhaps the earliest stages of events before they blossomed and grew into something static and unchangeable.36

These moments were analogous to a sapling that could still be bent and trained before its trunk was too stiff and branches too large; the brain of a child, which is far more open to influence and learning than an adult’s; or even a virus, which is far easier to overcome in its infancy.37

Random events, decisions with equally likely choices, or illness – all probabilistic moments disposed to early influence where human intention could slightly shift the outcome in a certain direction – might comprise the events in our lives most open to retro-influence. Braud referred to them as ‘open’, or labile, systems – those most open to change.

These systems include many of the workings of living things, which are random processes, much like the quantum systems of random-event generators. Any one of a number of the biological processes in living things requires a cascade of processes, which would be sensitive to the kind of subtle effects on REG machinery observed say, in the PEAR research.38

In Braud’s earlier work, he had discovered that remote influence had its greatest effect when there was a strong need for it.39 The necessity of a particular outcome might be the one quality that moves mountains backward in time.

A clue to the extent of our reach was revealed in Schmidt’s discovery of an observer effect in his audio REG experiments that is much like the effect in quantum experiments: it was most important that the person attempting to influence his tapes be the very first listener.

If anyone else heard the tape first and listened with focused attention, it was less susceptible to influence later. A few studies even suggest that observation by any sentient being – human or animal – blocks future attempts at time-displaced influence.

Bierman tested this by rigging up a radioactive source to trigger beeps that were delayed for one second and then observed by a final observer. In about half of the events, another pre-observer was given feedback of this quantum event before the final observer witnessed it. In those instances, the pre-observer’s observation resulted in a collapse of the superposition state of the quantum event while, in the other half of cases, the final observer ‘produced’ the collapse.40

If this consciousness is the crucial ingredient for ‘collapse’ to occur, humans – and their ability to ‘reduce’ reality to limited states – are completely responsible for the idea that time is an arrow in one direction. If our future choice of a particular state is what affects its present ‘collapse’, the reality may be that our future and present are constantly meeting up with each other.

This accords with what is understood about the observer effect in quantum theory – that the first observation of a quantum entity ‘decoheres’, or collapses, its pure state of potential into a single state.41 This rather suggests that, if no one had ever seen Hitler, we might have been able to send an intention to prevent the Holocaust.

Although our understanding of the mechanism is still primitive, the experimental evidence of time reversal is fairly robust. This research portrays life as one giant, smeared-out here and now, and much of it – past, present and future – open to our influence at any moment.

But that hints at the most unsettling idea of all. Once constructed, a thought is lit forever.

Note – Chapter 11: Praying for Yesterday

L. Leibovici, ‘Effects of remote, retroactive intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients with blood stream infection: Randomized controlled trial’, British Medical Journal, 2001; 323 (7327): 1450–1.
S. Andreassen et al., ‘Using probabilistic and decision-theoretic methods in treatment and prognosis modeling’, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 1999; 15 (2): 121–34.
L. Leibovici, ‘Alternative (complementary) medicine: a cuckoo in the nest o empiricist reed warblers’, British Medical Journal, 1999; 319: 1629–32; Leibovici, ‘Effects of remote, retroactive intercessory prayer’, op. cit.
Letters, BMJ Online, December 22, 2003.
L. Dossey, ‘How healing happens: exploring the nonlocal gap’, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 2002; 8 (2): 12–16, 103–10.
B. Oshansky and L. Dossey, ‘Retroactive prayer: A preposterous hypothesis?’ British Medical Journal, 2003; 327: 20–7.
Letters, ‘Effect of retroactive prayer’, British Medical Journal, 2002; 324: 1037.
Correspondence from Liebovici to author, June 28, 2005.
Interview with Jahn and Dunne, July 2005.
R. G. Jahn et al., ‘Correlations of random binary sequences with pre-stated operator intention: a review of a 12-year program’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1997; 11 (3): 345–67.
D. J. Bierman and J. M. Houtkooper, ‘Exploratory PK tests with programmable high speed random number generator’, European Journal of Parapsychology, 1975; 1 (1): 3–14.
R. Broughton, Parapsychology: The Controversial Science, New York: Ballantine Books, 1991: 175–6.
H. Schmidt and H. Stapp, ‘Study of PK with prerecorded random events an the effects of preobservation’, Journal of Parapsychology, 1993; 57: 351.
E. R. Gruber, ‘Conformance behavior involving animal and human subjects’, European Journal of Parapsychology, 1979; 3 (1): 36–50.
E. R. Gruber, ‘PK effects on pre-recorded group behaviour of livin systems’, European Journal of Parapsychology, 1980; 3 (2): 167–75.
F. W. J. J. Snel and P. C. van der Sijde, ‘The effect of retro-active distance healing on Babeia rodhani (rodent malaria) in rats’, European Journal of Parapsychology, 1990; 8: 123–30.
W. Braud, unpublished study, 1993, as reported in W. Braud, ‘Wellness implications of retroactive intentional influence: exploring an outrageous hypothesis’, Alternatives Therapies in Health and Medicine, 2000; 6 (1): 37–48.
H. Schmidt, ‘Random generators and living systems as targets in retro-PK experiments’, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1997; 912 (1): 1–13.D. Radin et al., ‘Effects of distant healing intention through time and space: Two exploratory studies’, Proceedings of Presented Papers: The 41st Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada: Parapsychological Association, 1998: 143–61.
J. R. Stroop, ‘Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions’,Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1935; 18: 643, as cited in D.I. Radin and E. C May, ‘Evidence for a retrocausal effect in the human nervous system’, Boundary Institute Technical Report 2000–1.
H. Klintman, ‘Is there a paranormal (precognitive) influence in certain types of perceptual sequences? Part I and II’,European Journal of Parapsychology, 1983; 5: 19–49 and 1984; 5: 125–40, as cited in Radin and May, Boundary Institute Technical Report, op. cit.
Radin and May, Boundary Institute Technical Report, op. cit.
Braud, ‘Wellness implications’, op. cit.
See http://www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/bierman-metaanalysis. html.
Radin and May, Boundary Institute Technical Report, op. cit.
G. A. Mourou and D. Umstadter, ‘Extreme light’, in ‘The Edge of Physics’ Special edition of Scientific American, 2003; 13 (1): 77–83 updated from May 2002 issue.
L. H. Ford and T. A. Roman, ‘Negative energy, wormholes and warp drive’ in ‘The Edge of Physics’. Special edition ofScientific American, 2003; 13 (1): 85–91 updated from January 2000 issue.
J. A. Wheeler and R. P. Reynman, ‘Interaction with the absorber as the mechanism of radiation’, Reviews of Modern Physics, 1945; 17 (2–3): 157– 81; J. A. Wheeler and R. P. Reynman, ‘Classical electrodynamics in terms o direct interparticle action’, Reviews of Modern Physics, 1949; 21: 425–33.
E. H. Walker, ‘The nature of consciousness’, Mathematical BioSciences, 1970; 7: 131–78.
H. P. Stapp, ‘Theoretical model of a purported empirical violation of the predictions of quantum theory’, Physical Review A, 1994; 50 (1): 18–22.
Braud, ‘Wellness implications’, op. cit.
L. Grover, ‘Quantum computing’, The Sciences, July/August 1999: 24–30.
M. Brooks, ‘The weirdest link’, New Scientist, March 27, 2004; 181(2440): 32–5.
D. Bierman, ‘Do PSI-phenomena suggest radical dualism?’ in S. Hammerof et al. (ed.), Toward a Science of Consciousness II, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998: 709–14.
D. I. Radin, ‘Experiments testing models of mind-matter interaction’ Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2006; 20 (3), 375–401.
Interview with William Braud, October 1999.
W. Braud, ‘Transcending the limits of time’, The Inner Edge: A Resource for Enlightened Business Practice, 1999; 2 (6): 16–18.
R. D. Nelson, ‘The physical basis of intentional healing systems’, Technical Report, PEAR 99001, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research, Princeton New Jersey, January 1999.
Braud, interview with author, October 1999.
D. Bierman ‘Does consciousness collapse the wave packet?’ Mind and Matter, 2003; 1 (1): 45–58.
H Schmidt, ‘Additional effect for PK on pre-recorded targets’,Journal of Parapsychology, 1985; 49: 229–44; ‘PK tests with and without preobservation by animals’, in L. S. Henkel and J. Palmer (eds.), Research in Parapsychology, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1990: 15–19.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Intention Experiment

SEEING ACETABULARIA FOR THE FIRST TIME takes your breath away. T mesmerizing appearance of this common algae of the Caribbean and the Mediterranean has earned a number of poetic nicknames – ‘mermaid’s wineglass’, or ‘sombrerillo’ in Spanish – and both are fitting. Its slender stem supports a tiny cupped sombrero, like a miniature green umbrella ready to be popped into an underwater tropical cocktail.

For more than 70 years, biology students have marvelled over this tiny plant, not simply for its appearance but for a single bizarre fact of its existence. Acetabularia is a freak of nature. From stem to sombrero, the entire plant, measuring up to 5 centimetres, consists of a single cell. Because of this, Acetabularia, unlike most living things, can be counted on to behave predictably.

The large nucleus of the cell always sits at the rhizoid, the base of the stalk, and divides only when the plant has reached its full height. This uncomplicated structure has helped to unmask biology’s greatest mystery: which portion of the plant engineers its ability to reproduce. In the 1930s, the German scientist Joachim Hammerling elected Acetabularia as his perfect ‘tool organism’ to work out the role of a nucleus in plant genetics.

The simplicity of this single-celled organism with its single giant nucleus not only offered up the secrets of the cell in bold relief, it divulged the whole of the building plans of plant life. Working with Acetabularia allowed one to sit in stunned witness to the complex morphology of life within the totality of a single cell, large enough to be visible to the naked eye.

Acetabularia also represented a model organism for my first intention experiment. Fritz Popp, who was to perform the experiment with me, believed that if we were going to attempt to carry out my proposal, we needed to begin on the ground floor. For this first experiment, I planned to assemble a small group of volunteers in London, and ask them to use their intention to affect an organism in Popp’s lab in Germany.

Using Acetabularia for our test subject would be analogous to testing a car made of a single moving part. It removes all the variables of a living thing, with its unfathomable number of chemical and energetic processes occurring at every instant.

Humans, for instance, are like a manufacturing plant covering most of the United States. A septillion chemical reactions occur every second in every tablespoon of our cells, tiny explosions that get multiplied by the 50 million million cells of the average human body. In an experiment comparing, say, the growth rates of two sections of the body, it is almost impossible to control for every variable. Growth rates can be altered by food, water, genetics, mood, or even a sudden dip in air temperature.

During our first intention experiment, Popp intended to examine the alteration in the tiny light being emitted from the algae, which was infinitely more subtle than cellular growth rate. Nonetheless, in multicellular living things, even the light that emanates from each cell is subject to a host of influences: the health of the host, the weather and even the activity of the sun.1 Light can also differ from cell to cell.

With Acetabularia, as the light reassuringly derives from its single nucleus, so it is subject to far less fluctuation. With such a primitive organism, Popp explained, it would be possible to demonstrate, with a fair degree of certainty, that any effect, for better or worse, was entirely the result of our remote influence. Only by using such a simple system could we show that our effect was indisputably due to intention and not a dozen other possibilities.

Generally speaking, an increase of photons indicates that a life form is being stressed and a decrease, that its health has improved. If I sent an intention to make the algae healthier, and the photon count went down, it would likely mean that I was having a good effect. If the photon count went up, it was probable that I was, in some way, harming it.

Popp has a number of extremely sensitive photocount detectors at his disposal, which can register an intensity of visible light of about 10–17 watts per square centimetre, analogous to the light coming from a candle several kilometres away.2 This type of ultrasensitive equipment would enable us to record every single hair’s breath of difference – even by a single photon – and so determine the extent of our influence.

Popp had reason to be cautious. For 30 years he had faced enormous opposition to his bold assertion that light emanates from living things,3 and had finally won respect from the physics community.

He had set up his international community of likeminded scientists from prestigious centres all over the globe to work on biophoton emissions.4 By participating in our experiment, he might risk this hard-won reputation and good will. After all, ultimately I was asking this world-renowned physicist to test whether collective positive thinking could change the physical world.

* * *

The results of a number of experiments had suggested that a ‘group’ consciousness might possibly exist. In their random-event generator experiments, PEAR’s Jahn and Dunne found that the influence of pairs of the opposite sex who knew each other had a powerful complementary effect on the machines – roughly three and a half times that of individuals. Two intensively involved people appeared to create six times the ‘order’ on a random machine. Some couples even produced a ‘signature’ result, which did not resemble the effects they generated individually.5

There was also evidence that a group all intently focused on the same thought registered as a large effect on a REG machine. Roger Nelson, the chief coordinato of the PEAR lab, had come up with the idea of running REG machines continuousl during a particularly engaging event, to examine whether the focused attention of a group had any effect on the random output of the machines.

He and Dean Radin developed what they termed ‘FieldREG’ devices and ra them during a host of events involving the highly focused attention of an audience: intense or euphoric group workshops; religious group rituals; Wagnerian festivals; theatrical presentations; even the Academy Awards. In most instances, their studies showed that multiple minds holding the same intensely felt thought created some kind of deviation from the norm on the equipment.6

Nelson had been fascinated by the possibility of a global collective consciousness. In 1997, he decided to place REGs all over the world, have them ru continuously and compare their output with moments of global events with the greatest emotional impact. For his programme, which became known as the Global Consciousness Project, Nelson organized a centralized computer program, so tha REGs located in 50 places around the globe could pour their continuous stream of random bits of data into one vast central hub through the Internet.

Periodically, Nelson and his colleagues, including Dean Radin, studied these outpourings and compared them with the biggest breaking news stories, attempting to root out any sort o f statistical connection. Standardized methods and analysis revealed any demonstration of order – a moment when the machine output displayed less randomness than usual – and whether the time that it had been generated corresponded with that of a major world event.

By 2006, they had studied 205 top news events, including the death of the Princess of Wales, the millennium celebrations, the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr, and his wife, and the attempted Clinton impeachment. When Nelson analysed four years’ worth of data, a pattern emerged. When people reacted with great joy or horror to a major event, the machines seemed to react as well. Furthermore, the degree of ‘order’ in the machine’s output seemed to match the emotional intensity of the event, particularly those that had been tragic: the greater the horror, the greater the order.7

This trend appeared most notable during the events of 9/11. After the twin towers were destroyed, Nelson, Radin and several colleagues studied the data that had poured in from 37 REGs around the world. Individual statistical analyses were performed by Radin, Nelson, computer scientist Richard Shoup of Boundary Institut and Bryan J. Williams, a psychology undergraduate at the University of New Mexico According to the results of all four analyses, the effect on the machines during the plane crashes was unprecedented.

Out of any moment in 2001, the greatest variance in the machines away from randomness took place that day. The results also represented the largest daily average correlation in output between each machine than at any other time in the history of the project.8 According to the REGs, the world’s mind had reacted with a coherent global horror.

Nelson and three independent analysts took apart the data using a variety of statistical methods. Nelson examined his results through the chi-square distribution method, that statistical technique which plots the square of each of the machine’s runs, so that any deviation from chance easily shows up. All of the analysts concluded that an enormous increase in ‘order’ occurred during time frames relating t o key moments in the drama (such as, shortly before the first tower was struck), which were likely to be the most intense periods of horror and disbelief.9 As REGs are designed to control for electrical disturbances, natural electromagnetic fields or increased levels of mobile phone use, the two scientists were able to discard all those possibilities as potential causes.10

Furthermore, although activity of the REGs was normal in the days leading up to /11, the machines became increasingly correlated a few hours before the first tower was hit, as though there had been a mass premonition. This similarity in output continued for two days after the first strike. Williams thought of it as kind of psychic signature, a giant unconscious psychokinetic effect created by 6 billion minds set to react in unified horror.11

The world had felt a collective shudder several hours before the first plane crash, and every REG machine had heard and duly recorded it.

Although not every analyst agreed with these conclusions,12 Nelson, Radin and several of their colleagues eventually were able to publish a summary of their findings in the prestigious physics journal Foundations of Physics Letters.13

Nelson went on to study other events in the wake of 9/11, including the start of the Iraqi war. He compared REG activity with variations in the approval polls o President George W. Bush, to see if he could discover a connection of any kind between the global ‘mind’ and current American opinions of the president, and whether the REG network reacted most when there were strong feelings of unity and purpose, as the Americans had shared in the wake of 9/11, or when the public mood was polarized, as it had been after the invasion of Iraq and the deposing of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

After examining 556 separate polls between 1998 and 2004, Nelson’s colleague, Peter Bancel, discovered that peaks in variations followed big public changes of opinion of any variety, either for or against the president. Strong emotion, positive or negative – even to presidential decisions – seemed to produce order.

The results of the FieldREG work and the Global Consciousness Project offe several important clues about the nature of group intention. A group mind appears to have a psychokinetic effect on any random microphysical process, even when not focused on the machinery itself.

The energy from a collective, intensely felt thought appears to be infectious. There also appears to be a ‘dose’ effect; the effect on an REG of a load of people thinking the same thought is larger than the effect of a single person. Finally, emotional content or degree of focus is important. The thought has to engulf a group of people in a moment of peak attention, so that every member of the group is thinking the same thought at the same time. A catastrophe is certainly an effective way to snap the mind to attention.

The data from the Global Consciousness Project had one serious limitation However accurately Nelson had taken the temperature of the world mind, his data simply referred to the effect of mass attention.

There had been no intention to cause change. What would happen if a number of people were not simply attending to something but also trying to affect it in some way? If the focused attention of a group has a physical impact on sensitive equipment, does the signal get stronger when the group is actually trying to change something?

The only systematic study of group intention concerns the so-called Maharishi Effect of Transcendental Meditation™ (TM), the technique first introduced by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to the West in the 1960s. Over several decades, the TM organization has carried out more than 500 studies of group meditation, with or without intention, to examine whether meditation has a resonance effect on reducing conflict and suffering.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi postulated that regularly practising TM enabled you to get in touch with a quantum energy field that connects all things. When a group of meditators was large enough, he claimed, their collective meditations caused ‘Super Radiance’, a term in physics used to describe the coherence of laser light.

During TM, the theory went, the minds of meditators all become tuned to the same frequency, and this coherent frequency begins to order the disordered frequencies around it. Resolution of individual internal conflict leads to resolution of global conflict.

The TM studies claimed to demonstrate effects from two types of meditation The first was undirected, the simple consequence of a certain percentage of the population meditating. The second resulted from deliberate intention, and required experience and focus; advanced meditators would target a particular area and direct their meditation to help resolve conflict and lower the rate of violence.

The Maharishi’s theory rests entirely on the premise that meditation has a threshold effect. If 1 per cent of the population of a particular area practises TM, he claims, or the square root of 1 per cent of the population practises TM-Sidhi, a more advanced type of meditation, conflict of any variety – rates of murders, crime, drug abuse, even traffic accidents – goes down.

Some 22 studies have tested the positive impact of the Maharishi Effect on crime levels. One study of 24 US cities showed that whenever a city reached a poin where 1 per cent of the population was carrying out regular TM, the crime rate dropped to 24 per cent. In a follow-up study of 48 cities, those 24 cities with the requisite threshold percentages of meditators (1 per cent of the population) experienced a 22 per cent decrease in crime, and an 89 per cent reduction in the crime trend. In the other 24 cities without the threshold percentage of meditators, crime increased by 2 per cent and the crime trend by 53 per cent.14

In 1993, the TM’s National Demonstration Project focused on Washington DC during a large upsurge of local violent crime in the first five months of the year. Whenever the local Super Radiance group reached the threshold number of 4000, the rate of violent crime fell and continued to fall, until the end of the experiment. The study was able to demonstrate that the effect had not been due to any other factors, such as police efforts or a special anti-crime campaign. After the group disbanded, the crime rate in the capital rose again.15

The TM organization has also targeted global conflict. In 1983 a special TM assembly met in Israel to send intentions through meditation to resolve the Palestinian conflict. During their sessions, they made daily comparisons between the number of meditators working on the project and the state of Arab–Israeli relations. On days with a high number of meditators, fatalities in Lebanon fell by 76 per cent. Their reach apparently extended beyond armed conflict; ordinary violence – local crime, traffic accidents and fires – also all decreased. When analysing their results, the TM group claimed to have controlled for confounding influences such as weather.16

TM adepts have also sought to influence the ‘misery index’ – the sum of inflation and unemployment rates – in the USA and Canada. And indeed, during one concerted effort between 1979 and 1988, the US index fell by 40 per cent and the Canadian index, by 30 per cent.

Another group of adepts sought to influence the monetary growth and crude- materials price indices as well as the American misery index. In this instance, the misery index fell by 36 per cent, and the crude-materials price index fell by 13 per cent. Although the growth rate of the monetary base was affected, it was only by a small margin.17

Critics of TM have argued that these effects could easily have been due to other factors – a reduction in the population of young men, say, or better educational programmes in these areas, or even the ebb and flow of the economy – although the TM organization claims to control for such changes.

The problem with these studies, to my mind, is the controversy surrounding the TM organization itself; rumours now abound about data fixing and the infiltration by Maharishi followers into many scientific organizations.

Nevertheless, the TM evidence is so abundant and the studies so thorough that it is difficult to dismiss them completely. Furthermore, the studies are regularly published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and so must meet some level of scientific rigour and critical scrutiny. The sheer bulk of the research argues compellingly that a force outside the understanding of orthodox science might be at work.

But even if the results are legitimate, the TM studies, like the REG data, mostl concerns group attention. In many instances, the meditators are not people who maintain a focused intention to change something else.

For three months in the first quarter of 1998, forest fires raged out of control in the Amazonian state of Roraima, 1500 miles northwest of Brasilia, devastating the rainforest. It had not rained for months – an effect blamed on El Niño – and the ordinarily humid rainforest was bone dry, perfect kindling for the fire that had by that time scorched 15 per cent of the state.

The rains, usually so copious in this part of Brazil, remained elusive. The UN termed the fire a disaster without precedent on the planet. Water-carrying helicopters and some 1500 firefighters, including recruits from neighbouring Venezuela and Argentina, fought the flames to no avail.

In late March, the weather-modification experts were called in: two Caiapo Indian shamans especially flown to the Yanomami reservation, housing the last of what are believed to be Stone Age tribes. They danced around a bit and prayed, and gathered up a few leaves. Two days later, the heavens opened and it began to pour. Up to 90 per cent of the fire was extinguished.18

The Western equivalent of a rain dance is to hope for good weather, and when carried out as a group intention, it may be just as effective. PEAR’s Roger Nelso carried out an ingenious little study, after realizing that the sun shone on graduation day at Princeton for as long as he could remember.

Had the desire of the community for a sunny commencement day had a powerful local effect?

He had gathered weather reports for the past 30 years in Princeton and the surrounding areas for the times around graduation day and statistically compared them; Princeton was drier than usual for that time of year, and drier and sunnier than surrounding communities for just that day. If the figures were to be believed, the collective wish for good weather by the community of Princeton may have created some sort of mental umbrella that only stretched to their borders during that single day.19

The only other evidence of group mind had been a provocative little double- blind exercise carried out by Dean Radin, who was interested in the claims of Japanese alternative medicine practitioner Masaru Emoto that the structure of water crystals is affected by positive and negative emotions.20

Emoto claims to have carried out hundreds of tests showing that even a single word of positive intent or negative intent profoundly changes the water’s internal organization.

The water subjected to the positive intent supposedly develops a beautiful, highly complex crystalline structure when frozen, whereas the structure of water exposed to negative emotions became random, disordered, even grotesque. The most positive results supposedly occur with feelings of love or gratitude.

Radin placed two vials of water in a shielded room in his laboratory at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, California. Meanwhile, a group of 200 attendees at one of Emoto’s conferences in Japan was shown a photo of the vials and asked to send them a prayer of gratitude.

Radin then froze the water in those vials as well as samples of control water from the same source that had not been exposed to the prayers, and showed the resulting crystals to a panel of independent volunteers. He had carefully blinded the study so that neither he nor his volunteers had any idea which crystals had been grown from the water samples that had been sent intention. A statistically significant number of the volunteer judges concluded that water sent the positive intentions had formed the more aesthetically pleasing crystalline structure.21

Nelson’s Global Consciousness Project effects had been an especially intriguing example of the power of mass thought. In a sense, they showed the same effect captured by Tiller’s equipment in his laboratory. Intention appeared to be raising order in the ground state of the Zero Point Field. But was there a magic threshold effect, as the Maharishi maintained? And how many people were required to constitute a critical mass? According to the Maharishi’s formula – that the square root of 1 per cent of any population practising advanced meditation will have a positive impact – only 1730 advanced American meditators would be required to have a positive influence on the US, and only 8084 to affect the entire world.

Nelson’s work with FieldREGs had suggested that the size of the group was no as important as the intensity of focus; any group, however small, exerted an effect so long as the parties were involved in rapturous attention. But how many people did the group need to exert an effect? How intently focused did we need to be? What were the true limits of our influence – if any? It was time for me to find my own answers.

The original plan for our first intention experiment, as Popp saw it, was to gather a group of experienced meditators in London, and to have them send positive intention to the Acetabularia acetabulum growing in Popp’s IIB laboratory in Neuss Germany.

I was deflated after we had discussed the likely target. For our first experiment, I had wanted to help heal burn victims, to save the world from global warming. Single-celled organisms weren’t exactly my idea of heroics and high drama.

Then I began to research algae, and quickly changed my mind. Vital algae were being killed off as a result of global warming. Scientists have discovered an inexorable rise in ocean temperatures over the past century.

For the past 30 years, coral reefs, the centrepiece of the sea’s ecosystem, have been vanishing off the earth. When oceans warm, the algae hugging coral reefs get sloughed off, and without this protective layer, the coral reefs themselves die. Some 97 per cent of a certain species of coral have disappeared in the Caribbean alone, and the US governmen has recently declared Elkhorn and Staghorn coral to be endangered species.

According to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, body made up of the world’s leading climatologists and other scientists, the predicted level of warming – up to 6°C by the end of this century – will bring on a disaster of biblical proportions: a rise of sea levels by nearly 1 metre; unendurable heat in many parts of the world; a vast increase of vector-born diseases; raging floods and storms. A change upward of six degrees may not seem like much until one takes on board that lowering it by the same amount would bring on another Ice Age.

The key to warding off all the fires and floods appeared to be algae. Algae and other plants are the firefighters of our overheated oceans. Scientists are presently engaged in studying sediments from the ocean floor to see how the oceans cope with rising levels of gases.

They are especially interested in the reaction of marine plants to global warming, as they are the primary shock absorbers of excess carbon dioxide. Algae provide oxygen and other benefits to plant and animal marine life. Algae offer a little wall of protection to the creatures of the sea from the worse excesses of man.

I reconsidered my resistance to Acetabularia as a test subject. Algae might be critical to our survival. The health of most life in the seas depends on these lowly, single-celled creatures, and the seas, like the rainforests, represent the lungs of the earth. As algae goes, so, eventually, do we. Being able to show that mass intention could rescue a sample of algae might demonstrate that our thoughts could combat something as potentially devastating as global warming.

* * *

On 1 March 2006 I travelled to Germany to meet Popp and his colleagues at th IIB laboratory on Museum Island in Hombroich, west of Düsseldorf. The ‘island’s innovative architecture had first been built to serve the eccentric needs of a millionaire art collector turned Buddhist, Karl Heinrich Müller, who had nowhere to house his vast collection of painting and sculpture. He purchased 650 acres from the American military, and then converted a NATO missile site into an open-air museum.

Müller’s ambitions for the island grew to embrace the possibility of an artists’ and writers’ community. He commissioned a sculptor turned architect named Erwin Heerich and gave him a free hand. Heerich created enormous futuristic brick structures – galleries, a concert hall, working spaces and even residences – and ingeniously placed them to best advantage against the bleak landscape. Nothing had been wasted; even the disused metal bunkers and rocket silos had been converted into studios and working spaces for famous German artists, writers and musicians, including Thomas Kling the lyricist and Joseph Beuys the sculptor.

Past a ‘garden’ of buildings of different pastels, the eye alighted on a squat building of interlocking squares on a narrow base, like a giant piece of Lego about to take flight – the new official international site of the IIB. Popp politely accepted the building, when it was first offered to him, but found the open, airy loft, its floor-to- ceiling windows staring out on the vast panorama of Museum Island, completely impractical for his purposes. Before long he set up camp in one of the cramped metal bunkers, left from the raketenstation, whose small dark rooms are more compatible with the work of counting living light.

There I met Popp’s team of eight, which included Yu Yan, a Chinese physicist, Sophie Cohen, a French chemist, and Eduard Van Wijk, a Dutch psychologist. Mos of the cramped rooms contained photomultipliers, large modern boxes attached to computers that count photon emissions. One room housed another smaller room, with a bed and a photomultiplier for human subjects.

The pride of place was reserved for a strange homemade contraption of welded metal circles, resembling a David Smith sculpture of scrap metal, which periodically clanged. That, Popp said with pride, was his first photomultiplier, assembled in 1976 by his student, Bernhard Ruth, and still one of the most accurate pieces of equipment in the field. Indeed, he was convinced that it kept improving with age.

When measuring subtle effects, such as the tiny discharges of light from a living thing, it is important to construct a test that will yield a large enough effect to indicate that something has changed.

Our experimental design had to be so robust, said Popp, that a positive result could not be dismissed by advocatus diaboli, the scientific process of identifying weaknesses in a scientific hypothesis and providing a ready explanation for anomalous effects. Or, as Gary Schwartz had put it, if we heard hoof beats, we first had to eliminate horses before leaping to the conclusion that they belonged to zebras.

In our experimental design, we also had to aim for an ‘on off, on off ’ effect, so that we could isolate any changes as being caused by remote influence. Popp suggested that we have our group send intention intermittently at regular intervals: 10 minutes on, then 10 minutes off, so that we would be ‘running’ intention a few times every hour. If our experiment worked and intention did have an effect, once we plotted our result on a graph it would create an identifiable, zigzag effect.

Popp acquiesced to including dinoflagellates as well as Acetabularia. The light emissions of these fluorescent creatures are extraordinarily responsive to change. As he had seen when they had been placed in shaken water, a change of any sort to which a dinoflagellate is exposed readily shows up as a large shift in emissions of light. I made a further appeal for the use of several subjects.

Each would constitute a separate experiment, and then we would have several results to compare. More than one positive finding would be less likely the result of chance. Finally, the scientists agreed. We also added a jade plant, and a human subject whom Eduard felt he could enlist.

As Popp had concluded during his experiment with Dick Blasband, change o any sort is easier to see with something ill that you try to make well, so we needed to stress some of our subjects in some way. The most obvious way to stress a life form is to place it in a hostile medium.

Eduard and Sophie decided to pour some vinegar into the medium of the dinoflagellates. We could stress the jade plant by sticking a needle through one of its fleshy leaves. Eduard ultimately decided to stress our human subject with three cups of coffee, but I agreed not to disclose this fact to my meditators, to see if they could pick up any psychic information about her. We decided to leave the Acetabularia alone, to test whether our intentions could also affect a healthy organism. To make it simple, our meditators would send intentions for the biophoton emissions of each organism to decrease and for its health and well- being to improve.

The experiment would run at night, between 3 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eduard and Sophie would turn on the equipment, and I would select three half-hour windows within that time frame, unbeknownst to them, to carry out our group intentions. Although it was impossible to conduct a double-blind trial (all of us in London would of course know when we sent our healing intention), we could create ‘singleblind’ conditions and control for experimenter effects, by ensuring that neither our human subject nor the scientists knew when intention was being sent. I would reveal our schedule to them only after the experiment had taken place.

Our study design was constrained by the equipment. A photomultiplier cannot run with the shutter open continually for six hours, so we decided to turn it on from the hour to the half hour, and give it a rest between the half hour and the hour. I would instruct my meditators to send an intention to all four subjects for two 10-minute sessions during the three time windows I’d chosen.

Eduard and Popp planned to look for any qualitative differences in the kind of light being emitted. Any change in the signal or the quantum nature of the photons during the times we were ‘running’ intention would suggest that change had occurred from an outside influence and that we were having an effect.

I took some photos of our subjects and the scientists. Before leaving, I stole a last look at the Acetabularia, growing in small pots in a converted, darkened refrigerator, and the dinoflagellates, which resembled tiny green specks in the water tiny participants about to be stressed, and possibly sacrificed, in the name of science.

A few weeks later, Eduard found a human volunteer in one of his Dutch colleagues, Annemarie Durr,22 a laser biologist and a meditator of long standing. Although rather sceptical of our plan, she was happy to be our first subject. Her agreement to participate was a particularly generous gesture, as it would entail sitting still on a bed in a pitch black room for six hours.

At one of our conferences in mid-March, I asked for volunteers to participate in a first intention experiment from those among our audience who were experienced meditators. I prepared a PowerPoint presentation to brief them on the subjects of our experiment and the experimental protocol, and to reinforce my verbal presentation, and set the day for 28 March at 5:30 p.m., at a university lecture room I had hired for the evening.

That night, there was such a fierce hailstorm when my colleague Nicolette Vuvan and I left our office for the train to central London that we had to take momentary shelter in a doorway.

We were half soaked after battling through a torrent of rain, but I was thrilled with the atmospheric conditions – a dark, stormy night would only aid our activities. Weather this wild often results from geomagnetic or atmospheric disturbance, which I knew enhances psychokinetic effects.

When I checked with America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s website later that evening, I discovered that they noted ‘unsettled’ conditions for the evening, with a fair degree of geomagnetic activity and minor to major storms in space.

Despite the weather, 16 volunteers showed up. I asked them to fill in a collection of forms, which included personal information plus several psychological tests used by Gary Schwartz and Stanley Krippner, including the Arizona Outcome Integrative Scale and the Hartmann Boundary Questionnaire test, to test psychic ability. I wanted as much data as possible in order to gauge whether their state of mind, psychic talent, or health status would have any bearing on our results.

I soon discovered that my volunteers were ideal candidates for an intention experiment. According to the forms they’d filled out for me, they’d meditated for an average of 14 years, and their scores on the psychological tests I’d given them showed that, as a group, they had very thin boundaries, tended toward a highly positive outlook, enjoyed excellent mental, emotional and physical health, and evidenced powerful emotions.

I explained the experiment, offered photographs and details about our four subjects, and then went over the protocol. We would be sending our intentions from 6 to 8:30 p.m. at every hour on the hour to 10 minutes past and from 20 past until the half hour. In between those times we would rest, chat and fill in the forms.

We began at 6 on the dot. As William Tiller had done in his black box experiments, I displayed the intentions in writing on the computer screen as I read them out loud so that all the meditators would be sending exactly the same thought during each meditation.

I led the meditation, directed our focus to each target subject, showing its image on screen, and read aloud the sentence that sent our intention to lower the subject’s biophoton emissions and increase its state of health and well- being.

The shared energy immediately felt tangible and increased in power as the evening carried on. Michael, one of our group members, suggested that we call our algae ‘Dino’ and ‘Tabu’, to establish some relationship with these little organisms. Although no one had any prior experience in telepathy, some participants began to pick up information about our subjects, notably Annemarie.

Several meditators were convinced that she was an amateur singer, and had a recurrent problem with her throat. Isabel thought she might be suffering from gut problems or something gynaecological. Michael, who was German, kept thinking of a termI m schutz der dunkelheit (‘under protection of darkness’), and interpreted it to mean that she was wrapped up in a blanket. Amy said she received a mental image of Annemarie wrapped up in a luxuriously soft blanket on a hard surface and at times asleep. She was also convinced that she had eaten something disagreeable and that her stomach was upset.

Many meditators felt a connection to the jade plant and ‘Tabu’, and Peter had a strong sense that Acetabularia was responding most to the intentions – but with few exceptions the group had the most difficulty establishing any connection with ‘Dino’, and this difficulty increased to the point where most felt no connection at all by the final session.

All of us were infused with a strong sense of purpose and momentarily lost a sense of our individual identities.

By the end of the evening, I had cast out my own doubts about the study and the niggling thought that what we were trying to do was faintly ludicrous. Even though we were not healers, we had all felt as if a healing of sorts had occurred. Whatever had happened in there, I thought, heading back out into the stormy night, I grew certain we’d had some kind of effect.

Several days later, I sent Popp our meditation schedule so that his team could compile our results.

I also spoke with Annemarie. Some of our extrasensory impressions had been correct. It was true she sang as a hobby and periodically suffered with a blocked throat. Although she ordinarily did not especially suffer problems in the gut, she had that night because the three cups of coffee Eduard had asked her to drink upset her stomach. Yet even though coffee late in the afternoon usually agitated her and caused insomnia, on the night of our experiment, she drifted off at various points throughout the six hours of the experiment and slept easily that night. She described tingling bodily sensations she had felt periodically through the evening, and the times of their occurrence corresponded with the first and third sessions that we had been ‘running’ intention. Nevertheless, we had also picked up some ‘noise’: she was not a vegetarian and never listened to or had sung Vivaldi, as a couple of meditators had felt.

When analysing the data, Eduard studied not only the intensity of light but also its deviation from symmetry: normal emissions from a living thing, when plotted on a graph as a bell curve, are perfectly symmetrical. He also looked at any deviations in the kurtosis, or the customary ‘peakedness’, of the distribution. High kurtosis means a bell curve that is high around the middle, or mean.

Again, when emissions are plotted on a graph, the normal peak distribution is 0 – the highs and lows cancel each other out. After examining our 12 block periods – the six times we sent intention and the six periods of rest – he found no change in light intensity. But he did find large changes in the skewness, showing a lack of the customary symmetry (from 1.124 to 0.922), and kurtosis (from 2.403 to 1.581) of the emissions. Something in the light was profoundly altered.

Eduard was excited by the results. They exactly matched those he had observed during his study of healers, when he had tested whether the act of healing has a ‘scatter effect’ on any other living things in the environment where the healing takes place. In the study, when he had placed some algae with a photon counter in the presence of a healer and his patients and measured the photons of the algae during 36 healings, he had been surprised to discover that the photon count distributions of the algae had ‘remarkable’ alterations during the healing rituals. Large shifts in the cyclical components of the emissions had occurred.

His tiny study had suggested that healing caused a shift in the light emissions of everything in its path.23 Now he had discovered the same effect when simple intention was sent by ordinary people from 300 miles away.

On 12 April, Fritz Popp sent me data on the algae, the dinoflagellates and the jade plant. Although a first glance at the numbers had convinced him we had had no effect, he changed his mind once he performed his calculations.

Ordinarily, any stressed living thing will begin to accustom itself to the stress, and its light emissions, although initially large, will naturally begin to decrease as the organism gets used to its new circumstances.

Consequently, in order to work out a true demonstration of the effect of change, Popp had to control for this phenomenon. He worked out mathematically a means of starting from zero, so that any deviation from normal behaviour would readily show up. In this way, he would then be able to determine whether any additional change represented an increase or a decrease in the number of biophoton emissions. The number of emissions he then plotted on his graph reflected any excess increase or decrease from the norm.

In all three instances, our subjects registered a significant decrease in biophotons during the meditation sessions, compared with the control periods. The dinoflagellates had been killed by the acid, in the end (one possible reason why they had been so difficult for our meditators to detect).

Nevertheless, Popp said, their response (a lowering of emissions by nearly 140,000) was significantly different from the normal emissions of a dying organism. Among the survivors, the Acetabularia, the healthy subject, had evidenced a larger effect than the jade plant, perhaps because it was not overcoming a stress (544 emissions lower than normal), whereas with the jade plant (which had 65.5 emissions lower than normal), the stress (the pin) remained in the leaf during the experiment.

He plotted the results on a graph, marking out the portions in red that represented the times of our healing intentions and emailed them to me. We had indeed produced a ‘zigzag’ effect. During meditation, Popp wrote in his report, ‘there is a clear preference of dropping down reactions rather than going up’, which tracked the times of our intentions. With the Acetabularia, we had had an overall decrease over the norm of 573 emissions, and an increase of only 29.

Our little meditation effort had created a major healing effect, a significant decrease in living light. Not only that, but the effect from all that distance was similar to the effect by an experienced healer when healing in the same room. The intention of our group had created the same light as a healer’s.

In many ways, it was a crude first effort. We had, after all, tested four subjects, some stressed and some not, and one had died. We had made use of control periods, but not control subjects. Both Eduard and Popp cautioned me not to take too much notice of it: ‘We have to be sure that these changes in kurtosis and skewness are real. That means that we have to repeat the experiments a couple of times,’ said Eduard. ‘Despite the right tendency of the results,’ wrote Popp, ‘I do not dare to state that it is proof.’

But, despite these caveats, the fact was that we had recorded a significant effect. In the end, achieving a positive result didn’t really surprise me. For more than 30 years Popp, Schlitz, Schwartz and all of their fellow scientists have been amassing unimpeachable evidence in other experiments that has stretched credulity. Frontier research into the nature of human consciousness has upended everything that we have hitherto considered scientific certainty about our world.

These discoveries offer convincing evidence that all matter in the universe exists in a web of connection and constant influence, which often overrides many of the laws of the universe that we used to believe held ultimate sovereignty.

The significance of these findings extends far beyond a validation of extrasensory power or parapsychology. They threaten to demolish the entire edifice of present-day science. The discoveries of Tom Rosenbaum, Sai Ghosh and Anton Zeilinger that quantum effects occur in the world of the tangible could signal an end to the divide in modern physics between the laws of the large and the laws of the quantum particle, and the beginning of a single rule book defining all of life.

Our definition of the physical universe as a collection of isolated objects, our definition of ourselves as just another of those objects, even our most basic understanding of time and space, will have to be recast. At least 40 top scientists in academic centres of research around the world have demonstrated that an information transfer constantly carries on between living things, and that thought forms are simply another aspect of transmitted energy. Hundreds of others have offered plausible theories embracing even the most counter-intuitive effects, such as time-displaced influence, as now consistent with the laws of physics.

We can no longer view ourselves as isolated from our environment and our thoughts the private, self-contained workings of an individual brain. Dozens of scientists have produced thousands of papers in the scientific literature offering sound evidence that thoughts are capable of profoundly affecting all aspects of our lives. As observers and creators, we are constantly remaking our world at every instant. Every thought we have, every judgement we hold, however unconscious, is having an effect. With every moment that it notices, the conscious mind is sending an intention.

These revelations not only force us to rethink what it is to be human, but also how to relate. We may have to reconsider the effect of everything that we think, whether we vocalize it or not. Our relationship with the world carries on, even in our silence.

We must also recognize that these ideas are no longer the ruminations of a few eccentric individuals. The power of thought underpins many well-accepted disciplines in every reach of life, from orthodox and alternative medicine to competitive sport. Modern medicine must fully appreciate the central role of intention in healing. Medical scientists often speak of the ‘placebo effect’ as an annoying impediment to the proof of the efficacy of a chemical agent. It is time that we understood and made full use of the power of the placebo. Repeatedly, the mind has proved to be a far more powerful healer than the greatest of breakthrough drugs.

We will have to reframe our understanding of our own biology in more miraculous terms. We are only beginning to understand the vast and untapped human potential at our disposal: the human being’s extraordinary capacity to influence the world. This potential is every person’s birthright, not simply that of the gifted master. Our thoughts may be an inexhaustible and simple resource that can be called upon to focus our lives, heal our illnesses, clean up our cities and improve the planet. We may have the power as communities to improve the quality of our air and water, our crime and accident statistics, the educational levels of our children. One well- directed thought may be a gentle but effective way for every man and woman on the street to take matters of global interest into their own hands.

This knowledge may give us back a sense of individual and collective power, which has been wrested from us, largely by the current world view espoused by modern science, which portrays an indifferent universe populated by things that are separate and unengaged. Indeed, an understanding of the power of conscious thought may also bring science closer to religion by offering scientific proof of the intuitive understanding, held by most of us, that to be alive is to be far more than an assemblage of chemicals and electrical signalling.

We must open our minds to the wisdom of many native traditions, which hold an intuitive understanding of intention. Virtually all of these cultures describe a unified energy field not unlike the Zero Point Field, holding everything in the universe in its invisible web. These other cultures understand our place in a hierarchy of energy and the value of choosing time and place with care. The modern science of remote influence has finally offered proof of ancient intuitive beliefs about manifestation, healing and the power of thoughts. We would do well to appreciate, as these traditional cultures do, that every thought is sacred, with the power to take physical form.

Both modern science and ancient practices can teach us how to use our extraordinary power of intention. If we could learn how to direct our potential for influence in a positive manner, we could improve every aspect of our world. Medicine, healing, education, even our interaction with our technology, would benefit from a greater comprehension of the mind’s inextricable involvement in its world. If we begin to grasp the remarkable power of human consciousness, we will advance our understanding of ourselves as human beings in all our complexity.

But there are still many more questions to ask about the nature of intention. Frontier science is the art of inquiring about the impossible. All of our major achievements in history have resulted from asking an outrageous question. What if stones fall from the sky? What if giant metal objects could overcome gravity? What if there is no end of the earth to sail off? What if time was not absolute, but depends on where you are? All of the discoveries about intention and remote influence have similarly proceeded from asking a seemingly absurd question: what if our thoughts could affect the things around us?

True science, unafraid to explore the dark passages of our ignorance, always begins with an unpopular question, even if there is no prospect of an immediate answer – even if the answer threatens to overturn every last one of our cherished beliefs. The scientists engaged in consciousness research must constantly put forward unpopular questions about the nature of the mind and the extent of its reach.

In our group experiments, we will be asking the most impossible question of all: what if a group thought could heal a remote target? It is a little like asking, what if a thought could heal the world?

It is an outlandish question, but the most important part of scientific investigation is just the simple willingness to ask the question. As Bob Barth of the Office of Prayer Research commented, when asked whether praye research should continue in the wake of the Benson STEP study: ‘We can’t find the answers if we don’t keep asking the questions.’ That is how we will begin our own experiments – unafraid to ask the question, whatever the answer.

Note – Chapter 12: The Intention Experiment

Interview with Fritz-Albert Popp, March 1, 2006.
F.-A. Popp et al., ‘Further analysis of delayed luminescence of plants’, Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology B: Biology, 2005, 78: 235–44.
For a full description of Popp’s history, see McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.
International Institute of Biophysics, see www.lifescientists.de.
B. J. Dunne, ‘Co-operator experiments with an REG device’, PEA Technical Note 91005, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Princeton, New Jersey, December 1991.
R. D. Nelson et al., ‘FieldREG anomalies in group situations’,Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1996; 10 (1): 111–41; R. D. Nelson et al., ‘FieldREGII: Consciousness field effects: replications and explorations’ Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1998; 12 (3): 425–54.
D. I. Radin, ‘For whom the bell tolls: A question of global consciousness’ Noetic Sciences Review, 2003; 63: 8–13 and 44–5; R. D. Nelson et al. ‘Correlation of continuous random data with major world events’, Foundations of Physics Letters, 2002; 15 (6): 537–50.
D. I. Radin, ‘Exploring relationships between random physical events and mass human attention: Asking for whom the bell tolls’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2002; 16 (4): 533–47.
R. D. Nelson, ‘Coherent consciousness and reduced randomness: Correlations on September 11, 2001’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2002; 16 (4): 549–70.
Ibid.
Bryan J. Williams, ‘Exploratory block analysis of field consciousness effects on global RNGs on September 11, 2001’ (http://noosphere.princeton.edu/williams/GCP911. html).
J. D. Scargle, ‘Commentary: Was there evidence of global consciousness on September 11, 2001?’ Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2002; 16 (4): 571–7.
Nelson et al., ‘Correlation of continuous random data’, op. cit.
M. C. Dillbeck et al., ‘The Transcendental Meditation program and crime rate change in a sample of 48 cities’, Journal of Crime and Justice, 1981; 4: 25–45.
J. Hagelin et al., ‘Effects of group practice of the Transcendental Meditation program on preventing violent crime in Washington, D. C.: Results of the National Demonstration Project, June–July 1993’,Social Indicators Research, 1999; 47 (2): 153–201.
W. Orme-Johnson et al., ‘International peace project in the Middle East: the effects of the Maharishi technology of the unified field’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 1988; 32: 776–812.
K. L. Cavanaugh et al., ‘Consciousness and the quality of economic life empirical research on the macroeconomic effects of the collective practice of Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi program.’ Paper originally presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Management Society, Chicago, March 1989, published in R. G. Greenwood (ed.) Proceedings of the Midwest Management Society, Chicago: Midwest Management Society, 1989: 183–90; K. L. Cavanaugh et al., ‘A multiple input transfer function model of Okun’s misery index: An empirical test of the Maharishi Effect.’ Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Statistical Association, Washington D. C., August 6–10, 1989, an abridged version of the paper appears in Proceedings of the American Statistical Association, Business and Economics Statistics Section, Alexandria, Va.: American Statistical Association, 1989: 565–70; K. L Cavanaugh and K. D. King, ‘Simultaneous transfer function analysis of Okun’s misery index: improvements in the economic quality of life through Maharishi’s Vedic Science and technology of consciousness.’ Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Statistical Association New Orleans, Louisiana, August 22–25, 1988, an abridged version of the paper appears in Proceedings of the American Statistical Association Business and Economics Statistics Section, Alexandria, Va.: American Statistical Association, 1988: 491–6; K. L. Cavanaugh, ‘Time serie analysis of U.S. and Canadian inflation and unemployment: A test of a field-theoretic hypothesis.’ Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Statistical Association, San Francisco, California, August 17–20 1987, published in Proceedings of the American Statistical Association Business and Economics Statistics Section, Alexandria, Va.: American Statistical Association, 1987: 799–804.
Strong rains fall on fire-ravaged Amazon state, March 31, 1998, Web posted at: 6:46 p.m. EST (2346 GMT), Brasilia, Brazil (CNN) http://twm co. nz/.
R. Nelson, ‘Wishing for good weather: a natural experiment in group consciousness’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1997; 11 (1): 47–58.
M. Emoto, The Hidden Messages in Water, New York: Atria, 2005.
Interview with Dean Radin, May 3, 2006.
Not her real name. I’ve changed her name at her request. Nevertheless, our meditators were shown her real name and photo.
R. Van Wijk and E. P. Van Wijk, ‘The search for a biosensor as a witness of a human laying on of hands ritual’, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 2003; 9 (2): 48–55.

PART FOUR

The Experiments

Miracles do not happen in contradiction to nature, but only in contradiction to that which is known in nature. 

-St Augustine

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Intention Exercises

UP UNTIL THIS POINT, The Intention Experiment has been concerned with the scientific evidence of the power of intention. What has not been tested is the extent of this power in the cut and thrust of ordinary life. An inordinate number of books have been written about the power of the human being to manifest his or her reality, and, while they have served up many intuitive truths, they offer little in the way of scientific evidence.

Exactly how much power do we possess to shape and mould our daily lives? What can we use this for, individually and collectively? How much power do we possess to heal ourselves, to live lives of greater happiness and purpose?

This is where I would like to enlist your help. Determining the further practical applications of the power of thought is the purpose of the next portion of this book – the part that involves you as a partner in the research.

Although the power of intention is such that any sort of focused will may have some effect, the scientific evidence suggests that you will be a more effective ‘intender’ if you become more ‘coherent’, in the scientific sense of the term. To do so to greatest effect, or so the scientific evidence suggests, you will need to choose the right time and place, quiet your mind, learn how to focus, entrain yourself with the object of your intention, visualize and mentally rehearse. Believing that the experiment will work is also essential.

Most of us operate with very little in the way of mental coherence. We walk around immersed in a riot of fragmentary and discordant thought. You will become more coherent simply by learning to shut down that useless internal chatter, which always focuses on the past or the future, never the present. In time, you will become adept at quietening down your mind and ‘powering up’, much as joggers train their muscles, and each day find that they can perform a little better than the day before.

The following exercises are designed to help you to become more coherent and so more effective in using intention in your life and in our group intention experiments. These have been extrapolated from what has appeared to work best in the scientific laboratory.

Think of intentions in terms of grand and smaller schemes. Take the grand schemes in stages, so that you send out intentions in steps towards achieving the grand scheme. Also start with modest goals – something realizable within a reasonable timeframe. If you are 40 pounds overweight and your goal is to be a size 8 next week, that is not a realistic timeframe. Nevertheless, keep the grand scheme in mind and build towards it as you gain experience. It is also important to overcome your natural scepticism. The idea that your thought can affect physical reality may not fit your current world paradigm, but nor would the concept of gravity if you were living in the Middle Ages.

Choose Your Intention Space

A number of scientific studies suggest that conditioning your space magnifies the effectiveness of your intentions. Choose a place to carry out your intentions that feels comfortable. Clear away extraneous items and make it personal or appealing, with cushions or comfortable furniture, so that whenever you spend time there you will find it an enjoyable refuge, a place where you can sit quietly and meditate. Use candles, soft lights and incense, if you prefer.

Some people find it helpful to create an ‘altar’ of sorts, as a focal point, with objects or photographs that you find inspirational or particularly meaningful. Even if you are not at home, you may find that you will naturally ‘enter’ your intention space by visualizing it whenever you want to send an intention.

Unless you live in the mountains and can open your windows to clean mountain air, you also may want to install an ionizer in your space to increase the number of negative ions in your environment.

The half-life of ions – which is related to the amount of time that ions maintain their effective radiation – depends on the amount of pollutants in the air. The cleaner the air, the longer the half-life of small ions, if there is a source of ionization (e.g. running water) present. The best levels of ions are:

in the uninhabited country, away from industrialized areas; near running water, whether a shower or a waterfall;
in natural habitats;
in clear sunshine – a natural ionizer; after storms;
in the mountains.

The worst are:

in enclosed spaces with a gathering of a number of people;
near television sets and other such electrical appliances, which can give off electric emissions up to 11,000 volts, exposing anything immediately in range to positive charge;
in cities;near industrial sources; in smog, fog, dust or haze.

As a rule of thumb, the lower the visibility, the lower the ion concentration. Low visibility is due to the presence of a great number of large particles, which air ions readily latch on to. For those among us who are city dwellers, placing plants and some source of water, like an indoor desk fountain, will help to improve ion levels in intention spaces. Keep your space free of electrical gadgets and computers.

Power Up

In order to ‘power up’ to peak intensity, you must first slow your brain waves down to a meditative, or ‘alpha’, state of light meditation or dreaming – when the brain emits frequencies (measured on an EEG machine) of 8–13 hertz (cycles per second).

Sit in a comfortable position. Many people like to sit upright in a hard-backed chair, with their hands placed on their knees. You may also sit on the floor cross- legged. Begin breathing slowly and rhythmically in through the nose and out through the mouth (slowly blow all the air out), so that your in-breath is the same length as your out-breath. Allow the belly to relax so that it slightly protrudes, then pull it back slowly as if you were trying to get it to touch your back. This will ensure that you are breathing through your diaphragm.

Repeat this every 15 seconds, but ensure that you are not overexerting or straining. Carry on for 3 minutes and then keep observing it. Work up to 5 or 10 minutes. Begin to focus your attention just on the breath. Practise this repeatedly, as it will form the basis of your meditative practices.

To enter an alpha state, the most important feature, as any Buddhist understands, is to still the mind. Of course, just thinking about nothing is often virtually impossible.

After entering the state by concentrating on the breath or focusing on a single object, most meditation schools recommend some sort of ‘anchor’, enabling you to keep your chattering mind quiet, so that you are allowed to be more receptive to intuitive information. The usual anchors include focusing on:

the body and its functions, or the breath;

your thoughts, as though they are floating by on a flying carpet, so that they are not ‘you’;

a mantra, such as used in Transcendental Meditation, is usually a ‘word’ such as OM (‘The Field’ in Buddhism), AH (the universal truth of life) or HUM (the physical manifestation of the truth – the universe itself). In the early 1970s, many practitioners of TM were given the mantra AHOM;

numbers, through silent repetitive counting, either backwards or forwards; music – usually something repetitive, such as Bach or chanting;

a single tone, such as that produced by an Australian didgeridoo;

a drum or rattle, the repetitive sounds of which have been used by many traditional cultures to still the mind;

prayer, as with a rosary, since the repetitive sounds still the mind.

Practise until you can comfortably focus on your ‘anchor’ for 20 minutes or more.

Peak Intensity

Powering up involves developing the ability to attend with peak intensity, moment by moment. One of the surest ways to develop this is to practise the ancient art of mindfulness, espoused as long ago as 1000 BC by Shakyamuni Buddha, founder of modern Buddhism. It is a discipline whereby you maintain clear, moment-to- moment awareness of what is happening internally and externally, rather than

in thought.

More than just concentration, mindfulness requires that you police the focus of your concentration and maintain that concentration in the present. With practice, you will be able to silence the constant inner chatter of your mind and concentrate on your sensory experiences, no matter how mundane – whether it is eating a meal, hugging your child, noticing some pain you are experiencing or just picking some lint off your sweater. It is like being a benevolent parent to your mind – selecting what it will focus on and leading it back when it strays.

In time, mindfulness meditation will also heighten your visual perceptions and prevent you from becoming numb to your everyday experience.

One of the difficulties in incorporating mindfulness into ordinary activity is that it is usually taught at retreats, where participants have the luxury of meditating for hours a day or practising mindfulness by engaging in activities, as it were, in ‘slow motion’. Nevertheless, there are ways to adapt many traditional practices for use in your intention meditation.

Once you have achieved your ‘alpha state’, quietly observe whatever manifests in your mind and body as precisely as you can. Be present and attentive to what is, rather than what your emotions tell you, what you wish were the case, or only what is most pleasant. Do not suppress or banish any negative thoughts, if they are true. One good means of harnessing your mind to the present is to ‘come into your body’ and feel your body posture.

It is vital that you distinguish mindfulness from mere concentration. The most important distinction is a lack of judgement or reference point about the experience. You attend to every moment in the present without colouring it with preference for the pleasant or distaste for the unpleasant, or even identifying the experience as something happening to you. There is, in short, no ‘better’ or ‘worse’.

Be aware of all the smells, textures, colours and sensual feelings you are experiencing. What does the room smell like? What taste is in your mouth? What does your seat feel like?

Be mindful of what is happening internally and externally. Whenever you catch yourself judging what you see, think to yourself, ‘I am thinking’, and return to observing with simple attention.

Cultivate the art of simple listening to all sounds in your room: the rumble of a pipe, the honking of a horn, the barking of a dog, a plane flying overhead. Accept all sounds – the noise, chaos or stillness – without judgement.

Notice other sensations in the room: the ‘colour’ of the day, the light in the room, any movement carrying on in front of you, the sensations of quiet.

Try not to try. Work on eliminating your expectations or striving for (and anxiety over) certain results.

Accept all that happens without judgement. This means putting away all opinions and interpretations of what goes on. Catch yourself clinging to certain views, thoughts, opinions and preferences, and rejecting others. Accept your

own feelings and experiences, even the unpleasant ones.

Try never to rush. If you must rush, be present in the rushing. Feel what it feels like.

Developing Mindfulness in Your Daily Life

Even when you are not using intention, the evidence suggests that you will mould your brain to become better at it if you develop mindfulness in your daily life. Psychologist Dr Charles Tart, one of the world’s experts on altered states of consciousness, has a number of suggestions of ways to do so:1

Take periodic breaks during the day in which you have quiet time to be mindful of what is happening internally and externally.

Whenever you feel your concentration flitting away in your daily activities, sense your breath – it will help to ground you.

Be mindful of the most mundane of activities, such as brushing your teeth or shaving.

Start with a small exercise, such as fetching your coat and walking, in which you stay focused completely on what you are doing.

Engage in mental noting, in which you label an ongoing activity, for example ‘I’m putting on my coat’, ‘opening the door’, ‘tying my shoes’.

Use mindfulness in every ordinary situation. When you are preparing dinner or even doing your teeth, be aware of all the smells, textures, colours and sensual feelings you are experiencing.

Learn to really look at your partner and your children, your pets, your friends and work colleagues. Observe them closely during every activity – every part of

them without judgement.

During some activity, such as breakfast, ask your children to be mindful (without speaking) of every aspect of it. Concentrate on the taste of your food. Look closely at the texture and the colours of it. How does the cereal crunch? How does their juice feel as it cascades down their throats? Become aware of the smells and sounds around you. While you are watching all this, how are the different parts of your body feeling?

Listen to what your life sounds like – the myriad noises surrounding you every day. When someone speaks to you, listen to the sound of his or her voice as well as the words. Do not think of a reply until he or she has stopped speaking. Practise mindfulness in every activity: walking down the street, driving home, in the garden.If you are practising these exercises and you happen to bump into someone, do not enter into conversation. Just greet the person, shake hands and stay in the present moment.

Use mindfulness when you are extremely busy or under a tight deadline. Observe what it is like to hurry or to be under the gun and what happens when you do. How does it affect your equilibrium? Be an observer of yourself in that situation. Can you stay in your body while you are working hard?

Practise mindfulness while you are standing in line. Experience the feeling of waiting itself, rather than focusing on what you are waiting for. Be aware of your physical movements and your thoughts.

Do not think about or try to work out your problems. Just deal with whatever daily problem solving is immediately in front of you.

Merging with the ‘Other’

Research shows that touch or even focus on the heart or compassionate feelings for the other is a powerful means of causing brain-wave entrainment between people. When two people touch while focusing loving thoughts on their hearts, the ‘coherent’ heart rhythms of one can entrain the brain of the other.2

Before you set your intention, it may be important to form an empathetic connection with the object of your intention.

Establish connection beforehand by the following techniques:

First send your intention to someone with whom you already have a strong bond

– a partner, a child, a sibling, a dear friend.

With someone you do not know, exchange an object or photograph.

Get to know the person. Go for a walk with them or meet them first.Spend half an hour meditating together first.

Ask the person to be open to receiving your intention when you are sending it. If you are sending an intention to something non-human or inanimate, you can also establish some connection. Find out all you can about the object of your intentions, whether a plant, an animal or an inanimate object. Have it near you for a period before sending your intention. It goes without saying that you should

be nice to it – even if ‘it’ is your computer or photocopier.

Be Compassionate

Use the following methods to encourage a sense of universal compassion during your intention session:

Focus your attention to your heart, as though you are sending light to it. Observe the light spreading from your heart to the rest of your body. Send a loving thought to yourself, such as ‘May I be well and free from suffering.’

On the out breath, imagine a white light radiating outward from your heart. As you do, think: ‘I appreciate the kindnesses and love of all living creatures. May all others be well.’ As Buddhists recommend, first think of all those you love, then your good friends. Move on to acquaintances and finally to those people you actively dislike. For each stage, think: ‘May they be well and free from suffering.’

Concentrate on the kindness and compassion of all living things and their contribution to your well-being. Finally, send your message of compassion to all people and living things on earth.

Practise switching roles with some of your loved ones. Imagine what it is like to be your partner or spouse, your parent, your child. Get inside their shoes and imagine what itwould be like to see the world through their eyes, with their hopes and fears and dreams. Think how you would respond.

Jerome Stone quotes Sogyal Rinpoche, author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying,3 who suggests that we open our hearts every day to the suffering around us, with beggars who pass us by, with the poverty, tragedy and grief we see on our television sets:

Don’t waste the love and grief it arouses; the moment you feel compassion welling up in you, don’t brush it aside, don’t shrug it off and try quickly to return to ‘normal’, don’t be afraid of the feeling or embarrassed by it, allow yourself to be distracted from it or let it run aground in apathy. Be vulnerable; use that quick, bright up rush of compassion; focus on it, go deep into your heart and meditate on it, develop it, enhance and deepen it. By doing this you will realize how blind you have been to suffering …4

During your intention, if you are sending healing to someone, first try to put yourself in his situation. Imagine what it is like to be him and to be faced with his current crisis. Try to feel and have empathy for your receiver’s suffering. Ask yourself how you would feel if you were suffering in this manner and how you would most want to be healed.

Now, direct your loving thoughts to the object of your intention. If he or she is present, hold his or her hand.

Stating Your Intention

In your meditative state, state your clear intention. Although many people use the construction ‘have always been’ – ‘I have always been healthy’ – I prefer the present tense – of sending your intention to its ‘endpoint’ as a wish that has already been achieved. For instance, if you are trying to heal back pain, you can say, ‘My lower back and sacrum are free of all pain and now move easily and fluidly.’ Remember to frame your intention as a positive statement; rather than ‘I will not have side effects’, say, ‘I will be free of side effects’.

Be Specific

Specific intentions seem to work best. Be sure to make your intentions highly specific and directed – and the more detailed, the better. If you are trying to heal the fourth finger of your child’s left hand, specify that finger and, if possible, the problem with it.

State your entire intention, and include what it is you would like to change, to whom, when and where. Use the following as a checklist (as news reporters do) to ensure you have covered every specific: who, what, when, where, why and how. It may help if you draw a picture of it, or create a collage from photos or magazine

pictures. Place this somewhere that you can look at often.

The Mental Dry Run

As with elite athletes, the best way to send an intention is to visualize the outcome you desire with all your five senses in real time. Visualization, or guided imagery, involves using images and/or internal messages to obtain a desired goal. It can be used for any desired outcome – to change or improve your living situation, job, relationships, physical condition or health, state of mind (from negative to positive), outlook on life or even a specific aspect of yourself, including your personality. It can also be used to send intentions to someone else. Self-guided imagery is a little like self-hypnosis.

Plan a mental image of the outcome of your intention well ahead of time. When carrying out visualization, many people believe that you must ‘see’ the exact image clearly in your mind’s eye. But for an intention it isn’t necessary to have a sharp internal image or, indeed, any image at all. It is enough to just think about an intention, without a mental picture, and simply to create an impression, a feeling or a thought. Some of us think in images, others through words, still others through sounds, touch or the spatial relationship between objects. Your mental rehearsal will depend on which senses are most developed in your brain.

For our example of healing back pain, imagine yourself free from pain and doing some sort of exercise or movement you enjoy. See yourself walking agilely, free from pain. Remember, feel the feeling of being pain-free and electrically alive. Imagine the internal and external sensations of your limber back. Feel yourself running free. Choose other sensations that support the healing of your back. If you are sending your intention to heal someone else, carry out all the same aspects of the healing, but imagine yourself inside the other person’s back. Send your intention to his back.

Practise Visualizing

You can practise visualization first by getting into a meditative state and imagining the following, while recalling or imagining as much as you can about the sight and smells, and your feelings about them:

A favourite recent meal (can you remember some of the smells and tastes you really enjoyed?).

Your bedroom. Walk yourself mentally through it, remembering certain details – the feel of your bedspread, the curtains or carpet. You do not have to see the entire room, just get a detail or impression.

A recent happy moment (with a loved one, or a child). Remember the most vivid sensations and images.

Yourself performing an activity such as running, riding a bike, swimming or working out at the gym. Try to feel what it is like for your body to be moving that way.

Your favourite music (try to ‘hear’ the music internally).

A recent experience with an intense physical sensation (such as plunging into a pool or the ocean, having a steam bath,feeling snow or rain, or making love).

Try to relive all of the physical sensations.

To visualize your intention, first work it out carefully ahead of time:

Now, create a picture in your mind’s eye of the desired result. Imagine it as already existing, with you in that situation.

Try to imagine as much sensory detail as you can about the situation (the look, smell and feel of it).

Think about it in a positive, optimistic, encouraging way; use mental statements, or affirmations, that confirm that it has or is now happening (not that it will happen in the future). For instance, for someone with a heart problem, ‘My heart is healthy and well.’

For healing, try to imagine healing energy (perhaps as a white light or as your personal deity) filling you and observe it healing the portion of your body that is ill – say, turning a diseased organ into a healthy one. If a good-versus-evil ‘contest’ is most vivid for you, imagine the ‘hero’ cells battling or eating up the ‘bad guys’. Otherwise, visualize diseased cells or tissue changing into healthy cells, healthy cells replacing diseased cells, or imagine your entire body with that specific body part in perfect health. Visualize yourself often as perfectly healthy, carrying out your daily activities. Find an image of the body part on the Internet or in a book as it looks when it is healthy. Imagine your own body part looking like that.Send out the visualization often, both during meditation and throughout the day.

Belief

The copious evidence of the placebo effect demonstrates the extraordinary power of belief. Belief in the power of intention is also vital. Keep firmly fixed in your mind the desired outcome and do not allow yourself to think of failure. Dismiss any it-won’t-happen-to-me type of thoughts. If you are attempting to affect someone who does not share your belief that it may be of benefit, speak to them about some of the scientific evidence in The Intention Experiment and elsewhere. It is important that both of you share the same beliefs. Herbert Benson believes that his monks were able to achieve their effects because they used words or phrases incorporating their most deeply held beliefs.5

Move Aside

In studies of meditation, mediumship and healing, those who are successful at intention imagine themselves and the person receiving healing as one with the universe. In your meditative state, enter into a zone where you relax your sense of ‘I’ and sense a merging with the object of your intention and The Field. Frame your intention, state it clearly and then let go of the outcome. At this point, you may sense that the intention is taken over by some greater force. Close your internal meditation with a request and then move your own ego aside. Remember: this ‘power’ does not originate with you – you are its conduit. Think of it as a request you are sending to the

universe.

Timing

The evidence suggests that mind-over-matter intention (that is, psychokinesis) works best at points of increased geomagnetic activity. You can find out about the geomagnetic levels in your area by consulting several websites. The US Nationa Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) created a Space Environmen Center (SEC), America’s official source of space weather activity (www.sec.noaa.gov). The SEC, in turn, set up a special Space Weather Operations (SWO) branch to act as a warning centre for the world concerning disturbances in space. Jointly operated by the NOAA and the US Air Force, SWO provides forecast and warnings of solar and geomagnetic activity.

SWO receives its data in real time from a large number of ground-based observatories and satellite sensors around the world. These data enable the SWO to predict solar and geomagnetic activity, and to make worldwide alerts during heavy storms. For the forecast of the day you plan to carry out your intentions, see http://sec.noaa.gov/today2. html.

The SEC has created Space Weather Scales to give lay people an idea of th severity of geomagnetic storms, solar radiation storms and radio blackouts, and their effect on our technological systems (www.sec.noaa.gov/NOAAscales). The numbers attached to them (such as ‘G5’) indicate the level of severity, with 1 being mild and 5 the most severe.

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) was set up as a joint projec by the European Space Agency and NASA to study the effect of the sun on the earth For more information, see http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/.

For other aspects of space weather, including charts of geomagnetic activity, see http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/spaceweather/. This website includes useful charts on geomagnetic activity, solar wind and high-energy proton and X-ray flux.

All geomagnetic activity is measured on a K index, with 0 being the most quiet and 9 the most turbulent. The a index is similar, but uses a larger scale – from 0 to 400.

When you are sending an intention, plan to do so on a day when the K index is 5 or more (or the a index more than 200).

It may also be best to use intention during 1 p.m. local sidereal time (check the web to compute local sidereal time).

Only send intentions on days when you feel happy and well in every way.

Putting It All Together

Your Intention Programme

Enter your intention space. Power up through meditation.

Move into peak focus through mindful awareness of the present.

Get onto the same wavelength by focusing on compassion and making a meaningful connection.

State your intention and make it specific. Mentally rehearse every moment of it with all your senses.

Visualize, in vivid detail, your intention as established fact.

Time it right – check what the sun is doing, and choose days when you feel happy and well.

Move aside – surrender to the power of the universe and let go of the outcome.

Note – Chapter 13: The Intention Exercises

1. See C. T. Tart, ‘Initial application of mindfulness extension exercises in a traditional Buddhist meditation retreat setting, 1995’, unpublished (www. paradigmsys. com/cttart).

2. R. McCraty et al., ‘The electricity of touch: Detection and measurement o cardiac energy exchange between people’, in K. H. Pribram (ed.), Brain and Values: Is a Biological Science of Values Possible? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998: 359–79.

3. S. Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.

4. S. Rinpoche, as quoted in J. Stone, Instructor’s Training Manual, Cours Syllabus: Training in Compassionate-Loving Intention, 2003.

5. H. Dienstfrey, Where the Mind Meets the Body, London: HarperCollins 1991: 39.

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The Intention Experiment (full text) by Lynne McTaggart. In HTML for free access. Part 2 of 4.

This is part 2 of 4.

Thus it’s placement in my blog.

Welcome to the world of quantum physics and how all those things about prayer, intention, and spirituality actually does have a scientific foundation that they are based upon.

CHAPTER THREE

The Two-Way Street

CLEVE BACKSTER WAS AMONG THE FIRST to propose that plants affected by human intention – a notion considered so preposterous that it was ridiculed for 40 years. Backster achieved his notoriety from a series of experiments that purported to demonstrate that living organisms read and respond to a person’s thoughts.

Plant telepathy interested me less than a tangential discovery of his that has been sidelined amid all his adverse publicity: evidence of a constant two-way flow of information between all living things. Every organism, from bacteria to human beings, appears to be in perpetual quantum communication. This relentless conversation offers a ready mechanism by which thoughts can have a physical effect.

This discovery resulted from a silly little diversion in 1966; Backster, at the time a tall, wiry man with a buzz cut and a great deal of childlike enthusiasm, was easily distracted. He often carried on working in his suite of offices when the rest of his staff had gone home and he could finally focus without the constant interruptions of colleagues and the tumultuous daytime activity of Times Square, four storeys below.1

Backster had made his name as the country’s leading lie-detector expert. During the Second World War, he had been fascinated by the psychology of lying, and the use of hypnosis and ‘truth serum’ interrogation in counter-intelligence, and he had brought these twin fascinations to bear in refining the polygraph test to a high psychological art. He had launched his first programme with the CIA for counter- intelligence several years after the war, and then went on to found the Backster School of Lie Detection, still the world’s leading school teaching polygraph techniques some 50 years after it first opened its doors.

One morning in February, after working all night, Backster was taking a coffee break at 7 a.m. He was about to water the Dracaena and rubber plant in his office. As he filled up his watering can, he wondered if it might be possible to measure the length of time it would take water to travel up the stem of a plant from the roots and reach the leaves, particularly in the Dracaena, a cane plant with an especially long trunk. It occurred to him that he could test this by connecting the Dracaena to one of his polygraph machines; once the water reached the spot between the electrodes, the moisture would contaminate the circuit and be recorded as a drop in resistance.

A lie detector is sensitive to the slightest change in the electrical conductivity of skin, which is caused by increased activity of the sweat glands, which in turn are governed by the sympathetic nervous system. The polygraph galvanic skin response (GSR) portion of the test displays the amount of the skin’s electrical resistance, much as an electrician’s ohmmeter records the electrical resistance of a circuit. A lie detector also monitors changes in blood pressure, respiration, and the strength and rate of the pulse. Low levels of electrical conductivity indicate little stress and a

state of calm. Higher electrodermal activity (EDA) readings indicate that the sympathetic nervous system, which is sensitive to stress or certain emotional states, is in overdrive – as would be the case when someone is lying. A polygraph reading can offer evidence of stress to the sympathetic nervous system even before the person being tested is consciously aware of it.

In 1966, the state-of-the-art technology consisted of a set of electrode plates, which were attached to two of a subject’s fingers, and through which a tiny current of electricity was passed. The smallest increases or decreases in electrical resistance were picked up by the plates and recorded on a paper chart, on which a pen traced a continuous, serrated line. When someone lied or in any way experienced a surge of emotion (such as excitement or fear), the size of the zigzag would dramatically increase and the tracing would move to the top of the chart.

Backster sandwiched one of the long, curved leaves of the Dracaena between the two sensor electrodes of a lie detector and encircled it with a rubber band. Once he watered the plant, what he expected to see was an upward trend in the ink tracing on the polygraph recording paper, corresponding to a drop in the leaf ’s electrical resistance as the moisture content increased. But as he poured in the water, the very opposite occurred. The first part of the tracing began heading downward and then displayed a short-term blip, similar to what happens when a person briefly experiences a fear of detection.

At the time Backster thought he was witnessing a human-style reaction, although he would later learn that the waxy insulation between the cells in plants causes an electrical discharge that mimics a human stress reaction on polygraph instruments. He decided that if the plant were indeed displaying an emotional reaction, he would have to come up with some major emotional stimulus to heighten this response.

When a person takes a polygraph test, the best way to determine if he is lying is to ask a direct and pointed question, so that any answer but the truth will cause an immediate, dramatic stress reaction in his sympathetic nervous system: ‘Was it you who fired the two bullets into Joe Smith?’

In order to elicit the equivalent of alarm in a plant, Backster knew he needed somehow to threaten its well-being. He tried immersing one of the plant’s leaves in a cup of coffee, but that did not cause any interesting reaction on the tracing – only a continuation of the downward trend. If this were the tracing of a human being, Backster would have concluded that the person being monitored was tired or bored. It was obvious to him that he needed to pose an immediate and genuine threat: he would get a match and burn the electroded leaf.

At the very moment he had that thought, the recording pen swung to the top of the polygraph chart and nearly jumped off. He had not burned the plant; he had only thought about doing so. According to his polygraph, the plant had perceived the thought as a direct threat and registered extreme alarm. He ran to his secretary’s desk in a neighbouring office for some matches. When he returned, the plant was still registering alarm on the polygraph. He lit a match and flickered it under one of the leaves. The pen continued on its wild, zigzag course. Backster then returned thematches to his secretary’s desk. The tracing calmed down and began to flat-line.

He hadn’t known what to make of it. He had long been drawn to hypnosis and ideas about the power of thought and the nature of consciousness. He had even performed a number of experiments with hypnosis during his work with the Army Counter Intelligence Corps and the CIA, as part of a campaign designed to detect the use of hypnosis techniques in Russian espionage.

But this was something altogether more extraordinary. This plant, it seemed, had read his thoughts. It wasn’t even as though he particularly liked plants. This only could have occurred if the plant possessed some sort of sophisticated extrasensory perception. The plant somehow must be attuned to its environment, able to receive far more than pure sensory information from water or light.

Backster modified his polygraph equipment to amplify electrical signals so that they would be highly sensitive to the slightest electrical change in the plants. He and his partner, Bob Henson, set about replicating the initial experiment. Backster spent the next year and a half frequently monitoring the reactions of the other plants in the office to their environment. They discovered a number of characteristics. The plants grew attuned to the comings and goings of their main caretaker. They also maintained some sort of ‘territoriality’ and so did not react to events in the other offices near Backster’s lab. They even seemed to tune in to Pete, his Doberman Pinscher, who spent his days at the office.

Most intriguing of all, there seemed to be a continuous two-way flow of information between the plants and other living things in their environment. One day, when Backster boiled his kettle to make coffee, he found he had put in too much water. But when he poured the residue down the sink, he noticed that the plants registered an intense reaction.

The sink was not the most hygienic; indeed, his staff had not cleaned the drain for several months. He decided to take some samples from the drain and examine them under a microscope, which showed a jungle of bacteria that ordinarily lives in the waste pipes of a sink. When threatened by the boiling water, had the bacteria emitted a type of mayday signal before they died, which had been picked up by the plants?

Backster, who knew he would be ridiculed if he presented findings like these to the scientific community, enlisted an impressive array of chemists, biologists, psychiatrists, psychologists and physicists to help him design an airtight experiment. In his early experiments, Backster had relied upon human thought and emotion as the trigger for reactions in the plants. The scientists discouraged him from using intention as the stimulus of the experiment, because it did not lend itself to rigorous scientific design. How could you set up a control for a human thought – an intention to harm, say? The orthodox scientific community could easily pick holes in his study. He had to create a laboratory barren of any other living things besides the plants to ensure that the plants would not be, as it were, distracted.

The only way to achieve this was to automate the experiment entirely. But he also needed a potent stimulus. He tried to think of the one act that would stir up the most profound reaction, something that would evoke the equivalent in the plants of dumbfounded horror. It became clear that the only way to get unequivocal results was to commit the equivalent of mass genocide. But what could he kill en masse that would not arouse the ire of anti-vivisectionists or get him arrested? It obviously could not be a person or a large animal of any variety. He did not even want to kill members of the usual experimental population, like rats or guinea pigs. The one obvious candidate was brine shrimp. Their only purpose, as far as he could tell, was to become fodder for tropical fish. Brine shrimp were already destined for the slaughterhouse. Only the most ardent anti-vivisectionist could object.

Backster and Henson rigged up a gadget that would randomly select one of six possible moments when a small cup containing the brine shrimp would invert and tip its contents into a pot of continuously boiling water. The randomizer was placed in the far room in his suite of six offices, with three plants attached to polygraph equipment in three separate rooms at the other end of the laboratory. His fourth polygraph machine, attached to a fixed valve resistor to ensure that there was no sudden surge of voltage from the equipment, acted as the control.

Microcomputers had yet to be invented, as Backster set up his lab in the late sixties. To perform the task, Backster created an innovative mechanical programmer, which operated on a time-delay switch, to set off each event in the automation process. After flipping the switch, Backster and Henson would leave the lab, so they and their thoughts would not influence the results. He had to eliminate the possibility that the plants might be more attuned to him and his colleague than a minor murder of brine shrimp down the hallway.

Backster and Henson tried their test numerous times. The results were unambiguous: the polygraphs of the electroded plants spiked a significant number of times just at the point when the brine shrimp hit the boiling water.

Years after he had made this discovery – and after he became a great fan of Star Wars – he would think of this moment as one in which his plants picked up a major disturbance in the Force, and he had discovered a means of measuring it.2

If plants could register the death of an organism three doors away, it must mean that all life forms were exquisitely in tune with each other. Living things must be registering and passing telepathic information back and forth at every moment, particularly at moments of threat or death.

Backster published the results of his experiment in several respected journals of psychic research and gave a modest presentation before the Parapsychology Association during its tenth annual meeting.3

Parapsychologists recognized Backster’s contribution and replicated it in a number of independent laboratories, notably that of Alexander Dubrov, a Russian doctor of botany and plant physiology.4 It was even glorified in a bestselling book, The Secret Life of Plants.5 But among the mainstream scientific community, his research was disparaged as ludicrous, largely because he was not a traditional scientist, and he was ridiculed for what became known as ‘The Backster Effect’. In 1975, Esquire magazine even awarded him one of its 100 Dubious Achievement Awards: ‘Scientist claims yogurt talks to itself’.6

Nonetheless, over the next 30 years Backster ignored his critics and stubbornly carried on with his research, as well as his polygraph business, eventually amassing file drawers full of studies of what he referred to as ‘primary perception’. A variety of plants that had been hooked up to his polygraph equipment showed evidence of a reaction to human emotional highs and lows, especially threats and other forms of negative intention – as did paramecia, mould cultures, eggs and, indeed, yogurt.7

Backster even demonstrated that bodily fluids such as blood and semen samples taken from himself and his colleagues registered reactions mirroring the emotional state of their hosts; the blood cells of a young lab assistant reacted intensely the moment he opened a Playboy centrefold and caught sight of Bo Derek in the nude.8

These reactions were not dependent on distance; any living system attached to a polygraph reacted similarly to his thoughts, whether he was in the room or miles away. Like pets, they had become attuned to their ‘owner’.

These organisms were not simply registering his thoughts; they were communicating telepathically with all the living things in their environment. The live bacteria in yogurt displayed a reaction to the death of other types of bacteria and even evidenced a desire to be ‘fed’ with more of its own beneficial bacteria. Eggs registered a cry of alarm and then resignation when one of their number was dropped in boiling water. Plants appeared to react in real time to any break in continuity with the living beings in their environment. They even appeared to react at the moment when their caretakers, who were away from the office, decided to return.9

His major difficulty was designing experiments that could demonstrate an effect scientifically. Even though his laboratory experiments were now entirely automated, when he left the office, the plants would remain attuned to him, no matter now far away he went. If Backster and his partner were at a bar a block away during an experiment, he would discover that the plants were not responding to the brine shrimp, but to the rising and falling animation of their conversations. It got so difficult to isolate reactions to specific events that eventually he had to design experiments that would be carried out by strangers in another lab.

Repeatability remained another big problem. Any tests required spontaneity and true intent. He had discovered this when the famous remote viewer Ingo Swann had come to visit him at his lab in October 1971.

Swann wanted to repeat Backster’s initial experiment with his Dracaena. As expected, the plant’s polygraph began to spike when Swann imagined burning the plant with a match. He tried it again, and the plant reacted wildly, then stopped.

‘What does that mean?’ Swann asked. Backster shrugged. ‘You tell me.’

The thought that occurred to Swann was so bizarre that he was not sure whether to say it aloud. ‘Do you mean,’ he said, ‘that it has learned that I’m not serious about really burning its leaf? So that it now knows it need not be alarmed?’

‘You said it, I didn’t,’ Backster replied. ‘Try another kind of harmful thought.’

Swann thought of putting acid in the plant’s pot. The needle on the polygraph again began to zigzag wildly. Eventually, the plant appeared to understand that Swann was not serious. The polygraph tracing flat-lined. Swann, a plant lover who was already convinced that plants were sentient, was nevertheless shocked at the thought that plants could learn to differentiate between true and artificial human intent: a plant learning curve.10

Although certain questions remain about Backster’s unorthodox research methods, the sheer bulk of his evidence argues strongly for some sort of primary responsiveness and attuning, if not sentience, present in all organisms, no matter how primitive. But for my purposes, Backster’s real contribution was his discovery of the telepathic communication carrying on between every living thing and its environment. Somehow, a constant stream of messages was being sent out, received and replied to.

Backster had to wait some years to discover the mechanism of this communication, which became apparent when physicist Fritz-Albert Popp discovered biophotons.11

At first Popp believed that a living organism used biophoton emissions solely as a means of instantaneous, non-local signalling from one part of the body to another – to send information about the global state of the body’s health, say, or the effects of any particular treatment. But then Popp grew intrigued by the most fascinating effect of all: the light seemed to be a communications system between living things.12

In experiments with Daphnia, a common water flea, he discovered that female water fleas were absorbing the light emitted from each other and sending back wave interference patterns, as though they had taken the light sent to themselves and updated it with more information. Popp concluded that this activity may be the mechanism enabling fleas to stay together when they swarm – a silent communication holding them together like an invisible net.13

He decided to examine the light emissions between dinoflagellates, luminescent algae that cause phosphorescence in seawater. These single-celled organisms sit somewhere between an animal and a plant in the evolutionary scale; although they are classified as a plant, they move like a primitive animal. Popp discovered that the light of each dinoflagellate was coordinated with that of its neighbours, as if each were holding aloft a tiny lantern on cue.14

Chinese colleagues of Popp’s who had tried positioning two samples of the algae so that they could ‘see’ each other through a shutter also found that the light emissions from each sample were synchronous. The researchers concluded that they had witnessed a highly sophisticated means of communication. There was no doubt that the two samples were signalling to each other.15

These organisms also appeared to be registering light from other species, although the greatest synchronicities occurred between members of the same species.16

Once the light waves of one organism were initially absorbed by another organism, the first organism’s light would begin trading information in synchrony. 17

Living things also appeared to communicate information with their surroundings. Bacteria absorbed light from their nutritional media: the more bacteria present, Popp found, the greater the absorption of light.18

Even the white and yolk of an egg appear to communicate with the shell.19

This communication carries on, even if an organism is cut into pieces. Gary Schwartz cut up a batch of string beans, placed them between 1 millimetre and 10 millimetres apart, and then used the NSF CCD camera he had borrowed to take series of photographs of the sections. Using software to enhance the light between the beans, he discovered so much light between the sections that it appeared as though the bean were whole again. Even though the string beans had been severed, the individual sections carried on their communication to the rest of the vegetable.20

This may be the mechanism accounting for the feeling described by amputees with phantom limb sensations. The light of the body still communicates with the energetic ‘footprint’ of the amputated limb.

Like Backster, Popp discovered that living things are exquisitely in tune with their environment through these light emissions. One of Popp’s colleagues, Professor Wolfgang Klimek, the head of the Ministry of Research for the German government devised an ingenious experiment to examine whether creatures such as algae were aware of past disturbances in their environment. He prepared two containers of seawater, and shook one of them. After 10 minutes, when the water in the shaken container had settled down, he placed samples of dinoflagellates in the two vessels. Those algae exposed to the shaken water suddenly increased their photon emissions – a sign of stress. The algae appeared to be aware of the slightest change in their environment – even a historical change – and responded with alarm.21

Another of Popp’s colleagues, Eduard Van Wijk, a Dutch psychologist, wondered how far this influence extended. Did a living thing register information from the entire environment, and not simply between two communicating entities? When a healer sends out healing intention, for instance, how far does his field of influence extend? Would he only affect his target, or would his aim have a shotgun effect, affecting other living organisms around the target?

Van Wijk placed a jar of Acetabularia acetabulum, another simple algae, near a healer and his patient, then measured the photon emissions of the algae during healing sessions and periods of rest. After analysing the data, he discovered remarkable alterations in the photon count of the algae. The quality of emissions significantly changed during the healing sessions, as though the algae were being bombarded with light. There also seemed to be changes in the rhythm of the emissions, as though the algae had become attuned to a stronger source of light.

During his initial research, Popp had discovered a strange reaction to light by a living thing. If he shone a bright light on an organism, after a certain delay, the organism would shine more brightly itself with extra photons, as if it were rejecting any excess. Popp called this phenomenon ‘delayed luminescence’, and assumed it was a corrective device to help the organism maintain its level of light at a delicate equilibrium. In Van Wijk’s experiment, the photon emissions of algae showed highly significant shifts from normal, when plotted on a graph. Van Wijk had generated some of the first evidence that healing light may affect anything in its path.22

Gary Schwartz’s associate Melinda Connor then demonstrated that intention has a direct effect on this light. For her study she clipped leaves from geranium plants, carefully matching them in pairs for size, health, placement on the plant and access to light and close to identical photon emissions. She asked each of 20 master energy healers to send intentions to one of each pair of leaves, first to reduce emissions and then to increase them. In 29 of the 38 sessions designed to decrease emissions, the light was significantly lowered in the treatment leaves, and in 22 of the 38 trials intending to increase the light, the healers caused a significantly greater glow.23

Sometimes a physical jolt to the system triggers a shock of realization. For physicist Konstantin Korotkov, his insight resulted from a fall off a roof. It was the winter of 1976, and Korotkov, who was 24 at the time, had been celebrating a birthday with some friends. Korotkov liked to celebrate outside, whatever the weather. He and his friends had been drinking vodka on the roof. Korotkov was given to expansive gestures, and during a moment of gaiety, threw himself off the roof onto what he thought was a deep bed of snow, which he assumed would cushion his fall. But hidden beneath the snow lay hard stone. Korotkov broke his left leg and landed in the hospital for months.24

During his long recovery, Korotkov, a conventional professor of quantum physics at St Petersburg State Technical University in Russia, pondered on a lecture on Kirlian effects and healing that he had attended earlier that year. He had been so intrigued that he wondered if he could improve on what Kirlian claimed to be doing: capturing someone’s life energy on film.

Semyon Davidovich Kirlian was an engineer who had discovered in 1939 tha photographing living things that had been exposed to a pulsed electromagnetic field would capture what many have termed the human ‘aura’. When any conductive object (like living tissue) is placed on a plate made of an insulating material, such as glass, and exposed to high-voltage, high-frequency electricity, a low current results that creates a corona discharge, a halo of coloured light around the object that can be captured on film. Kirlian claimed that the state of the aura reflected the person’s state of health; changes in the aura were evidence of disease or mental disturbance.

The Soviet scientific mainstream ignored Kirlian until the 1960s, when the Russian press discovered bioelectrography, as it came to be called, and hailed him as a great inventor. Kirlian photography suddenly became respectable, particularly in space research, and was championed by many Western scientists. Publication of Kirlian’s first study in 1964 further attracted the scientific community.25

Lying for months in his bed, Korotkov realized that if he was going to discover more about how to capture this mysterious light Kirlian claimed was so vital to health, he was going to have to give up his day job. He knew that the involvement of a well-established quantum physicist such as himself would lend the technique scientific legitimacy and his technical ability might also help advance the technology. Perhaps he could even devise a means of depicting the light in real time.

After he got back up on his feet, Korotkov spent months developing a mechanism, which he called the Gas Discharge Visualization (GDV) technique, that made use of state-of-the-art optics, digitized television matrices and a powerful computer. Ordinarily, a living thing will dribble out the faintest pulse of photons, perceptible only to the most sensitive equipment in conditions of utter pitch black. As Korotkov realized, a better way to capture this light was to stir up photons by ‘evoking’, or stimulating them into an excited state so that they would shine millions of times more intensely than normal.

His equipment blended several techniques: photography, measurements of light intensity and computerized pattern recognition. Korotkov’s camera would take pictures of the field around each of the 10 fingers, one finger at a time. A computer program would then extrapolate from this a real-time image of the ‘biofield’ surrounding the organism and deduce from it the state of the organism’s health.

Korotkov went on to write five books on the human bioenergy field.26

In time, he managed to convince the Russian Ministry of Health of the importance of his invention to medical technology, diagnosis and treatment. His equipment was initially employed to predict certain clinical situations, such as the progress of recovery of people after surgery.27

It soon became widely used in Russia as a diagnostic tool for many illnesses, including cancer and stress,28 and was even used to assess athletic potential – to predict the psychophysical reserves in athletes training for the Olympics and the likelihood of victory or exhaustion from overtraining.29

Eventually, some 3000 doctors, practitioners and researchers worldwide came to use the technology. The National Institutes of Health got interested and funded work on the ‘biofield’, which employed Korotkov’s equipment.30

While officially exploring these practical applications, Korotkov privately carried on with his own studies of what had really captured his imagination: the connection between biofields and consciousness.31

He took GDV readings of healers and a Qigong master while they were sending energy, and discovered remarkable changes in their corona discharges. Korotkov then explored the effects of a person’s thoughts on the people surrounding him. He asked a number of couples to ‘send’ a variety of thoughts to their partners, while they were standing within close range. Every strong emotion – whether love, hate or anger – produced an extraordinary effect on the light discharge of the recipient.32

Some 40 years after Backster first employed his crude polygraph mechanism to register the effect of thoughts, Korotkov verified those early discoveries with state- of-the-art equipment. He hooked up a potted plant to his GDV machine and asked his researchers to think of different emotions – anger, sadness, joy – and then positive and negative intentions towards the plant. Whenever a participant mentally threatened the plant, its energy field diminished. The opposite occurred if people approached the plant with water or feelings of love.

Largely because he lacked scientific credentials, Backster was never recognized for his contributions. He had stumbled across the first evidence that living things engage in a constant two-way flow of information with their environment, enabling them to register even the nuances of human thought. The more advanced scientific knowledge of physicists Fritz Popp and Konstantin Korotkov was needed to uncove the actual mechanism of that communication. Their research into the nature of quantum light emissions from living organisms suddenly made sense of Backster’s

findings. If thoughts are another stream of photons, it is perfectly plausible that a plant could pick up the signals and be affected by them.

The work of Backster, Popp and Korotkov suggested something profound abou the effect of intention. Every last thought appeared to augment or diminish something else’s light.

Notes – Chapter 3: The Two-Way Street

For all history of Cleve Backster’s discoveries and experiments, interview with Backster, October 2004 and his Primary Perception: Biocommunication with Plants, Living Foods, and Human Cells, Anza, Calif.: White Rose Millennium Press, 2003.
As Obi-Wan Kenobe tells Luke Skywalker, after Alderan has been blown up by the Empire in Star Wars part IV: A New Hope: ‘I feel a great disturbance in the Force. As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.’
Presentation given at the Tenth Annual Parapsychology Association meeting in New York City, September 7, 1967. Also published as C Backster, ‘Evidence of a primary perception in plant life’, International Journal of Parapsychology, 1968; 10 (4): 329–48.
P. Dubrov and V. N. Pushkin, Parapsychology and Contemporary Science, New York and London: Consultants Bureau, 1982.
P. Tompkins and C. Bird, The Secret Life of Plants, New York: Harper & Row, 1973.
‘Boysenberry to Prune, Boysenberry to Prune: Do you read me? Li detector expert Cleve Backster reported in the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that he had detected electrical impulses between two containers of yogurt at opposite ends of his laboratory. Backster claims the bacteria in the containers were communicating.’ Esquire, January 1976.
Backster, ‘Evidence of a primary perception’, op. cit.
Backster, Primary Perceptions, op. cit.: 112–13.
Backster, Primary Perceptions. See also Rupert Sheldrake, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and Other Unexplaine Powers of Animals, London: Three Rivers Press, 2000.
This and other personal details of events resulted from interviews with Ingo Swann, New York, July 2005.
See McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 39 for a full description of F.-A. Popp’s earlier work.
All details of these experiments resulted from an interview between the author and Fritz-Albert Popp, January 2006.
R. M. Galle et al., ‘Biophoton emission from Daphnia magna: A possible factor in the self-regulation of swarming’, Experientia, 1991; 47: 457–60; R. M. Galle, ‘Untersuchungen zum dichte und zeitabhängigen Verhalten der ultraschwachen Photonenemission von pathogenetischen Weibchen des Wasserflohs Daphnia magna.’ Dissertation. Universität Saarbrücken, Fachbereich Zoologie, 1993.
F.-A. Popp et al., ‘Nonsubstantial biocommunication in terms of Dicke’s Theory’, in M. W. Ho, F.-A. Popp and U. Warnke (eds.), Bioelectrodynamics and Biocommunication, Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 1994: 293–317; J. J. Chang et al., ‘Research on cel communication of P. elegans by means of photon emission’, Chinese Science Bulletin, 1995; 40: 76–9.
J. J. Chang et al., ‘Communication between Dinoflagellates by means o photon emission’, in L. V. Beloussov and F.-A. Popp (eds.), Proceedings of International Conference on Non-equilibrium and Coherent Systems in Biophysics, Biology and Biotechnology, Sep. 28–Oct. 2 1994, Moscow: Bioinform Services Co., 1995: 318–30.
Interview with Popp, Neuss, Germany, March 1, 2006.
F.-A. Popp et al., ‘Mechanism of interaction between electromagnetic fields and living organisms’, Science in China (Series C), 2000; 43 (5): 507–18.
Ibid.
L. Beloussov and N. N. Louchinskaia, ‘Biophoton emission from developing eggs and embryos: Nonlinearity, wholistic properties and indications of energy transfer’, in J. J. Chang et al. (eds.), Biophotons, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998: 121–40.
K. Creath and G. E. Schwartz, ‘What biophoton images of plants can tel us about biofields and healing’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2005; 19 (4): 531–50.
A. V. Tschulakow et al., ‘A new approach to the memory of water’, Homeopathy, 2005; 94: 241–7.
E. P. A. Van Wijk and R. Van Wijk, ‘The development ofa bio-sensor for the state of consciousness in a human intentional healing ritual’, Journal of International Society of Life Information Science (ISLIS,) 2002; 20 (2): 694–702.
M. Connor, ‘Baseline testing of energy practitioners: Biophoton imaging results.’ Paper presented at the North American Research in Integrative Medicine conference, Edmonton, Canada, May 2006.
Personal details about K. Korotkov the result of multiple interviews with the author, November–March 2005–2006.
S. D. Kirlian and V. K. Kirlian, ‘Photography and visual observation by means of high frequency currents’, J. Sci. Appl. Photogr., 1964; 6: 397– 403.
Korotkov’s most important work on the subject was K. Korotkov, Human Energy Field: Study with GDV Bioelectrography, New Jersey: Backbone Publishing Co., 2002; K. Korotkov, Aura and Consciousness – New Stage of Scientific Understanding, St Petersburg: St Petersburg Division of the Russian Ministry of Culture, State Publishing Unit ‘Kultura’, 1999.
K. Korotkov et al., ‘Assessing biophysical energy transfer mechanisms in living systems: The basis of life processes’, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2004; 10 (1): 49–57.
L. W. Konikiewicz and L. C. Griff,Bioelectrography – A new method for detecting cancer and body physiology, Harrisburg, Va.: Leonard Associates Press, 1982; G. Rein, ‘Corona discharge photography of human breast tumour biopsies’, Acupuncture & Electrotherapeutics Research, 1985; 10: 305–8; K. Korotkov et al., ‘Stress diagnosis and monitoring with new computerized “Crown-TV” device’, Journal of Pathophysiology, 1998; 5: 227.
P. Bundzen et al., ‘New technology of the athletes’ psycho-physical readiness evaluation based on the gas-discharge visualisation method in comparison with battery of tests’, ‘SIS-99’ Proceedings, International Congress St Petersburg, 1999: 19–22; P. V. Bundzen, et al., ‘Psychophysiological correlates of athletic success in athletes training for
the Olympics’, Human Physiology, 2005; 31 (3): 316–23; K. Korotkov et al., ‘Assessing biophysical energy transfer mechanisms’, op. cit.
Clair A. Francomano and Wayne B. Jonas, in Ronald A. Chez (ed.) Proceedings: Measuring the Human Energy Field: State of the Science. The Gerontology Research Center, National Institute of Aging, Nationa Institutes of Health, Baltimore, Maryland, April 17–18, 2002.
S. Kolmakow et al., ‘Gas discharge visualization technique and spectrophotometry in detection of field effects’, Mechanisms of Adaptive Behavior, Abstracts of International Symposium, St Petersburg, 1999: 79.
Interview with K. Korotkov, March 2006.

CHAPTER FOUR

Hearts that Beat as One

NONE OF THE SCIENTISTS INVOLVED IN ‘The Love Study’ remember who came up with its name. It might have started as Elisabeth Targ’s private joke, for the study involved couples who were installed in two different rooms and separated by a hallway, three doors, eight walls and several inches of stainless steel.1

The name was actually meant to be a gracious nod to the study’s arcane benefactor, the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love at Case Western Reserve As it happened, the study became a posthumous valentine to Targ, who was diagnosed with a fatal brain tumour just before the grant money came through. The Love Study would be a fitting tribute to Targ, as the first major scientific demonstration of exactly how intention physically affects its recipient, and the name proved especially apt in describing this process. When you send an intention, every major physiological system in your body is mirrored in the body of the receiver. Intention is the perfect manifestation of love. Two bodies become one.

Targ began her career as a mainstream psychiatrist, but made her name in 1999 with two remarkable studies at California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) in Sa Francisco, which tested the possibility of remote healing with end-stage AIDS patients. Targ spent months designing her trial. She and her partner, psychologist and retired hospital administrator Fred Sicher, sought out a homogeneous group of advanced AIDS patients with the same degree of illness, including the same T-cell counts and number of AIDS-defining illnesses. Because they wished to test the effec of distant healing, and not any particular healing modality, they decided to recruit highly experienced, successful healers from diverse backgrounds who might represent an array of approaches.

Targ and Sicher gathered together an eclectic mix of healers from all across America – from orthodox Christians to Native American shamans – and asked them to send healing thoughts to a group of AIDS patients under strict double-blind conditions. All healing was to be done remotely so that nothing, such as the presence of a healer or healing touch, could confound the results. Targ created a strict double- blind rota: each healer received sealed packets with information about the patients to be healed, including their name, photo and T-cell counts. Every other week, the healers were assigned a new patient and asked to hold an intention for the health and well-being of the patient an hour a day for six days, with alternate weeks off for rest. In this manner, eventually every patient in the healing group would be sent healing by every healer in turn.

At the end of the first study, although 40 per cent of the control population died, all 10 of the patients in the treatment group were not only alive but far healthier in every regard.

Targ and Sicher repeated the study, but this time, doubled the size of their study population and tightened their protocol even further. They also widened their brief of

the outcomes they planned to measure. In the second study, those sent healing were again far healthier on every parameter tested: significantly fewer AIDS-defining illnesses, improved T-cell levels, fewer hospitalizations, fewer visits to the doctor, fewer new illnesses, less severity of disease and better psychological well-being. The differences were decisive; for instance, the treatment group had six times fewer AIDS-defining illnesses and four times fewer hospitalizations at the end of the study than the controls.2

In Targ’s original studies, the healing had been carried out by highly experienced, successful healers who had been chosen because they possessed a special gift. After the studies were completed, Targ grew interested in whether an ordinary individual could be similarly trained to use intention effectively.

For the Love Study, Targ found a sympathetic partner in Marilyn Schlitz, the vice president for research and education at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) The energetic blonde had a colourful national reputation because of her meticulously designed parapsychology studies and their spectacular results, which attracted the attention of the senior powers in consciousness research as well as the New York Times. During a long partnership with psychologist William Braud, Schlitz had conducted rigorous research into what became known in the psychic community as ‘DMILS’ – direct mental interaction with living systems – the ability of human thought to influence the living world around it.3

Throughout her career in parapsychology, Schlitz had been fascinated by remote influence; she was one of the first to examine the effect of intention in healing, and went on to assemble a vast database of healing research for IONS.

For the Love Study, Schlitz recruited Dean Radin, her IONS senior researche and one of America’s most renowned parapsychologists. Radin was to design both the study and some of its equipment; with his background in engineering and psychology he would ensure that both the study protocol and its technical detail were pristine. Targ enlisted Jerome Stone, a nurse and practising Buddhist who had worked with her on the AIDS studies, to design the intention programme and train the patients.

In 2002, after Targ died, Schlitz and the others vowed to carry on with the study and recruited Ellen Levine, one of Targ’s colleagues from CPMC, to take her place and work with Stone as joint principal investigators.

The Love Study was to follow the basic study design of a perennial favorite among consciousness researchers: the sense of being stared at.4

In those studies, two people are isolated from each other in separate rooms and a video camera is trained on the receiver, who is also hooked up to skin conductance equipment, not unlike a polygraph machine – the type used in lie detection studies to detect an increase in ‘fight-or-flight’, unconscious autonomic nervous system activity. At random intervals, the ‘sender’ is instructed to stare at the subject on the monitor, while the ‘receiver’ is told to relax and try to think of anything other than the prospect of being stared at. A later comparison analysis determines whether the receiver’s autonomic system registered a reaction during those moments he or she was being stared at to determine whether the mere attention of the sender was unconsciously picked up by the most automatic systems of the receiver’s body.

Schlitz and Braud’s body of evidence on remote staring, conducted over 10 years, showed exactly such an effect. All the studies had been combined into a review that was published in a major psychology journal. The review concluded that the effects had been small but significant.5

The Love Study’s design was also inspired by the major DMILS studies conducted since 1963, which demonstrated that, under many types of circumstances, the electrical signalling in the brains of people gets synchronized.6

The frequencies, amplitudes and phases of the brain waves start operating in tandem. Although the studies followed slightly different designs, all of them asked the same question: can the stimulation of one person be felt in the higher central nervous system of another? Or, as Radin liked to think of it, after a sender gets pinched, does the receiver also feel the ‘ouch’?7

Two people wired up with a variety of physiological monitoring equipment, such as EEG machines, were isolated from each other indifferent rooms. One would be stimulated with something – a picture, a light or a mild electric shock. The researchers would then examine the two EEGs to determine if the receiver’s brain waves mirrored those of the sender when he or she was being stimulated.

The earliest DMILS research had been designed by psychologist an consciousness researcher Charles Tart, who carried out a series of brutal studies to determine whether people could empathetically feel another person’s pain. He administered shocks to himself, while a volunteer, isolated in a different room and hooked up to an array of medical gadgetry, was being monitored to see if his sympathetic nervous system somehow picked up Tart’s reactions. Whenever Tart jolted himself, the receiver registered an unconscious empathetic response in decreased blood volume and increased heart rate – as though he were also getting the shocks.8

Another fascinating early study had been carried out with identical twins. As soon as one twin closed his eyes and his brain electrical rhythms slowed to alpha waves, the other twin’s brain also slowed, even though his eyes were wide open.9

Harald Walach, a German scientist at the University of Freiburg, tried an approach that was guaranteed to magnify the sender’s effects, in order to maximize the response in the receiver. The sender was shown an alternating black-and-white checkerboard, called a ‘pattern reversal’, which is known to trigger predictable, high-amplitude electrical brain waves in viewers. At the same instant, the EEG of the distant, shielded receiver recorded identical brain-wave patterns.10

Neurophysiologist Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, had used this same protocol a decade before Walach but with a different twist: with light flashes rather than patterns as the stimulus. In this study, the particular patterns of firing in the brain of the sender, evoked by the light, turned out to be mirrored in the brain of the receiver, who was sitting in an electrically shielded room 14.5 metres away. Grinberg-Zylberbaum also discovered that an important condition determined success: the synchrony only occurred among pairs of participants who had met and established a connection by spending 20 minutes with each other in meditative silence.11

In earlier work, Grinberg-Zylberbaum had discovered that brainwave synchrony occurred not only between two people, but between both hemispheres of the brains of both participants, with one important distinction: the participant with the most cohesive quantum wave patterns sometimes set the tempo and tended to influence the other. The most ordered brain pattern often prevailed.12

In the most recent DMILS study, in 2005, a group of researchers from Basty University and the University of Washington gathered 30 couples with strong emotional and psychological connections and also a great deal of experience in meditation. The pairs were split up and placed in rooms 10 meters away from each other, with an EEG amplifier wired up to the occipital (visual) lobe of the brain of each participant. The moment each sender was exposed to a flickering light, he attempted to transmit an image or thought about the light to the partner. Of the 60 receivers tested, 5 of them, or 8 per cent, were shown to have significantly higher brain activation during times their partner ‘sent’ their visual images.13

The Washington researchers then selected five pairs of the participants who had scored a significant result, wired them up to a functional MRI, which measures minuscule changes in the brain during critical functions, and asked them to repeat the experiment. During the times the thought was ‘transmitted’, the recipients experienced an increase in blood oxygenation in a portion of the visual cortex of the brain. This increase did not occur when the sending partner was not being visually stimulated.14

The Bastyr researchers replicated their study, this time with volunteers highly experienced in meditation, and got some of the strongest correlations between senders and receivers of all the studies thus far.

The Bastyr study represented a major breakthrough in research on direct mental influence. It demonstrated that the brain-wave response of the sender to the stimulus is mirrored in the receiver, and that the stimulus in the receiver occurs in an identical place in the brain as that of the sender. The receiver’s brain reacts as though he or she is seeing the same image at the same time.

A final extraordinary study examined the effect of powerful emotional involvement on remote influence. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh studied and compared the EEGs of bonded couples, matched pairs of strangers, and several individuals with no partner but who nevertheless thought they were being paired off and having their brain waves compared. Everyone who had been paired off, whether he knew his partner or not, displayed increased numbers of brain waves in synchrony. The only participants who did not demonstrate this effect were those who had no partner.15

Radin carried out a variation of this experiment, attaching pairs who had close bonds – couples, friends, parents and their children. In a significant number of instances, the EEGs of the senders and receivers appeared to synchronize.16

In designing the Love Study, Schlitz and Radin also had been influenced by other research showing that, during acts of remote influence, the recipient’s EEG waves mirror those of the sender. In a number of studies of healing, the EEG waves of the patient synchronize with those of the healer during moments when healing energy is being ‘sent’.17

Brain mapping during certain types of healing, such as bioenergy, also shows evidence of brain-wave synchrony. 18

In many instances, when one person is sending focused intention to another, their brains appear to become entrained.

Entrainment is a term in physics which means that two oscillating systems fall into synchrony. It was coined in 1665 by the Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens, after discovering that two of his clocks with pendulums standing in close approximation to each other had begun to swing in unison. He had been toying with the two pendulums and found that even if he started one pendulum swinging at one end, and the other at the opposite end, eventually the two would swing in unison.

Two waves peaking and troughing at the same time, are considered ‘in phase’, or operating in synch. Those peaking at opposite times are ‘out of phase’. Physicists believe that entrainment results from tiny exchanges of energy between two systems that are out of phase, causing one to slow down and the other to accelerate until the two are in phase. It is also related to resonance, or the ability of any system to absorb more energy than normal at a particular frequency (the number of peaks and troughs in one second). Any vibrating thing, including an electromagnetic wave, has its own preferential frequencies, called ‘resonant frequencies’, where it finds vibrating the easiest. When it ‘listens’ or receives a vibration from somewhere else, it tunes out all pretenders and only tunes into its own resonant frequency. It is a bit like a mother instantly recognizing her child from among a mass of school children. Planets have orbital resonances. Our sense of hearing operates through a form of entrainment: different parts of a membrane of the inner ear resonate to different frequencies of sound. Resonance even occurs in the seas, such as in the tidal resonance of the Bay of Fundy in the northeast end of the Gulf of Maine, near Nova Scotia.

Once they march to the same rhythm, things that are entrained send out a stronger signal than they do individually. This most commonly occurs with musical instruments, which sound amplified when all playing in phase. At the Bay of Fundy, the time required for a single wave to travel from the bay’s mouth to its opposite end and back is exactly matched by the time of each tide. Each wave is amplified by the rhythm of each tide, resulting in some of the highest tides in the world.

Entrainment also occurs when someone sends a strong intention to cause harm, which became evident in the tohate experiments of Mikio Yamamoto of the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba and the Nippon Medical School in Tokyo. Tohate is a kind of mental stand-off between two Qigong practitioners, one of whom receives a sensory shock and is eventually made to submit and move back several yards without any physical contact from the other. The central question posed by the technique, in Yamamoto’s mind, was whether the effect of tohate is psychological or physical: does the opponent move back because of psychological intimidation, or is he knocked over by the qi of his opponent?

In the first of Yamamoto’s studies, a Qigong master was isolated in an electromagnetically shielded room on the fourth floor of a building, while his student was similarly isolated on the first floor.

Yamamoto signalled for the master to perform ‘qi emission’ over 80 seconds at random intervals. Each time, he tracked their separate movements – the sending of the qi and the start of the pupil’s recoil. In nearly a third of the 49 such trials – a highly significant result – whenever the master engaged in tohate movements, his opponent in the other room was physically knocked back. In a second set of 57 trials, Yamamoto wired both teacher and pupil to EEG machines. Whenever the master emitted qi, his pupil showed an increase in the number of alpha brain waves in his right frontal lobe, suggesting that this was where the body initially receives the intention ‘message’.

Yamamoto’s final set of trials examined the EEG-recorded brain waves of both master and student.

Whenever the master performed tohate, the beta brain waves of both men demonstrated a greater sense of coherence.19

In an earlier study carried out by the Tokyo group, the brain waves of the receiver and sender became synchronized within one second during tohate.20

Besides resonance, the DMILS studies offered evidence of another phenomenon during intention: the receiver anticipated the information by registering the ‘ouch’ a few moments before the pinch occurred in the sender.

In 1997, in his former laboratory at the University of Nevada, Radin discovered that humans may receive a physical foreboding of an event.

He set up a computer that would randomly select photos designed to calm, to arouse, or to upset a participant. His volunteers were wired to physiological monitors that recorded changes in skin conduction, heart rate and blood pressure, and they sat in front of a computer that would randomly display colour photos of tranquil scenes (landscapes), or scenes designed to shock (autopsies) or to arouse (erotic materials).

Radin discovered that his subjects were registering physiological responses before they saw the photo. As if trying to brace themselves, their responses were highest before they saw an image that was erotic or disturbing.

This offered the first laboratory proof that our bodies unconsciously anticipate and act out our own future emotional states and that the nervous system does not merely cushion itself against a future blow, but also works out the emotional meaning of it.21

Dr Rollin McCraty, executive vice-president and director of research for the Institute of HeartMath, in Boulder Creek, California was fascinated by the idea of shared physical foreboding of an event, but wondered where exactly in the body this intuitive information might first be felt. He used the original design of Radin’s study with a computerized system of randomly generated arousing photos, but hooked up his participants to a greater complement of medical equipment.

McCraty discovered that these forebodings of good and bad news were felt in both the heart and brain, whose electromagnetic waves would speed up or slow down just before a disturbing or tranquil picture was shown. Furthermore, all four lobes of the cerebral cortex appeared to take part in this intuitive awareness. Most astonishing of all, the heart appeared to receive this information moments before the brain did. This suggested that the body has certain perceptual apparatus that enables it continually to scan and intuit the future, but that the heart may hold the largest antenna. After the heart receives the information, it communicates this information to the brain.

McCraty’s study had shown certain fascinating differences between the sexes. Both the heart and brain became entrained with each other earlier and more frequently in women than they did in men. McCraty concluded that this offered scientific evidence of the universal assumption that women are naturally more intuitive than men and more in touch with their heart centre.22

McCraty’s conclusion – that the heart is the largest ‘brain’ of the body – has now gained credibility after research findings by Dr John Andrew Armour at the University of Montreal and the Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur in Montreal.

Armou discovered neurotransmitters in the heart that signal and influence aspects of higher thought in the brain.23 McCraty discovered that touch and even mentally focusing on the heart cause brain-wave entrainment between people.

When two people touched while focusing loving thoughts on their hearts, the more ‘coherent’ heart rhythms of the two began to entrain the brain of the other.24

Armed with this new evidence about the heart, Dean Radin and Marilyn Schlit decided to explore whether remote mental influence extended to anywhere else in the body. An obvious place to explore was the gut. People speak about intuition as a ‘gut instinct’ or ‘gut feeling’. Certain researchers have even referred to the gut as a ‘second brain’.25

Radin wondered if a gut instinct was accompanied by an actual physical effect.

Radin and Schlitz gathered 26 student volunteers, paired them, and this time wired them up to an electrogastrogram (EGG), which measures the electrical behaviour of the gut; monitors on the skin usually closely match the frequencies and contractions of the stomach. Although the Freiburg study had shown otherwise, Radin and Schlitz believed that familiarity could only help to magnify the effects of remote influence. In case some sort of physical connection was indeed important, Radin asked all the participants to exchange some meaningful object first.

Radin put one participant from a pair in one room. The other sat in another, darkened room, attached to an electrogastrogram, viewing live video images of the first person. Images periodically flashed on another monitor, accompanied by music designed to arouse particular emotions: positive, negative, angry, calming or just neutral.

The results revealed another example of entrainment – this time in the gut.

The EGG readings of the receiver were significantly higher and correlated with those of the sender when the sender experienced strong emotions, positive or negative. Here was yet more evidence that the emotional state of others is registered in the body of the receiver – in this case, deep in the intestines – and that the home of the gut instinct is indeed the gut itself.26

This latest evidence was further proof that our emotional responses are constantly being picked up and echoed in those closest to us.27 In every one of these studies, the bodies of the pairs had become entrained or ‘entangled’ as Radin called it;28 the recipients were ‘seeing’ or feeling what their partners actually saw or felt, in real time.

As this research intimates, intention might be an attunement of energy. The DMILS research established that, under certain conditions, the heart rate, the arousa of the autonomic nervous system, the brain waves and the blood flow to the extremities of different people all become entrained, even when they are situated at a distance. Nevertheless, in most of the DMILS studies, the correlated respons resulted from a simple stimulation of the sender, which the recipient unconsciously picked up. Except for one instance, no one attempted to influence another person.

Schlitz and Radin now wanted to find out whether they would achieve similar correlations if the sender were actually sending an intention to heal. For the Love Study, Schlitz and her colleagues decided to recruit ordinary individuals and train them in healing techniques. They wondered whether certain conditions were more favourable than others for achieving entrainment.

Many healing studies intimated that motivation, interpersonal connection and a shared belief system were vital to success.

Grinberg-Zylberbaum believed that a ‘transferred potential’, as he termed this form of entrainment, occurred only among those who had undergone some meditative regime and then only after some sort of psychic connection between sender and receiver had been established. Nevertheless, in the Freiberg study, many of the pairs had never met each other and had not had a chance to establish a bond.

The German researchers had concluded that ‘connectedness’ and mental preparation may play a role, but were not crucial. In Schlitz’s view, motivation was a key component of success. The more urgent the situation, such as would occur with a partner suffering from cancer, the more motivated his or her partner would be in attempting to get him or her well.

Schlitz and her fellow researchers decided to seek out couples with a wife suffering from breast cancer, and began advertising around the San Francisco Bay Area for volunteers.

It soon became apparent that they would have to widen their original brief. The breast-cancer population of the Bay Area, which is higher than average in the USA, has been extremely well studied.

From the lack-luster response to their advertising, it appeared that sufferers were unwilling to take part in yet more research. The scientists decided to open the study to any couple if either partner were suffering from cancer of any variety.

Eventually 31 couples volunteered, including healthy couples who were to act as controls.

Jerome Stone wrote a training manual for the couples, after analysing a number of healers and distilling their common practices.29

The first component of his programme involved teaching the sender how to focus and concentrate, as occurs in meditation, to create a high degree of sustained attention. The scientific evidence demonstrates that meditation establishes more coherent brain waves; at least 25 studies show that EEG synchronization occurs between the four regions of the brain during meditation.30

Other studies of meditation have shown that it creates more coherent biophoton emissions31 and in general aids healing.

Stone also believed that his senders needed to learn how to generate compassion or empathy for their partners, with a technique based largely on the Tonglen Buddhist idea of ‘giving and receiving’. This practice would train the partner to develop a true understanding of the suffering of another, to take on the suffering without being burdened by it, and to transform it through the process of sending healing.

Developing true empathy would also help to dissolve the boundaries and sense of self between the sender and receiver. Positive, loving thoughts also had positive physiological effects. Rollin McCraty’s research at HeartMath showed tha a steady (or, as they called it, ‘coherent’) variation in heartbeat was more likely with ‘positive’ – loving or altruistic – thoughts and that this ‘coherence’ was quickly picked up by the brain, which soon pulsed in synchrony32 and evidenced improved cognitive performance.33

After Stone instructed the partners in simple techniques of meditation, he also taught them to be compassionate when carrying out intention. The final aspect of Stone’s training involved instilling belief and confidence in both senders and receivers.

Stone had discovered evidence in both the healing and parapsychological literature that belief in the process assists in the success of psychic processes such as ESP, which, like intention, involves ‘transferring’ information across distance.34

Although the training programme was originally intended to run for eight weeks, limited funding meant that Stone had to compress his workshop into a single day, to be followed up with homework and practice.

Radin divided the couples into three groups.

The first group (the ‘trained group’) was to undergo Stone’s training, practise compassionate intention daily for three months and then carry out the test.

The second group (called the ‘wait group’) was to carry out the test first and then have the training.

The 18 healthy couples comprising the third group (the control group) was to have no training at all, but simply undergo the test.

With all three groups, the member of the couple with the cancer (or one of the designated partners in the control group) was asked to sit in a black reclining chair placed in a one-ton, solid steel, double-walled, electromagnetically shielded enclosure.

The tiny Lindgren/ETS chamber was separated from the outside world b two layers of steel and one of solid wood, which blocked out all sound and all electromagnetic energy. Any electrical signals were carried out of the chamber by a fibre-optic cable, to ensure that the room remained, electromagnetically speaking, a solitary confinement.

Each inhabitant was fitted to an array of medical gadgetry to measure brain waves, heartbeat, breathing rate, skin conductance and peripheral blood flow. A video camera stood discretely in the corner.

The room was curtained in earth tones and furnished with soft table lighting and an artificial, floor-to-ceiling weeping fig tree. When the room was occupied, ambient music flooded the space. The furnishings and music, and even a large colour poster of a cascading mountain stream, were all intended to distract from the fact that once the 400-pound steel door with an articulated closing mechanism snapped shut, the inhabitant was essentially trapped inside the warmer equivalent of a meatpacking-plant refrigerator.

Some 20 metres away, the other partner was seated in the dark, attached to the same medical equipment as his or her partner, staring at a small blank TV screen. Bunched towels blocked out the last vestiges of light. Whenever the image of the partner in the refrigerator room abruptly flashed on the television screen, the other member of the couple was to send a compassionate intention to his or her partner for 10 seconds.

Stone, Radin and their colleagues planned to examine two different outcomes: whether the training improved the marriage, and also whether there was any correspondence between the physical sensations of sender and receiver. Although they hoped to examine whether the intentions sent also affected the medical prognosis, limited funding made that aspect of the study impossible.

Stone and Levine were given the task of analysing the social aspects of the study. Initially they discovered that the training made no difference to the quality of the couples’ marriages.

The finding was not altogether surprising, considering that anyone prepared to be part of a study involving three months of training was already likely to be extremely committed to the partnership. And Schlitz had aimed to recruit motivated partners when she designed the study. A later, more detailed analysis of the figures showed that the intention training and practice had indeed improved the couples’ marriages, but Radin concluded that these effects were due to their expectation of improved relations.

Then Radin compiled all the physiological data from the three groups and studied the results between partners and group composite averages. Each physiological response offered fascinating information about the effect of intention on the receiver. For instance, in the case of measurements of blood to the extremities, in every group, the sender’s skin conductance increased 2 seconds after seeing the partner’s image, and the receiver recorded a similar arousal a half second after the image had flashed.

However, unlike the earlier DMILS studies, where the skin conduction response in the receiver resembled that of a ‘startle reflex’ and quickly tailed off, in this instance the response persisted 7 seconds after the stimulus.

The receiver clearly appeared to be responding to intention – indeed, almost instantaneously.

In fact, the receiver’s response occurred at least 1 second faster than it would have been possible for the sender to have consciously formulated an intention. Radin was not sure whether this meant that the receiver had had a premonition of the intention.

It might simply have reflected the turgid nature of the skin conductance response; the receiver was likely responding in his or her extremities to information sent by the sender’s central nervous system, which would have reacted to the initial stimulation of the image on the monitor far more quickly than the electrical impulses sent to his or her fingertips. Nevertheless, in Radin’s view, the two skin conductance responses were tracking each other, even if they were slightly out of phase.

A similar situation occurred with the heart rate. The sender’s heart rate increased 5 seconds after the stimulus prompt to send the intention – which was consistent with the physical response that occurs in the body during the process of making some sort of mental effort. But an identical increase took place in the receiver, which would not happen ordinarily if he or she were simply resting in a recliner.

Blood flow followed a similar pattern. Whenever we experience something that stimulates us, the vascular network in our extremities constricts slightly, to maximize blood flow to the core of the body. In the Love Study, this phenomenon occurred in the sender, and was soon imitated in the body of the receiver.

As for respiration, on average, whenever the stimulus image appeared, the sender immediately inhaled sharply and blew out the air 15 seconds later. This respiratory response resembles that of someone about to steady himself for the task at hand. In this case, Radin witnessed a different response in the receiver. During the first 5 seconds, the receiver’s respiration faltered, almost as though he or she had stopped breathing, and then resumed with a large exhale in the final 5 seconds of the intention. It was as though the receiver had been listening with care, holding her breath and straining to hear something, before sighing with relief as soon as the stimulation had passed.

But it was the brain-wave results that proved to be the most interesting. Whenever the receiver’s image flashed on the screen, the senders recorded a little upturn in brain waves, like a ‘flinch response’, and then a huge spike for about a third of a second before they dropped sharply and took about one second to come back to baseline. In the sender, this tiny initial upturn represents something called a P300 wave – a well-established phenomenon that records the time that the brain takes to process the switching on of a light. The drop represents the time it takes for internal attention to modulate the stimulus into a response.

In this instance, the receivers had no P300 wave, but their brain waves nevertheless mimicked the virtually vertical plunge of the brain wave that shortly followed in the sender, even though, unlike the sender, the receiver had had no stimulus. The brain of the receiver was reacting just as it does when asleep and dreaming. The receivers had registered an emotional reaction, even though there was no tangible stimulus.

Radin’s results were all the more remarkable because the receivers had not been told how long the stimulus period would be, and neither senders nor receivers knew in advance how long the sender would have to wait before the partner’s image flashed on screen. A computer program randomly selected the time frame, which ranged from 5 to 40 seconds. This meant that any expectation on the part of either member of the couples could not explain the results.

Radin then compared the responses of the groups. All three groups had shown an effect. In every instance, each physiological response of the receivers had tracked those of the senders. However, the most prolonged pattern occurred among the cancer patients whose partners had been trained in compassionate intention.

The receivers in the training group not only responded to the stimulus, but also kept responding over 8 of the 10 seconds of the intention. In quantum terms, the couples had become as one.35

The Love Study indicates a number of profound suggestions about the nature of intention.

Sending a directed thought seems to generate a palpable energy; whenever one of Radin’s senders sent a healing intention, many subtle aspects of the receiver’s body became activated, as though he had received a minuscule electric shock. It seemed to be a kind of activating awareness, as though his body had felt or heard the healing signal.

There had even been an element of anticipation in the receiver; some of the physiological reactions recorded suggested that the receiver had felt the partner’s healing intention before he had even sent it.

People appear to receive healing deep in their bodies by being retuned to the more coherent energy of the healer’s intention. During healing, it could be that the ‘orderly’ energy of the well person entrains and ‘re-orders’ the sick.

In order to have the most powerful effect, a healer or sender needs to become ‘ordered’ on some subatomic level, mentally and emotionally. The Love Study demonstrates that certain conditions and mental states make our intention especially powerful and ourselves more ordered, and that these states can be achieved with training. The success of the basic training programme that Schlitz, Radin and Stone assembled suggests that attention, belief, motivation and compassion are important for intention to work, but there are probably other conditions that intensify its effects.

I needed, for instance, to find out how we can loosen our psychological boundaries. It was becoming clear to me: when we send intention, in a manner of speaking, we have to ‘become’ the other.

Notes – Chapter 4: Hearts that Beat as One

All details of the Love Study were gleaned from multiple interviews with Dean Radin, Marilyn Schlitz and Jerome Stone, April 2005–June 2006.
F. Sicher, E. Targ et al., ‘A randomized double-blind study of the effect of distant healing in a population with advanced AIDS: report of a small scale study’, Western Journal of Medicine, 1998; 168 (6): 356–63; also multiple interviews with E. Targ, 1999–2001.
M. Schlitz and W. Braud, ‘Distant intentionality and healing: assessing the evidence’, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 1997; 3 (6): 62–73.
M. Schlitz and S. LaBerge, ‘Autonomic detection of remote observation two conceptual replications’, in D. J. Bierman (ed.), Proceedings of Presented Papers, 37th Annual Parapsychological Association Convention Amsterdam, Fairhaven, Mass.: Parapsychological Association, 1994: 352– 60.
S. Schmidt et al., ‘Distant intentionality and the feeling of being stared at: Two metaanalyses’, British Journal of Psychology, 2004; 95: 235–47, as reported in D. Radin, Entangled Minds, New York: Paraview, 2006: 135.
L. Standish et al., ‘Electroencephalographic evidence of correlated event- related signals between the brains of spatially and sensory isolated human subjects’, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2004; 10 (2): 307–14.
Radin, Entangled Minds, op. cit.: 136.
Charles Tart, ‘Physiological correlates of psi cognition’, International Journal of Parapsychology, 1963: 5; 375–86.
T. D. Duane and T. Behrendt, ‘Extrasensory electroencephalographic induction between identical twins’, Science, 1965; 150: 367.
J. Wackerman et al., ‘Correlations between brain electrical activities of two spatially separated human subjects’, Neuroscience Letters, 2003; 336: 60–4.
J. Grinberg-Zylberbaum et al., ‘The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox i the brain: The transferred potential’, Physics Essays, 1994; 7 (4): 422–28.
J. Grinberg-Zylberbaum and J. Ramos, ‘Patterns of interhemisphere correlations during human communication’, International Journal of Neuroscience, 1987; 36: 41–53; J. Grinberg-Zylberbaum et al., ‘Human communication and the electrophysiological activity of the brain,’ Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 1992; 3 (3): 25–43.
L. J. Standish et al., ‘Electroencephalographic evidence of correlated event-related signals’, op. cit.
L. J., Standish et al., ‘Evidence of correlated functional magnetic resonance imaging signals between distant human brains’, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 2003; 9 (1): 122–5; T. Richards et al., ‘Replicable functional magnetic resonance imaging evidence of correlated brain signals between physically and Notes 291 sensory isolated subjects’, Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2005; 11 (6): 955–63.
M. Kittenis et al., ‘Distant psychophysiological interaction effects between related and unrelated participants’, Proceedings of the Parapsychological Association Convention, 2004: 67–76, as reported inRadin, Entangled Minds, op. cit.: 138–9.16. D. I. Radin, ‘Event related EEG correlations between isolated huma subjects’, Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2004; 10: 315–24.
M. Cade and N. Coxhead,The Awakened Mind, 2nd edn, Shaftesbury: Element, 1986.
S. Fahrion et al., ‘EEG amplitude, brain mapping and synchrony in and between a bioenergy practitioner and client during healing’, Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 1992; 3 (1): 19–52.
M. Yamamoto, ‘An experiment on remote action against man in sensory shielding condition, Part 2’, Journal of the International Society of Life Information Sciences, 1996; 14 (2): 228–39, as reported in Larry Dossey, Be Careful What You Pray For … You Just Might Get It: What We Can D About the Unintentional Effect of Our Thoughts, Prayers, and Wishes, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998: 182–3.
M. Yamamoto et al., ‘An experiment on remote action against man in sense shielding condition’, Journal of the International Society of Life Information Sciences, 1996; 14 (1): 97–9.
D. I. Radin, ‘Unconscious perception of future emotions: An experiment in presentiment’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1997; 11 (2): 163–80. First presented before the annual meeting of the Parapsychological Association in August 1996. For a full description of the Radin experiment see D. Radin, The Conscious Universe, London: HarperCollins, 1997: 119– 24.
R. McCraty et al., ‘Electrophysiological evidence of intuition: Part 2: A systemwide process?’ T he Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2004; 10 (2): 325–36.
J. Andrew Armour and Jeffrey L. Ardell (eds.), Basic and Clinical Neurocardiology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
R. McCraty et al., ‘The electricity of touch: Detection and measuremen of cardiac energy exchange between people’, in Karl H. Pribram (ed.), Brain and Values: Is a Biological Science of Values Possible?
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998: 359–79.M. Gershon, The Second Brain: A Groundbreaking New Understanding ofNervous Disorders of the Stomach and Intestine, London: HarperCollins 1999.
D. I. Radin and M. J. Schlitz, ‘Gut feelings, intuition, and emotions: A exploratory study’, Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2005; 11 (5): 85–91.
D. Radin, ‘Event-related electroencephalographic correlations between isolated human subjects’, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2004; 10 (2): 315–23.
Dean Radin has devoted an excellent book to the subject: see D. Radin Entangled Minds, op cit.
J. Stone, Course Handbook: Training in Compassionate-Loving Intention 2003; J. Stone et al., ‘Effects of a compassionate/loving intention as a therapeutic intervention by partners of cancer patients: A randomized controlled feasibility study’, in press. 292 The Intention Experiment
M. Murphy et al., The Physiological and Psychological Effects o Meditation: A Review of Contemporary Research with a Comprehensive Bibliography, 1931–1996, Petaluma, Calif.: The Institute of Noeti Sciences, 1997.
E. P. Van Wijk et al., ‘Anatomic characterization of human ultra-weak photon emission in practitioners of Transcendental Meditation™ and control subjects’, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2006; 12 (1): 31–8.
R. McCraty et al., ‘Head-heart entrainment: A preliminary survey’, in Proceedings of the Brain-Mind Applied Neurophysiology EEG Neurofeedback Meeting. Key West, Florida, 1996.
R. McCraty, ‘Influence of cardiac afferent input on heart-brain synchronization and cognitive performance, Institute of HeartMath, Boulder Creek, California’,International Journal of Psychophysiology, 2002; 45 (1–2): 72–3.
G. R. Schmeidler, Parapsychology and Psychology, Jefferson: McFarlan and Company, 1988 as cited in J. Stone, Course Handbook, op. cit.; L Dossey, Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993.
D. Radin et al., ‘Effects of motivated distant intention on electrodermal activity.’ Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Parapsychological Association, Stockholm, Sweden, August 2006.

PART TWO

Powering Up

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
-‘Song of Myself’, Walt Whitman

CHAPTER FIVE

Entering Hyperspace

IN A DRAUGHTY MONASTERY high in the Himalayas in northern India during the winter of 1985, a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks were seated quietly, deep in meditation. Although scantily clad, they appeared oblivious to the chilly indoor air temperature, which approached freezing. A fellow monk passed between them, draping each, in turn, with sheets drenched with cold water. Such extreme conditions would ordinarily shock the body and send the core temperature plummeting. If body temperature falls by only 7°C, within minutes a person will lose consciousness and all vital signs.

Instead of shivering, the monks began to sweat. Steam rose from the wet sheets; within an hour, they were thoroughly dry. The attendant replaced the dry sheets with new ones, also drenched in ice-cold water. By this time, the monks’ bodies had become the equivalent of a furnace. Those sheets were efficiently dried, as was a third batch.

A team of scientists led by Herbert Benson, a cardiologist at Harvard Medica School, stood nearby, examining an array of medical equipment to which they had attached the monks for any clues as to what particular physiological mechanism might have enabled the body to generate this extraordinary level of heat.

For a number of years, Benson had explored the effects of meditation on the brain and the rest of the body. He’d embarked on an ambitious research programme, studying Buddhists in various remote outposts around the world who had spent many years in disciplined practice. During one trip to the Himalayas, he also videotaped monks, dressed only in light shawls, as they spent a freezing February night outdoors on a mountain ledge 4600 meters above sea level. Benson’s film showed that they had slept soundly through the night, without clothing or shelter.

In his travels, Benson had witnessed many extraordinary feats of intention – mastery over temperature or metabolic rate that could even produce a state resembling hibernation. The monks monitored by Benson’s team had raised the temperature of their extremities by up to 9.4°C and lowered their metabolism by more than 60 per cent.1

Benson realized that this represented the largest variation in resting metabolism ever reported. During sleep, by contrast, metabolism only drops by 10 to 15 per cent; even experienced meditators can only decrease it by 17 per cent, at best. But that day in the Himalayas, he had observed the impossible in terms of mental influence. The monks had used their bodies to boil freezing water simply through the power of their thoughts.2

Benson’s enduring enthusiasm for meditation ignited interest at major academic institutions across America. By the end of the twentieth century, monks had become the favourite guinea pigs of the neuroscience laboratory. Scientists from Princeton, Harvard, the University of Wisconsin and the University of California–Davi followed Benson’s lead by wiring up monks to state-of-the-art monitoring equipment and studying the effects of intensive, advanced meditation. Entire conferences were held on meditation and the brain.3

It was not the practice itself that fascinated these scientists, but its effect on the human body, particularly the brain, and the possibilities this suggested. By studying the biological effects in such detail, scientists hoped to understand the neurological processes that occur during feats of highly directed thought, as the monks had displayed in the Himalayas.

Monks also offered scientists an opportunity to study whether years of focused attention stretch the brain beyond its usual limits. Did the brain of a monk become the equivalent of an Olympic athlete’s body – more highly developed and ultimately transformed after gruelling discipline and practice?

Do training and experience change the physiology of the brain over time? Would practice enable you to become a bigger and better transmitter of intention? The answers would in turn address a long- standing debate in neuroscience: is neural structure basically hard-wired from youth or plastic – changeable – depending on the nature of a person’s thoughts through life?

For me, the most intriguing question about this research on focused attention was the means by which a Buddhist monk could turn himself into a human boiler, and how these means compared with techniques and practices of other ancient traditions. Like Benson, I was intrigued by ‘masters’ of intention: practitioners of ancient disciplines Buddhism, Qigong, shamanism, traditional native healing – who had been trained to perform extraordinary acts through their thoughts. I wanted to work out the common denominators they shared.

Do the steps taken by a Qigong master to send Qi resemble those of a Buddhist monk during meditation?

Which mental disciplines ensure that a healer will enter a state enabling him to repair another person’s body?

Are ‘masters’ of intention graced with special neurological gifts that enable them to use their minds more powerfully than the rest of us, or did they acquire a skill that ordinary people could learn as well? And, perhaps most important, what did the neurological study of monks tell me about the effect of focused intention on the brain? Would practice enable you to become a bigger and better transmitter of intention?

I began studying scientific research about healing methods from a variety of traditions and then conducted my own questionnaire and interviews with healers and ‘master’ intenders of all persuasions.4

I was aided in my research by the work of psychologist Stanley Krippner and his student Allan Cooperstein at Saybroo Graduate School. A clinical and forensic psychologist, Cooperstein had conducted a thorough study of the various techniques used by distant healers for his doctoral thesis, including an analysis of scholarly books on healing and exhaustive written and verbal interviews with well-known practitioners who had scientific evidence of success in healing.5

In every instance, I discovered, the most important first step involved achieving a state of concentrated focus, or peak attention.

According to Krippner, an expert on shamanic and other native traditions, virtually all native cultures carry out remote healing during an altered state of consciousness and achieve a state of concentrated focus through a variety of means.6

Although the use of hallucinogenic drugs such as ayahuasca is common, many cultures use a strong repetitive rhythm or beat to create that state; the Native American Ojibway wanbeno, for instance, use drumming, rattling, chanting, naked dancing and handling of live coals.7

Drumming is particularly effective in producing a highly concentrated focus; a number of studies have shown that listening to the beat of a drum causes the brain to slow down into a trancelike state.8

As Native Americans discovered, even intense heat, as in a sweat lodge, can transport individuals to an altered state.

In my own study of intention ‘masters’, I spoke with Bruce Frantzis, arguably the greatest Qigong master in the West. A martial arts champion, with black belts in five Japanese martial arts, he also learned healing Qigong through years of study with Chinese masters.

Frantzis’s powers of intention were legendary; he had been videoed sending people flying across the room simply by directing Qi. In his fighting days, he had put several people into wheelchairs. Now, knowing its extraordinary power, he reserved Qi for healing. During my own meeting with him, Frantzis gave a short demonstration of the power of directed Qi. After a moment of intense concentration, the plates of his skull began to undulate over the top of his head like a rolling surf.9

Frantzis taught his students how to develop peak attention gradually, through intense concentration on their breathing. Although they began with very short bursts of ‘longevity’ breathing, they would work on extending these periods until eventually they could hold this focus continuously. They would also be taught methods of becoming acutely aware of all physical sensation.10

The healers I interviewed entered this focused state through a variety of means: meditation; prayer; intense attention on the person to be healed; symbolic or mythic ideas; strong mental images of a situation producing the desired change; verbal affirmations; mental imagery; even internal autosuggestions as a warm-up exercise. One healer established focused attention by saturating his awareness with the goal that he was trying to achieve.

Dr Janet Piedilato, a shamanic healer, will often ‘gently hum or chant’ or use a ‘rattle or other instrument’. Dr Constance Johnson, a Reiki practitioner, can return to an altered state at will. Others need to work hard to achieve this transformation: The Reverend Francis Geddes, a spiritual healer, will meditate on a small object like a pebble, leaf, or twig in a ‘very concentrated manner for ten minutes’.

Still others use the patient as the object of meditation. As Dr Judith Swack, a mind–body healer who has developed her own holistic psychotherapy system, says: ‘I look directly at the client and focus all of my senses forward toward the client and enter a receptive state where I pay internal attention to any subtle information and impression coming in like a kind of radar.’ Many other healers likewise enter an altered state, simply by ‘listening to the patient’ – ‘audibly or otherwise’. ‘Just thinking of the need to help someone,’ wrote Dr Piedilato, ‘slows the blood in my veins.’

Initially, many healers experience a heightening of their cognitive processes, but most soon reach a point when inner chatter ceases, and they experience a falling away of all sensation but pure image. The focusing seems to dissolve their own boundaries. They suddenly become aware of the inner workings of the patient’s body and ultimately have a sense of being engulfed by the healee.

I was especially interested in the effect of this intense concentration on the activity of the brain. Does the brain slow down or speed up? The received wisdom is that during meditation the brain slows down. The bulk of the research examining the electrical activity of the brain during meditation indicates that meditation leads to a predominance of either alpha rhythms (slow, high-amplitude brain waves with frequencies of 8–13 hertz, or cycles per second), which also occurs during light dreaming, or even the slower theta waves (4–7 hertz), which typify the state of consciousness during deep sleep.11 During ordinary waking consciousness, the brain operates much faster, using beta waves (around 13–40 hertz). For decades, the prevailing view has been that the optimum state for manifesting intention is an ‘alpha’ state.

Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist and psychologist at the University o Wisconsin’s Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience, recently put this view to the test. Davidson was an expert in ‘affective processing’ – the place where the brain processes emotion and the resulting communication between the brain and body. His work had come to the attention of the Dalai Lama, who invited him to visit Dharamsala, India, in 1992; a science buff, his Holiness wished to understand more about the biological effects of intensive meditation.

Afterwards, eight of the Dalai Lama’s most seasoned practitioners of Nyingmapa and Kagyupa meditation were flown to Davidson’s lab in Wisconsin.

There, Davidson attached 256 EEG sensors to each monk’s scalp in order to record electrical activity from a large number of different areas in the brain.

The monks were then asked to carry out compassionate meditation. As with Jerome Stone’s intention regime, the meditation entailed focusing on an utter readiness to help others and a desire for all living things to be free of suffering.

For the control group, Davidson enlisted a group of undergraduates who had never practiced meditation and arranged for them to undergo a week’s training, then attached them to the same number of EEG sensors to monitor their brains during meditation.

After 15 seconds, according to the EEG readings, the monks’ brains did not slow down; they began speeding up.

In fact, they were activated on a scale neither Davidson nor any other scientist had ever seen. The monitors showed sustained bursts of high gamma-band activity – rapid cycles of 25–70 hertz. The monks had rapidly shifted from a high concentration of beta waves to a preponderance of alpha, back up to beta and finally up to gamma.

Gamma band, the highest rate of brain-wave frequencies, is employed by the brain when it is working its hardest: at a state of rapt attention, when sifting through working memory, during deep levels of learning, in the midst of great flashes of insight.

As Davidson discovered, when the brain operates at these extremely fast frequencies, the phases of brain waves (their times of peaking and troughing) all over the brain begin to operate in synchrony. This type of synchronization is considered crucial for achieving heightened awareness.12

The gamma state is even believed to cause changes in the brain’s synapses – the junctions over which electrical impulses leap to send a message to a neuron, muscle or gland.13

That the monks could achieve this state so rapidly suggested that their neural processing had been permanently altered by years of intensive meditation.

Although the monks were middle-aged, their brain waves were far more coherent and organized than those of the robust young controls. Even during their resting state, the Buddhists showed evidence of a high ratio of gamma-band activity, compared with that of the neophyte meditators.

Davidson’s study bolstered other pieces of preliminary research suggesting that certain advanced and highly focused forms of meditation produce a brain operating at peak intensity.14

Studies of yogis have shown that, during deep meditation, their brains produce bursts of high-frequency beta or gamma waves, which often are associated with moments of ecstasy or intense concentration.15

Those who can withdraw from external stimuli and completely focus their attention inward appear more likely to reach gamma-wave hyperspace. During peak attention of this nature, the heart rate also accelerates.16

Similar types of effects have been recorded during prayer. A study monitoring the brain waves of six Protestants during prayer found an increase in brain-wave speed during moments of the most intense concentration.17

Different forms of meditation may produce strikingly different brain waves. For instance, yogis strive for anuraga, or a sense of constant fresh perception; Zen Buddhists aim to eliminate their response to the outer world. Studies comparing the two find that the former produces heightened perceptual awareness – magnified outer focus – while the latter produces heightened inner absorption – magnified inner awareness.18

Most research on meditation has concerned the type that focuses on one particular stimulus, such as the breath or a sound, like a mantra. In Davidson’s study, the monks concentrated on having a sense of compassion for all living things. It may be that compassionate intention – and other similar, ‘expansive’ concepts – produces thoughts that send the brain soaring into a supercharged state of heightened perception.

When Davidson and his colleague Antoine Lutz wrote up their study, they realized that they were reporting the highest measures of gamma activity ever recorded among people who were not insane.19

In their results they noticed an association between level of experience and ability to sustain this extraordinarily high brain activity; those monks who had been performing meditation the longest recorded the highest levels of gamma activity. The heightened state also produced permanent emotional improvement, by activating the left anterior portion of the brain the portion most associated with joy.

The monks had conditioned their brains to tune into happiness most of the time.

In later research, Davidson demonstrated that meditation alters brain-wave patterns, even among new practitioners. Neophytes who had practised mindfulness meditation for only eight weeks showed increased activation of the ‘happy-thoughts’ part of the brain and enhanced immune function.20

In the past, neuroscientists imagined the brain as something akin to a complex computer, which got fully constructed in adolescence. Davidson’s results supported more recent evidence that the ‘hardwired’ brain theory was outdated.

The brain appeared to revise itself throughout life, depending on the nature of its thoughts. Certain sustained thoughts produced measurable physical differences and changed its structure. Form followed function; consciousness helped to form the brain.

Besides speeding up, brain waves also synchronize during meditation and healing. In fieldwork with indigenous and spiritual healers in five continents, Krippner suspected that, prior to healing, the healers all underwent brain ‘discharge patterns’ that produce a coherence and synchronization of the two hemispheres of the brain, and integrate the limbic (the lower emotional centre) with the cortical systems (the seat of higher reasoning).21

At least 25 studies of meditation have shown that, during meditation, EEG activity between the four regions of the brain synchronizes.22

Meditation makes the brain permanently more coherent – as might prayer. A study at the University of Pavia in Italy and the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford showe that saying the rosary had the same effect on the body as reciting a mantra. Both were able to create a ‘striking, powerful, and synchronous increase’ in cardiovascular rhythms when recited six times a minute.23

Another important effect of concentrated focus is the integration of both left and right hemispheres. Until recently, scientists believed that the two sides of the brain work more or less independently. The left side was depicted as the ‘accountant’, responsible for logical, analytical, linear thinking, and speech, and the right side, as the ‘artist’, providing spatial orientation, musical and artistic ability, and intuition.

But Peter Fenwick, consultant neuropsychiatrist at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford St Thomas’ Hospital, Bethlehem Hospital and the Institute of Psychiatry at th Maudsley Hospital, gathered evidence to show that speech and many other functions are produced in both sides of the brain and that the brain works best when it can operate as a totality. During meditation, both sides communicate in a particularly harmonious manner.24

Concentrated attention appears to enlarge certain mechanisms of perception, while tuning out ‘noise’. Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence,25 carried out research showing that the cortices of meditators ‘speed up’, but get cut off from the limbic emotional center.

With practice, he concluded, anyone can carry out this ‘switching-off ’ process, enabling the single mode of the brain to experience heightened perception without an overlay of emotion or meaning.26

During this process, all of the power of the brain is free to focus on a single thought: an awareness of what is happening at the present moment.

Meditation also appears to permanently enhance the brain’s reception. In several studies, meditators have been exposed to repetitive stimuli like light flashes or clicks. Ordinarily, a person will get used to the clicks, and the brain, in a sense, will switch off and stop reacting. But the brains of the meditators continued to react to the stimuli – an indication of heightened perception of every moment.27

In one study, practitioners of mindfulness meditation – the practice of bringing heightened, non-judgemental awareness of the senses’ perceptions to the present moment – were tested for visual sensitivity before and immediately after a three- month retreat, during which time they had practiced mindfulness meditation for 16 hours a day.

The staff members who did not practice the meditation acted as a control group. The researchers were testing whether the participants could detect the duration of simple light flashes and the correct interval between successive ones.

To those without mental training in focusing, these flashes would appear as one unbroken light.

After the retreat, the practitioners were able to detect the single-light flashes and to differentiate between successive flashes.

Mindfulness meditation enables its practitioners to become aware of unconscious processes and to remain exquisitely sensitive to external stimuli.28

As these studies indicate, certain types of concentrated focus, like meditation, enlarge the mechanism by which we receive information and clarify the reception. We turn into a larger, more sensitive radio.

In 2000, Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a expert in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), confirmed that this process produces actual physical changes.

Conventional MRI employs radio-frequency waves and a powerful magnetic field to view the soft tissues of the body, including the brain. ‘Functional’ magnetic resonance imaging, on the other hand, measures the minuscule changes in the brain during critical functions. It confirms where and when stimuli and language are being processed by measuring the increase in blood flow in the fine network of arteries and veins of the brain when certain neural networks are engaged. For scientists like Lazar, the fMRI is the closest science can get to observing a brain at work in real time.

Herbert Benson had enlisted Lazar to map the brain regions that are active during simple forms of meditation. Rather than scrutinizing more monks or other meditation ‘athletes’ who had devoted themselves to the contemplative life, Lazar preferred to study the effect of meditation on the millions of ordinary Americans who performed meditation for just 20–60 minutes a day. She and Benson recruited five volunteers, who had practised Kundalini meditation for at least four years.

This kind of meditation employs two different sounds to focus and still the mind while observing inhalation and exhalation of the breath. Lazar asked volunteers to alternate between intervals of meditation and control states, during which they silently ticked off a mental list of animals.

Throughout the experiment, Lazar also monitored the biological activity of her subjects – heart rate, breathing, oxygen saturation levels, levels of exhaled CO2, and EEG levels.

Lazar discovered that, during meditation, the volunteers had a significant increase of signalling in the neural structures of the brain involved in attention: the frontal and parietal cortex, or the ‘new’ part of the brain where higher cognition takes place, and the amygdala and hypothalamus, portions of the ‘old’ brain that govern arousal and autonomic control.

This finding was another contradiction of the received wisdom that meditation is always a state of quiescence. Her results offered yet more evidence that, during certain types of meditation, the brain is engaged in a state of rapt attention.

Lazar also discovered that the signalling in certain areas of the brain and the neural activity during meditation evolved over time and increased with meditative experience. Her subjects themselves had the impression that their states of mind continued to change during each individual meditation and as they grew more experienced.29

These results suggested to Lazar that highly concentrated focus over time might enlarge certain parts of the brain. To test this, she gathered 20 long-term practitioners of Buddhist mindfulness meditation (five of whom were meditation teachers) with an average of nine years of meditation experience. Fifteen non-meditators acted as controls. Participants meditated in turn inside an ordinary MRI scanner while Laza took detailed images of their neural structures.

Lazar discovered that those portions of the brain associated with attention, awareness of sensation, sensory stimuli and sensory processing were thicker in the meditators than in the controls. The effects of meditation definitely were ‘dose- dependent’: increases in cortical thickness were proportional to the overall amount of time the participant had spent meditating.

Lazar’s research offered some of the first evidence that meditation causes permanent alterations in brain structure. Up until the time of her experiment, this type of increase in cortical volume had only been linked to certain repetitive mechanical practices requiring a high degree of attention, such as playing an instrument or juggling. Here was some of the first evidence that thinking certain thoughts exercises the ‘attention’ portion of the brain and makes it grow larger. Indeed, the cortical thickness of these regions was even more pronounced in the older participants. Ordinarily, cortical thickness deteriorates as a result of ageing. Regular meditation appears to reduce or reverse the process.

Besides increasing cognitive processing, meditation also appears to integrate emotional and cognitive processes. In the fMRI study, Lazar found evidence o activation of the limbic brain – the primitive, so-called ‘instinctive’ part of the brain involved with primitive emotion. Meditation appears to affect not only the brain’s reasonable, analytical ‘upstairs’ but also the unconscious and intuitive ‘downstairs’. She had discovered greater activation in the part of the brain responsible for what is usually called ‘the gut instinct’. Here was physical evidence that meditation not only increases our ability to receive intuitive information, but also our conscious awareness of it. Davidson had shown increases in the ‘approach’ portion of the brain the part that wants to help – in his monks, who were attempting to help humanity by meditating on compassion. They had increased the ‘can I help you’ portion of their brains. Lazar’s meditators, however, were working on mindfulness, a state of peak attention, and that part of the brain responsible for attention had grown larger. The brain’s powers of observation had increased, allowing in more information, even the kind that is received intuitively.

Some people are born with a larger-than-normal antenna and better reception than usual. This appears to be the case with the psychic Ingo Swann. Swann’s psychic gifts extended to remote viewing, the ability to perceive objects or events beyond normal human vision.

He had helped to develop a remote viewing programme used by the American government and was widely regarded as one of the best remote viewers in the world. Swann once had allowed the peculiar workings of his brain to be monitored and analysed by Michael Persinger, professor of psychology at Laurentian University in Canada.

Wired to an EEG machine, Swan was asked to use his skills to identify items in a distant room. At the very moment that he was able to ‘see’ the items remotely, his brain showed bursts of fast activity in the high beta and gamma range, similar to that of Benson’s Tibetan monks.

Those bursts of activity occurred primarily over the right occipital region, the portion of the brain relating to sight. According to the results of brain-wave monitoring, Swann had entered a super-conscious state, enabling him to receive information impossible to access during normal waking consciousness.

When examined by MRI, Swann also showed that he had an unusually larg parieto-occipital right-hemisphere lobe, the portion of the brain involved with sensory and visual input.

Persinger had found a similar neural aberration in another gifted psychic called Sean Harribance.30

When monitored with EEG and single photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT) equipment during his psychi activities, Harribance evidenced an increase in firing of the right parietal lobe. Both he and Swann had been graced with a greater capacity than normal to ‘see’ beyond the limits of time, distance, and the five major senses.

Science has demonstrated that by thinking certain thoughts it is possible for us to alter and enlarge portions of our brains to become a larger, more powerful receiver. But is it also possible to develop a larger transmitter?

To discover some of the qualities that enhance transmission, I would have to study ‘masters’ of intention who were particularly gifted at transmitting. The best place to look seemed to be among talented healers.

Cancer specialist and psychologist Lawrence LeShan, who has studied how gifted healers work, discovered that they share two important practices, besides entering an altered state of consciousness: they visualize themselves as uniting with the person to be healed and imagine themselves and that person as being united with what they often describe as the absolute.31

Cooperstein’s healers had also described turning off the ego and eliminating their sense of self and separateness. They had the sense of assuming the body and vantage point of the person to be healed. One healer actually felt his body changing, with shifts of patterns and distributions of energy. Although the healers did not take on the disease or pain, they sensed it once they had visualized themselves as being at one with the person being healed. At this point of union, the healers’ perception markedly altered and their motor skills diminished.

They were suffused by an expanded sense of pure present, and grew unaware of the passage of time. They lost awareness of the boundaries of their own bodies, and even experienced an altered sense of bodily image. They felt taller, lighter – almost as though they were out of their physical being – engulfed by a sense of unconditional love. They began to observe themselves, according to one healer, only as ‘a kind of a core that remains’:

I’m aware of the process just being beyond me … My intent is obviously with the person – my conscious control is completely side-stepped, like I’m standing, watching. Then something else takes over … I don’t think that I ever lose complete awareness that I’m sitting there.32

Other healers experienced a more profound loss of identity; to carry out their work, they had to be at one with the person they were healing: to become that person, complete with his or her physical and emotional history. Their own personal identity and memory receded and they entered into some space of joint consciousness, where an impersonal self carried out the actual healing.

Some of the healers took on a mystical identification with guardian spirits or guides, and the spiritual alter ego took over.

In Krippner’s experience, certain personalities are more susceptible to merging identities than others: those who, according to a psychological test, possess ‘thin boundaries’.

According to the Hartmann Boundary Questionnaire test, a tes developed by Tufts University psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann to test a person’s psychological armament, people with thick boundaries are well organized, dependable, defensive and, as Hartmann himself liked to put it, ‘well armored’, with a sturdy sense of self that remains locked around them like a chain-link fence. People with ‘thin’ boundaries tend to be open, unguarded and undefended.33

Sensitive, vulnerable and creative, they tend to get involved quickly in relationships, experience altered states, and easily flit between fantasy and reality. Sometimes, they are not sure which state they are in.34

They do not repress uncomfortable thoughts or separate feelings from thoughts. They tend to be more comfortable than thick- boundaried people with the use of intention to control or change things around them. In a study by Marilyn Schlitz of musicians and artists, for instance, creative individuals with thin boundaries also scored best in remote influence.35

Krippner demonstrated the relationship between thin boundaries and intention with students at Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment in Yelm, Washington. Many of the techniques taught at the school – for example, focusing on a desired outcome and excluding all external stimuli, blindfolding students and having them find their way around a labyrinth – were designed to help students release their usual boundaries. The school encouraged students to engage in imaginative fantasy, claiming that it opened untapped areas in the brain.36

Krippner and several colleagues performed psychological tests on six of the long-time students who claimed to have developed keen skills in manifesting intention.

Ian Wickramasekera, a psychologist who participated in some of the Yelm research, had developed a battery of psychological tests based on his High-Risk Model of Threat Perception.37

Wickramasekera claimed the tests identify people most likely to have psychic experiences or to be susceptible to hypnosis. Although the test was originally developed to pinpoint people at high risk of psychological problems during times of major life changes, Krippner believed Wickramasekera’s model could also be used to evaluate mediums and healers. Krippner and his associates found they could readily use the test to identify people whose inflexible sense of reality blocked them from perceiving or acknowledging intuitive information. Wickramasekera’s model predicted that individuals would best perform healing if they were able to block the sense of a threat when they let go of their separatist notions of self.

According to their scores, the Ramtha students had extraordinarily thin boundaries. Hartmann’s own mean score, derived from tests on 866 individuals, was The Ramtha students scored 343. The only other groups Hartmann had identified with boundaries this thin were music students and people suffering from frequent nightmares.

The Ramtha students also showed a high degree of what psychologists call a type of ‘dissociation’ (the ability to undergo profound disruptions in their attention) and a high degree of absorption (a tendency to lose themselves in ongoing activity such as hypnosis and a readiness to accept other aspects of reality).38

In my own examination of healers, I had come across two types. Some regarded themselves as the water (the source of healing); others saw themselves as the hose (the channel for healing energy to travel through). The first group believed the power resulted from their own gift. By far the largest group, however, comprised the channellers – those who acted as vehicles for a greater force beyond themselves.

Elisabeth Targ’s AIDS project had recruited 40 healers of every persuasion.39 Approximately 15 per cent were traditional Christian religious healers, who used the rosary or prayer.

Others were members of non-traditional healing schools, such as the Barbara Brennan School of Healing Light, or those taught by Joyce Goodrich o Lawrence LeShan. Some worked on modifying complex energy fields through changing colours or vibrations or the patient’s energy field.

More than half the healers concentrated on healing a patient’s chakras, or energy centres of the body; others worked with tones, reattuning their patients with audible vibrations.

A Qigong master from China sent harmonizing Qi to the patients.

One man working in the Native American tradition went into a trance during a traditional drumming and chanting pipe ceremony on the deserted ridges of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, and claimed to have contacted spirits on behalf of the patients.

Much of the imagery the healers used to describe what they did was framed in terms of relaxing, releasing or allowing spirit, light or love in. For some healers, the spirit was Jesus; for others, Starwoman, a healing Native American grandmother image.

Targ had interviewed the healers about their work, and I spoke with her before she died about the common threads she had discovered among their diverse approaches.40

She found that a quality of loving compassion or kindness was essential in sending out a positive intention to heal.

But no matter what their approach, most of them agreed on a single point: the need to get out of the way. They surrendered to a healing force.

They had framed their intention essentially as a request – please may this person be healed – and then stepped back.

When Targ examined those patients whose illness had most improved, and analysed which healers they had been exposed to, those healers who were the most successful were the ‘channellers’ – the ones who had moved aside to allow the greater force in. None of the healers who had been successful believed he possessed the power himself.41 Psychiatrist Daniel Benor, who has accumulated and catalogued virtually every study of healing in four volumes42 as well as on a website,43 has examined the statements and writings of the most famous healers describing how they work.

One of the most remarkable and best-studied healers, Harry Edwards, wrote that a healer worked by handing over his will and his request for healing to a greater power:

This change may be described (inadequately) as the healer feeling a sense or condition enshrouding him, as if a blind had been drawn over his normal alert mind. In its place he experiences the presence of a new personality – one with an entirely new character – which imbues him with a super-feeling of confidence and power.

…

[While engaged in his healing] the healer may be only dimly aware of normal movement, speech, etc., taking place around him. If a question is addressed to him about the patients’ condition, he will find himself able to respond with extraordinary ease and without mental effort – in other words, the more knowledgeable personality of the Guide provides the answer.

Thus does the healer ‘tune-in’ – it is the subjection of his physical sense to the spirit part of himself, the latter becoming for the time being the superior self under the control of the director.44

To Edwards, the most important act was moving aside, shedding the personal ego, making a conscious attempt to get out of the way.

Cooperstein’s healers described their experience as a sense of total surrender to a higher being or even to the process. All believed that they were a part of a larger whole.

To gain access to the cosmic, non-local entity of true consciousness, they had to set aside the limiting boundaries of the self and personal identity, and merge with the higher entity.

With this change of consciousness and expanded awareness, the healers felt they got onto an open line to this larger information field, which offered them flashes of information, symbols and images.

Words would appear, seemingly from nowhere, giving them a diagnosis. Something beyond their conscious thought would carry out the healing for them.

Although the lead-up to healing was accomplished through consciously directed thought, the actual healing often was not. In giving a 2-minute treatment, for instance, they might have a minute and a half of rational thought and then ‘a five-second thing that would be an irrational thing, a space that may be the apex, the key to the whole experience’.45

The most important aspect of the healers’ process was undoubtedly their surrender – their willingness to give up their sense of cognitive control of the process and allow themselves to become pure energy.

But was this capacity to move aside important in all types of intention? I found an interesting answer in a study of people with brain damage. Investigators at the Behavioural Neurology Program and Rotman Research Institute at the University of Toronto attempted to replicate the work of the Princeton PEAR lab using random event generators, but with one important twist: they had enlisted several patients with frontal-lobe damage. The patients who had suffered right frontal-lobe damage, which probably affected their ability to focus and maintain attention, had no effect on the machines.

The only person to have a greater than normal effect was a volunteer with a damaged left frontal lobe but whose right frontal lobe was intact. The investigators speculated that the volunteer’s particular handicap could have given him a reduced sense of self, but a normal state of attention. Achieving a state of a reduced self- awareness – a difficult state for an ordinary person to achieve – might allow for greater effects of intention on the machines.46

Krippner suspects that during some altered states of consciousness, the body naturally ‘switches off ’ certain neural connections, including an area near the back of the brain that constantly calculates a person’s spatial orientation, the sense of where one’s body ends and the external world begins. During a transpersonal or transcendent experience, when this region becomes inactive, the boundary in the relationship between the self and the other blurs; you no longer know where you end and someone else begins.

Eugene d’Aquili, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Andrew Newberg, medical doctor at the university hospital’s nuclear medicine programme, demonstrated this in a study of Tibetan monks. Moments of meditative experience showed up as more activity in the brain’s frontal lobes with less activity in the parietal lobes.47

Meditation and other altered states can also affect the temporal lobes, which house the amygdala, a cluster of cells responsible for the sense of ‘I’ and our emotional response to the world: whether we like or dislike what we perceive.

Stimulation of the temporal lobes or disorder in them may create familiarity or strangeness – common features of a transcendent experience. Intense focus with intention on some other being appears to ‘switch off ’ the amygdala and so remove the neural sense of self.

Davidson, Krippner and Lazar demonstrated that we can remodel particular portions of our own brains, depending on our different types of focus and indeed different thoughts. It became clear to me that the intense focus of certain types of meditation can be a portal to hyperspace and peak awareness, transporting the meditator to a different layer of reality.

It can also be an energizing practice more than a calming one, that can help us rewire our brains to improve our reception and transmission of intention.

I had assumed that intention was like a strong ‘oomph’, or mental push, through which you project your thoughts to another person to ensure that your wishes are carried out. But the healers described a very different process: intention requires initial focus, but then a type of surrender, a letting go of the self as well as of the outcome.

Notes Chapter 5: Entering Hyperspace

H. Benson et al., ‘Body temperature changes during the practice of g tum-mo (heat) yoga’, Nature, 1982; 295: 234–6; H. Benson, ‘Body temperature changes during the practice of g tum-mo yoga (matters arising)’, Nature, 1982; 298: 402.
H. Benson et al., ‘Three case reports of the metabolic and electroencephalographic changes during advanced Buddhist meditation techniques’, Behavioral Medicine, 1990; 16 (2): 90–5.
The most celebrated was the Investigating the Mind conference a Massachusetts Institute of Technology, September 2005, which featured the Dalai Lama.
I am indebted to Stanley Krippner, who supplied me with a list of some 50 healers from a rich variety of traditions. I assembled a questionnaire, which I sent out to all 50. Some 15 replied in detail.
Cooperstein’s study eventually was published: M. A. Cooperstein, ‘The myths of healing: A summary of research into transpersonal healing experience’, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1992; 86: 99–133. I am also indebted to him for his in-depth analysis of the commonalities between healers.
Information about Krippner’s vast catalogue of work was also gleaned from numerous interviews between him and the author, April 2005–March 2006 and correspondence, 2005–2006.
S. Krippner, ‘The technologies of shamanic states of consciousness’, in M Schlitz et al. (eds.), Consciousness and Healing: Integral Approaches to Mind-Body Medicine, St. Louis, Mo.: Elsevier Churchill Livingstone, 2005 376–90.
Jilek W. G. Salish, Indian Mental Health and Culture Change Psychohygienic and Therapeutic Aspects of the Guardian Spiri Ceremonial, New York: Hold Rinehart & Winston, 1974.
All information about Bruce Frantzis the result of various interviews, April 2005–March 2006. Notes 293
B. K. Frantzis, Relaxing Into Your Being: Breathing, Chi and Dissolving the Ego, Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 1998.
Murphy, Meditation, op. cit.
W. Singer, ‘Neuronal synchrony: a versatile code for the definition of relations?’ Neuron, 1999; 24: 49–65; F. Varela et al., Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2001; 2: 229–39, as reported in A. Lutz et al., ‘Long-term meditators self-induce highamplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 2004; 101 (46):16369–73.
O. Paulsen and T. J. Sejnowski, ‘Natural patterns of activity and long-term synaptic plasticity’, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 2000; 10: 172–9, as reported in Lutz, ‘Long-term meditators’, op. cit.
Although the majority of studies carried out on meditation demonstrate that meditation leads to an increase in alpha rhythms (see Murphy, Meditation, op. cit.), the following are just a few that show that during meditation, subjects evidence spurts of high-frequency beta waves of twenty to forty cycles per second, usually during moments of intense concentration or ecstasy: J. P. Banquet, ‘Spectral analysis of the EEG in meditation’ Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 1973; 35: 143–51;
P. Fenwick et al., ‘Metabolic and EEG changes during Transcendenta Meditation: An explanation’, Biological Psychology, 1977; 5 (2): 101–18;
M. A. West, ‘Meditation and the EEG’,Psychological Medicine, 1980; 10 (2): 369–75; J. C. Corby et al., ‘Psychophysiological correlates of the practice of Tantric Yoga meditation’, Postgraduate Medical Journal, 1985; 61: 301–4.
N. Das and H. Gastaut, ‘Variations in the electrical activity of the brain heart and skeletal muscles during yogic meditation and trance’, Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 1955, Supplement no. 6: 211–19.
Murphy, Meditation, cites 10 studies showing that heart rate accelerates during these peak moments of meditation.
W. W. Surwillo and D. P. Hobson, ‘Brain electrical activity during prayer’,Psychological Reports, 1978; 43 (1): 135–43.
Murphy, Meditation, op. cit.
Lutz et al., ‘Long-term meditators’, op. cit.
Richard J. Davidson et al., ‘Alterations in brain and immune functio produce by mindfulness meditation’, Psychosomatic Medicine, 2003; 65: 564–70.
Krippner, ‘Shamanic states of consciousness’, op. cit.
Murphy, Meditation, op. cit.
L. Bernardi et al., ‘Effect of rosary prayer and yoga mantras on autonomic cardiovascular rhythms: comparative study’, British Medical Journal, 2001; 323: 1446–9.
Fenwick et al., ‘Metabolic and EEG changes during Transcendenta Meditation’, op. cit.
D. Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, London: Bloomsbury Press, 1996.
D. Goleman, ‘Meditation and consciousness: An Asian approach to mental health’, American Journal of Psychotherapy, 1976; 30 (1): 41–54; G. Schwartz, ‘Biofeedback, self-regulation, and the patterning of physiological processes’, American Scientist, 1975; 63 (3): 314–24; D. Goleman, ‘Why the brain blocks daytime dreams’, Psychology Today, 1976; March: 69–71.
P. Williams and M. West, ‘EEG responses to photic stimulation in persons experienced at meditation’, Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 294 The Intention Experiment 1975; 39 (5): 519–22; B. K Bagchi and M. A. Wenger, ‘Electrophysiological correlates of some yogi exercises’, Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 1957; (7): 132–49.
D. Brown, M. Forte and M. Dysart, ‘Visual sensitivity and mindfulnes meditation’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1984; 58 (3): 775–84; and ‘Differences in visual sensitivity among mindfulness meditators and non- meditators’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1984; 58 (3): 727–33.
S. W. Lazar et al., ‘Functional brain mapping of the relaxation response and meditation’, NeuroReport, 2000; 11: 1581–5.
C. Alexander et al., ‘EEG and SPECT data of a selected subject during ps tests: The discovery of a neurophysiological correlate’, Journal of Parapsychology, 1998; 62 (2): 102–4.
L. LeShan, The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist: Towards a Theory of the Paranormal, New York: Helios Press, 2003.
Cooperstein, ‘The myths of healing’, op. cit.
S. Krippner, ‘Trance and the Trickster: Hypnosis as a liminal phenomenon’, International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 2005; 53 (2): 97–118.
E. Hartmann, Boundaries in the Mind: A New Theory of Personality, New York: Basic Books, 1991, as quoted in Krippner, ‘Trance and the Trickster’,op. cit.
M. J. Schlitz and Charles Honorton, ‘Ganzfeld psi performance within a artistically gifted population’, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1992; 86 (2): 83–98.
S. Krippner et al., ‘Working with Ramtha: Is it a “high risk” procedure?’ Proceedings of Presented Papers: The Parapsychological Association 41s Annual Convention, 1998: 50–63.
The various tests included the Absorption Subscale of the Differential Personality Questionnaire, the Dissociative Experiences Scale and th Boundary Questionnaire.
S. Krippner et al., ‘The Ramtha phenomenon: Psychological phenomenological, and geomagnetic data’, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1998; 92: 1–24.
F. Sicher, E. Targ et al., ‘A randomized double-blind study’, op. cit.
Various conversations and correspondence between E. Targ and the author, October 1999–June 2001.
Interview with E. Targ, California, October 1999; J. Barrett, ‘Going th distance’, Intuition, 1999; June/July: 30–1.
D. J. Benor, Healing Research: Holistic Energy Medicine and Spirituality, 4 vols., Deddington, Oxfordshire: Helix Editions Ltd, 1993. http://www.wholistichealingresearch.com.
Benor, Healing Research, vol. 1, op. cit.: 54–5.
Cooperstein, ‘The myths of healing’, op. cit.
M. Freedman et al., ‘Effects of frontal lobe lesions on intentionality and random physical phenomena’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2003; 17 (4): 651–68.
E. d’Aquili and A. Newberg, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, New York: Ballantine Books, 2001.

CHAPTER SIX

In the Mood

MITCH KRUCOFF WAS RETURNING HOME from India in 1994 with alm every idea he had held about the practice of medicine turned on its head. Krucoff, a cardiologist at Duke University Medical Center, and his nurse practitioner, Suzanne Crater, had been invited to inspect the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medicine, hospital in Puttaparthi, at the end of its first year of operation.

The hospital was the pet project of the Indian guru Sri Sathya Sai Baba, who wanted to make available the services of a modern Western hospital to the poor and needy, entirely free of charge. Krucoff had been recruited as its cardiac specialist, to advise on the technology needed to build a state-of-the-art facility for high-tech cardiac catheterizations.

Krucoff and Crater were astonished by what they had seen. The overwhelmingly spiritual dimension of the facility – even the special quality of the sound and light – had dwarfed its considerable technological achievements.

Spirituality was present in the very design of the building – in the Hindu images lovingly chosen to grace the walls. Situated 9 kilometres from Sai Baba’s ashram, the building resembled an elongated Taj Mahal.

The wings had been structured as a curvature, like a welcome embrace for all those approaching its doors, and the rotunda inside the entrance was meant to represent a heart whose apex was pointing to heaven.

During their rounds, Krucoff and Crater had been struck by the effect this had on the patients – many of them Indians from extremely remote areas who had never seen running water before.

Despite the fact that they had been diagnosed with a life- threatening illness and were set to face an imposing twenty-first-century digital cath lab, not one of them seemed the slightest bit afraid. This utter absence of fear contrasted starkly with the terror and despair to which Krucoff had grown accustomed among the cardiac patients he regularly saw back home.

Krucoff longed to introduce some of these practices to hospitals in America, but if he were going to convince any of his colleagues in cardiology, he would have to prove the benefit of spirituality to the practice of heart surgery through hard data showing a measurable physiological effect. He would have to demonstrate that intangible aspects like intention, or spiritual beliefs, or even a spiritual, uplifting environment, could really make a difference to a patient’s outcome.

During the 18-hour flight home, Krucoff and Crater began teasing out ideas for a study. The only way to do it, they eventually realized, was to put prayer to the test – the biggest test of its kind.1

When Krucoff got home, he began researching the scientific literature for any evidence that prayer had improved medical outcomes. Fourteen well-conducted trials of prayer had shown a positive effect. In the most famous, published by Randolph Byrd in 1988, a group of born-again Christians outside a hospital had prayed for patients in a coronary care unit. Those who had been prayed for had significantly fewer symptoms, and needed fewer drugs and less medical intervention.2

A Mid-America Heart Institute study, published around the time Targ published her AIDS study and considered at the time to have bolstered Targ’s findings, showed that Christians of all denominations enlisted to pray for hospitalized cardiac patients reduced symptoms by 10 per cent, with fewer medical setbacks.3

Prayer is viewed as a kind of super-intention, a joint endeavour: you do the intending, and God carries it out. In some quarters, intention is considered synonymous with prayer, and prayer synonymous with healing; when you send out an intention, God puts the intention into action.

Indeed, many consciousness investigators consider these early prayer studies intention experiments. The small studies that had made use of groups of Christians to send intercessory prayers to heart patients are often construed as a group intention – an attempt by a collection of people to influence the same thing at the same time.

However promising the results of these early studies, Krucoff realized that a large-scale trial with tightened protocols was needed, and he mounted his own small pilot study. He enlisted 150 cardiac patients, recruited from nearby Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center, who had been scheduled for angioplasty and stents.

Besides prayer, Krucoff wanted to see whether ‘noetic’ therapies, involving some form of remote or mind-body influence, could affect patient outcomes. He divided the patient population into five groups. In addition to standard medical treatment, four of the five were to receive one of the noetic treatments – stress relaxation, healing touch, guided imagery or intercessory prayer.

The fifth group would be given no additional intervention besides orthodox medical care. Every patient would undergo continuous monitoring of brain waves, heart rate and blood pressure, to gauge the moment-by- moment effect of these intangible healing influences.

Krucoff decided to turn up the volume on prayer to full blast. To recruit prayer groups, his nurse-practitioner assistant Suzanne Crater launched a worldwide campaign of solicitation. She wrote to Buddhist monasteries in Nepal and France and to VirtualJerusalem.com, which arranged for prayers to be placed in the city’s Wailing Wall.

She phoned Carmelite nuns in Baltimore to ask for prayers during evening vespers. By the time she finished her campaign, she had enlisted prayer groups from seven denominations, including Fundamentalists, Moravians, Jews Buddhists, Catholics, Baptists and members of the Unity Church.

Each prayer group was assigned a group of patients, who were identified only by name, age and type of illness. Although Crater and Krucoff left the design of individual prayers to the groups themselves, they stipulated that the patients had to be prayed for by name and that the prayers on behalf of these patients had to concern their healing and recovery.

The prayer portion of the study would be blinded, so that neither patients nor staff knew who was going to be prayed for. The other noetic therapies would be administered an hour after the patients had undergone the angioplasty.

The results were impressive. Patients in all the noetic treatment groups enjoyed 30–50 per cent improvements in health during their hospital stay, with fewer complications and a lower incidence of narrowing of the arteries compared with the controls.

They also had a 25–30 per cent reduction in adverse outcomes: death, heart attack, or heart failure, a worsening of the state of their arteries or a need for a repeat angioplasty. But of all the alternative therapies employed, prayer had the most profound effect.

The study was too small to yield any definitive conclusions; after all, only 30 patients had been in the prayer group. Nevertheless, Krucoff ’s results seemed highly promising. Krucoff and Crater, who had christened their study MANTRA (Monito and Actualization of Noetic TRAinings), published it and presented their findings before the American Heart Association.4

Even the most conservative of cardiologists were beginning to take home the message that remote healing might actually work after all, and that prayer in particular was good for the heart.5

Krucoff understood that, for his results to be meaningful, the study needed to be replicated on a far larger scale. He rolled out his study and created MANTRA II b launching into an ambitious recruitment programme, eventually enlisting 750 patients from Duke’s Medical Center and nine other hospitals across America, and soliciting 12 prayer groups made up of an even larger, more ecumenical collection of the world’s major religions. Christians were recruited from Great Britain, Buddhists from Nepal, Muslims from America, Jews from Israel.

Emboldened by his early success, Krucoff and Duke loudly trumpeted the project as the largest multicentre study of remote influence, the supreme test of prayer.

With MANTRA II, he divided the patients into four groups. One group woul receive prayer; another, a specially designed programme that included music, imagery and touch (or MIT therapy); the third group, MIT plus prayer; and the fina control group, standard medical care. Immediately prior to undergoing angioplasty, those assigned to receive MIT would be instructed in a method of relaxed breathing while visualizing a favourite place and listening to calming music of their choice. They would then receive healing touch for 15 minutes from a trained practitioner. These patients could also wear headphones during surgery.

The point of the new study was to examine whether prayer or the noetic interventions would prevent further cardiovascular events in the hospital, such as death, new heart attacks, a need for additional surgery, readmission to the hospital, and signs of a sharp rise in the enzyme creatine phosphokinase, an indication that the heart has suffered damage. This time, Krucoff also wished to investigate longer-term effects as ‘secondary endpoints’: whether the interventions could alleviate emotional distress, or prevent death or rehospitalization at any point six months after the patients had been discharged.

Krucoff ’s study fell right in the midst of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and their aftermath. For three months, patient enrolment in the study fell so sharply that he had to amend its design. He developed a ‘two-tier’ prayer strategy by recruiting 12 ‘second-tier’ prayer groups. As soon as new patients were added to the study, the second-tier groups were to pray for the prayers of the ‘first-tier’ prayer groups, who had been praying for the patients all along. Through this strategy Krucoff hoped that newly enrolled patients would receive a higher ‘dosage’ of prayer to approximate the amount received by his patients enlisted earlier in the study.

After the enormous advance publicity, Krucoff ’s findings were an enormous letdown. When the results were finally in and tallied, there was no denying it: there were no differences in outcomes between any of the various groups during their hospital stay. The only apparent benefit was a slight reduction in distress among the MIT patients prior to the surgery. Otherwise, the large-scale MANTRA was an utte failure. Prayer did not seem to make anybody better.6

Among the long-term effects, there had been some therapeutic effects in alleviating emotional distress, need for further hospitalization, and even death rates after six months, but these were not considered statistically significant and they hadn’t been the main focus of the study.

Wresting a small victory from this enormous defeat, Krucoff managed to get his findings published in the prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet. To the public, he maintained that he was ‘thrilled’ with the findings and that they had been misinterpreted. Krucoff ’s study appeared to vindicate the sceptics of prayer as a subject for scientific inquiry. The simple message appeared to be that getting someone to pray for you just does not work.

Meanwhile, in 1997, the Mayo Clinic had begun a two-year study of patients with cardiovascular disease who had been recently discharged from its coronary care unit. Nearly 800 patients were subdivided into two groups: high-risk (those who had one or more risk factors, such as diabetes, a prior heart attack or pre-existing vascular disease) and low-risk (those who had no risk factors other than their present symptoms). The two groups were again divided into two.

In addition to ordinary medical treatment, one group in each of the two categories was to receive the prayers of five people once a week for 26 weeks. The two other groups would simply continue with standard medical treatment.

At the end of the study, the investigators concluded that prayer made no difference in mortality, future heart attacks, need for further intervention or hospitalization. Although there were small differences between the treated and untreated groups, particularly among the low-risk patients, these results were not deemed to be significant.7

To settle the matter once and for all, Herbert Benson came forward with an ambitious plan. Benson had managed to straddle both mainstream and complementary camps in medicine and was well respected for it – a diplomat with the status of elder statesman between two suspicious factions. Besides his Harvard Medical Schoo credentials, he had set up the Mind/Body Medical Institute, which was devoted to the study and practice of mind–body healing techniques. He had even coined the term ‘the relaxation response’ to describe their effects.8 Lending his name to a study of prayer would legitimatize it among the conservative camps.

For this study, Benson recruited five other powerhouses of medicine in the USA, including the Mayo Clinic. His plan was that this study of prayer, which he had dubbed STEP (Study of Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer), would be the largest, most scientifically rigorous of all time.

The study recruited 1800 patients undergoing coronary artery bypass surgery and divided them into three groups: the first two groups were uncertain whether they were going to receive prayer or not; the first group received prayer and the second did not. The third group, which would definitely receive prayer, was also told of the fact. Benson settled on this particular design so that he could isolate two potential effects: whether being prayed for in itself worked, and whether knowing you were going to be prayed for had any additional benefit. In this way he could control for the effect of belief.9

For his prayer groups, Benson enlisted a group of Roman Catholic monks and members of three other Christian denominations: St Paul’s Monastery in St Paul Missouri; the community of Teresian Carmelites in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Silent Unity, a Missouri Unity prayer ministry outside Kansas City. He maintained that his prayer groups included no members of Islam or Judaism because he could not find non-Christian groups happy to work within the demands of the study schedule. The prayer groups were given the patients’ first names and the initials of their surnames. Although the design of their prayers could be individual, they had to include the phrase: ‘for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications’. The groups were then followed for 30 days and any post-operative complications, major events or deaths tracked among all groups.

The results shocked the world and bewildered the researchers, most of all Benson, who had spent much of his career promoting the beneficial effects of the mind on the body. The researchers had predicted the greatest benefit in the prayed- for-and-knew-it group, the second greatest effect in the prayed-for-but-didn’t-know-it group and the least effect among the didn’t-get-prayed-for-and-didn’t-know-it group.

But their results indicated that no amount of prayer under any condition, whether the patients knew it or not, made any difference to the outcome of their operations. Indeed, the results were the very opposite of the researchers’ expectations. Those patients who were prayed for and knew they were being prayed for were worse off, by a statistically significant degree: 59 per cent of the prayed-for-and-knew-it group suffered post-operative complications, compared with 52 per cent among the non- prayed-fors.

Even the prayed-for-but-didn’t-know-it group suffered slightly more heart attacks and strokes than those who had not been given prayer. Among the uninformed patients who had received prayers, 10 per cent suffered major complications of the surgery, compared with 13 per cent of those who did not receive prayer.10

Benson and his co-authors didn’t know what to make of these results. They even wondered if the patients had suffered from a type of ‘performance anxiety’ as a result of the undue pressure and expectations created by the prayers.

Many commentators concluded that this study proved that prayer not only does not work, it is bad for you – or at least it cannot be scientifically tested. Krucoff, who was asked to write a commentary about the study, emphasized that prayer indeed had an effect – a negative one. People needed to discard the universally held view that being prayed for is ‘a priori’ good for you as these results impelled one to consider that not simply ‘voodoo and spells’ but also ‘well-intentioned, loving, heartfelt healing prayer might inadvertently harm or kill vulnerable patients in certain circumstances’.11

T he American Heart Journal released the study online, and its authors held press conferences. Benson cautioned the media that STEP was not the last word o prayer, although it did raise questions about whether patients should be told about prayers being offered for them.

A patient’s awareness of being prayed for was considered the most important subject about prayer for future study. But others were not sure whether prayer should or could be studied any more. The John Templeton Foundation had spent $2.4 million on the study, and with negative results like these it was likely that theirs would be the last funds available.

The STEP findings seemed to undercut my own plans for a large intention experiment. Then as I mulled over the negative findings, I came to think that the very designs of the studies might have been responsible. Although the studies attempted to be rigorous, in many instances they violated the most basic rules of scientific research.

For instance, all of the failed studies did not clearly formulate the content of the healing intention, and left the content of the prayers up to the individual supplicant. Although Benson asked that the single phrase ‘for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications’ be included, he had not asked them to be specific.

The most successful intention experiments incorporate a highly specific target into the intention. In Targ’s study, the healers were given the immune system T- cell counts of the AIDS patients and they sent healing specifically to improve the counts.

The prayer groups should have been instructed to ask for a specific outcome in cardiac symptoms, or fewer cardiac stents placed during the study time, or any other highly specific request, rather than a nebulous, highly generalized statement about the patient improving.

None of the studies tightly controlled for the number of people involved in the prayer groups or for either the frequency or length of time they were to pray, which again might have confused the mass intention. Perhaps, since they were using highly diverse prayer groups, their prayers were not equivalent. In Benson’s study, the prayer groups were allowed to pray anywhere from 30 seconds to several hours four times a week.

His researchers never recorded how long the individuals prayed. In Targ’s study, although diverse healers were used, they rotated patients, so that each received only a single healing message at any one time.

As Bob Barth, director of the Office of Prayer Research, put it: ‘How do yo determine a dose of something as intrinsic as prayer? For example, is one 5-minute prayer by a Buddhist different from 10 Catholic nuns in prayer for an hour or more? Is prayer more effective once or 20 times a day?’

In commenting on Krucoff ’s findings, The Lancet also aired its reservations about his study design. ‘Could a more restricted denominational approach have influenced the outcome?’12

Benson’s attempt to standardize the prayer methods used in his study inadvertently interfered with the methods by which the prayer groups usually carry out intercessory prayer.

In ordinary circumstances, when prayer groups are asked to pray for someone, they request specific details about the patient, including full name, age, medical condition and periodic reports of the patient’s progress. Often they meet with the patient and his or her family. By gathering this personal information, they are able to personalize the prayers.

Benson’s study design allowed for the prayer groups only to be given the name and a last initial of the person to be prayed for. The limited information made it impossible for the prayer groups to establish a meaningful connection with or indeed even to zero in on the people they were praying for – one of the conditions that Schlitz and Radin consider important for effective remote influence.

Several groups in Benson’s study objected to the design of the study. As one commentator wrote, ‘This would be similar to the concept of attempting to make a cell phone call to a friend and expecting her to answer when you have only dialled the first three digits of the phone number.’13

Like STEP, Krucoff ’s studies did not reveal anything about the patients in order to create a connection. In Targ’s research, the healers had been given a photo and a name as well as information about the patient’s condition. None of the groups tested the difference between praying for a patient whose full details were disclosed and simply praying for someone with a first name and last initial.

The selection of the prayer groups was equally unscientific. None of the major prayer studies used any criteria to select participants in the prayer groups or kept track of their size or experience in prayer. Targ had selected only those healers who were highly experienced and committed with a long track record of successfully healing. Although Schlitz’s Love Study employed amateurs sending healing intention, training was provided to ensure a homogeneous approach.

Another problem was the lack of a genuine control group in any of the studies. To be truly scientific, a study must be ‘randomized’ and randomly select participants in one group that is given the treatment and compare its outcome with a group not exposed to the treatment.

However, in any health crisis, family members routinely turn to prayer. The odds were overwhelming in all the major prayer studies that the not-prayed-for people were being prayed for by their own loved ones. In MANTRA II, 89 per cent of the patients from both treatment and control groups admitted that someone in their family was praying for them. These patients lived in the religiously active American Bible Belt.

The lack of a pure control group ultimately muddies the results of a study. This problem occurred with the early studies investigating the potential of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to cause cancer.

Many such studies were tainted because it is virtually impossible to enlist women for study who have not taken some form of exogenous hormones – the birth-control pill, the morning after pill or HRT – at some point in their lives. Consequently, none of the studies has a clean control group of true ‘non-takers’, with which to compare results. Women who take hormones now are compared with women who have taken hormones in the past. Both situations carry a cancer risk. The same ‘tainting’ would apply to these prayer studies. People in the ‘treatment’ groups getting prayed for are being compared with patients whose relatives are praying for them.

The large prayer studies had other basic flaws. In both the Benson and Krucof studies, the people praying did not know the patients and so would not have had a strong motivation to heal, as the ‘senders’ had in the Love Study. In Benson’s study, as Krucoff pointed out in his commentary about STEP, there should have been a true placebo group, which would have no expectation of the possibility of prayer and also there should have been a comparison between such a group and a super-group, whose members included all those exposed to prayer.

No analysis compared the effect of being prayed for with the particular belief a patient held about which groups he or she had been assigned, which would have shed light on the possible role of a placebo effect. The researchers also had not taken into account any possible stress on the patient from having to hide his or her assignment in the study from the hospital staff.14

Like STEP, Krucoff ’s study violated the basic rules of scientific design, largely because of events beyond his control. When he reconstituted his study in the wake of 9/11, some of the patients received straightforward prayer from diverse prayer groups, and the others, who had been enrolled after the World Trade Center tragedy, received the ‘two-tier’ type of prayer, in which those doing the praying were themselves prayed for. Unlike the most basic of scientific trials, his study did not offer the participants the identical treatment.

Even Targ had complained about problems in study design of the very first major prayer study by Randolph Byrd, in which ordinary Christians had been asked to pray for cardiac patients. There was no information about who was taking blood pressure medication, so it was unclear whether prayer or medicine had done the healing.

There were no controls for mental attitude during the study. A high number of patients with a positive outlook may have landed in the treatment group.

Sometimes a placebo effect, an expectation of healing, can be a large factor in positive results. In one healing study of patients suffering from clinical depression, all the patients improved, even the control group, which did not receive healing, largely from the psychological boost created by the possibility of healing.15

In Benson’s study the prospect of prayer might have had the opposite effect. According to Larry Dossey, the elegant Southern internist and author of many books on prayer,16 the STEP study offered prayer as a ‘tease’, dangled in front of seriously ill patients as something they might or might not be lucky enough to get.

‘Nowhere on earth is prayer delivered in this fashion,’ says Dossey. ‘When prayer occurs in real life, we don’t taunt our loved ones with it. They are extended compassionate prayer unconditionally and without equivocation. Who can say what emotions – resentment? hostility? – were generated in these three groups of patients as a result of how prayer was offered?’17

The fact that the people who knew they were being prayed for not only had no placebo response but also evidenced more post-surgical complications than any other group, he says, ‘suggests that very strange internal dynamics were operating within the Harvard prayer study.’18

The Mid-America Heart Institute study – the study in which prayer by Christian of diverse denominations had reduced symptoms in heart patients by 10 per cent – was also criticized for offering so many endpoints that it was bound to show a positive result.19

The negative results of these large prayer studies could be because praying for others does not work, because prayer simply cannot be subjected to scientific study, or simply because these new studies themselves were asking the wrong questions.

After all, according to Bob Barth of the Office of Prayer Research, these studies onl represent a small proportion of prayer research.20 Of the more than 227 studies investigated by the office, 75 per cent show a positive impact.

Nevertheless, to study the effect of remote intention, it may be best to move away from prayer, which contains a good deal of emotional baggage. Targ tried to isolate the effect of simple healing intention, which is different from prayer. With intention, the agent of change is human; with prayer it is God.

Simple healing intention can be more easily controlled for in a scientific study by ensuring that every member of the group sending the intention was sending the exact same message. For the purposes of my intention experiments, a simple intention to heal or improve something might avoid all the problems associated with studying prayer.

Unlike prayer, healing has been persuasively proven; a large body of evidence exists about the positive effects of distant healing – perhaps 150 studies in all.21 These scientific studies have been subjected to overall reviews that rate both the significance of the effects and the outcome. In the most cautious of such analysis, Professor Edzard Ernst, the exacting and skeptical chair of complementary medicine at Exeter University in Britain, concluded that of 23 studies, 57 per cent had shown a positive effect.22

Among the most rigorously scientific (those with double-blind trials), the average effect size, or size of change among those treated, was 0.40 – about 10 times better than the effect size of aspirin or propanolol, two drugs considered highly successful in preventing heart attacks.

Hidden in the failure of the large prayer studies lies vital instruction not only about the design of such mass experiments, but also about those elements that maximize the power of intention.

To be successful, an intention may require other parameters besides trained attention, getting out of the way, and formulating a simple request to the universe. As Gary Schwartz learned during his own research on healing, the attitude of the healers as well as the patients may matter a good deal.

Schwartz’s research began as a simple study of healing intention by Reiki practitioners. Schwartz had enlisted his colleague, Beverly Rubik, founding director of the Center for Frontier Sciences at Temple University, Philadelphia, a biophysicist interested in subtle energies.

As Rubik was well versed in studies using bacteria, they decided to use as their subject E. coli bacteria, which had been severely stressed. One way to stress bacteria is to shock them with a sudden blast of heat. Schwartz, Rubik and their colleague Audrey Brooks carefully managed the amount of heat so that it was enough to stress the bacteria without killing off the entire sample.

They then asked 14 practitioners of Reiki to heal the bacteria that survived by transmitting a standard Reiki treatment for 15 minutes. Each practitioner was to heal three different samples over three days. Equipment with an automated colony counter kept track of the number of bacteria that survived.

Initially, Schwartz, Rubik and Brooks were surprised to find that the Reik practitioners made no difference to the overall survival of the viable bacteria. On closer look, however, they discovered that the Reiki practitioners seemed to be successful on certain days, but not on others. This spotty batting average puzzled them.

Perhaps, Schwartz thought, a healer’s success depended on some sort of connection with the subject. It was difficult, after all, to feel any warm and fuzzy connection with E. coli bacteria, which ordinarily resides peacefully in the gut but can wreak havoc when it migrates out of the digestive tract. But what if he managed to get his practitioners in healing mode?

In the next batch of studies, Schwartz and his colleagues asked the Reiki practitioners to work for 30 minutes on a human patient suffering with pain, and then set them back to work on their bacteria samples.

This time, the healing was successful; the scientists discovered significantly more bacteria in the healed samples than in the controls. The healers appeared to enjoy a higher success rate once their healing ‘pumps’ had been primed.23

Nevertheless, Schwartz and the other researchers continued to discover instances in which the healers had a deleterious effect on the bacteria. It occurred to them that a healer’s own well-being might affect results. They needed a simple test to assess true well-being, to gauge more than physical condition.

They decided to use the Arizona Integrative Outcomes Scale (AIOS), an ingeniously simple visual mean of assessing spiritual, social, mental, emotional and physical well-being during the past 24 hours.24

Developed by physician and psychologist Iris Bell, one of Schwartz’s colleagues at the University of Arizona, AIOS allows patients to assess more than physical symptoms.

The subjects are told to reflect on their general sense of wellbeing, ‘taking into account your physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual condition over the past 24 hours’, then to mark a point on a horizontal line between ‘worst you have ever been’ on the left and ‘best you have ever been’ on the right that, in their view, represents their overall sense of well-being in the same time period. A number of studies demonstrated that AIOS is a useful, accurate tool for pinpointing emotional wellness and a healthy state of mind.25

In their next series of studies, Schwartz, Rubik and Brooks asked the Reik healers to assess themselves on the AIOS scale before and after they had carried ou the Reiki. With this data, the scientists discovered an important trend. On days when the healers felt really well in themselves, they had a beneficial effect on the bacteria; the counts in the bacteria given the therapy were higher than in the heat-shocked controls. On days when they did not feel so well and they scored lower on the test, they actually had a deleterious effect. Those practitioners who began the healing with diminished well-being actually killed off more bacteria than naturally died in the controls. Evidently, a practitioner’s own overall health was an essential factor in his ability to heal.

Schwartz and his colleagues then tried a study using AIOS with a different type of healing, called Johrei. They recruited 236 practitioners and volunteers, and asked them to fill in the AIOS scale plus a questionnaire he had created assessing emotional state of mind before and after they administered healing.

When Schwartz and Brooks compared the AIOS tests of both the healers and the patients before and after the healing, they discovered another interesting effect. Although the patients felt better after they had received the healing, so did the healers after they had performed the healing.

Giving was as good as getting for these senders. Other research showed a similar result.26 The act of healing and perhaps the healing context was itself healing. Healing someone else also healed the healer. 27

Schwartz and his fellow researchers then carried out another study of distant Johrei healing on cardiac patients – a double-blind study so that no one but the statistician knew who was receiving healing.28 The primary outcomes measured were clinical reports of pain, anxiety, depression and overall well-being.

After three days, the patients were asked if they had had a sense, feeling or belief that they had received Johrei healing. In both the treatment and control groups, certain patients strongly believed that they had received the treatment and others had a strong feeling they had been excluded.

When Schwartz and Brooks tabulated the results, a fascinating picture emerged The best outcomes were among those who had received Johrei and believed they had received it.

The worse outcomes were those who had not received Johrei and were convinced they had not had it. The other two groups – those who had received it but did not believe it and those who had not received it but believed they had – fell somewhere in the middle.

This result tended to contradict the idea that a positive outcome is entirely down to a placebo response; those who wrongly believed they received the healing did not do as well as those who rightly believed they had received it.

Schwartz’s studies uncovered something fundamental about healing: both the energy and intention of the healing itself and the patient’s belief that he or she had received healing promoted the actual healing. Belief in the efficacy of the particular healing treatment was undoubtedly another factor.

In the Love Study, Schlitz and Stone had stressed the importance of a shared belief system in the success of remote influence, and Schwartz’s results bear this out.

In the large prayer studies, the senders and receivers of prayer did not share the same belief system about God. Most of the patients had been prayed for by a number of groups from different religions and disparate belief systems. Even Benson’s Christian study employed different Christian sects, which do not share identical beliefs. It may be uncomfortable for some groups to be prayed for by people who do not share their views about the divine.

As Marilyn Schlitz pointed out, none of the clinical trials made use of what scientists call ‘ecological validity’. This means that the trials were not designed to model what happens in real life.

In the Harvard study, for example, the prayer groups were instructed to pray differently from how they would normally. None of the big prayer studies tested the effect of the kind of prayers that prayer groups believe is most likely to work.29

In these studies, says Dossey, ‘what is being tested is not genuine prayer but a watered-down faux version of it’.30 The contents and context of prayer were treated casually, as if it were no different than some new medication.

The Benson study also framed its intention as a ‘negative’ – asking that the patients heal with ‘no complications’ – countering the most basic folklore about prayer and affirmations, which stipulates that they should always be framed as a positive statement.

Ordinarily, says Schiltz, people have a meaningful relationship with the person they are praying for. Psychologist and mind-body researcher Jeanne Achterberg, of the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology in California, carried out a study at a Hawaiian hospital, using highly experienced distant healers, who selected as their ‘patient’ a person with whom they had a special connection.

Each healer was isolated from his patient, who was then placed in an MRI scanner. At random, two- minute intervals, the healers sent healing intentions to their patients, using their own traditional healing practices. Achterberg discovered significant brain activation in the same portions of the brains – mainly in the frontal lobes – of all the patients during times healing energy was being ‘sent’.

When the same regime was tried out on people the healers did not know, they had no effect on the patients’ brain activity. Some sort of emotional bond or empathetic connection may be crucial to the success of both prayer and healing intention.31

The large prayer studies may have failed because the researchers were looking in the wrong places for demonstration of an effect. A study of AIDS about to be published at the time of writing has also failed to find an effect.

Nevertheless, a highly significant number of people in the treatment group correctly guessed which group they were in, while the control group did not. As Schlitz concluded, ‘The treatment group seemed to feel something; it just did not correlate with the clinical outcomes that were measured.’32 The study may just have been asking the wrong questions.

Another important variable may be the kinds of thoughts experienced by the recipient during healing. Researchers have discovered that negative thoughts and visualization can have a powerfully negative effect on the body, as if the negativity is somehow infectious and these thoughts take physical form.

For instance, Pennsylvania researchers from the Center for Advanced Wound Care in Reading, Pennsylvania, have discovered that patients with slow-healing wounds often have negative thought patterns and behavioural or emotional wounds, such as guilt, anger and lack of self-worth.33

The same effect can occur with negative relationships. A recent study of couples showed that the stress of reliving an argument delays wound healing by at least a day. In an ingenious study by Ohio State University College of Medicine, the researcher

gathered together 42 married couples and inflicted small wounds with a tiny puncture device on one partner of each pair. During the first sessions, the partners held a conflict-free, constructive discussion and the wound healing was carefully timed.

Several months later, the researchers repeated the injury, but this time allowed the partners to raise an ongoing contentious issue, such as money or in-laws. This time, the wounds took a day longer to heal. What is more, among the more hostile couples, the wounds healed at only 60 per cent the rate of the more compatible pairs.

Examination of the fluids in the wounds found different levels of a chemical called interleukin-6 (IL6), a cytokine and key chemical in the immune system.

Among the hostile couples, the levels of interleukin-6 were too low initially and then too high immediately after an argument, suggesting that their immune systems had been overwhelmed.34

The person sending out an intention might also need to be sent good intentions. Krucoff ’s results as universally interpreted had overlooked one vital finding: the patients with the double-tier prayer groups who had been prayed for had fared far better in the secondary endpoints; their death and re-hospitalization rates over the six months after discharge were 30 per cent lower than the others.

Mortality over six months was lower among patients given MIT, and lowest of all among patients given MIT with prayer. These results had only been characterized as a ‘suggestive trend’, but may have been the entire point of the story. Praying worked if the person doing the praying – or his prayers – also had been prayed for. 35

Healing and positive intention are simply an aspect of the constant two-way flow of communication between living things. In the person being sent intention, a shared belief in the power of the healing modality and a positive state of mind may enhance results.

Fritz Popp’s research demonstrates that the degree of coherence of an organism’s light emissions is linked to its overall state of health. When healers are healthy, in a positive state of mind and have engaged in a healing ‘warm up’, their light is more likely to shine brighter. The most effective healer of all may be the one who has been healed himself.

Notes – Chapter 6: In the Mood

All details about M. Krucoff ’s trip to India and decision to study prayer from interviews, August 2006.
R. C. Byrd, ‘Positive therapeutic effects of intercessory prayer in a coronary care unit population’, Southern Medical Journal, 1988; 81 (7): 826–9.
W. Harris et al., ‘A randomised, controlled trial of the effects of remote, intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients admitted to the coronary care unit’, Archives of Internal Medicine, 1999; 159 (19): 2273–8.
M. Krucoff, ‘Integrative noetic therapies as adjuncts to percutaneous intervention during unstable coronary syndromes: Monitoring and Actualization of Noetic Training (MANTRA) feasibility pilot’,American Heart Journal, 2001; 142 (5): 760–7.
M. Krucoff announced the results at the Second Conference on the Integration of Complementary Medicine into Cardiology, a meeting sponsored by the American College of Cardiology, October 14, 2003.
M. Krucoff et al., ‘Music, imagery, touch and prayer as adjuncts to interventional cardiac care: The Monitoring and Actualisation of Noetic Trainings (MANTRA) II randomised study’,The Lancet, 2005; 366: 211–17.
J. M. Aviles et al., ‘Intercessory prayer and cardiovascular disease progression in a coronary care unit population: a randomized controlled trial’, Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 2001; 76 (12): 1192–8.
H. Benson, The Relaxation Response, New York: William Morrow, 1975.
M. Krucoff et al., Editorial: ‘From efficacy to safety concerns: A STE forward or a step back for clinical research and intercessory prayer? The Study of Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP)’,American Heart Journal, 2006; 151; 4: 762.
H. Benson et al., ‘Study of the therapeutic effects of intercessory prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multi-center randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer’, American Heart Journal, 2006; 151 (4): 934–42.
Krucoff et al., ‘A STEP forward’, op. cit.
Editorial: ‘MANTRA II: Measuring the unmeasurable?’The Lancet, 2005; 366 (9481): 178.
Letter to the editor, American Heart Journal, sent to author, 2006.
Krucoff et al., ‘A STEP forward’, op. cit.
B. Greyson, ‘Distance healing of patients with major depression’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1996; 10 (4): 447–65.
L. Dossey, Meaning and Medicine: Lessons from a Doctor’s Tales of Breakthough Healing, London: Bantam, 1991; Dossey, Healing Words, op.cit.
L. Dossey, ‘Prayer experiments: Science or folly? Observations on the Harvard prayer study’, Network Review (UK), 2006; 91: 22–3.
Ibid.
Harris, ‘Effects of remote intercessory prayer’, op. cit. www.officeofprayerresearch.org.
Benor, Healing Research, op. cit.
J. Astin et al., ‘The efficacy of “distant healing”: A systematic review of randomized trials’, Annals of Internal Medicine, 2000; 132: 903–10.
B. Rubik et al., ‘In vitro effect of Reiki treatment on bacterial cultures: Role of experimental context and practitioner well-being’, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2006; 12 (1): 7–13. 296 The Intention Experiment
I. R. Bell et al., ‘Development and validation of a new global well-being outcomes rating scale for integrative medicine research’, BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 2004; 4: 1.
Ibid.
S. O’Laoire, ‘An experimental study of the effects of distant, intercessory prayer on self-esteem, anxiety and depression’, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 1997; 3 (6): 19–53.
Rubik et al., ‘In vitro effect’, op, cit.
K. Reece et al., ‘Positive well-being changes associated with giving and receiving Johrei healing’, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 2005; 11 (3): 455–7.
M. Schlitz, ‘Can science study prayer?’ Shift: At the Frontiers of Consciousness, 2006; September–November (12): 38–9.
Dossey, ‘Prayer experiments’, op. cit.
J. Achterberg et al., ‘Evidence for correlations between distant intentionality and brain function in recipients: a functional magnetic resonance imagining analysis’, The Journal of Alternative andComplementary Medicine, 2005; 11 (6): 965–71.
Ibid.
K. A. Wientjes, ‘Mind-body techniques in wound healing’, Ostomy/Wound Management, 2002; 48 (11): 62–7.
J. K. Keicolt-Glaser, ‘Hostile marital interactions, proinflammatory cytokine production, and wound healing’, Archives of General Psychiatry, 2005; 62 (12): 1377–84.
Krucoff, ‘(MANTRA) II’, op. cit.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Right Time

Persinger’s basement vault was known as the Chamber of Heaven and Hell. Room COO2B, a disused sound booth, was a relic of the 1970s, its original fittings intact enormous nylon loudspeakers, deep orange flecked shag carpeting and a single item of furniture – a stained brown polyester armchair.

More than 2000 people had occupied the chair in pure darkness, a modified yellow motorcycle helmet on their heads, surrendering all control of their next half hour to the scientists behind the glass booth. Persinger, a neuroscientist, was god of room COO2B.

He had become expert in manipulating brain waves to yield up a divine experience, or, as he referred to it, ‘a sensed presence’. With a few simple commands typed into a computer, he would instruct the helmet to send low-level magnetic fields coursing through the temporal lobes of his volunteers, abruptly switching sides of the brain to heighten the transcendent and occasionally terrifying nature of the experience.1

Jesus had been sighted in the brown polyester reclining chair, as had the Virgin Mary, Muhammad, monks in hooded robes, knights in shining armour and a Native American deity, the Sky Spirit. Out-of-body experiences had been produced; near- death experiences relived. One journalist had been transported back to his life’s most transcendent moment – the time he first laid eyes on his high-school girlfriend’s perfect breasts.

Not all visitors found God. There had been imaginings of alien sightings and abductions, and even satanic ritual. One volunteer, overwhelmed by the sight of an enormous set of eyes and the smell of burning sulphur, attempted to pull himself loose from the helmet and wrench off the blindfold and earplugs. As soon as the 500-pound door was pried open for him he fled, terrorized, from the room.

The nature of the experience all depended, Persinger and his assistants explained, on a physiological roll of the dice: the sensitivity of the left amygdala of the brain compared with its counterpart on the right. If the left is more sensitive, and you send magnetic waves coursing through it, you get heaven. If you are unlucky enough to be born with a more sensitive right amygdala, you get hell.2

Persinger had a singular passion: the subtle influences of geology and meteorology on human biology, particularly the electrical circuitry of the brain. A transplant from the American South, he had headed north in the 1960s to avoid the draft and a likely stint in Vietnam – a possibility he objected to on moral grounds – and he remained in Canada after receiving a professorship at Laurentian in 1971.

Forty years later, he seemed an unlikely draft dodger, with his three-piece pinstripe suits, gold-chain swag and watch fob, and clipped, offhand manner. This conservative posturing masked a bold curiosity that led him into exotic areas of inquiry – the rhythms of biological systems, the volatile energy of outer space, the nature of epilepsy, the source of mystical visions – disparate areas that eventually converged in his mind after an extraordinary epiphany. Persinger realized that living things are attuned not only to each other, but also to the earth and its constantly shifting magnetic energies. This remarkable revelation, built upon the discoveries of Franz Halberg, would convince me that careful timing to coincide with these energies might be vital for an effective intention.

In 1948, as a young medic at Harvard Medical School on a temporary visa from war-torn Austria, Franz Halberg was assigned an impossible task: to help find the cure for all disease.3

At the time, the cure was assumed to involve the cortical hormones secreted by the adrenal glands, which enable the body to adapt to the ordinary stresses of life. The search was on to find reasonable substitutes for the body’s own scarce supply of steroids.

Halberg had been singled out to study mice whose adrenal glands had been removed and who were then injected with adrenaline in order to observe the effect on their circulating white blood cells called eosinophils. In ordinary circumstances, adrenaline will set off a predictable seesaw, causing more of the body’s natural steroids to be secreted, which, in turn, lower the eosinophil count.

However, in animals or humans without adrenal glands, the count should remain static. But the cell count in Halberg’s mice still seemed to fluctuate, even after he had removed all trace of adrenal tissue. Later, after moving to the University of Minnesota, he carried on his studies with a near limitless supply of experimental mice, and came up with the same conclusions.

Even when he handled them less frequently, which should have caused less stress to the tiny creatures, he noticed more variation in cell count.

Halberg was mystified by this fluctuation, until he suddenly recognized a recurring pattern: the cell counts were always higher in the morning and lower at night.

The variation was rising and falling according to a predictable, 24-hour cycle. Halberg studied other biological processes, and discovered that many appear to run according to an in-built clock. All living things respond to the same 24-hour rhythm, in tandem with the earth’s rotation. Halberg coined the terms ‘chronobiology’ – the influence of time and certain periodic cycles on biological function – and ‘circadian’ (circa = about; dia = day) for daily biological rhythms.

He created the Chronobiology Laboratories at the University of Minnesota and became known as the father o chronobiology. Chronobiology, as his lab began to discover, is a ready-made feature of organisms, not simply something learned or acquired – an inherent property of life.

Besides circadian rhythms, Halberg also discovered that living things keep in time to many other periodic rhythms; half-weekly, weekly, monthly and yearly cycles govern virtually every biological function.

The human pulse and blood pressure, body temperature and blood clotting, circulation of lymphocytes, hormonal cycles and other functions of the human body all appear to ebb and flow according to some basic, recurring timetable. These rhythms are not unique to humans, but are present throughout nature, and evident even in fossils of single-cell organisms that had existed millions of years ago.

Initially Halberg believed that the master switch for these biological rhythms was located in certain cells of the brain or adrenal glands. However, certain cycles carried on even when Halberg removed the brain cells in question – the adrenal glands – and even the brain itself. In his eighties, Halberg made his final breakthrough discovery: the synchronizer within every living thing is not internal but resides in the planets and in the sun.4

The sun is a furious star.

This huge ball of gases, with a surface temperature of around 6000°C, is encased by strong magnetic fields in the outer solar atmosphere – a recipe for periodic explosions, as the gases build up and magnetic fields intersect on the sun’s surface. Although the patch of space between sun and earth used to be considered an uneventful vacuum, ‘space weather’ is now understood to be weather so extreme, of such unimaginable turbulence, that if transferred to earth it would blow up the entire planet in an instant. Solar wind, a constant blast of electrified gas, dominates this interplanetary medium, soaring past the earth at speeds up to 2 million miles per hour. Although the earth’s magnetic field usually deflects it, this gale can penetrate our magnetic field during moments of intense solar activity.

Sunspots – vortices of concentrated magnetic fields, visible to us as dark blobs on the sun’s surface – begin to accumulate and then to disappear in fairly regular cycles, so that scientists can make some predictions about when the sun is likely to erupt.

A solar cycle of waxing and waning activity occurs, on average, every eleven years. As sunspots build up, so does the sun’s aggressive behaviour. At unpredictable moments, it hurls solar flares, gaseous explosions with the energy of 40 billion atomic bombs, likely caused by the ripping apart and reconnection of strong magnetic fields.

Electrified bullets of high–energy protons from the nuclei of gases are picked up by the solar wind and flung towards earth at speeds of more than 5 million miles per hour, showering our atmosphere with radiation and ionization.

Periodically, the sun also releases a corona mass ejection, a ball of gas and magnetic fields of up to a billion tons, which also speed towards earth at several million miles per hour, causing extreme geomagnetic storms in space.

Scientists have long understood that earth is, in effect, a giant magnet with two poles – North and South – surrounded by a magnetic field that is constantly in flux.

This field encircles the earth like a donut in a region of space called the ‘magnetosphere’, and is kept in place by the solar wind, with a force of about 0.5 gauss or 50,000 nanotesla – about 1000 times weaker than that of a typical horseshoe magnet.

The geomagnetic fields (GMFs) differ in different regions and at varying times Any changes in our solar system – the activity of the sun, the movement of the planets, the daily oscillation of the earth on its rotation – or geological changes on earth – the presence of ground water or the movement of the earth’s molten inner core – can alter the strength of the earth’s GMF on a daily basis.

Storms in space transfer some of the energy of the solar wind to the earth’s magnetosphere, causing wild fluctuations of direction and speed in the particles in the earth’s magnetic field. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which tracks these volatile space weather patterns, reckons that over any given solar cycle, geomagnetic storms in space will occur about a third of the time, almost half of which are severe enough to interfere with modern technology.

Storms of this magnitude (G5, or maximum severity on the NOAA scale) can disrupt portions of the earth’s electrical power, pipeline flow and high-tech communications systems, and disorient spacecraft and satellite navigation systems. In March 1989, one such storm left 6 million people in Montreal without electric power for nine hours.

At the time Halberg made his discoveries, geomagnetic storms were known to have a profound effect on the movement and orientation of animals such as pigeons and dolphins, which make use of the earth’s geomagnetic field to navigate.

Biologists assumed that the earth’s weak magnetic field had little effect on basic biological processes, particularly as living things have daily exposure to the more powerful electromagnetic and magnetic fields generated by modern technology. But in the course of investigating the health implications of space flight, the Soviet researchers uncovered evidence that natural geomagnetic fields, particularly those of extremely low frequencies (less than 100 hertz), have a pronounced effect on virtually all cellular and chemical processes in living things.

When Russian scientists at the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academ of Sciences explored the effects of space weather on cosmonauts being sent into space, they discovered that protein synthesis in bacteria cells is highly susceptible to changes in geomagnetic fields, and that this disturbance in protein synthesis also affects human micro-organisms.5

Geomagnetic disturbances influence the synthesis of micronutrients in plants; even single-celled algae respond to solar-cycle flux.6 So attuned are plants and microorganisms to these changes that the Russian researchers made use of them as a sensitive barometer for geomagnetic disturbances.7

The Soviet scientists also discovered that if the cosmonauts suffered cardiac arrest, it was usually during a magnetic storm.8 Illness on earth also appeared to parallel geomagnetic activity in space; both sickness and death increased on stormy geomagnetic days.9

But of all the systems in the body affected, changes in solar geomagnetic conditions most disturbed the rhythms of the heart.

The Space Research Institute scientists tracked the heart rate of healthy volunteers over an entire solar cycle and compared it with sunspot and other geomagnetic activity during that period. The healthiest heart rate is one with the greatest variation. In the Russian research, the most varied heart rate occurred during times of the least amount of solar activity,10 while heart rate variability (HRV) decreased during magnetic storms.

A disturbance in HRV most affects the autonomic nervous system, the system in the body that keeps it ticking over without any conscious intervention.

A low HRV increases the risk of all coronary artery disease and heart attack. During increased geomagnetic activity, the viscosity, or thickness, of the blood also increases sharply, sometimes doubling, and the bloodstream slows down.11

Sudden cardiovascular death also appears to be linked with solar geomagnetic activity.12

Heart-attack rates rise and fall according to solar-cycle activity:13 the largest number of sudden deaths from heart disease occurred within a day of a geomagnetic storm.14 Halberg himself discovered a 5 per cent increase in heart attacks in Minnesota during times of peak maximum solar activity.15

It is not surprising that biological systems like human beings are sensitive to external signals, such as geomagnetic disturbances. Magnetic fields are caused by the flow of electrons and atoms with charge, known as ions, and whenever magnetic forces change, they alter the direction of the flow of these atoms and particles.

Ultimately, since living organisms are also composed of particles like electrons, any profound change of magnetic direction may markedly alter their biological processes.

Once Halberg understood the effect of the earth’s geomagnetic field on living things, he renamed his life’s work ‘chronoastrobiology’ – the rhythms of biology as affected by astral bodies. The sun was the giant metronome setting the pace for all of life.

Persinger’s interests had mostly to do with geomagnetic effects on the brain. Researchers in the Soviet bloc had also discovered that space weather can affect neurological processes.

Scientists at the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences at Baku used a special device enabling them to continuously monitor the electrical activity of the heart and brain in a small number of healthy volunteers, and to compare those rhythms with those of the earth’s geomagnetic field.

They discovered that geomagnetic activity has a strong influence on brain functioning. During magnetically stormy days, EEG readings get destabilized.16

Geomagnetic turbulence also disturbs the balance between certain parts of the brain and profoundly disrupts communication within the nervous system, over-activating certain aspects of the autonomic nervous system and lowering others.17

The sun’s activity also affects mental equilibrium. As Persinger discovered, the more unsettled the weather in space, the greater the number of patients hospitalized for nervous disorders and the greater number of attempted suicides.18

Geomagnetic disturbance also seemed to correlate with increases in general psychiatric disorders.19

Even those already suffering from mental illness get more agitated during magnetically stormy days.

Persinger grew intrigued by a possible relationship between geomagnetic fluctuations in the earth and the timing of epileptic seizures after his neuroscientist colleague Todd Murphy, who had temporal-lobe epilepsy as a young child, disclosed that he often had out-of-body experiences while having a seizure.

Some data had already linked an increase in geomagnetic activity with the timing of epileptic seizures.20 Could an epileptic fit result from geomagnetic disturbance? Persinger decided to study this possibility in an animal.

He injected a batch of laboratory rats with lithium pilocarpine, which causes epileptic-like seizures in the rodents, and compared the timing of the onset of seizures about an hour after the onset of laboratory-simulated increased geomagnetic activity.21

From this, Persinger inferred that, above a certain threshold of geomagnetic activity, epilepsy is more likely to be triggered. Whenever geomagnetic activity exceeded 20 nanotesla, seizures would occur more frequently.22

Persinger then discovered a relationship between sudden death – from epilepsy or cot death – and high levels of geomagnetic activity.23 Sudden, seemingly inexplicable deaths might have a rational explanation after all: people with weaker constitutions are at the mercy of the sun’s restless activity.

Strong geomagnetic fields also appear to affect learning profoundly – often for the better. Increased geomagnetic activity enhances memory: rats exposed to geomagnetic fields learn mazes more quickly.24

Large fluctuations in solar activity cause other subtle effects in human behaviour and performance – for instance, the ability to perform a skilled task.25

Psychologist Dean Radin once examined the effec of GMFs on bowling. He tracked the performance of experienced bowlers over a number of periods, and then compared their scores with the geomagnetic activity of the same period.

Large geomagnetic fluctuations the day before a match appeared to cause more uneven results than normal – a 41 per cent variance in the men’s scores compared with the more consistent scores obtained during days of geomagnetic stability.26

Other research has demonstrated that the greater the change in the earth’s geomagnetic field, the greater the number of traffic violations and industrial accidents.27

The most important determinant appeared to be large change in geomagnetic activity, either from turbulent to calm or the reverse.

Although periodically destabilizing, exposure to the daily ebb and flow of earth’s geomagnetic activity may be essential to life here. The Solar Terrestrial Influences Laboratory at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia carried ou biological experiments on board the Soviet Mir space station to examine what happens to cosmonauts who are deprived of contact with the earth’s geomagnetic field while in space. The scientists constructed a ‘geomagnetic vacuum’, a six-metre stainless steel decompression press-chamber, which partially blocked out the earth’s natural geomagnetic field. Seven healthy young men were sealed off in the chamber and their bodily processes analysed. After being placed in the decompression chamber, the men evidenced a number of upsets in brain-wave activity. Sleep was more restless, with fewer periods of deep sleep.28

Contact with geomagnetic fields may play a primary role in maintaining the equilibrium of the nervous system. Indeed, the earth’s tiny geomagnetic fluctuations have the most profound effect on the two major engines of the body: the heart and the brain.

Persinger went on to discover other extraordinary geophysical effects on human beings.

Electromagnetic and geomagnetic phenomena resulting from the earth’s shifting plates, earthquakes, or from unusually high rainfall levels – even electromagnetic ‘luminosities’, or lights in the sky – can all stimulate certain portions of the brain that produce hallucinations.

Between 1968 and 1971, more than 100,000 people reported observing visions of an apparition of the Virgin Mary above a church in Zeitoun, Egypt. When Persinger examined the seismic activity in the area over the same time period, he discovered an unprecedented peak in earthquake activity.29

Sometimes the electromagnetic effects were man-made. At one point he studied a Roman Catholic woman with early brain trauma who reported nightly visitations by the Holy Spirit.

Ultimately, he discovered the source of the miracle: her disability caused her to be unduly affected by the electric alarm clock situated near her head as she slept.30

Persinger wondered whether he could reproduce these types of geomagnetic disturbances in the laboratory. His colleague Stan Koren modified and wired up a motorcycle helmet (thereafter named the ‘Koren’ helmet) so that it could send out very-low-frequency complex magnetic fields – about the amount that radiates from a telephone handset – in precise directions.

Participants would be fitted in the helmet, then placed in the acoustic chamber of room COO2B, which had been especially adapted to block out electromagnetic noise. Turning on the helmet would produce what Persinger referred to as ‘temporal lobe transients’, something possibly like a micro-seizure – tiny episodes causing alterations in neuronal firing patterns. This produced virtually the same effect on the brain as exposure to increased ambient geomagnetic activity.

Over time, Persinger began to recognize patterns. The brain waves of his participants would fall into resonance with the complex magnetic fields and remain in synchrony for up to 10 seconds after he had turned off the helmet.31

Through trial and error, he discovered that the portion of the brain most susceptible to electromagnetic and geomagnetic effects are the temporal lobes. Sending low level (1 microtesla), pulsed magnetic fields over the right cerebral hemisphere slowed brain waves to an alpha rhythm (8–13 hertz), but only on the right side.32

Our ‘sense of self ’ and our sense of the ‘other’ are housed in both temporal lobes but primarily in the left hemisphere, where the language centres are located.

To function normally, both left and right temporal lobes must work in harmony. If something upsets this balance, the brain will sense another ‘self ’ and create a hallucination.

As Persinger discovered in his experiments, stimulating the right temporal lobe portion of the brain generates the sense, presence or feeling of spiritual visions, both good and bad.

Aiming magnetic fields at the amygdala of the brain at the same time colours the experience with intense emotion, just as occurs during a spiritual experience. By first stimulating one side of the amygdala and then the other,

Persinger found that he could heighten the emotional complexion of the experience.

Volunteers wearing the Koren helmet experienced divine epiphanies, apparitions, out-of-body sensations and even a hallucination of Satan purely through temporal-lobe stimulation.

The nature of the experience largely depended on the participant’s individual history: negative early life experiences tend to increase the sensitivity of the right temporal lobe, and those with a high proportion of such experiences tend to have a negative experience while wearing the helmet. A happier person, with a more sensitive left temporal lobe, is more likely to experience a sense of the divine.33

It would have been tempting for Persinger to conclude that all spiritual experience is simply geomagnetically induced hallucination, except for one unsettling fact: extrasensory perception and other psychic abilities appear to be more acute during particular types of geomagnetic activity.

When the earth is ‘calm’ and geomagnetic flux at an ebb, telepathic and extrasensory perceptions increase.34

Even minor environmental changes – from slight variations in the weather to solar patterns appear to have a profound effect on extrasensory perception or the ability to view things remotely.

The reverse occurs with psychokinesis – mental attempts to change physical matter. The power of intention increases when the earth’s energy is agitated.35

In the 1970s, Persinger was able to test the effects of geomagnetic activity on telepathy during sleep by teaming up with noted parapsychologist Stanley Krippner, then the director of a dream laboratory at Maimonides Medical Center in New York City.

Krippner had perfected an experimental protocol to test telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition in dreams during deep sleep. Volunteers would be paired off.

While one partner slept, the other would be in a separate room and would be asked to concentrate on an image and attempt to ‘transmit’ the image to the dreamer, so that it would be incorporated into his dream.

Upon waking, the participants who had been sleeping would describe their dreams in great detail, to determine whether they contained anything resembling the target pictures they had been sent during their slumbers.36

Persinger and Krippner found that participants did better on certain days than on others.

When they tracked geomagnetic activity during the period of the study, they discovered that the dreamers had significantly higher accuracy in picking up the target pictures on nights when the earth’s GMF activity was relatively quiet.37

Geomagnetic activity also affects precognitive dreams – those that forecast events. Dr Alan Vaughan, a well-known clairvoyant whose dreams accurately foretold the future in great detail, kept a detailed dream diary in order to compare their contents with future events.

One of Vaughan’s dreams predicted the murder of then-presidential candidate Robert Kennedy two days before he was assassinated.38

An examination of the geomagnetic activity on the nights that Vaughan had dreamed 61 such premonitions showed that it was significantly quieter on the days when he had his most accurate dreams.39

During days of geomagnetic calm, spontaneous instances of telepathy or clairvoyance are more likely to occur40 and remote viewing accuracy appears to improve.41

Persinger carried out his own intriguing test of ESP using a group o couples.

One member of each pair was shown an image while it was being bathed in magnetic fields, then asked to describe the memory of an experience he or she had shared with the partner that was prompted by the image. Simultaneously, in another room, the partner was shown the same images and also asked to describe a memory.

When Persinger compared the results, he discovered that the two narratives were most alike when the ambient geomagnetic activity was at its quietest. The greater the geomagnetic activity, the less the two sets of memories mirrored each other.42

Nevertheless, the two sexes appear to respond very differently to geomagnetic activity, which Persinger discovered after comparing a database of paranormal experiences with geomagnetic activity and breaking down the data by sex.

Men tended to have more premonitions on days when geomagnetic activity was high (above 20 nanotesla), whereas women reported more premonitions if the geomagnetic activity was low (below 20 nanotesla).

Men also tended to have more accurate memories with higher geomagnetic activity; women, with lower geomagnetic activity. Just as Krippner had found, the people most susceptible to extrasensory experiences were those with ‘thin boundaries’, particularly those who had already had paranormal encounters.43

With time, Persinger found that he could enhance powers of extrasensory perception with the artificial geomagnetic fields of the Koren helmet. The remote- viewing ability of one of his students considerably improved after he was exposed to weak horizontal magnetic fields.44

In 1998, Persinger decided to put the Koren helmet to the ultimate test. Could i interrupt the ability of one of the greatest remote viewers in the world?

He invited Ingo Swann to his basement lab. Swann, then 68, soon proved he had lost none of his extrasensory prowess; he correctly described and drew in great detail images of randomly selected photographs sealed in envelopes in another room.

Nevertheless, after Persinger bathed the photos in complex magnetic field patterns, Swann’s accuracy suddenly plummeted. The most disruptive fields had different signal wave forms of varying phases.

This suggested that Swann was picking up the information in wave form and that those signals were easily interrupted by magnetic fields that could disturb their coherence.45

As Gary Schwartz had also discovered, information transmitted or received by human beings must have a strong magnetic component.

Persinger’s evidence persuaded me that geomagnetic activity influences the clarity of our reception in picking up quantum information.

But do geomagnetic fields also affect the strength of our transmissions and their effect on the physical world? Research by Stanley Krippner offers a few clues.

Krippner wished to test the hypothesis that psychokinesis is likely to occur on days when the earth is ‘noisy’. He and his team worked with the Brazilian sensitive Amyr Amiden, known for his extraordinary psychokinetic ability, and set about comparing the time of Amiden’s psychokinetic activities with geomagnetic fluctuations in the Brasilia area, where the sessions were taking place.

Krippner’s team also took readings of Amiden’s pulse and blood pressure.

The team found a significant correlation between Amiden’s psychic feats and the daily geomagnetic index for the entire southern hemisphere. For instance, Amiden performed the highest number of psychokinetic feats on 10 March and 15 March, which were the days that month with the greatest geomagnetic activity. He produced nothing out of the ordinary on 20 March, the geomagnetically quietest day of the month.46

Amiden’s psychic abilities were preceded by both a rise in his diastolic blood pressure (the pressure of the blood as it returns to the heart) and a rise in geomagnetic ‘noise’. It may be that geomagnetic activity must first cause changes in the ‘heart brain’ before a person can transmit information that can affect physical matter.

Interestingly, as with couples in the Love Study, Amiden’s most powerful psychokinetic effects anticipated strong input: in his case, geomagnetic flux.

In one instance, two religious medallions suddenly materialized in the room where Amiden and the researchers were present, appearing to drop from the ceiling – an event that was followed by a sudden rise in the area’s geomagnetic field. Can humans anticipate this geomagnetic noise, and, if so, do such anticipatory windows offer them more psychokinetic power than usual?

Psychologist William Braud carried out some intriguing studies of the effect of geomagnetic fields on intention by examining whether high levels of geomagnetic activity were correlated with powers of remote influence. Braud examined the effect of sending intention to human blood cells and to another person.

Like Krippner, he discovered that the success of intention was linked to a ‘noisy’ sun producing high geomagnetic activity.47

Besides solar activity, other environmental factors should be considered when working out the best times to send intention.

A number of scientists, including Persinger, found that certain days and certain times of day influence the success of ESP and psychokinesis.48 The best results occur around 1 p.m. local sidereal time, which is time measured by our relation to the stars, not the sun.

Local sidereal time is worked out as the hour’s angle of the vernal equinox, where the plane of the earth’s equator would intersect with that of its orbit, if measured out in the heavens.

Psychokinetic effects also seem to be greater about every 13 days, at times when solar wind is modulated.49

It might also be worth avoiding times of low visibility and high winds, a condition which produces a high percentage of ions with electrical charges in the air. An ion forms when a molecule encounters enough energy to unleash an electron.

They are also created by rainfall, air pressure, forces emitted during a waterfall and the friction from large volumes of air moving rapidly over a land mass, as during so- called ill winds, such as El Niño or Santa Anas of southern California.

Both positive and negative ions are equivalent to a tiny pulse of static electricity, and the air that we breathe is made up of billions of these tiny charges.

Good ‘clean’ air contains 1500–4000 ions per cubic centimetre, and the preferred ratio should be slightly more negative than positive ions: 1.2 to 1. However, ions are highly unstable; in our industrialized, largely indoor lives, filled with electromagnetic charge from pollution and artificial sources, this ideal number is drastically diminished and the ratio disturbed, leaving all but the most robustly outdoorsy among us inhaling too low a level of ions, with a predominance of positive ions.

Living with low levels of ions is not particularly good for us – or for our ability as receivers or transmitters.

Research in California and Israel has shown that lower concentrations of either positive or negative ions will produce fewer alpha frequencies in the human brain and that sudden higher levels of either charge can produce rapid, distinctive brain-wave changes.50

Persinger’s research offers a vast amount of evidence that magnetic frequency affects our ability to ‘tune’ in and transmit, and also affects those portions of the brain that receive the information.

Subtle shifts in the earth’s geomagnetic fields most noticeably affect the heart and brain, the very systems of the body shown by the

DMILS research and Schlitz’s Love Study to be the primary source of transmission After examining Persinger’s work, I began to view intention as a vast energetic relationship involving the sun, the atmosphere, and earthly and circadian rhythms.

To send intention effectively, we would have to take account of these energies.

Persinger had usefully located not only the best ‘channel’ for intention, but also the best time to turn it on.

Notes – Chapter 7:The Right Time

For all details about Michael Persinger’s experiments, interviews and correspondence with Persinger, August 2006 and a member of his neuroscientist team, Todd Murphy, May 23, 2006. Also, J. Hitt, ‘This is your brain on God’, Wired, November 1999; R. Hercz, ‘The God helmet’ SATURDAYNIGHTmagazine, October 2002: 40–6; B. Raynes, ‘Interview with Todd Murphy’, Alternative Perceptions Magazine online April 2004 (No. 78), plus T. Murphy’s website: www.spiritualbrain.com and M. Persinger’s home page at the Laurentian University website: www.laurentian.ca/Neursci/_people/Persinger.htm.
Neuroscientist Todd Murphy developed this theory and successfully demonstrated its validity in Persinger’s laboratory.
The main background of Halberg’s early life is taken from F. Halberg, ‘Transdisciplinary unifying implications of circadian findings in the 1950s’, Journal of Circadian Rhythms, 2003; 1: 2.
G. Cornélissen et al., ‘Is a birth-month-dependence of human longevity influenced by half-yearly changes in geomagnetics?’ ‘Physics of Auroral Phenomena’, Proceedings. XXV Annual Seminar, Apatity: Pola Geophysical Institute, Kola Science Center, Russian Academy of Science February 26–March 1, 2002: 161–6; A. M. Vaiserman et al., ‘Human longevity: related to date of birth?’ Abstract 9, 2nd International Symposium: Workshop on Chronoastrobiology and Chronotherapy, Tokyo Kasei University, Tokyo, Japan, November 2001.
O. N. Larina et al., ‘Effects of spaceflight factors on recombinant protein expression in E.coli producing strains’, in ‘Biomedical Research on the Science/NASA Notes 297 Project’, Abstracts of the Third US/Russia Symposium, Huntsville, Alabama, November 10–13, 1997: 110–11.
D. Hillman et al., ‘About-10 yearly (circadecennian) cosmo-helio geomagnetic signatures in Acetabularia’, Scripta Medica (BRNO), 2002 75 (6): 303–8.
P. A. Kashulin et al., ‘Phenolic biochemical pathway in plants can be used for the bioindication of heliogeophysical factors’, ‘Physics of Auroral Phenomena’, Proceedings. XXV Annual Seminar, Apatity: Pola Geophysical Institute, Kola Science Center, Russian Academy of Science February 26–March 1, 2002: 153–6.
V. M. Petro et al., ‘An influence of changes of magnetic field of the Earth on the functional state of humans in the conditions of space mission’, Proceedings, International Symposium ‘Computer Electro-Cardiograph on Boundary of Centuries’, Moscow, Russian Federation, 27–30 April, 1999.
K. F. Novikova and B. A. Ryvkin, ‘Solar activity and cardiovascular diseases’, in M. N. Gnevyshev and A. I. Ol (eds.),Effects of Solar Activity on the Earth’s Atmosphere and Biosphere , Academy of Science, USSR (translated from the Russian), Jerusalem: Israel Program for Scientific Translations, 1977: 184–200.
G. Cornélissen et al., ‘Chronomes, time structures, for chronobioengineering for “a full life”’, Biomedical Instrumentation and Technology, 1999; 33 (2): 152–87.
V. N. Oraevskii et al., ‘Medico-biological effect of natural electromagnetic variations’, Biofizika, 1998; 43 (5): 844–8; V. N. Oraevskii et al., ‘An influence of geomagnetic activity on the functional status of the body’, Biofizika, 1998; 43 (5): 819–26.
I. Gurfinkel et al., ‘Assessment of the effect of a geomagnetic storm on the frequency of appearance of acute cardiovascular pathology’, Biofizika, 1998; 43 (4): 654–8; J. Sitar, ‘The causality of lunar changes on cardiovascular mortality’, Casopis Lekaru Ceskych, 1990; 129: 1425–30.
F. Halberg et al., ‘Cross-spectrally coherent about 10-5- and 21-year biological and physical cycles, magnetic storms and myocardial infarctions’, Neuroendrocrinology Letters, 2000; 21: 233–58.
M. N. Gnevyshev, ‘Essential features of the 11-year solar cycle’, Solar Physics, 1977; 51: 175–82.
G. Cornélissen et al., ‘Non-photic solar associations of heart rate variability and myocardial infarction’, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar- terrestrial Physics, 2002; 64: 707–20.
A. R. Allahverdiyev et al., ‘Possible space weather influence on functional activity of the human brain’, Proceedings, Space Weather Workshop: Looking Towards a European Space Weather Programme, December 17– 19, 2001.
E. Babayev,‘Some results of investigations on the space weather influence on functioning of several engineering-technical and communication systems and human health’, Astronomical and Astrophysical Transactions, 2003; 22 (6): 861–7; G. Y. Mizon and P. G. Mizun, Space and Health, Moscow: ‘Znanie’, 1984.
E. Stoupel, ‘Relationship between suicide and myocardial infarction with regard to changing physical environmental conditions’, International Journal of Biometeorology, 1994; 38 (4): 199–203; E. Stoupel et al., ‘Clinical cosmobiology: the Lithuanian study, 1990–1992’, International Journal of Biometeorology, 1995; 38: 204–8; E. Stoupel et al., ‘Suicide- homicide temporal interrelationship, links with other fatalities and environmental physical activity’, Crisis, 2005; 26: 85–9. 298 The Intention Experiment
Avi Raps et al., ‘Geophysical Variables and Behavior: LXIX. Sola activity and admission of psychiatric inpatients’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1992; 74: 449; H. Friedman et al., ‘Geomagnetic parameters and psychiatric hospital admissions’, Nature, 1963; 200: 626–8.
M. Mikulecky, ‘Lunisolar tidal waves, geomagnetic activity and epilepsy in the light of multivariate coherence’, Brazilian Journal of Medicine, 1996; 29 (8): 1069–72; E. A. McGugan, ‘Sudden unexpected deaths i epileptics – a literature review’, Scottish Medical Journal, 1999; 44 (5): 137–9.
A. Michon et al., ‘Attempts to simulate the association between geomagnetic activity and spontaneous seizures in rats using experimentally generated magnetic fields’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1996; 82 (2): 619–26; Y. Bureau and M. Persinger, ‘Geomagnetic activity and enhanced mortality in rats with acute (epileptic) limbic lability’, International Journal of Biometeorology, 1992; 36: 226–32.
Y. Bureau and M. Persinger, ‘Decreased latencies for limbic seizures induced in rats by lithium-pilocarpine occur when daily average geomagnetic activity exceeds 20 nanotesla’, Neuroscience Letters, 1995; 192: 142–4; A. Michon and M. A. Persinger, ‘Experimental simulation o the effects of increased geomagnetic activity upon nocturnal seizures in epileptic rats’, Neuroscience Letters, 1997; 224: 53–6.
M. Persinger, ‘Sudden unexpected death in epileptics following sudden, intense, increases in geomagnetic activity: Prevalence of effect and potential mechanisms’, International Journal of Biometeorology, 1995; 38: 180–7; R. P. O’Connor and M. A. Persinger, ‘Geophysical Variables and Behavior: LXXXII. A strong association between sudden infant deat syndrome (SIDS) and increments of global geomagnetic activity – possible support for the melatonin hypothesis’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1997; 84: 395–402.
B. McKay and M. Persinger, ‘Geophysical Variables and Behavior LXXXVII. Effects of synthetic and natural geomagnetic patterns on maz learning’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1999; 89 (3 pt 1): 1023–4
Radin, Conscious Universe, op. cit.
D. Radin, ‘Evidence for relationship between geomagnetic field fluctuations and skilled physical performance.’ Presentation made at the 11th Annual Meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration, Princeton New Jersey, June 1992.
S. W. Tromp, Biometeorology, London: Heyden, 1980.
I. Stoilova and T. Zdravev, ‘Influence of the geomagnetic activity on the human functional systems’, Journal of the Balkan Geophysical Society, 2000; 3 (4): 73–6
M. A. Persinger and S. A. Koren, ‘Experiences of spiritual visitation an impregnation: potential induction by frequency-modulated transients from an adjacent clock’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2001; 92 (1): 35–6.
M. A. Persinger et al., ‘Differential entrainment of electroencephalographic activity by weak complex electromagnetic fields’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1997; 84 (2): 527–36.
M. A. Persinger, ‘Increased emergence of alpha activity over the left but not the right temporal lobe within a dark acoustic chamber: Differential response of the left Notes 299 but not the right hemisphere to transcerebral magnetic fields’, International Journal of Psychophysiology, 1999; 34 (2):163–9.
Interview with Todd Murphy, May 23, 2006.
W. G. Braud and S. P. Dennis, ‘Geophysical Variables and Behavior: LVIII. Autonomic activity, hemolysis and biological psychokinesis Possible relationships with geomagnetic field activity’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1989; 68: 1243–54.
Ibid.
McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 167–8.
M. A. Persinger and S. Krippner, ‘Dream ESP experiments an geomagnetic activity’, Journal of the American Society for Psychica Research, 1989; 83: 101–16; S. Krippner and M. Persinger, ‘Evidence for enhanced congruence between dreams and distant target material during periods of decreased geomagnetic activity’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1996; 10, (4): 487–93.
M. Ullman et al., Dream Telepathy: Experiments in ESP, Jefferson: McFarland, 1989.
Ibid.
M. A. Persinger, ‘ELF field meditation in spontaneous psi events. Direc information transfer or conditioned elicitation?’ Psychoenergetic Systems, 1975; 3: 155–69; M. A. Persinger, ‘Geophysical Variables and Behavior: XXX. Intense paranormal activities occur during days of quiet global geomagnetic activity’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1985; 61: 320–2.
M. H. Adams, ‘Variability in remote-viewing performance: Possible relationship to the geomagnetic field’, in D. H. Weiner and D. I. Radin (eds.), Research in Parapsychology, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1986: 25. [cf n.19, ch.8]
J. N. Booth et al., ‘Ranking of stimuli that evoked memories in significan others after exposure to circumcerebral magnetic fields: Correlations with ambient geomagnetic activity’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2002; 95(2): 555–8.
M. A. Persinger et al., ‘Differential entrainment of electroencephalographic activity by weak complex electromagnetic fields’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1997; 84 (2): 527–36.
M. A. Persinger, ‘Enhancement of images of possible memories of othersduring exposure to circumcerebral magnetic fields: Correlations with ambient geomagnetic activity’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2002; 95 (2): 531–43.
S. A. Koren and M. A Persinger, ‘Possible disruption of remote viewing by complex weak magnetic fields around the stimulus site and the possibility of accessing real phase space: A pilot study’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2002; 95 (3 Pt 1): 989–98.
S. Krippner, ‘Possible geomagnetic field effects in psi phenomena.’ Paper presented at international parapsychology conference in Recife, Brazil, November 1997.
Braud and Dennis, ‘Geophysical Variables and Behavior: LVIII’, op. cit.
S. J. P. Spottiswoode, ‘Apparent association between effect size in free response anomalous cognition experiments and local sidereal time’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1997; 11 (2): 109–22.
S. J. P. Spottiswoode and E. May, ‘Evidence that free response anomalous cognitive performance depends upon local sidereal time and geomagnetic fluctuations’, Presentation Abstracts, Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration, June 1997: 8.
A. P. Krueger and D. S. Sobel, ‘Air ions and health’, in David S. Sobe (ed.), Ways of Health: Holistic Approaches to Ancient and Contemporary Medicine, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.

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The Intention Experiment (full text) by Lynne McTaggart. In HTML for free access. Part 1 of 4.

Thus it’s placement in my blog.

Welcome to the world of quantum physics and how all those things about prayer, intention, and spirituality actually does have a scientific foundation that they are based upon.

Some Comments

One of the best books I have ever read. You will learn so much about intention. I call it "desire". How important this is!

-Carol S. Burney

I really enjoyed this book. I was impressed with the author's ability to make complex science clear and also the use of credible sources. 

She really doesn't talk so much about using your thoughts to change your life. It is more of a book about how science, real science, is showing more and more how the human mind is seen by quantum physics and other legitimate scientific disciplines. 

It was really interesting to me to see that the mind really is much more powerful than we think it is. 

As I said, I was very impressed with the research she used in the book as the references were to legitimate experiments that had been peer reviewed. Good insights into the amazing power of intention.

-Zipporia

I rate this a solid 5 due to the importance of the message; it combines everything I have learned in pieces into a nice little package. 

Although not too much attention was paid to the way the writing flows, and as some of you have pointed out the sloppiness of the writing, I have to say that I also write sloppy when I discover a very cool thing. 

The excitement overwhelms my style and attention to detail. But otherwise, it is a very solid read and I did not read it to be blown away with the "literature" quality of the writing, but for the clear and to the point message that it communicates so clearly. 

This is a life altering book if it's the first book you are reading about the power of your intentions, thoughts and quantum physics. Awesome job!

-Netaron

In Quantum theory , "the world" is comprised of two "systems",the system containing the observer and the system containing what is observed. 

Until the observer focuses his attention on the observed system it exists only as a host of infinite possibilities. The observer observation or measurement "fixes" its reality. That is the scientific theory. 

Hard enough for us mere mortals to grasp or integrate it with what we have been taught. 

From quantum theory it is almost irresistible to move to a consideration of how intention, rather than mere observation or objective measurement might work in our world and that is what this thought provoking book does. 

The experiments are about whether intention can change outcome or even in one experiment, can change a previously measured reality. 

It explores the power of consciousness and invites readers, through excercises in the book and through the web site to become part of an ongoing living experiment in consciousness. 

I found the experiments fascinating, engaging and worthy of reflection..and I found reflection on them energizing. I recommend it enthusiastically for anyone who is at work on increasing their own awareness and trying to live fully present in the moment.

-Lindsay N. Bowker

For those interested in Quantum Science, in the Zero Point Field, and in what they call the "soup of creation" - this is a "must read". 

I was pleased with this book right up to the chapter called Praying for Yesterday, which introduced experiments that couldn't hold water logically. I was so frustrated by that chapter that I almost ditched the book entirely - BUT - the third paragraph from the end of that chapter is a prize so wondrous - a double concept so unbelievable and empowering that all else is forgiven. 

In fact, based solely on that, I ordered her first book - The Field.

If you're one of the lucky one's who can wrap your brain around concepts like these - ordering this book is a favor you need to do for yourself. It's an exciting rush of potential at your command - if you allow it to be so. I, personally, noting the flaws of the above chapter, would still recommend this book without hesitation as a "must read"!

-SciFiCahill

Our thoughts create our reality.

This is a well written book about quantum physics and its extraordinary implications. That we live in a "Field" (Zero Point Field) which is a constant dance of quantum energy exchange. Clearly we are connected to the entire universe through our pulsating energy which is constantly interacting with the vast energy "out there". 

This is a great book filled with information about how the universe operates and our connection to it. This vast flow of energy, Consciousness, if you will, is all around us and is our connection to the "Source" or "Creator" of the Universe. A very powerful book, which I highly recommend.

-Richard Grant

The Intention Experiment

Comment

The preface is in italicized purple font. It’s pretty boring, but it tells you how the book came about, and at that it can give you some insight in how some things can manifest in our universe. Don’t ever think that everything is a coincidence.

Preface

THIS BOOK REPRESENTS A PIECE of unfinished business that began 2001 when I published a book called The Field. In the course of trying to find a scientific explanation for homeopathy and spiritual healing, I had inadvertently uncovered the makings of a new science.

During my research, I stumbled across a band of frontier scientists who had spent many years re-examining quantum physics and its extraordinary implications. Some had resurrected certain equations regarded as superfluous in standard quantum physics. These equations, which stood for the Zero Point Field, concerned the extraordinary quantum field generated by the endless passing back and forth of energy between all subatomic particles. The existence of the Field implies that all matter in the universe is connected on the subatomic level through a constant dance of quantum energy exchange.

Other evidence demonstrated that, on the most basic level, each one of us is also a packet of pulsating energy constantly interacting with this vast energy sea.

But the most heretical evidence of all concerned the role of consciousness. The well-designed experiments conducted by these scientists suggested that consciousness is a substance outside the confines of our bodies – a highly ordered energy with the capacity to change physical matter. Directing thoughts at a target seemed capable of altering machines, cells and, indeed, entire multicelled organisms like human beings. This mind-over-matter power even seemed to traverse time and space.

In The Field I aimed to make sense of all the ideas resulting from these disparate experiments and to synthesize them into one generalized theory. The Field created a picture of an interconnected universe and a scientific explanation for many of the most profound human mysteries, from alternative medicine and spiritual healing to extrasensory perception and the collective unconscious.

The Field apparently hit a nerve. I received hundreds of letters from readers who told me that the book had changed their lives. A writer wanted to depict me as a character in her novel. Two composers wrote musical compositions inspired by it, one of which was played on the international stage.

I was featured in a movie, What the Bleep!? Down the Rabbit Hole, and on the What The Bleep Do We Know!? Calendar, released by the film’s producers. Quotes from T h e Field became the centrepiece of a printed Christmas card.

However gratifying this reaction, I felt that my own journey of discovery had hardly left the station platform. The scientific evidence I had amassed for The Field suggested something extraordinary and even disturbing: directed thought had some sort of central participatory role in creating reality.

Targeting your thoughts – or what scientists ponderously refer to as ‘intention’ and ‘intentionality’ – appeared to produce an energy potent enough to change physical reality. A simple thought seemed to have the power to change our world.

After writing The Field, I puzzled over the extent of this power and the numerous questions it raised. How, for instance, could I translate what had been confirmed in the laboratory for use in the world that I lived in? Could I stand in the middle of a railway track and, Superman-style, stop the 9:45 to Paddington with my thoughts? Could I fly myself up to fix my roof with a bit of directed thought? Would it now be possible to cross doctors and healers off my list of essential contacts, seeing as I might now be able to think myself well? Could I help my children pass their maths tests just by thinking about it? If linear time and three-dimensional space didn’t really exist, could I go back and erase all those moments in my life that had left me with lasting regret? And could my one puny bit of mental input do anything to change the vast catalogue of suffering on the planet?

The implications of this evidence were unsettling. Should we be minding every last thought at every moment? Was a pessimist’s view of the world likely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy? Were all those negative thoughts – that ongoing inner dialogue of judgement and criticism – having any effect outside our heads?

Were there conditions that improved your chances of having a better effect with your thoughts? Would a thought work any old time or would you, your intended target and indeed the universe itself have to be in the mood? If everything is affecting everything else at every moment, doesn’t that counteract and thereby nullify any real effect?

What happens when a number of people think the same thought at the same time? Would that have an even larger effect than thoughts generated singly? Was there a threshold size that a group of like-minded intenders had to reach in order to exert the most powerful effect? Was an intention ‘dose dependent’ – the larger the group, the larger the effect?

An enormous body of literature, starting with Think and Grow Rich [1] by Napoleon Hill, arguably the first self-actualization guru, has been generated about the power of thought. ‘Intention’ has become the latest New Age buzzword. Practitioners of alternative medicine speak of helping patients heal ‘with intention’. Even Jane Fonda writes about raising children ‘with intention’.[2]

What on earth, I wondered, was meant by ‘intention’? And how exactly can one become an efficient ‘intender’? The bulk of the popular material had been written off the cuff – a smattering of Eastern philosophy here, a soupçon of Dale Carnegie there, with very little scientific evidence that it worked.

To find answers to all of these questions, I turned, once again, to science, scouring the scientific literature for studies on distant healing or other forms of psychokinesis, or mind over matter. I sought out international scientists who experimented with how thoughts can affect matter. The science described in The Field had been carried out mainly in the 1970s; I examined more recent discoveries in quantum physics for further clues.

I also turned to those people who had managed to master intention and who could perform the extraordinary – spiritual healers, Buddhist monks, Qigong masters, shamans – in order to understand the transformational processes they underwent to be able to use their thoughts to powerful effect. I uncovered myriad ways that intention is used in real life – in sports, for instance, and during healing modalities such as biofeedback. I studied how native populations incorporated directed thought into their daily ritual.

I then began to dig up evidence that multiple minds trained on the same target magnified the effect produced by an individual. The evidence was tantalizing, mostly gathered by the Transcendental Meditation organization, suggesting that a group of likeminded thoughts created some sort of order in the otherwise random Zero Point Field.

At that point in my journey, I ran out of pavement. All that stretched before me, as far as I could tell, was uninhabited open terrain.

Then one evening, my husband Bryan, a natural entrepreneur in most situations, put forward what seemed to be a preposterous suggestion: ‘Why don’t you do some group experiments yourself?’

I am not a physicist. I am not any kind of scientist. The last experiment I had conducted had been in a 10th grade science lab.

What I did have, though, was a resource available to few scientists: a potentially huge experimental body. Group intention experiments are extraordinarily difficult to perform in an ordinary laboratory. A researcher would need to recruit thousands of participants. How would he find them? Where would he put them? How would he get them all to think the same thing at the same time?

A book’s readers offer an ideal self-selected group of likeminded souls who might be willing to participate in testing out an idea. Indeed, I already had my own large population of regular readers with whom I communicated through e-news and my other spin-off activities from The Field.

I first broached the idea of carrying out my own experiment with dean emeritus of the Princeton University School of Engineering Robert Jahn and his colleague psychologist Brenda Dunne, who run the Princeton Engineering Anomalous Researc (PEAR) laboratory, both of whom I had got to know through my research forThe Field. Jahn and Dunne have spent some 30 years painstakingly amassing some of the most convincing evidence about the power of directed intention to affect machinery. They are absolute sticklers for scientific method, no-nonsense and to the point. Robert Jahn is one of the few people I have ever met who speaks in perfect, complete sentences. Brenda Dunne is equally perfectionist about detail in both experiment and language. I would be assured of no sloppy protocol in my experiments if Jahn and Dunne agreed to be involved.

The two of them also have a vast array of scientists at their disposal. They head the International Consciousness Research Laboratory, many of whose members are among the most prestigious scientists performing consciousness research in the world. Dunne also runs PEARTree, a group of young scientists interested in consciousness research.

Everyone met on occasions and kicked around some possibilities. Eventually, they put forward Fritz- Albert Popp, assistant director of the International Institute of Biophysics (IIB) i Neuss, Germany, to conduct the first intention experiments. I knew Fritz Popp throug my research for The Field. He was the first to discover that all living things emit a tiny current of light. As a noted German physicist recognized internationally for his discoveries, Popp would also be a stickler for pristine scientific method.

Other scientists, such as psychologist Gary Schwartz of the Biofield Center a the University of Arizona, Marilyn Schlitz, vice president for research and education at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Dean Radin, IONS’ senior scientist, an psychologist Roger Nelson of the Global Consciousness Project, have also offered to participate.

I do not have any hidden sponsors of this project. The website and all our experiments will be funded by the proceeds of this book or grants, now and in the future.

Scientists involved in experimental research often cannot venture beyond their findings to consider the implications of what they have uncovered. Consequently, when assembling the evidence that already exists about intention, I have tried to consider the larger implications of this work and to synthesize these individual discoveries into a coherent theory. In order to describe in words concepts that are generally depicted through mathematical equations, I have had to reach for metaphoric approximations of the truth. At times, with the help of many of the scientists involved, I have also had to engage in speculation. It is important to recognize that the conclusions arrived at in this book represent the fruits of frontier science. These ideas are a work in progress. Undoubtedly new evidence will emerge to amplify and refine these initial conclusions.

Researching the work of people at the very forefront of scientific discovery again has been a humbling experience for me. Within the unremarkable confines of a laboratory, these largely unsung men and women engage in activities that are nothing short of heroic. They risk losing grants, academic posts and, indeed, entire careers groping alone in the dark. Most scratch around for grant money to enable them to carry on.

All advancements in science are somewhat heretical, each important new discovery partly, if not completely, negating the prevailing views of the day. To be a true explorer in science – to follow the unprejudiced lead of pure scientific inquiry – is to be unafraid to propose the unthinkable, and to prove friends, colleagues and scientific paradigms wrong. Hidden within the cautious, neutral language of experimental data and mathematical equation is nothing less than the makings of a new world, which slowly takes shape for all the rest of us, one painstaking experiment at a time.

Lynne McTaggart, June 2006

Notes – Preface

N. Hill, Think and Grow Rich: The Andrew Carnegie Formula for Mone Making, New York: Ballantine Books (reissue edn), 1987.
J. Fonda, My Life So Far, London: Ebury Press, 2005: 571.

Introduction

THE INTENTION EXPERIMENT is no ordinary book, and you are no ordinary reader. This is a book without an ending, for I intend for you to help me finish it. You are not only the audience of this book, but also one of its protagonists – the primary participants in cutting-edge scientific research. You, quite simply, are about to embark on the largest mind-over-matter experiment in history.

The Intention Experiment is the first ‘living’ book in three-dimensions. The book, in a sense, is a prelude, and the ‘contents’ carry on well beyond the time you finish the final page. In the book itself, you will discover scientific evidence about the power of your own thoughts, and you will then be able to extend beyond this information and test further possibilities through a massive, ongoing international group experiment, under the direction of some of the most well-respected international scientists in consciousness research. Through The Intention Experiment’s website (www.theintention experiment.com), you and the rest of the readers of this book will be able to participate in remote experiments, the results of which will be posted on the site. Each of you will become a scientist at the hub of some of the most daring consciousness experiments ever conducted.

The Intention Experiment rests on an outlandish premise: thought affects physical reality.

Comment

It’s not at all outlandish. Thought actually does create reality.

A sizeable body of research exploring the nature of consciousness, carried on for more than 30 years in prestigious scientific institutions around the world, shows that thoughts are capable of affecting everything from the simplest machines to the most complex living beings.[1]

This evidence suggests that human thoughts and intentions are an actual physical ‘something’ with the astonishing power to change our world. Every thought we have is a tangible energy with the power to transform.

A thought is not only a thing; a thought is a thing that influences other things.

Comment

If quanta were like fine particles of dust, or finely ground flour… then thoughts are like a breeze that attracts or scatters the dust particles everywhere.

This central idea, that consciousness affects matter, lies at the very heart of an irreconcilable difference between the world view offered by classical physics – the science of the big, visible world – and that of quantum physics – the science of the world’s most diminutive components. That difference concerns the very nature of matter and the ways it can be influenced to change.

Comment

The idea behind quantum physics is that consciousness and thoughts affect physical matter.

All of classical physics, and indeed the rest of science, is derived from the laws of motion and gravity developed by Isaac Newton in his Principia.

Newton’s laws described a universe in which all objects moved within the three-dimensional space of geometry and time according to certain fixed laws of motion. Matter was considered inviolate and self-contained, with its own fixed boundaries. Influence of any sort required something physical to be done to something else – a force or collision. Making something change basically entailed heating it, burning it, freezing it, dropping it or giving it a good swift kick.

Newtonian laws, science’s grand ‘rules of the game’, as the celebrated physicist

Richard Feynman once referred to them,[3] and their central premise, that things exist independently of each other, underpin our own philosophical view of the world. We believe that all of life and its tumultuous activity carries on around us, regardless of what we do or think. We sleep easy in our beds at night, in the certainty that when we close our eyes, the universe doesn’t disappear.

Nevertheless, that tidy view of the universe as a collection of isolated, well- behaved objects got dashed in the early part of the twentieth century, once the pioneers of quantum physics began peering closer into the heart of matter. The tiniest bits of the universe, those very things that make up the big, objective world, did not in any way behave themselves according to any rules that these scientists had ever known.

This outlaw behavior was encapsulated in a collection of ideas that became known as the Copenhagen Interpretation, after the place where the forceful Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his brilliant protégé, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, formulated the likely meaning of their extraordinary mathematical discoveries. Bohr and Heisenberg realized that atoms are not little solar systems of billiard balls but something far more messy: a tiny cloud of probability.

Every subatomic particle is not a solid and stable thing, but exists simply as a potential of any one of its future selves – or what is known by physicists as a ‘superposition’, or sum, of all probabilities, like a person staring at himself in a hall of mirrors.

One of their conclusions concerned the notion of ‘indeterminacy’; that you can never know all there is to know about a subatomic particle all at the same time. If you discover information about where it is, for instance, you cannot work out at the same time exactly where it is going or at what speed. They spoke about a quantum particle as both a particle – a congealed, set thing – and a ‘wave function’ – a big smeared- out region of space and time, any corner of which the particle may occupy. It was akin to describing a person as comprising the entire street where he lives.

Their conclusions suggested that, at its most elemental, physical matter isn’t solid and stable – indeed, isn’t an anything yet.

Subatomic reality did not resemble the solid and reliable state of being described to us by classical science, but an ephemeral prospect of seemingly infinite options. So capricious seemed the smallest bits of nature that the first quantum physicists had to make do with a crude symbolic approximation of the truth – a mathematical range of all possibility.

At the quantum level, reality resembled unset jelly.

Comment

Newtonian physics treated things as nice set fixed and solid objects; like billiard balls. That they would follow set rules of behavior. Quantum physics says otherwise. The smallest things are actually like unset jello. When you think about them, they turn hard and freeze in place.

The quantum theories developed by Bohr, Heisenberg and a host of others rocked the very foundation of the Newtonian view of matter as something discrete and self-contained. They suggested that matter, at its most fundamental, could not be divided into independently existing units and indeed could not even be fully described. Things had no meaning in isolation, but only in a web of dynamic interrelationship.

The quantum pioneers also discovered the astonishing ability of quantum particles to influence each other, despite the absence of all those usual things that physicists understand are responsible for influence, such as an exchange of force occurring at a finite velocity. Once in contact, particles retained an eerie remote hold over each other.

The actions – for instance, the magnetic orientation – of one subatomic particle instantaneously influenced the other, no matter how far they were separated.

Comment

In quantum physics, things influence other things regardless of physical distance.

At the subatomic level, change also resulted through dynamic shifts of energy; these little packets of vibrating energy constantly traded energy back and forth to each other like ongoing passes in a game of basketball, a ceaseless to-ing and from-ing that gave rise to an unfathomably large basic layer of energy in the universe.[4]

Subatomic matter appeared to be involved in a continual exchange of information, causing constant refinement and subtle alteration. The universe was not a storehouse of static, separate objects, but a single organism of interconnected energy fields in a constant state of becoming. At its infinitesimal level, our world resembled a vast network of quantum information, with all its component parts constantly on the phone.

The only thing dissolving this little cloud of probability into something solid and measurable was the involvement of an observer.

Once these scientists decided to have a closer look at a subatomic particle by taking a measurement, the subatomic entity that existed as pure potential would ‘collapse’ into one particular state.

The implications of these early experimental findings were profound: living consciousness somehow was the influence that turned the possibility of something into something real. The moment we looked at an electron or took a measurement, it appeared that we helped to determine its final state. This suggested that the most essential ingredient in creating our universe is the consciousness that observes it. Several of the central figures in quantum physics argued that the universe was democratic and participatory – a joint effort between observer and observed. [5]

The observer effect in quantum experimentation gives rise to another heretical notion: that living consciousness is somehow central to this process of transforming the unconstructed quantum world into something resembling everyday reality. It suggests not only that the observer brings the observed into being, but also that nothing in the universe exists as an actual ‘thing’ independently of our perception of it.

Comment

Nothing in this universe exists without an observer to think about it.

It implies that observation – the very involvement of consciousness – gets the jelly to set.

It implies that reality is not fixed, but fluid, or mutable, and hence possibly open to influence.

The idea that consciousness creates and possibly even affects the physical universe also challenges our current scientific view of consciousness, which developed from the theories of the seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes – mind is separate and somehow different from matter – and eventually embraced the notion that consciousness is entirely generated by the brain and remains locked up in the skull.

Most modern workaday physicists shrug their shoulders over this central conundrum: that big things are separate, but the tiny building blocks they are made up of are in instant and ceaseless communication with each other. For half a century, physicists have accepted, as though it makes perfect sense, that an electron behaving one way subatomically somehow transmutes into ‘classical’ (that is, Newtonian) behavior once it realizes it is part of a larger whole.

In the main, scientists have stopped caring about the troublesome questions posed by quantum physics, and left unanswered by its earliest pioneers.

Quantum theory works mathematically. It offers a highly successful recipe for dealing with the subatomic world. It helped to build atomic bombs and lasers, and to deconstruct the nature of the sun’s radiation. Today’s physicists have forgotten about the observer effect.

They content themselves with their elegant equations and await the formulation of unified Theory of Everything or the discovery of a few more dimensions beyond the ones that ordinary humans perceive, which they hope will somehow pull together all these contradictory findings into one centralized theory.

Thirty years ago, while the rest of the scientific community carried on by rote, a small band of frontier scientists at prestigious universities around the globe paused to consider the metaphysical implications of the Copenhagen Interpretation and the observer effect.[6]

If matter was mutable, and consciousness made matter a set something, it seemed likely that consciousness might also be able to nudge things in a particular direction.

Comment

If you can control your thoughts, then you can control matter and the events in your life.

Their investigations boiled down to a simple question: if the act of attention affected physical matter, what was the effect of intention – of deliberately attempting to make a change? In our act of participation as an observer in the quantum world, we might be not only creators, but also influencers.7

They began designing and carrying out experiments, testing what they gave the unwieldy label of ‘directed remote mental influence’ or ‘psychokinesis’, or, in shorthand, ‘intention’ or even ‘intentionality’.

A textbook definition of intention characterizes it as ‘a purposeful plan to perform an action, which will lead to a desired outcome’,[8] unlike a desire, which means simply focusing on an outcome, without a purposeful plan of how to achieve it.

Comment

Intention is quite different from desire.

An intention was directed at the intender’s own actions; it required some sort of reasoning; it required a commitment to do the intended deed. Intention implied purposefulness: an understanding of a plan of action and a planned satisfactory result.

Marilyn Schlitz, vice-president for research and education at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and one of the scientists engaged in the earliest investigations of remote influence, defined intention as ‘the projection of awareness, with purpose and efficacy, toward some object or outcome’.[9] To influence physical matter, they believed, thought had to be highly motivated and targeted.

In a series of remarkable experiments, these scientists provided evidence that thinking certain directed thoughts could affect one’s own body, inanimate objects and virtually all manner of living things, from single-celled organisms to human beings.

Two of the major figures in this tiny subgroup were former dean of engineering Robert Jahn at the Princeton Anomalies Engineering Research (PEAR) laboratory a Princeton University and his colleague Brenda Dunne, who together created a sophisticated, scholarly research programme grounded in hard science.

Over 25 years, Jahn and Dunne led what became a massive international effort to quantify what is referred to as ‘micro-psychokinesis’, the effect of mind on random-event generators (REGs), which perform the electronic, twenty-first century equivalent of a toss of a coin.

The output of these machines (the computerized equivalent of heads or tails) was controlled by a randomly alternating frequency of positive and negative pulses. Because their activity was utterly random, they produced ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ each roughly 50 per cent of the time, according to the laws of probability.

The most common configuration of the REG experiments was a computer screen randomly alternating two attractive images – say, of cowboys and Indians. Participants in the studies would be placed in front of the computers and asked to try to influence the machine to produce more of one image – more cowboys, say – then to focus on producing more images of Indians, and then to try not to influence the machine in either direction.

Over the course of more than two and a half million trials Jahn and Dunne decisively demonstrated that human intention can influence these electronic devices in the specified direction,[10] and their results were replicated independently by 68 investigators.[11]

Comment

Experiments have conclusively shown that intention; directed thought, can absolute influence the physical world.

While PEAR concentrated on the effect of mind on inanimate objects an processes, many other scientists experimented with the effect of intention on living things.

A diverse number of researchers demonstrated that human intention can affect an enormous variety of living systems: bacteria, yeast, algae, lice, chicks, mice, gerbils, rats, cats and dogs.[12]

A number of these experiments have also been carried out with human targets; intention has been shown to affect many biological processes within the receiver, including gross motor movements and those in the heart, the eye, the brain and the respiratory system.

Animals themselves proved capable of acts of effective intention.

In one ingenious study by René Peoc’h of the Fondation ODIER in Nantes, France, a roboti ‘mother hen’, constructed from a moveable random-event generator, was ‘imprinted’ on a group of baby chicks soon after birth.

The robot was placed outside the chicks’ cage, where it moved around freely, as its path was tracked and recorded.

Eventually, it was clear that the robot was moving towards the chicks two and a half times more often than it would ordinarily; the ‘inferred intention’ of the chicks – their desire to be close to their mother – appeared to affect the robot, drawing it closer to the cage.

In over 80 similar studies, in which a lighted candle was placed on a movable REG, baby chicks kept in the dark, finding the light comforting, managed to influence the robot to spend more time than normal in the vicinity of their cage.[13]

The largest and most persuasive body of research has been amassed by William Braud, a psychologist and the research director of the Mind Science Foundation i San Antonio, Texas, and, later, the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. Braud and his colleagues demonstrated that human thoughts can affect the direction in which fish swim, the movement of other animals such as gerbils, and the breakdown of cells in the laboratory.[14]

Braud also designed some of the earliest well-controlled studies of mental influence on human beings. In one group of studies, Braud demonstrated that one person could affect the autonomic nervous system (or fight-or-flight mechanisms) of another.[15]

Comment

Which is one of the many reasons why I tell people that they must isolate themselves from chronically negative people, sociopaths, psychopaths, and people with social, mental or emotional disorders. these individuals will absolutely affect your life, and often it is for their benefit, whatever they perceive it to be, and not yours.

Electrodermal activity (EDA) is a measure of skin resistance and shows an individual’s state of stress; a change of EDA usually occurs if someone is stressed or made uncomfortable in some way.[16]

Braud’s signature study tested the effect on EDA of being stared at, one of the simplest means of isolating the effect of remote influence on a human being. He repeatedly demonstrated that people were subconsciously aroused while they were being stared at.[17]

Perhaps the most frequently studied area of remote influence concerns remote healing.

Some 150 studies, of variable scientific rigor, have been carried out,[18] and one of the best designed was conducted by the late Dr Elisabeth Targ. During the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, she devised an ingenious, highly controlled pair of studies, in which some 40 remote healers across America were shown to improve the health of terminal AIDS patients, even though the healers had never met or been in contact with their patients.[19]

Comment

The use of thought and intention as a means to heal others over distances has been scientifically confirmed to be valid.

Even some of the most rudimentary mind-over-matter experiments have had tantalizing results.

One of the first such studies involved attempts to influence a throw of the dice. To date, some 73 studies have examined the efforts of 2500 people to influence more than two and a half million throws of the dice, with extraordinary success. When all the studies were analyzed together, and allowances made for quality or selective reporting, the odds of the results occurring by chance alone were 1076 (1 followed by 76 zeros) to one.[20]

There was also some provocative material about spoon bending, that perennial party trick made popular by psychic Uri Geller. John Hasted, a professor at Birkbec College at the University of London, had tested this with an ingenious experiment involving children.

Hasted suspended latch keys from the ceiling and placed the children 3 to 10 feet away from their target key, so that they could have no physical contact. Attached to each key was a strain gauge, which would detect and register on a strip chart recorder any change in the key.

Hasted then asked the children to try to bend the suspended metal. During the sessions, he observed not only the keys swaying and sometimes fracturing, but also abrupt and enormous spikes of voltage pulses up to 10 volts – the very limits of the chart recorder. Even more compelling, when children had been asked to send their intention to several keys hung separately, the individual strain recorders noted simultaneous signals, as though the keys were being affected in concert.[21]

Comment

My first wife has a first cousin that could bend spoons, and she did it right there within inches of my nose. It was real, and pretty darn amazing.

Most intriguing, in much of the research on psychokinesis, mental influence of any variety had produced measurable effects, no matter how far the distance between the sender or what point in time he generated his intention. According to the experimental evidence, the power of thought transcended time and space.

By the time these revisionists were finished, they had torn up the rule book and scattered it to the four winds. Mind in some way appeared to be inextricably connected to matter and, indeed, was capable of altering it. Physical matter could be influenced, even irrevocably altered, not simply by force, but through the simple act of formulating a thought.

Nevertheless, the evidence from these frontier scientists left three fundamental questions unanswered.

Through what physical mechanisms do thoughts affect reality?

At the time of this writing, some highly publicized studies of mass prayer showed no effect.

Were certain conditions and preparatory states of mind more conducive to success than others?
How much power did a thought have, for good or ill?
How much of our lives could a thought actually change?

Most of the initial discoveries about consciousness occurred more than 30 years ago. More recent discoveries in frontier quantum physics and in laboratories around the globe offer answers to some of those questions. They provide evidence that our world is highly malleable, open to constant subtle influence. Recent research demonstrates that living things are constant transmitters and receivers of measurable energy. New models of consciousness portray it as an entity capable of trespassing physical boundaries of every description.

Intention appears to be something akin to a tuning fork, causing the tuning forks of other things in the universe to resonate at the same frequency.

The latest studies of the effect of mind on matter suggest that intention has variable effects that depend on the state of the host, and the time and the place where it originates. Intention has already been employed in many quarters to cure illness, alter physical processes and influence events.

It is not a special gift but a learned skill, readily taught. Indeed, we already use intention in many aspects of our daily lives.

Comment

Intention is a learned skill, and with practice, anyone can become proficient with it.

A body of research also suggests that the power of an intention multiplies, depending upon how many people are thinking the same thought at the same time.[22]

The Intention Experiment consists of three aspects.

The main body of the book (chapters 1–12) attempts to synthesize all the experimental evidence that exists on intention into a coherent scientific theory of how intention works, how it can be used in your life and which conditions optimize its effect.

The second portion of the book (chapter 13) offers a blueprint for using intention effectively in your own life through a series of exercises and recommendations for how best to ‘power up’. This portion is also an exercise in frontier science. I am not an expert in human potential, so this is not a self-help manual, but a journey of discovery for me as well as you. I have extrapolated this programme from scientific evidence describing those circumstances that created the most positive results in psychokinetic laboratory experiences. We know for certain that these techniques have generated success under controlled experimental laboratory conditions, but I cannot guarantee they will work in your life. By making use of them, you will, in effect, engage in an ongoing personal experiment.

The final section of the book (chapters 14 and 15) consists of a series of personal and group experiments. Chapter 14 outlines a series of informal experiments on the use of intention in your own life for you to carry out individually. These mini ‘experiments’ are also intended to be pieces of research. You will have the opportunity to post your results on our website and share them with other readers.

Besides these individual experiments, I have also designed a series of large group experiments to be carried out by the readers of this book (chapter 15). With the aid of our highly experienced scientific team, The Intention Experiment will conduct periodic large-scale experiments to determine whether the focused intention of its readers has an effect on scientifically quantifiable targets.

All it requires is that you read the book, digest its contents, log on to the website (www.theintentionexperiment.com) and, after following the instructions and exercises at the back of this book, send out some highly specific thoughts, as and when described on the site. The first such studies will be carried out by the German physicist Fritz-Albert Popp, vice-president of the International Institute of Biophysics in Neuss, Germany (www.lifescientists.de), and his team of seven, psychologist Gary Schwartz and his colleagues at the University of Arizona at Tucson, and Marilyn Schlitz and Dean Radin of the Institute of Noetic Sciences.

Website experts have collaborated with our scientific team to design log-on protocols to enable us to identify which characteristics of a group or aspects of their thoughts produce the most effective results. For each intention experiment, a target will be selected – a specific living thing or a population where change caused by group intention can be measured. We have started with algae, the lowliest of subjects (see chapter 12), and, with every experiment, we will move on to an increasingly complex living target.

Our plans are ambitious: to tackle a number of societal ills. One eventual human target might be patients with a wound. It is known and accepted that wounds generally heal at a particular, quantifiable rate with a precise pattern.[23] Any departure from the norm can be precisely measured and shown to be an experimental effect. In that instance, our aim would be to determine whether focused group intention will enable wounds to heal more quickly than usual.

Naturally, you don’t have to participate in our experiments. If you don’t wish to get involved, you can read about the intention experiments of others, and use some of that information to inform how you use intention in your life.

Please do not casually participate in the experiments. In order for the experiment to work properly, you must read the book and digest its contents fully beforehand. The experimental evidence suggests that those who are the most effective have trained their minds, much as athletes train their muscles, to maximize their chances of success.

In order to discourage uncommitted participation, The Intention Experiment website contains a complicated password comprising some words or ideas from the book (which will change slightly every few months). In order to be part of the experiment, you will have to log on with the password and you will have to have read the book and understood it.

The website (www.theintentionexperiment.com) has a running clock (set to US Eastern Standard Time and Greenwich Mean Time). At a particular moment on a date specified on the website, you will be asked to send a carefully worded, detailed intention, depending on the target site.

Once finished, the results of the experiments will be analysed and data-crunched by our scientific team, examined by a neutral statistician, and then published on the website and in subsequent printings of this book. The website will thus become the living sequel to the book you are holding in your hands. You simply need to consult the website periodically for announcements of the date of every experiment.

Hundreds of well-designed studies of group intention and remote mental influence have demonstrated significant results. Nevertheless, it might be the case that our experiments will not produce demonstrable, measurable effects, at first or indeed ever. As reputable scientists and objective researchers, we are duty-bound to report the data we have. As with all science, failure is instructive, helping us to refine the design of the experiments and the premises that they are based upon.

As you read this book, keep in mind that this is a work of frontier science. Science is a relentless process of self-correction. Assumptions originally considered as fact must often ultimately be discarded. Many – indeed, most – of the conclusions drawn in this book are bound to be amended or refined at a later date.

By reading this book and participating in its experiments you may well contribute to the world’s knowledge, and possibly further a paradigm shift in our understanding of how the world works. Indeed, the power of mass intention may ultimately be the force that shifts the tide towards repair and renewal of the planet. When combined with hundreds of thousands of others, your solitary voice, now one barely audible note, could transmute into a thunderous symphony.

My own motive for writing The Intention Experiment was to make a statement about the extraordinary nature and power of consciousness. It may prove true that a single collective, directed thought is all it takes to change the world.

Notes – Introduction

For a complete description of these scientists and their findings, consult L. McTaggart, The Field: the Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe, London: HarperCollins, 2001.
The full title of Newton’s major treatise is Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, a name that offers a nod to its philosophical implications, although it is always referred to reverentially as the Principia.
R. P. Feynman, Six Easy Pieces: The Fundamentals of Physics Explained, London: Penguin, 1995: 24.
McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.
Eugene Wigner, the Hungarian-born American physicist who received a Nobel Prize for his contribution to the theory of quantum physics, is one of the early pioneers of the central role of consciousness in determining reality and argued, through a thought experiment called ‘Wigner’s friend’, that the observer, ‘the friend’, might collapse Schrödinger’s famous cat into a single state or, like the cat itself, remain in a state of superposition until another ‘friend’ comes into the lab. Other proponents of ‘the observer effect’ include John Eccles and Evan Harris Walker. John Wheeler is credited with espousing the theory that the universe is participatory: it only exists because we happen to be looking at it.
McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.
E. J. Squires, ‘Many views of one world – an interpretation of quantum theory’, European Journal of Physics, 1987; 8: 173.
B. F. Malle et al., Intentions and Intentionality: Foundations of Socia Cognition, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001.
M. Schlitz, ‘Intentionality in healing: mapping the integration of body, mind, and spirit’, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 1995; 1 (5): 119–20.
R. G. Jahn et al., ‘Correlations of random binary sequences with prestated operator intention: a review of a 12-year program’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1997; 11: 345–67.
R. G. Jahn et al., ‘Correlations of random binary sequences’, op. cit.; Dean Radin and Roger Nelson, ‘Evidence for consciousness-related anomalies in random physical systems’, Foundations of Physics, 1989; 19 (12): 1499–514; McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 116–17.
These studies are itemized in great detail in D. Benor, Spiritual Healing, Volume 1, Southfield, Mich.: Vision Publications, 1992.
Rene Peoc’h, ‘Psychokinetic action of young chicks on the path of a “illuminated source”’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1995; 9 (2): 223;
R. Peoc’h, ‘Chicken imprinting and the tychoscope: An Anpsi experiment’ Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 1988; 55: 1; R. Peoc’h, ‘Psychokinesis experiments with human and animal subjects upon a robot moving at random’, The Journal of Parapsychology, September 1, 2002.
William G. Braud and Marilyn J. Schlitz, ‘Consciousness interaction with remote biological systems: anomalous intentionality effects’, Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 1991; 2 (1): 1–27; McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 128–9.
Marilyn Schlitz and William Braud, ‘Distant intentionality and healing assessing the evidence’, Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 1997; 3 (6): 62–73.
William Braud and Marilyn Schlitz, ‘A methodology for the objective study of transpersonal imagery’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1989; 3 (1): 43–63.
W. Braud et al., ‘Further studies of autonomic detection of remote staring: replication, new control procedures and personality correlates’, Journal of Parapsychology, 1993; 57: 391–409; M. Schlitz and S. LaBerge ‘Autonomic detection of remote observation; two conceptual replications’, in D. Bierman (ed.), Proceedings of Presented Papers: 37 Annual Parapsychological Association Convention, Amsterdam, Fairhaven, Mass.: Parapsychological Association, 1994: 465–78.
D. Benor, Spiritual Healing: Scientific Validation of a Healing Revolution, Southfield, Mich.: Vision Publications, 2001.
F. Sicher, E. Targ et al., ‘A randomized double-blind study of the effect of distant healing in a population with advanced AIDS: report of a small scale study’, Western Journal of Medicine, 1998; 168 (6): 356–63. For a full description of the studies, see McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 181–96.
Psychologist Dean Radin conducted a meta-analysis in 1989 at Princeton University of all known dice experiments (73) published between 1930 and 1989. They are recounted in his book Entangled Minds, New York: Paraview, 2006: 148–51.
J. Hasted, The Metal Benders, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981, as cited in W. Tiller, Science and Human Transformation; Subtle Energies Intentionality and Consciousness, Walnut Creek, Calif.: Pavior Publications, 1997: 13.
McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 199.
W. W. Monafo and M. A. West, ‘Current recommendations for topical burn therapy’, Drugs, 1990; 40: 364–73.

The Science of Intention

A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. 

-Albert Einstein

Chapter 1 Mutable Matter

FEW PLACES IN THE GALAXY are as cold as the helium-diluti refrigerator in Tom Rosenbaum’s lab. Temperatures in the refrigerator – a boiler- sized circular apparatus with a number of cylinders – can descend to a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero, almost 273°C below freezing – three thousand times colder than the farthest reaches of outer space. For two days, liquid nitrogen and helium circulate around the refrigerator, and then three pumps constantly blasting out gaseous helium take the temperature down to the final rung. Without heat of any description, the atoms in matter slow to a crawl. At this scale of coldness, the universe would grind to a halt. It is the scientific equivalent of hell freezing over.

Absolute zero is the preferred temperature of a physicist like Tom Rosenbaum. At 47, as a distinguished professor of physics at the University of Chicago and former head of the James Franck Institute, Rosenbaum was in the vanguard o experimental physicists who liked exploring the limits of disorder in condensed- matter physics, the study of the inner workings of liquids and solids when their underlying order was disturbed.[1]

In physics, if you want to find out how something behaves, the best way is simply to make it uncomfortable and then see what happens. Creating disorder usually involves adding heat or applying a magnetic field to determine how it will react when disturbed and also to determine which spin position – or magnetic orientation – the atoms will choose.

Most of his colleagues in condensed-matter physics remained interested in symmetrical systems such as crystalline solids, whose atoms are arranged in orderly array, like eggs in a carton, but Rosenbaum was drawn to strange systems that were inherently disordered – to which more conventional quantum physicists referred disparagingly as ‘dirt’.

In dirt, he believed, lay exposed the unprobed secrets of the quantum universe, uncharted territory that he was happy to navigate.

He loved the challenge posed by spin glasses, strange hybrids of crystals, with magnetic properties, technically considered slow-moving liquids. Unlike a crystal, whose atoms point in the same direction in perfect alignment, the tiny magnets associated with the atoms of a spin glass are wayward and frozen in disarray.

The use of extreme coldness allowed Rosenbaum to slow down the atoms of these strange compounds enough to observe them minutely, and to tease out their quantum mechanical essence. At temperatures near to absolute zero, when their atoms are nearly stationary, they begin taking on new collective properties.

Rosenbaum was fascinated by the recent discovery that systems disorderly at room temperature display a conformist streak once they are cooled down. For once, these delinquent atoms begin to act in concert.

Examining how molecules behave as a group in various circumstances is highly instructive about the essential nature of matter.

In my own journey of discovery, Rosenbaum’s laboratory seemed the most appropriate place to begin. There, at those lowest temperatures where everything occurs in slow motion, the true nature of the most basic constituents of the universe might be revealed. I was looking for evidence of ways in which the components of our physical universe, which we think of as fully realized, are capable of being fundamentally altered.

I also wondered whether it could be shown that quantum behaviour like the observer effect occurs outside the subatomic world, in the world of the everyday. What Rosenbaum had discovered in his refrigerator might offer some vital clues as to how every object or organism in the physical world, which classical physics depicts as an irreversible fact, a finalized assemblage only changeable by the brute force of Newtonian physics, could be affected and ultimately altered by the energy of a thought.

According to the second law of thermodynamics, all physical processes in the universe can only flow from a state of greater to lesser energy. We throw a stone into a river and the ripple it makes eventually stops. A cup of hot coffee left standing can only grow cold.

Things inevitably fall apart; everything travels in a single direction, from order to disorder.

But this might not always be inevitable, Rosenbaum believed. Recent discoveries about disordered systems suggested that certain materials, under certain circumstances, might counteract the laws of entropy and come together rather than fall apart.

Was it possible that matter could go in the opposite direction, from disorder to greater order?

For ten years Rosenbaum and his students at the James Franck Institute had bee asking that question of a small chunk of lithium holmium fluoride salt. Inside Rosenbaum’s refrigerator lay a perfect chip of rose-coloured crystal, no bigger than the head of a pencil, wrapped in two sets of copper coils.

Over the years, after many experiments with spin glasses, Rosenbaum had grown very fond of these dazzling little specimens, one of the most naturally magnetic substances on earth. This characteristic presented the perfect situation in which to study disorder, but only after he had altered the crystal beyond recognition into a disordered substance.

He had first instructed the laboratory that grew the crystals to combine the holmium with fluorine and lithium, the first metal on the periodic table. The resulting lithium holmium fluoride salt was compliant and predictable – a highly ordered substance whose atoms behaved like a sea of microscopic compasses all pointing north.

Rosenbaum then had wreaked havoc on the original salt compound, instructing the lab to rip out a number of the atoms of holmium, bit by bit, and replace them with yttrium, a silvery metal without such natural magnetic attraction, until he was left with a strange hybrid of a compound: a salt called lithium holmium yttrium tetrafluoride.

By virtually eliminating the magnetic properties of the compound, Rosenbaum eventually had created spin-glass anarchy – the atoms of this Frankenstein monstrosity pointing any way they liked. Being able to manipulate the essential property of elements like holmium by creating weird new compounds so cavalierly was a little like having ultimate control over matter itself. With these new spin-glass compounds, Rosenbaum could virtually change the properties of the compound at will; he could make the atoms orientate in a particular direction, or freeze them in some random pattern.

Nevertheless, his omnipotence had a limit. Rosenbaum’s holmium compounds behaved themselves in some regards, but not in others. One thing he could not do was to get them to obey the laws of temperature. No matter how cold Rosenbaum made his refrigerator, the atoms inside them resisted any sort of ordered orientation, like an army refusing to march in step.

If Rosenbaum was playing God with his spin glasses the crystal was Adam, stubbornly refusing to obey His most fundamental law.

Sharing Rosenbaum’s curiosity about the strange property of the crystal compound was a young student called Sayantani Ghosh, one of his star PhD candidates. Sai, as her friends called her, a native of India, had graduated with a first-class honours degree from Cambridge, after which she had chosen Tom’s lab for her doctoral programme in 1999. Almost immediately, she had distinguished herself by winning the Gregor Wentzel Prize, given each year by the University of Chicago’s physics department to the best first-year graduate student teaching assistant. The slight 23-year-old, who at first glance appeared abashed, hiding behind her copious dark hair, had soon impressed her peers and teachers alike with her bold authority, a rarity among science students, and her ability to translate complex ideas to the level an undergraduate could comprehend. Sai shared the distinction of winning the coveted prize with only one other woman since its inception 25 years before.

According to the laws of classical physics, applying a magnetic field will disrupt the magnetic alignment of a substance’s atoms. The degree to which this happens is the salt’s ‘magnetic susceptibility’.

The usual pattern with a disordered substance is that it will respond to the magnetic field for a time and then plateau and tail off, as the temperature drops or the magnetic field reaches a point of magnetic saturation. The atoms will no longer be able to flip in the same direction as that of the magnetic field and so will begin to slow down.

In Sai’s first experiments, the atoms in the lithium holmium yttrium salt, as predicted, grew wildly excited with the application of the magnetic field. But then, as Sai increased the field, something strange began to happen. The more she turned up the frequency, the faster the atoms continued to flip over.

What is more, all the atoms, which had been in a state of disarray, began pointing in the same direction and operating as a collective whole. Then, small clusters of about 260 atoms aligned, forming ‘oscillators’, spinning collectively in one direction or another.

No matter how strong the magnetic field that Sai applied, the atoms remained stubbornly aligned with each other, acting in concert. This self-organization persisted for 10 seconds.

At first, Sai and Rosenbaum thought these effects might have something to do with the strange effects of the remaining atoms of holmium, known to be one of the very few substances in the world with such long-range internal forces that in some quarters it was described and worked out mathematically as something existing in another dimension.[2] Although they didn’t understand the phenomenon they had observed, they wrote up their results, which were published in the journal Science in 2002.[3]

Rosenbaum decided to carry out another experiment to attempt to isolate the property in the crystal’s essential nature that had enabled it to override such strong outside influences. He left the study’s design to his bright young graduate student, suggesting only that she create a computerized three-dimensional mathematical simulation of the experiment she had intended to carry out. In experiments of this nature on such tiny matter, physicists must rely on a computerized simulation to confirm mathematically the reactions they are witnessing experimentally.

Sai spent months developing the computer code and building her simulation. The plan was to find out a bit more about the salt’s magnetic capability, by applying two systems of disorder to the crystal chip: higher temperatures and a stronger magnetic field.

She prepared the sample by placing it in a little 2.4 x 4.8 cm copper holder, then wrapped two coils around the tiny crystal: one a gradiometer, to measure its magnetic susceptibility and the direction of spin of the individual atoms, and the other to cancel out any random flux affecting the atoms inside.

A connection attached to her PC would enable her to change the voltage, the magnetic field or the temperature, and would record any changes whenever she altered one of the variables by the tiniest degree.

She began lowering the temperature, a fraction of a kelvin (K) at a time, and then began applying a stronger magnetic field. To her amazement, the atoms kept aligning progressively. Then she tried applying heat, and discovered they again aligned. No matter what she did, in every instance the atoms ignored the outside interference. Although she and Tom had flushed out most of the compound’s magnetic component, of its own volition, as it were, it was turning into a larger and larger magnet.

That’s weird, she thought. Perhaps she should take more data, just to ensure they had encountered nothing strange in the system.

She repeated her experiment over six months until the early spring of 2002, when her computer simulation was finally complete. One evening, she mapped the results of the simulation on a graph, and then she superimposed the results from her actual experiment.

It was as though she had drawn a single line.

There on the computer screen was a perfect duplicate: the diagonal line formed from the computer simulation lay exactly over the diagonal line created from the results of the experiment itself.

What she had witnessed in the little crystal was not an artefact, but something real that she had now reproduced in her computer simulation. She had even mapped out where the atoms should have been on the graph, had they been obeying the usual laws of physics.

But there they were in a line: a law completely unto themselves.

She wrote Rosenbaum a guarded email late that evening:

‘I’ve got something interesting to show you in the morning.’

The following day, they examined her graph. There was no other possibility, they both realized; the atoms had been ignoring her and instead were controlled by the activity of their neighbors. No matter whether she blasted the crystal with a strong magnetic field or an increase in temperature, the atoms overrode this outside disturbance.

The only explanation was that the atoms in the sample crystal were internally organizing and behaving like one single giant atom. All the atoms, they realized with some alarm, must be entangled.

One of the strangest aspects of quantum physics is a feature called ‘non- locality’, also poetically referred to as ‘quantum entanglement’. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr discovered that once subatomic particles such as electrons or photons are in contact, they remain cognizant of and influenced by each other instantaneously over any distance forever, despite the absence of the usual things that physicists understand are responsible for influence, such as an exchange of force or energy.

When entangled, the actions – for instance, the magnetic orientation – of one will always influence the other in the same or the opposite direction, no matter how far they are separated. Erwin Schrödinger, another one of the original architects of quantum theory, believed that the discovery of non-locality represented no less than quantum theory’s defining moment – its central property and premise.

The activity of entangled particles is analogous to a set of twins being separated at birth, but retaining identical interests and a telepathic connection forever. One lives in Colorado, and the other in London. Although they never meet again, both like the color blue. Both take a job in engineering. Both like to ski; in fact when one falls down and breaks his right leg at Vale, his twin breaks his right leg at precisely that moment, even though he is 4000 miles away, sipping a latte at Starbucks.[4]

Albert Einstein refused to accept non-locality, referring to it disparagingly as ‘spukhafte Fernwirkungen’ or ‘spooky action at a distance’.

This type of instantaneous connection would require information traveling faster than the speed of light, he argued through a famous thought experiment, which would violate his own special relativity theory.[5]

Since the formulation of Einstein’s theory, the speed of light (299,792,458 meters per second) has been used as the absolute limiting factor on how quickly one thing can affect something else. Things are not supposed to be able to affect other things faster than the time it would take the first thing to travel to the second thing at the speed of light.

Nevertheless, modern physicists, such as Alain Aspect and his colleagues in Paris, have demonstrated decisively that the speed of light is not an absolute outer boundary in the subatomic world.

Aspect’s experiment, which concerned two photons fired off from a single atom, showed that the measurement of one photon instantaneously affected the position of the second photon[6] so that it has the same or opposite spin or position (as IBM physicist Charles H. Bennett once put it, ‘opposit luck’).[7]

The two photons continued to talk to each other and whatever happened to one was identical to, or the very opposite of, what happened to the other. Today, even the most conservative physicists accept non-locality as a strange feature of subatomic reality.[8]

Most quantum experiments incorporate some test of Bell’s Inequality. This famous experiment in quantum physics was carried out by John Bell, an Irish physicist who developed a practical means to test how quantum particles really behaved.[9]

This simple test required that you get two quantum particles that had once been in contact, separate them and then take measurements of the two. It is analogous to a couple named Daphne and Ted who have once been together but are now separated. Daphne can choose one of two possible directions to go in and so can Ted. According to our commonsense view of reality, Daphne’s choice should be utterly independent of Ted’s.

When Bell carried out his experiment, the expectation was that one of the measurements would be larger than the other – a demonstration of ‘inequality’. However, a comparison of the measurements showed that both were the same and so his inequality was ‘violated’.

Some invisible wire appeared to be connecting these quantum particles across space, to make them follow each other. Ever since, physicists have understood that when a violation of Bell’s Inequality occurs, it means that two things are entangled.

Bell’s Inequality has enormous implications for our understanding of the universe.

By accepting non-locality as a natural facet of nature we are acknowledging that two of the bedrocks on which our world view rests are wrong: that influence only occurs over time and distance, and that particles like Daphne and Ted, and indeed the things that are made up of particles, only exist independently of each other.

Although modern physicists now accept non-locality as a given feature of the quantum world, they console themselves by maintaining that this strange, counter- intuitive property of the subatomic universe does not apply to anything bigger than a photon or electron.

Once things got to the level of atoms and molecules, which in the world of physics is considered ‘macroscopic’, or large, the universe started behaving itself again, according to predictable, measurable, Newtonian laws.

With one tiny thumbnail’s worth of crystal, Rosenbaum and his graduate student demolished that delineation.

They had demonstrated that big things like atoms were non-locally connected, even in matter so large you could hold it in your hand. Never before had quantum non-locality been demonstrated on such a scale. Although the specimen had been only a tiny chip of salt, to the subatomic particle, it was a palatial country mansion, housing a billion billion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 1018) atoms.

Rosenbaum, ordinarily loathe to speculate about what he could not yet explain, realized that they had uncovered something extraordinary about the nature of the universe.

And I realized they had discovered a mechanism for intention: they had demonstrated that atoms, the essential constituents of matter, could be affected by non-local influence. Large things like crystals were not playing by the grand rules of the game, but by the anarchic rules of the quantum world, maintaining invisible connections without obvious cause.

In 2002, after Sai wrote up their findings, Rosenbaum polished up the wording and sent off their paper to Nature, a journal notorious for conservatism and exacting peer review. After four months of responding to the suggestions of reviewers, Ghosh finally got her paper published in the world’s premier scientific journal, a laudatory feat for a 26-year-old graduate student.[10]

One of the reviewers, Vlatko Vedral, noted the experiment with a mix of interest and frustration.[11] A Yugoslav who had studied at Imperial College, London, during his country’s civil war and subsequent collapse, Vedral had distinguished himself in his adopted country and been chosen to head up quantum information science at the University of Leeds. Vedral, who was tall and leonine, was part of a small group in Vienna working on frontier quantum physics, including entanglement.

Vedral first theoretically predicted the effect that Ghosh and Rosenbaum eventually found three years later. He had submitted the paper to Nature in 2001, but the journal, which preferred experiment to theory, had rejected it. Eventually, Vedral managed to publish his paper in Physical Review Letters, the premier physics journal.[12] After Nature decided to publish Ghosh’s study, its editors threw him a conciliatory bone. They allowed him to be a reviewer on the paper, and then offered him a place in the same issue to write an opinion piece on the findings.

In the article, Vedral allowed himself some speculation. Quantum physics is accepted as the most accurate means of describing how atoms combine to form molecules, he wrote, and since molecular relationship is the basis of all chemistry, and chemistry is the basis of biology, the magic of entanglement could well be the key to life itself.[13]

Vedral and a number of others in his circle did not believe that this effect was unique to holmium. The central problem in uncovering entanglement is the primitive state of our technology; isolating and observing this effect is only possible at the moment by slowing atoms down so much in such cold conditions that they are hardly moving. Nevertheless, a number of physicists had observed entanglement in matter at 200 K, or –73°C – a temperature that can be found on Earth in some of its very coldest places.

Other researchers have proved mathematically that everywhere, even inside of our own bodies, atoms and molecules are engaged in an instantaneous and ceaseless passing back and forth of information.

Thomas Durt of Vrije University in Brussels demonstrated through elegant mathematical formulations that almost all quantum interactions produce entanglement, no matter what the internal or surrounding conditions. Even photons, the tiniest particles of light emanating from stars, are entangled with every atom they meet on their way to earth.[14]

Entanglement at normal temperatures appears to be a natural condition of the universe, even in our bodies. Every interaction between every electron inside of us creates entanglement. According to Benni Reznik, a theoretical physicist at Tel Aviv University in Israel, even the empty space around us is heaving with entangled particles.[15]

The English mathematician Paul Dirac, an architect of quantum field theory, firs postulated that there is no such thing as nothingness, or empty space. Even if you tipped all matter and energy out of the universe and examined all the ‘empty’ space between the stars you would discover a netherworld world teeming with subatomic activity.

In the world of classical physics, a field is a region of influence, in which two or more points are connected by a force, like gravity or electromagnetism. However, in the world of the quantum particle, fields are created by exchanges of energy.

According to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, one reason that quantum particles are ultimately unknowable is because their energy is always being redistributed in a dynamic pattern. Although often rendered as tiny billiard balls, subatomic particles more closely resemble little packets of vibrating waves, passing energy back and forth as if in an endless game of basketball. All elementary particles interact with each other by exchanging energy through what are considered temporary or ‘virtual’ quantum particles. These are believed to appear out of nowhere, combining and annihilating each other in less than an instant, causing random fluctuations of energy without any apparent cause. Virtual particles, or negative energy states, do not take physical form, so we cannot actually observe them. Even ‘real’ particles are nothing more than a little knot of energy, which briefly emerge and disappear back into the underlying energy field.

These back-and-forth passes, which rise to an extraordinarily large ground state of energy, are known collectively as the Zero Point Field.

Comment

Zero point field is the basis of many types of substantive extraterrestrial technology.

The field is called ‘zero point’ because even at temperatures of absolute zero, when all matter theoretically should stop moving, these tiny fluctuations are still detectable. Even at the coldest place in the universe, subatomic matter never comes to rest, but carries on this little energy tango.[16]

The energy generated by every one of these exchanges between particles is unimaginably tiny – about half a photon’s worth. However, if all exchanges between all subatomic particles in the universe were to be added up, it would produce an inexhaustible supply of energy of unfathomable proportions, exceeding all energy in matter by a factor of 1040, or 1 followed by 40 zeros.[17] Richard Feynman himself once remarked that the energy in a cubic meter of space was enough to boil all the oceans of the world.[18]

After the discoveries of Heisenberg about Zero Point energy, most conventional physicists have subtracted the figures symbolizing Zero Point energy from their equations. They assumed that, because the Zero Point Field was ever present in matter, it did not change anything and so could be safely ‘renormalized’ away.

However, in 1973, when trying to work out an alternative to fossil fuel during the petrol crisis, American physicist Hal Puthoff, inspired by the Russian Andrei Sakharov, began trying to figure out how to harness the teeming energy of empty space for transport on earth and to distant galaxies.

Puthoff spent more than 30 years examining the Zero Point Field.

With some colleagues, he had proved that this constant energy exchange of all subatomic matter with the Zero Point Field accounts for the stability of the hydrogen atom, and, by implication, the stability of all matter.[19]

Remove the Zero Point Field and all matter would collapse in on itself.

He also demonstrated that Zero Point energy is responsible for two basic properties of mass: inertia and gravity.[20]

Puthoff also worked on a multimillion-dollar project funded by Lockheed Martin and a variety of American universities, to develop Zero Point energy for space travel – a programme that finally went public in 2006.

Many strange properties of the quantum world, like uncertainty or entanglement, could be explained if you factored in the constant interaction of all quantum particles with the Zero Point Field. To Puthoff, science’s understanding of the nature of entanglement was analogous to two sticks stuck in the sand at the edge of the ocean, about to be hit by a huge wave. If they both were knocked over, and you did not know about the wave, you would think that one stick was affecting the other and call it a non-local effect. The constant interaction of quantum particles with the Zero Point Field might be the underlying mechanism for non-local effects between particles, allowing one particle to be in touch with every other particle at any moment.[21]

Benni Reznik’s work in Israel with the Zero Point Field and entanglement bega mathematically with a central question: what would happen to a hypothetical pair of probes interacting with the Zero Point Field? According to his calculations, once they began interacting with the Zero Point Field, the probes would begin talking to each other and ultimately become entangled.[22]

If all matter in the universe were interacting with the Zero Point Field, it meant quite simply, that all matter was interconnected and potentially entangled throughout the cosmos through quantum waves.[23]

And if we and all of empty space are a mass of entanglement, we must be establishing invisible connections with things at a distance to ourselves.

Acknowledging the existence of the Zero Point Field and entanglement offers a ready mechanism for why signals being generated by the power of thought can be picked up by someone else many miles away.

* * *

Sai Ghosh had proved that non-locality existed in the large building blocks of matter and the other scientists proved that all matter in the universe was, in a sense, a satellite of a large central energy field. But how could matter be affected by this connection? The central assumption of all of classical physics is that large material things in the universe are set pieces, a fait accompli of manufacture.

How can they possibly be changed?

Vedral had an opportunity to examine this question when he was invited to work with the renowned quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger. Zeilinger’s Institute for Experimental Physics lab at the University of Vienna was at the very frontier of some of the most exotic research into the nature of quantum properties. Zeilinger himself was profoundly dissatisfied with the current scientific explanation of nature, and he had passed on that dissatisfaction and the quest to resolve it to his students.

In a flamboyant gesture, Zeilinger and his team had entangled a pair of photons from beneath the River Danube. They had set up a quantum channel via a glass fibre and run it across the river bed of the Danube. In his lab, Zeilinger liked to refer to individual photons as Alice and Bob, and sometimes, if he needed a third photon, Carol or Charlie. Alice and Bob, separated by 600 metres of river and nowhere in sight of each other, maintained a non-local connection.[24]

Zeilinger was particularly interested in superposition, and the implications of the Copenhagen Interpretation – that subatomic particles exist only in a state of potential.

Could objects, and not simply the subatomic particles that compose them, he wondered, exist in this hall-of-mirrors state?

To test this question, Zeilinger employed a piece of equipment called a Talbot Lau interferometer, developed by some colleagues at MIT, using a variation on the famous double-slit experiment of Thomas Young, a British physicist of the nineteenth century. In Young’s experiment, a beam of pure light is sent through a single hole, or slit, in a piece of cardboard, then passes through a second screen with two holes before finally arriving at a third, blank screen.

When two waves are in phase (that is, peaking and troughing at the same time), and bump into each other – technically called ‘interference’ – the combined intensity of the waves is greater than each individual amplitude. The signal gets stronger. This amounts to an imprinting or exchange of information, called ‘constructive interference’. If one is peaking when the other troughs, they tend to cancel each other out – called ‘destructive interference’. With constructive interference, when all the waves are wiggling in synch, the light will get brighter; destructive interference will cancel out the light and result in complete darkness.

In the experiment, the light passing through the two holes forms a zebra pattern of alternating dark and light bands on the final blank screen. If light were simply a series of particles, two of the brightest patches would appear directly behind the two holes of the second screen. However, the brightest portion of the pattern is halfway between the two holes, caused by the combined amplitude of those waves that most interfere with each other. From this pattern, Young was the first to realize that light beaming through the two holes spreads out in overlapping waves.

A modern variation of the experiment fires off single photons through the double slit. These single photons also produce zebra patterns on the screen, demonstrating that even single units of light travel as a smeared-out wave with a large sphere of influence.

Twentieth-century physicists went on to use Young’s experiment with other individual quantum particles, and held it up as proof that quantum physics had Through-the-Looking-Glass properties: quant um entities acted wavelike and travelled though both slits at once. Fire a stream of electrons at the triple screens, and you end up with the interference patterns of alternating light and dark patches, just as you do with a beam of light. Since you need at least two waves to create such interference patterns, the implication of the experiment is that the photon is somehow mysteriously able to travel through both slits at the same time and interfere with itself when it reunites.

The double-slit experiment encapsulates the central mystery of quantum physics

the idea that a subatomic particle is not a single seat but the entire stadium. It also demonstrates the principle that electrons, which exist in a hermetic quantum state, are ultimately unknowable. You could not identify something about a quantum entity without stopping the particle in its tracks, at which point it would collapse to a single point.

In Zeilinger’s adaptation of the slit experiment, using molecules instead of subatomic particles, the interferometer contained an array of slits in the first screen, and a grating of identical parallel slits in the second one, whose purpose was to diffract (or deflect) the molecules passing by. The third grating, turned perpendicular to the beam of molecules, acted as a scanning ‘mask’, with the ability to calculate the size of the waves of any of the molecules passing through, by means of a highly sensitive laser detector to locate the positions of the molecules and their interference patterns.

For the initial experiment, Zeilinger and his team carefully chose a batch of fullerene molecules, or ‘buckyballs’ made of 60 carbon atoms. At one nanometre apiece, these are the behemoths of the molecular world. They selected fullerene not only for its size but also for its neat arrangement, with a shape like a tiny symmetrical football.

It was a delicate operation. Zeilinger’s group had to work with just the right temperature; heating the molecules just a hair too much would cause them to disintegrate. Zeilinger heated the fullerenes to 900 K so they would create an intense molecular beam, then fired them through the first screen; they then passed through the second screen before making a pattern on the final screen. The results were unequivocal. Each molecule displayed the ability to create interference patterns with itself. Some of the largest units of physical matter had not ‘localized’ into their final state. Like a subatomic particle, these giant molecules had not yet gelled into anything real.

The Vienna team scouted out some other molecules that were double the size and oddly shaped to see if geometrically asymmetric molecules also demonstrated the same magical properties. They settled on gigantic fluorinated American football- shaped molecules of 70 carbon atoms and pancake-shaped tetraphenylporphyrin, a derivative of the biodye present in chlorophyll. At more than 100 atoms apiece, both of these entities are among the largest molecules on the planet. Again, each one created an interference pattern with itself.

Zeilinger’s group repeatedly demonstrated that the molecules could be two places at once, which meant that they remained in a state of superposition even at this large scale.[25]

They had proved the unthinkable: the largest components of physical matter and living things exist in a malleable state.[26]

Sai Ghosh didn’t often think about the implications of her discovery.

She was content with the knowledge that her experiment had made a very nice paper, and might help along her career as an assistant professor involved in research into miniaturization, the direction she believed quantum mechanics was heading. Occasionally, she allowed herself to speculate that her crystal might have proved something important about the nature of the universe. But she was only a postgraduate student. What did she, after all, really know about how the world worked?

But to me, Ghosh’s research and Zeilinger’s work on the double-slit experiment represent two defining moments in modern physics. Ghosh’s experiments show that an invisible connection exists between the fundamental elements of matter, which is often so strong that it can override classical methods of influence, such as heat or a push. Zeilinger’s work demonstrated something even more astonishing. Large matter was neither something solid and stable nor something that necessarily behaved according to Newtonian rules. Molecules needed some other influence to settle them into a completed state of being.

Theirs were the first evidence that the peculiar properties of quantum physics do not simply occur at the quantum level with subatomic particles, but also in the world of visible matter. Molecules also exist in a state of pure potential, not a final actuality. Under certain circumstances, they escape Newtonian rules of force and display quantum non-local effects. The fact that something as large as a molecule can become entangled suggests that there are not two rule books – the physics of the large and the physics of the small – but only a single rule book for all of life.

These two experiments also hold the key to a science of intention – how thoughts are able to affect finished, solid matter.

Comment

Thoughts create reality. They can change the physical world around us in the most profound manners. Thus we absolutely need to have direct and substantive control over our thoughts.

They suggest that the observer effect occurs not simply in the world of the quantum particle but also in the world of the everyday. Things no longer should be seen to exist in and of themselves but, like a quantum particle, only in relationship. Co-creation and influence may be a basic, inherent property of life.

Our observation of every component in our world may help to determine its final state, which suggests that we are likely to be influencing every large thing we see around us.

When we enter a crowded room, when we engage with our partners and our children, when we gaze up at the sky, we may be creating and even influencing at every moment. We can’t yet demonstrate this at normal temperatures; our equipment is still too crude. But we already have some preliminary proof: the physical world – matter itself – appears to be malleable, susceptible to influence from the outside.

Notes – Chapter 1: Mutable Matter

All personal information about Tom Rosenbaum and Sai Ghosh and their studies have been culled from multiple interviews conducted in February and March 2005.
This was the solution posed by Giorgio Parisi at Rome in 1979.
S. Ghosh et al., ‘Coherent spin oscillations in a disordered magnet’, Science, 2002; 296: 2195–8.
Once again, I am indebted to Danah Zohar for her easy-to-digest description of quantum non-locality, which appears in D. Zohar, The Quantum Self, London: Bloomsbury, 1991: 19–20.
A. Einstein, B. Podolsky and N. Rosen, ‘Can quantum-mechanica description of physical reality be considered complete?’ Physical Review, 1935; 47: 777–80.
A. Aspect et al., ‘Experimental tests of Bell’s inequalities using time- varying analyzers’, Physical Review Letters, 1982; 49: 1804–7; A. Aspect, ‘Bell’s inequality test: more ideal than ever’, Nature, 1999; 398: 189–90.
Science Fact: Scientists achieve ‘Star Trek’-like feat – The Associate Press, December 10, 1997, posted on CNN http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/9712/10/beam. me. up. ap.
Non-locality was considered to be proven by Aspect et al.’ s experiments in Paris in 1982.
J. S. Bell, ‘On the Einstein-Poldolsky-Rosen paradox’,Physics, 1964; 1: 195–200.
S. Ghosh et al., ‘Entangled quantum state of magnetic dipoles’, Nature, 2003; 435: 48–51.
Details of Vedral’s views and experiments the result of multiple interviews, February, October and December 2005.
C. Arnesen et al., ‘Thermal and magnetic entanglement in the 1D Heisenberg Model’, Physical Review Letters, 2001; 87: 017901.
V. Vedral, ‘Entanglement hits the big time’, Nature, 2003; 425: 28–9.
T. Durt, interview with author, April 26, 2005.
B. Reznik, ‘Entanglement from the vacuum’, Foundations of Physics, 2003; 33: 167–76; Michael Brooks, ‘Entanglement: The weirdest link’, New Scientist, 2004; 181 (2440): 32.
John D. Barrow, The Book of Nothing, London: Jonathan Cape, 2000: 216.
Erwin Laszlo, The Interconnected Universe: Conceptual Foundations o Transdiscipinary Unified Theory, Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 1995: 28.
A. C. Clarke, ‘When will the real space age begin?’ Ad Astra, May–June 1996; 13–15.
Harold Puthoff, ‘Ground state of hydrogen as a zero-point-fluctuation- determined state’, Physical Review D, 1987; 35: 3266.
B. Haisch, Alfonso Rueda and H. E. Puthoff, ‘Inertia as a zero-point-fiel Lorentz force’, Physical Review A, 1994; 49 (2): 678–94; Bernhard Haisch, Alfonso Rueda and H. E. Puthoff, ‘Physics of the zero-point field implications for inertia, gravitation and mass’, Speculations in Science and Technology, 1997; 20: 99–114.
Reznik, ‘Entanglement from the vacuum’, op. cit.
McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 35–6.
J. Resch et al., ‘Distributing entanglement and single photons through an intra-city, free-space quantum channel’, Optics Express, 2005; 13 (1): 202–9; R. Ursin et al., ‘Quantum teleportation across the Danube’, Nature, 2004; 430: 849.
M. Arndt et al., ‘Wave–particle duality of C60 molecules’, Nature, 1999; 401: 680–2; doi: 10.1038/44348.
A. Zeilinger, ‘Probing the limits of the quantum world’, Physics World, March 2005 (online journal: http://www.physicsweb.org/articles/world/18/3/5/1).

The Human Antenna

IN 1951, AT THE AGE OF SEVEN, Gary Schwartz made a remarkabe discovery. He had been trying to get a good picture on the family’s television set. The recently acquired black and white Magnavox set encased behind the doors of its boxed walnut console fascinated him, not because of the people in the moving pictures so much as the means by which they arrived in his living room in the first place.

The mechanisms of the relatively new invention remained a mystery, even to most adults. Television, like any other electrical gadget, was something the precocious child longed to take apart and understand. This passion had already found expression with the worn-out radios given to him by his grandfather.

Ignatz Schwartz sold replacement tubes for televisions and radios in his drug store in Great Neck, Long Island, and those that were beyond repair were handed over to his grandson to disassemble. In a corner of Gary’s bedroom lay a mass of experimental debris – tubes, resistors and the carcasses of radios heaped on the cosmetic display racks he had borrowed from his grandfather – the first signs of what would become a lifelong fascination with electronics.

Gary knew that the way you twisted the rabbit-ear antenna on top of the television would determine the clarity of the picture. His father had explained that television sets were powered by something invisible, similar to radio waves, that flew through the air and were somehow translated into an image.

Gary had even carried out some rudimentary experiments. When you stood somewhere between the antenna and the television, you could make the picture go away. When you touched the antenna in certain ways, you made the picture clearer.

One day, on a whim, Gary unscrewed the antenna and placed his finger on the screw where the cable had been. What had been a mass of squiggles and static noise on the screen suddenly coalesced into a perfect image.

Even at that young age, he had understood that he had witnessed something extraordinary about human beings: his body was acting like a television antenna, a receiver of this invisible information.

He tried the same experiment with a radio – substituting his finger for the antenna, and the same thing happened.

Something in the makeup of a person was not unlike the rabbit ears that helped produce his television image. He too was a receiver of invisible information, with the ability to pick up signals transmitted across time and space.

Until he was 15, however, he could not visualize what these signals were made of. He had learned to play the electric guitar and had often wondered what unseen influences allowed the instrument to create different sounds. He could play the same note, middle C, and yet produce more of a treble or bass sound, depending on which way he turned the knob. How was it possible that a single note could sound so different? For a science project, he created multiple-track recordings of his music and then located a company in upstate New York that had equipment designed to analyse the frequency of sound. When he fed his recordings into the equipment, it quickly deconstructed the notes down to their essence.

Each note registered as a batch of squiggles across the screen of the cathode-ray tube in front of him – a complex mix of hundreds of frequencies representing a blend of overtones that would subtly change when he turned the knob to treble or bass. He knew that these frequencies were waves, represented on the monitor as a sideways S, or sine curve, like a skipping rope held at both ends and wriggled, and that they had periodic oscillations, or fluctuations, similar to the waves on Long Island Sound.

Every time he spoke, he knew he generated similar frequencies through his voice. He remembered his early television experiments and wondered whether a field of energy pulsated inside him and shared a kinship with sound waves.1

Gary’s childhood experiments may have been rudimentary, but he had already stumbled across the central mechanism of intention. Something in the quality of our thoughts was a constant transmission, not unlike a television station.

As an adult, Schwartz, still a bustling dynamo of enthusiasms, found an outlet in psychophysiology, then a fledgling study of the effect of the mind on the body. By the time he had accepted a post at the University of Arizona, which was known for encouraging freedom of research among its faculty, he had grown fascinated by biofeedback and the ways in which the mind could control blood pressure and a variety of illnesses – and the powerful physical effect of different types of thoughts.2

One weekend in 1994, at a conference on the relationship between love and energy, he sat in on a lecture by physicist Elmer Green, one of the pioneers of biofeedback. Green, like Schwartz, had grown interested in the energy being transmitted by the mind. To examine this more closely, he had decided to study remote healers and to determine whether they sent out more electrical energy than usual while in the process of healing.

Green reported in his lecture that he had built a room whose four walls and ceiling were entirely made of copper, and were attached to microvolt electroencephalogram (EEG) amplifiers – the kind used to measure the electrical activity in the brain. Ordinarily, an EEG amplifier is attached to a cap with imbedded electrodes, each of which records separate electrical discharges from different places in the brain. The cap is placed on a person’s head, and the electrical activity picked up is displayed on the amplifier. EEG amplifiers are extraordinarily sensitive, capable of picking up the most minute of effects – even one-millionth of a volt of electricity.

In remote healing, Green suspected that the signal produced was electrical and emanated from the healer’s hands. The copper wall acted like a giant antenna, magnifying the ability to detect the electricity from the healers and enabling Green to capture it from five directions.

He discovered that, whenever a healer sent healing, the EEG amplifier often recorded it as a huge surge of electrostatic charge, the same kind of the build up and discharge of electrons that occurs after you shuffle your feet along a new carpet and then touch a metal doorknob.3

In the early days of the copper wall experiment, Green had been faced with an enormous problem. Whenever a healer so much as wriggled a finger, patterns got recorded on an EEG amplifier. Green had had to work out a means of separating out the true effects of healing from this electrostatic noise. The only way to do so, as he saw it, was to have his healers remain perfectly still while they were sending out healing energy.

Schwartz listened to the talk with growing fascination. Green was discarding what might be the most interesting part of the data, he thought. One man’s noise was another man’s signal.

Does movement, even the physiology of your breathing, create an electromagnetic signal big enough to be picked up on a copper wall? Could it be that human beings were not only receivers of signals but also transmitters?

It made perfect sense that we transmitted energy. A great deal of evidence had already proved that all living tissue has an electric charge. Placing this charge in three-dimensional space caused an electromagnetic field that traveled at the speed of light. The mechanisms for the transmission of energy were clear, but what was unclear was the degree to which we sent out electromagnetic fields just by simple movements and whether our energy was being picked up by other living things.

Schwartz was itching to test this out for himself. After the conference, he contacted Green for advice about how to build his own copper wall. He rushed to Home Depot, which did not stock copper shielding but did have aluminum shielding, which could also act as a rudimentary antenna.

He purchased some two by fours, placed them on glass bricks so that they would be isolated from the ground, and used them to assemble a ‘wall’. After he had attached the wall to an EEG amplifier, he began playing around with the effects of his hand, waving it back and forth above the box. As he suspected, the amplifier tracked the movement. His hand movements were generating signals.4

Schwartz began demonstrating these effects in front of his students in his faculty office, making use of a bust of Einstein for dramatic effect. With these experiments, he made use of an EEG cap, with its dozens of electrodes. When not picking up brain signals, the cap will register only noise on the amplifier.

During his experiments, Schwartz placed the EEG cap on his Einstein bust, an turned on just a single electrode channel on the top of the cap. Then he moved his hand over Einstein’s head. As though the great man had suddenly experienced a moment of enlightenment, the amplifier suddenly came alive and produced evidence of an electromagnetic wave.

But the signal, Schwartz explained to his students, was not a sudden brain wave emitted from the lifeless statue – only the tracking of the electromagnetic field produced by his arm’s movement. It seemed indisputable: his body must be sending out a signal with every single flutter of his hand.

Schwartz got more creative with his experiments. When he tried the same gesture from three feet away, the signal diminished. When he placed the bust in a Faraday cage, an enclosure of tightly knit copper mesh that screens out electromagnetic fields, all effect disappeared. This strange energy resulting from movement had all the hallmarks of electricity: it decreased with distance, and was blocked by an electromagnetic shield.

At one point, Schwartz asked one of the students to stand with his left hand over Einstein’s head, with his right arm extended towards Schwartz, who was sitting in a chair three feet away. Schwartz moved his arm up and down. To the amazement of the other students, Schwartz’s movement was picked up by the amplifier. The signal had passed through Schwartz’s body and travelled through the student. Schwartz was still generating the signal, but this time, the student had become the antenna, receiving the signal and transmitting it to the amplifier, which acted as another antenna.

Schwartz realized he had hit upon the most important point of all his research.

Simple movement generated electrical charge, but, more important, it created a relationship. Every movement we make appears to be felt by the people around us.

The implications were staggering.

What if he were admonishing a student? What might be the physical effect on the student of wagging his finger while shouting ‘Don’t do that’? The student might feel as if he were getting shot with a wave of energy. Some people might even have more powerful positive or negative charges than others. In Elmer Green’s copper wall experiment, all sorts of equipment malfunctioned in the presence of Roslyn Bruyere, a famous healer.

Schwartz was onto something fundamental about the actual energy that human beings emit. Could the energy of thought have the same effect as the energy of movement outside the thinker’s own body? Did thoughts also create a relationship with the people around us? Every intention towards someone else might have its own physical counterpart, which would be registered by its recipient as a physical effect.

Like Schwartz, I suspected the energy generated by thoughts did not behave in the same way as the energy generated by movement. After all, the signal from movement decreased over distance, much like ordinary electricity. With healing, distance appeared to be irrelevant. The energy of intention, if indeed there were any, would have to be more fundamental than that of ordinary electromagnetism – and lie somewhere, perhaps, in the realm of quantum physics. How could I test the energetic effects of intention? Healers, who appeared to be sending more energy than normal through their healing, offered an obvious place to start.

Elmer Green demonstrated in his research that an enormous surge of electrostatic energy occurred during healing. When a person is simply standing still, his or her breathing and beating heart will produce electrostatic energy of 10–15 millivolts on the EEG amplifiers; during activities requiring focused attention, such as meditation, the energy will surge up to 3 volts. During healing, however, Green’s healers produced voltage surges up to 190 volts; one produced 15 such pulses, which were 100,000 times higher than normal, with smaller pulses of 1–5 volts appearing on each of the four copper walls. On investigating the source of this energy, Green discovered that the pulses were coming from the healer’s abdomen, called dan tien and considered the central engine of internal energy in the body in Chinese martial arts.5

Stanford University physicist William Tiller constructed an ingenious device to measure the energy produced by healers. The equipment discharged a steady stream of gas and recorded the exact number of electrons pulsing out with the discharge. Any increase in voltage would be captured by the pulse counter.

In his experiment, Tiller asked ordinary volunteers to place their hands about six inches from his device and hold a mental intention to increase the count rate. In the majority of more than 1000 such experiments, Tiller discovered that, during the intention, the number of recorded pulses would increase by 50,000 and remain there for 5 minutes.

These increases would occur even if a participant was not close to the machine, so long as he or she held an intention.

Tiller concluded that directed thoughts produce demonstrable physical energy, even over remote distance.6

Comment

Tiller concluded that directed thoughts produce demonstrable physical energy, even over remote distance..

I found two other studies measuring the actual electrical frequencies emitted by people using intention.

One study measured healing energy and the other examined energy generated by a Chinese Qigong master during times that he was emitting external Qi, the Chinese term for energy or the life force.7

In both instances, the measurements were identical: frequency levels of 2–30 hertz were being emitted by the healers.

This energy also seemed to change the molecular nature of matter.

Comment

Qi seemed to change the molecular nature of matter.

I discovered a body of scientific evidence examining chemical changes caused by intention.

Bernard Grad, an associate professor of biology at McGill University in Montreal had examined the effect of healing energy on water that was to be used to irrigate plants. After a group of healers had sent healing to samples of water, Grad chemically analysed the water by infrared spectroscopy.

He discovered that the water treated by the healers had undergone a fundamental change in the bonding of oxygen and hydrogen in its molecular makeup.

The hydrogen bonding between the molecules had lessened in a similar manner to that which occurs in water exposed to magnets.8

A number of other scientists confirmed Grad’s findings; Russian research discovered that the hydrogen–oxygen bonds in water molecules undergo distortions in the crystalline microstructure during healing.9

These kinds of changes can occur simply through the act of intention.

In one study, experienced meditators sent an intention to affect the molecular structure of water samples they were holding throughout the meditation. When the water was later examined by infrared spectrophotometry, many of its essential qualities, particularly its absorbance – the amount of light absorbed by the water at a particular wavelength had been significantly altered.10

When someone holds a focused thought, he may be altering the very molecular structure of the object of his intention.

Comment

When someone holds a focused thought, he may be altering the very molecular structure of the object of his intention.

In his research, Gary Schwartz wondered whether intention only manifested as electrostatic energy. Perhaps magnetic energy also played a role.

Magnetic fields naturally had more power, more ‘push–pull’ energy. Magnetism seemed the more powerful and universal energy; the earth itself is profoundly influenced by its own faint pulse of geomagnetic energy.

Schwartz remembered a study carried out by William Tiller, in which psychics had been placed inside a variety of devices that block different forms of energy. They had performed better than usual in a Faraday cage, which filters out only electrical energy, but they performed worse when placed in a magnetically shielded room.11

From these early studies, Schwartz gleaned two important implications: healing may generate an initial surge of electricity, but the real transfer mechanism may be magnetic.

Indeed, psychic phenomena and psychokinesis could be differentially influenced, simply through different types of shielding. Electrical signals might interfere, while magnetic signals enhance the process.

To test this latest idea, Schwartz was approached by a colleague of his, Melinda Connor, a post-doctoral fellow in her mid-forties with an interest in healing.

The first hurdle was finding an accurate means of picking up magnetic signals. Measuring tiny low-frequency magnetic fields is tricky, requiring the use of expensive and highly sensitive equipment called a SQUID, or superconducting quantum interferenc device. A SQUID, which can cost up to four million dollars, ordinarily occupies a specially constructed room that has been magnetically shielded in order to eliminate ambient radiating noise.

The best Schwartz and Connor could come up with on their limited budget was a poor man’s SQUID – a small handheld, battery-operated three-axis digita gaussmeter originally designed to measure electromagnetic pollution by picking up extra-low-frequency (ELF) magnetic fields.

The gaussmeter was sensitive enough to pick up one-thousandth of a gauss, a very faint pulse of a magnetic field. In Schwartz’s mind, this level of sensitivity was more than adequate to do the job.

It occurred to Connor that the way to measure change in low-frequency magnetic fields was to count the number of changes in the meter reading over time. When simply recording ambient stable magnetic fields, the device will only deviate slightly by less than one-tenth of a gauss.

However, in the presence of an oscillating magnetic field – with periodic changes in frequency – the numbers will keep moving, from, say, 0.6 to 0.7 to 0.8, and back down to 0.6.

The greater and more frequent the change, which would be recorded by the number of changes in the dials, the more likely it is that the magnetic field has been affected by a source of directed energy.

Connor and Schwartz gathered together a group of practitioners of Reiki, the healing art developed a century ago in Japan.

They took measurements near each hand of all the healers during alternating periods while they were ‘running energy’ and then during times they were at rest, with their eyes closed. Next, the pair assembled a group of ‘master healers’ with a substantial track record of successful, dramatic healings. Again, Connor and Schwartz took magnetic field measurements near each hand, while the master healers were running energy and at rest. Then, they compared the Reiki measurements with measurements they had taken of people who had not been trained in healing.

Once Schwartz and Conner had analyzed the data, they discovered that both groups of healers demonstrated significant fluctuations in very low pulsations of a magnetic field, emanating from both hands.

A huge increase in oscillations in the magnetic field occurred whenever a healer began to run energy. However, the most profound energy increase surged from their dominant hands. The control group of people who were not trained healers did not demonstrate the same effect.

Then Schwartz compared effects from the Reiki group with those of the master healers and discovered another enormous difference. The master healers averaged close to a third more magnetic-field changes per minute than the Reiki healers.12

The study results seemed clear. Schwartz and Connor had their proof that directed intention manifests as both electrostatic and magnetic energy.

Comment

Directed intention manifests as both electrostatic and magnetic energy.

But they also discovered that intention was like playing the piano; you need to learn how to do it, and some people do it better than others.

Comment

The ability to manipulate energy comes with training and practice.

In considering what this all meant, Gary Schwartz thought of the phrase often used by medical doctors, usually in emergency situations: when you hear hoof beats, don’t think zebras .

In other words, when you are trying to diagnose someone with physical symptoms, first rule out all the most likely causes, and only then consider more exotic possibilities.

He liked to approach science in the same way and so he questioned his own findings: Could the healers’ increase in magnetic field oscillations during healing simply be the result of certain peripheral biophysical changes? Muscle contractions generate a magnetic field, as do changes in blood flow, the increasing or decreasing dilation of blood vessels, the body’s current volume of liquid or even the flow of electrolytes. Skin, sweat glands, change of temperature, neural induction – all generate magnetic fields.

His guess was that healing resulted from a summation of multiple biological processes that are mediated magnetically.

But the possibility that healing might be a magnetic effect did not explain long- distance remote healing.

In some instances, healers sent healing from thousands of miles away and the effect did not decay with distance. In one successful study of AIDS patients who improved through remote healing, the 40 healers involved in the study sent the healing to the San Francisco patients from locations all across America.13

Similar to electrical fields, magnetic fields decrease with distance. The magnetic and electrical effects were likely to be some aspect of the process, but not its central one. It was likely to be closer to a quantum field, possibly more akin to light.

Schwartz began to consider the possibility that the mechanism creating intention originated with the tiny elements of light emitted from human beings. In the mid- 1970s, a German physicist named Fritz-Albert Popp had stumbled upon the fact that all living things, from the most basic of single-celled plants to the most sophisticated of organisms like human beings, emitted a constant tiny current of photons – tiny particles of light.14

He labelled them ‘biophoton emissions’ and believed that he had uncovered the primary communication channel of a living organism – that it used light as a means of signalling to itself and to the outside world.

For more than 30 years, Popp has maintained that this faint radiation, rather than biochemistry, is the true driving force in orchestrating and coordinating all cellular processes in the body. Light waves offered a perfect communication system able to transfer information almost instantaneously across an organism. Having waves, rather than chemicals, as the communication mechanism of a living being also solved the central problem of genetics – how we grow and take final shape from a single cell. It also explains how our bodies manage to carry out tasks with different body parts simultaneously. Popp theorized that this light must be like a master tuning fork setting off certain frequencies that would be followed by other molecules of the body.15

A number of biologists, such as the German biophysicist Herbert Fröhlich, had proposed that a type of collective vibration causes proteins and cells to coordinate their activities.

Nevertheless, all such theories were ignored until Popp’s discoveries, largely because no equipment was sensitive enough to prove they were right.

With the help of one of his students, Popp constructed the first such machine – a photomultiplier that captured light and counted it, photon by photon. He carried out years of impeccable experimentation that demonstrated that these tiny frequencies were mainly stored and emitted from the DNA of cells.

The intensity of the light in organisms was stable, ranging from a few to several hundred photons per second per square centimetre surface of the living thing – until the organism was somehow disturbed or ill, at which point the current went sharply up or down.

The signals contained valuable information about the state of the body’s health and the effects of any particular therapy. Cancer victims had fewer photons, for instance. It was almost as though their light were going out.

Initially vilified for his theory, Popp was eventually recognized by the German government and then internationally.

Eventually he formed the International Institute of Biophysics (IIB), composed of 15 groups of scientists from international centres all around the world, including prestigious institutions like CERN in Switzerland Northeastern University in the USA, the Institute of Biophysics Academy of Scienc in Beijing, China, and Moscow State University in Russia. By the early twenty-firs century, the IIB numbered at least 40 distinguished scientists from around the globe.

Could it be that these were the frequencies that mediated healing? Schwartz realized that if he was going to carry out studies of biophoton emissions, first he had to figure out how to view these tiny emissions of light.

In his laboratory, Popp developed a computerized mechanism attached to a box in which a living thing, such as a plant, could be placed. The machine could count the photons and chart the amount of light emitted on a graph. But those machines only recorded photons in utter pitch blackness. Up until then, it had been impossible for scientists to witness living things actually glowing in the dark.

As Schwartz mulled over the kind of equipment that would allow him to see very faint light, he thought of state-of-the-art supercooled charge-coupled device (CCD) cameras on telescopes. This exquisitely sensitive equipment, now used to photograph galaxies deep in space, picks up about 70 per cent of any light, no matter how faint.

CCD devices were also used for night-vision equipment.

If a CCD camera could pick up the light from the most distant of stars, it might also be able to pick up the faint light coming off living things. However, this kind of equipment can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and usually had to be cooled to temperatures only 100 degrees above absolute zero, to eliminate any ambient radiation emitted at room temperature. Cooling the camera down also helped to improve its sensitivity to faint light. Where on earth was he going to get hold of this kind of high-tech equipment?

Kathy Creath, a professor of optical sciences at Schwartz’s university, who shared his fascination with living light and its possible role in healing, had an idea. As it happened, she knew that the department of radiology at the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Tucson owned a low-light CCD camera, which they used t measure the light emitted from laboratory rats after being injected with phosphorescent dyes.

The Roper Scientific VersArray 1300 B low-noise, high performance CCD camera was housed in a dark room inside a black box and above a Cryotiger cooling system, which cooled temperatures to –100°C. A computer screen displayed its images. It was just what they were looking for. After Creath approached the director of the NSF project, he generously agreed to allow the two of them access to the camera during its down time.

In their first test, Schwartz and Creath placed a geranium leaf on a black platform. They took fluorescent photographs after exposures of up to five hours. When the computer displayed the final photograph, it was dazzling: a perfect image of the leaf in light, like a shadow in reverse, but in incredible detail, each of its tiniest veins delineated.

Surrounding the leaf were little white spots, like a sprinkling of fairy dust – evidence of high-energy cosmic rays. With his next exposure, Schwartz used a software filter to screen out the ambient radiation. The image of the leaf was now perfect.

As they studied this latest photograph on the screen of the computer in front of them, Schwartz and Creath understood that they were making history. It was the first time a scientist had been able to witness images of the light actually emanating from a living thing.16

Now that he had equipment that captured and recorded light, Schwartz was finally able to test whether healing intention also generated light.

Creath got hold of a number of healers, and asked them to place their hands on the platform underneath the camera for 10 minutes. Schwartz’s first crude images showed a rough glow of large pixilations, but they were too out of focus for him to analyse them.

Next he tried placing the healers’ hands on a white background (which reflected light) rather than on a black background (which absorbed light). The images were breathtakingly clear: a stream of light flowed out of the healers’ dominant hands, almost as though it were flowing from their fingers. Schwartz now had his answer about the nature of conscious thought: healing intention creates waves of light – and, indeed, among the most organized light waves found in nature.

The theory of relativity was not Einstein’s only great insight.

He had had another astonishing realization in 1924, after correspondence with an obscure Indian physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose, who had been pondering the then-new idea that light was composed of little vibrating packets called photons. Bose had worked out that, at certain points, photons should be treated as identical particles. At the time nobody believed him – nobody but Einstein, after Bose sent him his calculations.

Einstein liked Bose’s proofs and used his influence to get Bose’s theory published. Einstein also was inspired to explore whether, under certain conditions or certain temperatures, atoms in a gas, which ordinarily vibrated anarchically, might also begin to behave in synchrony, like Bose’s photons. Einstein set to work on his own formula to determine which conditions might create such a phenomenon.

When he reviewed his figures, he thought he had made a mistake in his calculations.

According to his results, at certain extraordinarily low temperatures, just a few kelvin above absolute zero, something really strange would begin to happen: the atoms, which ordinarily can operate at a number of different speeds, would slow down to identical energy levels. In this state, the atoms would lose their individuality and both look and behave like one giant atom. Nothing in his mathematical armamentarium could tell them apart. If this were true, he realized, he had stumbled upon an entirely new state of matter, with utterly different properties from anything known in the universe.

Einstein published his findings,17 and lent his name to the phenomenon, called a Bose–Einstein condensate, but he was never convinced that he had been right.

Nor were other physicists, until more than 70 years later when, on 5 June 1995, Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman of JILA, a programme sponsored by the National Institut of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado at Boulder, managed to cool a tiny batch of rubidium atoms down to 170 billionths of a degree above absolute zero.18

It had been quite a feat, requiring trapping the atoms in a web of laser light and then magnetic fields. At a certain point, a batch of some 2000 atoms – measuring about 20 microns, about one-fifth the thickness of a single piece of paper – began behaving differently from the cloud of atoms surrounding them, like one smeared-out single entity. Although the atoms were still part of a gas, they were behaving more like the atoms of a solid.

Four months later, Wolfgang Ketterle from Massachusetts Institute of Technology replicated their experiment, but with a form of sodium, for which he, as well as Cornell and Wieman, won the 2001 Nobel prize.19

Then a few years after that, Ketterle and others like him were able to reproduce the effect with molecules.20

Scientists believed that a form of Einstein and Bose’s theory could account for some of the strange properties they had begun to observe in the subatomic world: superfluidity, when certain fluids can flow without losing energy, or even spontaneously work themselves out of their containers; or superconduction, a similar property of electrons in a circuit. In superfluid or superconductor states, liquid or electricity could theoretically flow at the same pace forever.

Ketterle had discovered another amazing property of atoms or molecules in this state. All the atoms were oscillating in perfect harmony, similar to photons in a laser, which behave like one giant photon, vibrating in perfect rhythm. This organization makes for an extraordinary efficiency of energy. Instead of sending a light about 3 meters, the laser emits a wave 300 million times that far.

Scientists were convinced that a Bose–Einstein condensate was a peculiar property of atoms and molecules slowing down so much that they are almost at rest, when exposed to temperatures only a fraction above the coldest temperatures in the universe.

But then Fritz-Albert Popp and the scientists working with him made the astonishing discovery that a similar property existed in the weak light emanating from organisms. This was not supposed to happen in the boiling inner world of the living thing. What is more, the biophotons he measured from plants, animals and humans were highly coherent. They acted like a single super-powerful frequency, a phenomenon also referred to as ‘superradiance’.

The German biophysicist Herbert Fröhlich had first described a model in which this type of order could be present and play a central role in biological systems. His model showed that, with complex dynamic systems like human beings, the energy within created all sorts of subtle relationships, so that it is no longer discordant.21

Living energy is able to organize to one giant coherent state, with the highest form of quantum order known to nature.

When subatomic particles are said to be ‘coherent’, or ‘ordered’, they become highly interlinked by bands of common electromagnetic fields, and resonate like a multitude of tuning forks all attuned to the same frequency. They stop behaving like anarchic individuals and begin operating like one well- rehearsed marching band.

As one scientist put it, coherence is like comparing the photons of a single 60- watt light bulb to the sun.

Ordinarily, light is extraordinarily inefficient. The intensity of light from a bulb is only about 1 watt per square centimetre of light – because many of the waves made by the photons destructively interfere with and cancel out each other. The light per square centimetre generated by the sun is about 6000 times stronger. But if you could get all the photons of this one small light bulb to become coherent and resonate in harmony with each other, the energy density of the single light bulb would be thousands to millions of times higher than that of the surface of the sun.22

After Popp made his discoveries about coherent light in living organisms, other scientists postulated that mental processes also create Bose–Einstein condensates. British physicist Roger Penrose and his partner, American anaesthetist Stuar Hameroff from the University of Arizona, were in the vanguard of frontier scientists who proposed that the microtubules in cells, which create the basic structure of the cells, were ‘light pipes’ through which disordered wave signals were transformed into highly coherent photons and pulsed through the rest of the body.23

Gary Schwartz had witnessed just this coherent photon stream emanating from the hands of healers. After studying the work of scientists like Popp and Hameroff, he finally had his answer about the source of healing: if thoughts are generated as frequencies, healing intention is well-ordered light.

Gary Schwartz’s creative experiments revealed to me something fundamental about the quantum nature of thoughts and intentions. He and his colleagues had uncovered evidence that human beings are both receivers and transmitters of quantum signals. Directed intention appears to manifest as both electrical and magnetic energy and to produce an ordered stream of photons, visible and measurable by sensitive equipment. Perhaps our intentions also operate as highly coherent frequencies, changing the very molecular makeup and bonding of matter. Like any other form of coherence in the subatomic world, one well-directed thought might be like a laser light, illuminating without ever losing its power.

I was reminded of an extraordinary experience Schwartz once had in Vancouver. He had been staying in the penthouse apartment suite of a downtown hotel. He had awakened at 2 a.m., as he often did, and had walked out to the balcony to have a look at the spectacular view of the city to the west, framed by the mountains. He was surprised to see how many hundreds of homes along the peninsula below him still had their lights on.

He wished he had a telescope handy to see what some of the people were doing up at this late hour. But of course, if any of them had their own telescope, they would be able to see him standing there in the nude. An odd thought suddenly came to him of his own naked image flying into each window. But maybe the idea was not so fanciful.

After all, he was emitting a constant stream of biophotons, all travelling at the speed of light; each photon would have travelled 186,000 miles one second later, and 372,000 miles one second after that.

His light was not unlike the photons of visible light emanating from stars in the sky. Much of the light from distant stars has been traveling for millions of years. Starlight contains a star’s individual history. Even if a star had died long before its light reached earth, its information remains, an indelible footprint in the sky.

He then had a sudden image of himself as a ball of energy fields, a little star, glowing with a steady stream of every photon his body had ever produced for more than 50 years.

All the information he had been sending from the time he was a young boy in Long Island, every last thought he had ever had, was still out there, glowing like starlight. Perhaps, I thought, intention was also like a star. Once constructed, a thought radiated out like starlight, affecting everything in its path.

Notes – Chapter 2: The Human Antenna

All personal details about Gary Schwartz and his discoveries result from multiple interviews with him and the author, March–June 2006.
H. Benson et al., ‘Decreased systolic blood pressure through operant conditioning techniques in patients with essential hypertension’, Science, 1971; 173 (3998): 740–2.
E. E. Green, ‘Copper wall research psychology and psychophysics: subtle energies and energy medicine: emerging theory and practice’, Proceedings, First Annual Conference, International Society for the Stud of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine (ISSSEEM,) Boulder, Colorado, 21–25 June 1991.
This research was eventually published as G. Schwartz and L. Russek ‘Subtle energies – electrostatic body motion registration and the human antenna-receiver effect: a new method for investigating interpersonal dynamical energy system interactions’, Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 1996; 7 (2): 149–84.
E. E. Green et al., ‘Anomalous electrostatic phenomena in exceptional subjects’, Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, 1993; 2: 69; W. A. Tiller et al., ‘Towards explaining anomalously large body voltage surges on exceptional subjects, Part I: The electrostatic approximation’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1995; 9 (3): 331.
William A. Tiller, ‘Subtle energies’, Science & Medicine, 1999, 6 (3): 28–33.
A. Seto et al., ‘Detection of extraordinary large biomagnetic field strength from the human hand during external qi emission’, Acupuncture and Electrotherapeutics Research International, 1992; 17: 75–94; J. Zimmerman, ‘New technologies detect effects in healing hands’, Brain/Mind Bulletin, 1985; 10 (2): 20–3.
B. Grad, ‘Dimensions in “Some biological effects of the laying on o hands” and their implications’, in H. A. Otto and J. W. Knight (eds.) Dimension in Wholistic Healing: New Frontiers in the Treatment of the Whole Person, Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1979: 199–212.
L. N. Pyatnitsky and V. A. Fonkin, ‘Human consciousness influence on water structure’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1995; 9 (1): 89.
G. Rein and R. McCraty, ‘Structural changes in water and DN associated with new physiologically measurable states’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1994; 8 (3): 438–9.
W. Tiller would eventually write about the effect of shielding psychics in his book Science and Human Transformation, Walnut Creek, Calif.: Pavior Publishing, 1997: 32.
M. Connor, G. Schwartz et al., ‘Oscillation of amplitude as measured by an extra low frequency magnetic field meter as a biophysical measure of intentionality’. Paper presented at the Toward a Science of Consciousness Conference, Tucson, Arizona, April 2006.
Sicher, Targ et al., ‘A randomized double-blind study’, op. cit.
See McTaggart, The Field, op. cit.: 39, for a full description of F.-A. Popp’s earlier work.
S. Cohen and F.-A. Popp, ‘Biophoton emission of the human body’ Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology, 1997; 40: 187–9.
K. Creath and G. E. Schwartz, ‘What biophoton images of plants can tel us about biofields and healing’, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 2005; 19 (4): 531–50.
S. N. Bose, ‘Planck’s Gesetz und Lichtquantenhypothese’, Zeitschrift für Physik, 1924; 26: 178–81; A. Einstein, ‘Quantentheorie des einatomigen idealen Gases [Quantum theory of ideal monoatomic gases]’, Sitz. Ber. Preuss. Akad. Wiss. (Berlin), 1925; 23: 3.
C. E. Wieman and E. A. Cornell, ‘Seventy years later: the creation of Bose-Einstein condensate in an ultracold gas’, Lorentz Proceedings, 1999; 52: 3–5.
K. Davis et al., ‘Bose-Einstein condensation in a gas of sodium atoms’ Physical Review Letters, 1995; 75: 3969–73.
M. W. Zwierlein et al., ‘Observation of Bose-Einstein condensation o molecules’, Physical Review Letters, 2003; 91: 250401.
H. Fröhlich, ‘Long range coherence and energy storage in biological systems’, Int. J. Quantum Chem., 1968; II: 641–9.
For this entire example, see Tiller, Science and Human Transformation, op. cit.: 196.
M. Jibu et al., ‘Quantum optical coherence in cytoskeletal microtubules: implications for brain function’, Biosystems, 1994; 32: 195–209; S. R. Hameroff, ‘Cytoplasmic gel states and ordered water: possible roles in biological quantum coherence’, Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Advanced Water Sciences Symposium, Dallas, Texas, 1996.

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Orphans of the Sky (full text) by Robert A. Heinlein

The following is the full text of the short science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein titled “Orphans of the Sky”. Here it is in it’e entirety and you do not need to “register”, give out your credit card number or do anything that compromises your privacy to view it. It is all 100% free for you to read. Enjoy.

Lost in Space -- Hugh had been taught that, according to the ancient sacred writings, the Ship was on a voyage to faraway Centaurus. But he also understood this was just allegory for a voyage to spiritual perfection. Indeed, how could the Ship move, since its miles and miles of metal corridors were all there was of creation? Science knew that the Ship was all the universe, and as long as the sacred Converter was fed, the lights would continue to glow, the air would flow, and the Creator's Plan would be fulfilled.

Some quick reviews

I've read this book three times; first when I was a young boy and, later, as a young man, at my aunt and uncle's house in Potsdam, NY. My uncle was David A. Kyle and he was a sci-fi writer and #1 fan of that genre. He and my aunt used to fly me up from NJ to spend summers with them. They had a vast library of sci-fi literature, books, in particular. It was a fascinating place to stay and it opened my mind to the universe. I read many books, but this one really captured my imagination and brought back happy memories of my youth.

-Marinade Dave

I first read this when I was 9. Back then it was just a simple adventure story. I re-read it at 21 and got a whole lot more about the background politics and such in the story. When this e-book came out, I snatched it up out of nostalgia, and when I read it again at 53, I saw things I had never realized were in there before about just how degraded society and conditions were aboard that ship. It's a short novel, but there are layers upon layers woven throughout it.

-Richard Chandler

First Impressions:

The book reads rather rapidly and well for a young adult novel, originally appearing in Astounding Science Fiction back in the 1940s. Heinlein's writing and plotting had improved since those days, but there's something fun and unique about his early writings such as Space Cadet, or Starship Troopers, contemporary stories that involved a strong lead character and lots of plot points.

Plots:

I may be wrong but this may be one of the first stories of a multi-generational ship that had some kind of catastrophe where everyone forgot they lived on a ship and thought the Ship was all there was! I've seen this idea played out in the original Star Trek episode "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky" and the television series "Star Lost."

The main character Hugh Hoyland lives on a Ship where scientists are revered as holy and the Captain of the ship is near godhood. There are farms going on, and a Converter that is used to create energy from mass (and occasionally from dead bodies). There is an internal struggle with mutants in the upper levels. It's very dictatorial and people know their places. To question is to court death.

But Hugh questions. And he ends up with the mutants, a two headed guy called Joe-Jim and his sidekick Bobo. This small unassuming trio are the vanguard of a major change where the Ship is headed for a star -- but the inhabitants don't even know what space is.

Fascinating scenario, but not enough time is spent on the whole religious aspect of the scientists. They do mention a few scientific facts but have decided its all allegory and ancient myths -- such as the law of gravity!

The part where we move into rebellion, assassination and betrayal towards the end of the book is really fascinating. The end is a bit rushed, but Heinlein acknowledges that as a string of amazing coincidences! Ha!

Overall a great read and highly recommended to fans of early Heinlein.

-Critics Corner

Orphans of the Sky

UNIVERSE

The Proxima Centauri Expedition, sponsored by the Jordan Foundation in 2119, was the first recorded attempt to reach the nearer stars of this galaxy. Whatever its unhappy fate we can only conjecture. — Quoted from The Romance of Modern Astrography, by Franklin Buck, published by Lux Transcriptions, Ltd., 3.50 cr.

“THERE’S AMUTIE! Look out!”

At the shouted warning, Hugh Hoyland ducked, with nothing to spare. An egg-sized iron missile clanged against the bulkhead just above his scalp with force that promised a fractured skull. The speed with which he crouched had lifted his feet from the floor plates. Before his body could settle slowly to the deck, he planted his feet against the bulkhead behind him and shoved. He went shooting down the passageway in a long, flat dive, his knife drawn and ready.

He twisted in the air, checked himself with his feet against the opposite bulkhead at the turn in the passage from which the mutie had attacked him, and floated lightly to his feet. The other branch of the passage was empty. His two companions joined him, sliding awkwardly across the floor plates.

“Is it gone?” demanded Alan Mahoney.

“Yes,” agreed Hoyland. “I caught a glimpse of it as it ducked down that hatch. Afemale, I think. Looked like it had four legs.” “Two legs or four, we’ll never catch it now,” commented the third man.

“Who the Huff wants to catch it?” protested Mahoney. “I don’t.”

“Well, I do, for one,” said Hoyland. “By Jordan, if its aim had been two inches better, I’d be ready for the Converter.”

“Can’t either one of you two speak three words without swearing?” the third man disapproved. “What if the Captain could hear you?” He touched his forehead reverently as he mentioned the Captain.

“Oh, for Jordan’s sake,” snapped Hoyland, “don’t be so stuffy, Mort Tyler. You’re not a scientist yet. I reckon I’m as devout as you are; there’s no grave sin in occasionally giving vent to your feelings. Even the scientists do it. I’ve heard ‘em.”

Tyler opened his mouth as if to expostulate, then apparently thought better of it. Mahoney touched Hoyland on the arm. “Look, Hugh,” he pleaded, “let’s get out of here. We’ve never been this high before. I’m jumpy; I want to get back down to where I can feel some weight on my feet.”

Hoyland looked longingly toward the hatch through which his assailant had disappeared while his hand rested on the grip of his knife, then be turned to Mahoney. “OK, kid,” he agreed, “It’s along trip down anyhow.”

He turned and slithered back toward the hatch, whereby they had reached the level where they now were, the other two following him. Disregarding the ladder by which they had mounted, he stepped off into the opening and floated slowly down to the deck fifteen feet below, Tyler and Mahoney close behind him. Another hatch, staggered a few feet from the first, gave

access to a still lower deck. Down, down, down, and still farther down they dropped, tens and dozens of decks, each silent, dimly lighted, mysterious. Each time they fell a little faster, landed a little harder. Mahoney protested at last, “Let’s walk the rest of the way, Hugh. That last jump hurt my feet.”

“All right. But it will take longer. How far have we got to go? Anybody keep count?” “We’ve got about seventy decks to go to reach farm country,” answered Tyler. “How d’you know?” demanded Mahoney suspiciously.

“I counted them, stupid. And as we came down I took one away for each deck.”

“You did not. Nobody but a scientist can do numbering like that. Just because you’re learning to read and write you think you know everything.”

Hoyland cut in before it could develop into a quarrel. “Shut up, Alan. Maybe he can do it. He’s clever about such things. Anyhow, it feels like about seventy decks — I’m heavy enough.” “Maybe he’d like to count the blades on my knife.”

“Stow it, I said. Dueling is forbidden outside the village. That is the Rule.” They proceeded in silence, running lightly down the stairways until increasing weight on each succeeding level forced them to a more pedestrian pace. Presently they broke through into a level that was quite brilliantly lighted and more than twice as deep between decks as the ones above it. The air was moist and warm; vegetation obscured the view.

“Well, down at last,” said Hugh. “I don’t recognize this farm; we must have come down by a different line than we went up.” “There’s a farmer,” said Tyler. He put his little fingers to his lips and whistled, then called, “Hey! Shipmate! Where are we?”

The peasant looked them over slowly, then directed them in reluctant monosyllables to the main passageway which would lead them back to their own village.

Abrisk walk of a mile and a half down a wide tunnel moderately crowded with traffic: travelers, porters, an occasional pushcart, a dignified scientist swinging in a litter borne by four husky orderlies and preceded by his master-at-arms to clear the common crew out of the way. Amile and a half of this brought them to the common of their own village, a spacious compartment three decks high and perhaps ten times as wide. They split up and went their own ways, Hugh to his quarters in the barracks of the cadets, young bachelors who do not live with their parents. He washed himself and went thence to the compartments of his uncle, for whom he worked for his meals. His aunt glanced up as he came in, but said nothing, as became a woman.

His uncle said, “Hello, Hugh. Been exploring again?” “Good eating, Uncle. Yes.”

His uncle, a stolid, sensible man, looked tolerantly amused. “Where did you go and what did you find?”

Hugh’s aunt had slipped silently out of the compartment, and now returned with his supper which she placed before him. He fell to; it did not occur to him to thank her. He munched a bite before replying.

“Up. We climbed almost to the level-of-no-weight. Amutie tried to crack my skull.”

His uncle chuckled. “You’ll find your death In those passageways, lad. Better you should pay more attention to my business against the day when I die and get out of your way.” Hugh looked stubborn. “Don’t you have any curiosity, Uncle?”

“Me? Oh, I was prying enough when I was a lad. I followed the main passage all the way around and back to the village. Right through the Dark Sector I went, with muties tagging my heels. See that scar?”

Hugh glanced at it perfunctorily. He had seen it many times before and heard the story repeated to boredom. Once around the Ship, pfft! He wanted to go everywhere, see everything, and find out the why of things. Those upper levels now: if men were not intended to climb that high, why had Jordan created them?

But he kept his own counsel and went on with his meal. His uncle changed the subject. “I’ve occasion to visit the Witness. John Black claims I owe him three swine. Want to come along?”

“Why, no, I guess not — Wait! I believe I will.”

“Hurry up, then.”

They stopped at the cadets’ barracks, Hugh claiming an errand. The Witness lived in a small, smelly compartment directly across the Common from the barracks, where he would be readily accessible to any who had need of his talents. They found him leaning in his doorway, picking his teeth with a fingernail. His apprentice, a pimply-faced adolescent with an intent nearsighted expression, squatted behind him.

“Good eating.” said Hugh’s uncle.

“Good eating to you, Edard Hoyland. D’you come on business, or to keep an old man company?” “Both,” Hugh’s uncle returned diplomatically, then explained his errand.

“So,” said the Witness. “Well, the contract’s clear enough. Black John delivered ten bushels of oats, Expecting his pay in a pair of shoats; Ed brought his sow to breed for pig; John gets his pay when the pigs grow big.

“How big are the pigs now, Edard Hoyland?”

“Big enough,” acknowledged Hugh’s uncle, “but Black John claims three instead of two.” “Tell him to go soak his head. The Witness has spoken.”

He laughed in a thin, high cackle.

The two gossiped for a few minutes, Edard Hoyland digging into his recent experiences to satisfy the old man’s insatiable liking for details. Hugh kept decently silent while the older men talked. But when his uncle turned to go he spoke up. “I’ll stay awhile, Uncle.”

“Eh? Suit yourself. Good eating, Witness.” “Good eating, Edard Hoyland.”

“I’ve brought you a present, Witness,” said Hugh, when his uncle had passed out of hearing. “Let me see it.”

Hugh produced a package of tobacco which he had picked up from his locker at the barracks. The Witness accepted it without acknowledgment, then tossed it to his apprentice, who took charge of it.

“Come inside,” invited the Witness, then directed his speech to his apprentice. “Here, you, fetch the cadet a chair.” “Now, lad,” he added as they sat themselves down, “tell me what you have been doing with yourself.”

Hugh told him, and was required to repeat In detail all the incidents of his more recent explorations, the Witness complaining the meanwhile over his inability to remember exactly everything he saw.

“You youngsters have no capacity,” he pronounced. “No capacity. Even that lout—” he jerked his head toward the apprentice, “he has none, though he’s a dozen times better than you. Would you believe it, he can’t soak up a thousand lines a day, yet he expects to sit in my seat when I am gone. Why, when I was apprenticed, I used to sing myself to sleep on a mere thousand lines. Leaky vessels — that’s what you are.”

Hugh did not dispute the charge, but waited for the old man to go on, which he did in his own time. “You had a question to put to me, lad?”

“In a way, Witness.”

“Well? Out with it. Don’t chew your tongue.”

“Did you ever climb all the way up to no-weight?”

“Me? Of course not. I was a Witness, learning my calling. I had the lines of all the Witnesses before me to learn, and no time for boyish amusements.” “I had hoped you could tell me what I would find there.”

“Well, now, that’s another matter. I’ve never climbed, but I hold the memories of more climbers than you will ever see. I’m an old man. I knew your father’s father, and his grandsire before that. What is it you want to know?”

“Well…” What was it be wanted to know? How could he ask a question that was no more than a gnawing ache in his breast? Still… “What is it all for, Witness? Why are there all those levels above us?”

“Eh? How’s that? Jordan’s name, son, I’m a Witness, not a scientist.” “Well … I thought you must know. I’m sorry.”

“But I do know. What you want is the Lines from the Beginning.” “I’ve heard them.”

“Hear them again. All your answers are in there, if you’ve the wisdom to see them. Attend me. No, this is a chance for my apprentice to show off his learning. Here, you! The Lines from the Beginning — and mind your rhythm.”

The apprentice wet his lips with his tongue and began:

“In the Beginning there was Jordan, thinking His lonely thoughts alone. In the Beginning there was darkness, formless, dead, and Man unknown. Out of the loneness came a longing, out of the longing came a vision, Out of the dream there came a planning, out of the plan there came decision: Jordan’s hand was lifted and the Ship was born.

Mile after mile of snug compartments, tank by tank for the golden corn, Ladder and passage, door and locker, fit for the needs of the yet unborn. He looked on His work and found it pleasing, meet for a race that was yet to be. He thought of Man; Man came into being; checked his thought and searched for the key. Man untamed would shame his Maker, Man unruled would spoil the Plan; So Jordan made the Regulations, orders to each single man, Each to a task and each to a station, serving a purpose beyond their ken, Some to speak and some to listen; order came to the ranks of men. Crew He created to work at their stations, scientists to guide the Plan. Over them all He created the Captain, made him judge of the race of Man. Thus it was in the Golden Age!

Jordan is perfect, all below him lack perfection in their deeds. Envy, Greed, and Pride of Spirit sought for minds to lodge their seeds. One there was who gave them lodging: accursed Huff, the first to sin! His evil counsel stirred rebellion, planted doubt where it had not been; Blood of martyrs stained the floor plates, Jordan’s Captain made the Trip. Darkness swallowed up—”

The old man gave the boy the back of his hand, sharp across the mouth. “Try again!” “From the beginning?”

“No! From where you missed.”

The boy hesitated, then caught his stride: “Darkness swallowed ways of virtue, Sin prevailed through out the Ship . .”

The boy’s voice droned on, stanza after stanza, reciting at great length but with little sharpness of detail the dim, old story of sin, rebellion, and the time of darkness. How wisdom prevailed at last and the bodies of the rebel leaders were fed to the Converter. How some of the rebels escaped making the Trip and lived to father the muties. How a new Captain was chosen, after prayer and sacrifice. Hugh stirred uneasily, shuffling his feet. No doubt the answers to his questions were there, since these were the Sacred Lines, but he had not the wit to understand them. Why? What was it all about? Was there really nothing more to life than eating and sleeping and finally the long Trip? Didn’t Jordan intend for him to understand? Then why this ache in his breast? This hunger that persisted in spite of good eating?

While he was breaking his fast after sleep an orderly came to the door of his uncle’s compartments. “The scientist requires the presence of Hugh Hoyland,” be recited glibly.

Hugh knew that the scientist referred to was lieutenant Nelson, in charge of the spiritual and physical welfare of the Ship’s sector which included Hugh’s flative vilage. He bolted the last of his breakfast and hurried after the messenger.

“Cadet Hoyland!” he was announced. The scientist locked up from his own meal and said: “Oh, yes. Come in, my boy. Sit down. Have you eaten?”

Hugh acknowjedged that he had, but his eyes rested with interest on the fancy fruit In front of his superior. Nelson followed his glance. “Try some of these figs. They’re a new mutation; I had them brought all the way from the far side. Go ahead — a man your age always has somewhere to stow a few more bites.”

Hugh accepted with much self-consciousness. Never before had he eaten in the presence of a scientist. The elder leaned back in his chair, wiped his fingers on his shirt, arranged his beard, and started in.

“I haven’t seen you lately, son. Tell me what you have been doing with yourself.” Before Hugh could reply he went on: “No, don’t tell me; I will tell you. For one thing you have been exploring, climbing, without too much respect for the forbidden areas. Is it not so?” He held the young man’s eye. Hugh fumbled for a reply.

But he was let off again. “Never mind. I know, and you know that I know. I am not too displeased. But it has brought it forcibly to my attention that it is time that you decided what you are to do with your life. Have you any plans?”

“Well, no definite ones, sir.”

“How about that girl, Edris Baxter? D’you intend to marry her?”

“Why, uh — I don’t know, sir. I guess I want to, and her father is willing, I think. Only…” “Only what?”

“Well, he wants me to apprentice to his farm. I suppose it’s a good idea. His farm together with my uncle’s business would make a good property.” “But you’re not sure?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Correct. You’re not for that. I have other plans. Tell me, have you ever wondered why I taught you to read and write? Of course, you have. But you’ve kept your own counsel. That is good. “Now attend me. I’ve watched you since you were a small child. You have more imagination than the common run, more curiosity, more go. And you are a born leader. You were different even as a baby. Your head was too large, for one thing, and there were some who voted at your birth inspection to put you at once into the Converter. But I held them off. I wanted to see how you would turn out.

“Apeasant life is not for the likes of you. You are to be a scientist.”

The old man paused and studied his face. Hugh was confused, speechless. Nelson went on, “Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. For a man of your temperament, there are only two things to do with him: Make him one of the custodians, or send him to the Converter.”

“Do you mean, sir, that I have nothing to say about it?”

“If you want to put it that bluntly, yes. To leave the bright ones among the ranks of the Crew is to breed heresy. We can’t have that. We had it once and it almost destroyed tbe human race. You have marked yourself out by your exceptional ability; you must now be instructed in right thinking, be initiated into the mysteries, in order that you may be a conserving force rather than a focus of infection and a source of trouble.” The orderly reappeared loaded down with bundles which he dumped on the deck. Hugh glanced at them, then burst out, “Why, those are my things!”

“Certainly,” acknowledged Nelson. “I sent for them. You’re to sleep here henceforth. I’ll see you later and start you on your studies, unless you have something more on your mind?” “Why, no, sir. I guess not. I must admit I am a little confused. I suppose … I suppose this means you don’t want me to marry?”

“Oh, that,” Nelson answered indifferently. “Take her if you like; her father can’t protest now. But let me warn you, you’ll grow tired of her.”

Hugh Hoyland devoured the ancient books that his mentor permitted him to read, and felt no desire for many, many sleeps to go climbing, or even to stir out of Nelson’s cabin. More than once he felt that he was on the track of the secret — a secret as yet undefined, even as a question — but again he would find himself more confused than ever. It was evidently harder to reach the wisdom of scientisthood than he had thought.

Once, while he was worrying away at the curious twisted characters of the ancients and trying to puzzle out their odd rhetoric and unfamiliar terms, Nelson came into the little compartment that had been set aside for him, and, laying a fatherly hand on his shoulder, asked, “How goes it, boy?”

“Why, well enough, sir, I suppose,” he answered, laying the book aside. “Some of it is not quite clear to me — not clear at all, to tell the truth.”

“That is to be expected,” the old man said equably. “I’ve let you struggle along by yourself at first in order that you may see the traps that native wit alone will fall into. Many of these things are not to be understood without instruction. What have you there?” He picked up the book and glanced at it. It was inscribed Basic Modern Physics. “So? This is one of the most valuable of the sacred writings, yet the uninitiate could not possibly make good use of it without help. The first thing that you must understand, my boy, is that our forefathers, for all their spiritual perfection, did not look at things in the fashion in which we do.

“They were incurable romantics, rather than rationalists, as we are, and the truths which they handed down to us, though strictly true, were frequently clothed in allegorical language. For example, have you come to the Law of Gravitation?”

“I read about it.”

“Did you understand it? No, I can see that you didn’t.”

“Well,” said Hugh defensively, “it didn’t seem to mean anything. It just sounded silly, if you will pardon me, sir.”

“That illustrates my point. You were thinking of it in literal terms, like the laws governing electrical devices found elsewhere in this same book. ‘Two bodies attract each other directly as the product of their masses and inversely as the square of their distance.’ It sounds like a rule for simple physical facts, does it not? Yet it is nothing of the sort; it was the poetical way the old ones bad of expressing the rule of propinquity which governs the emotion of love. The bodies referred to are human bodies, mass is their capacity for love. Young people have a greater capacity for love than the elderly; when they are thrown together, they fall in love, yet when they are separated they soon get over it. ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’ It’s as simple as that. But you were seeking some deep meaning for it.”

Hugh grinned. “I never thought of looking at it that way. I can see that I am going to need a lot of help.” “Is there anything else bothering you just now?”

“Well, yes, lots of things, though I probably can’t remember them offhand. I mind one thing: Tell me, Father, can muties be considered as being people?”

“I can see you have been listening to idle talk. The answer to that is both yes and no. It is true that the niuties originally descended from people but they are no longer part of the Crew; they cannot now be considered as members of the human race, for they have flouted Jordan’s Law.

“This is a broad subject,” he went on, settling down to it. “There is even some question as to the original meaning of the word ‘mutie.’ Certainly they number among their ancestors the mutineers who escaped death at the time of the rebellion. But they also have in their blood the blood of many of the mutants who were born during the dark age. You understand, of

course, that during that period our present wise rule of inspecting each infant for the mark of sin and returning to the Converter any who are found to be mutations was not in force. There are strange and horrible things crawling through the dark passageways and lurking in the deserted levels.”

Hugh thought about it for a while, then asked, “Why is it that mutations still show up among us, the people?”

“That is simple. The seed of sin is still in us. From time to time it still shows up, incarnate. In destroying those monsters we help to cleanse the stock and thereby bring closer the culmination of Jordan’s Plan, the end of the Trip at our heavenly home, Far Centaurus.”

Hoyland’s brow wrinkled again. “That is another thing that I don’t understand. Many of these ancient writings speak of the Trip as if it were an actual moving, a going somewhere, as if the Ship itself were no more than a pushcart. How can that be?”

Nelson chuckled. “How can it, indeed? How can that move which is the background against which all else moves? The answer, of course, is plain. You have again mistaken allegorical language for the ordinary usage of everyday speech. Of course, the Ship is solid, immovable, in a physical sense. How can the whole universe move? Yet, it does move, in a spiritual sense. With every righteous act we move closer to the sublime destination of Jordan’s Plan.”

Hugh nodded. “I think I see.”

“Of course, it is conceivable that Jordan could have fashioned the world in some other shape than the Ship, had it suited His purpose. When man was younger and more poetical, holy men vied with one another in inventing fanciful worlds which Jordan might have created. One school invented an entire mythology of a topsy-turvy world of endless reaches of space, empty save for pinpoints of light and bodiless mythological monsters. They called it the heavenly world, or heaven, as if to contrast it with the solid reality of the Ship. They seemed never to tire of speculating about it, inventing details for it, and of outlining pictures of what they conceived it to be like. I suppose they did it to the greater glory of Jordan, and who is to say that He found their dreams unacceptable? But in this modern age we have more serious work to do.”

Hugh was not interested In astronomy. Even his untutored mind had been able to see in its wild extravagance an intention not literal. He turned to problems nearer at hand. “Since the muties are the seed of sin, why do we make no effort to wipe them out? Would not that be an act that would speed the Plan?”

The old man considered a while before replying. “That is a fair question and deserves a straight answer. Since you are to be a scientist you will need to know the answer. Look at it this way. There is a definite limit to the number of Crew the Ship can support. If our numbers increase without limit, there comes a time when there will not be good eating for all of us. Is it not better that some should die in brushes with the muties than that we should grow in numbers until we killed each other for food?.

“The ways of Jordan are inscrutable. Even the muties have a part in His Plan.” It seemed reasonable, but Hugh was not sure.

But when Hugh was transferred to active work as a junior scientist in the operation of the Ship’s functions, he found there were other opinions. As was customary, he put in a period serving the Converter. The work was not onerous; he had principally to check in the waste materials brought in by porters from each of the villages, keep books of their contributions, and make sure that no redemable metal was introduced into the first-stage hopper. But it brought him into contact with Bill Ertz, the Assistant Chief Engineer, a man not much older than himself.

He discussed with him the things he had learned from Nelson, and was shocked at Ertz’s attitude.

“Get this through your head, kid,” Ertz told him. “This is a practical job for practical men. Forget all that romantic nonsense. Jordan’s Plan! That stuff is all right to keep the peasants quiet and in their place, but don’t fall for it yourself. There is no Plan, other than our own plans for looking out for ourselves. The Ship has to have light and heat and power for cooking and irrigation. The Crew can’t get along without those things and that makes us boss of the Crew.

“As for this softheaded tolerance toward the muties, you’re going to see some changes made! Keep your mouth shut and string along with us.”

It impressed on him that he was expected to maintain a primary loyalty to the bloc of younger men among the scientists. They were a well-knit organization within an organization and were made up of practical, hardheaded men who were working toward improvement of conditions throughout the Ship, as they saw them. They were well knit because an apprentice who failed to see things their way did not last long. Either he failed to measure up and soon found himself back in the ranks of the peasants, or, as was more likely, suffered some mishap and wound up in the Converter.

And Hoyland began to see that they were right.

They were realists. The Ship was the Ship. It was a fact, requiring no explanation. As for Jordan, who had ever seen Him, spoken to Him? What was this nebulous Plan of His? The object of life was living. Aman was born, lived his life, and then went to the Converter. It was as simple as that, no mystery to it, no sublime Trip and no Centaurus. These romantic stories were simply hangovers from the childhood of the race before men gained the understanding and the courage to look facts in the face.

He ceased bothering his head about astronomy and mystical physics and all the other mass of mythology he bad been taught to revere. He was still amused, more or less, by the Lines from the Beginning and by all the old stories about Earth (what the Huff was ‘Earth,’ anyhow?) but now realized that such things could be taken seriously only by children and dullards.

Besides, there was work to do. The younger men, while still maintaining the nominal authority of their elders, had plans of their own, the first of which was a systematic extermination of the muties. Beyond that, their intentions were still fluid, but they contemplated making full use of the resources of the Ship, including the upper levels. The young men were able to move ahead with their plans without an open breach with their elders because the older scientists simply did not bother to any great extent with the routine of the Ship. The present Captain had grown so fat that he rarely stirred from his cabin; his aide, one of the young men’s bloc, attended to affairs for him.

Hoyland never laid eyes on the Chief Engineer save once, when he showed up for the purely religious ceremony of manning landing stations.

The project of cleaning out the muties required reconnaissance of the upper levels to be done systematically. It was in carrying out such scouting that Hugh Hoyland was again ambushed by a mutie.

This mutie was more accurate with his slingshot. Hoyland’s companions, forced to retreat by superior numbers, left him for dead.

Joe-Jim Gregory was playing himself a game of checkers. Time was when they had played cards together, but Joe, the head on the right, had suspected Jim, the left-hand member of the team, of cheating. They had quarreled about it, then given it up, for they both learned early in their joint career that two heads on one pair of shoulders must necessarily find ways of getting along together.

Checkers was better. They could both see the board, and disagreement was impossible.

Aloud metallic knocking at the door of the oompartment interrupted the game. Joe-Jim unsheathed his throwing knife and cradled it, ready for quick use. “Come in!” roared Jim. The door opened, the one who had knocked backed into the room — the only safe way, as everyone knew, to enter Joe-Jim’s presence. The newcomer was squat and rugged and

powerful, not over four feet in height. The relaxed body of a man hung across one shoulder and was steadied by a hand.

Joe-Jim returned the knife to its sheath. “Put it down, Bobo,” Jim ordered. “And close the door,” added Joe. “Now what have we got here?”

It was a young man, apparently dead, though no wound appeared on him. Bobo patted a thigh. “Eat ‘im?” he said hopefully. Saliva spilled out of his still-opened lips. “Maybe,” temporized Jim. “Did you kill him?”

Bobo shook his undersized head.

“Good Bobo,” Joe approved. “Where did you hit him?”

“Bobo hit him there.” The microcephalic shoved a broad thumb against the supine figure in the area between the umbilicus and the breasthone. “Good shot,” Joe approved. “We couldn’t have done better with a knife.”

“Bobo good shot,” the dwarf agreed blandly. “Want see?” He twitched his slingshot invitingly.

“Shut up,” answered Joe, not unkindly. “No, we don’t want to see; we want to make him talk.” “Bobo fix,” the short one agreed, and started with simple brutality to carry out his purpose.

Joe-Jim slapped him away, and applied other methods, painful but considerably less drastic than those of the dwarf. The younger man jerked and opened his eyes. “Eat ‘im?” repeated Bobo.

“No,” said Joe. “When did you eat last?” inquired Jim.

Bobo shook his head and rubbed his stomach, indicating with graphic pantomime that it had been a long time, too long. Joe-Jim went over to a locker, opened it, and withdrew a haunch of meat. He held it up. Jim smelled it and Joe drew his head away in nose-wrinkling disgust Joe-Jim threw, it to Bobo, who snatched it happily out of the air. “Now, get out,” ordered Jim.

Bobo trotted away, closing the door behind him. JoeJim turned to the captive and prodded him with his foot. “Speak up,” said Jim. “Who the Huff are you?”

The young man shivered, put a hand to his head, then seemed suddenly to bring his surroundings into focus, for be scrambled to his feet, moving awkwardly. against the low weight conditions of this level, and reached for his knife.

It was not at his belt.

Joe-Jim had his own out and brandished it. “Be good and you won’t get hurt. What do they call you?” The young man wet his lips, and his eyes hurried about the room. “Speak up,” said Joe.

“Why bother with him?” inquired Jim. “I’d say he was only good for meat. Better call Bobo back.” “No hurry about that,” Joe answered. “I want to talk to him. What’s your name?”

The prisoner looked again at the kife and muttered, “Hugh Hoyland.”

“That doesn’t tell us much,” Jim commented. “What d’you do? What village do you come from? And what were you doing in mutie country?” But this time Hoyland was sullen. Even the prick of the knife against his ribs caused him only to bite his lips. “Shucks,” said Joe, “he’s only a stupid peasant. Let’s drop it.”

“Shall we finish him off?” “No. Not now. Shut him up.”

Joe-Jim opened the door of a small side compartment, and urged Hugh in with the knife. He then closed and fastened the door and went back to his game. “Your move, Jim.”

The compartment in which Hugh was locked was dark. He soon satisfied himself by touch that the smooth steel walls were entirely featureless save for the solid, securely fastened door. Presently he lay down on the deck and gave himself up to fruitless thinking.

He had plenty of time to think, time to fall asleep and awaken more than once. And time to grow very hungry and very, very thirsty.

When Joe-Jim next took sufficient interest in his prisoner to open the door of the cell, Hoyland was not immediately in evidence. He had planned many times what he would do when the door opened and his chance came, but when the event arrived, he was too weak, semi-comatose. Joe-Jim dragged him out. , The disturbance roused him to partial comprehension. He sat up and stared around him. “Ready to talk?” asked Jim. Hoyland opened his mouth but no words came out.

“Can’t you see he’s too dry to talk?” Joe told his twin. Then to Hugh: “Will you talk if we give you some water?” Hoyland looked puzzled, then nodded vigorously.

Joe-Jim returned in a moment with a mug of water. Hugh drank greedily, paused, and seemed about to faint. Joe-Jim took the mug from him. “That’s enough for now,” said Joe. “Tell us about yourself.”

Hugh did so. In detail, being prompted from time to time by questions from one of the twins, or a kick against his shin.

Hugh accepted a de facto condition of slavery with no particular resistance and no great disturbance of soul. The word ‘slave’ was not in his vocabulary, but the condition was a commonplace in everything he had ever known. There had always been those who gave orders and those who carried them out; he could imagine no other condition, no other type of social organization. It was a fact of life.

Though naturally he thought of escape.

Thinking about it was as far as he got. Joe-Jim guessed his thoughts and brought the matter out into the open. Joe told him, “Don’t go getting ideas, youngster. Without a knife you wouldn’t get three levels away in this part of the Ship. If you managed to steal a knife from me, you still wouldn’t make it down to high-weight. Besides, there’s Bobo.”

Hugh waited a moment, as was fitting, then said, “Bobo?”

Jim grinned and replied, “We told Bobo that you were his to butcher, if he liked, if you ever stuck your head out of our compartments without us. Now he sleeps outside the door and spends a lot of his time there.”

“It was only fair,” put in Joe. “He was disappointed when we decided to keep you.”

“Say,” suggested Jim, turning his bead toward his brother’s, “how about some fun?” He turned back to Hugh. “Can you throw a knife?” “Of course,” Hugh answered.

“Let’s see you. Here.” Joe-Jim handed him their own knife. Hugh accepted it, jiggling it in his band to try its balance. “Try my mark.”

Joe-Jim had a plastic target. set up at the far end of the room from his favorite chair, on which he was wont to practice his own skill. Hugh eyed it, and, with an arm motion too fast to follow, let fly. He used the economical underhand stroke, thumb on the blade, fingers together. The blade shivered in the target, well centered in the chewed-up area which marked Joe- Jim’s best efforts. “Good boy!” Joe approved. “What do you have in mind, Jim?”

“Let’s give him the knife and see how far he gets.” “No,” said Joe, “I don’t agree.”

“Why not?”

“If Bobo wins, we’re out one servant. If Hugh wins, we lose both Bobo and him. It’s wasteful.” “Oh, well, if you insist.”

“I do. Hugh, fetch the knife.”

Hugh did so. It had not occurred to him to turn the knife against Joe-Jim. The master was the master. For servant to attack master was not simply repugnant to good morals, it was an idea so wild that it did not occur to him at all.

Hugh had expected that Joe-Jim would be impressed by his learning as a scientist. It did not work out that way. Joe-Jim, especially Jim, loved to argue. They sucked Hugh dry in short order and figuratively cast him aside. Hoyland felt humiliated. After all, was he not a scientist? Could he not read and write?

“Shut up,” Jim told Hugh. “Reading is simple. I could do it before your father was born. D’you think you’re the first scientist that has served me? Scientists—bah! Apack of ignoramuses!” In an attempt to re-establish his own intellectual conceit, Hugh expounded the theories of the younger scientists, the strictly matter-of-fact, hard-boiled realism which rejected all religious interpretation and took the Ship as it was. He confidently expected Joe-Jim to approve such a point of view; it seemed to fit their temperaments. They laughed in his face.

“Honest,” Jim insisted, when be bad ceased snorting, “are you young punks so stupid as all that? Why you’re worse than your elders.”

“But you just got through saying,” Hugh protested in hurt tones, “that all our accepted religious notions are so much bunk. That is just what my friends think. They want to junk all that old nonsense.”

Joe started to speak; Jim cut in ahead of him. “Why bother with him, Joe? He’s hopeless.”

“No, he’s not. I’m enjoying this. He’s the first one I’ve talked with in I don’t know how long who stood any chance at all of seeing the truth. Let us be — I want to see whether that’s a head he has on his shoulders, or just a place to hang his ears.”

“O.K.,” Jim agreed, “but keep it quiet. I’m going to take a nap.” The left-hand head closed its eyes, soon it was snoring. Joe and Hugh continued their discussion in whispers.

“The trouble with you youngsters,” Joe said, “is that if you can’t understand a thing right off, you think it can’t be true. The trouble with your elders is, anything they didn’t understand they reinterpreted to mean something else and then thought they understood it. None of you has tried believing clear words the way they were written and then tried to understand them on that basis. Oh, no, you’re all too bloody smart for that! If you can’t see it right off, it ain’t so; it must mean something different.”

“What do you mean?” Hugh asked suspiciously.

“Well, take the Trip, for instance. What does it mean to you?

“Well, to my mind, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a piece of nonsense to impress the peasants.” “And what is the accepted meaning?”

“Well, it’s where you go when you die, or rather what you do. You make the Trip to Centaurus.” “And what is Centaurus?”

“It’s — mind you, I’m just telling you the orthodox answers; I don’t really believe this stuff — it’s where you arrive when you’ve made the Trip, a place where everybody’s happy and there’s always good eating.” Joe snorted. Jim broke the rhythm of his snoring, opened one eye, and settled back again with a grunt.

“That’s just what I mean,” Joe went on in a lower whisper. “You don’t use your head. Did it over occur to you that the Trip was just what the old books said It was: the Ship and all the Crew actually going somewhere, moving?” Hoyland thought about it. “You don’t mean for me to take you seriously. Physically, it’s an impossibility. The Ship can’t go anywhere. It already is everywhere. We can make a trip through it, but the Trip, that has to have a spiritual meaning, if it has any.”

Joe called on Jordan to support him. “Now, listen,” he said, “get this through that thick head of yours. Imagine a place a lot bigger than the Ship, a lot bigger, with the Ship inside it, moving. D’you get it?”

Hugh tried. He tried very hard. He shook his bead. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “There can’t be anything bigger than the Ship. There wouldn’t be any place for it to be.” “Oh, for Huff’s sake! Listen. Outside the Ship, get that? Straight down beyond the level in every direction. Emptiness out there. Understand me?”

“But there isn’t anything below the lowest level. That’s why it’s the lowest level.”

“Look. If you took a knife and started digging a hole in the floor of the lowest level, where would it get you?” “But you can’t. It’s too hard.”

“But suppose you did and it made a hole. Where would that hole go? Imagine it.”

Hugh shut his eyes and tried to imagine digging a hole in the lowest level. Digging as if it were soft, soft as cheese. He began to get some glimmering of a possibility, a possibility that was unsettling, soul-shaking. He was falling, falling into a hole that he had dug which had no levels under it. He opened his eyes very quickly. “That’s awful!” he ejaculated. “I won’t believe it.”

Joe-Jim got up. “I’ll make you believe it,” he said grimly, “if I have to break your neck to do it.” He strode over to the outer door and opened it. “Bobo!” he shouted. “Bobo!”

Jim’s head snapped erect. “Wassa matter? Wha’s going on?” “We’re going to take Hugh to no-weight.”

“What for?”

“To pound some sense into his silly head.” “Some other time.”

“No, I want to do it now.”

“All right, all right. No need to shake. I’m awake now anyhow.”

Joe-Jim Gregory was almost as nearly unique in his — or their — mental ability as he was in his bodily construction. Under any circumstances he would have been a dominant personality; among the muties it was inevitable that he should bully them, order them about, and live on their services. Had he had the will-to-power, it is conceivable that he could have organized the muties to fight and overcome the Crew proper.

But he lacked that drive. He was by native temperament an intellectual, a bystander, an observer. He was interested in the ‘how’ and the ‘why,’ but his will to action was satisfied with comfort and convenience alone.

Had he been born two normal twins and among the Crew, it is likely that he would have drifted into scientisthood as the easiest and most satisfactory answer to the problem of living and as such would have entertained himself mildly with conversation and administration. As it was, he lacked mental companionship and had whiled away three generations reading and rereading books stolen for him by his stooges.

The two halves of his dual person had argued and discussed what they had read, and had almost inevitably arrived at a reasonably coherent theory of history and the physical world, except in one respect. The concept of fiction was entirely foreign to them; they treated the novels that had been provided for the Jordan expedition in exactly the same fashion that they did text and reference books.

This led to their one major difference of opinion. Jim regarded Allan Quartermain as the greatest man who had ever lived; Joe held out for John Henry.

They were both inordinately fond of poetry; they could recite page after page of Kipling, and were nearly as fond of Rhysling, the blind singer of the spaceways. Bobo backed in. Joe-Jim hooked a thumb toward Hugh. “Look,” said Joe, “he’s going out.”

“Now?” said Bobo happily, and grinned, slavering.

“You and your stomach!” Joe answered, rapping Bobo’s pate with his knuckles. “No, you don’t eat him. You and him, blood brothers. Get it?” “Not eat ‘im?”

“No. Fight for him. He fights for you.”

“O.K.” The pinhead shrugged his shoulders at the inevitable. “Blood brothers. Bobo know.” “All right. Now we go up to the place-where-everybody-flies. You go ahead and make lookout.”

They climbed in single file, the dwarf running ahead to spot the lie of the land, Hoyland behind him, Joe-Jim bringing up the rear, Joe with eyes to the front, Jim watching their rear, head

turned over his shoulder.

Higher and higher they went, weight slipping imperceptibly from them with each successive deck. They emerged finally into a level beyond which there was no further progress, no opening above them. The deck curved gently, suggesting that the true shape of the space was a giant cylinder, but overhead a metallic expanse which exhibited a similar curvature obstructed the view and prevented one from seeing whether or not the deck in truth curved back on itself.

There were no proper bulkheads; great stanchions, so huge and squat as to give an impression of excessive, unnecessary strength, grew thickly about them, spacing deck and overhead evenly apart.

Weight was imperceptible. If one remained quietly in one place, the undetectable residuum of weight would bring the body in a gentle drift down to the ‘floor,’ but ‘up’ and ‘down’ were terms largely lacking in meaning. Hugh did not like it; it made him gulp, but Bobo seemed delighted by it and not unused to it. He moved through the air like an uncouth fish, banking off stanchion, floor plate, and overhead as suited his convenience.

Joe-Jim set a course parallel to the common axis of the inner and outer cylinders, following a passageway formed by the orderly spacing of the stanchions. There were handrails set along the passage, one of which he followed like a spider on its thread. He made remarkable speed, which Hugh floundered to maintain. In time, be caught the trick of the easy, effortless, overhand pull, the long coast against nothing but air resistance, and the occasional flick of the toes or the hand against the floor. But he was much too busy to tell how far they went before they stopped. Miles, he guessed it to be, but he did not know.

When they did stop, it was because the passage, had terminated. Asolid bulkhead, stretching away to right and left, barred their way. Joe-Jim moved along it to the right, searching.

He found what he sought, a man-sized door, closed, its presence distinguishable only by a faint crack which marked its outline and a cursive geometrical design on its surface. Joe-Jim studied this and scratched his right-hand head. The two heads whispered to each other. Joe-Jim raised his hand in an awkward gesture.

“No, no!” said Jim. Joe-Jim checked himself. “How’s that?” Joe answered. They whispered together again, Joe nodded, and Joe-Jim again raised his hand.

He traced the design on the door without touching It, moving his forefinger through the air perhaps four inches from the surface of the door. The order of succession in which his finger moved over the lines of the design appeared simple but certainly not obvious.

Finished, he shoved a palm against the adjacent bulkhead, drifted back from the door, and waited.

Amoment later there was a soft, almost inaudible insufflation; the door stirred and moved outward perhaps six inches, then stopped. Joe-Jim appeared puzzled. He ran his hands cautiously into the open crack and pulled. Nothing happened. He called to Bobo, “Open it.”

Bobo looked the situation over, with a scowl on his forehead which wrinkled almost to his crown. He then placed his feet against the bulkhead, steadying himself by grasping the door with one hand. He took hold of the edge of the door with both hands, settled his feet firmly, bowed his body, and strained.

He held his breath, chest rigid, back bent, sweat breaking out from the effort. The great cords in his neck stood out, making of his head a misshapen pyramid. Hugh could hear the dwarf’s joints crack. It was easy to believe that he would kill himself with the attempt, too stupid to give up.

But the door gave suddenly, with a plaint of binding metal. As the door, in swinging out, slipped from Bobo’s fingers, the unexpectedly released tension in his legs shoved him heavily away from the bulkhead; he plunged down the passageway, floundering for a handhold. But he was back in a moment, drifting awkwardly through the air as he massaged a cramped calf.

Joe-Jim led the way inside, Hugh close behind him. “What is this place?” demanded Hugh, his curiosity overcoming his servant manners. “The Main Control Room,” said Joe.

Main Control Room! The most sacred and taboo place in the Ship, its very location a forgotten mystery. In the credo of the young men it was nonexistent. The older scientists varied in their attitude between fundamentalist acceptance and mystical belief. As enlightened as Hugh believed himself to be, the very words frightened him. The Control Room! Why, the very spirit of Jordan was said to reside there. He stopped.

Joe-Jim stopped and Joe looked around. “Come on,” he said. “What’s the matter?” “Why, uh … uh …”

“Speak up.”

“But … but this place is haunted … this is Jordan’s…”

“Oh, for Jordan’s sake!” protested Joe, with slow exasperation. “I thought you told me you young punks didn’t take any stock in Jordan.” “Yes, but … but this is…”

“Stow it. Come along, or I’ll have Bobo drag you.” He turned away. Hugh followed, reluctantly, as a man climbs a scaffold. They threaded through a passageway just wide enough for two to use the handrails abreast. The passage curved in a wide sweeping arc of full ninety degrees, then opened into the control room proper. Hugh peered past Joe-Jim’s broad shoulders, fearful but curious.

He stared into a well-lighted room, huge, quite two hundred feet across. It was spherical, the interior of a great globe. The surface of the globe was featureless, frosted silver. In the geometrical center of the sphere, Hugh saw a group of apparatus about fifteen feet across. To his inexperienced eye, it was completely unintelligible; he could not have described it, but he saw that it floated steadily, with no apparent support.

Running from the end of the passage to the mass at the center of the globe was a tube of metal latticework, wide as the passage itself. It offered the only exit from the passage. Joe-Jim turned to Bobo, and ordered him to remain in the passageway, then entered the tube.

He pulled himself along it, hand over hand, the bars of the latticework making a ladder. Hugh followed him; they emerged into the mass of apparatus occupying the center of the sphere. Seen close up, the gear of the control station resolved itself into its individual details, but it still made no sense to him. He glanced away from it to the inner surface of the globe which surrounded them.

That was a mistake. The surface of the globe, being featureless silvery white, had nothing to lend it perspective. It might have been a hundred feet away, or a thousand, or, many miles. He had never experienced an unbroken height greater than that between two decks, nor an open space larger than the village common. He was panic-stricken, scared out of his wits, the more so in that he did not know what it was he feared. But the ghost of long-forgotten jungle ancestors possessed him and chilled his stomach with the basic primitive fear of falling.

He clutched at the control gear, clutched at Joe-Jim.

Joe-Jim let him have one, hard across the mouth with the flat of his hand. “What’s the matter with you?” growled Jim. “I don’t know,” Hugh presently managed to get out. “I don’t know, but I don’t like this place. Let’s get out of here!”

Jim lifted his eyebrows to Joe, looked disgusted, and said, “We might as well. That weak-bellied baby will never understand anything you tell him.” “Oh, he’ll be all right,” Joe replied, dismissing the matter. “Hugh, climb into one of the chairs; there, that one.”

In the meantime, Hugh’s eyes had fallen on the tube whereby they had reached the control center and had followed it back by eye to the passage door. The sphere suddenly shrank to its proper focus and the worst of his panic was over. He complied with the order, still trembling, but able to obey. The control center consisted of a rigid framework, made up of chairs, or frames, to receive the bodies of the operators, and consolidated instrument and report panels, mounted in such a fashion as to be almost in the laps of the operators, where they were readily visible but did not obstruct the view. The chairs had high supporting sides, or arms, and mounted in these aims were the controls appropriate to each officer on watch, but Hugh was not yet aware of that. He slid under the instrument panel into his seat and settled back, glad of its enfolding stability. It fitted him in a semi-reclining position, footrest to head support.

But something was happening on the panel in front of Joe-Jim; he caught it out of the corner of his eye and turned to look. Bright red letters glowed near the top of the board: 2ND ASTROGATOR POSTED. What was a second astrogator? He didn’t know; then he noticed that the extreme top of his own board was labeled 2ND ASTROGATOR and concluded it must be himself, or rather, the man who should be sitting there. He felt momentarily uncomfortable that the proper second astrogator might come in and find him usurping his post, but he put

it out of his mind; it seemed unlikely.

But what was a second astrogator, anyhow?

The letters faded from Joe-Jim’s board, a red dot appeared on the left-hand edge and remained. Joe-Jim did something with his right hand; his board reported: ACCELERATION: ZERO, then MAIN DRIVE. The last two words blinked several times, then were replaced with NO REPORT. These words faded out, and a bright green dot appeared near the right-hand edge.

“Get ready,” said Joe, looking toward Hugh; “the light is going out.” “You’re not going to turn out the light?” protested Hugh.

“No, you are. Take a look by your left hand. See those little white lights?”

Hugh did so, and found, shining up through the surface the chair arm, little beads of light arrayed to form two squares, one above the other. “Each one controls the light of one quadrant,” explained Joe. “Cover them with your hand to turn Out the light. Go ahead, do it.”

Reluctantly, but fascinated, Hugh did as he was directed. He placed a palm over the tiny lights, and waited. The silvery sphere turned to dull lead, faded still more, leaving them in darkness complete save for the silent glow from the instrument panels. Hugh felt nervous but exhilarated. He withdrew his palm; the sphere remained dark, the eight little lights had turned blue.

“Now,” said Joe, “I’m going to show you the Stars!”

In the darkness, Joe-Jim’s right hand slid over another pattern of eight lights. Creation.

Faithfully reproduced, shining as steady and serene from the walls of the stellarium as did their originals from the black deeps of space, the mirrored stars looked down on him. Light after jeweled light, scattered in careless bountiful splendor across the simulacrum sky, the countless suns lay before him; before him, over him, under him, behind him, in every direction from him. He hung alone in the center of the stellar universe.

“Oooooh!” It was an involuntary sound, caused by his indrawn breath. He clutched the chair arms hard enough to break fingernails, but he was not aware of it. Nor was he afraid at the moment; there was room in his being for but one emotion. Life within the Ship, alternately harsh and workaday, had placed no strain on his innate capacity to experience beauty; for the first time in his life he knew the intolerable ecstasy of beauty unalloyed. It shook him and hurt him, like the first trembling intensity of sex.

It was some time before Hugh sufficiently recovered from the shock and the ensuing intense preoccupation to be able to notice Jim’s sardonic laugh, Joe’s dry chuckle. “Had enough?” inquired Joe. Without waiting for a reply, Joe-Jim turned the lights back on, using the duplicate controls mounted in the left arm of his chair.

Hugh sighed. His chest ached and his heart pounded. He realized suddenly that he had been holding his breath the entire time that the lights had been turned out. “Well, smart boy,” asked Jim, “are you convinced?”

Hugh sighed again, not knowing why. With the lights back on, he felt safe and snug again, but was possessed of a deep sense of personal loss. He knew, subconsciously, that, having seen the stars, he would never be happy again. The dull ache in his breast, the vague inchoate yearning for his lost heritage of open sky and stars, was never to be silenced, even though he was yet too ignorant to be aware of it at the top of his mind. “What was it?” he asked in a hushed voice.

“That’s,” answered Joe. “That’s the world. That’s the universe. That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you about.”

Hugh tried furiously to force his inexperienced mind to comprehend. “That’s what you mean by Outside?” he asked. “All those beautiful little lights?” “Sure,” said Joe, “only they aren’t little. They’re a long way off, you see; maybe thousands of miles.”

“What?”

“Sure, sure,” Joe persisted. “There’s lots of room out there. Space. It’s big. Why, some of those stars may be as big as the Ship, maybe bigger.” Hugh’s face was a pitiful study in overstrained imagination. “Bigger than the Ship?” he repeated. “But … but …”

Jim tossed his head impatiently and said to Joe, “Wha’d’ I tell you? You’re wasting our time on this lunk. He hasn’t got the capacity.”

“Easy, Jim,” Joe answered mildly; “don’t expect him to run before he can crawl. It took us a long time. I seem to remember that you were a little slow to believe your own eyes.” “That’s a lie,” said Jim nastily. “You were the one that had to be convinced.”

“O.K., O.K.,” Joe conceded, “let it ride. But it was a long time before we both had it all straight.”

Hoyland paid little attention to the exchange between the two brothers. It was a usual thing; his attention was centered on matters decidedly not usual. “Joe,” he asked, “what became of the Ship while we were looking at the Stars? Did we stare right through it?”

“Not exactly,” Joe told him. “You weren’t looking directly at the stars at all, but at a kind of picture of them. It’s like… Well, they do it with mirrors, sort of. I’ve got a book that tells about it.” “But you can see ‘em directly,” volunteered Jim, his momentary pique forgotten. “There’s a compartment forward of here…”

“Oh, yes,” put in Joe, “it slipped my mind. The Captain’s veranda. He’s got one all of glass; you can look right out.” “The Captain’s veranda? But—”

“Not this Captain. He’s never been near the place. That’s the name over the door of the compartment.” “What’s a ‘veranda’?”

“Blessed if I know. It’s just the name of the place.” “Will you take me up there?”

Joe appeared to be about to agree, but Jim cut in. “Some other time. I want to get back; I’m hungry.” They passed back through the tube, woke up Bobo, and made the long trip back down.

It was long before Hugh could persuade Joe-Jim to take him exploring again, but the time intervening was well spent. Joe-Jim turned him loose on the largest collection of books that Hugh had ever seen. Some of them were copies of books Hugh had seen before, but even these he read with new meanings. He read incessantly, his mind soaking up new ideas, stumbling over them, struggling, striving to grasp them. He begrudged sleep, he forgot to eat until his breath grew sour and compelling pain in his midriff forced him to pay attention to his body. Hunger satisfied, he would be back at it until his head ached and his eyes refused to focus.

Joe-Jim’s demands for service were few. Although Hugh was never off duty, Joe-Jim did not mind his reading as long as he was within earshot and ready to jump when called. Playing checkers with one of the pair when the other did not care to play was the service which used up the most time, and even this was not a total loss, for, if the player were Joe, he could almost always be diverted into a discussion of the Ship, its history, its machinery as equpment, the sort of people who had built it and then manned it and their history, back on Earth, Earth the incredible, that strange place where people had lived on the outside instead of the inside.

Hugh wondered why they did not fall off.

He took the matter up with Joe and at last gained some notion of gravitation. He never really understood it emotionally; it was too wildly improbable; but as an intellectual concept he was able to accept it and use it, much later, in his first vague glimmerings of the science of ballistics: and the art of astrogation and ship maneuvering. And it led in time to his wondering about weight in the Ship, a matter that had never bothered him before. The lower the level the greater the weight had been to his mind simply the order of nature, and nothing to wonder at. He was familiar with centrifugal force as it applied to slingshots. To apply it also to the whole Ship, to think of the Ship as spinning like a slingshot and thereby causing weight, was too much of a hurdle; he never really believed it.

Joe-Jim took him back once more to the Control Room and showed him what little Joe-Jim knew about the manipulation of the controls and the reading of the astrogation instruments.

The long-forgotten engineer-designers employed by the Jordan Foundation had been instructed to design a ship that would not — could not — wear out, even though the Trip were protracted beyond the expected sixty years. They builded better than they knew. In planning the main drive engines and the auxiliary machinery, largely automatic, which would make the Ship habitable, and in designing the controls necessary to handle all machinery not entirely automatic, the very idea of moving parts had been rejected. The engines and auxiliary equipment worked on a level below mechanical motion, on a level of pure force, as electrical transformers do. Instead of push buttons, levers, cams, and shafts, the controls and the machinery they served were planned in terms of balance between static fields, bias of electronic flow, circuits broken or closed by a hand placed over a light.

On this level of action, friction lost its meaning, wear and erosion took no toll. Had all hands been killed in the mutiny, the Ship would still have plunged on through space, still lighted, its air still fresh and moist, its engines ready and waiting. As it was, though elevators and conveyor belts fell into disrepair, disuse, and finally into the oblivion of forgotten function, the essential machinery of the Ship continued its automatic service to its ignorant human freight, or waited, quiet and ready, for someone bright enough to puzzle out its key.

Genius had gone into the building of the Ship. Far too huge to be assembled on Earth, it had been put together piece by piece in its own orbit out beyond the Moon. There it had swung for fifteen silent years while the problems presented by the decision to make its machinery foolproof and enduring had been formulated and solved. Awhole new field of submolar action had been conceived in the process, struggled with, and conquered.

So, when Hugh placed an untutored, questing hand over the first of a row of lights marked ACCELERATION, POSITIVE, he got an immediate response, though not in terms of acceleration. Ared light at the top of the chief pilot’s board blinked rapidly and the annunciator panel glowed with a message: MAIN ENGINES: NOT MANNED.

“What does that mean?” he asked Joe-Jim.

“There’s no telling,” said Jim. “We’ve done the same thing in the main engine room,” added Joe. “There, when you try it, it says ‘Control Room Not Manned.’” Hugh thought a moment. “What would happen,” he persisted, “if all the control stations had somebody at ‘em at once, and then I did that?”

“Can’t say,” said Joe. “Never been able to try it.”

Hugh said nothing. Aresolve which had been growing, formless, in his mind was now crystalizing into decision. He was busy with it for some time, weighing it, refining it, and looking for the right moment to bring it into the open.

He waited until he found Joe-Jim in a mellow mood, both of him, before broaching his idea. They were in the Captain’s veranda at the time Hugh decided the moment was due. Joe-Jim rested gently in the Captain’s easy chair, his belly full of food, and gazed out through the heavy glass of the view port at the serene stars. Hugh floated beside him. The spinning of the Ship caused the stars to cross the circle of the port in barely perceptible arcs.

Presently he said, “Joe-Jim …”

“Eh? What’s that, youngster?” It was Joe who had replied. “It’s pretty swell, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

“All that. The stars.” Hugh indicated the view through the port with a sweep of his arm, then caught at the chair to stop his own backspin. “Yeah, it sure is. Makes you feel good.” Surprisingly, it was Jim who offered this.

Hugh knew the time was right. He waited a moment, then said, “Why don’t we finish the job?” Two heads turned simultaneously, Joe leaning out a little to see past Jim. “What job?”

“The Trip. Why don’t we start up the main drive and go on with it? Somewhere out there,” be said hurriedly to finish before he was interrupted, “there are planets like Earth, or so the First Crew thought. Let’s go find them.”

Jim looked at him, then laughed. Joe shook his head.

“Kid,” he said, “you don’t know what you are talking about. You’re as balmy as Bobo. “No,” he went on, “that’s all over and done with. Forget it.” “Why is it over and done with, Joe?”

“Well, because. It’s too big a job. It takes a crew that understands what it’s all about, trained to operate the Ship.”

“Does it take so many? You have shown me only about a dozen places, all told, for men actually to be at the controls. Couldn’t a dozen men run the Ship … if they knew what you know,” he added slyly.

Jim chuckled. “He’s got you, Joe. He’s right”

Joe brushed it aside. “You overrate our knowledge. Maybe we could operate the Ship, but we wouldn’t get anywhere. We don’t know where we are. The Ship has been drifting for I don’t know how many generations. We don’t know where we’re headed, or how fast we’re going.”

“But look,” Hugh pleaded, “there are instruments. You showed them to me. Couldn’t we learn how to use them? Couldn’t you figure them out, Joe, if you really wanted to?” “Oh, I suppose so,” Jim agreed.

“Don’t boast, Jim,” said Joe.

“I’m not boasting,” snapped Jim. “If a thing’ll work, I can figure it out.”

“Humph!” said Joe. The matter rested in delicate balance. Hugh had got them disagreeing among themselves — which was what he wanted — with the less tractable of the pair on his side. Now, to consolidate his gain, “I had an idea,” he said quickly, “to get you men to work with, Jim, if you were able to train them.”

“What’s your idea?” demanded Jim suspiciously. “Well, you remember what I told you about a bunch of the younger scientists?” “Those fools!”

“Yes, yes, sure; but they didn’t know what you know. In their way they were trying to be reasonable. Now, if I could go back down and tell them what you’ve taught me, I could get you enough men to work with.”

Joe cut in. “Take a good look at us, Hugh. What do you see?” “Why … why, I see you. Joe-Jim.”

“You see a mutie,” corrected Joe, his voice edged with sarcasm. “We’re a mutie. Get that? Your scientists won’t work with us.”

“No, no,” protested Hugh, “that’s not true. I’m not talking about peasants. Peasants wouldn’t understand, but these are scientists, and the smartest of the lot. They’ll understand. All you need to do is to arrange safe conduct for them through mutie country. You can do that, can’t you?” he added, instinctively shifting the point of the argument to firmer ground.

“Why, sure,” said Jim. “Forget it,” said Joe.

“Well, O.K.,” Hugh agreed, sensing that Joe really was annoyed at his persistence, “but it would be fun.” He withdrew some distance from the brothers.

He could hear Joe-Jim continuing the discussion with himself in low tones. He pretended to ignore it. Joe-Jim had this essential defect in his joint nature: being a committee, rather than a single individual, he was hardly fitted to be a man of action, since all decisions were necessarily the result of discussion and compromise. Several moments later Hugh heard Joe’s

voice raised. “All right, all right, have it your own way!” He then called out, “Hugh! Come here!” Hugh kicked himself away from an adjacent bulkhead and shot over to the immediate vicinity of Joe-Jim, arresting his flight with both hands against the framework of the Captain’s chair.

“We’ve decided,” said Joe without preliminaries, “to let you go back down to the high-weight and try to peddle your goods. But you’re a fool,” he added sourly.

Bobo escorted Hugh down through the dangers of the levels frequented by muties and left him in the uninhabited zone above high-weight “Thanks, Bobo,” Hugh said in parting. “Good eating.” The dwarf grinned, ducked his head, and sped away, swarming up the ladder they had just descended. Hugh turned and started down, touching his knife as he did so. It was good to feel it against him again.

Not that it was his original knife. That had been Bobo’s prize when he was captured, and Bobo had been unable to return it, having inadvertently left it sticking in a big one that got away. But the replacement Joe-Jim had given him was well balanced and quite satisfactory.

Bobo had conducted him, at Hugh’s request and by Joe-Jim’s order, down to the area directly over the auxiliary Converter used by the scientists. He wanted to find Bill Ertz, Assistant Chief Engineer and leader of the bloc of younger scientists, and he did not want to have to answer too many questions before he found him. Hugh dropped quickly down the remaining levels and found himself in a main passageway which he recognized. Good! Aturn to the left, a couple of hundred yards walk and he found himself at the door of the compartment which housed the Converter. Aguard lounged in front of it. Hugh started to push on past, was stopped. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“I want to find Bill Ertz.”

“You mean the Chief Engineer? Well, he’s not here.”

“Chief? What’s happened to the old one?” Hoyland regretted the remark at once, but it was already out.

“Huh? The old Chief? Why, he’s made the Trip long since.” The guard looked at him suspiciously. “What’s wrong with you?” “Nothing,” denied Hugh. “Just a slip.”

“Funny sort of a slip. Well, you’ll find Chief Ertz around his office probably.” “Thanks. Good eating.”

“Good eating.”

Hugh was admitted to see Ertz after a short wait Ertz looked up from his desk as Hugh came in. “Well,” he said, “so you’re back, and not dead after all. This is a surprise. We had written you off, you know, as making the Trip.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“Well, sit down and tell me about it; I’ve a little time to spare at the moment. Do you know, though, I wouldn’t have recognized you. You’ve changed a lot, all that gray hair. I imagine you had some pretty tough times.”

Gray hair? Was his hair gray? And Ertz had changed a lot, too, Hugh now noticed. He was paunchy and the lines in his face had set. Good Jordan! How long had he been gone? Ertz drummed on his desk top, and pursed his lips. “It makes a problem, your coming back like this. I’m afraid I can’t just assign you to your old job; Mort Tyler has that. But we’ll find a place for you, suitable to your rank.”

Hugh recalled Mort Tyler and not too favorably. Aprecious sort of a chap, always concerned with what was proper and according to regulations. So Tyler had actually made scientisthood, and was on Hugh’s old job at the Converter. Well, it didn’t matter. “That’s all right, he began. “I wanted to talk to you about—”

“Of course, there’s the matter of seniority,” Ertz went on, “Perhaps the Council had better consider the matter. I don’t know of a precedent. We’ve lost a number of scientists to the muties in the past, but you are the first to escape with his life in my memory.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Hugh broke in. “I’ve something much more pressing to talk about. While I was away I found out some amazing things, Bill, things that it is of paramount importance for you to know about. That’s why I came straight to you. Listen. I—”

Ertz was suddenly alert. “Of course you have! I must be slowing down. You must have had a marvelous opportunity to study the muties and scout out their territory. Come on, man, spill it! Give me your report.”

Hugh wet his lips. “It’s not what you think,” he said. “It’s much more important than just a report on the muties, though it concerns them, too. In fact, we may have to change our whole policy with respect to the mu—”

“Well, go ahead, go ahead! I’m listening.”

“All right.” Hugh told him of his tremendous discovery as to the actual nature of the Ship, choosing his words carefully and trying very hard to be convincing. He dwelt lightly on the difficulties presented by an attempt to reorganize the Ship in accordance with the new concept and bore down heavily on the prestige and honor that would accrue to the man who led the effort.

He watched Ertz’s face as he talked. After the first start of complete surprise when Hugh launched his key idea, the fact that the Ship was actually a moving body in a great outside space, his face became impassive and Hugh could read nothing in it, except that he seemed to detect a keener interest when Hugh spoke of how Ertz was just the man for the job because of his leadership of the younger, more progressive scientists.

When Hugh concluded, he waited for Ertz’s response. Ertz said nothing at first, simply continued with his annoying habit of drumming on the top of his desk. Finally he said, “These are important matters, Hoyland, much too important to be dealt with casually. I must have time to chew it over.”

“Yes, certainly,” Hugh agreed. “I wanted to add that I’ve made arrangements for safe passage up to no-weight. I can take you up and let you see for yourself.” “No doubt that is best,” Ertz replied. “Well, are you hungry?”

“No.”

“Then we’ll both sleep on it. You can use the compartment at the back of my office. I don’t want you discussing this with anyone else until I’ve had time to think about it; it might cause unrest if it got out without proper prepartion.”

“Yes, you’re right”

“Very well, then.” Ertz ushered him into a compartment behind his office which he very evidently used for a lounge. “Have a good rest,” he said, “and we’ll talk later.” “Thanks,” Hugh acknowledged. “Good eating.”

“Good eating.”

Once he was alone, Hugh’s excitement gradually dropped away from him, and he realized that he was fagged out and very sleepy. He stretched out on a builtin couch and fell asleep. When he awoke he discovered that the only door to the compartment was barred from the other side. Worse than that, his knife was gone.

He had waited an indefinitely long time when he heard activity at the door. It opened; two husky, unsmiling men entered. “Come along,” said one of them. He sized them up, noting that neither of them carried a knife. No chance to snatch one from their belts, then. On the other hand he might be able to break away from them.

But beyond them, a wary distance away in the outer room, were two other equally formidable men, each armed with a knife. One balanced his for throwing; the other held his by the grip, ready to stab at close quarters. He was boxed in and be knew it. They had anticipated his possible moves.

He had long since learned to relax before the inevitable. He composed his face and marched quietly out. Once through the door he saw Ertz, waiting and quite evidently in charge of the party of men. He spoke to him, being careful to keep his voice calm. “Hello, Bill. Pretty extensive preparations you’ve made. Some trouble, maybe?”

Ertz seemed momentarily uncertain of his answer, then said, “You’re going before the Captain.”

“Good!” Hugh answered. “Thanks, Bill. But do you think it’s wise to try to sell the idea to him without laying a little preliminary foundation with the others?”

Ertz was annoyed at his apparent thickheadedness and showed it. “You don’t get the idea,” he growled. “You’re going before the Captain to stand trial for heresy!”

Hugh considered this as if the idea had not before occurred to him. He answered mildly, “You’re off down the wrong passage, Bill. Perhaps a charge and trial is the best way to get at the matter, but I’m not a peasant, simply to be hustled before the Captain. I must be tried by the Council. I am a scientist.”

“Are you now?” Ertz said softly. “I’ve had advice about that. You were written off the lists. Just what you are is a matter for the Captain to determine.”

Hugh held his peace. It was against him, he could see, and there was no point in antagonizing Ertz. Ertz made a signal; the two unarmed men each grasped one of Hugh’s arms. He went with them quietly.

Hugh looked at the Captain with new interest. The old man had not changed much, a little fatter, perhaps. The Captain settled himself slowly down in his chair, and picked up the memorandum before him. “What’s this all about?” he began irritably. “I don’t understand it.”

Mort Tyler was there to present the case against Hugh, a circumstance which Hugh had had no way of anticipating and which added to his misgivings. He searched his boyhood recollections for some handle by which to reach the man’s sympathy, found none. Tyler cleared his throat and commenced: “This is the case of one Hugh Hoyland, Captain, formerly one of your junior scientists—”

“Scientist, eh? Why doesn’t the Council deal with him?”

“Because he is no longer a scientist, Captain. He went over to the muties. He now returns among us, preaching heresy and seeking to undermine your authority.” The Captain looked at Hugh with the ready belligerency of a man jealous of his prerogatives. “Is that so?” he bellowed. “What have you to say for yourself?”

“It is not true, Captain,” Hugh answered. “All that I have said to anyone has been an affirmation of the absolute truth of our ancient knowledge. I have not disputed the truths under which we live; I have simply affirmed them more forcibly than is the ordinary custom. I—”

“I still don’t understand this,” the Captain interrupted, shaking his head. “You’re charged with heresy, yet you say you believe the Teachings. If you aren’t guilty, why are you here?” “Perhaps I can clear the matter up,” put in Ertz. “Hoyland—”

“Well, I hope you can,” the Captain went on. “Come, let’s hear it.”

Ertz proceeded to give a reasonably correct, but slanted, version of Hoyland’s return and his strange story. The Captain listened, with an expression that varied between puzzlement and annoyance. When Ertz had concluded, the Captain turned to Hugh. “Humph!” he said.

Hugh spoke immediately. “The gist of my contention, Captain, is that there is a place up at no-weight where you can actually see the truth of our faith that the Ship is moving, where you can actually see Jordan’s Plan in operation. That is not a denial of faith; that affirms it. There is no need to take my word for it. Jordan Himself will prove it.”

Seeing that the Captain appeared to be in a state of indecision, Tyler broke in: “Captain, there is a possible explanation of this incredible situation which I feel duty bound that you should hear. Offhand, there are two obvious interpretations of Hoyland’s ridiculous story He may simply be guilty of extreme heresy, or he may be a mutie at heart and engaged in a scheme to lure you into their hands. But there is a third, more charitable explanation and one which I feel within me is probably the true one.

“There is record that Hoyland was seriously considered for the Converter at his birth inspection, but that his deviation from normal was slight, being simply an overlarge head, and he was passed. It seems to me that the terrible experiences he has undergone at the hands of the muties have finally unhinged an unstable mind. The poor chap is simply not responsible for his own actions.”

Hugh looked at Tyler with new respect. To absolve him of guilt and at the same time to make absolutely certain that Hugh would wind up making the Trip: how neat! The Captain shook a palm at them. “This has gone on long enough.” Then, turning to Ertz, “Is there recommendation?”

“Yes, Captain. The Converter.”

“Very well, then. I really don’t see, Ertz,” he continued testily, “why I should be bothered with these details. It seems to me that you should be able to handle discipline in your department without my help.”

“Yes, Captain.”

The Captain shoved back from his desk, started to get up. “Recommendation confirmed. Dismissed.”

Anger flooded through Hugh at the unreasonable injustice of it. They had not even considered looking at the only real evidence he had in his defense. He heard a shout: “Wait!” — then discovered it was his own voice. The Captain paused, looking at him.

“Wait a moment,” Hugh went on, his words spilling out of their own accord. “This won’t make any difference, for you’re all so damn sure you know all the answers that you won’t consider a fair offer to come see with your own eyes. Nevertheless … Nevertheless, it still moves!”

Hugh had plenty of time to think, lying in the compartment where they confined him to await the power needs of the Converter, time to think, and to second-guess his mistakes. Telling his tale to Ertz immediately, that had been mistake number one. He should have waited, become reacquainted with the man and felt him out, instead of depending on a friendship which had never been very close.

Second mistake, Mort Tyler. When he heard his name he should have investigated and found out just how much influence the man had with Ertz. He had known him of old, he should have known better.

Well, here he was, condemned as a mutant, or maybe as a heretic. It came to the same thing. He considered whether or not he should have tried to explain why mutants happened. He had learned about it himself in some of the old records in Joe-Jim’s possession. No, it wouldn’t wash. How could you explain about radiations from the Outside causing the birth of mutants when the listeners did not believe there was such a place as Outside? No, he had messed it up before he was ever taken before the Captain.

His self-recriminations were disturbed at last by the sound of his door being unfastened. It was too soon for another of the infrequent meals; he thought that they had come at last to take him away, and renewed his resolve to take someone with him.

But he was mistaken. He heard a voice of gentle dignity: “Son, son, how does this happen?” It was Lieutenant Nelson, his first teacher, looking older than ever and frail.

The interview was distressing for both of them. The old man, childless himself, had cherished great hopes for his protege, even the ambition that he might eventually aspire to the captaincy, though he had kept his vicarious ambition to himself, believing it not good for the young to praise them too highly. It had hurt his heart when the youth was lost.

Now he had returned, a man, but under disgraceful conditions and under sentence of death. The meeting was no less unhappy for Hugh. He had loved the old man, in his way, wanted to please him and needed his approval. But he could see, as he told his story, that Nelson was not capable of treating the the story as anything but an aberration of Hugh’s mind, and he suspected that Nelson would rather see him meet a quick death in the Converter, his atoms smashed to hydrogen and giving up clean useful power, than have him live to make a mock of the ancient teachings.

In that.he did the old man an injustice; he underrated Nelson’s mercy, but not his devotion to ‘science.’ But let it be said for Hugh that, had there been no more at issue than his own personal welfare, he might have preferred death to breaking the heart of his benefactor, being a romantic and more than a bit foolish. Presently the old man got up to leave, the visit having grown unendurable to each of them. “Is there anything I can do for you, son? Do they feed you well enough?”

“Quite well, thanks,” Hugh lied. “Is there anything else?”

“No … yes, you might send me some tobacco. I haven’t had a chew in a long time.”

“I’ll take care of it. Is there anyone you would like to see?”

“Why, I was under the impression that I was not permitted visitors … ordinary visitors.”

“You are right, but I think perhaps I may be able to get the rule relaxed. But you will have to give me your promise not to speak of your heresy,” he added anxiously. Hugh thought quickly. This was a new aspect, a new possibility. His uncle? No, while they had always got along well, their minds did not meet; they would greet each other as strangers. He had never made friends easily; Ertz had been his obvious next friend and now look at the damned thing! Then he recalled his village chum, Alan Mahoney, with whom he had played as a boy. True, he had seen practically nothing of him since the time he was apprenticed to Nelson. Still… “Does Alan Mahoney still live in our village?”

“Why, yes.”

“I’d like to see him, if he’ll come.”

Alan arrived, nervous, ill at ease, but plainly glad to see Hugh and very much upset to find him under sentence to make the Trip. Hugh pounded him on the back. “Good boy,” he said. “I knew you would come.”

“Of course, I would,” protested Alan, “once I knew. But nobody in the village knew it. I don’t think even the Witnesses knew it.” “Well, you’re here, that’s what matters. Tell me about yourself. Have you married?”

“Huh, uh, no. Let’s not waste time talking about me. Nothing ever happens to me anyhow. How in Jordan’s name did you get in this jam, Hugh?” “I can’t talk about that, Alan. I promised Lieutenant Nelson that I wouldn’t.”

“Well, what’s a promise, that kind of a promise? You’re in a jam, fellow.” “Don’t I know it!”

“Somebody have it in for you?”

“Well, our old pal Mort Tyler didn’t help any; I think I can say that much.” Alan whistled and nodded his head slowly. “That explains a lot.” “How come? You know something?”

“Maybe, — maybe not. After you went away he married Edris Baxter.”

“So? Hmm-m-m … yes, that clears up a lot.” He remained silent for a time.

Presently Alan spoke up: “Look, Hugh. You’re not going to sit here and take it, are you? Particularly with Tyler mixed in it. We gotta get you outa here.” “How?”

“I don’t know. Pull a raid, maybe. I guess I could get a few knives to rally round and help us; all good boys, spoiling for a fight.” “Then, when it’s over, we’d all be for the Converter. You, me, and your pals. No, it won’t wash.”

“But we’ve got to do something. We can’t just sit here and wait for them to burn you.”

“I know that.” Hugh studied Alan’s face. Was it a fair thing to ask? He went on, reassured by what he had seen. “Listen. You would do anything you could to get me out of this, wouldn’t you?”

“You know that.” Alan’s tone showed hurt.

“Very well, then. There is a dwarf named Bobo. I’ll tell you how to find him…”

Alan climbed, up and up, higher than he had ever been since Hugh had led him, as a boy, into foolhardy peril. He was older now, more conservative; he had no stomach for it. To the very real danger of leaving the well-traveled lower levels was added his superstitious ignorance. But still he climbed.

This should be about the place, unless he had lost count. But he saw nothing of the dwarf Bobo saw him first. Aslingshot load caught Alan in the pit of the stomach, even as he was shouting, “Bobo!”

Bobo backed into Joe-Jim’s compartment and dumped his load at the feet of the twins. “Fresh meat,” he said proudly. “So it is,” agreed Jim indifferently. “Well, it’s yours; take it away.”

The dwarf dug a thumb into a twisted ear, “Funny,” he said, “he knows Bobo’s name.”

Joe looked up from the book he was reading: _Browning’s Collected Poems_, L-Press, New York, London, Luna City, cr. 35. “That’s interesting. Hold on a moment.”

Hugh had prepared Alan for the shock of Joe-Jim’s appearance. In reasonably short order he collected his wits sufficiently to be able to tell his tale. Joe-Jim listened to it without much comment, Bobo with interest but little comprehension.

When Alan concluded, Jim remarked, “Well, you win, Joe. He didn’t make it.” Then, turning to Alan, he added, “You can take Hoyland’s place. Can you play checkers?” Alan looked from one head to the other. “But you don’t understand,” he said. “Aren’t you going to do anything about it?”

Joe looked puzzled. “Us? Why should we?”

“But you’ve got to. Don’t you see? He’s depending on you. There’s nobody else he can look to. That’s why I came. Don’t you see?”

“Wait a moment,” drawled Jim, “wait a moment. Keep your belt on. Supposing we did want to help him, which we don’t, how in Jordan’s Ship could we? Answer me that.” “Why, why,” Alan stumbled in the face of such stupidity. “Why, get up a rescue party, of course, and go down and get him out!”

“Why should we get ourselves killed in a fight to rescue your friend?” Bobo pricked his ears. “Fight?” he inquired eagerly. “No, Bobo,” Joe denied. “No fight. Just talk.” “Oh,” said Bobo and returned to passivity.

Alan looked at the dwarf. “If you’d even let Bobo and me—”

“No,” Joe said shortly. “It’s out of the question. Shut up about it.”

Alan sat in a corner, hugging his knees in despair. If only he could get out of there. He could still try to stir up some help down below. The dwarf seemed to be asleep, though it was difficult to be sure with him. If only Joe-Jim would sleep, too.

Joe-Jim showed no indication of sleepiness. Joe tried to continue reading, but Jim interrupted him from time to time. Alan could not hear what they were saying. Presently Joe raised his voice. “Is that your idea of fun?” he demanded.

“Well,” said Jim, “it beats checkers.”

“It does, does it? Suppose you get a knife in your eye; where would I be then?” “You’re getting old, Joe. No juice in you any more.”

“You’re as old as I am.”

“Yeah, but I got young ideas.”

“Oh, you make me sick. Have it your own way, but don’t blame me. Bobo!” The dwarf sprang up at once, alert. “Yeah, Boss.”

“Go out and dig up Squatty and Long Arm and Pig.”

Joe-Jim-got up, went to a locker, and started pulling knives out of their racks.

Hugh heard the commotion in the passageway outside his prison. It could be the guards coming to take him to the Converter, though they probably wouldn’t be so noisy. Or it could be just some excitement unrelated to him. On the other hand it might be …

It was. The door burst open, and Alan was inside, shouting at him and thrusting a brace of knives into his hands. He was hurried out of the door, while stuffing the knives in his belt and accepting two more.

Outside he saw Joe-Jim, who did not see him at once, as he was methodically letting fly, as calmly as if he had been engaging in target practice in his own study. And Bobo, who ducked his head and grinned with a mouth widened by a bleeding cut, but continued the easy flow of the motion whereby he loaded and let fly. There were three others, two of whom Hugh recognized as belonging to Joe-Jim’s privately owned gang of bullies, muties by definition and birthplace; they were not deformed.

The count does not include still forms on the floor plates.

“Come on!” yelled Alan. “There’ll be more in no time.” He hurried down the passage to the right

Joe-Jim desisted and followed him. Hugh let one blade go for luck at a figure running away to the left. The target was poor, and he had no time to see if he had thrown 01000. They scrambled along the passage, Bobo bringing up the rear, as if reluctant to leave the fun, and came to a point where a side passage crossed the main one.

Alan led them to the right again. “Stairs ahead,” he shouted.

They did not reach them. An airtight door, rarely used, clanged in their faces ten yards short of the stairs. Joe-Jim’s bravoes checked their flight and they looked doubtfully at their master. Bobo broke his thickened nails trying to get a purchase on the door.

The sounds of pursuit were clear behind them. “Boxed in,” said Joe softly. “I hope you like it, Jim.”

Hugh saw a head appear around the corner of the passage they had quitted. He threw overhand but the distance was too great; the knife clanged harmlessly against steel. The head disappeared. Long Arm kept his eye on the spot, his sling loaded and ready.

Hugh grabbed Bobo’s shoulder. “Listen! Do you see that light?”

The dwarf blinked stupidly. Hugh pointed to the intersection of the glowtubes where they crossed in the overhead directly above the junction of the passages. “That light. Can you hit them where they cross?”

Bobo measured the distance with his eye. It would be a hard shot under any conditions at that range. Here, constricted as he was by the low passageway, it called for a fast, flat trajectory, and allowance for higher weight then he was used to.

He did not answer. Hugh felt the wind of his swing but did not see the shot. There was a tinkling crash; the passage became dark.

“Now!” yelled Hugh, and led them away at a run. As they neared the intersection he shouted, “Hold your breaths! Mind the gas!” The radioactive vapor poured lazily out from the broken tube above and filled the crossing with a greenish mist.

Hugh ran to the right, thankful for his knowledge as an engineer of the lighting circuits. He had picked the right direction; the passage ahead was black, being serviced from beyond the break. He could hear footsteps around him; whether they were friend or enemy he did not know.

They burst into light. No one was in sight but a scared and harmless peasant who scurried away at an unlikely pace. They took a quick muster. All were present, but Bobo was making heavy going of it.

Joe looked at him. “He sniffed the gas, I think. Pound his back.”

Pig did so with a will. Bobo belched deeply, was suddenly sick, then grinned. “He’ll do,” decided Joe.

The slight delay had enabled one at least to catch up with them. He came plunging out of the dark, unaware of, or careless of, the strength against him. Alan knocked Pig’s arm down, as he raised it to throw. “Let me at him!” he demanded. “He’s mine!” It was Tyler.

“Man-fight?” Alan challenged, thumb on his blade.

Tyler’s eyes darted from adversary to adversary and accepted the invitation to individual duel by lunging at Alan. The quarters were too cramped for throwing; they closed, each achieving his grab in parry, fist to wrist.

Alan was stockier, probably stronger; Tyler was slippery. He attempted to give Alan a knee to the crotch. Alan evaded it, stamped on Tyler’s planted foot. They went clown. There was a crunching crack.

Amoment later, Alan was wiping his knife against his thigh. “Let’s get goin’,” he complained. “I’m scared.”

They reached a stairway, and raced up it, Long Arm and Pig ahead to fan out on each level and cover their flanks, and the third of the three choppers (Hugh heard him called Squatty) covering the rear. The others bunched in between.

Hugh thought they had won free, when he heard shouts and the clatter of a thrown knife just above him. He reached the level above in time to be cut not deeply but jaggedly by a ricocheted blade.

Three men were down. Long Arm bad a blade sticking in the fleshy part of his upper arm, but it did not seem to bother him. His slingshot was still spinning. Pig was scrambling after a thrown knife, his own armament exhausted. But there were signs of his work; one man was down on one knee some twenty feet away. He was bleeding from a knife wound in the thigh.

As the figure steadied himself with one hand against the bulkhead and reached towards an empty belt with the other, Hugh recognized him. Bill Ertz.

He had led a party up another way, and flanked them, to his own ruin. Bobo crowded behind Hugh and got his mighty arm free for the cast. Hugh caught at it. “Easy, Bobo,” he directed. “In the stomach, and easy.”

The dwarf looked puzzled, but did as he was told.

Ertz folded over at the middle and slid to the deck. “Well placed,” said Jim. “Bring him along, Bobo,” directed Hugh, “and stay in the middle.” He ran his eye over their party, now huddled at the top of that flight of stairs. “All right, gang; up we go again! Watch it.”

Long Arm and Pig swarmed up the next flight, the others disposing themselves as usual. Joe looked annoyed. In some fashion, a fashion by no means clear at the moment, he had been eased out as leader of this gang, his gang, and Hugh was giving orders. He reflected as there was no time now to make a fuss. It might get them all killed.

Jim did not appear to mind. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying himself.

They put ten more levels behind them with no organized opposition. Hugh directed them not to kill peasants unnecessarily. The three bravoes obeyed; Bobo was too loaded down with Ertz to constitute a problem in discipline. Hugh saw to it that they put thirty-odd more decks below them and were well into no man’s land before he let vigilance relax at all. Then he called a halt and they examined wounds.

The only deep ones were to Long Arm’s arm and Bobo’s face. Joe-Jim examined them and applied presses with which he had outfitted himself before starting. Hugh refused treatment for his flesh wound. “It’s stopped bleeding,” he insisted, “and I’ve got a lot to do.”

“You’ve got nothing to do but to get up home,” said Joe, “and that will be an end to this foolishness.” “Not quite,” denied Hugh. “You may be going home, but Alan and I and Bobo are going up to no-weight; to the Captain’s veranda.”

“Nonsense,” said Joe. “What for?”

“Come along if you like, and see. All right, gang. Let’s go.”

Joe started to speak, stopped when Jim kept still. Joe-Jim followed along. They floated gently through the door of the veranda, Hugh, Alan, Bobo with his still-passive burden, and Joe- Jim. “That’s it,” said Hugh to Alan, waving his hand at the splendid stars, “that’s what I’ve been telling you about.”

Alan looked and clutched at Hugh’s arm. “Jordan!” he moaned. “We’ll fall out!” He closed his eyes tightly. Hugh shook him. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s grand. Open your eyes.”

Joe-Jim touched Hugh’s arm. “What’s it all about?” he demanded. “Why did you bring him up here?” He pointed to Ertz. “Oh, him. Well, when he wakes up I’m going to show him the stars, prove to him that the Ship moves.”

“Well? What for?”

“Then I’ll send him back down to convince some others.”

“Hm-m-m, suppose he doesn’t have any better luck than you had?”

“Why, then,” Hugh shrugged his shoulders “why, then we shall just have to do it all over, I suppose, till we do convince them. “We’ve got to do it, you know.”

COMMON SENSE

JOE, THE RIGHT HAND head of Joe-Jim, addressed his words to Hugh Hoyland. “All right, smart boy, you’ve convinced the Chief Engineer.” He gestured toward Bill Ertz with the blade of his knife, then resumed picking Jim’s teeth with it. “So what? Where does it get you?”

“I’ve explained that,” Hugh Hoyland answered irritably. “We keep on, until every scientist in the Ship, from the Captain to the greenest probationer, knows that the Ship moves and believes that we can make it move. Then we’ll finish the Trip, as Jordan willed. How many knives can you muster?” he added.

“Well, for the love of Jordan! Listen, have you got some fool idea that we are going to help you with this crazy scheme?” “Naturally. You’re necessary to it.”

“Then you had better think up another think. That’s out. Bobo! Get out the checkerboard.”

“O.K., Boss.” The microcephalic dwarf hunched himself up off the floor plates and trotted across Joe-Jim’s apartment.

“Hold it, Bobo.” Jim, the left-hand head, had spoken. The dwarf stopped dead, his narrow forehead wrinkled. The fact that his two-headed master occasionally failed to agree as to what Bobo should do was the only note of insecurity in his tranquil bloodthirsty existence.

“Let’s hear what he has to say,” Jim continued. “There may be some fun in this.”

“Fun! The fun of getting a knife in your ribs. Let me point out that they are my ribs, too. I don’t agree to it.”

“I didn’t ask you to agree; I asked you to listen. Leaving fun out of it, it may be the only way to keep a knife out of our ribs.”

“What do you mean?” Joe demanded suspiciously. “You heard what Ertz had to say.” Jim flicked a thumb toward the prisoner. “The Ship’s officers are planning to clean out the upper levels. How would you like to go into the Converter, Joe? You can’t play checkers after we’re broken down into hydrogen.”

“Bunk! The Crew can’t exterminate the muties; they’ve tried before.” Jim turned to Etrz. “How about it?”

Ertz answered somewhat diffidently, being acutely aware of his own changed status from a senior Ship’s officer to prisoner of war. He felt befuddled anyhow; too much had happened and too fast. He had been kidnaped, hauled up to the Captain’s veranda, and had there gazed out at the stars. The stars.

His hard-boiled rationalism included no such concept. If an Earth astronomer had had it physically demonstrated to him that the globe spun on its axis because someone turned a crank, the upset in evaluations could have been no greater.

Besides that, he was acutely aware that his own continued existence hung in fine balance. Joe-Jim was the first upper-level mutie he had ever met other than in combat, knife to knife. A word from him to that great ugly dwarf sprawled on the deck— He chose his words. “I think the Crew would be successful, this time. We … they have organized for it. Unless there are more of you than we think there are and better organized, I think it could be done. You see … well, uh, I organized it.”

“You?”

“Yes. Agood many of the Council don’t like the policy of letting the muties alone. Maybe it’s sound religious doctrine and maybe it isn’t, but we lose a child here and a couple of pigs there. It’s annoying.”

“What do you expect muties to eat?” demanded Jim belligerently. “Thin air?”

“No, not exactly. Anyhow, the new policy was not entirely destructive. Any muties that surrendered and could be civilized we planned to give to masters and put them to work as part of the Crew. That is, any that weren’t, uh … that were—” He broke off in embarrassment, and shifted his eyes from the two-headed monstrosity before him.

“You mean any that weren’t physical mutations, like me,” Joe filled in nastily. “Don’t you?” he persisted. “For the likes of me it’s the Converter, isn’t it?” He slapped the blade of his knife nervously on the palm of his hand.

Ertz edged away, his own hand shifting to his belt. But no knife was slung there; he felt naked and helpless without it. “Just a minute,” he said defensively, “you asked me; that’s the situation. It’s out of my hands. I’m just telling you.”

“Let him alone, Joe. He’s just handing you the straight dope. It’s like I was telling you: either go along with Hugh’s plan, or wait to be hunted down. And don’t get any ideas about killing him; we’re going to need him.” As Jim spoke he attempted to return the knife to its sheath. There was a brief and silent struggle between the twins for control of the motor nerves to their right arm, a clash of will below the level of physical activity. Joe gave in.

“All right,” he agreed surlily, “but if I go to the Converter, I want to take this one with me for company.” “Stow it,” said Jim. “You’ll have me for company.”

“Why do you believe him?”

“He has nothing to gain by lying. Ask Alan.”

Alan Mahoney, Hugh’s friend and boyhood chum, had listened to the argument round-eyed, without joining it. He, too, had suffered the nerve-shaking experience of viewing the outer stars, but his ignorant peasant mind had not the sharply formulated opinions of Ertz, the Chief Engineer. Ertz had been able to see almost at once that the very existence of a world outside the Ship changed all his plans and everything he had believed in; Alan was capable only of wonder.

“What about this plan to fight the muties, Alan?”

“Huh? Why, I don’t know anything about it. Shucks, I’m not a scientist. Say, wait a minute; there was a junior officer sent in to help our village scientist, Lieutenant Nelson.” He stopped and looked puzzled.

“What about it? Go ahead.”

“Well, he has been organizing the cadets in our village, and the married men, too, but not so much. Making ‘em practice with their blades and slings. Never told us what for, though.” Ertz spread his hands. “You see?”

Joe nodded. “I see,” he admitted grimly.

Hugh Hoyland looked at him eagerly. “Then you’re with me?” “I suppose so,” Joe admitted. “Right!” added Jim.

Hoyland looked back to Ertz. “How about you, Bill Ertz?” “What choice have I got?”

“Plenty. I want you with me wholeheartedly. Here’s the layout: The Crew doesn’t count; it’s the officers we have to convince. Any that aren’t too addlepated and stiff-necked to understand after they’ve seen the stars and the Control Room, we keep. The others—” he drew a thumb across his throat while making a harsh sibilance in his cheek, “the Converter.”

Bobo grinned happily and imitated the gesture and the sound. Ertz nodded. “Then what?”

“Muties and Crew together, under a new Captain, we move the Ship to Far Centaurus! Jordan’s Will be done!”

Ertz stood up and faced Hoyland. It was a heady notion, too big to be grasped at once, but, by Jordan! he liked it. He spread his hands on the table and leaned across it. “I’m with you, Hugh Hoyland!”

Aknife clattered on the table before him, one from the brace at Joe-Jim’s belt. Joe looked startled, seemed about to speak to his brother, then appeared to think better of it. Ertz looked his thanks and stuck the knife in his belt.

The twins whispered to each other for a moment, then Joe spoke up. “Might as well make it stick,” he said. He drew his remaining knife and, grasping the blade between thumb and forefinger so that only the point was exposed, he jabbed himself in the fleshly upper part of his left arm. “Blade for blade!”

Ertz’s eyebrows shot up. He whipped out his newly acquired blade and cut himself in the same location. The blood spurted and ran down to the crook of his arm. “Back to back!” He shoved the table aside and pressed his gory shoulder against the wound on Joe-Jim.

Alan Mahoney, Hugh Hoyland, Bobo: all had their blades out, all nicked their arms till the skin ran red and wet. They crowded in, bleeding shoulders pushed together so that the blood dripped united to the death.

“Blade for blade!” “Back to back!” “Blood to blood!”

“Blood brothers, to the end of the Trip!”

An apostate scientist, a kidnaped scientist, a dull peasant, a two-headed monster, a apple-brained moron; five knives, counting Joe-Jim as one; five brains, counting Joe-Jim as two and Bobo as none; five brains and five knives to overthrow an entire culture.

“But I don’t want to go back, Hugh.” Alan shuffled his feet and looked dogged. “Why can’t I stay here with you? I’m a good blade.” “Sure you are, old fellow. But right now you’ll be more useful as a spy.”

“But you’ve got Bill Ertz for that.”

“So we have, but we need you too. Bill is a public figure; he can’t duck out and climb to the upper levels without it being noticed and causing talk. That’s where you come in; you’re his go- between.”

“I’ll have a Huff of a time explaining where I’ve been.”

“Don’t explain any more than you have to. But stay away from the Witness.” Hugh had a sudden picture of Alan trying to deceive the old village historian, with his searching tongue and lust for details. “Keep clear of the Witness. The old boy would trip you up.”

“Him? You mean the old one; he’s dead. Made the Trip long since. The new one don’t amount to nothing.” “Good. If you’re careful, you’ll be safe.” Hugh raised his voice. “Bill! Are you ready to go down?”

“I suppose so.” Ertz picked himself up and reluctantly put aside the book he had been reading _The Three Musketeers_, illustrated, one of Joe-Jim’s carefully stolen library. “Say, that’s a wonderful book. Hugh, is Earth really like that?”

“Of course. Doesn’t it say so in the book?”

Ertz chewed his lip and thought about it. “What is a house?” “Ahouse? Ahouse is a sort of a… a sort of a compartment.”

“That’s what I thought at first, but how can you ride on a compartment?” “Huh? What do you mean?”

“Why, all through the book they keep climbing on their houses and riding away.”

“Let me see that book,” Joe ordered. Ertz handed it to him. Joe-Jim thumbed through it rapidly. “I see what you mean. Idiot! They ride horses, not houses.” “Well, what’s a horse?”

“Ahorse is an animal, like a big hog, or maybe like a cow. You squat up on top of it and let it carry you along.”

Ertz considered this. “It doesn’t seem practical. Look, when you ride in a litter, you tell the chief porter where you want to go. How can you tell a cow where you want to go?” “That’s easy. You have a porter lead it.”

Ertz conceded the point. “Anyhow, you might fall off. It isn’t practical. I’d rather walk.” “It’s quite a trick,” Joe explained. “Takes practice.”

“Can you do it?”

Jim sniggered. Joe looked annoyed. “There are no horses in the Ship.” “OK, O.K. But look. These guys Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, they had something—” “We can discuss that later,” Hugh interrupted. “Bobo is back. Are you ready to go, Bill?” “Don’t get in a hurry, Hugh. This is important. These chaps had knives.” “Sure. Why not?”

“But they were better than our knives. They had knives as long as your arm, maybe longer. If we are going to fight the whole Crew, think what an advantage that would be.” “Hm-m-m.” Hugh drew his knife and looked at it, cradling it in his palm. “Maybe. You couldn’t throw it as well.”

“We could have throwing knives, too.” “Yes, I suppose we could.”

The twins had listened Without comment. “He’s right,” put in Joe. “Hugh, you take care of placing the knives. Jim and I have some reading to do.” Both of Joe-Jim’s heads were busy thinking of other books they owned, books. that discussed in saguinary detail the infinitely varied methods used by mankind to shorten the lives of enemies. He was about to institute a War College Department of Historical Research, although he called his project by no such fancy term.

“O.K.,” Hugh agreed, “but you will have to say the word to them.”

“Right away.” Joe-Jim stepped out of his apartment into the passageway where Bobo had assembled a couple of dozen of Joe-Jim’s henchmen among the muties. Save for Long Arm, Pig, and Squatty, who had taken part in the rescue of Hugh, they were all strangers to Hugh, Alan, and Bill, and they were all sudden death to strangers.

Joe-Jim motioned for the three from the lower decks to join him. He pointed them out to the muties, and ordered them to look closely and not to forget: these three were to have safe passage and protection wherever they went. Furthermore, in Joe-Jim’s absence his men were to take orders from any of them.

They stirred and looked at each other. Orders they were used to, but from Joe-Jim only.

Abig-nosed individual rose up from his squat and addressed them. He looked at Joe-Jim, but his words were intended for all. “I am Jack-of-the-Nose. My blade is sharp and my eye is keen. Joe-Jim with the two wise heads is my Boss and my knife fights for him. But Joe is my Boss, not strangers from heavy decks. What do say, knives? Is that not the Rule?”

He paused. The others had listened to him stealing glances at Joe-Jim. Joe muttered something of the corner of his mouth to Bobo. Jack O’Nose opened his mouth to continue. There was a smash of splintering teeth, a crack from a broken neck; his mouth stopped with a missile.

Bobo reloaded his slingshot. The body, not yet still, settled slowly to the deck. Joe-Jim waved a hand it. “Good eating!” Joe announced. “He’s yours.” The muties converged on the body as if they had suddenly been unleashed. They concealed it completely in a busy grunting pile-up. Knives out, they cuffed and crowded each other for a piece of the prize.

Joe-Jim waited patiently for the undoing to be over, then, when the place where Jack O’Nose had been was no more than a stain on the deck and the several polite arguments over the sharing had died down, he started again; Joe spoke. “Long Arm, you and Forty-one and the Ax go down with Bobo, Alan and Bill. The rest here.”

Bobo trotted away in the long loping strides, sped on by the low pseudogravity near the axis of rotation of Ship. Three of the muties detached themselves from pack and followed. Ertz and Alan Mahoney hurried catch up.

When he reached the nearest staircase trunk, he skipped out into space without breaking his stride letting centrifugal force carry him down to the next. Alan and the muties followed; but Ertz paused on the edge and looked back. “Jordan keep you, brother!” he sang out.

Joe-Jim waved to him. “And you,” acknowledged Joe. “Good eating!” Jim added.

“Good eating!”

Bobo led them down forty-odd decks, well into no man’s land inhabited neither by mutie nor crew, stopped. He pointed in succession to Long Arm, Forty-one, and the Ax. “Two Wise Heads say for you to watch here. You first,” he added, pointing again to Forty-one. “It’s like this,” Ertz amplified. “Alan and I are going down to heavy-weight level. You three are to keep a guard here, one at a time, so that I will be able to send messages back up to Joe-Jim. Get it?”

“Sure. Why not?” Long Arm answered.

“Joe-Jim says it,” Forty-one commented with a note of finality in his voice. The Ax grunted agreeably.

“O.K.,” said Bobo. Forty-one sat down at the stairwell, letting his feet hang over, and turned his attention to food which he had been carrying tucked under his left arm.

Bobo slapped Ertz and Alan on their backs. “Good eating,” he bade them, grinning. When he could get his breath, Ertz acknowledged the courteous thought, then dropped at once to the next lower deck, Alan close after him. They had still many decks to go to ‘civilization.’

Commander Phineas Narby, Executive Assistant to Jordan’s Captain, in rummaging through the desk of the Chief Engineer was amused to find that Bill Ertz had secreted therein a couple of Unnecessary books. There were the usual Sacred books, of course, including the priceless _Care and Maintenance of the Auxiliary Fourstage Converter_ and the _Handbook of Power, Light, and Conditioning, Starship Vanguard_. These were Sacred books of the first order, bearing the imprint of Jordan himself, and could lawfully be held only by the Chief Engineer.

Narby considered himself a skeptic and rationalist. Belief in Jordan was a good thing — for the Crew. Nevertheless the sight of a title page with the words ‘Jordan Foundation’ on it stirred up within him a trace of religious awe such as he had not felt since before he was admitted to scientisthood.

He knew that the feeling was irrational; probably there had been at some time in the past some person or persons called Jordan. Jordan might have been an early engineer or captain who codified the common sense and almost instinctive rules for running the Ship. Or, as seemed more likely, the Jordan myth went back much farther than this book in his hand, and its author had simply availed himself of the ignorant superstitions of the Crew to give his writings authority. Narby knew how such things were done; he planned to give the new policy with respect to the muties the same blessing of Jordan when the time was ripe for it to be put into execution. Yes, order and discipline and belief in authority were good things, for the Crew. It was equally evident that a rational, coolheaded common sense was a proper attribute for the scientists who were custodians of the Ship’s welfare, common sense and a belief in nothing but facts.

He admired the exact lettering on the pages of the book he held. They certainly had excellent clerks in those ancient times; not the sloppy draftsmen he was forced to put up with, who could hardly print two letters alike.

He made a mental note to study these two indispensable handbooks of the engineering department before turning them over to Ertz’s successor. It would be well, he thought, not to be too dependent on the statements of the Chief Engineer when he himself succeeded to the captaincy. Narby had no particular respect for engineers, largely because he had no particular talent for engineering. When he had first reached scientisthood and had been charged to defend the spiritual and material welfare of the Crew, had sworn to uphold the Teachings of Jordan, he soon discovered that administration and personnel management were more in his lines than tending the converter or servicing the power lines. He had served as clerk, village administrator, recorder to the Council, personnel officer, and was now chief executive for Jordan’s Captain himself, ever since an unfortunate and rather mysterious accident had shortened the life of Narby’s predecessor in that post.

His decision to study up on engineering before a new Chief Engineer was selected brought to mind the problem of choosing a new chief. Normally the Senior Watch Officer for the Converter would become Chief Engineer when a chief made the Trip, but in this case, Mort Tyler, the Senior Watch, had made the Trip at the same time; his body had been found, stiff and cold, after the mutie raid which had rescued that heretic, Hugh Hoyland. That left the choice wide open and Narby was a bit undecided as to whom he should suggest to the Captain.

One thing was certain; the new chief must not be a man with as much aggressive initiative as Ertz. Narby admitted that Ertz had done a good job in organizing the Crew for the proposed

extermination of the muties, but his very efficiency had made him too strong a candidate for succession to the captaincy, if and when. Had he thought about it overtly Narby might have admitted to himself that the present Captain’s life span had extended unduly because Narby was not absolutely certain that Ertz would not be selected. What he did think was that this might be a good time for the old Captain to surrender his spirit to Jordan. The fat old fool had long outlived his usefulness; Narby was tired of having to wheedle him into giving the proper orders. If the Council were faced with the necessity of selecting a new Captain at this time, there was but one candidate available. Narby put the book down, his mind made up.

The simple decision to eliminate the old Captain carried with it in Narby’s mind no feeling of shame, nor sin, nor disloyalty. He felt contempt but not dislike for the Captain, and no mean spirit colored his decision to kill him. Narby’s plans were made on the noble level of statesmanship. He honestly believed that his objective was the welfare of the entire Crew; common- sense administration, order and discipline, good eating for everyone. He selected himself because it was obvious to him that he was best fitted to accomplish those worthy ends. That some must make the Trip in order that these larger interests be served he did not find even mildly regrettable, but he bore them no malice.

“What in the Huff are you doing at my desk?”

Narby looked up to see the late Bill Ertz standing over him, not looking pleased. He looked again, then as an afterthought closed his mouth. He had been so certain, when Ertz failed to reappear after the raid, that he had made the Trip and was in all probability butchered and eaten; so certain that it was now a sharp wrench to his mind to see Ertz standing before him, aggressively alive. But he pulled himself together.

“Bill! Jordan bless you, man, we thought you had made the Trip! Sit down, sit down, and tell me what happened to you.” “I will if you will get out of my chair,” Ertz answered bitingly.

“Oh, sorry!” Narby hastily vacated the chair at Ertz’s desk and found another.

“And now,” Ertz continued, taking the seat Narby had left, “you might explain why you were going through my writings.”

Narby managed to look hurt. “Isn’t that obvious? We assumed you were dead. Someone had to take over and attend to your department until a new chief was designated. I was acting on behalf of the Captain.”

Ertz looked him in the eyes. “Don’t give me that guff, Narby. You know and I know who puts words in the Captain’s mouth; we’ve planned it often enough. Even if you did think I was dead, it seems to me you could wait longer than the time between two sleeps to pry through my desk.”

“Now really, old man, when a person is missing after a mutie raid, it’s a common-sense assumption that he has made the Trip.” “O.K., O.K., skip it. Why didn’t Mort Tyler take over in the meantime?”

“He’s in the Converter.”

“Killed, eh? But who ordered him put in the Converter? That much mass will make a terrific peak in the load.”

“I did, in place of Hugh Hoyland. Their masses were nearly the same, and your requisition for the mass of Hugh Hoyland was unfilled.” “Nearly the same isn’t good enough in handling the Converter. I’ll have to check on it.” He started to rise.

“Don’t get excited,” said Narby. “I’m not an utter fool in engineering, you know. I ordered his mass to be trimmed according to the same schedule you had laid out for Hoyland.” “Well, all right. That will do for now. But I will have to check it. We can’t afford to waste mass.”

“Speaking of waste mass,” Narby said sweetly, “I found a couple of Unnecessary books in your desk.” “Well?”

“They are classed as mass available for power, you know.” “So? And who is the custodian of mass allocated for power?” “You are certainly. But what were they doing in your desk?”

“Let me point out to you, my dear Captain’s Best Boy, that it lies entirely within my discretion where I choose to store mass available for power.” “Hm-m-m. I suppose you are right. By the way, if you don’t need them for the power schedule at once, would you mind letting me read them?”

“Not at all, if you want to be reasonable about it. I’ll check them out to you: have to do that; they’ve already been centrifuged. Just be discreet about it.” “Thanks. Some of those ancients had vivid imaginations. Utterly crazy, of course, but amusing for relaxation.”

Ertz got out the two volumes and prepared a receipt for Narby to sign. He did this absent-mindedly, being preoccupied with the problem of how and when to tackle Narby. Phineas Narby he knew to be a key man in the task he and his blood brothers had undertaken, perhaps the key man. If he could be won over… “Fine,” he said, when Narby had signed, “I wonder if we followed the wisest policy in Hoyland’s case.” Narby looked surprised, but said nothing.

“Oh, I don’t mean that I put any stock in his story,” Ertz added hastily, “but I feel that we missed an opportunity. We should have kidded him along. He was a contact with the muties. The worst handicap we work under in trying to bring mutie country under the rule of the Council is the fact that we know very little about theni. We don’t know how many of them there are, nor how strong they are, or how well organized. Besides that, we will have to carry the fight to them and that’s a big disadvantage. We don’t really know our way around the upper decks. If we had played along with him and pretended to believe his story, we might have learned a lot of things.”

“But we couldn’t rely on what he told us,” Narby pointed out

“We didn’t need to. He offered us an opportunity to go all the way to no-weight, and look around.”

Narby looked astounded. “You surely aren’t serious? Amember of the Crew that trusted the muties’ promise not to harm him wouldn’t get up to no-weight; he’d make the Trip — fast!” “I’m not so certain about that,” Ertz objected. “Hoyland believed his own story, I’m sure of that. And—”

“What! All that utter nonsense about the Ship being capable of moving. The solid Ship.” He pounded the bulkhead. “No one could believe that.”

“But I tell you he did. He’s a religious fanatic, granted. But he saw something up there, and that was how he interpreted it. We could have gone up to see whatever it was he was raving about and used the chance to scout out the muties.”

“Utterly foolhardy!”

“I don’t think so. He must have a great deal of influence among the muties; look at the trouble they went to just to rescue him. If he says he can give us safe passage up to no-weight, I think he can.”

“Why this sudden change of opinion?”

“It was the raid that changed my mind. If anyone had told me that a gang of muties would come clear down to high-weight and risk their necks to save the life of one man I would not have believed him. But it happened. I’m forced to revise my opinions. Quite aside from his story, it’s evident that the muties will fight for him and probably take orders from him. If that is true, it would be worth while to pander to his religious convictions if it would enable us to gain control over the muties without having to fight for it.”

Narby shrugged it off. “Theoretically you may have something there. But why waste time over might-have-beens? If there was such an opportunity, we missed it.” “Maybe not. Hoyland is still alive and back with the muties. If I could figure out some way of getting a message to him, we might still be able to arrange it.” “But how could you?”

“I don’t know exactly. I might take a couple of the boys and do some climbing. If we could capture a mutie without killing him, it might work out.”

“Aslim chance.”

“I’m willing to risk it”

Narby turned the matter over in his mind. The whole plan seemed to him to be filled with long chances and foolish assumptions. Nevertheless if Ertz were willing to take the risk and it did work, Narby’s dearest ambition would be much nearer realization. Subduing the unities by force would be a long and bloody job, perhaps an impossible job. He was clearly aware of its difficulty.

If it did not work, nothing was lost, but Ertz. Now that he thought it over, Ertz would be no loss at this point in the game. Hm-m-m. “Go ahead,” he said. “You are a brave man, but its a worth-while venture.”

“O.K.,” Ertz agreed. “Good eating.”

Narby took the hint. “Good eating,” he answered, gathered up the books, and left. It did not occur to him until later that Ertz had not told him where he had been for so long.

And Ertz was aware that Narby had not been entirely frank with him, but, knowing Narby, he was not surprised. He was pleased enough that his extemporaneous groundwork for future action had been so well received. It never did occur to him that it might have been simpler and more effective to tell the truth.

Ertz busied himseif for a short time in making a routine inspection of the Converter and appointed an acting Senior Watch Officer. Satisfied that his department could then take care of itself during a further absence, he sent for his chief porter and told the servant to fetch Alan Mahoney from his village. He had considered ordering his litter and meeting Mahoney halfway, but he decided against it as being too conspicuous.

Alan greeted him with enthusiasm. To him, still an unmarried cadet and working for more provident men when his contemporaries were all heads of families and solid men of property, the knowledge that he was blood brother to a senior scientist was quite the most important thing that had ever happened to him, even overshadowing his recent adventures, the meaning of which he was hardly qualified to understand anyway.

Ertz cut him short, and hastily closed the door to the outer engineering office. “Walls have ears,” he said quietly, “and certainly clerks have ears, and tongues as well. Do you want us both to make the Trip?”

“Aw, gosh, Bill … I didn’t mean to—”

“Never mind. I’ll meet you on the same stair trunk we came down by, ten decks above this one. Can you count?”

“Sure, I can count that much. I can count twice that much. One and one makes two, and one more makes three, and one more makes four, and one makes five, and—”

“That’s enough. I see you can. But I’m relying more on your loyalty and your knife than I am on your mathematical ability. Meet me there as soon as you can. Go up somewhere where you won’t be noticed.”

Forty-one was still on watch when they reached the rendezvous. Ertz called him by name while standing out of range of slingshot or thrown knife, a reasonable precaution in dealing with a creature who had grown to man size by being fast with his weapons. Once identification had been established, he directed the guard to find Hugh Hoyland. He and Alan sat down to wait.

Forty-one failed to find Hugh Hoyland at Joe-Jim’s apartment. Nor was Joe-Jim there. He did find Bobo, but the pinhead was not very helpful. Hugh, Bobo told him, had gone up where- everybody-flies. That meant very little to Forty-one; he had been up to no-weight only once in his life. Since the level of weightlessness extended the entire length of the Ship, being in fact the last concentric cylinder around the Ship’s axis, not that Forty-one could conceive it in those terms, the information that Hugh. had headed for no-weight was not helpful.

Forty-one was puzzled. An order from Joe-Jim was not to be ignored and he had got it through his not overbright mind that an order from Ertz carried the same weight. He woke Bobo up again. “Where is the Two Wise Heads?”

“Gone to see knifemaker.” Bobo closed his eyes again.

That was better. Forty-one knew where the knifemaker lived. Every mutie had dealings with her; she was the indispensable artisan and tradesman of mutie country. Her person was necessarily taboo; her workshop and the adjacent neighborhood were neutral territory for all. He scurried up two decks and hurried thence.

Adoor reading THERMODYNAMIC LABORATORY: KEEP OUT was standing open. Forty-one could not read; neither the name nor the injunction mattered to him. But he could hear voices, one of which be identified as coming from the twins, the other from the knifemaker. He walked in. “Boss,” be began.

“Shut up,” said Joe. Jim did not look around but continued his argument with the Mother of Blades. “You’ll make knives,” he said, “and none of your lip.”

She faced him, her four calloused hands set firmly on her broad hips. Her eyes were reddened from staring into the furnace in which she heated her metal; sweat ran down her wrinkled face into the sparse gray mustache which disfigured her upper lip, and dripped onto her bare chest. “Sure I make knives,” she snapped. “Honest knives. Not pig-stickers like you want me to make. Knives as long as your arm, ptui!” She spat at the cherry-red lip of the furnace.

“Listen, you old Crew bait,” Jim replied evenly, “you’ll make knives the way I tell you to, or I’ll toast your feet in your own furnace. Hear me?” Forty-one was struck speechless. No one ever talked back to the Mother of Blades; the Boss was certainly a man of power!

The knifemaker suddenly cracked. “But that’s not the right way to make knives,” she complained shrilly. “They wouldn’t balance right. I’ll show you.” She snatched up two braces of knives from her workbench and let fly at a cross-shaped target across the room — not in succession, but all four arms swinging together, all four blades in the air at once. They spwiged into the target, a blade at the extreme end of each arm of the cross. “See? You couldn’t do that with a long knife. It would fight with itself and not go straight.”

“Boss—” Forty-one tried again. Joe-Jim handed him a mouthful of knuckles without looking around.

“I see your point,” Jim told the knifemaker, “but we don’t want these knives for throwing. We want them for cutting and stabbing up close. Get on with it; I want to see the first one before you eat again.”

The old woman bit her lip. “Do I get my usuals?” she said sharply.

“Certainly you get your usuals,” he assured her. “Atithe on every kill till the blades are paid for, and good eating all the time you work.”

She shrugged her misshapen shoulders. “O.K.” She turned, tonged up a long flat fragment of steel with her two left hands and clanged the stock into the furnace. Joe-Jim turned to Forty- one.

“What is it?” Joe asked. “Boss, Ertz sent me to get Hugh.” “Well, why didn’t you do it?”

“I don’t find him. Bobo says he’s gone up to no-weight.”

“Well, go get him. No, that won’t do; you wouldn’t know where to find him. I’ll have to do it myself. Go back to Ertz and tell him to wait.” Forty-one hurried off. The Boss was all right, but it was not good to tarry in his presence.

“Now you’ve got us running errands,” Jim commented sourly. “How do you like being a blood brother, Joe?” “You got us into this.”

“So? The blood-swearing was your idea.”

“Damn it, you know why I did that. They took it seriously. And we are going to need all the help we can get, if we are to get out of this with a skin that will hold water.”

“Oh? So you didn’t take it seriously?”

“Did you?”

Jim smiled cynically. “Just about as seriously as you do, my dear, deceitful brother. As matters stand now, it is much, much healthier for you and me to keep to the bargain right up to the hilt. ‘All for one and one for all!’”

“You’ve been reading Dumas again.” “And why not?”

“That’s O.K. But don’t be a damn fool about it.” “I won’t be. I know which side of the blade is edged.”

Joe-Jim found Squatty and Pig sleeping outside the door which led to the Control Room. He knew then that Hugh must be inside, for he had assigned the two as personal bodyguards to Hugh. It was a foregone conclusion anyhow; if Hugh had gone up to no-weight, he would be heading either for Main Drive, or the Control Room, more probably the Control Room. The place held a tremendous fascination for Hugh. Ever since the earlier time when Joe-Jim had almost literally dragged him into the Control Room and had forced him to see with his own eyes that the Ship was not the whole world but simply a vessel adrift in a much larger world — a vessel that could be driven and moved — ever since that time and throughout the period that followed while he was still a captured slave of Joe-Jim’s, he had been obsessed with the idea of moving the Ship, of sitting at the controls and making it go!

It meant more to him than it could possibly have meant to a space pilot from Earth. From the time that the first rocket made the little jump from Terra to the Moon, the spaceship pilot has been the standard romantic hero whom every boy wished to emulate. But Hugh’s ambition was of no such picayune caliber; he wished to move his world. In Earth standards and concepts it would be less ambitious to dream of equipping the Sun with jets and go gunning it around the Galaxy.

Young Archimedes had his lever; he sought a fulcrum.

Joe-Jim paused at the door of the great silver stellarium globe which constituted the Control Room and peered in. He could not see Hugh, but he knew that he must be at the controls in the chair of the chief astrogator, for the lights were being manipulated. The images of the stars were scattered over the inner surface of the sphere producing a simulacrum of the heavens outside the Ship. The illusion was not fully convincing from the door where Joe-Jim rested; from the center of the sphere it would be complete.

Sector by sector the stars snuffed out, as Hugh manipulated the controls from the center of the sphere. Asector was left shining on the far side forward. It was marked by a large and brilliant orb, many times as bright as its companions. Joe-Jim ceased watching and pulled himself hand over hand up to the control chairs. “Hugh!” Jim called out.

“Who’s there?” demanded Hugh and leaned his head out of the deep chair. “Oh, it’s you. Hello.” “Ertz wants to see you. Come on out of there.”

“O.K. But come here first. I want to show you something.”

“Nuts to him,” Joe said to his brother. But Jim answered, “Oh, come on and see what it is. Won’t take long.” The twins climbed into the control station and settled down in the chair next to Hugh’s. “What’s up?” “That star out there,” said Hugh, pointing at the brilliant one. “It’s grown bigger since the last time I was here.” “Huh? Sure it has. It’s been getting brighter for a long time. Couldn’t see it at all first time I was ever in here.” “Then we’re closer to it.”

“Of course,” agreed Joe. “I knew that. It just goes to prove that the Ship is moving.” “But why didn’t you tell me about this?”

“About what?”

“About that star. About the way it’s been growing bigger.” “What difference does it make?”

“What difference does it make! Why, good Jordan, man, that’s it. That’s where we’re going. That’s the End of the Trip!”

Joe-Jim, both of him, was momentarily startled. Not being himself concerned with any objective other than his own safety and comfort, it was hard for him to realize that Hugh, and perhaps Bill Ertz as well, held as their first objective the recapturing of the lost accomplishments of their ancestors’ high order to complete the long-forgotten, half-mythical Trip to Far Centaurus.

Jim recovered himself. “Hm-m-m. Maybe. What makes you think that star is Far Centaurus?”

“Maybe it isn’t. I don’t care. But it’s the star we are closest to and we are moving toward it. When we don’t know which star is which, one is as good as another. Joe-Jim, the ancients must have had some way of telling the stars apart.”

“Sure they did,” Joe confirmed, “but what of it? You’ve picked the one you want to go to. Come on. I want to get back down.” “All right,” Hugh agreed reluctantly. They began the long trip down.

Ertz sketched out to Joe-Jim and Hugh his interview with Narby. “Now my idea in coming up,” he continued, “is this: I’ll send Alan back down to heavy-weight with a message to Narby, telling him that I’ve been able to get in contact with you, Hugh, and urging him to meet us somewhere above Crew country to hear what I’ve found out.”

“Why don’t you simply go back and fetch him yourself?” objected Hugh.

Ertz looked slightly sheepish. “Because you tried that method on me, and it didn’t work. You returned from mutie country and told me the wonders you had seen. I didn’t believe you and had you tried for heresy. If Joe-Jim hadn’t rescued you, you would have gone to the Converter. If you had not hauled me up to no-weight and forced me to see with my own eyes, I never would have believed you. I assure you Narby won’t be any easier a lock to force than I was. I want to get him up here, then show him the stars and make him see, peacefully if we can; by force if we must.”

“I don’t get it,” said Joe. “Why wouldn’t it be simpler to cut his throat?”

“It would be a pleasure. But it wouldn’t be smart. Narby can be a tremendous amount of help to us. Jim, if you knew the Ship’s organization the way I do, you would see why. Narby carries more weight in the Council than any other Ship’s officer and he speaks for the Captain. If we win him over, we may never have to fight at all. if we don’t … well, I’m not sure of the outcome, not if we have to fight.”

“I don’t think he’ll come up. He’ll suspect a trap.”

“Which is another reason why Alan must go rather than myself. He would ask me a lot of embarrassing questions and be dubious about the answers. Alan he won’t expect so much of.” Ertz turned to Alan and continued, “Alan, you don’t know anything when he asks you but just what I’m about to tell you. Savvy?”

“Sure. I don’t know nothing, I ain’t seen nothing, I ain’t heard nothing.” With frank simplicity he added, “I never did know much.”

“Good. You’ve never laid eyes on Joe-Jim, you’ve never heard of the stars. You’re just my messenger, a knife I took along to help me. Now here’s what you are to tell him.” He gave Alan the message for Narby, couched in simple but provocative terms, then made sure that Alan had it all straight. “All right, on your way! Good eating.”

Alan slapped the grip of his knife, answered, “Good eating!” and sped away.

It is not possible for a peasant to burst precipitously into the presence of the Captain’s Executive; Alan found that out. He was halted by the master-at-arms on watch outside Narby’s

suite, cuffed around a bit for his insistence on entering, referred to a boredly unsympathetic clerk who took his name and told him to return to his village and wait to be summoned. He held his ground and insisted that he had a message of immediate importance from the Chief Engineer to Commander Narby. The clerk looked up again. “Give me the writing.”

“There is no writing.”

“What? That’s ridiculous. There is always a writing. Regulations.” “He had no time to make a writing. He gave me a word message.” “What is it?”

Alan shook his head. “It is private, for Commander Narby only. I have orders.” The clerk looked his exasperation.

But, being only a probationer, he forewent the satisfaction of direct and immediate disciplining of the recalcitrant churl in favor of the safer course of passing the buck higher up. The chief clerk was brief. “Give me the message.”

Alan braced himself and spoke to a scientist in a fashion be had never used in his life, even to one as junior, as this passed clerk. “Sir, all I ask is for you to tell Commrnder Narby that I have a message for him from Chief Engineer Ertz. If the message is not delivered, I won’t be the one to go to the Converter! But I don’t dare give the message to anyone else.”

The under official pulled at his lip, and decided to take a chance on disturbing his superior.

Alan delivered his message to Narby in a low voice in order that the orderly standing just outside the door might not overhear. Narby stared at him. “Ertz wants me to come along with you up to mutie country?”

“Not all the way up to mutie country, sir. To a point in between, where Hugh Hoyland can meet you.” Narby exhaled noisily. “It’s preposterous. I’ll send a squad of knives up to fetch him down to me.”

Alan delivered the balance of his message. This time he carefully raised his voice to ensure that the orderly, and, if possible, others might hear his words. “Ertz said to tell you that if you were afraid to go, just to forget the whole matter. He will take it up with the Council himself.”

Alan owed his continued existence thereafter to the fact that Narby was the sort of man who lived by shrewdness rather than by direct force. Narby’s knife was at his belt; Alan was painfully aware that he had been required to deposit his own with the master-at-arms.

Narby controlled his expression. He was too intelligent to attribute the insult to the oaf before him, though he promised himself to give said oaf a little special attention at a more convenient time. Pique, curiosity, and potential loss of face all entered into his decision. “I’m coming with you,” he said savagely. “I want to ask him if you got his message straight.”

Narby considered having a major guard called out to accompany him, but he discarded the idea. Not only would it make the affair extremely public before he had an opportunity to judge its political aspects, but also it would cost him almost as much face as simply refusing to go. But he inquired nervously of Alan as Alan retrieved his weapon from the master-at-arms, “You’re a good knife?”

“None better,” Alan agreed cheerfully.

Narby hoped that the man was not simply boasting. Muties! Narby wished that he himself had found more time lately for practice in the manly arts.

Narby gradually regained his composure as he followed Alan up toward low-weight. In the first place nothing happened, no alarms; in the second place Alan was obviously a cautious and competent scout, one who moved alert and noiselessly and never entered a deck without pausing to peer cautiously around before letting his body follow his eye. Narby might have been more nervous had be hearing what Alan did hear: little noises from the depths of the great dim passageways, rustlings which told him that their progress was flanked on all sides. This worried Alan subconsciously, although he had expected something of the sort; he knew that both Hugh and Joe-Jim were careful captains who would not neglect to cover an approach. He would have worried more if he had not been able detect a reconnaissance which should have been present.

When he approached the rendezvous some twenty decks above the highest civilized level, he stopped and whistled. Awhistle answered him. “It’s Alan,” he called out.

“Come up and show yourself?” Alan did so, without neglecting his usual caution. When be saw no one but his friends: Ertz, Hugh, Joe-Jim, and Bobo, be motioned for Narby to foflow him.

The sight of Joe-Jim and Bobo broke Narby’s unsteady calm with a sudden feeling that he had been trapped. He snatched at his knife and backed clumsily down the stair then turned. Bobo’s knife was out even faster. For a split moment the outcome hung balanced, ready to fall either way. But Joe-Jim slapped Bobo across the face, took his knife from him and let it clatter to the deck, then relieved him of his slingshot.

Narby was in full flight, with Hugh and Ertz calling vainly after him. “Fetch him, Bobo!” Jim commanded, “and do not hurt him.” Bobo lumbered away.

He was back in fairly short order. “Run fast,” be commented. He dropped Narby to the deck where the officer lay almost quiet while he fought to catch his breath. Bobo took Narby’s knife from his own belt and tried it by shaving coarse black hairs from his left forearm. “Good blade,” he approved.

“Give it back to him,” Jim ordered. Bobo looked extremely startled but complied wistfully. Joe-Jim returned Bobo’s own weapons to him. Narby matched Bobo’s surprise at regaining his sidearm, but he concealed it better. He even managed to accept it with dignity.

“Look,” Ertz began in worried tones, “I’m sorry you got your wind up, Fin. Bobo’s not a bad sort. It was the only way to get you back.”

Narby fought with himself to regain the cool self-discipline with which he habitually met the world. Damn! he told himself, this situation is preposterous. Well… “Forget it,” he said shortly. “I was expecting to meet you; I didn’t expect a bunch of armed muties. You have an odd taste in playmates, Ertz.”

“Sorry,” Bill Ertz replied, “I guess I should have warned you.” a piece of mendacious diplomacy. “But they’re all right. Bobo you’ve met. This is Joe-Jim. He’s a… a sort of a Ship’s officer among the muties.”

“Good eating,” Joe acknowledged politely. “Good eating,” Narby replied mechanically.

“Hugh you know, I think.” Narby agreed that he did. An embarrassed pause followed. Narby broke it.

“Well,” he said, “you must have had some reason to send word for me to come up here. Or was it just to play games?”

“I did,” Ertz agreed. “I — Shucks, I hardly know where to start. See here, Narby, you won’t believe this, but I’ve seen. Everything Hugh told us was true. I’ve been in the Control Room. I’ve seen the stars. I know?”

Narby stared at him. “Ertz,” he said slowly, “you’ve gone out of your mind.”

Hugh Hoyland spoke up excitedly. “That’s because you haven’t seen. It moves, look you. The Ship moves like a—”

“Fit handle this,” Ertz cut in. “listen to me, Narby. What it all means you will soon decide for yourself, but I can tell you what I saw. They took me up to no-weight and into the Captain’s veranda. That’s a compartment with a glass wall. You can stare right out through into a great black empty space: big, bigger than anything could be. Bigger than the Ship. And there were lights out there, stars, just like the ancient myths said.”

Narby looked both amazed and disgusted. “Where’s your logic, man? I thought you were a scientist. What do you mean, ‘bigger than the Ship’? That’s an absurdity, a contradiction in terms. By definition, the Ship is the Ship. All else is a part of it.”

Ertz shrugged helplessly. “I know it sounds that way. I can’t explain it; it defies all logic. It’s — Oh, Huff! You’ll know what I mean when you see it.”

“Control yourself,” Narby advised him. “Don’t talk nonsense. Athing is logical or it isn’t. For a thing to be it must occupy space. You’ve seen, or thought you saw, something remarkable, but whatever it was, it can be no larger than the compartment it was in. You can’t show me anything that contradicts an obvious fact of nature.”

“I told you I couldn’t explain it.” “Of course you can’t.”

The twins had been whispering disgustedly, one head to the other. “Stop the chatter,” Joe said in louder tones. “We’re ready to go. Come on.” “Sure,” Ertz agreed eagerly, “let’s drop it, Narby, until you have seen it. Come on now; it’s a long climb.”

“What?” Narby demanded. “Say, what is this? Go where?” “Up to the Captain’s veranda, and the Control Room.” “Me? Don’t be ridiculous. I’m going down at once.”

“No, Narby,” Ertz denied. “That’s why I sent for you. You’ve got to see.”

“Don’t be silly. I don’t need to see; common sense gives sufficient answer. However,” he went on, “I do want to congratulate you on making a friendly contact with the muties. We should be able to work out some means of cooperation. I think—”

Joe-Jim took one step forward. “You’re wasting time,” he said evenly. “We’re going up; you, too. I really do insist.” Narby shook his head. “It’s out of the question. Some other time, perhaps, after we have worked out a method of cooperation.” Hugh stepped in closer to him from the other side. “You don’t seem to understand. You’re going now.”

Narby glanced the other way at Ertz. Ertz nodded. “That’s how it is, Narby.”

Narby cursed himself silently. Great Jordan! What in the Ship was he thinking of to let himself get into such a position? He had a distinct feeling that the two-headed man would rather that he showed fight. Impossible, preposterous situation. He cursed again to himself, but gave way as gracefully as he could. “Oh, well! Rather than cause an argument I’ll go now. Let’s get on with it. Which way?”

“Just stick with me,” advised Ertz. Joe-Jim whistled loudly in a set pattern. Muties seemed to grow out of the floor plates, the bulkheads, the overhead, until six or eight more had been added to the party. Narby was suddenly sick with the full realization of just how far he had strayed from the way of caution. The party moved up.

It took them a long time to get up to no-weight, as Narby was not used to climbing. The steady reduction in weight as they rose from deck to deck relieved him somewhat but the help afforded was more than offset by the stomach qualms he felt as weight dropped away from him. He did not have a true attack of space-sickness; like all born in the Ship, muties and Crew, he was more or less acclimated to lessened weight, but he had done practically no climbing since reckless adolescence. By the time they reached the innermost deck of the Ship he was acutely uncomfortable and hardly able to proceed.

Joe-Jim sent the added members of the party back below and told Bobo to carry Narby. Narby waved him away. “I can make it,” he protested, and by sheer stubborn will forced his body to behave. Joe-Jim looked him over and countermanded the order. By the time a long series of gliding dives had carried them as far forward as the transverse bulkhead beyond which lay the Control Room, he was reasonably comfortable again.

They did not stop first at the Control Room, but, in accordance with a plan of Hugh’s, continued on to. the Captain’s veranda. Narby was braced for what he saw there, not only by Ertz’s confused explanation, but because Hugh had chattered buoyantly to him about it all the latter part of the trip. Hugh was feeling warmly friendly to Narby by the time they arrived; it was wonderful to have somebody to listen!

Hugh floated in through the door ahead of the others, executed a neat turn in mid-air, and steadied himself with one hand on the back of the Captain’s easy chair. With the other he waved at the great view port and the starry firmament beyond it. “There it is!” he exulted. “There it is. Look at it, isn’t it wonderful?”

Narby’s face, showed no expression, but he looked long and intently at the brilliant display. “Remarkable,” he conceded at last, “remarkable. I’ve never seen anything like it.” “Remarkable ain’t half,” protested Hugh. “Wonderful is the word.”

“O.K., ‘wonderful,’” Narby assented. “Those bright little lights … you say those are the stars that the ancients talked about?”

“Why, yes,” agreed Hugh, feeling slightly disconcerted without knowing why, “only they’re not little. They’re big, enormous things, like the Ship. They just look little because they are so far away. See that very bright one, that big one, down to the left? It looks big because it’s closer. I think that is Far Centaurus, but I’m not sure,” he admitted in a burst of frankness.

Narby glanced quickly at him, then back to the big star. “How far away is it?”

“I don’t know. But we’ll find out. There are instruments to measure such things in the Control Room, but I haven’t got the hang of them entirely. It doesn’t matter, though. We’ll get there yet!”

“Huh?”

“Sure. Finish the Trip.”

Narby looked blank, but said nothing. His was a careful and orderly mind, logical to a high degree. He was a capable executive and could make rapid decisions when necessary, but he was by nature inclined to reserve his opinions when possible, until he had had time to chew over the data and assess it.

He was even more taciturn, in the Control Room. He listened and looked, but asked very few questions. Hugh did not care. This was his toy, his gadget, his baby. To show it off to someone who had never seen it and who would listen was all he asked.

At Ertz’s suggestion the party stopped at Joe-Jim’s apartment on the way back down. Narby must be committed to the same course of action as the blood brotherhood and plans must be made to carry out such action, if the stratagem which brought Narby to them was to be fruitful. Narby agreed to stop unreluctantly, having become convinced of the reality of the truce under which he made this unprecedented sortie into mutie country. He listened quietly while Ertz outlined what they had in mind. He was still quiet when Ertz had finished.

“Well?” said Ertz at last, when the silence had dragged on long enough to get on his nerves. “You expect some comment from me?”

“Yes, of course. You figure into it.” Narby knew that he did and knew that an answer was expected from him; he was stalling for time.

“Well…” Narby pursed his lips and fitted his fingertips together. “It seems to me that this problem divides itself into two parts. Hugh Hoyland, as I understand it, your purpose of carrying out the ancient Plan of Jordan cannot be realized until the Ship as a whole is pacified and brought under one rule; you need order and discipline for your purpose from Crew country clear to the Control Room. Is that right?”

“Certainly. We have to man the Main Drive and that means—”

“Please. Frankly, I am not qualified to understand things that I have seen so recently and have had no opportunity to study. As to your chances of success in that project, I would prefer to rely on the opinion of the Chief Engineer. Your problem is the second phase; it appears that you are necessarily interested in the first phase.”

“Of course.”

“Then let’s talk about the first phase only. It involves matters of public policy and administration. I feel more at home there; perhaps my advice will be useful. Joe-Jim, I understand that you ate looking for an opportunity to effect a peace between the muties and the members of the Crew; peace and good eating? Right?”

“That’s correct,” Jim agreed.

“Good. It has been my purpose for a long time and that of many of the Ship’s officers. Frankly it never occurred to me that it could be achieved other than by sheer force. We had steeled ourselves to the prospect of a long and difficult and bloody war. The records of the oldest Witness, handed down to him by his predecessors clear back to the time of the mythical Mutiny, make no mention of anything but war between muties and the Crew. But this is a better way; I am delighted.”

“Then you’re with us!” exclaimed Ertz.

“Steady, there are many other things to be considered. Ertz, you and I know, and Hoyland as well I should think, that not all of the Ship’s officers will agree with us. What of that?” “That’s easy,” put in Hugh Hoyland. “Bring them up to no-weight one at a time, let them see the stars and learn the truth.”

Narby shook his head. “You have the litter carrying the porters. I told you this problem is in two phases. There is no point in trying to convince a man of something he won’t believe when you need him to agree to something he can understand. After the Ship is consolidated it will be simple enough then to let the officers experience the Control Room and the stars.”

“But—”

“He’s right,” Ertz stopped him. “No use getting cluttered up with a lot of religious issues when the immediate problem is a practical one. There are numerous officers whom we could get on our side for the purpose of pacifying the Ship who would raise all kinds of fuss if we tackled them first on the idea that the Ship moves.”

“But—”

“No ‘buts’ about it. Narby is right. It’s common sense. Now, Narby, about this matter of those officers who may not be convinced, here’s how we see it: In the first place it’s your business and mine to win over as many as we can. Any who hold out against us — well, the Converter is always hungry.”

Narby nodded, completely undismayed by the idea of assassination as a policy. “That seems the safest plan. Mightn’t it be a little bit difficult?” “That is where Joe-Jim comes in. We’ll have the best knives in the Ship to back us up.”

“I see. Joe-Jim is, I take it, Boss of all the muties?”

“What gave you that idea?” growled Joe, vexed without knowing why.

“Why, I supposed … I was given to understand—” Narby stopped. No one had told him that Joe-Jim was king of the upper decks; he had assumed it from appearances. He felt suddenly very uneasy. Had he been negotiating uselessly? What was the point in a pact with this two-headed monstrosity if he did not speak for the muties?

“I should have made that clear,” Ertz said hastily. “Joe-Jim helps us to establish a new administration, then we will be able to back him up with knives to pacify the rest of the muties. Joe- Jim isn’t Boss of all the muties, but he has the largest, strongest gang. With our help he soon will be Boss of all of them.”

Narby quickly adjusted his mind to the new data. Muties against muties, with only a little help from the cadets of the Crew, seemed to him a good way to fight. On second thoughts, it was better than an outright truce at once, for there would be fewer muties to administer when it was all over, less chance of another mutiny. “I see,” he agreed. “So … Have you considered what the situation will be afterwards?”

“What do you mean?” inquired Hoyland.

“Can you picture the present Captain carrying out these plans?” Ertz saw what he was driving at, and so did Hoyland vaguely. “Go on,” said Ertz.

“Who is to be the new Captain?” Narby looked squarely at Ertz.

Ertz had not thought the matter through; he realized now that the question was very pertinent, if the coup d’etat was not to be followed by a bloody scramble for power. He had permitted himself to dream of being selected as Captain, sometime. But he knew that Narby was pointed that way, too.

Ertz had been as honestly struck by the romantic notion of moving the Ship as Hoyland. He realized that his old ambition stood in the way of the plan; he renounced the old with only a touch of wistfulness.

“You will have to be Captain, Fin. Are you willing to be?”

Phineas Narby accepted gracefully. “I suppose so, if that’s the way you want it. You would make a fine Captain, yourself, Ertz.”

Ertz shook his head, understanding perfectly that Narby’s full cooperation turned on this point. “I’ll continue Chief Engineer. I want to handle the Main Drive of the Trip.” “Slow down!” Joe interrupted. “I don’t agree to this. Why should he be Captain?”

Narby faced him. “Do you want to be Captain?” He kept his voice carefully free of sarcasm. Amutie for Captain! “Huff’s name, no! But why should you be? Why not Ertz or Hugh?”

“Not me,” Hugh disclaimed. “I’ll have no time for administration. I’m the astrogator.”

“Seriously, Joe-Jim,” Ertz explained, “Narby is the one of the group who can get the necessary cooperation out of the Ship’s officers.” “Damn it, if they won’t cooperate we can slit their throats.”

“With Narby as Captain we won’t have to slit throats.”

“I don’t like it,” groused Joe. His brother shushed, “Why get excited about it, Joe? Jordan knows we don’t want the responsibility.”

“I quite understand your misgivings,” Narby suggested suavely, “but I don’t think you need worry. I would forced to depend on you, of course, to administer the muties. I would administer the lower decks, a job I am used to and you would be Vice-Captain, if you are willing serve, for the muties. It would be folly for me to attempt to administer directly a part of the Ship I’m not familiar with and people whose customs I don’t know. I really can’t accept the captaincy unless you are willing to help me in that fashion. Will you do it?”

“I don’t want any part of it,” protested Joe.

“I’m sorry. Then I must refuse to be Captain. I really can’t undertake it if you won’t help me that much.” “Oh, go ahead, Joe,” Jim insisted. “Let’s take it, for the time being at least. The job has to be done.” “All right,” Joe capitulated, “but I don’t like it.”

Narby ignored the fact that Joe-Jim had not specifically agreed to Narby’s elevation to the captaincy; no further mention was made of it.

The discussion of ways and means was tedious and need not be repeated. It was agreed that Ertz, Alan, and Narby should all return to their usual haunts and occupations while preparations were made to strike.

Hugh detailed a guard to see them safely down to high-weight. “You’ll send Alan up when you are ready?” he said to Narby as they were about to leave.

“Yes,” Narby agreed, “but don’t expect him soon. Ertz and I will have to have time to feel out friends, and there’s the matter of the old Captain. I’ll have to persuade him to call a meeting of all the Ship’s officers; he’s never too easy to handle.”

“Well, that’s your job. Good eating!” “Good eating.”

On the few occasions when the scientist priests who ruled the Ship under Jordan’s Captain met in full assembly they gathered in a great hall directly above the Ship’s offices on the last civilized deck. Forgotten generations past, before the time of the mutiny led by Ship’s Metalsmith Roy Huff, the hall had been a gymnasium, a place for fun and healthy exercise, as planned by the designers of the great starship; but the present users knew nothing of that.

Narby watched the roster clerk check off the Ship’s Officers as they arrived, worried under a bland countenance. There were only a few more to arrive; he would soon have no excuse not to notify the Captain that the meeting was ready, but he had received no word from Joe-Jim and Hoyland. Had that fool Alan managed to get himself killed on the way up to deliver the word? Had he fallen and broken his worthless neck? Was he dead with a mutie’s knife in his belly?

Ertz came in, and before seeking his seat among the department heads, went up to where Narby sat in front of the Captain’s chair. “How about it?” he inquired softly. “All right,” Narby told him, “but no word yet.”

“Hm-m-m.” Ertz turned around and assayed his support in the crowd. Narby did likewise. Not a majority, not a certain majority, for anything as drastic as this. Still, the issue would not depend on voting.

The roster clerk touched his arm. “All present, sir, except those excused for sickness, and one on watch at the Converter.”

Narby directed that the Captain be notified, with a sick feeling that something had gone wrong. The Captain, as usual, with complete disregard for the comfort and convenience of others, took his time about appearing. Narby was glad of the delay, but miserable in enduring it. When the old man finally waddled in, flanked by his orderlies, and settled heavily into his chair, he was, again as usual, impatient to get the meeting over. He waved for the others to be seated and started in on Narby.

“Very well, Commander Narby, let’s have the agenda. You have an agenda, I hope?” “Yes, Captain, there is an agenda.”

“Then have it read, man, have it read! Why are you delaying?”

“Yes, sir.” Narby turned to the reading clerk and handed him a sheaf of writings. The clerk glanced at them, looked puzzled, but, receiving no encouragement from Narby, commenced to read: “Petition, to Council and Captain: Lieutenant Braune, administrator of the village of Sector 9, being of frail health and advanced age, prays that he be relieved of all duty and retired.” The clerk continued, setting forth the recommendations of the officers and departments concerned.

The Captain twisted impatiently in his chair, finally interrupted the reading. “What is this, Narby? Can’t you handle routine matters without all this fuss?”

“I understood that the Captain was displeased with the fashion in which a similar matter was lately handled. I have no wish to trespass on the Captain’s prerogatives.” “Nonsense, man! Don’t read Regulations to me. Let the Council act, then bring their decision to me for review.”

“Yes, sir.” Narby took the writing from the clerk and gave him another. The clerk read.

It was an equally fiddling matter. Sector 3 village, because of an unexplained blight which had infected their hydroponic farms, prayed for relief and a suspension of taxes. The Captain put up with still less of this item before interrupting. Narby would have been sorely pressed for any excuse to continue the meeting had not the word he awaited arrived at that moment. It was a mere scrap of parchment, brought in from outside the hall by one of his own men. It contained the single word, “Ready.” Narby looked at it, nodded to Ertz, and addressed the Captain:

“Sir, since you have no wish to listen to the petitions of your Crew, I will continue at once with the main business of this meeting.” The veiled insolence of the statement caused the Captain to stare at him suspiciously, but Narby went on. “For many generations, through the lives of a succession of Witnesses, the Crew has suffered from the depredations of the muties. Our livestock, our children, even our own persons, have been in constant jeopardy. Jordan’s Regulations are not honored above the levels where we live. Jordan’s Captain himself is not free to travel in the upper levels of the Ship.

“It has been an article of faith that Jordan so ordained it, that the children pay with blood for the sins of their ancestors. It was the will of Jordan, we were told. “I, for one, have never been reconciled to this constant drain on the Ship’s mass.” He paused.

The old Captain had been having some difficulty in believing his ears. But he found his voice. Pointing, he squealed, “Do you dispute the Teachings?”

“I do not. I maintain that the Teachings do not command us to leave the muties outside the Regulations, and never did. I demand that they be brought under the Regulations!” “You … you! You are relieved of duty, sir!”

“Not,” answered Narby, his insolence now overt, “until I have had my say.”

“Arrest that man!” But the Captain’s orderlies stood fast, though they shuffled and looked unhappy. Narby himself had selected them.

Narby turned back to the amazed Council, and caught the eye of Ertz. “All right,” he said. “Now!” Ertz got up and trotted toward the door. Narby continued, “Many of you think as I do, but we always supposed that we would have to fight for it. With the help of Jordan, I have been able to achieve contact with the muties and propose terms of a truce. Their leaders are coming here to negotiate with us. There!” He pointed dramatically at the door.

Ertz reappeared; following him came Hugh Hoyland, Joe-Jim, and Bobo. Hoyland turned to the right along the wall and circled the company. He was followed single file by a string of muties: Joe-Jim’s best butcher boys. Another such column trailed after Joe-Jim and Bobo to the left.

Joe-Jim, Hugh, and half a dozen more in each wing were covered with crude armor which extended below their waists. The armor was topped off with clumsy helms, latticeworks of steel, which protected their heads without greatly interfering with vision. Each of the armored ones, a few of the others, carried unheard-of knives, long as a man’s arm!

The startled officers might have stopped the invasion at the bottleneck through which it entered had they been warned and led. But they were disorganized, helpless, and their strongest leaders had invited the invaders in. They shifted in their chairs, reached for their knives, and glanced anxiously from one to another. But no one made the first move which would start a general bloodletting.

Narby turned to the Captain. “What about it? Do you receive this delegation in peace?”

It seemed likely that age and fat living would keep the Captain from answering, from ever answering anything again. But he managed to croak, “Get ‘em out of here! Get ‘em out! You— You’ll make the Trip for this!”

Narby turned back to Joe-Jim and jerked his thumb upward. Jim spoke to Bobo and a knife was buried to the grip in the Captain’s fat belly. He squawked, rather than screamed, and a look of utter bewilderment spread over his features. He plucked awkwardly at the hilt as if to assure himself that it was really there. “Mutiny.” he stated. “Mutiny—” The word trailed off as he collapsed into his chair, and fell heavily forward to the deck on his face.

Narby shoved it with his foot and spoke to the two orderlies. “Carry it outside,” he commanded. They obeyed, seeming relieved at having something to do and someone to tell them to do it. Narby turned back to the silent watching mass. “Does anyone else object to a peace with the muties?”

An elderly officer, one who had dreamed away his life as judge and spiritual adviser to a remote village, stood up and pointed a bony finger at Narby, while his white beard jutted indignantly. “Jordan will punish you for this! Mutiny and sin, the spirit of Huff!”

Narby nodded to Joe-Jim; the old man’s words gurgled in his throat, the point of a blade sticking out under one ear. Bobo looked pleased with himself.

“There has been enough talk,” Narby announced. “It is better to have a little blood now than much blood later. Let those who stand with me in this matter get up and come forward.” Ertz set the precedent by striding forward and urging his surest personal supporters to come with him. Reaching the front of the room, he pulled out his knife and raised the point. “I

salute Phineas Narby, Jordan’s Captain!”

His own supporters were left with no choice. “Phineas Narby, Jordan’s Captain!”

The hard young men in Narby’s clique, the backbone of the dissident rationalist bloc among the scientist priests, joined the swing forward en masse, points raised high and shouting for

the new Captain. The undecided and the opportunists hastened to join, as they saw which side of the blade was edged. When the division was complete, there remained a handful only of Ship’s officers still hanging back, almost all of whom were either elderly or hyperreligious.

Ertz watched Captain Narby look them over, then pick up Joe-Jim with his eyes. Ertz put a hand on his arm. “There are few of them and practically helpless,” he pointed out. “Why not disarm them and let them retire?”

Narby Eave him an unfriendly look. “Let them stay alive and breed mutiny. I am quite capable of making my own decisions, Ertz.” Ertz bit his lip. “Very well, Captain.”

“That’s better.” He signaled to Joe-Jim. The long knives made short work of it.

Hugh hung back horn the slaughter. His old teacher, Lieutenant Nelson, the village scientist who had seen his ability and selected him for scientisthood, was one of the group. It was a factor be had not anticipated.

World conquest and consolidation. Faith, or the Sword. Joe-Jim’s bullies, amplified by hot-blooded young cadets supplied by Captain Narby, combed the middle decks and the upper decks. The muties, individualists by the very nature of their existence and owing no allegiance higher than that to the leaders of their gangs, were no match for the planned generalship of Joe-Jim, nor did their weapons match the strange, long knives that bit before a man was ready.

The rumor spread through mutie country that it was better to surrender quietly to the gang of the Two Wise Heads; good eating for those who surrendered, death inescapable for those who did not.

But it was nevertheless a long slow process. There were so many, many decks, so many miles of gloomy corridors, so many countless compartments in which unsubdued muties might lurk. Furthermore, the process grew slower as it advanced, as Joe-Jim attempted to establish a police patrol, an interior guard, over each sector, deck, and stair way trunk, as fast as his striking groups mopped them up.

To Narby’s disappointment, the two-headed man was not killed in his campaigns. Joe-Jim had learned from his own books that a general need not necessarily expose himself to direct combat.

Hugh buried himself in the Control Room. Not only was he more interested in the subtle problems of mastering the how and why of the complex controls and the parallel complexity of starship ballistics, but also the whole matter of the blood purge was distasteful to him because of Lieutenant Nelson. Violence and death he was used to; they were commonplace even on the lower levels, but that incident made him vaguely unhappy, even though his own evaluations were not sufficiently clean-cut for him to feel personal responsibility for the old man’s death.

He just wished it had not happened.

But the controls: ahh. There was something a man could put his heart into. He was attempting a task that an Earthman would have rejected as impossible; an Earthmaa would have known that the piloting and operation of an interstellar ship was a task so difficult that the best possible technical education combined with extensive experience in the handling of lesser spacecraft would constitute a barely adequate grounding for the additional intensive highly specialized training necessary for the task.

Hugh Hoyland did not know that. So he went ahead and did it anyhow.

In which attempt he was aided by the genius of the designers. The controls of most machinery may be considered under the head of simple pairs, stop-and-go, push-and-pull, up-and- down, in-and-out, on-and-off, right-and-left, their permutations and combinations. The real difficulties have to do with upkeep and repair, adjustment and replacements.

But the controls and main drive machinery of the starship Vanguard required no upkeep and no repair; their complexities were below the molar level, they contained no moving parts, friction took no toil and they did not fall out of adjustment. Had it been necessary for him to understand and repair the machines he dealt with, it would have been impossible. Afourteen- year-old child may safely be entrusted with a family skycar and be allowed to make thousand-mile jaunts overnight unaccompanied; it is much more probable that he will injure himself on the trip by overeating than by finding some way to mismanage or damage the vehicle. But if the skycar should fall out of adjustment, ground itself, and signal for a repair crew, the repair crew is essential; the child cannot fix it himself.

The Vanguard needed no repair crew, save for nonessential ancilliary machinery such as transbelts, elevators, automassagers, dining services, and the like. Such machinery which necessarily used moving parts had worn out before the time of the first Witness; the useless mass involved had gone into the auxiliary Converter, or had been adapted to other simpler purposes. Hugh was not even aware that there ever had been such machinery; the stripped condition of most compartments was a simple fact of nature to him, no cause for wonder.

Hugh was aided in his quest for understanding by two other facts:

First, spaceship ballistics is a very simple subject, being hardly more than the application of the second law of motion to an inverse-square field. That statement runs contrary to our usual credos; It happens to be true. Baking a cake calls for much greater, though subconscious, knowledge of engineering; knitting a sweater requires a subconscious understanding of much more complex mathematical relationships: topology of a knitted garment, but try it yourself sometime!

For a complex subject, consider neurology, or catalysts, but don’t mention ballistics.

Second, the designers had clearly in mind that the Vanguard would reach her destination not sooner than generations after her departure; they wished to make it easy for the then-not- yet-born pilots who would command her on arrival. Although they anticipated no such hiatus in technical culture as took place, they did their best to make the controls simple and self- explanatory. The sophisticated fourteen-year-old mentioned, oriented as he would be to the concept of space, would doubtless have figured them out in a few minutes. Hugh, reared in a culture which believed that the Ship was the whole world, made no such quick job of it.

He was hampered by two foreign concepts, distance and metrical time. He had to learn to operate the finder, a delayed-action, long-base, parallax type designed for the Vanguard, and had taken measurements on a couple of dozen stellar bodies before it occurred him that the results he was getting could possibly stand for anything. The readings were in parsecs and without meaning emotionally. The attempt with the aid of the Sacred to translate his readings into linear units he could stand resulted in figures which he felt sure were were obviously preposterous. Check and recheck, followed long periods of brooding forced him unwillingly into some dim comprehension of astronomical magnitudes.

The concepts frightened him and bewildered him. For a period of several sleeps he stayed away from the Control Room, and gave way to a feeling of futility and depression. He occupied the time in sorting over the women captives, it being the first time since his capture by Joe-Jim long ago that he had had both the opportunity and the mood to consider the subject. The candidates were numerous, for, in addition to the usual crop of village maidens, Joe-Jim’s military operations had produced a number of prime widows. Hugh availed himself of his leading position in the Ship’s new setup to select two women. The first was a widow, a strong competent woman, adept at providing a man with domestic comforts. He set her up in his new apartment high up in low-weight, gave her a free hand, and allowed her to retain her former name of Chloe.

The other was a maiden, untrained and wild as a mutie. Hugh could not have told himself why he picked her. Certainly she had no virtues, but she made him feel funny. She had bitten him while he was inspecting her; he had slapped her, naturally, and that should have been an end to the matter. But he sent word back later for her father to send her along.

He had not got around to naming her.

Metrical time caused him as much mental confusion as astronomical distances, but no emotional upset The trouble was again the lack of the concept in the Ship. The Crew had the notion of topological time; they understood “now,” “before,” “after,” “has been,” “will be,” even such notions as long time and short time, but the notion of measured time had dropped out of the culture. The lowest of earthbound cultures has some idea of measured time, even if limited to days and seasons, but every earthly concept of measured time originates in astronomical phenomena; the Crew had been insulated from all astronomical phenomena for uncounted generations.

Hugh had before him, on the control consoles, the only working timepieces in the Ship, but it was a long, long time before he grasped what they were for and what bearing they had on other instruments. But until did, he could not control the Ship. Speed, and its derivatives, acceleration and flexure, are based on measured time.

But when these two new concepts were finally grasped, chewed over, and ancient books reread in the light of these concepts, he was, in a greatly restricted and theoretical sense, an astrogator.

Hugh sought out Joe-Jim to ask him a question. Joe-Jim’s minds were brilliantly penetrating when he cared to exert himself; he remained a superficial dilettante because he rarely cared.

Hugh found Narby just leaving. In order to conduct the campaign of pacification of the muties it had been necessary for Narby and Joe-Jim to confer frequently; to their mutual surprise they got along well together. Narby was a capable administrator, able to delegate authority and not given to useless elbow jogging; Joe-Jim surprised and pleased Narby by being more able than any subordinate he had ever dealt with before. There was no love wasted. between them, but each recognized in the other both intelligence and a hard self-interest which matched his own. There was respect and grudging contemptuous liking.

“Good eating, Captain,” Hugh greeted Narby formally.

“Oh, hello, Hugh,” Narby answered, then turned back to Joe-Jim. “I’ll expect a report, then.”

“You’ll get it,” Joe agreed. “There can’t be more than a few dozen stragglers. We’ll hunt them out, or starve them.” “Am I butting in?” Hugh asked.

“No, I’m just leaving. How goes the great work, my dear fellow?” He smiled irritatingly. “Well enough, but slowly. Do you wish a report?”

“No hurry. Oh, by the bye, I’ve made the Control Room and Main Drive, in fact the entire level of no-weight, taboo for everyone, muties and Crew alike.” “So? I see your point, I guess. There is no need for any but officers to go up there.”

“You don’t understand me. It is a general taboo, applying to officers as well. Not to ourselves, of course.” “But… but, that won’t work. The only effective way to convince the officers of the truth is to take them up and show them the stars!”

“That’s exactly my point. I can’t have any officers upset by disturbing ideas while I am consolidating my administration. It will, create religious differences and impair discipline.” Hugh was too upset and astounded to answer at once. “But,” he said at last, “but that’s the point. That’s why you were made Captain.”

“And as Captain I will have to be the final judge of policy. The matter is closed. You are not to take anyone to the Control Room, nor any part of no-weight, until I deem it advisable. You’ll have to wait.”

“It’s a good idea, Hugh,” Jim commented. “We shouldn’t stir things up while we’ve got a war to attend to.” “Let me get this straight,” Hugh persisted. “You mean this is a temporary policy?”

“You could put it that way.”

“Well, all right,” Hugh conceded. “But wait — Ertz and I need to train assistants at once.” “Very well. Nominate them to me and I’ll pass on them. Whom do you have in mind?”

Hugh thought. He did not actually need assistance himself; although the Control Room contained acceleration chairs for half a dozen, one man, seated in the chief astrogator’s chair, could pilot the Ship. The same applied to Ertz in the Main Drive station, save in one respect. “How about Ertz? He needs porters to move mass to the Main Drive.”

“Let him. I’ll sign the writing. See that he uses porters from the former muties; but no one goes to the Control Room save those who have been there before.” Narby turned and left with an air of dismissal.

Hugh watched him leave, then said, “I don’t like this, Joe-Jim.” “Why not?” Jim asked. “It’s reasonable.”

“Perhaps it is. But … well, damn it! It seems to me, somehow, that truth ought to be free to anyone, any time!” He threw up his hands in a gesture of baffled exasperation. Joe-Jim looked at him oddly. “What a curious idea,” said Joe.

“Yeah, I know. It’s not common sense, but it seems like it ought to be. Oh, well, forget it! That’s not what I came to see you about.” “What’s on your mind, Bud?”

“How do we … Look, we finish the Trip, see? We’ve got the Ship touching a planet, like this—” He brought his two fists together. “Yes. Go on.”

“Well, when that’s done, how do we get out of the Ship?”

The twins looked confused, started to argue between themselves. Finally Joe interrupted his brother. “Wait a bit, Jim. Let’s be logical about this. It was intended for us to get out; that implies a door, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“There’s no door up here. It must be down in high weight.”

“But it isn’t,” objected Hugh. “All that country is known. There isn’t any door. It has to be up in mutie country.”

“In that case,” Joe continued, “it should be either all the way forward, or all the way aft, otherwise it would not go anywhere. It isn’t aft. There’s nothing back of Main Drive but solid bulkheads. It would need to be forward.”

“That’s silly,” Jim commented. “There’s the Control Room and the Captain’s veranda. That’s all.” “Oh, yeah? How about the locked compartments?”

“Those aren’t doors, not to the Outside anyway. Just bulkheads abaft the Control Room.” “No, stupid, but they might lead to doors.”

“Stupid, eh? Even so, how are you going to open them; answer me that, bright boy?” “What,” demanded Hugh, “are the ‘locked compartments’?”

“Don’t you know? There are seven doors, spaced on the main shaft in the same bulkhead as the door to Main Control Room. We’ve never been able to open them.” “Well, maybe that’s what we’re looking for. Let’s see!”

“It’s a waste of time,” Jim insisted. But they went.

Bobo was taken along to try his monstrous strength on the doors. But even his knotted swollen muscles couldn’t budge the levers which appeared to be intended to actuate the doors. “Well?” Jim sneered to his brother. “You see?”

Joe shrugged. “O.K., you win. Let’s go down.”

“Wait a little,” Hugh pleaded. “The second door back the handle seemed to turn a little. Let’s try it again.” “I’m afraid it’s useless,” Jim commented. But Joe said, “Oh, all right, as long as we’re here.”

Bobo tried again, wedging his shoulder under the lever and pushing from his knees. The lever gave suddenly, but the door did not open. “He’s broken it,” Joe announced.

“Yeah,” Hugh acknowledged. “I guess that’s that.” He placed his hand against the door. It swung open easily.

The door did not lead to outer space, which was well for the three, for nothing in their experience warned them against the peril of the outer vacuum. Instead a very short and narrow vestibule led them to another door which was just barely ajar. The door stuck on its hinges, but the fact that it was slightly ajar prevented it from binding anywhere else. Perhaps the last man to use it left it so as a precaution against the metal surfaces freezing together, but no one would ever know.

Bobo’s uncouth strength opened it easily. Another door lay six feet beyond. “I don’t understand this,” complained Jim as Bobo strained at the third door. “What’s the sense in an endless series of doors?”

“Wait and find out,” advised his brother.

Beyond the third door lay, not another door, but an apartment, a group of compartments, odd ones, small, crowded together and of unusual shapes. Bobo shot on. ahead and explored the place, knife in teeth, his ugly body almost graceful in flight. Hugh and Joe-Jim proceeded more slowly, their eyes caught by the strangeness Of the place.

Bobo returned, killed his momentum skillfully against a bulkhead, took his blade from his teeth, and reported, “No door. No more door any place. Bobo look.” “There has to be,” Hugh insisted, irritated at the dwarf for demolishing his hopes.

The moron shrugged. “Bobo look.”

“We’ll look.” Hugh and the twins moved off in different directions, splitting the reconnaissance between them.

Hugh found no door, but what he did find interested him even more: an impossibility. He was about to shout for Joe-Jim, when he heard his own name called. “Hugh! Come here!” Reluctantly he left his discovery, and sought out the twins. “Come see what I’ve found,” he began.

“Nevermind,” Joe cut him short. “Look at that.”

Hugh looked. “That” was a Converter. Quite impossibly but indubitably a Converter. “It doesn’t make sense,” Jim protested. “An apartment this size doesn’t need a Converter. That thing would supply power and light for half the Ship. What do you make of it, Hugh?”

Hugh examined it. “I don’t know,” he admitted, “but if you think this is strange, come see what I’ve found.” “What have you found?”

“Come see.”

The twins followed him, and saw a small compartment, one wall of which appeared to be of glass, black as if the far side were obscured. Facing the wall were two acceleratlon chairs, side by side. The arms and the lap desks of the chairs were covered with patterns of little white lights of the same sort as the control lights on the chairs in the Main Control Room.

Joe-Jim made no comment at first, save for a low whistle from Jim. He sat down in one of the chairs and started experimenting cautiously with the controls. Hugh sat down beside him. Joe-Jim covered a group of white lights on the right-hand arm of his chair; the lights in the compartment went out. When he lifted his hand the tiny control lights were blue instead of white. Neither Joe-Jim nor Hugh was startled. When the lights went out; they had expected it, for the control involved corresponded to similar controls in the Control Room.

Joe-Jim fumbled around, trying to find controls which would produce a simulacrum of the heavens on the blank glass before him. There were no such controls and he had no way of knowing that the glass was an actual view port, obscured by the hull of the Ship proper, rather than a view screen.

But he did manage to actuate the controls that occupied the corresponding position. These controls were labeled LAUNCHING; Joe-Jim had disregarded the label because he did not understand it. Actuating them produced no very remarkable results, except that a red light blinked rapidly and a transparency below the label came into life. It read: AIR-LOCK OPEN.

Which was very lucky for Joe-Jim, Hugh, and Bobo. Had they closed the doors behind them and had the little Converter contained even a few grams of mass available for power, they would have found themselves launched suddenly into space, in a Ship’s boat unequipped for a trip and whose controls they understood only by analogy with those in the Control Room. Perhaps they could have maneuvered the boat back into its cradle; more likely they would have crashed attempting it.

But Hugh and Joe-Jim were not yet aware that the “apartment” they had entered was a spacecraft; the idea of a Ship’s boat was still foreign to them. “Turn on the lights,” Hugh requested. Joe-Jim did so.

“Well?” Hugh went on. “What do you make of it?”

“It seems pretty obvious,” answered Jim. “This is another Control Room. We didn’t guess it was here because we couldn’t open the door.” “That doesn’t make sense,” Joe objected. “Why should there be two Control Rooms for one Ship?”

“Why should a man have two heads?” his brother reasoned. “From my point of view, you are obviously a supernumerary.” “It’s not the same thing; we were born that way. But this didn’t just happen; the Ship was built.”

“So what?” Jim argued. “We carry two knives, don’t we? And we weren’t born with ‘em. It’s a good idea to have a spare.”

“But you can’t control the Ship from here,” Joe protested. “You can’t see anything from here. If you wanted a second set of controls, the place to put them would be the Captain’s veranda, where you can see the stars.”

“How about that?” Jim asked, indicating the wall of glass.

“Use your head,” his brother advised. “It faces the wrong direction. It looks into the Ship, not out. And it’s not an arrangement like the Control Room; there isn’t any way to mirror the stars on it.”

“Maybe we haven’t located the controls for it.”

“Even so, you’ve forgotten something. How about that little Converter?” “What about it?”

“It must have some significance. It’s not here by accident. I’ll bet you that these controls have something to do with that Converter.” “Why?”

“Why not? Why are they here together if there isn’t some connection?”

Hugh broke his puzzled silence. Everythmg the twins had said seemed to make sense, even the contradictions. It was all very confusing. But the Converter, the little Conver— “Say, look,” he burst out.

“Look at what?”

“Do you suppose — Do you think that maybe this part of the Ship could move?” “Naturally. The whole Ship moves.”

“No,” said Hugh, “no, no. I don’t mean that at all. Suppose it moved by itself. These controls and the little Converter, suppose it could move right away from the Ship.” “That’s pretty fantastic.”

“Maybe so … but if it’s true, this is the way out.”

“Huh?” said Joe. “Nonsense. No door to the Outside here either.”

“But there would be if this apartment were moved away from the Ship: the way we came in!”

The two heads snapped simultaneously toward him as if jerked by the same string. Then they looked at each other and fell to arguing. Joe-Jim repeated his experiment witit the controls. “See?” Joe pointed out “‘Launching.’ It means to start something, to push something away.”

“Then why doesn’t it?”

“‘Air Lock Open.’ The doors we came through; it has to be that. Everything else is closed.” “Let’s try it.”

“We would have to start the Converter first.” “O.K.”

“Not so fast. Get out, and maybe you can’t come back. We’d starve.” “Hm-m-m, we’ll wait a while.”

Hugh listened to the discussion while snooping around the control panels, trying to figure them out. There was a stowage space under the lap desk of his chair; he fished into it, encountered something, and hauled it out. “See what I’ve found!”

“What Is it?” asked Joe. “Oh, a book. Lot of them back in the room next to the Converter.” “Let’s see it,” said Jim. But Hugh had opened it himself. “Log, Starship Vanguard,” he spelled out, “2 June, 2172. Cruising as before—” “What!” yelled Joe. “Let me see that!”

“3 June. Cruising as before. 4 June. Cruising as before. Captain’s mast for rewards and punishments held at 1300. See Administration Log. 5 June. Cruising as before.” “Gimme that!”

“Wait!” said Hugh. “6 June. Mutiny broke out at 0431. The watch became aware of it by visiplate. Hull, Metalsmith Ordinary, screened the control station and called on the watch to surrender, designating himself as ‘Captain.’ The officer of the watch ordered him to consider himself under arrest and signaled the Captain’s cabin. No answer.

“0435. Communications failed. The officer of the watch dispatched a party of three to notify the Captain, turn out the chief proctor, and assist in the arrest of Huff. “0441. Converter power off; free flight

“0502. Lacy, Crewman Ordinary, messenger-of-thewatch, one of the party of three sent below, returned to the control station alone. He reported verbally that the other two, Malcolm Young and Arthur Sears, were dead and that he had been permitted to return in order to notify the watch to surrender. The mutineers gave 0515 as a—”

The next entry was in a different hand: “0545. I have made every attempt to get into communication with other stations and officers in the Ship, without success. I conceive it as my duty, under the circumstances, to leave the control station without being properly relieved, and attempt to restore order down below. My decision may be faulty, since we are unarmed, but I see no other course open to me.

“Jean Baldwin, Pilot Officer Third Class, Officer of the Watch.” “Is that all?” demanded Joe.

“No,” said Hugh. “1 October (approximately), 2172. I, Theodor Mawson, formerly Storekeeper Ordinary, have been selected this date as Captain of the Vanguard. Since the last entry in this log there have been enormous changes. The mutiny has been suppressed, or more properly, has died out, but with tragic cost. Every pilot officer, every navigation officer is dead, or believed to be dead. I would not have been chosen Captain had there been a qualified man left.

“Approximately ninety per cent of the personnel are dead. Not all of that number died in the original outbreak; no crops have been planted since the mutiny; our food stocks are low. There seems to be clear evidence of cannibalism among the mutineers who have not surrendered.

“My immediate task must be to restore some semblance of order and discipline among the Crew. Crops must be planted. Aregular watch must be instituted at the auxiliary Converter on which we are dependent for heat and light and power.”

The next entry was undated. “I have been far too busy to keep this log up properly. Truthfully, I do not know the date even approximately. The Ship’s clocks no longer run. That may be attributable to the erratic operation of the auxiliary Converter, or it may possibly be an effect of radiations from outer space. We no longer have an antiradiation shield around the Ship, since the Main Converter is not in operation. My Chief Engineer assures me that the Main Converter could be started, but we have no one fitted to astrogate. I have tried to teach myself astrogation from the books at hand, but the mathematics involved are very difficult.

“About one newborn child out of twenty is deformed. I have instituted a Spartan code: such children are not permitted to live. It is harsh, but necessary.

“I am growing very old and feeble and must consider the selection of my successor. I am the last member of the crew to be born on Earth, and even I have little recollection of it. I was five when my parents embarked. I do not know my own age, but certain unmistakable signs tell me that the time is not far away when I, too, must make the Trip to the Converter.

“There has been a curious change in orientation in my people. Never having lived on a planet, it becomes more difficult as time passes for them to comprehend anything not connected with the Ship. I have ceased trying to talk to them about it; it is hardly a kindness anyhow, as I have no hope of leading them out of the darkness. Theirs is a hard life at best: they strive for a crop only to have it raided by the outlaws who still flourish on the upper levels. Why speak to them of better things?

“Rather than pass this on to my successor I have decided to attempt to hide it, if possible, in the single Ship’s boat left by the mutineers who escaped. It will be safe there a long time, otherwise some witless fool may decide to use it for fuel for the Converter. I caught the man on watch feeding it with the last of a set of Encyclopaedia Terresriana: priceless books. The idiot had never been taught to read! Some rule must be instituted concerning books.

“This is my last entry. I have put off making the attempt to place this log in safekeeping, because it is very perilous to ascend above the lower decks. But my life is no longer valuable; I wish to die knowing that a true record is left.

“Theodor Mawson, Captain.”

Even the twins were silent for a long time after Hugh stopped reading. At last Joe heaved a long sigh and said, “So that’s how it happened.” “The poor guy,” Hugh said softly.

“Who? Captain Mawson? Why so?”

“No, not Captain Mawson. That other guy, Pilot Officer Baldwin. Think of him going out through that door, with Huff on the other side.” Hugh shivered. In spite of his enlightenment, he subconsciously envisioned Huff, ‘Huff the Accursed, first to sin,’ as about twice as high as Joe-Jim, twice as strong as Bobo, and having fangs rather than teeth.

Hugh borrowed a couple of porters from Ertz, porters whom Ertz was using to fetch the pickled bodies of the war casualties to the Main Converter for fuel, and used them to provision the Ship’s boat: water, breadstuffs, preserved meats, mass for the Converter. He did not report the matter to Narby, nor did he report the discovery of the boat itself. He had no conscious reason; Narby irritated him.

The star of their destination grew and grew, swelled until it showed a visible disc and was too bright to be stared at long. Its bearing changed rapidly, for a star; it pulled across the backdrop of the stellariwn dome. Left uncontrolled, the Ship would have swung part way around it in a wide hyperbolic arc, accelerated as it flipped around the star, then sped off again into the darkness. It took Hugh the equivalent of many weeks to calculate the elements of the trajectory; it took still longer for Ertz and Joe-Jim to check his figures and satisfy themselves that the preposterous answers were right. It took even longer to convince Ertz that the way to rendezvous in space was to apply a force that pushed one away from where one wished to go, that is to say, dig in the heels, put on the brakes, kill the momentum.

In fact it took a series of experiments in free flight on the level of weightlessness to sell him the idea, otherwise he would have favored finishing the Trip by the simple expedient of crashing headlong into the star at top Speed. Thereafter Hugh and Joe-Jim calculated how to apply acceleration to kill the speed of the Vanguard and warp her into an eccentric ellipse around the star. After that, they would search for planets.

Ertz bad a little trouble understanding the difference between a planet and a star. Alan never did get it. “If my numbering is correct,” Hugh informed Ertz, “we should start accelerating any time now.”

“O.K.,” Ertz told him. “Main Drive is ready: over two hundred bodies and a lot of waste mass. What are waiting for?” “Let’s see Narby and get permission to start.”

“Why ask him?”

Hugh shrugged. “He’s Captain. He’ll want to know.”

“All right. Let’s pick up Joe-Jim and get on with it.” They left Hugh’s apartment and went to Joe-Jim’s. Joe-Jim was not there, but they found Alan looking for him, too. “Squatty says he’s gone down to the Captain’s office,” Alan informed him.

“So? It’s just as well. We’ll see him there. Alan, old boy, you know what?” “What?”

“The time has arrived. We’re going to do it! Start moving the Ship!” Alan looked round-eyed. “Gee! Right now?” “Just as soon as we can notify the Captain. Come along, if you like.”

“You bet! Wait while I tell my woman.” He darted away to his own quarters nearby. “He pampers that wench,” remarked Ertz.

“Sometimes you can’t help it,” said Hugh with a faraway look.

Alan returned promptly, although it was evident that he had taken time to change to a fresh breechcloth. “O.K.,” he bubbled. “Let’s go!”

Alan approached the Captain’s office with a proud step. He was an important guy now, he exulted to himself. He’d march on through with his friends while the guards saluted; no more of this business of being pushed around.

But the doorkeeper did not stand aside, although he did salute, while placing himself so that he filled the door. “Gangway, man!” Ertz said gruffly. “Yes, sir,” acknowledged the guard, without moving. “Your weapons, please.”

“What! Don’t you know me, you idiot? I’m the Chief Engineer.” “Yes, sir. Leave your weapons with me, please. Regulations.”

Ertz put a hand on the man’s shoulder and shoved. The guard stood firm. “I’m sorry, sir. No one approaches the Captain wearing weapons. No one.” “Well, I’ll be damned!”

“He remembers what happened to the old Captain,” Hugh observed sotto voce. “He’s smart.” He drew his own knife and tossed it to the guard, who caught it neatly by the hilt. Ertz looked; shrugged, and handed over his own. Alan, considerably crestfallen, passed his own pair over with a look that should have shortened the guard’s life.

Narby was talking; Joe-Jim was scowling on both his faces; Bobo looked puzzled, and naked, unfinished, without his ubiquitous knives and slingshot. “The matter is closed, Joe-Jim. That is my decision. I’ve granted you the faver of explaining my reasons, but it does not matter whether you like them or not.”

“What’s the trouble?” inquired Hugh.

Narby looked up. “Oh. I’m glad you came in. Your mutie friend seems to be in doubt as to who is Captain.” “What’s up?”

“He,” growled Jim, hooking a thumb toward Narby, “seems to think he’s going to disarm all the muties.” “Well, the war’s over, isn’t it?”

“It wasn’t agreed on. The muties were to become part of the Crew. Take the knives away from the muties and the Crew will kill them off in no time. It’s not fair. The Crew have knives.” “The time will come when they won’t,” Narby predicted, “but I’ll do it at my own time in my own way. This is the first step. What did you want to see me about, Ertz?”

“Ask Hugh.” Narby turned to Hugh.

“I’ve come to notify you, Captain Narby,” Hugh stated formally, “that we are about to start the Main Converter and move the Ship.”

Narby looked surprised but not disconcerted. “I’m afraid you will have to postpone that. I am not yet ready to permit officers to go up to no-weight.”

“It won’t be necessary,” Hugh explained. “Ertz and I can handle the first maneuvers alone. But we can’t wait. If the Ship is not moved at once, the Trip won’t be in your lifetime nor mine.” “Then it must,” Narby replied evenly, “wait.”

“What?” cried Hugh. “Narby, don’t you want to the Trip?” “I’m in no hurry.”

“What sort of damn foolishness is this?” Ertz demanded. “What’s got into you, Fin? Of course we move the Ship.”

Narby drummed on his desk top before replying. Then: he said, “Since there seems to be some slight misunderstanding as to who gives orders around here, I might as well let you have it straight. Hoyland, as long as your pastimes did not interfere with the administration of tbe Ship, I was willing for you to amuse yourself. I granted that willingly, for you have been very useful in your own way. But when your crazy beliefs become a possible source of corruption to good morals and a danger to the peace and security of the Ship, I have to crack down.”

Hugh had opened and closed his mouth several times during this speech. Finally he managed to get out: “Crazy? Did you say crazy?”

“Yes, I did. For a man to believe that the solid Ship can move means that he is either crazy, or an ignorant religious fanatic. Since both of you have the advantage of a scientist’s training, I assume that you have lost your minds.”

“Good Jordan!” said Hugh. “The man has seen with his own eyes, he’s seen the immortal stars, yet he sits there and calls us crazy!”

“What’s the meaning of this, Narby?” Ertz inquired coldly. “Why the razzle-dazzle? You aren’t kidding anyone; you’ve been to the Control Room, you’ve been to the Captain’s veranda, you know the Ship moves.”

“You interest me, Ertz,” commented Narby, looking him over. “I’ve wondered whether you were playing up to Hoyland’s delusions, or were deluded yourself. Now I see that you are crazy too.”

Ertz kept his temper. “Explain yourself. You’ve seen the Control Room; how can you contend that the Ship does not move?”

Narby smiled. “I thought you were a better engineer than you appear to be, Ertz. The Control Room is an enormous hoax. You know yourself that those lights are turned on and off by

switches — a very clever piece of engineering. My theory is that it was used to strike awe in the minds of the superstitious and make them believe in the ancient myths. But we don’t need it any more, the Crew believe without it. It’s a source of distraction now I’m going to have it destroyed and the door sealed up.”

Hugh went all to pieces at this, sputtered incoherently, and would have grappled with Narby had not Ertz restrained him. “Easy, Hugh,” he admonished. Joe-Jim took Hugh by the arm, his own faces stony masks.

Ertz went on quietly, “Suppose what you say is true. Suppose that the Main Converter and the Main Drive itself are nothing but dummies and that we can never start them, what about the Captain’s veranda? You’ve seen the stars there, not just an engineered shadow show.”

Narby laughed. “Ertz, you are stupider than I’ve guessed. I admit that the display in the veranda had me mystified at first, not that I ever believed in it! Then the Control Room gave the clue: it’s an Illusion, a piece of skillful engineering. Behind that glass is another compartment, about the same size and unlighted. Against its darkness those tiny moving lights give the effect of a bottomless hole. It’s essentially the same trick as they used in the Control Room.

“It’s obvious,” he went on. “I’m surprised that you did not see it. When an apparent fact runs contrary to logic and common sense, it’s obvious that you have failed to interpret the fact correctly. The most obvious fact of nature is the reality of the Ship itself, solid, immutable, complete. Any so-called fact which appears to disprove that is bound to be an illusion. Knowing that, I looked for the trick behind the illusion and found it.”

“Wait,” said Ertz. “Do you mean that you have been on the other side of the glass in the Captain’s veranda and seen these trick lights you talk about?”

“No,” admitted Narby, “it wasn’t necessary. Not that it wouldn’t be easy enough to do so, but it isn’t necessary. I don’t have to cut myself to know that knives are sharp.”

“So…” Ertz paused and thought a moment. “I’ll strike a deal with you. If Hugh and I are crazy in our beliefs, no harm is done as long as we keep our mouths shut. We try to move the Ship. If we fail, we’re wrong and you’re right.”

“The Captain does not bargain,” Narby pointed out. “However, I’ll consider it. That’s all. You may go.” Ertz turned to go, unsatisfied but checked for moment. He caught sight of Joe-Jim’s faces, and turned back. “One more thing,” he said. “What’s this about the muties? Why are you shoving Joe-Jim around? He and his boys made you Captain; you’ve got to fair about this.”

Narby’s smiling superiority cracked for amoment.

“Don’t interfere, Ertz! Groups of armed savages are not going to threaten this Ship!”

“You can do what you like with the prisoners,” Jim stated, “but my own gang keep their knives. They were promised good eating forever if they fought for you. They keep their knives. And that’s flnal!”

Narby looked him up and down. “Joe-Jim,” he remarked, “I have long believed that the only good mutie was a dead mutie. You do much to confirm my opinion. It will interest you to know that, by this time, your gang is already disarmed, and dead in the bargain. That’s why I sent for you!”

The guards piled in, whether by signal or previous arrangement it was impossible to say. Caught flatfooted, naked, weaponless, the five found themselves each with an armed man at his back before they could rally. “Take them away,” ordered Narby.

Bobo whined and looked to Joe-Jim for guidance. Joe caught his eye. “Up, Bobo!”

The dwarf jumped straight for Joe-Jim’s captor, careless of the knife at his back. Forced to split his attention, the man lost a vital half second. Joe-Jim kicked him in the stomach, and appropriated his blade.

Hugh was on the deck, deadlocked with his man, his fist clutched around the knife wrist. Joe-Jim thrust and the struggle ceased. The two-headed man looked around, saw a mixed pile- up of four bodies, Ertz, Alan, two others. Joe-Jim used his knife judiciously, being careful to match the faces with the bodies. Presently his men emerged. “Get their knives,” he ordered superfluously.

His words were drowned by a high, agonized scream. Bobo, still without a knife, had resorted to his primal weapons. His late captor’s face was a bloody mess, half bitten away. “Get his knife,” said Joe.

“Can’t reach it,” Bobo admitted guiltily. The reason was evident: the hilt protruded from Bobo’s ribs, just below his right shoulder blade. Joe-Jim examined it, touched it gently. It was stuck. “Can you walk?”

“Sure,” grunted Bobo, and grimaced.

“Let it stay where it is. Alan! With me. Hugh and Bill, cover rear. Bobo In the middle.” “Where’s Narby?” demanded Ertz, dabbing at a round on his cheekbone.

But Narby was gone, ducked out through the rear door behind his desk. And it was locked.

Clerks scattered before them in the outer office; Joe-Jim knifed the guard at the outer door while he was still raising his whistle. Hastily they retrieved their own weapons and added them to those they had seized. They fled upward.

Two decks above inhabited levels Bobo stumbled and fell. Joe-Jim picked him up. “Can you make it?” The dwarf nodded dumbly, blood on his lips. They climbed. Twenty decks or so higher it became evident that Bobo could no longer climb, though they had taken turns in boosting him from the rear. But weight was lessened appreciably at that level; Alan braced himself and picked up the solid form as if it were a child. They climbed. Joe-Jim relieved Alan. They climbed.

Ertz relieved Joe-Jim. Hugh relieved Ertz.

They reached the level on which they lived forward of their group apartments. Hugh turned in that direction. “Put him down,” commanded Joe. “Where do you think you are going?” Hugh settled the wounded man to the deck. “Homes. Where else?”

“Fool! That’s where they will look for us first.” “Where do we go?”

“Nowhere, in the Ship. We go out of the Ship!” “Huh?”

“The Ship’s boat.”

“He’s right,” agreed Ertz. “The whole Ship’s against us, now.”

“But … but—” Hugh surrendered. “It’s a long chance — but we’ll try it.” He started again in the direction of their homes. “Hey!” shouted Jim. “Not that way.”

“We have to get our women.”

“To Huff with the women! You’ll get caught. There’s no time.” But Ertz and Alan started off without question. “Oh, all right!” Jim snorted. “But hurry! I’ll stay with Bobo” Joe-Jim turned his attention to the dwarf, gently rolled him to his side and made a careful examination. His skin was gray and damp; a long red stain ran down from his right shoulder. Bobo sighed bubblingly and rubbed his head against Joe-Jim’s thigh. “Bobo tired, Boss.”

Joe-Jim patted his head. “Easy,” said Jim, “this is going to hurt.” Lifting the wounded man slightly, he cautiously worked the blade loose and withdrew it from the wound. Blood poured out freely.

Joe-Jim examined the knife, noted the deadly length of steel, and measured it against the wound. “He’ll never make it,” whispered Joe.

Jim caught his eye. “Well?”

Joe nodded slowly. Joe-Jim tried the blade he had just extracted from the wound against his own thigh, and discarded it in favor of one of his own razor-edged tools. He took the dwarf’s chin in his left hand and Joe commanded, “Look at me, Bobo!”

Bobo looked up, answered inaudibly. Joe held his eye. “Good Bobo! Strong Bobo!” The dwarf grinned as if he heard and understood, but made no attempt to reply. His master pulled his head a little to one side; the blade bit deep, snicking the jugular vein without touching the windpipe. “Good Bobo!” Joe repeated. Bobo grinned again.

When the eyes were glassy and breathing had unquestionably stopped, Joe-Jim stood up, letting the head and shoulders roll from him. He shoved the body with his foot to the side of the passage, and stared down the direction in which the others had gone. They should be back by now.

He stuck the salvaged blade in his belt and made sure that all his weapons were loose and ready.

They arrived on a dead run. “Alittle trouble,” Hugh explained breathlessly. “Squatty’s dead. No more of your men around. Dead maybe. Narby probably meant it. Here.” He handed him a long knife and the body armor that had been built for Joe-Jim, with its great wide cage of steel, fit to cover two heads.

Ertz and Alan wore armor, as did Hugh. The women did not; none had been built for them. Joe-Jim noted that Hugh’s younger wife bore a fresh swelling on her lip, as if someone had persuaded her with a heavy hand. Her eyes were stormy though her manner was docile. The older wife, Chloe, seemed to take the events in her stride. Ertz’s was crying softly; Alan’s wench reflected the bewilderment of her master.

“How’s Bobo?” Hugh inquired, as he settled Joe-Jim’s armor in place. “Made the Trip,” Joe informed him.

“So? Well, that’s that; let’s go.”

They stopped short of the level of no-weight and worked forward, because the women were not adept at weightless flying. When they reached the bulkhead which separated the Control Room and boat pockets from the body of the Ship, they went up. There was neither alarm nor ambush, although Joe thought that he saw a head show as they reached one deck. He mentioned it to his brother but not to the others.

The door to the boat pocket stuck and Bobo was not there to free it. The men tried it in succession, sweating big with the strain. Joe-Jim tried it a second time, Joe relaxing and letting Jim control their muscles, that they might not fight each other. The door gave. “Get them inside!” snapped Jim.

“And fast!” Joe confirmed. “They’re on us.” He had kept lookout while his brother strove. Ashout from down the line reinforced his warning.

The twins faced around to meet the threat while the men shoved the women in. Alan’s fuzzy-headed mate chose that moment to go to pieces, squalled, and tried to run but weightlessness defeated her. Hugh nabbed her, shoved her inside and booted her heartily with his foot.

Joe-Jim let a blade go at long throwing range to slow down the advance. It accomplished its purpose; their opponents, half a dozen of them, checked their advance. Then, apparently on signal, six knives cut the air simultaneonsly.

Jim felt something strike him, felt no pain, and concluded that the armor had saved him. “Missed us, Joe,” he exulted.

There was no answer. Jim turned his bead, tried to look at his brother. Afew inches from his eye a knife stuck through the bars of the helmet, its point was buried deep inside his left eye. His brother was dead.

Hugh stuck his head back out of the door. “Come on, Joe-Jim,” he shouted. “We’re all in.” “Get inside,” ordered Jim. “Close the door.”

“But—”

“Get inside!” Jim turned, and shoved him in the face, closing the door as he did so. Hugh had one startled glimpse of the knife and the sagging, lifeless face it pinned. Then the door closed against him, and he heard the lever turn.

Jim turned back at the attackers. Shoving himself away from the bulkhead with legs which were curiously heavy, he plunged toward them, his great arm-long knife, more a bob than a sword, grasped with both hands. Knives sang toward him, clattered against his breastplate, bit into his legs. He swung a wide awkward two-handed stroke which gutted an opponent, nearly cutting him in two. “That’s for Joe!”

The blow stopped him. He turned in the air, steadied himself, and swung again. “That’s for Bobo!”

They closed on him; he swung widely caring not where he hit as long as his blade met resistance. “And that’s for me!” Aknife planted itself in his thigh. It did not even slow him up; legs were dispensable in no-weight. “‘One for all!’”

Aman was on his back now he could feel him. No matter; here was one before him, too, one who could feel steel. As be swung, he shouted, “All for o—” The words trailed off, but the stroke was finished.

Hugh tried to open the door which had been slammed in his face. He was unable to do so; if there were means provided to do so, he was unable to figure them out. He pressed an ear against the steel and listened, but the airtight door gave back no clue.

Ertz touched him on the shoulder. “Come on,” be said. “Where’s Joe-Jim?” “He stayed behind.”

“Open up the door! Get him.”

“I can’t, it won’t open. He meant to stay, he closed it himself.” “But we’ve got to get him; we’re blood-sworn.”

“I think,” said Hugh, with a sudden flash of insight, “that’s why he stayed behind.” He told Ertz what he had seen.

“Anyhow,” he concluded, “it’s the End of the Trip to him. Get on back and feed mass to that Converter. I want power.” They entered the Ship’s boat proper. Hugh closed the air-lock doors behind them. “Alan!” he called out. “We’re going to start. Keep those damned women out of the way.”

He settled himself in the pilot’s chair, and cut the lights.

In the darkness he covered a pattern of green lights. Atransparency flashed on the lap desk: DRIVE READY. Ertz was on the job. Here goes! he thought, and actuated the launching combination. There was a short pause, a short and sickening lurch, a twist. It frightened him, since he had no way of knowing that the launching tracks were pitched to offset the normal spinning of the Ship.

The glass of the view port before him was speckled with stars; they were free — moving!

But the spread of jeweled lights was not unbroken, as it invariably had been when seen from the veranda, or seen mirrored on the Control Room walls; a great, gross, ungainly shape gleamed softly under the light of the star whose system they had entered. At first he could not account for it. Then with a rush of superstitious awe he realized that he was looking at the Ship itself, the true Ship, seen from the Outside. In spite of his long intellectual awareness of the true nature of the Ship; he had never visualized looking at it. The stars, yes; the surface of a planet, he had struggled with that concept; but the outer surface of the Ship, no.

When he did see it, it shocked him. Alan touched him. “Hugh, what is it?”

Hoyland tried to explain to him. Alan shook his head, and blinked his eyes. “I don’t get it.”

“Never mind. Bring Ertz up here. Fetch the women, too; we’ll let them see it.”

“All right. But,” he added, with sound intuition, “it’s a mistake to show the women. You’ll scare ‘em silly; they ain’t even seen the stars.”

Luck, sound engineering design, and a little knowledge. Good design, ten times that much luck, and a precious little knowledge. It was luck that had placed the Ship near a star with a planetary system, luck that the Ship arrived there with a speed low enough for Hugh to counteract it in a ship’s auxiliary craft, luck that he learned to handle it after a fashion before they starved or lost themselves in deep space.

It was good design that provided the little craft with a great reserve of power and speed. The designers had anticipated that the pioneers might need to explore the far-flung planets of a solar system; they had provided for it in the planning of the Ship’s boats, with a large factor of safety. Hugh strained that factor to the limit.

It was luck that placed them near the plane of planetary motion, luck that, when Hugh did manage to gun the tiny projectile into a closed orbit, the orbit agreed in direction with the rotation of the planets.

Luck that the eccentric ellipse he achieved should cause them to crawl up on a giant planet so that he was eventually able to identify it as such by sight.

For otherwise they might have spun around that star until they all died of old age, ignoring for the moment the readier hazards of hunger and thirst, without ever coming close enough to a planet to pick it out from the stars.

There is a misconception, geocentric and anthropomorphic, common to the large majority of the earth-bound, which causes them to visualize a planetary system stereoscopically. The mind’s eye sees a sun, remote from a backdrop of stars, and surrounded by spinning apples: the planets. Step out on your balcony and look. Can you tell the planets from the stars? Venus you may pick out with ease, but could you tell it from Canopus, if you had not previously been introduced? That little red speck: is it Mars, or is it Antares? How would you know, if you were as ignorant as Hugh Hoyland? Blast for Antares, believing it to be a planet, and you will never live to have grandchildren.

The great planet that they crawled up on, till it showed a visible naked-eye disc, was larger than Jupiter, a companion to the star, somewhat younger and larger the the Sun, around which it swung at a lordly distance. Hugh blasted back, killing his speed over many sleeps, to bring the Ship into a path around the planet. The maneuver brought him close enough to see its moons.

Luck helped him again. He had planned to ground the great planet, knowing no better. Had he been able do so they would have lived just long enough to open the air-lock.

But he was short of mass, after the titanic task of pulling them out of the headlong hyperbolic plunge around an arc past the star and warping them into a closed orbit about the star, then into a subordinate orbit around the giant planet. He pored over the ancient books, substituted endlessly in the equations the ancients had set down as the laws for moving bodies, figured and refigured, and tested even the calm patience of Chloe. The other wife, the unnamed one, kept out of his way after losing a tooth, quite suddenly.

But he got no answer that did not require him to sacrifice some, at least, of the precious, irreplaceable ancient books for fuel. Yes, even though they stripped themselves naked and chucked in their knives, the mass of the books would still be needed.

He would have preferred to dispense with one of his wives. He decided to ground on one of the moons.

Luck again. Coincidence of such a colossal proportion that one need not be expected to believe it, for the moon of that planet was suitable for human terrestrial life. Never mind, skip over it, rapidly; the combination of circumstances is of the same order needed to produce such a planet in the first place. Our own planet, under our own sun is of the “There ain’t no such animal” variety. It is a ridiculous improbability.

Hugh’s luck was a ridiculous improbability.

Good design handled the next phase. Although he learned to maneuver the little Ship out in space where there is elbow room, landing is another and a ticklish matter. He would have crashed any spacecraft designed before the designing of the Vanguard. But the designers of the Vanguard had known that the Ship’s auxiliary craft would be piloted and grounded by at least the second generation of explorers; green pilots must make those landings unassisted. They planned for it.

Hugh got the vessel down into the stratosphere and straightened it triumphantly into a course that would with certainty kill them all. The autopilots took over.

Hugh stormed and swore, producing some words which diverted Alan’s attention and admiration from the view out of the port. But nothing he could do would cause the craft to respond. It settled in its own way and leveled off at a thousand feet, an altitude which it maintained regardless of changing contour.

“Hugh, the stars are gone!” “I know it.”

“But Jordan! Hugh, what happened to them?”

Hugh glared at Alan. “I don’t know and I don’t care! You get aft with the women and stop asking silly questions.”

Alan departed reluctantly with a backward look at the surface of the planet and the bright sky; It interested him, but he did not marvel much at it; his ability to marvel had been overstrained. It was some hours before Hugh discovered that a hitherto ignored group of control lights set in motion a chain of events whereby the autopilot would ground the Ship. Since he found this

out experimentally he did not exactly choose the place of landing. But the unwinking stereo-eyes of the autopilot fed its data to the ‘brain’; the submolar mechanism selected and rejected;

the Ship grounded gently on a rolling high prairie near a clump of vegetation.

Ertz came forward. “What’s happened, Hugh?”

Hugh waved at the view port. “We’re there.” He was too tired to make much of it, too tired and too emotionally exhausted. His weeks of fighting a fight he understood but poorly, hunger, and lately thirst, years of feeding on a consuming ambition, these left him with little ability to enjoy his goal when it arrived.

But they had landed, they had finished Jordan’s Trip. He was not unhappy, at peace rather, and very tired. Ertz stared out. “Jordan!” he muttered. Then, “Let’s go out.” “All right.”

Alan came forward, as they were opening the air-lock, and the women pressed after him. “Are we there, Captain?” “Shut up,” said Hugh.

The women crowded up to the deserted view port; Alan explained to them, importantly and incorrectly, the scene outside. Ertz got the last door open.

They sniffed at the air. “It’s cold,” said Ertz. In fact the temperature was perhaps five degrees less than the steady monotony of the Ship’s temperature, but Ertz was experiencing weather for the first time.

“Nonsense,” said Hugh, faintly annoyed that any fault should be found with _his_ planet. “It’s just your imagination.” “Maybe,” Ertz conceded. He paused uneasily. “Going out?” he added.

“Of course.” Mastering his own reluctance, Hugh pushed him aside and dropped five feet to the ground “Come on; it’s fine.” Ertz joined him, and stood close to him. Both of them remained close to the Ship. “It’s big, isn’t it?” Ertz said in a hushed voice. “Well, we knew it would be,” Hugh snapped, annoyed with himself for having the same lost feeling.

“Hi!” Alan peered cautiously out of the door. “Can I comedown? Is it alright?” “Come ahead.”

Alan eased himself gingerly over the edge and joined them. He looked around and whistled. “Gosh!”

Their first sortie took them all of fifty feet from the Ship. They huddled close together for silent comfort, and watched their feet to keep from stumbling on this strange uneven deck. They made it without incident until Alan looked up from the ground and found himself for the first time in his life with nothing close to him. He was hit by vertigo and acute agoraphobia; he moaned, closed his eyes and fell.

“What in the Ship?” demanded Ertz, looking around. Then it hit him.

Hugh fought against it. It pulled him to his knees, but be fought it, steadying himself with one hand on the ground. However, he had the advantage of having stared out through the view port for endless time; neither Alan nor Ertz were cowards.

“Alan!” his wife shrilled from the open door. “Alan! Come back here!” Alan opened one eye, managed to get it focused on the Ship, and started inching back on his belly. “Man!” commanded Hugh. “Stop that! Situp.”

Alan did so, with the air of a man pushed too far. “Open your eyes!” Alan obeyed cautiously, reclosed them hastily.

“Just sit still and you’ll be all right,” Hugh added. “I’m all right already.” To prove it he stood up. He was still dizzy, but he made it. Ertz sat up.

The sun had crossed a sizable piece of the sky, enough time had passed for a well-fed man to become hungry, and they were not well fed. Even the women were outside; that had been accomplished by the simple expedient of going back in and pushing them out. They had not ventured away from the side of the Ship, but sat huddled against it. But their menfolk had even learned to walk singly, even in open spaces. Alan thought nothing of strutting a full fifty yards away from the shadow of the Ship, and did so more than once, in full sight of the women.

It was on one such journey that a small animal native to the planet let his curiosity exceed his caution. Alan’s knife knocked him over and left him kicking. Alan scurried to the spot, grabbed his fat prize by one leg, and bore it proudly back to Hugh. “Look, Hugh, look! Good eating!”

Hugh looked with approval. His first strange fright of the place had passed and had been replaced with a deep warm feeling, a feeling that he had come at last to his long home. This seemed a good omen. “Yes,” he agreed. “Good eating. From now on, Alan, always Good Eating.”

The End

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The Geography of Heaven; Journey of Souls (full text) by Michael Newton (part 1d) with world-line (MWI) annotations.

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Comment d0

This post continues our study of the Journey of Souls. This is part 1d.

The Intermediate Soul

ONCE our souls advance past Level II into the intermediate ranges of development, group cluster activity is considerably reduced. This does not mean we return to the kind of isolation we saw with the novice soul. Souls evolving into the middle development levels have less association with primary groups because they have acquired the maturity and experience for operating more independently. These souls are also reducing the number of their incarnations.

Comment d1

I have repeatedly stated that the purpose of this planet was as a sentience nursery for emerging humans as a species. Is this not what is going on in the studies by Dr Newton? Are the souls not going through an educational program? Are they not learning, advancing and then evolving?

The physical world is but a very small part of the entire universe. To absolutely understand what is going on, we have to accept that much of what is truth is beyond our observational capabilities as humans.

Within Levels III and IV we are at last ready for more serious responsibilities. The relationship we have with our guides now changes from teacher-student to one of colleagues working together. Since our old guides have acquired new student groups, it is now our turn to develop teaching skills which will eventually qualify us for the responsibilities of being a guide to someone else.

I have said the transitional stages of Levels II and IV are particularly difficult for me in pinpointing a soul’s development. For instance, some Level IV souls begin targeting themselves toward primary cluster teacher training while still in Level III, while other subjects who are clearly Level IV’s find they are unsuited to be effective guides.

Despite their high standards of morality and conduct, entities who have reached the intermediate levels of maturity are modest about their achievements. Naturally, each case is different, but I notice more composure with clients in this stage and above. I see trust rather than suspicion toward the motives of others on both a conscious and subconscious level. These people demonstrate a forward-looking attitude of faith and confidence for the future of humanity, which encourages those around them.

My questions to the more mature soul are directed to esoteric ideas of purpose and creation. I admit to taking advantage of the higher knowledge possessed by these souls for the sort of spiritual information others lack. There have been clients who have told me they felt I pushed them rather hard in drawing out their spiritual memories and I know they are right.

The more advanced souls of this world possess remarkable comprehension of a universal life plan. I want to learn as much as possible from them.

My next case falls into the upper portion of Level III development, radiating a yellow energy devoid of any reddish tones.

This client was a small, nondescript man nearly fifty years old.

His demeanor was quietly courteous towards me when we met, and I thought him a trifle solemn. I felt his unassuming detachment was somewhat studied, almost as a cover for stronger emotions. The most striking feature about him was his dark, morose eyes, which grew more intense as he began to talk about himself in a direct and persuasive manner.

He told me he worked for a charitable organization dispensing food to the homeless, and that he had once been a journalist. This client had traveled quite some distance to discuss with me his concern over a decline in enthusiasm for his work. He said he was tired and wanted to spend the rest of his life quietly alone. His first session involved a review of the highlights of many past lives so we could better evaluate a proper course for the remainder of his current life.

I began by regressing the subject rapidly through a series of early lives starting from his first life as a Cro-Magnon man in a Stone Age culture some 30,000 years ago. As we moved forward in time, I noted a consistency of lone-wolf behavior patterns as opposed to normal tribal integration.

From about 3,000 BC to 500 BC, my client lived a number of lives in the Middle East during the rise of the early city states in Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian cultures. Nevertheless, even in lives as a woman, this subject often avoided family ties, including having no children. As a man, he showed a preference for nomadism.

By the time we reached a life in Europe during the Dark Ages, I was becoming accustomed to a rebellious soul resisting tyrannical societies. During his lives, my subject worked to uplift people from fear, while remaining non-aligned to opposing factions. Suffering hardships and many setbacks, he continued as a wanderer with an obsession for freedom of movement.

Some lives were not too productive, but during the twelfth century I found him in Central America in the body of an Aztec, organizing a band of Indians against the oppressions of a high priest. He was killed in this setting as a virtual outcast, while promoting non-violent relations between tribes who were traditional enemies.

In the fourteenth century, this soul was a European chronicler, traveling the silk road to Cathay to gain understanding of the peoples of Asia. Always facile with languages (as he is today), my client died in Asia as an old man happily living in a peasant village.

In Japan, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, he was a member of the clan of the Bleeding Crane. These men were respected, independent Samurai mercenaries. At the end of this life my subject was living in seclusion from the ruling Tokugawa shoguns, because he had advised their weaker opponents on battle strategy.

Frequently the outsider, always an explorer searching for truth across many lands, this soul continued to seek a rational meaning to life while giving aid to those he met along the way.

I was surprised when he popped up as the wife of an American farmer on the frontier in the nineteenth century. The farmer died soon after their marriage. I learned my subject had deliberately incarnated to be a widow with children, tied to a piece of property, as an exercise in the loss of mobility.

When this part of his session ended I knew I was working with a more advanced, older soul, even though he had a great many lives we did not review.

Since this soul is approaching Level IV, I would not have been surprised if his first appearance on Earth had gone back 70,000 years rather than half that amount of time. However, as I have mentioned, it is not an absolute prerequisite that souls have hundreds of physical lives in order to advance. I once had a client who entered into a Level III state of awareness after only 4,000 years-an outstanding performance.

I talked to my client about his current life and his customary methods of learning in previous lives. He explained he had never been married, and that social non- alignments worked best for him.

I suggested a few alternatives for his consideration.

Primarily, I felt his lack of intimacy with people in too many lives was obstructing his progress. When this session ended, he was anxious that we explore his mind further for perceptions about the spirit world in another session.

Upon his arrival the next day, I placed him in a superconscious state and we went back to work.

Case 22 – An older soul.

Dr. N: By what name are you called in the spirit world?

S: I am called Nenthum.

Dr. N: Nenthum, do you have spirits around you right now or are you alone?

S: (pause) I am with two of my long-time companions.

Dr. N: What are their names?

S: Raoul and Senji.

Dr. N: And are the three of you part of a larger spiritual group of souls working together?

S: We were … but now the three of us work… more by ourselves.

Dr. N: What are the three of you doing at this moment?

S: We are discussing the best ways to help each other during our incarnations.

Dr. N: Tell me what you do for each other.

S: I help Senji to forgive herself for mistakes and appreciate her own worth. She needs to stop being a mother-figure all the time on Earth.

Dr. N: How does she assist you?

S: To… see my lack of a sense of belonging.

Dr. N: Give me an example of Senji’s actions to assist you with this issue.

S: Well, she was my wife in Japan after my days as a warrior were over. (something is troubling Nenthum, and after a pause he adds the following) Raoul likes to pair with Senji and I am usually alone.

Dr. N: What about Raoul, how do you two help each other?

S: I help him with patience and he helps me with my tendency to avoid community life.

Dr. N: Are you always two males and a female in your incarnations on Earth?

S: No, we can change-and do-but this is comfortable for us.

Dr. N: Why are the three of you working independently from the rest of your spiritual group?

S: (pause) Oh, we see them here… some have not gone forward with us … a few others are further ahead of us in their tasks.

Dr. N: Do you have a guide or teacher?

S: (in a soft tone) She is Idis.

Dr. N: It sounds to me as if you have a high regard for her. Do you communicate well with Idis?

S: Yes I do-not that we don’t have our disagreements.

Dr. N: What is the main area of conflict between the two of you?

S: She doesn’t reincarnate much, and I tell her she should have more direct exposure to current conditions on Earth.

Dr. N: Are you mentally in tune with Idis to such an extent that you know all about her background training as a guide?

S: (shakes head while pondering) It isn’t that we can’t ask questions … but we can only question what we know. Idis reveals to me what she thinks is relevant to my own experience.

Dr. N: Are guides able to screen their thoughts so you can’t read their minds completely?

S: Yes, the older ones get proficient at that-knowing how to filter things we don’t need to know because this knowledge would confuse us.

Dr. N: Will you learn to filter images?

S: I already have … a little.

Dr. N: This must be why I have had many people tell me they have not been given definitive answers by their guides to all their questions.

S: Yes, and the intent of the question is important … when it was asked and why. Perhaps it was not in their best interests to be given certain information which might disrupt them.

Dr. N: Aside from her teaching techniques, are you fond of Idis in terms of her identity?

S: Yes … I just wish she would agree to come with me… once.

Dr. N: Oh, you would like to actually have an Earth incarnation with her?

S: (grins mischievously) I have told her we might relate better here if she would consent to come to Earth sometime and mate with me.

Dr. N: And what does Idis say to that suggestion?

S: She laughs and says she will think about it-if I can prove to her that it would be productive.

At this junction I ask Nenthum how long Idis has been associated with him and learn she was assigned these three entities when they moved into Level III.

Nenthum, Raoul, and Senji are also under the tutelage of a beloved older master guide who has been with them since the beginning of their existence.

It would be inaccurate to assume that more advanced spirits lead lonely spiritual lives. This subject told me he was in contact with many souls. Raoul and Senji were simply his closest friends.

Levels III and IV are significant stages for souls in their development because now they are given increased responsibilities for younger souls. The status of a guide is not given to us all at once, however. As with many other aspects of soul life, we are carefully tested. The intermediate levels are trial periods for potential teachers. While our aura is still yellow, our mentors assign us a soul to look after, and then evaluate our leadership performance both in and out of physical incarnations.

Only if this preliminary training is successful are we allowed to function even at the level of a junior guide.

Not everyone is suited for teaching, but this does not keep us from becoming an advanced soul in the blue section. Guides, like everyone else, have different abilities and talents, as well as shortcomings.

By the time we reach Level V, our soul aptitudes are well known in the spirit world. We are given occupational duties commensurate with our abilities, which I will go into later in this chapter. Different avenues of approach to learning eventually bring all of us to the same end in acquiring spiritual wholeness. The richness of diversity is part of a master plan for the advancement of every soul, and I am interested in how Case 22 is progressing in Level III.

Dr. N: Nenthum, can you tell me if Idis is preparing you to be a guide, assuming you have an interest in that activity?

S: (quick response) I do have an interest.

Dr. N: Oh, then are you developing as a guide yourself?

S: (modestly) Don’t make too much of it. I’m really no more than a caretaker … helping Idis and taking directions.

Dr. N: Do you try and imitate her teaching style?

S: No, we are different. As an apprentice-a caretaker-I couldn’t do what she is able to accomplish, anyway.

Dr. N: When did you know you were ready to be a caretaker and begin assisting others spiritually?

S: It’s an … awareness which comes over you after a great number of lives … that you are more in balance with yourself than previously, and are able to aid people as a spirit and in the flesh.

Dr. N: Are you operating in or out of the spirit world as a caretaker at this time?

S: (has difficulty in forming a response) I’m out … in two lives.

Dr. N: Are you living in two parallel lives now?

S: Yes, I am.

Comment d2

Souls can partition. As I have stated previously, they can cut themselves into different bits and pieces. This includes having two separate consciousnesses during the same instant moving about the different world-lines.

In this instance, the subject states that this is exactly what has happened, and that his soul created multiple consciousnesses to occupy multiple bodies at the same instance.

The Doctor Newton assumes that this is on the same world, at the same time. But it could be at the same time, but on different world-lines.

The advantage of this is rapid growth in a smaller instance of time. But that can also be fraught with dangers as well.

Dr. N: Where are you living in this other life?

S: Canada.

Dr. N: Is geography important to your Canadian assignment?

S: Yes, I picked a poor family in a rural community where I would be more indispensable. I’m in a small mountain town.

Dr. N: Give me the details of this Canadian life and your responsibilities.

S: (slowly) I’m … taking care of my brother Billy. His face and hands were horribly burned by a flash fire from a kitchen stove when he was four years old. I was ten when it happened.

Dr. N: Are you the same age in the Canadian life as you are now in your American one?

S: About the same.

Dr. N: And your prime assignment in the Canadian life?

S: To care for Billy. To help him see the world past his pain. He is almost blind and his facial disfigurement causes him to be rejected by the community. I try to open him to an acceptance of life and to know who he really is from the inside. I read to him and go for walks in the forest holding his arm. I don’t hold his hands because they are so damaged.

Dr. N: What about your Canadian parents?

S: (without boasting) I am the parent. My father left after the fire and never came back. He was a weak man who was not kind to the family even before the fire. My mother’s soul is not very… capable in her body. They need someone with seasoning.

Dr. N: Someone physically strong?

S: (laughing) No, I’m a woman in Canada. I’m Billy’s sister. My mother and brother require someone mentally tough to hold the family together and give them a course to follow.

Dr. N: How do you provide for the family?

S: I am a baker and I’ll never marry, because I can’t leave them.

Dr. N: What is your brother’s major lesson?

S: To acquire humility without being crushed by a life of little self-gratification.

Dr. N: Why didn’t you take the role of your burned brother? Wouldn’t that scenario provide you with the more difficult challenge?

S: (grimacing) Hmm-I’ve already been through that one!

Note: This subject has been physically injured in a number of past lives.

Dr. N: Yes, I suppose you have. I wonder if Billy’s soul was ever involved with physically hurting you in one of your past lives?

S: As a matter of fact, he did in one of them. When I was the sufferer another caretaker stayed with me and I was a grateful receiver. Now it is Billy’s turn and I am here for him.

Dr. N: Did you know in advance your brother was going to be incapacitated before you came into the Canadian life?

S: Sure, Idis and I discussed the whole situation. She said Billy’s soul would require a caretaker, and since I had negative contact with this soul before in another life, I welcomed the job.

Dr. N: Besides the karmic lesson for Billy’s soul, there are some for you too, in terms of your being in the role of a woman who is tied down. You can’t just take off and roam around as you often do in your lives.

S: That’s true. The degree of difficulty in a life is measured by how challenging the situation is for you, not others. For me, being Billy’s caretaker is harder than when I was on the receiving end with another soul as my caretaker.

Dr. N: Give me the most difficult factor of this assignment for you as a caretaker.

S: To sustain a child … through their helplessness … to adulthood … to teach a child to confront torment with courage.

Dr. N: Billy’s life is an extreme example, but it does seem Earth’s children have much physical and emotional pain to go through.

S: Without addressing and overcoming pain you can never really connect with who you are and build on that. I must tell you, the more pain and adversity which come to you as a child, the more opportunity to expand your potential.

Comment d3

It is all about experiencing things and events. The greater the diversity of experiences, the more quanta that can be added to the soul. As well as the more thoughts, in quantity and diversity, that one can have. This keeps the exposure to new things fresh and really helps generate a set of robust and well-rounded quanta “building blocks” that the soul can use to grow.

Dr. N: And how are things working out for you as a caretaker in Canada?

S: There is a more difficult set of choices to be made in the Canadian family-unlike my American life. But, I have confidence in myself … to put my comprehension to practical use.

Dr. N: Did Idis encourage or discourage your wanting to accelerate development by living parallel lives?

S: She is always open about this … I haven’t done it too much in the past.

Dr. N: Why not?

S: Life combinations can be tiring and divisive. The effort may become counter- productive with diminished returns for both lives.

Dr. N: Well, I see that you are helping people in both your lives today, but have you ever lived contrasting lives where you did poorly in one life and better in another at the same time?

S: Yes, although that was a long time ago on Earth. This is one of the advantages of life combinations. One life can offset the other. Still, doing this can be rough going.

Dr. N: Then why do the guides permit parallel lives?

S: (scowling at me) Souls are not in a rigid bureaucratic environment. We are allowed to make mistakes in judgement and learn from them.

Comment d4

Souls can partition multiple consciousnesses, but it is ill advised.

Dr. N: I have the impression you think the average soul is better off living one life at a time.

S: I would say yes, in most instances, but there are other motivations to cause us to speed up incarnations.

Dr. N: Such as … ?

S: (amused) The rewards for bunching up lives can allow for more reflection out of incarnation.

Comment d5

True. But it’s a stretch.

Dr. N: You mean the rest periods between lives might last longer for us after concurrent lives?

S: (smiles) Sure, it takes longer to reflect on two lives than one.

Dr. N: Nenthum, I just have a couple more questions on the mechanics of soul- splitting. How do you see the manner in which you divide your soul energy into various parts?

Comment d6

It’s all quanta. It can be configured in various ways, and souls use experiences int he human form (primarily) to obtain quanta. The quanta can then be reworked into globes, known as garbions that are connected to each other via swales..

S: We are … as particles … of energized units. We originated out of one unit.

Dr. N: What was the original unit.

Comment d7

Souls are made up of quanta. The quanta form distinct shapes or “units”. These are rather difficult to define using conventional technology as they exist outside of time and space, which are the primary units of measure in our physical universe. Sigh..

S: The maker.

Dr. N: Does each part of your soul remain intact, complete within itself?

S: Yes, it does.

Dr. N: Do all parts of our soul energy go out of the spirit world when we incarnate?

S: Part of us never leaves, since we do not totally separate from the maker.

Dr. N: What does the part that remains in the spirit world do while we are on Earth in one or more bodies?

S: It is … more dormant … waiting to be rejoined to the rest of our energy.

Most of my colleagues who work with past life clients have listened to overlapping time chronologies from people living on Earth in two places at once. Occasionally, there are three or more parallel lives. Souls in almost any stage of development are capable of living multiple physical lives, but I really don’t see much of this in my cases.

Comment d8

Souls can partition. We, as humans like to believe that our consciousness is all that there is and as such we identify it as self.

Well… sorry, but that is wrong.

We possess multiple consciousnesses and it id difficult (being in the human physical form) to think otherwise. Yet, when your consciousness is free of the physical universe, and in the non-physical universe, the ability to have two consciousnesses at one time is not a problem at all.

In fact, you can consider ever past life to be a single unified consciousness. Thus you can remember all the consciousnesses together… if it is your desire. Most people prefer to segregate them to help form their resultant base personality at any given moment.

Many people feel the idea of souls having the capacity to divide in the spirit world and then attaching to two or more human bodies is against all their preconceptions of a singular, individualized spirit.

I confess that I too felt uncomfortable the first time a client told me about having parallel lives.

I can understand why some people find the concept of soul duality perplexing, especially when faced with the further proposition that one soul may even be capable of living in different dimensions during the same relative time.

What we must appreciate is, if our souls are all part of one great oversoul energy force which divides, or extends itself to create our souls, then why shouldn’t the offspring of this intelligent soul energy have the same capacity to detach and then recombine?

Collecting information about spiritual activity from souls who are in the higher stages of development is sometimes frustrating. This is because the complex nature of memory and knowledge at these levels can make it difficult to sift out what these people recognize and won’t tell me, from what they really don’t know.

Case 22 was both knowledgeable and open to my questions. This case is compatible with other accounts in my files about the diversity of soul training in the spirit world.

Dr. N: Nenthum, I want to turn now to your activities in the spirit world when you are not so busy with Earth incarnations, interacting in souls groups and learning to be a guide. Can you tell me of other spiritual areas in which you are occupied?

S: (long pause) Yes, there are other areas … I know of them

Dr. N: How many?

S: (cautiously) I can think of four.

Dr. N: What would you call these areas of activity?

S: The World Without Ego, the World of All Knowing, the World of Creation and Non-creation, and the World of Altered Time.

Dr. N: Are they worlds which exist in our physical universe?

S: One does, the rest are non-dimensional spheres of attention.

Comment d9

Souls can crate their own areas or regions within a given universe. These are space with their own physical properties and their own laws. Many of these spaces are reused and are well established areas where souls can learn, and experience life.

Dr. N: All right, let’s start with the non-dimensional spheres. Are these three areas in the spirit world for the use of souls?

S: Yes.

Dr. N: Why do you call all these spiritual areas worlds?

S: I see them as … habitations for spiritual life.

Dr. N: So, three of them are mental worlds?

S: Yes, that’s what they are.

Dr. N: What is the World Without Ego?

S: It’s the place of learning to be.

Dr. N: I have heard of it, expressed in different ways. Doesn’t it involve the beginners?

S: Yes, the newly created soul is there to learn who they are. It’s the place of origin.

Dr. N: Are the ego-identities passed out at random, or is there a choice for beginner souls?

S: The new soul is not capable of choice. You acquire your character based upon the way your energy is … combined … put together for you.

Comment d10

Souls do not organically grow and suddenly materialize. They are assembled. Other souls build them. It’s almost like a factory making robots, if you can tolerate that analogy.

Dr. N: Is there some sort of spiritual inventory of characteristics that are assigned to souls-so much of one type, so much of another?

S: (long pause) I think many factors are considered in the allocations of that which makes us who we are. What I do know is, once given, ego becomes a covenant between oneself and the givers.

Comment d11

Creation of garbions. The behaviors that one manifests is a function of the design and layout of the garbions (and the swales). Thus, for instance, “ego” is a result of a garbionic configuration.

Dr. N: What does that mean?

S: To do the best I can with who I am.

Dr. N: So, the purpose of this world is the distribution of soul identity by advanced beings?

S: Yes, the new soul is pure energy with no real Self yet. The World Without Ego provides you with a signature.

Dr. N: Then why do you call it the World Without Ego?

S: Because the newly created souls arrive with no ego. The idea of Self has not come into the new soul’s consciousness. It is here where the soul is offered meaning to its existence.

Dr. N: And does the creation of souls with personhood go on continually?

S: As far as I know, yes.

Dr. N: I want you to answer this next question carefully for me. When you acquired your particular identity as a soul, did that automatically mean you were slated for Earth incarnations in human form?

S: Not specifically, no. Planets don’t last forever.

Dr. N: I wondered if certain types of souls have an affinity for specific forms of physical life in the universe?

S: (pause) I won’t argue against that.

Dr. N: In your beginnings, Nenthum, were you given the opportunity to choose other planetary hosts besides humans on Earth?

S: Ah … as a new soul … the guides assist in those selections. I was drawn to human beings.

Dr. N: Were you given other choices?

S: (long pause) Yes … but it’s not very clear at the moment. They usually start you on an easy world or two, without much to do. Then I was offered service on this severe planet.

Dr. N: Earth is considered severe?

S: Yes. On some worlds you must overcome physical discomforts-even suffering. Others lean toward mental contests. Earth has both.

Comment d12

You need to experience a harsh winter to appreciate Spring. You need to live in the desert for a few years to appreciate grass and trees. You need to spend five years in prison to appreciate the freedom to watch television.

We get kudos for doing well on the hard worlds. (smiling) We are called the adventurous ones by those who don’t travel much.

Dr. N: What really appeals to you about Earth?

S: The kinship humans have for each other while they struggle against one another… competing and collaborating at the same time.

Dr. N: Isn’t that a contradiction?

S: (laughs) That’s what appeals to me-mediating quarrels of a fallible race which has so much pride and need of self-respect. The human brain is rather unique, you know.

Dr. N: How?

S: Humans are egocentric but vulnerable. They can make their character mean and yet have a great capacity for kindness. There is weak and courageous behavior on Earth. It’s always a push-me pull-you tug-of-war going on with human values. This diversity suits my soul.

Dr. N: What are some of the other things about human hosts which might appeal to the souls who are sent to Earth?

S: Hmm… those of us developing on Earth have … a sanction to help humans know of the infinite beyond their life and to assist them in expressing true benevolence through their passion. Having a passion to fight for life-that’s what is so worthwhile about humanity.

Dr. N: Humans also have a great capacity for malevolence.

S: That’s part of the passion. But it’s evolving too, and when humans experience trouble, they can be at their best and are … quite noble.

Dr. N: Perhaps it is the soul which fosters the positive characteristics you suggested?

S: We try to enhance what is already there.

Dr. N: Does any soul ever go back to the World Without Ego after they have once been there and acquired identity?

S: (uncomfortable) Yes … but I don’t want to get into that…

Dr. N: Well, then we won’t, but I have been told some souls do return if their conduct during physical assignments is consistently irregular. I have the impression they are considered defective and are returned to the factory for a kind of spiritual prefrontal lobotomy?

S: (subject shakes his head with annoyance) I am offended by that description. Where did you get such a notion? Those souls who have developed severe obstacles to improvement are mended by the restoration of positive energy.

Dr. N: Is this procedure just for Earth souls?

S: No, young souls from everywhere may require restoration as a last resort.

Comment d13

There is no Hell. The only “punishment” a person can have is to undergo a reincarnation where their roles are reversed. There is, however, a process of restoration and rebuilding.

Dr. N: Are these restored spirits then allowed to return to their respective groups and eventually go back to incarnating on physical worlds?

S: (sighs deeply) Yes.

Dr. N: How would you compare the World Without Ego to the World of All Knowing?

S: They are opposites. This world is not for young souls.

Dr. N: Have you been to the World of All Knowing?

S: No, I’m not ready. I am only aware of it as a place we strive for.

Dr. N: What do you know about this spiritual area?

S: (long pause) It is a place of contemplation … the ultimate mental world of planning and design. I can tell you little about this sphere except it is the final destination of all thought. The senses of all living things are coordinated here.

Dr. N: Then the World of All Knowing is abstract in the highest form?

S: Yes, it’s about blending content with form-the rational with ideals. It is a dimension where the realization of all our hopes and dreams is possible.

Dr. N: Well, if you can’t go there yet, how come you know about it?

S: We get … glimpses … as an incentive to encourage us to make that final effort to finish our work and join the masters.

Comment d14

This is referred to as a “highest level” spiritual “plane” in Asian religions, and New Age literature.

The foundation of the spirit world is a place of knowing and has been alluded to under different names by clients. I am given only bare references to this universal absolute, because even my advanced subjects have no direct experience there. All souls are anxious to reach and be absorbed by this nucleus, especially as they draw closer and are enticed by what little they can see.

I’m afraid the World of All Knowing can only be fully understood by a non-reincarnating soul above Level V.

Dr. N: If the World Without Ego and the World of All Knowing are at opposite ends of a soul’s experience, then where does the World of Altered Time fall?

S: This sphere is available to all souls because it represents their own physical world. In my case, it is Earth.

Dr. N: Oh, this must be the physical dimension you told me about?

S: No, the sphere of Earth is only simulated for my use.

Dr. N: Then all souls in the spirit world wouldn’t study the same simulated world?

S: No, each of us studies our own geographical planet, where we incarnate. They are physically real … temporarily.

Comment d15

This is a place where simulations of the earth and a sequence of world-lines are created. It is a simulation like a holo-deck.

Dr. N: And you don’t physically live on this simulated world which appears as Earth-you only use it?

S: Yes, that’s right-for training purposes.

The Holodeck is a fictional device from the television franchise Star Trek. It is a stage where participants may engage with different virtual reality environments.

Dr. N: Why do you call this third sphere the World of Altered Time?

S: Because we can change time sequences to study specific events.

Dr. N: What is the basic purpose of doing this?

S: To improve my decisions for life. This study makes me more discriminating and prepares me for the World of All Knowing.

Note: Subjects frequently use the term “world” to describe non-physical spatial work areas. These regions can be tiny or indescribably large in relation to the soul and may involve different dimensions.  I believe there are separate realities  for different learning experiences outside the restrictions of time. The coexistence of past, present, and future time in spiritual settings suggested by this case will be explored further in the next two chapters with Cases 23 and 25.

Dr. N: We haven’t talked about the World of Creation and Non-creation. This must be the three-dimensional physical world you spoke of earlier.

Comment d16

This is a actual physical world within the physical universe. It is contemporaneous with the earth universe..

S: Yes, and we enjoy using it as well.

Dr. N: Is this world intended for the use of all souls?

S: No, it is not. I’m just starting to apply myself there. I am considered a newcomer.

Dr. N: Well, before we get into that, I want to ask if this physical world is the same as Earth.

S: No, it is a little different. It’s larger and somewhat colder. There is less water- fewer oceans, but similar.

Dr. N: Is this planet further from its sun than Earth is from our sun?

S: Yes.

Dr. N: If I could call this physical world Earth II, since it seems to be geographically similar to the Earth we know, would it be near Earth I in the sky?

S: No.

Dr. N: Where is Earth II in relation to Earth I?

S: (pause) I can’t tell you.

Dr. N: Is Earth II in our Milky Way galaxy?

S: (long pause) No, I think it’s further away.

Dr. N: Could I see the galaxy Earth II is located in with a telescope from my backyard?

S: I… would think so.

Dr. N: Would you say the galaxy containing this physical world is shaped like a spiral as our galaxy, or is it elliptical? How would it look in a telescope from a long way off?

S: … as a great extended … chain … (with a troubled expression) I can’t tell you more.

Note: As an amateur stargazer who uses a large reflector telescope designed for deep sky objects, I am always inquisitive when a session takes an astronomical turn. Client responses to these kinds of questions usually fall short of my expectations. I am never sure if this is due to blocking by guides or the subject’s lack of a physical frame of reference between Earth and the rest of our universe.

Dr. N: (I throw out a leading question) I suppose you go to Earth II to reincarnate with some sort of intelligent being?

S: (loudly) No! That’s just what we don’t want to do there.

Dr. N: When do you go to Earth II?

S: Between my lives on this Earth.

Dr. N: Why do you go to Earth II?

S: We go there to create and just enjoy ourselves as free spirits.

Dr. N: And you don’t bother the inhabitants of Earth II?

S: (enthusiastically) There are no people … it’s so peaceful … we roam among the forests, the deserts, and over oceans with no responsibilities.

Dr. N: What is the highest form of life on Earth II?

S: (evasive) Oh … small animals … without much intelligence.

Dr. N: Do animals have souls?

S: Yes, all living things do-but they have very simple fragments of mind energy.

Comment d17

Everything has a soul. However, the complexity varies.

Dr. N: Has your soul, and that of your friends, evolved from using lower forms of physical life on Earth I after your creation?

S: We don’t know for sure, but none of us thinks so.

Dr. N: Why not?

S: Because intelligent energy is arranged by … a precedence of life. Plants, insects, reptiles-each is in a family of souls.

Dr. N: And all categories of living things are separated from each other?

S: No. The maker’s energy joins the units of every living thing in existence.

Dr. N: Are you involved with this element of creation?

S: (startled) Oh, no!

Dr. N: Well, who is selected to visit Earth II?

S: Those of us who are connected with Earth come here. This is a vacation spot compared to Earth.

Dr. N: Why?

S: There is no fighting, bickering, or striving for supremacy. There is a pristine atmosphere and all life is … quiet. This place gives us an incentive to return to Earth and make it more peaceful, too.

Dr. N: Well, I do see how this Garden of Eden would allow you to rest and be carefree, but you also said you come here to create.

S: Yes, we do.

Dr. N: It is no accident then that souls from Earth come to a world that is so similar geographically?

S: That’s right.

Dr. N: Do other souls, who are not earthbound, go to physical worlds which resemble those planets where they incarnate?

S: Yes … younger worlds with simpler organisms … to learn to create without any intelligent life around.

Dr. N: Go on.

S: We can experiment with creation and see it developing here. It’s as if you were in a lab where you can form physical things from your energy.

Dr. N: Do these physical things resemble what you might see on Earth I?

S: Yes, only on Earth. That’s why I am here.

Dr. N: Start with your arrival on Earth II and explain to me what your soul does first.

S: (balks at my question and then finally says) I’m … not very good.

Note: Since this subject is experiencing resistance, I take a few minutes for reconditioning and end with the following: “On the count of three you will feel more relaxed about telling me what you and I consider appropriate for my knowledge. One, two, three!” I repeat my question.

S: I look to see what I am supposed to make on the ground in front of me. Then I mold the object in my mind and try and create the same thing with small doses of energy. The teachers assist us with … control. I’m supposed to see my mistakes and make corrections.

Dr. N: Who are the teachers?

S: Idis and Mulcafgil (subject’s highly advanced guide) … and there are other instructors around … I don’t know them very well.

Dr. N: Try to be as clear as possible. What exactly are you doing?

S: We… form things…

Dr. N: Living things?

S: I’m not ready for that yet. I experiment with the basic elements-you know, hydrogen and oxygen-to create planetary substance … rocks, air, water … keeping everything very small.

Dr. N: Do you actually create the basic elements of our universe?

S: No, I just use the elements available.

Dr. N: In what way?

S: I take the basic elements and charge them with impulses from my energy … and they can change.

Dr. N: Change into what?

S: (simply) I’m good with rocks …

Dr. N: How do you form rocks with your energy?

S: Oh … by learning to heat and cool … dust … to make it hard.

Dr. N: Do you make the minerals in the dust?

S: They do that for you … the teachers give us that stuff … gas vapors for water making … and so on …

Dr. N: I want to understand this clearly. Your work consists of learning to create by causing heat, pressure, and cooling from your energy flow?

S: That’s about right-by alternating our currents of energy radiation.

Dr. N: So, you don’t actually produce the substance of rock and water in some chemical way?

S: No, like I told you, my job is to transform things by … mixing what I am given. I play with the frequency and dosages of my energy-it’s tricky, but not too complicated …

Dr. N: Not complicated! I thought nature did those things?

S: (laughs) Who do you think nature is?

Comment d18

Don’t you mess around with “Mother Nature”.

Dr. N: Well, who creates the basic elements of your experiments-the primary substances of physical matter?

S: The maker … and those creating on a grander scale than me.

Dr. N: Well, in a sense you are creating inanimate objects such as rocks.

S: Hmm… it’s more our trying to copy what we see in front of us what we know. (as an afterthought) I’m getting into plants but I can’t do them yet.

Dr. N: And you start small, experimenting until you get better?

S: That’s it. We copy things and compare them against the original so we can make larger models.

Dr. N: This all sounds like souls playing as children in a sandbox with toys.

S: (smiles) We are children. Directing an energy flow resembles the sculpturing of clay.

Dr. N: Are the other members of this creative training class from your original cluster group?

S: Some are. Most come from all over (the spirit world), but they have all incarnated on Earth.

Dr. N: Does everyone make the same things as you do?

S: Well, of course, some of us are better with certain things, but we help each other. The teachers come around and give us tips and advice on how to improve … but … (stops)

Dr. N: But, what?

S: (sheepishly) If I am clumsy and do a bad job, I disassemble some creations without showing them to Idis.

Dr. N: Give me an example.

S: Plants … I don’t apply my energy delicately enough to produce the proper chemical conversions.

Dr. N: You are not good with the formation of plant life?

S: No, so I undo my abominations.

Dr. N: Is this what you mean by uncreation? You can destroy energy?

S: Energy can’t be destroyed. We reassemble it and start over using different combinations.

Comment d19

The physical universe did not come into being naturally. It was fabricated. It is a creation and a technology in order for souls to grow and advance with..

Dr. N: I don’t see why the creator needs your help in creating.

S: For our benefit. We participate in these exercises so that when our work is judged to be of quality, hopefully we can make real contributions to life.

Dr. N: If we are all working up the ladder of development as souls, Nenthum, I am left with the impression the spirit world is one huge organizational pyramid with a supreme authority of power at the top.

S: (sighs) No, you are wrong. It is not a pyramid. We are all threads in the same long piece of fabric. We are all woven into it.

Dr. N: It’s hard for me to visualize fabric when there are so many levels of competency for souls.

S: Think of it as a moving continuum rather than souls being in brackets of highs and lows.

Dr. N: I always think of souls moving up in their existence.

S: I know you do, but consider us moving across

Dr. N: Give me something I can picture in my mind.

S: It’s as if we are all part of a universal train on a flat track of existence. Most of the souls on Earth are in one car moving along the track.

Dr. N: Are all other souls in different cars?

S: Yes, but all on the same track.

Dr. N: Where are the conductors such as Idis?

S: They move back and forth between the connected cars, but sit closer to the engine.

Dr. N: Where is the engine?

S: The maker? Up front, naturally.

Dr. N: Can you see the engine from your car?

S: (laughs at me) No, but I can smell the smoke. I can feel the engine rumbling along and I can hear the motor.

Dr. N: It would be nice if all of us were closer to the engine.

S: Ultimately, we will be.

I have found it is not necessary for souls to go to physical worlds when they begin using their energy in life creation training. Apparently, these exercises begin in group settings where souls find it easier to pool their energy with each other and their instructor. A subject explained the process this way…

“When I started, my group formed a circle around Senwa (guide). Collectively, we had to practice so hard to harmonize our thoughts and fine-tune our ability to all focus on one thing with the same intensity. One time we were working on a tree leaf after Senwa demonstrated how it should appear in front of us. As we directed our beams of energy for texture, color, and shape we kept messing up. We weren’t unified, so a small part of the leaf did not have the proper veining and pigmentation. I am very serious and kind of a perfectionist in my studies, but Nemi (the group jokester) was deliberately alternating his energy the wrong way to screw up the experiment for laughs and because he was tired of the lesson. We finally got him to behave and completed the assignment.”

From what I am able to determine, souls are expected to individually work with the forces of creation by the time they are solidly established in Level III.

Exposure to plant photosynthesis takes place before student souls work up the organic scale of life.

I am told that early creation training consists of souls learning relationships between substances to develop the ability of unifying their energy with different values in the elements. The formation of inanimate to animate objects from the simple to the complex is a long, slow process. Students are encouraged to create miniature planetary microhabitats for a given set of organisms which can adapt to certain environmental conditions.

With practice comes improvement, but not until they approach Level V do my clients begin to feel they might actually contribute to the development of living things. We will hear more about this with Case 23.

Some souls seem to have a natural gift for working with energy in their creation classes. My cases indicate ability in creation assignments does not mean a soul is at the same level of advancement in all other areas of the spiritual curricula. A soul may be a good technician in harnessing the forces of creation, but lack the subtle techniques of a competent guide. Perhaps this is why I have been given the impression that the highly advanced soul is allowed to specialize.

In the previous chapter, I explained some benefits of soul solitude and the last case gave us another example. Spiritual experience is not easily translated into human language.

Comment d20

This is very much the truth.

Case 22 talks about the World of Altered Time as a means of transient planetary study. To someone in trance, it is the timeless mental world that is true reality while all else is an illusion created for various benefits. Other subjects at about the same level call this sphere “the space of transformation” or simply “rooms of recreation.” Here, I’m told, souls are able to meld their energy into animate and inanimate objects created for learning and pleasure.

Comment d21

“Play” is the work of children. It’s how we learn; through play..

One subject said to me, “I think of what I want and it happens. I know I’m being assisted. We can be anything familiar to our past experiences.

Comment d22

Oh. So much fun, eh?.

For instance, souls can become rocks to capture the essence of density, trees for serenity, water for a flowing cohesiveness, butterflies for freedom and beauty and whales for power and immensity. People deny these actions represent former earthly transmigrations.

I have also learned souls may become amorphous without substance or texture and totally integrate into a particular feeling, such as compassion, to sharpen their sensitivity.

Some subjects tell of being mystical spirits of nature including figures I associate with folklore, such as elves, giants and mermaids. Personal contact with strange mythological beasts are mentioned as well. Theses accounts are so vivid it is hard for me to simply label them as metaphoric.

Comment d23

There are all sorts of non-physical beings, and physical beings from other realities, and (yes) other alternative world-lines that actually do exist. These mythological figures are actually real.

Are the old folk tales of many races pure superstition, or manifestations of shared soul experience? I have the sense that many of our legends are the sympathetic memories of souls carried from other places to Earth long ago.

The Advanced Soul

PEOPLE who possess souls which are both old and highly advanced are scarce. Although I haven’t had the opportunity to regress many Blues in Level V, they are always stimulating to work with because of their comprehension and far-reaching spiritual consciousness.

The fact is, a person whose maturity is this high doesn’t seek out a regression therapist to resolve life-plan conflicts.

In most cases, Level V’s are here as incarnated guides. Having mastered the fundamental issues most of us wrestle with daily, the advanced soul is more interested in making small refinements toward specific tasks.

We may recognize them when they appear as public figures, such as a Mother Teresa; however, it is more usual for the advanced soul to go about their good works in a quiet, unassuming manner. Without displaying self-indulgence, their fulfillment comes from improving the lives of other people.

They focus less on institutional matters and more on enhancing individual human values. Nevertheless, Level V’s are also practical, and so they are likely to be found working in a cultural mainstream which allows them to influence people and events.

I have been asked if most people who are sensitive, aesthetic, and particularly right- brained have advanced souls since individuals with these characteristics often appear to be at odds with the wrongs of an imperfect world.

I see no correlation here.

Being emotional, appreciating beauty, or having extrasensory impressions- including psychic talent-does not necessarily denote an advanced soul.

Comment d24

Skill levels have no bearing on soul development. They are a function of the lifetime that the consciousness lives within a given world-line train. They are unique and limited to the specific consciousness and the world-line path. Not the ability and the growth of a soul int he grand scheme of things.

The mark of an advanced spirit is one who has patience with society and shows extraordinary coping skills. Most prominent is their exceptional insight.

This is not to say life has no karmic pitfalls for them, otherwise the Level V probably wouldn’t be here at all.

They may be found in all walks of life, but are frequently in the helping professions or combating social injustice in some fashion. The advanced soul radiates composure, kindness, and understanding toward others. Not being motivated by self-interest, they may disregard their own physical needs and live in reduced circumstances.

Comment d25

A highly advanced soul might live a life of squalor, poverty, trials or hardships. They might end up being shunned by others. There is no way that a person can tell who is spiritually advanced or who is not..

The individual I have chosen to represent the Level V soul is a woman in her mid- thirties who works for a large medical treatment facility specializing in chemical substance abuse. I was introduced to this woman by a colleague who told me of her skill in guiding recovering drug addicts into an improved state of self-awareness.

At our first meeting, I was struck by the woman’s expression of serenity while surrounded by chaotic emergencies at her place of employment. She was tall and excessively thin, with flaming red hair which stuck out in all directions. Although warm and friendly, there was about her an air of impenetrability. Her clear, luminous gray eyes were those of one who sees small things unnoticed by ordinary folk. I felt she was looking into rather than at me.

My colleague suggested the three of us have lunch because this woman was interested in my studies of the spirit world.

She told me that she had never been hypnotically regressed but there was the sense of a long spiritual genealogy through her own meditations. She thought our meeting was no accident on her own learning path and we came to an agreement to explore her spiritual knowledge.

A few weeks later she arrived at my office. Clearly, this woman had no compelling desire for a long chronology of past life history. I decided to get a brief sketch of her earliest lives on Earth to use as a springboard into superconscious memories.

She rapidly entered into a deep trance and made instant contact with her inner self.

Almost at once, I found this woman’s span of incarnations staggering, going far back into the distant past of human life on Earth. Touching on her earliest memories, I came to the conclusion her first lives occurred at the beginning of the last warm interglacial period which lasted from 130,000 to 70,000 years ago, before the last great Ice Age spread over the planet.

During the warmer climate of the middle Paleolithic period of Earth’s history, my subject described living in moist, sub-tropical savannas near hunting, fishing, and plant-gathering areas.

Later, some 50,000 years ago, when continental sheets of ice had again changed Earth’s climate, she spoke of living in caves and enduring bitter cold.

Leaping rapidly over large blocks of time, I found her physical appearance changing from a slightly bent to a more erect posture. As we moved forward in time, I directed her to look into pools of water and feel her body while reporting back to me.

Her sloping forehead became more vertical over thousands of years in different bodies.

Supraorbital ridges above the eyes grew less pronounced as did body hair and the massive jaws of archaic man. In her many lives as both men and women, I was given enough information on habitat, the use of fire, tools, clothes, food, and ritualistic tribal practices for rough anthropological dating.

Paleontologists have estimated Homo erectus, an ape-like ancestor of modern humans, appeared at least 1.7 million years ago. Have souls been incarnating on Earth for this long, utilizing the bodies of these primitive bipeds we call hominids?

A few of my more advanced clients declare that highly advanced souls who specialize in seeking out suitable hosts for young souls, evaluated life on Earth for over a million years.

My impression is these examiner souls found the early hominid brain cavity and restricted voice box to be inadequate for soul development earlier than some 200,000 years ago.

Archaic Homo sapiens, whom we call humans, evolved several hundred thousand years ago.

Within the last 100,000 years, we find two clear signs of spiritual consciousness and communication. These are burial practices and ritualistic art, as found in carved totems and rock drawings. There is no anthropological evidence that these practices existed on Earth before Neanderthal peoples.

Souls eventually made us human, not the reverse.

One of my advanced subjects remarked, “Souls have seeded the Earth in different cycles.” A composite of information collected from a wide range of clients suggests to me that the land masses we know today deviate from earlier continents, drowned, perhaps, by cataclysmic volcanic or magnetic upheavals.

For instance, the Azores in the Atlantic Ocean have been said to represent the tops of mountains of the submerged continent of Atlantis. Indeed, I have had subjects discuss being in ancient lands on Earth that I cannot identify with modern geography.

Comment d26

The earth has indeed changed substantially over time..

Thus, it is possible souls existed in bodies more advanced than Homo erectus, who died out about a quarter of a million years ago, with the fossilized evidence hidden from us today by geological change.

However, this hypothesis means the physical evolution of humans was an up, down, up affair, which I think is unlikely.

Comment d27

Unlikely. But it actually did occur. It’s just that the assumed evolutionary tree of humans is wrong. Other “transplanted” entities, similar to humans, have added complexities to the human evolutionary tract. .

I now moved my subject into an African life around 9,000 years ago, which she said was an important milestone in her advancement.

This was the last life she was to spend with her guide, Kumara. Kumara was an advanced soul herself at the time of this life, counseling a benevolent tribal chief as his influential wife. I tentatively located their land as the highlands of Ethiopia. Apparently, my subject had known Kumara in a number of earlier lives covering thousands of years during Kumara’s final incarnations on Earth. Their association in human form ended when my subject died, saving Kumara’s life on a river boat, by throwing herself in front of an enemy spear.

Full of love, Kumara still appears to this subject as a large woman, with skin of polished mahogany and a shock of white hair crowned by a headdress of feathers. She is practically nude, except for a strip of animal hide around her ample middle.

On Kumara’s neck hangs a garish bunch of multi-colored stones, which she sometimes jiggles in my subject’s ear to get her attention during dreams in the middle of the night.

Kumara teaches by a technique of flashing symbolistic memories of prior lessons already learned in past lives. Old solutions to problems are mixed with new hypothetical choices in the form of metaphoric picture puzzles. By these means, Kumara tests her student’s considerable storehouse of knowledge during meditations and dreams.

I glanced at my watch. There was no more time for background information if I was going to allow for exploration of this woman’s after life experiences.

Rapidly I took her into superconsciousness, anticipating some interesting spiritual disclosures. She would not disappoint me.

Case 23 – Kumara

Dr. N: What is your spiritual name?

S: Thece.

Dr. N: And your spiritual guide kept her African name of Kumara?

S: For me, yes.

Dr. N: What do you look like in the spirit world?

S: A glowing fragment of light.

Dr. N: What exactly is the color of your energy?

S: Sky-blue.

Dr. N: Does your light have flecks of another color in it?

S: (pause) Some gold … not much.

Dr. N: How about Kumara’s energy color?

S: It’s violet.

Dr. N: How does light and color identify the quality of a soul’s spiritual attainment?

S: The intensity of mental power increases with the darker phases of light.

Dr. N: Where does the highest intensity of intelligent light energy originate from?

S: The knowledge by which the energy of darker light is extended to us comes from the source. Our light is attached to the source.

Dr. N: When you say source-you mean God?

S: That word has been misused.

Dr. N: How?

S: By too much personalizing, which makes the source less than it is.

Dr. N: What’s wrong with us doing that?

S: It takes the liberty of making the source too … human, although we are all part of its oneness.

Dr. N: Thece, I want you to reflect on the source as we talk about other aspects of soul life and the spirit world. Later, I will ask you more about this oneness. Now, let’s go back to the energy manifestations of souls. Why do spirits display two black glowing cavities for eyes when not showing their human forms? It seems so spooky to me.

S: (laughs and is more relaxed) That’s how Earth’s legends of ghosts came about- from these memories. Our energy mass is not uniform. The eyes you speak of represent a more concentrated intensity of thought.

Dr. N: Well, if the myths about ghosts are not so fanciful after all, then these black eye sockets must be useful extensions of their energy.

S: Rather than eyes … they are windows to old bodies … and all the physical extensions of former selves. This blackness is a … concentration of our presence. We communicate by absorbing the energy presence of each other.

Dr. N: When you return to the spirit world, do you have energy contact with other souls who may look like ghosts?

S: Yes, and appearance is a matter of individual preference. Of course there is always a multitude of thought waves around me-mingling with my returning energy, but I avoid too much contact.

Dr. N: Why?

S: It is not necessary for me to make attachments here. I will be alone for a while to contemplate and sort out any mistakes from my last incarnation, before talking to Kumara.

Note: This statement is typical of advanced souls returning to the spirit world, mentioned earlier in Case 9. However, this soul is so advanced she will have no deliberations with her guide until much later, and upon her request.

Dr. N: Perhaps we should talk about older souls for a minute. Does Kumara incarnate on Earth any more?

S: No, she doesn’t.

Dr. N: Do you know others like Kumara who were here during the early times on Earth and don’t come back any more?

S: (cautiously) A few… yes… many got on Earth early and got off before I came.

Dr. N: Did any stay?

S: What do you mean?

Dr. N: Advanced souls who keep coming back to life on Earth when they could stay in the spirit world.

S: Oh, you mean the Sages?

Dr. N: Yes, the Sages-tell me about them. (this is a new term for me, but I often pretend to know more than I do with advanced souls to elicit information)

S: (with admiration) They are the true watchers of Earth, you know to be here and keep watch over what is going on.

Dr. N: As highly advanced souls who continue to incarnate?

S: Yes.

Dr. N: Don’t the Sages get tired of still hanging around Earth?

S: They choose to stay and help people directly because they are dedicated to Earth.

Dr. N: Where are these Sages?

S: (wistfully) They live simple lives. I first came to know some of them thousands of years ago. Today it’s hard to see them … they don’t like cities much.

Dr. N: Are there many of them?

S: No, they live in small communities, or out in the open … in the deserts and mountains … in simple dwellings. They wander about, too …

Dr. N: How does one recognize them?

S: (sighs) Most people don’t. They were known as the oracles of truth in earlier times on Earth.

Dr. N: I know this sounds pragmatic, but wouldn’t these old, highly developed souls be more useful helping humankind in positions of international leadership rather than being hermits?

S: Who said they were hermits? They prefer to be with the common people who are most affected by the movers and shakers.

Dr. N: What is the feeling one gets when meeting a Sage on Earth?

S: Ah… you feel a special presence. Their power of understanding and the advice they give you is so wise. They do live simply. Material things mean nothing to them.

Dr. N: Are you interested in this sort of service, Thece?

S: Hmm … no, they are saints. I welcome the time when I can stop incarnating.

Dr. N: Perhaps the word Sage could also be applied to souls like Kumara, or even with the entities to whom she turns for knowledge?

S: (pause) No, they are different … they are beyond the Sages. We call them the Old Ones.

Note: I would place these beings beyond Level VI.

Dr. N: Are there many Old Ones working with souls at Kumara’s level and above?

S: I don’t think so… compared to the rest of us … but we feel their influence.

Dr. N: What do you feel in their presence?

S: (pensive) A… concentrated power of enlightenment… and guidance …

Dr. N: Could the Old Ones be embodiments of the source itself?

S: It is not for me to say, but I don’t think so yet. They must be close to the source. The Old Ones represent the purest elements of thought … engaging in the planning and arranging of … substances.

Dr. N: Could you clarify a bit more what you mean by these highly placed souls being close to the source?

S: (vaguely) Only that they must be close to conjunction.

Dr. N: Does Kumara ever talk about these entities who help her?

S: To me-only a little. She aspires to be of them, as we all do.

Dr. N: Is she getting close to the Old Ones in knowledge?

S: (faintly) She … approaches, as I approach her. It is slow assimilating with the source, because we are not complete.

Once the duties of a guide are fully established for the advancing soul, it is necessary for these entities to juggle two balls. Besides completing their own unfinished business with continued (though less frequent) incarnations, they must also help others while in a discarnated state. Thece talks to me about this aspect of her soul life.

Dr. N: When you are back in the spirit world and come out of your self-imposed isolation, what do you ordinarily do then?

S: I join with members of my company.

Dr. N: How many souls are in your company?

S: Nine.

Dr. N: (jumping to the next conclusion too quickly) Oh, so the ten of you are a group of souls under the leadership of Kumara?

S: No, they are my responsibility.

Dr. N: Then, these nine entities are students whom you teach?

S: you could say that

Dr. N: And they are all in one group (cluster) which, I assume, is your company?

S: No, my company is made up of two different groups.

Dr. N: Why is that?

S: They are in … different progressions (levels).

Dr. N: And yet, you are the spiritual teacher for all nine?

S: I prefer to call myself a watcher. Three of my company are also watchers.

Dr. N: Well, who are the other six?

S: (matter-of-factly) People who don’t watch.

Dr. N: I want to clarify this using my terms, if you will, Thece If you are a senior watcher, three of your company must be what I would call junior guides?

S: Yes, but the words senior and junior-that portrays us as authoritarian, which we are not!

Dr. N: My intention is not to denote rank, for me it is just an easy identification of responsibility. Consider the word senior as meaning an advanced teacher. I would call Kumara a master teacher or possibly an educational director.

S: (shrugs) That’s okay, I suppose, as long as director doesn’t mean dictator.

Dr. N: it doesn’t. Now, Thece, cast your mind to a place where you can see the energy colors of all your company. What do the six souls who are not watchers look like?

S: (smiles) Dirty snowballs!

Dr. N: If they are white in tone, what about the rest?

S: (pause) Well … two are rather yellowish.

Dr. N: We are one short. What about the ninth member?

S: That’s An-ras. He is doing quite well.

Dr. N: Describe his energy color.

S: He is … turning bluish … an excellent watcher … he will be leaving me soon

Dr. N: Let’s go to the opposite end of your company. What member are you most concerned about and why?

S: Ojanowin. She has the conviction from many lives that love and trust only bring hurt. (musing) She has fine qualities which I want to bring out but this attitude is holding her back.

Dr. N: Ojanowin is developing more slowly than the rest?

S: (protectively) Don’t misunderstand, I am proud of her effort. She has great sensitivity and integrity, which I like. She just requires more of my attention.

Dr. N: As a watcher-teacher, what is the one quality which An-ras has acquired which you want to see in Ojanowin?

S: (no hesitation) Adaptability to change.

Dr. N: I am curious if the nine members of your company advance in a rather uniform way together under your teaching.

S: That’s totally unrealistic.

Dr. N: Why?

S: Because there are differences in character and integrity.

Dr. N: Well, if learning rates are different between souls because of character and integrity, how does this equate with the mental capabilities of the human brain a soul selects?

S: It doesn’t. I was speaking of motivation. On Earth we use many variations of the physical brain in the course of our expansion. However, each soul is driven by its integrity.

Dr. N: Is this what you mean by a soul having character?

S: Yes, and intensity of desire is part of character.

Dr. N: If character is the identity of a soul, where does desire come in?

S: The drive to excel is internal to each soul, but this too can fluctuate between lives.

Dr. N: So where does a soul’s integrity fit into this?

S: The extension of desire. Integrity is the desire to be honest about Self and motives to such an extent that full awareness of the path to the source is possible.

Dr. N: If all basic intelligent energy is the same, why are souls different in their character and integrity?

S: Because their experiences with physical life change them and this is intentional. By that change new ingredients are added to the collective intelligence of every soul.

Dr. N: And this is what incarnation on Earth is all about?

S: Incarnation is an important tool, yes. Some souls are driven more than others to expand and achieve their potential, but all of us will do so in the end. Being in many physical bodies and different settings expands the nature of our real self.

Dr. N: And this sort of self-actualization of the soul identity is the purpose of life on our world?

S: On any world.

Dr. N: Well, if each soul is preoccupied with Self, doesn’t this explain why we have a world of self-centered people?

S: No, you misinterpret. Fulfillment is not cultivating Self for selfish means, but allowing for integration with others in life. That also shows character and integrity. This is ethical conduct.

Dr. N: Does Ojanowin have less honesty than An-ras?

S: (pause) I’m afraid she does engage in self-deception.

Dr. N: I wonder how you can function effectively as a spiritual guide for the nine members of your company and still incarnate on Earth to finish your own lessons.

S: It used to affect my concentration to some extent, but now there is no conflict.

Dr. N: Do you have to separate your soul energy to accomplish this?

S: Yes, this capacity (of souls) allows for the management of both. Being on Earth also permits me to directly assist a member of my company and help myself at the same time.

Dr. N: The idea that souls can divide themselves is not an easy thing for me to conceptualize.

S: Your use of the term divide is not quite accurate. Every part of us is still whole. I’m only saying it does take some getting used to at first, since you manage more than one program at a time.

Dr. N: So your effectiveness as a teacher is not diminished by having multiple activities?

S: Not in the least.

Dr. N: Would you consider the major thrust of your instruction to be on Earth with your human body or in the spirit world as a free entity?

S: They are two different settings. My instruction is diversified but no less effective.

Dr. N: But your approach to a company member would be different depending upon the setting?

S: Yes, it would.

Dr. N: Wouldn’t you say the spirit world is the main center for learning?

S: It is the center for evaluation and analysis, but souls do rest.

Dr. N: When your students are living on Earth, do they know you are their guide and are with them always?

S: (laughs) Some more than others, but they all sense my influence at one time or another.

Dr. N: Thece, you are on Earth with me right now as a woman. Are you also able to be in contact with members of your company?

S: I told you, yes.

Comment d28

Our mind might be unaware, but our consciousness is in near constant connection with our other parts of the soul and every association and friendship in the non-physical worlds.. .

Dr. N: What I am getting at is this-isn’t teaching by example difficult when your Earth visits are rather infrequent these days?

S: If I came too often and worked with them directly as one human being to another I would be interfering with their natural unfolding.

Dr. N: Do you have the same reservations about interference as a teacher operating from the spirit world in a discarnate state?

S: Yes, I do … although the techniques are different.

Dr. N: For mental contact?

S: Yes.

Dr. N: I would like to know more about the ability of spiritual teachers to contact their students. What exactly do you do from the spirit world to comfort or advise one of the nine company members on Earth?

S: (no answer).

Dr. N: (coaxing her) Do you know what I am asking? How do you implant ideas?

S: (finally) I’m unable to tell you.

Comment d29

It’s a typical human reaction. Some things are confidential and even secret. You might think that you have the authority to hear these secrets, but you do not. .

Note: I suspect blocking here, but I can’t complain. So far, Thece has been liberal with information and so has her guide. I decide to stop the session for a minute to appeal directly to Kumara. It is a speech I have given before.

Dr. N: Kumara, permit me to reason with you through Thece. My work here is intended for good. By questioning your disciple, I wish to add to my knowledge of healing and bring people closer to the higher creative power available within themselves. My larger mission is to combat the fear of death by offering people understanding about the nature of their souls and their spiritual home. Will you aid me in this endeavor?

S: (Thece answers me in an odd tone of voice) We know who you are.

Dr. N: Then would you both assist me?

S: We will talk to you … at our discretion.

Note: This tells me if I exceed the undefined boundaries of these two guides with an intrusive question, it won’t be answered.

Dr. N: All right, Thece, on the count of three you will feel more comfortable talking to me about how souls function as guides. Begin by telling me in what way a company member on Earth can signal to get your attention. One, two, three! (I snap my fingers for added effect)

S: (after a long pause) First, they have to calm their minds and focus attention away from their immediate surroundings.

Dr. N: How would they do this?

S: By silence … reaching inward … to fasten on their inner voice.

Dr. N: Is this how one calls for spiritual help?

S: Yes, at least to me. They must expand upon their inner consciousness to engage me on a central thought.

Comment d30

Prayer and intention can be much more than simply mapping out your world-line travels. They can be a message to others associated with your spiritual group to assist you. .

Dr. N: On you, or the specific problem which is bothering them?

S: They must reach out beyond what is troubling them in order to be receptive to me. That’s difficult when they don’t remain calm.

Dr. N: Do all nine company members have about the same abilities to reach you for help?

S: No, they don’t.

Dr. N: Perhaps Ojanowin has the most problems?

S: Mmm, she is one of those that does…

Dr. N: Why?

S: For me, getting the signals is easy. It’s harder for people on Earth. The energy of directed thought must override human emotion.

Dr. N: Within a spirit world framework, how do you pick up the messages of just your company out of billions of souls who are sending out distress signals to other guides?

S: I know instantly. All watchers do because people send out their own individual patterns of thought.

Dr. N: Like a vibrational code in a field of thought particles?

S: (laughing) You could describe an energy pattern that way, I guess.

Dr. N: Okay, then how would you reach back to someone in need of guidance?

S: (grins) By whispering answers into their ear!

These "nudges" you have to do things, just might be from friendly spirits and friends that want to help you in your earthy travels. — These “nudges” you have to do things, just might be from friendly spirits and friends that want to help you in your earthy travels.

Dr. N: (lightly) Is that what a friendly spirit does with a troubled mind on Earth?

S: It depends

Dr. N: On what? Are teacher-spirits rather indifferent with the day-to-day problems of humans?

S: Not indifferent, or we wouldn’t communicate. We gauge each situation. We know life is transitory. We are more … detached because without human bodies we are unencumbered by the immediacy of human emotion.

Dr. N: But when the situation does call for spiritual guidance, what do you do?

S: (gravely) As watchers in the stillness, we recognize the amount of turbulence … from the wake of troubled thought. Then we carefully merge with it and gently touch the mind.

Dr. N: Please describe this connection process further.

S: (pause) It’s a slip-stream of thought which is usually turbulent rather than smooth, from someone in distress. I was awkward at first and I still don’t have Kumara’s skill. One must enter with subtlety … to wait for the best receptivity.

Dr. N: How can a watcher be awkward, you have had thousands of years of experience?

S: Communicators are not all the same. Watchers too have a variety of abilities. If one of my company is in crisis-physically hurt, sad, anxious, resentful-they send out great amounts of uncontrolled negative energy which alerts me, but exhausts them. This is the challenge of a watcher, to know when and how to communicate. When people want immediate relief, they may not be in the proper mode for reflection.

Dr. N: Well, in terms of abilities, can you tell me how you were awkward as an inexperienced guide?

S: I wanted to rush in too fast to help without coordinating the patterns of thought we talked about. People can go numb. You don’t get through to them when they have intense grief, for example. You are shut out of a cluttered mind when attentions are distracted and thought energy is scattered all about.

Dr. N: Do the nine members of your company sense your intrusion into their minds following a cry to you for help?

S: Watchers are not supposed to intrude. It’s more of a … soft coupling. I implant ideas-which they assume is inspiration-to try and give them peace.

Dr. N: What single thing do you have the most problem with during communications with people on Earth?

S: Fear.

Dr. N: Would you enlarge on that?

S: I have to be careful not to spoil my people by making life too easy for them … to let them work out most of their difficulties without jumping right in. They only suffer more if a watcher moves in too quickly before this is done. Kumara is an expert at this …

Dr. N: Is she ultimately responsible for you and your company?

S: Well yes, we are all under her influence.

Dr. N: Do you ever see any of your own peer members around? I’m thinking of associates at your level of attainment with whom you can confer about teaching methods.

S: Oh, you mean with those I grew up with here?

Dr. N: Yes.

S: Yes … three in particular.

Dr. N: And do they lead company groups themselves?

S: Yes.

Dr. N: Are these more advanced souls responsible for about the same number of souls as you?

S: Uh…. yes, except Wa-roo. His company is more than double my own. He is good. Another company is being added to his work load.

Dr. N: How many superior entities do you and your friends who are company leaders go to for advice and direction?

S: One. We all go to Kumara to exchange observations and seek ways of improvement.

Dr. N: How many souls like you and Wa-roo does Kumara oversee?

S: Oh … I couldn’t know that …

Dr. N: Try and give an estimate of the number.

S: (after reflection) At least fifty, probably more.

Additional inquiries into Kumara’s spiritual activities were fruitless, so I turned next to Thece’s creation training. Her experiences (which I have condensed) take us a little further than those training exercises described by Nenthum in the last chapter. To those readers with a scientific bent, I want to stress that when a subject is reporting to me about creation their frame of reference is really not grounded in earth science. I have to make the best interpretations I can from the information provided.

Dr. N: The curriculum for souls seems to have great variety, Thece. I want to go into another aspect of your training. Does your energy utilize the properties of light, heat, and motion in the creation of life?

S: (startled) Uh,… you know about that

Dr. N: What more can you tell me?

S: Only that I am familiar with this …

Dr. N: I don’t want to talk about anything which will make you uncomfortable, but I would appreciate your confirmation of certain biological effects resulting from the actions of souls.

S: (hesitates) Oh … I don’t think

Dr. N: (I jump in quickly) What creation have you recently done which makes Kumara proud of you?

S: (without resistance) I am proficient with fish.

Dr. N: (I follow up with a deliberate exaggeration to keep her going) Oh, so you can create a whole fish with your mental energy?

S: (vexed) … You must be kidding?

Dr. N: Then where do you start?

S: With the embryos, of course. I thought you knew…

Dr. N: Just checking. When do you think you will be ready for mammals?

S: (no answer)

Dr. N: Look Thece, if you will try to cooperate with me for a few more minutes, I promise not to take long with my questions on this subject. Will you agree to that?

S: (pause) We will see

Dr. N: Okay, as a means of basic clarification tell me what you actually do with your energy to develop life up to the stage of fish.

S: (reluctantly) We give instructions to … organisms … within the surrounding conditions

Dr. N: Do you do this on one world or many in your training?

S: More than one. (would not elaborate except to say these planets were “earth types”)

Comment d31

Multiple earth-like worlds through out the universe. .

Dr. N: In what kind of environment are you working now?

S: In oceans.

Dr. N: With basic sea life such as algae and plankton?

S: When I started.

Dr. N: You mean before you worked up to the embryos of fish?

S: Yes.

Dr. N: Then when souls start to create forms of life, they begin with microorganisms?

S: … Small cells, yes, and this is very difficult to learn. Dr. N: Why?

S: The cells of life… our energy cannot become proficient unless we can direct it to … alter molecules.

Dr. N: Then you are actually producing new chemical compounds by mixing the basic molecular elements of life by your energy flow?

S: (nods)

Dr. N: Can you be more explicit?

S: No, I can’t.

Dr. N: Let me try and sum this up, and please tell me if I am on the wrong track. A soul who becomes proficient with actually creating life must be able to split cells and give DNA instructions, and you do this by sending particles of energy into protoplasm?

S: We must learn to do this, yes-coordinating it with a sun’s energy.

Dr. N: Why?

S: Because each sun has different energy effects on the worlds around them.

Comment d31

The entire energy, quanta, and non-physical environment around different stars and solar systems are drastically different. Thus my argument that earth is a special and unique place and that we must treasure what we have. We must not expect an easy earth analog for us to acquire in the future..

Dr. N: Then why would you interfere with what a sun would naturally do with its own energy on a planet?

S: It is not interference. We examine new structures … mutations … to watch and see what is workable. We arrange substances for their most effective use with different suns.

Dr. N: When a species of life evolves on a planet, are the environmental conditions for selection and adaptation natural, or are intelligent soul-minds tinkering with what happens?

S: (evasively) Usually a planet hospitable to life has souls watching and whatever we do is natural.

Dr. N: How can souls watch and influence biological properties of growth evolving over millions of years on a primordial world?

S: Time is not in Earth years for us. We use it to suit our experiments.

Dr. N: Do you personally create suns in our universe?

S: A full scale sun? Oh no, that’s way over my head… and requires the powers of many. I generate only on a small scale.

Dr. N: What can you generate?

S: Ah … small bundles of highly concentrated matter… heated.

Dr. N: But what does your work look like when you are finished?

S: Small solar systems.

Dr. N: Are your miniature suns and planets the size of rocks, buildings, the moon- what are we talking about here?

S: (laughs) My suns are the size of basketballs and the planets marbles … that’s the best I can do.

Dr. N: Why do you do this on a small scale?

S: For practice, so I can make larger suns. After enough compression the atoms explode and condense, but I can’t do anything really big alone.

Dr. N: What do you mean?

S: We must learn to work together to combine our energy for the best results.

Dr. N: Well, who does the full-sized thermonuclear explosions which create physical universes and space itself?

S: The source … the concentrated energy of the Old Ones.

Dr. N: Oh, so the source has help?

S: I think so…

Comment d32

God has assistance? Things are mighty complex out in the non-physical worlds. .

Dr. N: Why is your energy striving to create universal matter and more complex life when Kumara and the entities above her are already proficient?

S: We are expected to join them, just as they wish to unite their accomplished energy with the Old Ones.

Creation questions always evoke the issue of First Cause. Was the exploding interstellar mass which caused the birth of our stars and planets an accident of nature or planned by an intelligent force? When I listen to subjects such as Thece, I ask myself why souls would be practicing the chain reactions of energy matter with models on a small scale if they were not intending to make larger celestial bodies. I have had no subjects in Levels VI and above to substantiate how they might carry the forces of creation further. It would seem if souls do progress, then entities at this level could be expected to involve themselves with the birthing of planets and the development of life forms capable of higher intelligence suitable for soul use.

After pondering why less-than-perfect souls are associated with creation at all, I came to the following conclusion. All souls are given the opportunity to participate in the development of lower forms of intelligent life in order to advance themselves. This principle could also be applied to the reason why souls incarnate in physical form. Thece suggested that the supreme intelligence she calls the source is made up of a combination of creators (the Old Ones) who fuse their energy to spawn universes. The thought has been expressed to me in different ways by other subjects when they describe the combined power of non-reincarnating old souls.

This concept is not new. For instance, the idea we have no single Godhead is the philosophy of the Jainist sect in India. The Jains believe fully perfected souls, called Siddhas, are a group of universal creators. These souls are fully liberated from further transmigrations. Below them are the Arhats souls, advanced illuminators who still incarnate along with three more lower gradations of evolving souls. To the Jams, reality is uncreated and eternal. Thus, the Siddhas need no creator. Most Eastern philosophies deny this tenet of Jainism in favor of a divine board of directors created by a chairman. This conclusion is more palatable to the Western mind as well.

With certain subjects it is possible to pursue a wide range of topics in condensed periods.

Earlier, Thece had alluded to intelligent life existing on other worlds when she talked about a soul’s cosmic training. This brings up another aspect about soul life which may be hard for some of us to accept…

A small percentage of my subjects, usually the older advanced souls, are able to recall being in strange, non-human intelligent life-forms on other worlds. Their memories are rather fleeting and clouded about the circumstances of these lives, the physical details, and planetary location relative to our universe. I wondered if Thece had any such experiences long ago, so I opened up this line of inquiry for a few minutes to see where it might lead.

Comment d33

It need not be so shocking. Trans-species evolution of soul does occur. It is rare, and often just a period of “adventure” and “discovery”, but it does occur. .

Dr. N: A while back you remarked about other physical worlds besides Earth which are available to souls.

S: (hesitant) Yes

Dr. N: (casually) And, I assume, some of these planets support intelligent life which are useful to souls wishing to incarnate?

S: That’s true, there are many schoolyards.

Dr. N: Do you ever talk to other souls about their planetary schoolyards?

S: (long pause) It’s not my inclination to do so-I’m not attracted to them-the other schools.

Dr. N: Perhaps you could give me some idea of what they are like?

S: Oh, some are … analytical schools. Others are basically mental worlds … subtle places

Dr. N: What do you think of the Earth school by comparison?

S: The Earth school is insecure, still. It is filled with resentment of many people over being led and antagonism of the leaders toward each other. There is so much fear to overcome here. It is a world in conflict because there is too much divers

ity among too many people. Other worlds have low populations with more harmony. Earth’s population has outpaced its mental development.

Dr. N: Would you rather be training on another planet, then?

S: No, for all Earth’s quarreling and cruelty, there is passion and bravery here. I like working in crisis situations. To bring order out of disorder. We all know Earth is a difficult school.

Dr. N: So, the human body is not an easy host for souls?

S: … There are easier life forms … who are less in conflict with themselves …

Dr. N: Well, how would you know this unless your soul had been in another life form?

After I had provided this suitable opening, Thece began talking about being a small flying creature in an alien environment on a dying world where it was hard to breathe. From her descriptions, the sun of this planet was apparently going into a nova stage. Her words were halting and came in short, rapid breaths.

Thece said she lived on this world in a humid jungle with a night sky so densely packed with stars there were no dark lanes in between. This gave me the impression she was located near the center of a galaxy, perhaps our own. She also said her brief time on this world was spent as a very young soul and Kumara was her mentor. After the world could no longer support life, they had come to Earth to continue working together. I was told there was a kinship in the mental evolution of life on Earth and what she had experienced before. This flying race of people began afraid, isolated, and dangerous to each other. Also, like Earth, family alliances were important, representing expressions of loyalty and devotion. While I was concluding this line of questioning, there was a further development.

Dr. N: Do you think there are other souls on Earth who also had physical lives on this now-dead world?

S: (pause, then unable to restrain herself) Actually, I have met one.

Dr. N: Under what circumstances?

S: (laughs) I met a man at a party a while ago. He recognized me, not physically, but with the mind. It was an odd meeting. I was caught off balance when he came up to me and took my hand. I thought he was pushy when he said he knew me.

Dr. N: Then what happened?

S: (softly) I was in a daze, which is unusual for me. I knew there was something between us. I thought it was sexual. Now, I can see it all clearly. It was … Ikak. (this name is spoken with a clacking noise from the back of her throat) He told me we were once together from a place far away and there were a couple of others here …

Dr. N: Did he say anything more about them?

S: (faintly) No … I wonder … I ought to know them …

Dr. N: Did Ikak say anything else about your former physical relationship on this world?

S: No. He saw I was confused. I didn’t know what he was talking about then anyway.

Dr. N: How could he consciously know about this planet when you didn’t?

S: (puzzled) He is … ahead of me … he knows Kumara. (then, more to herself than me) What is he doing here?

Dr. N: Why don’t you finish telling me about him at the party?

S: (laughs again) I thought he was just trying to pick me up. It was awkward because I was drawn to him. He said I was very attractive, which is something men don’t usually say to me. There were flashes in my mind that we had been together before … as fragments in a dream sequence.

Dr. N: How did your conversation end with this man?

S: He saw my discomfort. I guess he thought it best to have no further contact, because I haven’t seen him since. I’ve thought about him though, and maybe we will see each other again …

I believe souls do come across time and space for each other.

Recently, I had two subjects who were best friends and came to me at the same time for regression. Not only had they been soulmates in many former lives on Earth, but were also mated as fish-like intelligent beings in a beautiful water world.

Both recalled the enjoyment of playing underwater with their strong appendages and coming up to the surface, “to peek.” Neither subject could recall much about this planet or what happened to their race of sea creatures.

Perhaps they were part of a failed Earth experiment long before a land mammal developed into the most promising species on Earth for souls. I suspect it was not Earth because I have had others who tell of living in an aquatic environment they know was unearthly.

One of these subjects said,

“My water world was very warm and clear because we had three suns overhead. The total lack of darkness underwater was comforting and made building our dwellings much easier.”

I have often wondered if the dreams we have at night about flying, breathing underwater, and performing other non-human physical feats relate to our earlier physical experiences in other environments.

In the early days of my studies of souls, I half-expected that those subjects who could recall other worlds would say they had lived in our galaxy with in the neighborhood of the sun. This assumption was naive.

Earth is in a sparse section of the Milky Way with only eight stars that are ten light years from the sun.

Comment d34

This was written before the observation and discovery of nearby brown dwarf stars and solar systems..

We know our own galaxy has more than two-hundred billion stars within a universe currently speculated at one-hundred-billion galaxies.

Comment d35

The number is actually closer to 900 billion stars in our galaxy.

The worlds around the suns which might support life are staggering to the imagination. Consider, if only a small fraction of one percent of the stars in our galaxy had planets with intelligent life useful to souls, the number would still be in the millions.

From what I can gather from subjects willing and able to discuss former assignments, souls are sent to any world with suitable intelligent life forms.

Out of all the stars which are known to us, only four percent are like our sun.

Apparently this means nothing to souls.

Their planetary incarnations are not linked to Earth- type worlds or with intelligent bipeds who walk on land. Souls who have been to other worlds tell me they have a fondness for certain ones and return to them (like Earth) periodically for a succession of lives.

I have not had many subjects who are able to recall specific details about living on other worlds. This maybe due to lack of experience, a suppression of memory, or blocks imposed by master guides to avoid any discomfort from flashbacks in non-earthly bodies.

Those subjects who are able to discuss their experiences on other worlds tell me that before coming to Earth, souls are frequently placed in the bodies of creatures with less intelligence than human beings (unlike Thece’s case).

However, once in a human body, souls are not sent back down the mental evolutionary ladder.

Yet, physical contrasts can be stark and side trips away from Earth are not necessarily pleasant. One mid-level client of mine expressed it this way. “After a long series of human lives, I told my guide I needed a break from Earth for a while in another kind of environment. He warned me, ‘You might not like this change right now because you have become so accustomed to the attributes of the human mind and body.’ “My client persisted and was duly given life on what was described as, “A pastel world living among a race of small, thickly-set beings. They were a thoughtful but somber people with tiny chalk-white faces which never smiled. Without human laughter and physical flexibility, I was out of sync and made little progress. The assignment must have been particularly difficult for this individual when we consider that humor and laughter is such a hallmark of soul life in the spirit world.

I was now approaching the final phase of my session with Case 23.

It was necessary to apply additional deepening techniques because I wanted Thece to reach into the highest recesses of her superconscious mind to talk with me about space-time and the source.

Dr. N: Thece, we are coming to the end of our time together and I want you to turn your mind once again to the source-creator. (pause) Will you do that for me?

S: Yes.

Dr. N: You said the ultimate objective of souls was to seek unification with the supreme source of creative energy-do you remember?

S:… The act of conjunction, yes.

Dr. N: Tell me, does the source dwell in some special central space in the spirit world?

S: The source is the spirit world.

Dr. N: Then why do souls speak of reaching a core of spiritual life?

S: When we are young spirits we sense power around us everywhere and yet we feel we … are on the edge of it. As we grow older there is an awareness of a concentrated power, but it is the same feeling.

Dr. N: Even though you have called this the place of the Old Ones?

S: Yes, they are part of the concentrated power of the source which sustains us as souls.

Dr. N: Well, lumping this power together as one energy source, can you describe the creator in more human terms?

S: As the ultimate selfless being which we strive to be.

Dr. N: If the source represents all the spirit world, how does this mental place differ from physical universes with stars, planets, and living things?

S: Universes are created-to live and die-for the use of the source. The place of spirits … is the source.

Dr. N: We seem to live in a universe which is expanding and may contract again and eventually die. Since we live in a space with time limitations, how can the spirit world itself be timeless?

S: Because here we live in non-space which is timeless … except in certain zones.

Dr. N: Please explain what these zones are.

S: They are … interconnecting doors … openings for us to pass through into a physical universe of time.

Dr. N: How can time-doors exist in non-space?

S: The openings exist as thresholds between realities.

Dr. N: Well, if the spirit world is non-dimensional, what kind of reality is that?

S: A constant reality state, as opposed to the shifting realities of dimensional worlds which are material and changing.

Dr. N: Do past, present, and future have any relevance for souls living in the spirit world?

S: Only as a means of understanding succession in physical form. Living here … there is a … changelessness … for those of us not crossing thresholds into a universe of substance and time.

Note: A major application of time thresholds used by souls will be examined in the upcoming chapter on life selection.

Dr. N: You speak of universes in the plural. Are these other physical universes besides the one which contains Earth?

S: (vaguely) There are … differing realities to suit the source.

Dr. N: Are you saying souls can enter various rooms of different physical realities from spiritual doorways?

S: (nods) Yes, they can-and do.

Before concluding the session with this highly advanced subject, I should add that most people who are in deep hypnosis are able to see beyond an Earth reality of three-dimensional space, into alternate realities of timelessness. In the subconscious state, my subjects experience a chronology of time with their past and present lives which resembles what they perceive when conscious.

There is a change when I take them into superconsciousness and the spirit world.

Here they see the now of time as one homogeneous unit of past, present, and future. Seconds in the spirit world seem to represent years on Earth. When their sessions are over, clients will often express surprise at how time in the spirit world is unified.

Quantum mechanics is a modern branch of physics which investigates all subatomic movement in terms of electromagnetic energy levels where all things in life are thought to be ultimately non-solid and existing in a unified field.

Comment d36

Everything is quanta and quantum mechanics..

Going beyond Newton’s physical laws of gravity, the elements of action on time are also considered to be unified by light wave frequency and kinetic energy. Since I show that souls do experience feelings of the passage of time in a chronological fashion in the spirit world, doesn’t this contradict the concept of oneness for past, present, and future?

No, it does not.

My research indicates to me that the illusion of time progression is created and sustained for those souls coming to and from physical dimensions (who are used to such biological responses as aging), so they may more easily gauge their advancement. Thus, it makes sense to me when the quantum physicists hypothesize that time, rather than being an absolute of three phases, is only an expression of change.

When my subjects speak of traveling as souls on lines which curve, I think of the space-time theories of those astrophysicists who believe light and motion are a union of time and space curving back on itself. They say if space is bent severely enough, time stops. Indeed, when listening to my clients talk about time zones and tunnels of passage into different dimensions, I think about the similarities here to current astronomical theories of physical space being warped, or twisted, into cosmic loops creating “mouths” of hyperspace and black holes which may lead out of our three- dimensional universe. Perhaps the space-time concepts of astrophysics and metaphysics are edging closer together.

I have suggested to my subjects that if the spirit world seems round to them, and appears to curve when they travel rapidly as souls, this could represent a finite, enclosed sphere.

They deny the idea of any dimensional boundaries yet offer me little else except metaphors.

Case 23 says the spirit world itself is the source of creation. Some have called this place the heart, or breath, of God.

Case 22 defined the space of souls as “fabric” and I have had other subjects give the spirit world a quality of “the folds of a seamless dress swishing back and forth.”

They sometimes feel the effects of a gently “rippling” motion from light energy which has been described as “waves (or rings) rolling outward from a disturbed pool of water.” Normally, the geography of soul spaces has a smooth and open consistency to people in superconsciousness, without displaying the properties of gravity, temperature, pressure, matter, or a time clock associated with a chaotic physical universe. However, when I attempt to characterize the entire spirit world as a void, people in trance resist this notion.

Although my cases are unable to fully explain the place where their souls live, they are all outspoken about its ultimate reality for them. A subject in trance doesn’t see the spirit world as being either near or far away from our physical universe.

Nevertheless, in a curious way, they do portray spiritual substance as being light or heavy, thick or thin, and large or small, when comparing their experiences as souls to life on Earth.

While the absolute reality of the spirit world appears to remain constant in the minds of people in hypnosis, their references to other physical dimensions do not.

I have the sense that universes other than our own are created for the purpose of providing environments suitable for the growth of souls with beings we can’t even imagine.

One advanced subject told me he had lived on a number of worlds in his long existence, never dividing his soul more than twice at one time. Some adult lives lasted only months in Earth time for him, due to local planetary conditions and short life spans of the dominant life form.

While speaking of a “paradise planet,” with few people and a quieter, simpler version of Earth, he added this world was not far from Earth.

“Oh,” I interrupted, “then it must only be a few light years from Earth?”

He patiently explained that the planet was not in our universe, but closer to Earth than many planets in our own galaxy.

It is important for the reader to understand that when people do recall living on other worlds they seem not to be limited by the dimensional constraints of our universe.

When souls travel to planets intergalactically or interdimensionally, they measure the trip by the time it takes them to reach their destinations through the tunnel effect from the spirit world. The size of the spatial region involved and the relative position of worlds to each other are also considerations.

After listening to references about multiple dimensional realities from some of my subjects, I am left with the impression they believe there is a confluence of all these dimensional streams into one great river of the spirit world. If I could stand back and take apart all these alternate realities seated in the minds of my cases, it would be like peeling an artichoke of all its layers down to one heart at the core.

I had been questioning Thece for quite a while and I could see she was growing tired. Few subjects can sustain this level of spiritual receptivity for very long. I decided to end the session with a few questions about the genesis of all creation.

Dr. N: Thece, I want to close by asking you more about the source. You have been a soul for a long time, so how do you see yourself relating to the oneness of creation you told me about earlier?

S: (long pause) By sensations of movement. In the beginning there is an outward migration of our soul energy from the source. Afterward, our lives are spent moving inward … toward cohesion and the uniting …

Dr. N: You make this process seem as though a living organism was expanding and contracting.

S: … There is an explosive release … then a returning … yes, the source pulsates.

Dr. N: And you are moving toward the center of this energy source?

S: There really is no center. The source is all around us as if we were … inside a beating heart.

Dr. N: But, you did say you were moving back to a point of origin as your soul advanced in knowledge?

S: Yes, when I was thrust outward I was a child. Now I’m being drawn back as my adolescence fades …

Dr. N: Back where?

S: Further inside the source.

Dr. N: Perhaps you could describe this energy source through the use of colors to explain soul movement and the scope of creation.

S: (sighs) It’s as if souls are all part of a massive electrical explosion which produces … a halo effect. In this … circular halo is a dark purple light which flares out … lightening to a whiteness at the edges. Our awareness begins at the edges of brilliant light and as we grow … we become more engulfed in the darker light.

Dr. N: I find it hard to visualize a god of creation as cold, dark light.

S: That’s because I am not close enough to conjunction to explain it well. The dark light is itself a … covering, beyond which we feel an intense warmth … full of a knowing presence which is everywhere for us and… alive!

Dr. N: What was it like when you were first aware of your identity as a soul after being pushed out to the rim of this halo?

S: To be… is the same as watching the first flower of spring open and the flower is you. And, as it opens more, you become aware of other flowers in a glorious field and there is … unbounded joy.

Dr. N: If this explosive, multi-colored energy source collapses in on itself, will all the flowers eventually die?

S: Nothing is collapsing … the source is endless. As souls we will never die-we know that, somehow. As we coalesce, our increasing wisdom makes the source stronger.

Dr. N: Is that the reason the source desires to perform this exercise?

S: Yes, to give life to us so we can arrive at a state of perfection.

Dr. N: Why does a source, who is ostensibly perfect already, need to create further intelligence which is less than perfect?

S: To help the creator create. In this way, by self-transformation and rising to higher plateaus of fulfillment, we add to the building blocks of life.

Dr. N: Were souls forced to break away from the source and come to places like Earth because of some sort of original sin or fall from grace in the spirit world?

S: That’s nonsense. We came to be … magnified … in the beautiful variety of creation.

Dr. N: Thece, I want you to listen to me carefully. If the source needs to be made stronger, or more wise, by using a division of its divine energy to create lesser intelligence which it hopes will magnify-doesn’t this suggest it lacks full perfection itself?

S: (pause) The source creates for fulfillment of itself.

Dr. N: That’s my point. How can that which is absolute become more absolute unless something is lacking?

S: (hesitates) That which we see to be … our source … is all we can know, and we think what the creator desires is to express itself through us by … birthing.

Dr. N: And do you think the source is actually made stronger by our existence as souls?

S: (long pause) I see the creator’s perfection … maintained and enriched… by sharing the possibility of perfection with us and this is the ultimate extension of itself

Dr. N: So the source starts out by deliberately creating imperfect souls and imperfect life forms for these souls and watches what happens in order to extend itself?

S: Yes, and we have to have faith in this decision and trust the process of returning to the origin of life. One has to be starving to appreciate food, to be cold to understand the blessings of warmth, and to be children to see the value of the parent. The transformation gives us purpose.

Dr. N: Do you want to be a parent of souls?

S: … Participation in the conception of ourselves is … a dream of mine.

Dr. N: If our spirits did not experience physical life, would we ever know of these things you are telling me about?

S: We would know of them, but not about them. It would be as if your spiritual energy were told to play piano scales with only one note.

Dr. N: And do you believe if the source didn’t create souls to nurture and grow, its sublime energy would shrink from a lack of expression?

S: (sighs) Perhaps that is its purpose.

With this last prophetic statement by Thece, I ended the session. As I brought this subject out of her deep trance, it was as though she were returning to me from across time and space. As she sat quietly focusing her eyes around my office, I expressed my appreciation for the opportunity of working with her on such an advanced level. Smiling, the lady said if she had any idea of the grilling in store for her, she might well have refused to work with me.

As we said goodbye, I thought about her last statements concerning the source of life. In ancient Persia the Sufis had a saying that if the creator represents absolute good, and therefore absolute beauty, it is the nature of beauty to desire manifestation.

Life Selection

THERE comes that time when the soul must once again leave the sanctuary of the spirit world for another trip to Earth. This decision is not an easy one. Souls must prepare to leave a world of total wisdom, where they exist in a blissful state of freedom, for the physical and mental demands of a human body.

We have seen how tired souls can be when reentering the spirit world. Many don’t want to think about returning to Earth again. This is especially true when we have not come close to our goals at the end of a physical life. Once back in the spirit world, souls have misgivings about even temporarily leaving a world of self- understanding, comradeship, and compassion to go to a planetary environment of uncertainty and fear brought about by aggressive, competing humans. Despite having family and friends on Earth, many incarnated souls feel lonely and anonymous among large impersonal populations. I hope my cases show the opposite is true in the spirit world, where our souls are involved in the most intimate sharing on an everlasting basis. Our spiritual identity is known and appreciated by a multitude of other entities, whose support is never ending.

The rejuvenation of our energy and personal assessment of one’s Self takes longer for some souls than others, but eventually the soul is motivated to start the process of incarnation. While our spiritual environment is hard to leave, as souls we also remember the physical pleasures of life on Earth with fondness and even nostalgia.

When the wounds of a past life are healed and we are again totally at one with ourselves, we feel the pull of having a physical expression for our identity.

Training sessions with our counselors and peer groups have provided a collaborative spiritual effort to prepare us for the next life. Our karma of past deeds towards humanity and our mistakes and achievements have all been evaluated with an eye toward the best course of future endeavors. The soul must now assimilate all this information and take purposeful action based upon three primary decisions:

Am I ready for a new physical life?
What specific lessons do I want to undertake to advance my learning and development?
Where should I go, and who shall I be in my next life for the best opportunity to work on my goals?

Older souls incarnate less, regardless of the population demands of their assigned planets.

When a world dies, those entities with unfinished business move on to another world which has a suitable life form for the kind of work they have been doing.

Cycles of incarnation for the eternal soul seem to be regulated more by the internal desires of a particular soul, than by the urgency of host bodies evolving in a universe of planets.

Comment d37

This next few paragraphs are based on the idea of a singular world-line where every person has an individual soul. That is wrong. Each Instead there are multiple world-lines with consciousness occupying elements within that MWI-track..

Nevertheless, Earth certainly has an increasing need for souls.

Today, we have over five billion people. Demographers vary in their calculations on how many individuals have lived on Earth in the last 200,000 years. The average estimate is some 50 billion people. This figure, which I think is low, does not signify the number of visitations by different souls. Bear in mind the same souls continue to reincarnate, and there are those who occupy more than one body at a time.

There are reincarnationists who believe the number of people living on Earth today is close to the total number of souls who ever lived here. The frequency of incarnation on Earth by souls is uneven. Earth clearly has more need for souls today than in the past. Population estimates in 1 AD are around 200 million. By 1800, humans had quadrupled, and after only 170 more years, quadrupled again. Between 1970 and 2010, the world’s population is expected to double once more.

When I study the incarnation chronology of a client, I find there is usually a long span of hundreds, even thousands, of years between their lives in Paleolithic nomadic cultures.

With the introduction of agriculture and domesticated animals in the Neolithic Age, from 7,000 to 5,000 years ago, my subjects report living more frequent lives. Still, their lives are often spaced as much as 500 years apart.

With the rise of cities, trade, and more available food, I see the incarnation schedules of souls increasing with a growing population. Between 1000 and 1500 AD, my clients live an average of once in two centuries.

After 1700, this changes to once in a century.

By the 1900s, living more than one life in a century is common among my cases.

It has been argued these increases in soul incarnations only appear to be so because past life recall improves as people in hypnosis get closer to their current lives. This may be true to some extent, but if a life is important it will be vividly remembered at any age in time.

Without doubt, the enormous population increase on Earth is the basic cause for souls coming here more often. Is there a possibility that the inventory of souls slated for Earth could be strained by this surge in human reproduction?

When I ask clients about the inventory of available souls, they tell me I should worry more about our planet dying from over-population than exhausting the reserve of souls. There is the conviction that new souls are always available to fill any expanding population requirements. If our planet is just one example among all other intelligent populations which exist in this universe, the inventory of souls must truly be astronomical.

I have said souls do have the freedom to choose when, where, and who they want to be in their physical lives. Certain souls spend less time in the spirit world in order to accelerate development, while others are very reluctant to leave. There is no question but what our guides exert great influence in this matter. Just as we were given an intake interview in the orientation phase right after death, there are preparatory exit interviews by spiritual advisors to determine our readiness for rebirth.

The case which follows illustrates a typical spiritual scene with a lower-level soul.

Case 24 – Typical

Dr. N: When do you first realize that you might be returning to Earth?

S: A soft voice comes into my mind and says, “It’s about time, don’t you think?”

Dr. N: Who is this voice?

S: My instructor. Some of us have to be given a push when they think we are ready again.

Dr. N: Do you feel you are about ready to return to Earth?

S: Yes, I think so … I have prepared for it. But my studies are going to take such a long time in earth years before I’m done. It’s kind of overwhelming.

Dr. N: And do you think you will still be going to Earth when you near the end of your incarnations?

S: (long pause) Ah … maybe no … there is another world besides Earth … but with Earth people …

Dr. N: What does this mean?

S: Earth will have fewer people … less crowded … it’s not clear to me.

Comment d38

Souls can see the entirety of time, and can look at both past and future time-tracks / world-line maps. In this statement we see evidence for human colonies on other planets.

Dr. N: Where do you think you might be then?

S: I’m getting the impression there is colonization someplace else-it’s not clear to me.

Note: The opposite of past life regression is post life progression, which enables some subjects to see snatches of the future as incomplete scenes. For instance, some have told me Earth’s population will be greatly reduced by the end of the twenty- second century, partially due to adverse soil and atmospheric changes. They also see people living in odd-looking domed buildings. Details about the future are always rather limited, due, I suspect, to built-in amnesia from karmic constraints. I’ll have more to say about this with the next case.

Dr. N: Let’s go back to what you were saying about the instructors giving people a push to leave the spirit world. Would you prefer that they not do this?

S: Oh … I’d like to stay… but the instructors don’t want us hanging around here too long or we will get into a rut.

Dr. N: Could you insist on staying?

S: Well … yes … the instructors don’t force you to leave because they are so gentle. (laughs) But they have their ways of … encouraging you when the time comes.

Dr. N: Do you know of anyone who didn’t want to be reborn again on Earth for any reason?

S: Yes, my friend Mark. He said he had nothing to contribute anymore. He was sick of life on Earth and didn’t want to go back.

Dr. N: Had he lived many lives?

S: No, not really. But he wasn’t adjusting well in them.

Dr. N: What did the teachers do with him? Was he allowed to stay in the spirit world?

S: (reflectively) We choose to be reborn when it is decided we are ready. They don’t force you to do anything. Mark was shown he did benefit others around him.

Dr. N: What happened to Mark?

S: After some more … indoctrination … Mark realized he had been wrong about his abilities and finally he went back to Earth.

Dr. N: Indoctrination! This makes me think of coercion.

S: (disturbed by my remark) It’s not that way at all! Mark was just discouraged, and needed the confidence to keep trying.

Note: Case 10 in Chapter Four on displaced souls told us about how souls who had absorbed too much negative energy from Earth were “remodeled.” Case 22 also mentioned the need for restoration with some damaged souls. These are more extreme alterations than the basic reframing apparently used on Mark’s tired soul.

Dr. N: If the guides don’t force you, could a soul absolutely refuse to be reborn?

S: (pause) Yes … I guess you could stay here and never be reborn if you hated it that much. But the instructors told Mark that without life in a body, his studies would take longer. If you lose having direct experience, you miss a great deal.

Dr. N: How about the reverse situation where a soul insists on returning to Earth immediately, say after an untimely death?

S: I have seen that, too. It’s an impulsive reaction and does wear off after a while. The instructors get you to see that wanting to hurry back someplace as a new baby wouldn’t change the circumstances of your death. It might be different if you could be reborn as an adult right away in the same situation. Eventually, everyone realizes they must rest and reflect.

Dr. N: Well, give me your final thoughts about the prospect of living again.

S: I’m excited about it. I would have no satisfaction without my physical lives.

Dr. N: When you are ready for a new incarnation, what do you do?

S: I go to a special place.

Once a soul has decided to incarnate again, the next stage in the return process is to be directed to the place of life selection. Souls consider when and where they want to go on Earth before making a decision on who they will be in their new life. Because of this spiritual practice, I have divided life selection and our final choice of a body into two chapters for ease of understanding.

The selection of a time and place for incarnation and who we want to be are not completely separate decisions. However, we start by having the opportunity of viewing how we might fit into certain environments in future time segments. Then our attention is directed to people living in these places. I was a little distracted by this procedure until I realized a soul is largely influenced by cultural conditions and events, as well as by the participants in these events, during a span of chronological time.

I have come to believe that the spirit world, as a whole, is not functionally uniform.

All spiritual regions are seen by traveling souls as having the same ethereal properties, but with different applications.

As an illustration, the space of orientation for incoming souls could be contrasted to the space of life selection for those who are leaving. Both involve life evaluations for souls in transit which include scenes from Earth, but there the resemblance ends. Orientation spaces are said to be small, intimate conference areas designed to make a newly arrived soul comfortable, but our mental attitude in this space can be somewhat defensive. This is because there is the feeling we might have done better with life. A guide is always directly interacting with us.

On the other hand, when we enter the space of life selection, we are full of hope, promise, and lofty expectations. Here souls are virtually alone, with their guides out of sight, while evaluating new life options. This hectic, stimulating place is described as being much larger than other spiritual study areas.

Case 22 considered it a world unto itself, where transcendent energy alters time to allow for planetary study.

While some spiritual locales are difficult for my subjects to describe, most love to talk about the place of life selection, and they use remarkably similar descriptions. I am told it resembles a movie theater which allows souls to see themselves in the future, playing different roles in various settings. Before leaving, souls will have selected one scenario for themselves. Imagine being given a dress rehearsal before the actual performance of a new life.

To tell us about it, I have picked a male subject who is well acquainted with the way his soul is assisted in making appropriate decisions.

Case 25 – How to prepare

Dr. N: After you have made the decision you want to come back to Earth, what happens next?

S: Well, when my trainer and I agree the time is right to accomplish things, I send out thoughts …

Dr. N: Go on.

S: My messages are received by the coordinators.

Dr. N: Who are they? Doesn’t your trainer-guide handle all the arrangements for incarnation?

S: Not exactly. He talks to the coordinators, who actually assist us in previewing our life possibilities at the Ring.

Dr. N: What is the Ring?

S: That’s where I’m going. We call it the Ring of Destiny.

Dr. N: Is there just one place like it in the spirit world?

S: (pause) Oh, I think there must be many, but I don’t see them.

Dr. N: All right, let’s go to the Ring together on the count of three. When I am finished with my count you will have the capacity to remember all the details of this experience. Are you ready to go?

S: Yes.

Dr. N: One, two, three! Your soul is now moving toward the space of life selection.

Explain what you see.

S: (long pause) I … am floating towards the Ring … it’s circular … a monster bubble

…

Dr. N: Keep going. What else can you tell me.

S: There is a … concentrated energy force … the light is so intense. I’m being sucked inward … through a funnel … it’s a little darker.

Dr. N: Are you afraid?

S: Hmm … no, I’ve been here before, after all. It’s going to be interesting. I’m excited at what’s in store for me.

Dr. N: Okay, as you float inside the Ring, what are your first impressions?

S: (voice lowers) I … am a little apprehensive … but the energy relaxes me. I have an awareness of concern for me … caring … I don’t feel alone … my trainer’s presence is with me, too.

Dr. N: Continue to report everything. What do you see next?

S: The Ring is surrounded by banks of screens-I am looking at them.

Dr. N: Screens on walls?

S: They appear as walls themselves, but nothing is really solid … it’s all … elastic … the screens curve around me … moving …

Dr. N: Tell me more about the screens.

S: They are blank … not reflecting anything yet … they shimmer as sheets of glass … mirrors.

Dr. N: What happens next?

S: (nervously) I feel a moment of quietness-it’s always like this-then it’s as if someone flipped a switch on the projector in a panorama movie theater. The screens come alive with images and there is color … action … full of light and sound.

Dr. N: Keep reporting to me. Where is your soul in relation to the screens?

S: I am hovering in the middle, watching the panorama of life all around me … places … people … (jauntily) I know this city!

Dr. N: What do you see?

S: New York.

Dr. N: Did you ask to see New York City?

S: We talked about my going back there … (absorbed) Gee-it’s changed-more buildings … and the cars … it’s as noisy as ever.

Dr. N: I’ll come back to New York in a few minutes. Right now I want you to tell me what is expected of you in the Ring.

S: I’m going to mentally operate the panel.

Dr. N: What’s that?

S: A scanning device in front of the screens. I see it as a mass of lights and buttons. It’s as if I’m in the cockpit of an airplane.

Dr. N: And you see these mechanical objects in a spiritual setting?

S: I know it sounds crazy, but this is what is coming through to me so I can explain to you what I am doing.

Dr. N: That’s fine, don’t worry about it. Just tell me what you are supposed to do with the panel.

S: I will help the controllers change the images on the screens by operating the scanner with my mind.

Dr. N: Oh, you are going to operate the projector as if you were working in a movie theater?

S: (laughs) Not the projector, the scanner. Anyway, they aren’t really movies. I am watching life actually going on in the streets of New York. My mind connects with the scanner to control the movement of the scenes I am watching.

Dr. N: Would you say this device resembles a computer?

S: Sort of … it works on a tracking system which … converts …

Dr. N: Converts what?

S: My commands … are registered on the panel so I can track the action.

Dr. N: Position yourself at the panel and become the operator while continuing to explain everything to me.

S: (pause) I have assumed control. I see … lines converging along various points in a series of scenes … I’m traveling through time now on the lines and watching the images on the screens change.

Dr. N: And the scenes are constantly moving around you?

S: Yes, then the points light up on the lines when I want the scene to stop.

Note: Lines of travel is a term we have heard before in other spiritual regions to describe soul transition (i.e., Case 14).

Dr. N: Why are you doing all this?

S: I’m scanning. The stops are major turning points on life’s pathways involving important decisions … possibilities … events which make it necessary to consider alternate choices in time.

Dr. N: So, the lines mark the pathways through a series of events in time and space? S: Yes, the track is controlled in the Ring and transmitted to me.

Dr. N: Do you create the scenes of life while you track?

S: Oh, no! I simply control their movement through time on the lines.

Dr. N: What else can you tell me about the lines?

S: The lines of energy are … roads with points of colored light as guideposts which I can move forward, backward, or stop.

Dr. N: As if you were running a video tape with start, fast-forward, stop, and rewind buttons?

S: (laughs) That’s the idea.

Dr. N: All right, you are moving along the track, scanning scenes and you decide to stop. Tell me what you do then.

S: I suspend the scene on the screens so I can enter it.

Dr. N: What? Are you saying you become part of the scene yourself?

S: Yes, now I have direct access to the action.

Dr. N: In what way? Do you become a person in the scene, or does your soul hover overhead while people move around?

S: Both. I can experience what life is like with anyone in the scene, or just watch them from any vantage point.

Dr. N: How can you leave the panel and go into a scene on Earth while still monitoring the action in the Ring?

S: I know you probably won’t understand this, but part of me stays at the controls so I can start up the scene again and stop it anytime.

Dr. N: Perhaps I do understand. Can you divide your energy?

S: Yes, and I can send thoughts back to myself. Of course, the controllers are helping too, as I go in and out of the screens.

Dr. N: So, essentially you can move time forward, backward, and stop it while tracking?

S: Yes… in the Ring.

Dr. N: Outside the Ring, does time co-exist for you in the spirit world, or is it progressive?

S: It co-exists here, but we can still see it progress on Earth.

Dr. N: It seems to me when souls are in the Ring of Destiny they use time almost like a tool.

S: As spirits, we do use time … subjectively. Things and events are moved around … and become objects in time … but to us time is uniform.

Dr. N: The paradox I have with time travel is that what is going to happen has already happened, so you could meet your own soul in some human being as you come and go in life scenes from the future.

S: (smiles enigmatically) When making contact the soul in residence is put on hold for a moment. It’s relatively short. We don’t disturb life cycles when tracking through time.

Comment d39

It doesn’t make much sense here, but when you look at time being a map of world-line transitions, it makes complete and absolute sense..

Dr. N: Well, if past, present, and future are not really separate while you are tracking, why do you stop scenes to consider choices when you can already see into the future?

S: I’m afraid you don’t realize the real purpose of time use by the controllers of the Ring. Life is still conditional. Progressive time is created to test us. We are not shown all the possible endings to a scene. Parts of lives are obscured to us.

Dr. N: So, time is used as a catalyst for learning by viewing lives when you can’t see everything that is going to happen?

S: Yes, to test our ability to find solutions. We gauge our abilities against the difficulty of the events. The Ring sets up different experiments to choose from. On Earth we will try to solve them.

Dr. N: In the Ring, can you look at life on planets besides Earth?

S: I can’t because I’m programmed for tracking time on Earth.

Dr. N: Your being able to jump through time from the screens sounds like a ball!

S: (grins) Oh, it’s stimulating-that’s for sure-but we can’t frolic around, because there are serious decisions to be made for the next life. I’ll have to accept the consequences for any mistakes in my choices … if I am not able to handle a life well.

Dr. N: I still don’t see how you could make many serious mistakes in your choices when you actually experience part of the life in which you plan to live.

S: My choices of life environments are not unlimited. As I said, I probably Won’t be able to see all of a scene in one time segment. Because of what they don’t show you, there is risk attached to all body choices.

Dr. N: If one’s future destiny is not fully preordained, as you say, why call this space the Ring of Destiny?

S: Oh, there is destiny, all right. The life cycles are in place. It’s just that there are so many alternatives which are unclear.

When I take my subjects into the spatial area of life selection, they see a circle of past, present and future time-such as the Ring in this case. Sensing they are leaving spiritual Now time within the circle, souls apparently rotate back and forth on resonating waves during their observational runs. All aspects of time are presented to them as reoccurring realities ebbing and flowing together. Because parallel realities are superimposed upon one another, they too can be seen as possibilities for physical lives, especially by the more experienced souls.

I was puzzled why my subjects did not fully see the future under these conditions, as part of an all-knowing spiritual setting. In trying to sort this out, I finally came to the conclusion that the spirit world is designed to protect the interests of each soul. Generally, the people I work with are still-incarnating younger souls. They may not clearly see significant events too far into the future because the further away these souls get from present probabilities, the higher the incidence of possible alternative realities which cloud their images. Although the same properties hold true for time in the distant past, there is one exception. A soul’s own past lives are more easily identified. This is because a single reality, with a definite course of action, was previously established to train this soul, and thus is firmly imprinted on his memory.

In Chapter Five, Case 13 demonstrated how amnesia is imposed upon us when we come into a current life, so that past life experiences will not inhibit self-discovery in the present. The same condition holds true for souls examining future lives. Without knowing why, most people believe their life has a plan.

Of course, they are right.

Although amnesia does prevent having full conscious knowledge of this plan, the unconscious mind holds the key to spiritual memories of a general blueprint of each life. The vehicle of life selection provides a kind of time machine for souls, where they see some alternative routes to the main road. Although these paths are not fully exposed to us as souls, we carry some of the road map to Earth.

A client once said to me,

“Whenever I am confused about what to do in life, I quietly sit down and think about where I have been and compare this to where I might want to go in future. The answer to the next step just comes to me from inside myself.”

Accepting what befalls us on the road of life as “acts of God” does not mean our existence should be locked into spiritual determinism where we must submit to an unalterable fate. If everything was preordained, there would be no purpose or justice to our struggle. When adversity strikes, it is not intended that we sit back with a fatalistic attitude and not fight to improve the situation by making on-site changes. During our lives all of us will experience opportunities for change which involve risk. These occasions may come at inconvenient times. We may not act upon them, but the challenge is there for us.

The purpose of reincarnation is the exercise of free will. Without this ability, we would be impotent creatures indeed.

Thus, karmic destiny means we are not just caught up in events over which we have no control. This also means we have karmic lessons and responsibilities. The law of cause and effect for our actions always exists, which is why this case did not want to make a mistake in choosing a life unsuited to him. But whatever happens to us in life, it is important we understand that our happiness or pain does not reflect either blessings or betrayal on the part of a God-oversoul, our guides, or life selection coordinators. We are the masters of our destiny.

As I conclude my conversation with Case 25, it may strike the reader that the musical goals of this individual toward his next life are rather self-serving. Certainly his desire to be an admired musical talent has elements of personal compensation which would be less evident in a more advanced soul. However, it will also be seen that this soul wants to give a lot of himself.

Dr. N: Now, I want to talk more about the scenes you are seeing of New York City. Prior to your coming into the Ring, were you given any preparation about selections based on geography?

S: Oh, to some extent. My trainer and I talked about the fact that I had died young in New York in my last life. I wanted to go back to this dynamic city and study music.

Dr. N: Did you also talk to your trainer about other souls-your friends, who might want to incarnate with you?

S: Sure, that’s part of it. Some of us begin staking out a new life by deciding what surroundings are best for all concerned. I made it known I wanted to start again in the same place where I was killed. My trainer and friends offered their suggestions.

Note: This subject came to America as a Russian immigrant in his past life. He was killed in a railway construction accident in New York at age twenty-two in 1898. His rebirth in the same city occurred in 1937.

Dr. N: What suggestions?

S: We talked about my wanting to be a classical pianist. I had played an accordion for extra pick-up change-you know, banquets, weddings-that kind of thing.

Dr. N: And this experience is motivating your interest in the piano?

S: Yes. When making ice deliveries on the streets of New York, I would pass by the concert hall. It was my goal to some day study music and make a name for myself in the big city. I hardly got started before I died.

Dr. N: Did you see your death as a young man in New York during your last visit to the Ring?

S: (sadly) Yes … and I accepted that … as a condition of the life. It was a good life- just short. Now I want to go back with a better start and make a name for myself in music.

Dr. N: Could you ask to go anywhere on Earth?

S: Hmm….. it’s fairly open. If we have preferences, they are weighed against what’s available.

Comment d40

What’s available can mean many things. But generally it means the best-fit life to obtain the goals that one has in mind.

Dr. N: You mean, against what bodies are available?

S: Yes, in certain places.

Dr. N: When you said you wanted a better start in music, I assume this is another reason you want to go back to New York.

S: This city will give me the best opportunity to develop my desire to study the piano. I wanted a large, cosmopolitan city with music schools.

Dr. N: What’s wrong with a city like Paris?

S: I wasn’t offered a body in Paris.

Dr. N: I want to be clear on your selection options. When you start previewing life scenes in the Ring, are you primarily looking at people or locations?

S: We begin with locations.

Dr. N: Okay, and so you are looking at the streets of New York City at the moment?

S: Right, and it’s wonderful because I am doing more than looking. I’m floating around smelling the food in the restaurants … I hear the honking of cars … I’m following people walking past the shops on Fifth Avenue … getting the feel of the place again.

Dr. N: At this point have you actually entered the minds of the people walking along the streets?

S: No, not yet.

Dr. N: What do you do next?

S: I go to other cities.

Dr. N: Oh, I guess I just assumed your body choices had to be in New York City.

S: I didn’t tell you that. I also could go to Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, or Oslo.

Dr. N: I’m going to count to five and when I reach five you will scan these cities while we continue talking … one … two… three … four … five! Report what you are doing.

S: I’m going to concert halls and music academies and watching the students practice.

Dr. N: Do you just observe the general surroundings while floating around these students?

S: I do more. I go inside the heads of some of them to see how they … translate the music.

Dr. N: Do you need to be in a special place like the Ring to examine the mental processes of people?

S: For past and future events I do. Making contact with someone in the present on Earth can be done anywhere (from the spirit world).

Dr. N: Could you describe the way your soul makes contact with someone?

S: (pause) As … a light brush stroke.

Note: Souls are quite capable of sending and receiving messages from each other between spiritual and temporal worlds, as many of us have personally experienced. However, these temporary connections are made and broken quickly. The joining of a soul to a soulless baby for a lifetime is more difficult, and will be described further in Case 29.

Dr. N: As you look at these prospective lives, what year is it on Earth?

S: (hesitates) It’s … 1956 now, and most of my prospects are in their teens. I’ll check them out before and after this year … as much as the Ring will let me.

Comment d41

In this simulation the soul observes the life of the various candidate lives he can have. He observes them moving about and their actions as teenagers. Note that none of this are fixed. They are an extrapolation of most likely world-line tracks. It is up to the soul and their consciousness to deviate from this track..

Dr. N: So the Ring gives you the opportunity to actually be various people who, in relative time on Earth, are not yet born?

S: Uh-huh, to see if I would fit in well-to check out their talent and parents-that sort of thing. (decisively) I want New York.

Dr. N: Do you think you have looked at the other cities carefully enough?

S: (impatiently) Yes, I did that, but I don’t want them.

Dr. N: Wait a minute. What if you liked a music student in Oslo, but wanted to live in New York City?

S: (laughs) As a matter of fact, there is a promising girl in Los Angeles, but I still want New York.

Dr. N: All right, move forward. As your time in the Ring draws to a close, give me the details of your probable life selection.

S: I am going to New York to be a musician. I’m still trying to make up my mind between a couple of people, but I think I will choose (stops to laugh) a dumpy kid with a lot of talent. His body won’t have the stamina of my last one, but I’ll have the advantage of parents with some money who will encourage me to practice, practice, practice.

Dr. N: Money is important?

S: I know I sound … grasping … selfish … but there was no money in my last life. If I want to express the beauty of music and give pleasure to myself and others, I need proper training and supportive parents, otherwise I’ll get sidetracked … I know myself.

Comment d42

The consciousness might inhabit a physical body, and the genetic encoding of that body, but it will also need to mate with the personality of the consciousness involved.

Dr. N: If you didn’t like any of the options presented to you in the Ring, could you ask for more places and people to look at?

S: It isn’t necessary, at least for me. I’m offered enough.

Dr. N: Let me be more blunt. If you are supposed to select a life from only the selections shown you in the Ring, how do you know the coordinators aren’t stacking the deck against you? Maybe they are programming you to make certain choices?

S: (pause) I don’t think so, considering all the times I have come to the Ring. We don’t go unless our minds are made up as to the type of life we want to live, and I’ve always had interesting choices based upon my own ideas.

Dr. N: Okay, after you are completely finished with reviewing lives in the Ring, what happens then?

S: The controllers … come into my mind to see if I am satisfied with what I have been shown.

Dr. N: Are they always the same entities?

S: I think so … as far back as I can remember.

Dr. N: Do they pressure you to make a decision before leaving the Ring?

S: Not at all. I float out and go back to talk to my companions before making up my mind.

Of course, theaters such as the Ring are not limited to viewing our planet. I have shown how some souls who come to Earth enjoy incarnating on other worlds as well. In Chapter Ten, I explained how the space of transformation within the spirit world allows souls to experiment with all sorts of shapes and forms for enlightenment and short-term recreation.

However, for purposes of actual incarnation into our universe and other dimensions my subjects tell me there are space-time tunnels, or channels, available near their group centers. (Later, Case 29 will describe what it feels like to go through one of them at rebirth).

People say these portals are symbolized by a line of huge archways for passage similar to a large train station. One woman put it this way, “We see these openings as lighter or darker voids of space. To me, the lighter tunnels denote more interactive communities of beings. The darker fields lead to low-density mental colonies where I am going to be alone a lot more.”

When I asked her for an example of the latter, she said, “On the world of Arnth, we are as balls of cotton candy moving on waves of gas where nothing is solid. The swirling around each other is very orgasmic.” Another subject, describing his entry into a lighter opening said, “Sometimes between human incarnations I go with groups of souls to the fire world of Jesta. In this volcanic atmosphere we can experience the physical and emotional stimulation of becoming intelligent molecules of flame. Now I know why I love to be in temperatures of over 100 degrees on Earth”

A soul’s physical anchorage is important. Case 25 told us his choice of locations was confined to four cities. The number of scenes souls preview before a new life is, of course, different for each visit. Individual life offerings are selective, which indicates to me that other spiritual entities have been actively working on our behalf to set up location scenes before we arrive. The number of specialist spirits who assist souls at the space of life selection never seems to be large. They appear as rather vague apparitions to my subjects, although most believe members of their Council of Elders and personal guides are involved.

Early in human history, when the world was underpopulated, my clients recall lives where they were always born in sparse human settlements. In time, with the rise of villages and then larger centers of ancient civilizations, my cases report returning to the same areas. Life selections were geographically scattered again by the great migrations of people colonizing new lands, particularly in the last four hundred years. In this century of over-population, more souls are choosing to live in places where they have been before.

Does this tendency today mean souls want to return to the same countries because of race? Souls are not inclined toward life selections based on ethnicity or nationalism. These products of human separatism are taught in childhood. Aside from the comfortable familiarity of culture in a soul’s choice (which is different from racial bias), we must also factor in the affinity many spirits have for deserts, mountains, or the sea. Souls may also have a preference for rural or urban living.

Are souls drawn back to the same geographic areas because they want a new life with the same family they had in their past life? The tradition among certain cultures, such as Native Americans, is that souls choose to stay within family bloodlines. A dying man is expected to come back as his own unborn grandchild. In my practice I rarely see souls repeating the same genetic choices in past lives because this would inhibit growth and opportunity.

Once in awhile I hear about a soul returning to the body of a relative in a former life under unusual karmic circumstances. For example, if a brother and sister had a close affinity for each other, and one were to die suddenly while still young, the soul of the dead sibling might want to return in the surviving sibling’s child to restore this broken life connection to finish an important task.

What is even more common in my experience, are the souls of young children who die soon after birth and then return to the same parents as the soul of their next baby. These plans are all made in advance by the souls participating in tragic family events. They involve a maze of karmic issues.

Not long ago, I had a case where my client had died from a birth defect early in his last life. I asked, “What was the purpose of your life ending when you were only a few days old?” He replied, “The lesson was for my parents, not me, and that’s why I elected to come back for them as a filler.” When souls return for a short life to help someone else rather than work on their own issues, because there isn’t time, some call this “a filler life.” In this case, the parents had abused and finally caused the death of another child when they were together in an earlier life. Although they were a loving young couple in the last life of my client, these parents evidently needed to experience the grief of having a child they desperately wanted taken away from them. Experiencing the anguish from this terrible loss gave the souls of these parents a deeper insight into the effects of severing a blood bond. I will have an example of this theme in Case 27.

Spirits do not routinely see their deaths in future lives. If souls choose a life where their death will be premature, they often see it in the place of life selection. I have found that souls essentially volunteer in advance for bodies who will have sudden fatal illnesses, are to be killed by someone, or come to an abrupt end of life with many others from a catastrophic event.

Souls who become involved in these tragedies are not caught in the wrong place at the wrong time with a capricious God looking the other way. Every soul has a motive for the events in which it chooses to participate. One client told me his last life was planned in advance to end at seven years of age as an American Indian boy. He said, “I was looking for a short-burst lesson in humility and this life as a mistreated starving half-breed was enough.”

Another, more graphic example of a soul volunteering for a terrible assignment was that of one of my subjects who elected in her last life to join (with three others of her soul group) the bodies of Jewish women taken from Munich into the death camp at Dachau in 1941. All were assigned to the same barracks (also prearranged) where my client died in 1943 at age 18 comforting the children and trying to help them survive. Her mission was accomplished with courage.

While events, race, culture, and geographic location often appear to come first in the selection process, they are not the most significant choices for the soul’s next life. Aside from all other considerations, incarnation comes down to souls making that all-important decision of a specific body, and what can be learned by utilizing the brain of a certain human being.

The next chapter is devoted to an analysis of why souls choose their bodies for various biological and psychological reasons…

This is the fourth part of a multiple part series. To go to the next part, please click HERE.

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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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The Veldt (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury

There is nothing wrong with reading a nice piece of literature. That’s true, don’t you know. Lately, I’ve been thinking about Ray Bradbury. His writings are so… oh so… special.

It’s some of the best that the world can offer.

Here’s a great little gem of a story. Please enjoy.

The Veldt – Ray Bradbury

“George, I wish you’d look at the nursery. “What’s wrong with it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, then.”

“I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look at it.” “What would a psychologist want with a nursery?”

“You know very well what he’d want.” His wife was standing in the middle of the kitchen watching the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for four.

“It’s just that it is different now than it was.” “All right, let’s have a look.”

They walked down the hall of their HappyLife Home, which had cost them thirty thousand dollars with everything included. This house which clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them. Their approach was sensed by a hidden switch and the nursery light turned on when they came within ten feet of it. Similarly, behind them, in the halls, lights went on and off automatically as they left them behind.

“Well,” said George Hadley. They stood on the grass-like floor of the nursery. It was forty feet across by forty feet long and thirty feet high; it had cost half again as much as the rest of the house. “But nothing’s too good for our children,” George had said.

The room was silent and empty. The walls were white and two dimensional. Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls made a quiet noise and seemed to fall away into the distance. Soon an African veldt appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in color. It looked real to the smallest stone and bit of yellow summer grass. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun.

George Hadley started to sweat from the heat. “Let’s get out of this sun,” he said. “This is a little too real. But I don’t see anything wrong.”

“Wait a moment, you’ll see,” said his wife.

Now hidden machines were beginning to blow a wind containing prepared smells toward the two people in the middle of the baked veldt. The hot straw smell of lion grass, the cool green smell of the hidden water hole, the strong dried blood smell of the animals, the smell of dust like red pepper in the hot air. And now the sounds: the thump of distant antelope feet on soft grassy ground, the papery rustle of vultures. A shadow passed through the sky. George Hadley looked up, and as he watched the shadow moved across his sweating face. “Horrible creatures,” he heard his wife say.

“The vultures.”

“You see, there are the lions, far over, that way. Now they’re on their way to the water hole.

They’ve just been eating,” said Lydia. “I don’t know what.”

“Some animal.” George Hadley put his hand above his eyes to block off the burning light and looked carefully. “A zebra or a baby giraffe, maybe.”

“Are you sure?” His wife sounded strangely nervous.

“No, it’s a little late to be sure,” he said, with a laugh. “Nothing over there I can see but cleaned bone, and the vultures dropping for what’s left.”

“Did you hear that scream?” she asked. “No.”

“About a minute ago?” “Sorry, no.”

The lions were coming. And again George Hadley was filled with respect for the brilliant mind that had come up with the idea for this room. A wonder of efficiency selling for an unbelievably low price. Every home should have one. Oh, occasionally they frightened you with their realism, they made you jump, gave you a scare. But most of the time they were fun for everyone. Not only your own son and daughter, but for yourself when you felt like a quick trip to a foreign land, a quick change of scenery. Well, here it was!

And here were the lions now, fifteen feet away. They looked so real, so powerful and shockingly real, that you could feel the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. Your mouth was filled with the dusty smell of their heated fur. The yellow of the lions and the summer grass was in your eyes like a picture in an expensive French wall hanging. And there was the sound of the lions quick, heavy breaths in the silent mid-day sun, and the smell of meat from their dripping mouths.

The lions stood looking at George and Lydia Hadley with terrible green-yellow eyes. “Watch out!” screamed Lydia.

The lions came running at them. Lydia turned suddenly and ran. Without thinking, George ran after her. Outside in the hall, after they had closed the door quickly and noisily behind them, he was laughing and she was crying. And they both stood shocked at the other’s reaction.

“George!”

“Lydia! Oh, my dear poor sweet Lydia!” “They almost got us!”

“Walls, Lydia, remember; glass walls, that’s all they are. Oh, they look real, I must admit – Africa in your living room. But it’s all created from three dimensional color film behind glass screens. And the machines that deliver the smells and sounds to go with the scenery. Here’s my handkerchief.”

“I’m afraid.” She came to him and put her body against him and cried as he held her. “Did you see? Did you feel? It’s too real.”

“Now, Lydia…”

“You’ve got to tell Wendy and Peter not to read any more on Africa.” “Of course – of course.” He patted her.

“Promise?” “Sure.”

“And lock the nursery for a few days until I can get over this.”

“You know how difficult Peter is about that. When I punished him a month ago by locking it for even a few hours – the way he lost his temper! And Wendy too. They live for the nursery.”

“It’s got to be locked, that’s all there is to it.”

“All right.” Although he wasn’t happy about it, he locked the huge door. “You’ve been working too hard. You need a rest.”

“I don’t know – I don’t know,” she said, blowing her nose, sitting down in a chair that immediately began to rock and comfort her. “Maybe I don’t have enough to do. Maybe I have time to think too much. Why don’t we shut the whole house off for a few days and take a vacation?”

“You mean you want to fry my eggs for me?” “Yes.” She nodded.

“And mend my socks?”

“Yes.” She nodded again excitedly, with tears in her eyes. “And clean the house?”

“Yes, yes – oh, yes!”

“But I thought that’s why we bought this house, so we wouldn’t have to do anything?”

“That’s just it. I feel like I don’t belong here. The house is wife and mother now, and nurse for the children. Can I compete with an African veldt? Can I give a bath and clean the children as efficiently or quickly as the automatic body wash can? I cannot. And it isn’t just me. It’s you. You’ve been awfully nervous lately.”

“I suppose I have been smoking too much.”

“You look as if you didn’t know what to do with yourself in this house, either. You smoke a little more every morning and drink a little more every afternoon, and you are taking more pills to help you sleep at night. You’re beginning to feel unnecessary too.”

“Am I?” He thought for a moment as he and tried to feel into himself to see what was really there. “Oh, George!” She looked past him, at the nursery door. “Those lions can’t get out of there, can

they?”

He looked at the door and saw it shake as if something had jumped against it from the other side. “Of course not,” he said.

At dinner they ate alone, for Wendy and Peter were at a special plastic fair across town. They had called home earlier to say they’d be late. So George Hadley, deep in thought, sat watching the dining-room table produce warm dishes of food from the machines inside.

“We forgot the tomato sauce,” he said.

“Sorry,” said a small voice within the table, and tomato sauce appeared.

As for the nursery, thought George Hadley, it won’t hurt for the children to be locked out of it a while. Too much of anything isn’t good for anyone. And it was clearly indicated that the children had been spending a little too much time on Africa. That sun. He could still feel it on his neck, like a hot paw. And the lions. And the smell of blood. Remarkable how the nursery read the thoughts in the children’s minds and created life to fill their every desire. The children thought lions, and there were lions. The children thought zebras, and there were zebras. Sun – sun. Giraffes – giraffes. Death and death.

That last. He ate the meat that the table had cut for him without tasting it. Death thoughts. They were awfully young, Wendy and Peter, for death thoughts. Or, no, you were never too young, really. Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else. When you were two years old you were shooting people with toy guns.

But this – the long, hot African veldt. The awful death in the jaws of a lion. And repeated again and again.

“Where are you going?”

George didn’t answer Lydia… he was too busy thinking of something else. He let the lights shine softly on ahead of him, turn off behind him as he walked quietly to the nursery door. He listened against it. Far away, a lion roared. He unlocked the door and opened it. Just before he stepped inside, he heard a faraway scream. And then another roar from the lions, which died down quickly. He stepped into Africa.

How many times in the last year had he opened this door and found Wonderland with Alice and the Mock Turtle, or Aladdin and his Magical Lamp, or Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz, or Dr. Doolittle, or the cow jumping over a very real-looking moon. All the most enjoyable creations of an imaginary world. How often had he seen Pegasus the winged horse flying in the sky ceiling, or seen explosions of red fireworks, or heard beautiful singing.

But now, is yellow hot Africa, this bake oven with murder in the heat. Perhaps Lydia was right. Perhaps they needed a little vacation from the fantasy which was growing a bit too real for ten-year- old children. It was all right to exercise one’s mind with unusual fantasies, but when the lively child mind settled on one pattern..?

It seemed that, at a distance, for the past month, he had heard lions roaring, and noticed their strong smell which carried as far away as his study door. But, being busy, he had paid it no attention.

George Hadley stood on the African veldt alone. The lions looked up from their feeding, watching

him. The only thing wrong with the image was the open door. Through it he could see his wife, far down the dark hall, like a framed picture. She was still eating her dinner, but her mind was clearly on other things.

“Go away,” he said to the lions.

They did not go. He knew exactly how the room should work. You sent out your thoughts. Whatever you thought would appear. “Let’s have Aladdin and his lamp,” he said angrily. The veldt remained; the lions remained.

“Come on, room! I demand Aladdin!” he said.

Nothing happened. The lions made soft low noises in the hot sun. “Aladdin!”

He went back to dinner. “The fool room’s out of order,” he said. “It won’t change.” “Or…”

“Or what?”

“Or it can’t change,” said Lydia, “because the children have thought about Africa and lions and killing so many days that the room’s stuck in a pattern it can’t get out of.”

“Could be.”

“Or Peter’s set it to remain that way.” “Set it?”

“He may have got into the machinery and fixed something.” “Peter doesn’t know machinery.”

“He’s a wise one for ten. That I.Q. of his…” “But…”

“Hello, Mom. Hello, Dad.”

The Hadleys turned. Wendy and Peter were coming happily in the front door, with bright blue eyes and a smell of fresh air on their clothes from their trip in the helicopter.

“You’re just in time for supper,” said both parents.

“We’re full of strawberry ice-cream and hot dogs,” said the children, holding hands. “But we’ll sit and watch.”

“Yes, come tell us about the nursery,” said George Hadley.

The brother and sister looked at him and then at each other. “Nursery?”

“All about Africa and everything,” said the father with a false smile. “I don’t understand,” said Peter.

“Your mother and I were just traveling through Africa. “There’s no Africa in the nursery,” said Peter simply. “Oh, come now, Peter. We know better.”

“I don’t remember any Africa,” said Peter to Wendy. “Do you?” “No.”

“Run see and come tell.” She did as he told her.

“Wendy, come back here!” said George Hadley, but she was gone. The house lights followed her like fireflies. Too late, he realized he had forgotten to lock the nursery door after his last visit.

“Wendy’ll look and come tell us,” said Peter. “She doesn’t have to tell me. I’ve seen it.” “I’m sure you’re mistaken, Father.”

“I’m not, Peter. Come along now.”

But Wendy was back. “It’s not Africa,” she said breathlessly.

“We’ll see about this,” said George Hadley, and they all walked down the hall together and opened the door.

There was a green, lovely forest, a lovely river, a purple mountain, high voices singing. And there was Rima the bird girl, lovely and mysterious. She was hiding in the trees with colorful butterflies, like flowers coming to life, flying about her long hair. The African veldt was gone. The lions were gone. Only Rima was here now, singing a song so beautiful that it brought tears to your eyes.

George Hadley looked in at the changed scene. “Go to bed,” he said to the children. They opened their mouths.

“You heard me,” he said.

They went off to the air tube, where a wind blew them like brown leaves up to their sleeping rooms. George Hadley walked through the forest scene and picked up something that lay in the corner near

where the lions had been. He walked slowly back to his wife. “What is that?” she asked.

“An old wallet of mine,” he said. He showed it to her. The smell of hot grass was on it… and the smell of a lion. It was wet from being in the lion’s mouth, there were tooth marks on it, and there was dried blood on both sides. He closed the door and locked it, tight.

They went to up to bed but couldn’t sleep. “Do you think Wendy changed it?” she said at last, in the dark room.

“Of course.”

“Made it from a veldt into a forest and put Rima there instead of lions?” “Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. But it’s staying locked until I find out.” “How did your wallet get there?”

“I don’t know anything,” he said, “except that I’m beginning to be sorry we bought that room for the children. If children are suffering from any kind of emotional problem, a room like that…”

“It’s supposed to help them work off their emotional problems in a healthy way.” “I’m starting to wonder.” His eyes were wide open, looking up at the ceiling.

“We’ve given the children everything they ever wanted. Is this our reward – secrecy, not doing what we tell them?”

“Who was it said, ‘Children are carpets, they should be stepped on occasionally’? We’ve never lifted a hand. They’re unbearable – let’s admit it. They come and go when they like; they treat us as if we were the children in the family. They’re spoiled and we’re spoiled.”

“They’ve been acting funny ever since you wouldn’t let them go to New York a few months ago.” “They’re not old enough to do that alone, I explained.”

“I know, but I’ve noticed they’ve been decidedly cool toward us since.”

“I think I’ll have David McClean come tomorrow morning to have a look at Africa.” “But it’s not Africa now, it’s South America and Rima.”

“I have a feeling it’ll be Africa again before then.”

A moment later they heard the screams. Two screams. Two people screaming from downstairs. And then a roar of lions.

“Wendy and Peter aren’t in their rooms,” said his wife.

He lay in his bed with his beating heart. “No,” he said. “They’ve broken into the nursery.”

“Those screams – they sound familiar.” “Do they?”

“Yes, awfully.”

And although their beds tried very hard, the two adults couldn’t be rocked to sleep for another hour. A smell of cats was in the night air.

* * * “Father?” asked Peter the next morning.

“Yes.”

Peter looked at his shoes. He never looked at his father any more, nor at his mother. “You aren’t going to lock up the nursery for good, are you?”

“That all depends.”

“On what?” said Peter sharply.

“On you and your sister. If you break up this Africa with a little variety – oh, Sweden perhaps, or Denmark or China…”

“I thought we were free to play as we wished.” “You are, within reasonable limits.”

“What’s wrong with Africa, Father?”

“Oh, so now you admit you have been thinking up Africa, do you?” “I wouldn’t want the nursery locked up,” said Peter coldly. “Ever.”

“Matter of fact, we’re thinking of turning the whole house off for about a month. Live sort of a happy family existence.”

“That sounds terrible! Would I have to tie my own shoes instead of letting the machine do it? And brush my own teeth and comb my hair and give myself a bath?”

“It would be fun for a change, don’t you think?”

No, it would be horrible. I didn’t like it when you took out the picture painter last month.” “That’s because I wanted you to learn to paint all by yourself, son.”

“I don’t want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?” “All right, go play in Africa.”

“Will you shut off the house sometime soon?” “We’re considering it.”

“I don’t think you’d better consider it any more, Father.” “I won’t have any threats from my son!”

“Very well.” And Peter walked off to the nursery.

* * * “Am I on time?” said David McClean. “Breakfast?” asked George Hadley.

“Thanks, had some. What’s the trouble?” “David, you’re a psychologist.”

“I should hope so.”

“Well, then, have a look at our nursery. You saw it a year ago when you dropped by; did you notice anything unusual about it then?”

“Can’t say I did; the usual violences, a tendency toward a slight paranoia here or there. But this is usual in children because they feel their parents are always doing things to make them suffer in one way or another. But, oh, really nothing.”

They walked down the hall. “I locked it up,” explained the father, “and the children broke back into it during the night. I let them stay so they could form the patterns for you to see.”

There was a terrible screaming from the nursery.

“There it is,” said George Hadley. “See what you make of it.”

They walked in on the children without knocking. The screams had stopped. The lions were feeding.

“Run outside a moment, children,” said George Hadley. “No, don’t change the mental picture. Leave the walls as they are. Get!”

With the children gone, the two men stood studying the lions sitting together in the distance, eating with great enjoyment whatever it was they had caught.

“I wish I knew what it was,” said George Hadley. “Sometimes I can almost see. Do you think if I brought high-powered binoculars here and…”

David McClean laughed dryly. “Hardly.” He turned to study all four walls. “How long has this been going on?”

“A little over a month.”

“It certainly doesn’t feel good.” “I want facts, not feelings.”

“My dear George, a psychologist never saw a fact in his life. He only hears about feelings; things that aren’t always clearly expressed. This doesn’t feel good, I tell you. Trust me. I have a nose for something bad. This is very bad. My advice to you is to have the whole damn room torn down and your children brought to me every day during the next year for treatment.”

“Is it that bad?”

“I’m afraid so. One of the original uses of these rooms was so that we could study the patterns left on the walls by the child’s mind. We could study them whenever we wanted to, and help the child. In this case, however, the room has become a means of creating destructive thoughts, instead of helping to make them go away.”

“Didn’t you sense this before?”

“I sensed only that you had spoiled your children more than most. And now you’re letting them down in some way. What way?”

“I wouldn’t let them go to New York.” “What else?”

“I’ve taken a few machines from the house and threatened them, a month ago, with closing up the nursery unless they did their homework. I did close it for a few days to show I meant business.”

“Ah, ha!”

“Does that mean anything?”

“Everything. Where before they had a Santa Claus now they have a Scrooge. Children prefer Santa. You’ve let this room and this house replace you and your wife in your children’s feelings. This room is their mother and father, far more important in their lives than their real parents. And now you come along and want to shut it off. No wonder there’s hatred here. You can feel it coming out of the sky. Feel that sun. George, you’ll have to change your life. Like too many others, you’ve built it around creature comforts. Why, you’d go hungry tomorrow if something went wrong in your kitchen. You wouldn’t know how to cook an egg. All the same, turn everything off. Start new. It’ll take time. But we’ll make good children out of bad in a year, wait and see.”

“But won’t the shock be too much for the children, shutting the room up without notice, for good?” “I don’t want them going any deeper into this, that’s all.”

The lions were finished with their bloody meat. They were standing on the edge of the clearing watching the two men.

“Now I’m feeling worried,” said McClean. “Let’s get out of here. I never have cared for these damned rooms. Make me nervous.”

“The lions look real, don’t they?” said George Hadley. I don’t suppose there’s any way…” “What?”

“…that they could become real?” “Not that I know.”

“Some problem with the machinery, someone changing something inside?” “No.”

They went to the door.

“I don’t imagine the room will like being turned off,” said the father. “Nothing ever likes to die – even a room.”

“I wonder if it hates me for wanting to switch it off?”

“Paranoia is thick around here today,” said David McClean. “You can see it everywhere. Hello.” He bent and picked up a bloody scarf. “This yours?”

“No.” George Hadley’s face set like stone. “It belongs to Lydia.”

They went to the control box together and threw the switch that killed the nursery.

The two children were so upset that they couldn’t control themselves. They screamed and danced around and threw things. They shouted and cried and called them rude names and jumped on the furniture.

“You can’t do that to the nursery, you can’t!” “Now, children.”

The children threw themselves onto a sofa, crying.

“George,” said Lydia Hadley, “turn it on again, just for a few moments. You need to give them some more time.”

“No.”

“You can’t be so cruel…”

“Lydia, it’s off, and it stays off. And the whole damn house dies as of here and now. The more I see of the mess we’ve put ourselves in, the more it sickens me. We’ve been thinking of our machine assisted selves for too long. My God, how we need a breath of honest air!”

And he marched about the house turning off the voice clocks, the stoves, the heaters, the shoe cleaners, the body washer, the massager, and every other machine he could put his hand to.

The house was full of dead bodies, it seemed. It felt like a mechanical cemetery. So silent. None of

the humming hidden energy of machines waiting to function at the tap of a button.

“Don’t let them do it!” cried Peter to the ceiling, as if he was talking to the house, the nursery. “Don’t let Father kill everything.” He turned to his father. “Oh, I hate you!”

“Saying things like that won’t get you anywhere.” “I wish you were dead!”

“We were, for a long while. Now we’re going to really start living. Instead of being handled and massaged, we’re going to live.”

Wendy was still crying and Peter joined her again. “Just a moment, just one moment, just another moment of nursery,” they cried.

“Oh, George,” said the wife, “it can’t hurt.”

“All right – all right, if they’ll just shut up. One minute, mind you, and then off forever.” “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!” sang the children, smiling with wet faces.

“And then we’re going on a vacation. David McClean is coming back in half an hour to help us move out and get to the airport. I’m going to dress. You turn the nursery on for a minute, Lydia, just a minute, mind you.”

And the three of them went off talking excitedly while he let himself be transported upstairs through the air tube and set about dressing himself. A minute later Lydia appeared.

“I’ll be glad when we get away,” she said thankfully. “Did you leave them in the nursery?”

“I wanted to dress too. Oh, that horrible Africa. What can they see in it?”

“Well, in five minutes we’ll be on our way to Iowa. Lord, how did we ever get in this house? What made us buy a nightmare?”

“Pride, money, foolishness.”

“I think we’d better get downstairs before those kids spend too much time with those damned beasts again.”

Just then they heard the children calling, “Daddy, Mommy, come quick – quick!”

They went downstairs in the air tube and ran down the hall. The children were nowhere in sight. “Wendy? Peter!”

They ran into the nursery. The veldt was empty save for the lions waiting, looking at them. “Peter, Wendy?”

The door closed loudly.

“Wendy, Peter!”

George Hadley and his wife turned quickly and ran back to the door.

“Open the door!” cried George Hadley, trying the handle. “Why, they’ve locked it from the outside! Peter!” He beat at the door. “Open up!”

He heard Peter’s voice outside, against the door.

“Don’t let them switch off the nursery and the house,” he was saying.

Mr. and Mrs. George Hadley beat at the door. “Now, don’t be silly, children. It’s time to go. Mr. McClean’ll be here in a minute and…”

And then they heard the sounds.

The lions were on three sides of them in the yellow veldt grass. They walked quietly through the dry grass, making long, deep rolling sounds in their throats. The lions!

Mr. Hadley looked at his wife and they turned and looked back at the beasts edging slowly forward, knees bent, tails in the air.

Mr. and Mrs. Hadley screamed.

And suddenly they realized why those other screams had sounded familiar.

* * *

“Well, here I am,” said David McClean from the nursery door. “Oh, hello.” He looked carefully at the two children seated in the center of the room eating a little picnic lunch. On the far them he could see the water hole and the yellow veldt. Above was the hot sun. He began to sweat. “Where are your father and mother?”

The children looked up and smiled. “Oh, they’ll be here directly.” “Good, we must get going.”

At a distance Mr. McClean saw the lions fighting over something and then quietening down to feed in silence under the shady trees. He put his hand to his eyes to block out the sun and looked at them. Now the lions were done feeding. They moved to the water hole to drink. A shadow moved over Mr. McClean’s hot face. Many shadows moved. The vultures were dropping down from the burning sky.

“A cup of tea?” asked Wendy in the silence.

The End

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Plague Ship (Full Text) by Andre Norton (writing as “Andrew North”)

Here is a piece of classic science fiction. It’s a full novel or novelle (if your wish)… maybe a novelette. Plague Ship (Full Text) by Andre Norton. What ever it is, it’s a good read from the days of pulp science fiction stories.

These books used to rest in wire frames in the fronts of pharmacies, small-town grocery stores, soda fountains, and other similiar venues all accross the United States. Boys like myself, would plop down a nickel, buy one of these books, and grab a soda to read during the long hot Summer.

Well, I actually came a little later on the scene. The stores that sold these books were mostly “booksellers”, and the cost of a soda increased to twenty five cents. But pretty much everything else stayed the same. Oh, and I fogot to add my “Banana seat” bicycle to the mix…

Anyways…

It’s a grood read for all of you’se guys who are all at home cooped up trying to avoid the COVID-19. Stay safe. Be cool, and enjoy this moment. It will allow you some much needed family and personal time. Don’t squander it.

Enjoy.

PLAGUE SHIP

Chapter I

PERFUMED PLANET

Dane Thorson, Cargo-master-apprentice of the Solar Queen, Galactic Free Trader spacer, Terra registry, stood in the middle of the ship’s cramped bather while Rip Shannon, assistant Astrogator and his senior in the Service of Trade by some four years, applied gobs of highly scented paste to the skin between Dane’s rather prominent shoulder blades. The small cabin was thickly redolent with spicy odors and Rip sniffed appreciatively.

“You’re sure going to be about the best smelling Terran who ever set boot on Sargol’s soil,” his soft slur of speech ended in a rich chuckle.

Dane snorted and tried to estimate progress over one shoulder.

“The things we have to do for Trade!” his comment carried a hint of present embarrassment. “Get it well in—this stuff’s supposed to hold for hours. It’d better. According to Van those Salariki can talk your ears right off your head and say nothing worth hearing. And we have to sit and listen until we get a straight answer out of them. Phew!” He shook his head. In such close quarters the scent, pleasing as it was, was also overpowering. “We would have to pick a world such as this—”

Rip’s dark fingers halted their circular motion. “Dane,” he warned, “don’t you go talking against this venture. We got it soft and we’re going to be credit-happy—if it works out—”

But, perversely, Dane held to a gloomier view of the immediate future. “If,” he repeated. “There’s a galaxy of ‘ifs’ in this Sargol proposition. All very well for you to rest easy on your fins—you don’t have to run about smelling like a spice works before you can get the time of day from one of the natives!”

Rip put down the jar of cream. “Different worlds, different customs,” he iterated the old tag of the Service. “Be glad this one is so easy to conform to. There are some I can think of—There,” he ended his massage with a stinging slap. “You’re all evenly greased. Good thing you don’t have Van’s bulk to cover. It takes him a good hour to get his cream on—even with Frank helping to spread. Your clothes ought to be steamed up and ready, too, by now—”

He opened a tight wall cabinet, originally intended to sterilize clothing which might be contaminated by contact with organisms inimical to Terrans. A cloud of steam fragrant with the same spicy scent poured out.

Dane gingerly tugged loose his Trade uniform, its brown silky fabric damp on his skin as he dressed. Luckily Sargol was warm. When he stepped out on its ruby tinted soil this morning no lingering taint of his off-world origin must remain to disgust the sensitive nostrils of the Salariki. He supposed he would get used to this process. After all this was the first time he had undergone the ritual. But he couldn’t lose the secret conviction that it was all very silly. Only what Rip had pointed out was the truth—one adjusted to the customs of aliens or one didn’t trade and there were other things he might have had to do on other worlds which would have been far more upsetting to that core of private fastidiousness which few would have suspected existed in his tall, lanky frame.

“Whew—out in the open with you—!” Ali Kamil apprentice Engineer, screwed his too regular features into an expression of extreme distaste and waved Dane by him in the corridor.

For the sake of his shipmates’ olfactory nerves, Dane hurried on to the port which gave on the ramp now tying the Queen to Sargol’s crust. But there he lingered, waiting for Van Rycke, the Cargo-master of the spacer and his immediate superior. It was early morning and now that he was out of the confinement of the ship the fresh morning winds cut about him, rippling through the blue-green grass forest beyond, to take much of his momentary irritation with them.

There were no mountains in this section of Sargol—the highest elevations being rounded hills tightly clothed with the same ten-foot grass which covered the plains. From the Queen’s observation ports, one could watch the constant ripple of the grass so that the planet appeared to be largely clothed in a shimmering, flowing carpet. To the west were the seas—stretches of shallow water so cut up by strings of islands that they more resembled a series of salty lakes. And it was what was to be found in those seas which had lured the Solar Queen to Sargol.

Though, by rights, the discovery was that of another Trader—Traxt Cam—who had bid for trading rights to Sargol, hoping to make a comfortable fortune—or at least expenses with a slight profit—in the perfume trade, exporting from the scented planet some of its most fragrant products. But once on Sargol he had discovered the Koros stones—gems of a new type—a handful of which offered across the board in one of the inner planet trading marts had nearly caused a riot among bidding gem merchants. And Cam had been well on the way to becoming one of the princes of Trade when he had been drawn into the vicious net of the Limbian pirates and finished off.

Because they, too, had stumbled into the trap which was Limbo, and had had a very definite part in breaking up that devilish installation, the crew of the Solar Queen had claimed as their reward the trading rights of Traxt Cam in default of legal heirs. And so here they were on Sargol with the notes left by Cam as their guide, and as much lore concerning the Salariki as was known crammed into their minds.

Dane sat down on the end of the ramp, his feet on Sargolian soil, thin, red soil with glittering bits of gold flake in it. He did not doubt that he was under observation from hidden eyes, but he tried to show no sign that he guessed it. The adult Salariki maintained at all times an attitude of aloof and complete indifference toward the Traders, but the juvenile population were as curious as their elders were contemptuous. Perhaps there was a method of approach in that. Dane considered the idea.

Van Rycke and Captain Jellico had handled the first negotiations—and the process had taken most of a day—the result totaling exactly nothing. In their contacts with the off world men the feline ancestered Salariki were ceremonious, wary, and completely detached. But Cam had gotten to them somehow—or he would not have returned from his first trip with that pouch of Koros stones. Only, among his records, salvaged on Limbo, he had left absolutely no clue as to how he had beaten down native sales resistance. It was baffling. But patience had to be the middle name of every Trader and Dane had complete faith in Van. Sooner or later the Cargo-master would find a key to unlock the Salariki.

As if the thought of Dane’s chief had summoned him, Van Rycke, his scented tunic sealed to his bull’s neck in unaccustomed trimness, his cap on his blond head, strode down the ramp, broadcasting waves of fragrance as he moved. He sniffed vigorously as he approached his assistant and then nodded in approval.

“So you’re all greased and ready—”

“Is the Captain coming too, sir?”

Van Rycke shook his head. “This is our headache. Patience, my boy, patience—” He led the way through a thin screen of the grass on the other side of the scorched landing field to a well-packed earth road.

Again Dane felt eyes, knew that they were being watched. But no Salarik stepped out of concealment. At least they had nothing to fear in the way of attack. Traders were immune, taboo, and the trading stations were set up under the white diamond shield of peace, a peace guaranteed on blood oath by every clan chieftain in the district. Even in the midst of interclan feuding deadly enemies met in amity under that shield and would not turn claw knife against each other within a two mile radius of its protection.

The grass forests rustled betrayingly, but the Terrans displayed no interest in those who spied upon them. An insect with wings of brilliant green gauze detached itself from the stalk of a grass tree and fluttered ahead of the Traders as if it were an official herald. From the red soil crushed by their boots arose a pungent odor which fought with the scent they carried with them. Dane swallowed three or four times and hoped that his superior officer had not noticed that sign of discomfort. Though Van Rycke, in spite of his general air of sleepy benevolence and careless goodwill, noticed everything, no matter how trivial, which might have a bearing on the delicate negotiations of Galactic Trade. He had not climbed to his present status of expert Cargo-master by overlooking anything at all. Now he gave an order:

“Take an equalizer—”

Dane reached for his belt pouch, flushing, fiercely determined inside himself, that no matter how smells warred about him that day, he was not going to let it bother him. He swallowed the tiny pellet Medic Tau had prepared for just such trials and tried to occupy his mind with the work to come. If there would be any work—or would another long day be wasted in futile speeches of mutual esteem which gave formal lip service to Trade and its manifest benefits?

“Houuuu—” The cry which was half wail, half arrogant warning, sounded along the road behind them.

Van Rycke’s stride did not vary. He did not turn his head, show any sign he had heard that heralding fanfare for a clan chieftain. And he continued to keep to the exact center of the road, Dane the regulation one pace to the rear and left as befitted his lower rank.

“Houuu—” that blast from the throat of a Salarik especially chosen for his lung power was accompanied now by the hollow drum of many feet. The Terrans neither looked around nor withdrew from the center, nor did their pace quicken.

That, too, was in order, Dane knew. To the rank conscious Salariki clansmen you did not yield precedence unless you wanted at once to acknowledge your inferiority—and if you did that by some slip of admission or omission, there was no use in trying to treat face to face with their chieftains again.

“Houuu—!” The blast behind was a scream as the retinue it announced swept around the bend in the road to catch sight of the two Traders oblivious of it. Dane longed to be able to turn his head, just enough to see which one of the local lordlings they blocked.

“Houu—” there was a questioning note in the cry now and the heavy thud-thud of feet was slacking. The clan party had seen them, were hesitant about the wisdom of trying to shove them aside.

Van Rycke marched steadily onward and Dane matched his pace. They might not possess a leather-lunged herald to clear their road, but they gave every indication of having the right to occupy as much of it as they wished. And that unruffled poise had its affect upon those behind. The pound of feet slowed to a walk, a walk which would keep a careful distance behind the two Terrans. It had worked—the Salariki—or these Salariki—were accepting them at their own valuation—a good omen for the day’s business. Dane’s spirits rose, but he schooled his features into a mask as wooden as his superior’s. After all this was a very minor victory and they had ten or twelve hours of polite, and hidden, maneuvering before them.

The Solar Queen had set down as closely as possible to the trading center marked on Traxt Cam’s private map and the Terrans now had another five minutes march, in the middle of the road, ahead of the chieftain who must be inwardly boiling at their presence, before they came out in the clearing containing the roofless, circular erection which served the Salariki of the district as a market place and a common meeting ground for truce talks and the mending of private clan alliances. Erect on a pole in the middle, towering well above the nodding fronds of the grass trees, was the pole bearing the trade shield which promised not only peace to those under it, but a three day sanctuary to any feuder or duelist who managed to win to it and lay hands upon its weathered standard.

They were not the first to arrive, which was also a good thing. Gathered in small groups about the walls of the council place were the personal attendants, liege warriors, and younger relatives of at least four or five clan chieftains. But, Dane noted at once, there was not a single curtained litter or riding orgel to be seen. None of the feminine part of the Salariki species had arrived. Nor would they until the final trade treaty was concluded and established by their fathers, husbands, or sons.

With the assurance of one who was master in his own clan, Van Rycke, displaying no interest at all in the shifting mass of lower rank Salariki, marched straight on to the door of the enclosure. Two or three of the younger warriors got to their feet, their brilliant cloaks flicking out like spreading wings. But when Van Rycke did not even lift an eyelid in their direction, they made no move to block his path.

As fighting men, Dane thought, trying to study the specimens before him with a totally impersonal stare, the Salariki were an impressive lot. Their average height was close to six feet, their distant feline ancestry apparent only in small vestiges. A Salarik’s nails on both hands and feet were retractile, his skin was gray, his thick hair, close to the texture of plushy fur, extended down his backbone and along the outside of his well muscled arms and legs, and was tawny-yellow, blue-gray or white. To Terran eyes the broad faces, now all turned in their direction, lacked readable expression. The eyes were large and set slightly aslant in the skull, being startlingly orange-red or a brilliant turquoise green-blue. They wore loin cloths of brightly dyed fabrics with wide sashes forming corselets about their slender middles, from which gleamed the gem-set hilts of their claw knives, the possession of which proved their adulthood. Cloaks as flamboyant as their other garments hung in bat wing folds from their shoulders and each and every one moved in an invisible cloud of perfume.

Brilliant as the assemblage of liege men without had been, the gathering of clan leaders and their upper officers within the council place was a riot of color—and odor. The chieftains were installed on the wooden stools, each with a small table before him on which rested a goblet bearing his own clan sign, a folded strip of patterned cloth—his “trade shield”—and a gemmed box containing the scented paste he would use for refreshment during the ordeal of conference.

A breeze fluttered sash ends and tugged at cloaks, otherwise the assembly was motionless and awesomely quiet. Still making no overtures Van Rycke crossed to a stool and table which stood a little apart and seated himself. Dane went into the action required of him. Before his superior he set out a plastic pocket flask, its color as alive in the sunlight as the crudely cut gems which the Salariki sported, a fine silk handkerchief, and, last of all, a bottle of Terran smelling salts provided by Medic Tau as a necessary restorative after some hours combination of Salariki oratory and Salariki perfumes. Having thus done the duty of liege man, Dane was at liberty to seat himself, cross-legged on the ground behind his chief, as the other sons, heirs, and advisors had gathered behind their lords.

The chieftain whose arrival they had in a manner delayed came in after them and Dane saw that it was Fashdor—another piece of luck—since that clan was a small one and the chieftain had little influence. Had they so slowed Halfer or Paft it might be a different matter altogether.

Fashdor was established at his seat, his belongings spread out, and Dane, counting unobtrusively, was certain that the council was now complete. Seven clans Traxt Cam had recorded divided the sea coast territory and there were seven chieftains here—indicative of the importance of this meeting since some of these clans beyond the radius of the shield peace, must be fighting a vicious blood feud at that very moment. Yes, seven were here. Yet there still remained a single stool, directly across the circle from Van Rycke. An empty stool—who was the late comer?

That question was answered almost as it flashed into Dane’s mind. But no Salariki lordling came through the door. Dane’s self-control kept him in his place, even after he caught the meaning of the insignia emblazoned across the newcomer’s tunic. Trader—and not only a Trader but a Company man! But why—and how? The Companies only went after big game—this was a planet thrown open to Free Traders, the independents of the star lanes. By law and right no Company man had any place here. Unless—behind a face Dane strove to keep as impassive as Van’s his thoughts raced. Traxt Cam as a Free Trader had bid for the right to exploit Sargol when its sole exportable product was deemed to be perfume—a small, unimportant trade as far as the Companies were concerned. And then the Koros stones had been found and the importance of Sargol must have boomed as far as the big boys could see. They probably knew of Traxt Cam’s death as soon as the Patrol report on Limbo had been sent to Headquarters. The Companies all maintained their private information and espionage services. And, with Traxt Cam dead without an heir, they had seen their chance and moved in. Only, Dane’s teeth set firmly, they didn’t have the ghost of a chance now. Legally there was only one Trader on Sargol and that was the Solar Queen, Captain Jellico had his records signed by the Patrol to prove that. And all this Inter-Solar man would do now was to bow out and try poaching elsewhere.

But the I-S man appeared to be in no haste to follow that only possible course. He was seating himself with arrogant dignity on that unoccupied stool, and a younger man in I-S uniform was putting before him the same type of equipment Dane had produced for Van Rycke. The Cargo-master of the Solar Queen showed no surprise, if the Eysies’ appearance had been such to him.

One of the younger warriors in Paft’s train got to his feet and brought his hands together with a clap which echoed across the silent gathering with the force of an archaic solid projectal shot. A Salarik, wearing the rich dress of the upper ranks, but also the collar forced upon a captive taken in combat, came into the enclosure carrying a jug in both hands. Preceded by Paft’s son he made the rounds of the assembly pouring a purple liquid from his jug into the goblet before each chieftain, a goblet which Paft’s heirs tasted ceremoniously before it was presented to the visiting clan leader. When they paused before Van Rycke the Salarik nobleman touched the side of the plasta flask in token. It was recognized that off world men must be cautious over the sampling of local products and that when they joined in the Taking of the First Cup of Peace, they did so symbolically.

Paft raised his cup, his gesture copied by everyone around the circle. In the harsh tongue of his race he repeated a formula so archaic that few of the Salariki could now translate the sing-song words. They drank and the meeting was formally opened.

But it was an elderly Salarik seated to the right of Halfer, a man who wore no claw knife and whose dusky yellow cloak and sash made a subdued note amid the splendor of his fellows, who spoke first, using the click-clack of the Trade Lingo his nation had learned from Cam.

“Under the white,” he pointed to the shield aloft, “we assemble to hear many things. But now come two tongues to speak where once there was but one father of a clan. Tell us, outlanders, which of you must we now hark to in truth?” He looked from Van Rycke to the I-S representative.

The Cargo-master from the Queen did not reply. He stared across the circle at the Company man. Dane waited eagerly. What was the I-S going to say to that?

But the fellow did have an answer, ready and waiting. “It is true, fathers of clans, that here are two voices, where by right and custom there should only be one. But this is a matter which can be decided between us. Give us leave to withdraw from your sight and speak privately together. Then he who returns to you will be the true voice and there shall be no more division—”

It was Paft who broke in before Halfer’s spokesman could reply.

“It would have been better to have spoken together before you came to us. Go then until the shadow of the shield is not, then return hither and speak truly. We do not wait upon the pleasure of outlanders—”

A murmur approved that tart comment. “Until the shadow of the shield is not.” They had until noon. Van Rycke arose and Dane gathered up his chief’s possessions. With the same superiority to his surroundings he had shown upon entering, the Cargo-master left the enclosure, the Eysies following. But they were away from the clearing, out upon the road back to the Queen before the two from the Company caught up with them.

“Captain Grange will see you right away—” the Eysie Cargo-master was beginning when Van Rycke met him with a quelling stare.

“If you poachers have anything to say—you say it at the Queen and to Captain Jellico,” he stated flatly and started on.

Above his tight tunic collar the other’s face flushed, his teeth flashed as he caught his lower lip between them as if to forcibly restrain an answer he longed to make. For a second he hesitated and then he vanished down a side path with his assistant. Van Rycke had gone a quarter of the distance back to the ship before he spoke.

“I thought it was too easy,” he muttered. “Now we’re in for it—maybe right up the rockets! By the Spiked Tail of Exol, this is certainly not our lucky day!” He quickened pace until they were close to trotting.

Chapter II

RIVALS

“That’s far enough, Eysie!”

Although Traders by law and tradition carried no more potent personal weapons—except in times of great crisis—than hand sleep rods, the resultant shot from the latter was just as unpleasant for temporary periods as a more forceful beam—and the threat of it was enough to halt the three men who had come to the foot of the Queen’s ramp and who could see the rod held rather negligently by Ali. Ali’s eyes were anything but negligent, however, and Free Traders had reputations to be respected by their rivals of the Companies. The very nature of their roving lives taught them savage lessons—which they either learned or died.

Dane, glancing down over the Engineer-apprentice’s shoulder, saw that Van Rycke’s assumption of confidence had indeed paid off. They had left the trade enclosure of the Salariki barely three-quarters of an hour ago. But below now stood the bebadged Captain of the I-S ship and his Cargo-master.

“I want to speak to your Captain—” snarled the Eysie officer.

Ali registered faint amusement, an expression which tended to rouse the worst in the spectator, as Dane knew of old when that same mocking appraisal had been turned on him as the rawest of the Queen’s crew.

“But does he wish to speak to you?” countered Kamil. “Just stay where you are, Eysie, until we are sure about that fact.”

That was his cue to act as messenger. Dane retreated into the ship and swung up the ladder to the command section. As he passed Captain Jellico’s private cabin he heard the muffled squall of the commander’s unpleasant pet—Queex, the Hoobat—a nightmare combination of crab, parrot and toad, wearing a blue feather coating and inclined to scream and spit at all comers. Since Queex would not be howling in that fashion if its master was present, Dane kept on to the control cabin where he blundered in upon an executive level conference of Captain, Cargo-master and Astrogator.

“Well?” Jellico’s blaster scarred left cheek twitched as he snapped that impatient inquiry at the messenger.

“Eysie Captain below, sir. With his Cargo-master. They want to see you—”

Jellico’s mouth was a straight line, his eyes very hard. By instinct Dane’s hand went to the grip of the sleep rod slung at his belt. When the Old Man put on his fighting face—look out! Here we go again, he told himself, speculating as to just what type of action lay before them now.

“Oh, they do, do they!” Jellico began and then throttled down the temper he could put under iron control when and if it were necessary. “Very well, tell them to stay where they are. Van, we’ll go down—”

For a moment the Cargo-master hesitated, his heavy-lidded eyes looked sleepy, he seemed almost disinterested in the suggestion. And when he nodded it was with the air of someone about to perform some boring duty.

“Right, sir.” He wriggled his heavy body from behind the small table, resealed his tunic, and settled his cap with as much precision as if he were about to represent the Queen before the assembled nobility of Sargol.

Dane hurried down the ladders, coming to a halt beside Ali. It was the turn of the man at the foot of the ramp to bark an impatient demand:

“Well?” (Was that the theme word of every Captain’s vocabulary?)

“You wait,” Dane replied with no inclination to give the Eysie officer any courtesy address. Close to a Terran year aboard the Solar Queen had inoculated him with pride in his own section of Service. A Free Trader was answerable to his own officers and to no one else on earth—or among the stars—no matter how much discipline and official etiquette the Companies used to enhance their power.

He half expected the I-S officers to leave after an answer such as that. For a Company Captain to be forced to wait upon the convenience of a Free Trader must be galling in the extreme. And the fact that this one was doing just that was an indication that the Queen’s crew did, perhaps, have the edge of advantage in any coming bargain. In the meantime the Eysie contingent fumed below while Ali lounged whistling against the exit port, playing with his sleep rod and Dane studied the grass forest. His boot nudged a packet just inside the port casing and he glanced inquiringly from it to Ali.

“Cat ransom,” the other answered his unspoken question.

So that was it—the fee for Sinbad’s return. “What is it today?”

“Sugar—about a tablespoon full,” the Engineer-assistant returned, “and two colored steelos. So far they haven’t run up the price on us. I think they’re sharing out the spoil evenly, a new cub brings him back every night.”

As did all Terran ships, the Solar Queen carried a cat as an important member of the regular crew. And the portly Sinbad, before their landing on Sargol, had never presented any problem. He had done his duty of ridding the ship of unusual and usual pests and cargo despoilers with dispatch, neatness and energy. And when in port on alien worlds had never shown any inclination to go a-roving.

But the scents of Sargol had apparently intoxicated him, shearing away his solid dignity and middle-aged dependability. Now Sinbad flashed out of the Queen at the opening of her port in the early morning and was brought back, protesting with both voice and claws, at the end of the day by that member of the juvenile population whose turn it was to collect the standing reward for his forceful delivery. Within three days it had become an accepted business transaction which satisfied everyone but Sinbad.

The scrape of metal boot soles on ladder rungs warned of the arrival of their officers. Ali and Dane withdrew down the corridor, leaving the entrance open for Jellico and Van Rycke. Then they drifted back to witness the meeting with the Eysies.

There were no prolonged greetings between the two parties, no offer of hospitality as might have been expected between Terrans on an alien planet a quarter of the Galaxy away from the earth which had given them a common heritage.

Jellico, with Van Rycke at his shoulder, halted before he stepped from the ramp so that the three Inter-Solar men, Captain, Cargo-master and escort, whether they wished or no, were put in the disadvantageous position of having to look up to a Captain whom they, as members of one of the powerful Companies, affected to despise. The lean, well muscled, trim figure of the Queen’s commander gave the impression of hard bitten force held in check by will control, just as his face under its thick layer of space burn was that of an adventurer accustomed to make split second decisions—an estimate underlined by that seam of blaster burn across one flat cheek.

Van Rycke, with a slight change of dress, could have been a Company man in the higher ranks—or so the casual observer would have placed him, until an observer marked the eyes behind those sleepy drooping lids, or caught a certain note in the calm, unhurried drawl of his voice. To look at the two senior officers of the Free Trading spacer were the antithesis of each other—in action they were each half of a powerful, steamroller whole—as a good many men in the Service—scattered over a half dozen or so planets—had discovered to their cost in the past.

Now Jellico brought the heels of his space boots together with an extravagant click and his hand flourished at the fore of his helmet in a gesture which was better suited to the Patrol hero of a slightly out-of-date Video serial.

“Jellico, Solar Queen, Free Trader,” he identified himself brusquely, and added, “this is Van Rycke, our Cargo-master.”

Not all the flush had faded from the face of the I-S Captain.

“Grange of the Dart,” he did not even sketch a salute. “Inter-Solar. Kallee, Cargo-master—” And he did not name the hovering third member of his party.

Jellico stood waiting and after a long moment of silence Grange was forced to state his business.

“We have until noon—”

Jellico, his fingers hooked in his belt, simply waited. And under his level gaze the Eysie Captain began to find the going hard.

“They have given us until noon,” he started once more, “to get together—”

Jellico’s voice came, coldly remote. “There is no reason for any ‘getting together,’ Grange. By rights I can have you up before the Trade Board for poaching. The Solar Queen has sole trading rights here. If you up-ship within a reasonable amount of time, I’ll be inclined to let it pass. After all I’ve no desire to run all the way to the nearest Patrol post to report you—”

“You can’t expect to buck Inter-Solar. We’ll make you an offer—” That was Kallee’s contribution, made probably because his commanding officer couldn’t find words explosive enough.

Jellico, whose forté was more direct action, took an excursion into heavy-handed sarcasm. “You Eysies have certainly been given excellent briefing. I would advise a little closer study of the Code—and not the sections in small symbols at the end of the tape, either! We’re not bucking anyone. You’ll find our registration for Sargol down on tapes at the Center. And I suggest that the sooner you withdraw the better—before we cite you for illegal planeting.”

Grange had gained control of his emotions. “We’re pretty far from Center here,” he remarked. It was a statement of fact, but it carried over-tones which they were able to assess correctly. The Solar Queen was a Free Trader, alone on an alien world. But the I-S ship might be cruising in company, ready to summon aid, men and supplies. Dane drew a deep breath, the Eysies must be sure of themselves, not only that, but they must want what Sargol had to offer to the point of being willing to step outside the law to get it.

The I-S Captain took a step forward. “I think we understand each other now,” he said, his confidence restored.

Van Rycke answered him, his deep voice cutting across the sighing of the wind in the grass forest.

“Your proposition?”

Perhaps this return to their implied threat bolstered their belief in the infallibility of the Company, their conviction that no independent dared stand up against the might and power of Inter-Solar. Kallee replied:

“We’ll take up your contract, at a profit to you, and you up-ship before the Salariki are confused over whom they are to deal with—”

“And the amount of profit?” Van Rycke bored in.

“Oh,” Kallee shrugged, “say ten percent of Cam’s last shipment—”

Jellico laughed. “Generous, aren’t you, Eysie? Ten percent of a cargo which can’t be assessed—the gang on Limbo kept no records of what they plundered.”

“We don’t know what he was carrying when he crashed on Limbo,” countered Kallee swiftly. “We’ll base our offer on what he carried to Axal.”

Now Van Rycke chucked. “I wonder who figured that one out?” he inquired of the scented winds. “He must save the Company a fair amount of credits one way or another. Interesting offer—”

By the bland satisfaction to be read on the three faces below the I-S men were assured of their victory. The Solar Queen would be paid off with a pittance, under the vague threat of Company retaliation she would up-ship from Sargol, and they would be left in possession of the rich Koros trade—to be commended and rewarded by their superiors. Had they, Dane speculated, ever had any dealings with Free Traders before—at least with the brand of independent adventurers such as manned the Solar Queen?

Van Rycke burrowed in his belt pouch and then held out his hand. On the broad palm lay a flat disc of metal. “Very interesting—” he repeated. “I shall treasure this recording—”

The sight of that disc wiped all satisfaction from the Eysie faces. Grange’s purplish flush spread up from his tight tunic collar, Kallee blinked, and the unknown third’s hand dropped to his sleep rod. An action which was not overlooked by either Dane or Ali.

“A smooth set down to you,” Jellico gave the conventional leave taking of the Service.

“You’d better—” the Eysie Captain began hotly, and then seeing the disc Van Rycke held—that sensitive bit of metal and plastic which was recording this interview for future reference, he shut his mouth tight.

“Yes?” the Queen’s Cargo-master prompted politely. But Kallee had taken his Captain’s arm and was urging Grange away from the spacer.

“You have until noon to lift,” was Jellico’s parting shot as the three in Company livery started toward the road.

“I don’t think that they will,” he added to Van Rycke.

The Cargo-master nodded. “You wouldn’t in their place,” he pointed out reasonably. “On the other hand they’ve had a bit of a blast they weren’t expecting. It’s been a long time since Grange heard anyone say ‘no.'”

“A shock which is going to wear off,” Jellico’s habitual distrust of the future gathered force.

“This,” Van Rycke tucked the disc back into his pouch, “sent them off vector a parsec or two. Grange is not one of the strong arm blaster boys. Suppose Tang Ya does a little listening in—and maybe we can rig another surprise if Grange does try to ask advice of someone off world. In the meantime I don’t think they are going to meddle with the Salariki. They don’t want to have to answer awkward questions if we turn up a Patrol ship to ask them. So—” he stretched and beckoned to Dane, “we shall go to work once more.”

Again two paces behind Van Rycke Dane tramped to the trade circle of the Salariki clansmen. They might have walked out only five or six minutes of ship time before, and the natives betrayed no particular interest in their return. But, Dane noted, there was only one empty stool, one ceremonial table in evidence. The Salariki had expected only one Terran Trader to join them.

What followed was a dreary round of ceremony, an exchange of platitudes and empty good wishes and greetings. No one mentioned Koros stones—or even perfume bark—that he was willing to offer the off-world traders. None lifted so much as a corner of his trade cloth, under which, if he were ready to deal seriously, his hidden hand would meet that of the buyer, so that by finger pressure alone they could agree or disagree on price. But such boring sessions were part of Trade and Dane, keeping a fraction of attention on the speeches and “drinkings-together,” watched those around him with an eye which tried to assess and classify what he saw.

The keynote of the Salariki character was a wary independence. The only form of government they would tolerate was a family-clan organization. Feuds and deadly duels between individuals and clans were the accepted way of life and every male who reached adulthood went armed and ready for combat until he became a “Speaker for the past”—too old to bear arms in the field. Due to the nature of their battling lives, relatively few of the Salariki ever reached that retirement. Short-lived alliances between families sometimes occurred, usually when they were to face a common enemy greater than either. But a quarrel between chieftains, a fancied insult would rip that open in an instant. Only under the Trade Shield could seven clans sit this way without their warriors being at one another’s furred throats.

An hour before sunset Paft turned his goblet upside down on his table, a move followed speedily by every chieftain in the circle. The conference was at an end for that day. And as far as Dane could see it had accomplished exactly nothing—except to bring the Eysies into the open. What had Traxt Cam discovered which had given him the trading contract with these suspicious aliens? Unless the men from the Queen learned it, they could go on talking until the contract ran out and get no farther than they had today.

From his training Dane knew that ofttimes contact with an alien race did require long and patient handling. But between study and experiencing the situation himself there was a gulf, and he thought somewhat ruefully that he had much to learn before he could meet such a situation with Van Rycke’s unfailing patience and aplomb. The Cargo-master seemed in nowise tired by his wasted day and Dane knew that Van would probably sit up half the night, going over for the hundredth time Traxt Cam’s sketchy recordings in another painstaking attempt to discover why and how the other Free Trader had succeeded where the Queen’s men were up against a stone wall.

The harvesting of Koros stones was, as Dane and all those who had been briefed from Cam’s records knew, a perilous job. Though the rule of the Salariki was undisputed on the land masses of Sargol, it was another matter in the watery world of the shallow seas. There the Gorp were in command of the territory and one had to be constantly alert for attack from the sly, reptilian intelligence, so alien to the thinking processes of both Salariki and Terran that there was, or seemed to be, no point of possible contact. One went gathering Koros gems after balancing life against gain. And perhaps the Salariki did not see any profit in that operation. Yet Traxt Cam had brought back his bag of gems—somehow he had managed to secure them in trade.

Van Rycke climbed the ramp, hurrying on into the Queen as if he would not get back to his records soon enough. But Dane paused and looked back at the grass jungle a little wistfully. To his mind these early morning hours were the best time on Sargol. The light was golden, the night winds had not yet arisen. He disliked exchanging the freedom of the open for the confinement of the spacer.

And, as he hesitated there, two of the juvenile population of Sargol came out of the forest. Between them they carried one of their hunting nets, a net which now enclosed a quiet but baneful eyed captive—Sinbad being delivered for nightly ransom. Dane was reaching for the pay to give the captors when, to his real astonishment, one of them advanced and pointed with an extended forefinger claw to the open port.

“Go in,” he formed the Trade Lingo words with care. And Dane’s surprise must have been plain to read for the cub followed his speech with a vigorous nod and set one foot on the ramp to underline his desire.

For one of the Salariki, who had continually manifested their belief that Terrans and their ship were an offence to the nostrils of all right living “men,” to wish to enter the spacer was an astonishing about-face. But any advantage no matter how small, which might bring about a closer understanding, must be seized at once.

Dane accepted the growling Sinbad and beckoned, knowing better than to touch the boy. “Come—”

Only one of the junior clansmen obeyed that invitation. The other watched, big-eyed, and then scuttled back to the forest when his fellow called out some suggestion. He was not going to be trapped.

Dane led the way up the ramp, paying no visible attention to the young Salarik, nor did he urge the other on when he lingered for a long moment or two at the port. In his mind the Cargo-master apprentice was feverishly running over the list of general trade goods. What did they carry which would make a suitable and intriguing gift for a small alien with such a promising bump of curiosity? If he had only time to get Van Rycke!

The Salarik was inside the corridor now, his nostrils spread, assaying each and every odor in this strange place. Suddenly his head jerked as if tugged by one of his own net ropes. His interest had been riveted by some scent his sensitive senses had detected. His eyes met Dane’s in appeal. Swiftly the Terran nodded and then followed with a lengthened stride as the Salarik sped down into the lower reaches of the Queen, obviously in quest of something of great importance.

Chapter III

CONTACT AT LAST

“What in”—Frank Mura, steward, storekeeper, and cook of the Queen, retreated into the nearest cabin doorway as the young Salarik flashed down the ladder into his section.

Dane, with the now resigned Sinbad in the crook of his arm, had tailed his guest and arrived just in time to see the native come to an abrupt halt before one of the most important doors in the spacer—the portal of the hydro garden which renewed the ship’s oxygen and supplied them with fresh fruit and vegetables to vary their diet of concentrates.

The Salarik laid one hand on the smooth surface of the sealed compartment and looked back over his shoulder at Dane with an inquiry to which was added something of a plea. Guided by his instinct—that this was important to them all—Dane spoke to Mura:

“Can you let him in there, Frank?”

It was not sensible, it might even be dangerous. But every member of the crew knew the necessity for making some sort of contact with the natives. Mura did not even nod, but squeezed by the Salarik and pressed the lock. There was a sign of air, and the crisp smell of growing things, lacking the languorous perfumes of the world outside, puffed into the faces.

The cub remained where he was, his head up, his wide nostrils visibly drinking in that smell. Then he moved with the silent, uncanny speed which was the heritage of his race, darting down the narrow aisle toward a mass of greenery at the far end.

Sinbad kicked and growled. This was his private hunting ground—the preserve he kept free of invaders. Dane put the cat down. The Salarik had found what he was seeking. He stood on tiptoe to sniff at a plant, his yellow eyes half closed, his whole stance spelling ecstasy. Dane looked to the steward for enlightenment.

“What’s he so interested in, Frank?”

“Catnip.”

“Catnip?” Dane repeated. The word meant nothing to him, but Mura had a habit of picking up strange plants and cultivating them for study. “What is it?”

“One of the Terran mints—an herb,” Mura gave a short explanation as he moved down the aisle toward the alien. He broke off a leaf and crushed it between his fingers.

Dane, his sense of smell largely deadened by the pungency with which he had been surrounded by most of that day, could distinguish no new odor. But the young Salarik swung around to face the steward his eyes wide, his nose questing. And Sinbad gave a whining yowl and made a spring to push his head against the steward’s now aromatic hand.

So—now they had it—an opening wedge. Dane came up to the three.

“All right to take a leaf or two?” he asked Mura.

“Why not? I grow it for Sinbad. To a cat it is like heemel smoke or a tankard of lackibod.”

And by Sinbad’s actions Dane guessed that the plant did hold for the cat the same attraction those stimulants produced in human beings. He carefully broke off a small stem supporting three leaves and presented it to the Salarik, who stared at him and then, snatching the twig, raced from the hydro garden as if pursued by feuding clansmen.

Dane heard the pad of his feet on the ladder—apparently the cub was making sure of escape with his precious find. But the Cargo-master apprentice was frowning. As far as he could see there were only five of the plants.

“That’s all the catnip you have?”

Mura tucked Sinbad under his arm and shooed Dane before him out of the hydro. “There was no need to grow more. A small portion of the herb goes a long way with this one,” he put the cat down in the corridor. “The leaves may be preserved by drying. I believe that there is a small box of them in the galley.”

A strictly limited supply. Suppose this was the key which would unlock the Koros trade? And yet it was to be summed up in five plants and a few dried leaves! However, Van Rycke must know of this as soon as possible.

But to Dane’s growing discomfiture the Cargo-master showed no elation as his junior poured out the particulars of his discovery. Instead there were definite signs of displeasure to be read by those who knew Van Rycke well. He heard Dane out and then got to his feet. Tolling the younger man with him by a crooked finger, he went out of his combined office-living quarters to the domain of Medic Craig Tau.

“Problem for you, Craig.” Van Rycke seated his bulk on the wall jump seat Tau pulled down for him. Dane was left standing just within the door, very sure now that instead of being commended for his discovery of a few minutes before, he was about to suffer some reprimand. And the reason for it still eluded him.

“What do you know about that plant Mura grows in the hydro—the one called ‘catnip’?”

Tau did not appear surprised at that demand—the Medic of a Free Trading spacer was never surprised at anything. He had his surfeit of shocks during his first years of service and after that accepted any occurrence, no matter how weird, as matter-of-fact. In addition Tau’s hobby was “magic,” the hidden knowledge possessed and used by witch doctors and medicine men on alien worlds. He had a library of recordings, odd scraps of information, of certified results of certain very peculiar experiments. Now and then he wrote a report which was sent into Central Service, read with raised eyebrows by perhaps half a dozen incredulous desk warmers, and filed away to be safely forgotten. But even that had ceased to frustrate him.

“It’s an herb of the mint family from Terra,” he replied. “Mura grows it for Sinbad—has quite a marked influence on cats. Frank’s been trying to keep him anchored to the ship by allowing him to roll in fresh leaves. He does it—then continues to sneak out whenever he can—”

That explained something for Dane—why the Salariki cub wished to enter the Queen tonight. Some of the scent of the plant had clung to Sinbad’s fur, had been detected, and the Salarik had wanted to trace it to its source.

“Is it a drug?” Van Rycke prodded.

“In the way that all herbs are drugs. Human beings have dosed themselves in the past with a tea made of the dried leaves. It has no great medicinal properties. To felines it is a stimulation—and they get the same satisfaction from rolling in and eating the leaves as we do from drinking—”

“The Salariki are, in a manner of speaking, felines—” Van Rycke mused.

Tau straightened. “The Salariki have discovered catnip, I take it?”

Van Rycke nodded at Dane and for the second time the Cargo-master apprentice made his report. When he was done Van Rycke asked a direct question of the medical officer:

“What effect would catnip have on a Salarik?”

It was only then that Dane grasped the enormity of what he had done. They had no way of gauging the influence of an off-world plant on alien metabolism. What if he had introduced to the natives of Sargol a dangerous drug—started that cub on some path of addiction. He was cold inside. Why, he might even have poisoned the child!

Tau picked up his cap, and after a second’s hesitation, his emergency medical kit. He had only one question for Dane.

“Any idea of who the cub is—what clan he belongs to?”

And Dane, chill with real fear, was forced to answer in the negative. What had he done!

“Can you find him?” Van Rycke, ignoring Dane, spoke to Tau.

The Medic shrugged. “I can try. I was out scouting this morning—met one of the storm priests who handles their medical work. But I wasn’t welcomed. However, under the circumstances, we have to try something—”

In the corridor Van Rycke had an order for Dane. “I suggest that you keep to quarters, Thorson, until we know how matters stand.”

Dane saluted. That note in his superior’s voice was like a whip lash—much worse to take than the abuse of a lesser man. He swallowed as he shut himself into his own cramped cubby. This might be the end of their venture. And they would be lucky if their charter was not withdrawn. Let I-S get an inkling of his rash action and the Company would have them up before the Board to be stripped of all their rights in the Service. Just because of his own stupidity—his pride in being able to break through where Van Rycke and the Captain had faced a stone wall. And, worse than the future which could face the Queen, was the thought that he might have introduced some dangerous drug into Sargol with his gift of those few leaves. When would he learn? He threw himself face down on his bunk and despondently pictured the string of calamities which could and maybe would stem from his thoughtless and hasty action.

Within the Queen night and day were mechanical—the lighting in the cabins did not vary much. Dane did not know how long he lay there forcing his mind to consider his stupid action, making himself face that in the Service there were no short cuts which endangered others—not unless those taking the risks were Terrans.

“Dane—!” Rip Shannon’s voice cut through his self-imposed nightmare. But he refused to answer. “Dane—Van wants you on the double!”

Why? To bring him up before Jellico probably. Dane schooled his expression, got up, pulling his tunic straight, still unable to meet Rip’s eyes. Shannon was just one of those he had let down so badly. But the other did not notice his mood. “Wait ’til you see them—! Half Sargol must be here yelling for trade!”

That comment was so far from what he had been expecting that Dane was startled out of his own gloomy thoughts. Rip’s brown face was one wide smile, his black eyes danced—it was plain he was honestly elated.

“Get a move on, fire rockets,” he urged, “or Van will blast you for fair!”

Dane did move, up the ladder to the next level and out on the port ramp. What he saw below brought him up short. Evening had come to Sargol but the scene immediately below was not in darkness. Blazing torches advanced in lines from the grass forest and the portable flood light of the spacer added to the general glare, turning night into noonday.

Van Rycke and Jellico sat on stools facing at least five of the seven major chieftains with whom they had conferred to no purpose earlier. And behind these leaders milled a throng of lesser Salariki. Yes, there was at least one carrying chair—and also an orgel from the back of which a veiled noblewoman was being assisted to dismount by two retainers. The women of the clans were coming—which could mean only that trade was at last in progress. But trade for what?

Dane strode down the ramp. He saw Paft, his hand carefully covered by his trade cloth, advance to Van Rycke, whose own fingers were decently veiled by a handkerchief. Under the folds of fabric their hands touched. The bargaining was in the first stages. And it was important enough for the clan leaders to conduct themselves. Where, according to Cam’s records, it had been usual to delegate that power to a favored liege man.

Catching the light from the ship’s beam and from the softer flares of the Salariki torches was a small pile of stones resting on a stool to one side. Dane drew a deep breath. He had heard the Koros stones described, had seen the tri-dee print of one found among Cam’s recordings but the reality was beyond his expectations. He knew the technical analysis of the gems—that they were, as the amber of Terra, the fossilized resin exuded by ancient plants (maybe the ancestors of the grass trees) long buried in the saline deposits of the shallow seas where chemical changes had taken place to produce the wonder jewels. In color they shaded from a rosy apricot to a rich mauve, but in their depths other colors, silver, fiery gold, spun sparks which seemed to move as the gem was turned. And—which was what first endeared them to the Salariki—when worn against the skin and warmed by body heat they gave off a perfume which enchanted not only the Sargolian natives but all in the Galaxy wealthy enough to own one.

On another stool placed at Van Rycke’s right hand, as that bearing the Koros stones was at Paft’s, was a transparent plastic box containing some wrinkled brownish leaves. Dane moved as unobtrusively as he could to his proper place at such a trading session, behind Van Rycke. More Salariki were tramping out of the forest, torch bearing retainers and cloaked warriors. A little to one side was a third party Dane had not seen before.

They were clustered about a staff which had been driven into the ground, a staff topped with a white streamer marking a temporary trading ground. These were Salariki right enough but they did not wear the colorful garb of those about them, instead they were all clad alike in muffling, sleeved robes of a drab green—the storm priests—their robes denoting the color of the Sargolian sky just before the onslaught of their worst tempests. Cam had not left many clues concerning the religion of the Salariki, but the storm priests had, in narrowly defined limits, power, and their recognition of the Terran Traders would add to good feeling.

In the knot of storm priests a Terran stood—Medic Tau—and he was talking earnestly with the leader of the religious party. Dane would have given much to have been free to cross and ask Tau a question or two. Was all this assembly the result of the discovery in the hydro? But even as he asked himself that, the trade cloths were shaken from the hands of the bargainers and Van Rycke gave an order over his shoulder.

“Measure out two spoonsful of the dried leaves into a box—” he pointed to a tiny plastic container.

With painstaking care Dane followed directions. At the same time a servant of the Salarik chief swept the handful of gems from the other stool and dropped them in a heap before Van Rycke, who transferred them to a strong box resting between his feet. Paft arose—but he had hardly quitted the trading seat before one of the lesser clan leaders had taken his place, the bargaining cloth ready looped loosely about his wrist.

It was at that point that the proceedings were interrupted. A new party came into the open, their utilitarian Trade tunics made a drab blot as they threaded their way in a compact group through the throng of Salariki. I-S men! So they had not lifted from Sargol.

They showed no signs of uneasiness—it was as if their rights were being infringed by the Free Traders. And Kallee, their Cargo-master, swaggered straight to the bargaining point. The chatter of Salariki voices was stilled, the Sargolians withdrew a little, letting one party of Terrans face the other, sensing drama to come. Neither Van Rycke nor Jellico spoke, it was left to Kallee to state his case.

“You’ve crooked your orbit this time, bright boys,” his jeer was a paean of triumph. “Code Three—Article six—or can’t you absorb rules tapes with your thick heads?”

Code Three—Article six, Dane searched his memory for that law of the Service. The words flashed into his mind as the auto-learner had planted them during his first year of training back in the Pool.

“To no alien race shall any Trader introduce any drug, food, or drink from off world, until such a substance has been certified as nonharmful to the aliens.”

There it was! I-S had them and it was all his fault. But if he had been so wrong, why in the world did Van Rycke sit there trading, condoning the error and making it into a crime for which they could be summoned before the Board and struck off the rolls of the Service?

Van Rycke smiled gently. “Code Four—Article two,” he quoted with the genial air of one playing gift-giver at a Forkidan feasting.

Code Four, Article two: Any organic substance offered for trade must be examined by a committee of trained medical experts, an equal representation of Terrans and aliens.

Kallee’s sneering smile did not vanish. “Well,” he challenged, “where’s your board of experts?”

“Tau!” Van Rycke called to the Medic with the storm priests. “Will you ask your colleague to be so kind as to allow the Cargo-master Kallee to be presented?”

The tall, dark young Terran Medic spoke to the priest beside him and together they came across the clearing. Van Rycke and Jellico both arose and inclined their heads in honor to the priests, as did the chief with whom they had been about to deal.

“Reader of clouds and master of many winds,” Tau’s voice flowed with the many voweled titles of the Sargolian, “may I bring before your face Cargo-master Kallee, a servant of Inter-Solar in the realm of Trade?”

The storm priest’s shaven skull and body gleamed steel gray in the light. His eyes, of that startling blue-green, regarded the I-S party with cynical detachment.

“You wish of me?” Plainly he was one who believed in getting down to essentials at once.

Kallee could not be overawed. “These Free Traders have introduced among your people a powerful drug which will bring much evil,” he spoke slowly in simple words as if he were addressing a cub.

“You have evidence of such evil?” countered the storm priest. “In what manner is this new plant evil?”

For a moment Kallee was disconcerted. But he rallied quickly. “It has not been tested—you do not know how it will affect your people—”

The storm priest shook his head impatiently. “We are not lacking in intelligence, Trader. This plant has been tested, both by your master of life secrets and ours. There is no harm in it—rather it is a good thing, to be highly prized—so highly that we shall give thanks that it was brought unto us. This speech-together is finished.” He pulled the loose folds of his robe closer about him and walked away.

“Now,” Van Rycke addressed the I-S party, “I must ask you to withdraw. Under the rules of Trade your presence here can be actively resented—”

But Kallee had lost little of his assurance. “You haven’t heard the last of this. A tape of the whole proceedings goes to the Board—”

“As you wish. But in the meantime—” Van Rycke gestured to the waiting Salariki who were beginning to mutter impatiently. Kallee glanced around, heard those mutters, and made the only move possible, away from the Queen. He was not quite so cocky, but neither had he surrendered.

Dane caught at Tau’s sleeve and asked the question which had been burning in him since he had come upon the scene.

“What happened—about the catnip?”

There was lightening of the serious expression on Tau’s face.

“Fortunately for you that child took the leaves to the storm priest. They tested and approved it. And I can’t see that it has any ill effects. But you were just lucky, Thorson—it might have gone another way.”

Dane sighed. “I know that, sir,” he confessed. “I’m not trying to rocket out—”

Tau gave a half-smile. “We all off-fire our tubes at times,” he conceded. “Only next time—”

He did not need to complete that warning as Dane caught him up:

“There isn’t going to be a next time like this, sir—ever!”

Chapter IV

GORP HUNT

But the interruption had disturbed the tenor of trading. The small chief who had so eagerly taken Paft’s place had only two Koros stones to offer and even to Dane’s inexperienced eyes they were inferior in size and color to those the other clan leader had tendered. The Terrans were aware that Koros mining was a dangerous business but they had not known that the stock of available stones was so very small. Within ten minutes the last of the serious bargaining was concluded and the clansmen were drifting away from the burned over space about the Queen’s standing fins.

Dane folded up the bargain cloth, glad for a task. He sensed that he was far from being back in Van Rycke’s good graces. The fact that his superior did not discuss any of the aspects of the deals with him was a bad sign.

Captain Jellico stretched. Although his was not, or never, what might be termed a good-humored face, he was at peace with his world. “That would seem to be all. What’s the haul, Van?”

“Ten first class stones, about fifty second grade, and twenty or so of third. The chiefs will go to the fisheries tomorrow. Then we’ll be in to see the really good stuff.”

“And how’s the herbs holding out?” That interested Dane too. Surely the few plants in the hydro and the dried leaves could not be stretched too far.

“As well as we could expect.” Van Rycke frowned. “But Craig thinks he’s on the trail of something to help—”

The storm priests had uprooted the staff marking the trading station and were wrapping the white streamer about it. Their leader had already gone and now Tau came up to the group by the ramp.

“Van says you have an idea,” the Captain hailed him.

“We haven’t tried it yet. And we can’t unless the priests give it a clear lane—”

“That goes without saying—” Jellico agreed.

The Captain had not addressed that remark to him personally, but Dane was sure it had been directed at him. Well, they needn’t worry—never again was he going to make that mistake, they could be very sure of that.

He was part of the conference which followed in the mess cabin only because he was a member of the crew. How far the reason for his disgrace had spread he had no way of telling, but he made no overtures, even to Rip.

Tau had the floor with Mura as an efficient lieutenant. He discussed the properties of catnip and gave information on the limited supply the Queen carried. Then he launched into a new suggestion.

“Felines of Terra, in fact a great many other of our native mammals, have a similar affinity for this.”

Mura produced a small flask and Tau opened it, passing it to Captain Jellico and so from hand to hand about the room. Each crewman sniffed at the strong aroma. It was a heavier scent than that given off by the crushed catnip—Dane was not sure he liked it. But a moment later Sinbad streaked in from the corridor and committed the unpardonable sin of leaping to the table top just before Mura who had taken the flask from Dane. He miaowed plaintively and clawed at the steward’s cuff. Mura stoppered the flask and put the cat down on the floor.

“What is it?” Jellico wanted to know.

“Anisette, a liquor made from the oil of anise—from seeds of the anise plant. It is a stimulant, but we use it mainly as a condiment. If it is harmless for the Salariki it ought to be a bigger bargaining point than any perfumes or spices, I-S can import. And remember, with their unlimited capital, they can flood the market with products we can’t touch, selling at a loss if need be to cut us out. Because their ship is not going to lift from Sargol just because she has no legal right here.”

“There’s this point,” Van Rycke added to the lecture. “The Eysies are trading or want to trade perfumes. But they stock only manufactured products, exotic stuff, but synthetic.” He took from his belt pouch two tiny boxes.

Before he caught the rich scent of the paste inside them Dane had already identified each as luxury items from Casper—chemical products which sold well and at high prices in the civilized ports of the Galaxy. The Cargo-master turned the boxes over, exposing the symbol on their undersides—the mark of I-S.

“These were offered to me in trade by a Salarik. I took them, just to have proof that the Eysies are operating here. But—note—they were offered to me in trade, along with two top Koros for what? One spoonful of dried catnip leaves. Does that suggest anything?”

Mura answered first. “The Salariki prefer natural products to synthetic.”

“I think so.”

“D’you suppose that was Cam’s secret?” speculated Astrogator Steen Wilcox.

“If it was,” Jellico cut in, “he certainly kept it! If we had only known this earlier—”

They were all thinking of that, of their storage space carefully packed with useless trade goods. Where, if they had known, the same space could have carried herbs with five or twenty-five times as much buying power.

“Maybe now that their sales’ resistance is broken, we can switch to some of the other stuff,” Tang Ya, torn away from his beloved communicators for the conference, said wistfully. “They like color—how about breaking out some rolls of Harlinian moth silk?”

Van Rycke sighed wearily. “Oh, we’ll try. We’ll bring out everything and anything. But we could have done so much better—” he brooded over the tricks of fate which had landed them on a planet wild for trade with no proper trade goods in either of their holds.

There was a nervous little sound of a throat being apologetically cleared. Jasper Weeks, the small wiper from the engine room detail, the third generation Venusian colonist whom the more vocal members of the Queen’s complement were apt to forget upon occasion, seeing all eyes upon him, spoke though his voice was hardly above a hoarse whisper.

“Cedar—lacquel bark—forsh weed—”

“Cinnamon,” Mura added to the list. “Imported in small quantities—”

“Naturally! Only the problem now is—how much cedar, lacquel bark, forsh weed, cinnamon do we have on board?” demanded Van Rycke.

His sarcasm did not register with Weeks for the little man pushed by Dane and left the cabin to their surprise. In the quiet which followed they could hear the clatter of his boots on ladder rungs as he descended to the quarters of the engine room staff. Tang turned to his neighbor, Johan Stotz, the Queen’s Engineer.

“What’s he going for?”

Stotz shrugged. Weeks was a self-effacing man—so much so that even in the cramped quarters of the spacer very little about him as an individual impressed his mates—a fact which was slowly dawning on them all now. Then they heard the scramble of feet hurrying back and Weeks burst in with energy which carried him across to the table behind which the Captain and Van Rycke now sat.

In the wiper’s hands was a plasta-steel box—the treasure chest of a spaceman. Its tough exterior was guaranteed to protect the contents against everything but outright disintegration. Weeks put it down on the table and snapped up the lid.

A new aroma, or aromas, was added to the scents now at war in the cabin. Weeks pulled out a handful of fluffy white stuff which frothed up about his fingers like soap lather. Then with more care he lifted up a tray divided into many small compartments, each with a separate sealing lid of its own. The men of the Queen moved in, their curiosity aroused, until they were jostling one another.

Being tall Dane had an advantage, though Van Rycke’s bulk and the wide shoulders of the Captain were between him and the object they were so intent upon. In each division of the tray, easily seen through the transparent lids, was a carved figure. The weird denizens of the Venusian polar swamps were there, along with lifelike effigies of Terran animals, a Martian sand-mouse in all its monstrous ferocity, and the native animal and reptile life of half a hundred different worlds. Weeks put down a second tray beside the first, again displaying a menagerie of strange life forms. But when he clicked open one of the compartments and handed the figurine it contained to the Captain, Dane understood the reason for now bringing forward the carvings.

The majority of them were fashioned from a dull blue-gray wood and Dane knew that if he picked one up he would discover that it weighed close to nothing in his hand. That was lacquel bark—the aromatic product of a Venusian vine. And each little animal or reptile lay encased in a soft dab of frothy white—frosh weed—the perfumed seed casing of the Martian canal plants. One or two figures on the second tray were of a red-brown wood and these Van Rycke sniffed at appreciatively.

“Cedar—Terran cedar,” he murmured.

Weeks nodded eagerly, his eyes alight. “I am waiting now for sandalwood—it is also good for carving—”

Jellico stared at the array in puzzled wonder. “You have made these?”

Being an amateur xenobiologist of no small standing himself, the shapes of the carvings more than the material from which they fashioned held his attention.

All those on board the Queen had their own hobbies. The monotony of voyaging through hyper-space had long ago impressed upon men the need for occupying both hands and mind during the sterile days while they were forced into close companionship with few duties to keep them alert. Jellico’s cabin was papered with tri-dee pictures of the rare animals and alien creatures he had studied in their native haunts or of which he kept careful and painstaking records. Tau had his magic, Mura not only his plants but the delicate miniature landscapes he fashioned, to be imprisoned forever in the hearts of protecting plasta balls. But Weeks had never shown his work before and now he had an artist’s supreme pleasure of completely confounding his shipmates.

The Cargo-master returned to the business on hand first. “You’re willing to transfer these to ‘cargo’?” he asked briskly. “How many do you have?”

Weeks, now lifting a third and then a fourth tray from the box, replied without looking up.

“Two hundred. Yes, I’ll transfer, sir.”

The Captain was turning about in his fingers the beautifully shaped figure of an Astran duocorn. “Pity to trade these here,” he mused aloud. “Will Paft or Halfer appreciate more than just their scent?”

Weeks smiled shyly. “I’ve filled this case, sir. I was going to offer them to Mr. Van Rycke on a venture. I can always make another set. And right now—well, maybe they’ll be worth more to the Queen, seeing as how they’re made out of aromatic woods, then they’d be elsewhere. Leastwise the Eysies aren’t going to have anything like them to show!” he ended in a burst of honest pride.

“Indeed they aren’t!” Van Rycke gave honor where it was due.

So they made plans and then separated to sleep out the rest of the night. Dane knew that his lapse was not forgotten nor forgiven, but now he was honestly too tired to care and slept as well as if his conscience were clear.

But morning brought only a trickle of lower class clansmen for trading and none of them had much but news to offer. The storm priests, as neutral arbitrators, had divided up the Koros grounds. And the clansmen, under the personal supervision of their chieftains were busy hunting the stones. The Terrans gathered from scraps of information that gem seeking on such a large scale had never been attempted before.

Before night there came other news, and much more chilling. Paft, one of the two major chieftains of this section of Sargol—while supervising the efforts of his liege men on a newly discovered and richly strewn length of shoal water—had been attacked and killed by gorp. The unusual activity of the Salariki in the shallows had in turn drawn to the spot battalions of the intelligent, malignant reptiles who had struck in strength, slaying and escaping before the Salariki could form an adequate defense, having killed the land dwellers’ sentries silently and effectively before advancing on the laboring main bodies of gem hunters.

A loss of a certain number of miners or fishers had been preseen as the price one paid for Koros in quantity. But the death of a chieftain was another thing altogether, having repercussions which carried far beyond the fact of his death. When the news reached the Salariki about the Queen they melted away into the grass forest and for the first time the Terrans felt free of spying eyes.

“What happens now?” Ali inquired. “Do they declare all deals off?”

“That might just be the unfortunate answer,” agreed Van Rycke.

“Could be,” Rip commented to Dane, “that they’d think we were in some way responsible—”

But Dane’s conscience, sensitive over the whole matter of Salariki trade, had already reached that conclusion.

The Terran party, unsure of what were the best tactics, wisely decided to do nothing at all for the time being. But, when the Salariki seemed to have completely vanished on the morning of the second day, the men were restless. Had Paft’s death resulted in some interclan quarrel over the heirship and the other clans withdrawn to let the various contendents for that honor fight it out? Or—what was more probable and dangerous—had the aliens come to the point of view that the Queen was in the main responsible for the catastrophe and were engaged in preparing too warm a welcome for any Traders who dared to visit them?

With the latter idea in mind they did not stray far from the ship. And the limit to their traveling was the edge of the forest from which they could be covered and so they did not learn much.

It was well into the morning before they were dramatically appraised that, far from being considered in any way an enemy, they were about to be accepted in a tie as close as clan to clan during one of the temporary but binding truces.

The messenger came in state, a young Salarik warrior, his splendid cloak rent and hanging in tattered pieces from his shoulders as a sign of his official grief. He carried in one hand a burned out torch, and in the other an unsheathed claw knife, its blade reflecting the sunlight with a wicked glitter. Behind him trotted three couples of retainers, their cloaks also ragged fringes, their knives drawn.

Standing up on the ramp to receive what could only be a formal deputation were Captain, Astrogator, Cargo-master and Engineer, the senior officers of the spacer.

In the rolling periods of the Trade Lingo the torch bearer identified himself as Groft, son and heir of the late lamented Paft. Until his chieftain father was avenged in blood he could not assume the high seat of his clan nor the leadership of the family. And now, following custom, he was inviting the friends and sometimes allies of the dead Paft to a gorp hunt. Such a gorp hunt, Dane gathered from amidst the flowers of ceremonial Salariki speech, as had never been planned before on the face of Sargol. Salariki without number in the past had died beneath the ripping talons of the water reptiles, but it was seldom that a chieftain had so fallen and his clan were firm in their determination to take a full blood price from the killers.

“—and so, sky lords,” Groft brought his oration to a close, “we come to ask that you send your young men to this hunting so that they may know the joy of plunging knives into the scaled death and see the horned ones die bathed in their own vile blood!”

Dane needed no hint from the Queen’s officers that this invitation was a sharp departure from custom. By joining with the natives in such a foray the Terrans were being admitted to kinship of a sort, cementing relations by a tie which the I-S, or any other interloper from off-world, would find hard to break. It was a piece of such excellent good fortune as they would not have dreamed of three days earlier.

Van Rycke replied, his voice properly sonorous, sounding out the rounded periods of the rolling tongue which they had all been taught during the voyage, using Cam’s recording. Yes, the Terrans would join with pleasure in so good and great a cause. They would lend the force of their arms to the defeat of all gorp they had the good fortune to meet. Groft need only name the hour for them to join him—

It was not needful, the young Salariki chieftain-to-be hastened to tell the Cargo-master, that the senior sky lords concern themselves in this matter. In fact it would be against custom, for it was meet that such a hunt be left to warriors of few years, that they might earn glory and be able to stand before the fires at the Naming as men. Therefore—the thumb claw of Groft was extended to its greatest length as he used it to single out the Terrans he had been eyeing—let this one, and that, and that, and the fourth be ready to join with the Salariki party an hour after nooning on this very day and they would indeed teach the slimy, treacherous lurkers in the depths a well needed lesson.

The Salarik’s choice with one exception had unerringly fallen upon the youngest members of the crew, Ali, Rip, and Dane in that order. But his fourth addition had been Jasper Weeks. Perhaps because of his native pallor of skin and slightness of body the oiler had seemed, to the alien, to be younger than his years. At any rate Groft had made it very plain that he chose these men and Dane knew that the Queen’s officers would raise no objection which might upset the delicate balance of favorable relations.

Van Rycke did ask for one concession which was reluctantly granted. He received permission for the spacer’s men to carry their sleep rods. Though the Salariki, apparently for some reason of binding and hoary custom, were totally opposed to hunting their age-old enemy with anything other than their duelists’ weapons of net and claw knife.

“Go along with them,” Captain Jellico gave his final orders to the four, “as long as it doesn’t mean your own necks—understand? On the other hand dead heroes have never helped to lift a ship. And these gorp are tough from all accounts. You’ll just have to use your own judgment about springing your rods on them—” He looked distinctly unhappy at that thought.

Ali was grinning and little Weeks tightened his weapon belt with a touch of swagger he had never shown before. Rip was his usual soft voiced self, dependable as a rock and a good base for the rest of them—taking command without question as they marched off to join Groft’s company.

Chapter V

THE PERILOUS SEAS

The gorp hunters straggled through the grass forest in family groups, and the Terrans saw that the enterprise had forced another uneasy truce upon the district, for there were representatives from more than just Paft’s own clan. All the Salariki were young and the parties babbled together in excitement. It was plain that this hunt, staged upon a large scale, was not only a means of revenge upon a hated enemy but, also, a sporting event of outstanding prestige.

Now the grass trees began to show ragged gaps, open spaces between their clumps, until the forest was only scattered groups and the party the Terrans had joined walked along a trail cloaked in knee-high, yellow-red fern growth. Most of the Salariki carried unlit torches, some having four or five bundled together, as if gorp hunting must be done after nightfall. And it was fairly late in the afternoon before they topped a rise of ground and looked out upon one of Sargol’s seas.

The water was a dull-metallic gray, broken by great swaths of purple as if an artist had slapped a brush of color across it in a hit or miss fashion. Sand of the red grit, lightened by the golden flecks which glittered in the sun, stretched to the edge of the wavelets breaking with only languor on the curve of earth. The bulk of islands arose in serried ranks farther out—crowned with grass trees all rippling under the sea wind.

They came out upon the beach where one of the purple patches touched the shore and Dane noted that it left a scummy deposit there. The Terrans went on to the water’s edge. Where it was clear of the purple stuff they could get a murky glimpse of the bottom, but the scum hid long stretches of shoreline and outer wave, and Dane wondered if the gorp used it as a protective covering.

For the moment the Salariki made no move toward the sea which was to be their hunting ground. Instead the youngest members of the party, some of whom were adolescents not yet entitled to wear the claw knife of manhood, spread out along the shore and set industriously to gathering driftwood, which they brought back to heap on the sand. Dane, watching that harvest, caught sight of a smoothly polished length. He called Weeks’ attention to the water rounded cylinder.

The oiler’s eyes lighted and he stooped to pick it up. Where the other sticks were from grass trees this was something else. And among the bleached pile it had the vividness of flame. For it was a strident scarlet. Weeks turned it over in his hands, running his fingers lovingly across its perfect grain. Even in this crude state it had beauty. He stopped the Salarik who had just brought in another armload of wood.

“This is what?” he spoke the Trade Lingo haltingly.

The native gazed somewhat indifferently at the branch. “Tansil,” he answered. “It grows on the islands—” He made a vague gesture to include a good section of the western sea before he hurried away.

Weeks now went along the tide line on his own quest, Dane trailing him. At the end of a quarter hour when a hail summoned them back to the site of the now lighted fire, they had some ten pieces of the tansil wood between them. The finds ranged from a three foot section some four inches in diameter, to some slender twigs no larger than a writing steelo—but all with high polish, the warm flame coloring. Weeks lashed them together before he joined the group where Groft was outlining the technique of gorp hunting for the benefit of the Terrans.

Some two hundred feet away a reef, often awash and stained with the purple scum, angled out into the sea in a long curve which formed a natural breakwater. This was the point of attack. But first the purple film must be removed so that land and sea dwellers could meet on common terms.

The fire blazed up, eating hungrily into the driftwood. And from it ran the young Salariki with lighted brands, which at the water’s edge they whirled about their heads and then hurled out onto the purple patches. Fire arose from the water and ran with frantic speed across the crests of the low waves, while the Salariki coughed and buried their noses in their perfume boxes, for the wind drove shoreward an overpowering stench.

Where the cleansing fire had run on the water there was now only the natural metallic gray of the liquid, the cover was gone. Older Salariki warriors were choosing torches from those they had brought, doing it with care. Groft approached the Terrans carrying four.

“These you use now—”

What for? Dane wondered. The sky was still sunlit. He held the torch watching to see how the Salariki made use of them.

Groft led the advance—running lightly out along the reef with agile and graceful leaps to cross the breaks where the sea hurled in over the rock. And after him followed the other natives, each with a lighted torch in hand—the torch they hunkered down to plant firmly in some crevice of the rock before taking a stand beside that beacon.

The Terrans, less surefooted in the space boots, picked their way along the same path, wet with spray, wrinkling their noses against the lingering puffs of the stench from the water.

Following the example of the Salariki they faced seaward—but Dane did not know what to watch for. Cam had left only the vaguest general descriptions of gorp and beyond the fact that they were reptilian, intelligent and dangerous, the Terrans had not been briefed.

Once the warriors had taken up their stand along the reef, the younger Salariki went into action once more. Lighting more torches at the fire, they ran out along the line of their elders and flung their torches as far as they could hurl them into the sea outside the reef.

The gray steel of the water was now yellow with the reflection of the sinking sun. But that ocher and gold became more brilliant yet as the torches of the Salariki set blazing up far floating patches of scum. Dane shielded his eyes against the glare and tried to watch the water, with some idea that this move must be provocation and what they hunted would so be driven into view.

He held his sleep rod ready, just as the Salarik on his right had claw knife in one hand and in the other, open and waiting, the net intended to entangle and hold fast a victim, binding him for the kill.

But it was at the far tip of the barrier—the post of greatest honor which Groft had jealously claimed as his, that the gorp struck first. At a wild shout of defiance Dane half turned to see the Salarik noble cast his net at sea level and then stab viciously with a well practiced blow. When he raised his arm for a second thrust, greenish ichor ran from the blade down his wrist.

“Dane!”

Thorson’s head jerked around. He saw the vee of ripples headed straight for the rocks where he balanced.

But he’d have to wait for a better target than a moving wedge of water. Instinctively he half crouched in the stance of an embattled spaceman, wishing now that he did have a blaster.

Neither of the Salariki stationed on either side of him made any move and he guessed that was hunt etiquette. Each man was supposed to face and kill the monster that challenged him—without assistance. And upon his skill during the next few minutes might rest the reputation of all Terrans as far as the natives were concerned.

There was a shadow outline beneath the surface of the metallic water now, but he could not see well because of the distortion of the murky waves. He must wait until he was sure.

Then the thing gave a spurt and, only inches beyond the toes of his boots, a nightmare creature sprang halfway out of the water, pincher claws as long as his own arms snapping at him. Without being conscious of his act, he pressed the stud of the sleep rod, aiming in the general direction of that horror from the sea.

But to his utter amazement the creature did not fall supinely back into watery world from which it had emerged. Instead those claws snapped again, this time scrapping across the top of Dane’s foot, leaving a furrow in material the keenest of knives could not have scored.

“Give it to him!” That was Rip shouting encouragement from his own place farther along the reef.

Dane pressed the firing stud again and again. The claws waved as the monstrosity slavered from a gaping frog’s mouth, a mouth which was fanged with a shark’s vicious teeth. It was almost wholly out of the water, creeping on a crab’s many legs, with a clawed upper limb reaching for him, when suddenly it stopped, its huge head turning from side to side in the sheltering carapace of scaled natural armor. It settled back as if crouching for a final spring—a spring which would push Dane into the ocean.

But that attack never came. Instead the gorp drew in upon itself until it resembled an unwieldy ball of indestructible armor and there it remained.

The Salariki on either side of Dane let out cries of triumph and edged closer. One of them twirled his net suggestively, seeing that the Terran lacked what was to him an essential piece of hunting equipment. Dane nodded vigorously in agreement and the tough strands swung out in a skillful cast which engulfed the motionless creature on the reef. But it was so protected by its scales that there was no opening for the claw knife. They had made a capture but they could not make a kill.

However, the Salariki were highly delighted. And several abandoned their posts to help the boys drag the monster ashore where it was pinned down to the beach by stakes driven through the edges of the net.

But the hunting party was given little time to gloat over this stroke of fortune. The gorp killed by Groft and the one stunned by Dane were only the van of an army and within moments the hunters on the reef were confronted by trouble armed with slashing claws and diabolic fighting ability.

The battle was anything but one-sided. Dane whirled, as the air was rent by a shriek of agony, just in time to see one of the Salariki, already torn by the claws of a gorp, being drawn under the water. It was too late to save the hunter, though Dane, balanced on the very edge of the reef, aimed a beam into the bloody waves. If the gorp was affected by this attack he could not tell, for both attacker and victim could no longer be seen.

But Ali had better luck in rescuing the Salarik who shared his particular section of reef, and the native, gashed and spurting blood from a wound in his thigh, was hauled to safety. While the gorp, coiling too slowly under the Terran ray, was literally hewn to pieces by the revengeful knives of the hunter’s kin.

The fight broke into a series of individual duels carried on now by the light of the torches as the evening closed in. The last of the purple patches had burned away to nothing. Dane crouched by his standard torch, his eyes fastened on the sea, watching for an ominous vee of ripples betraying another gorp on its way to launch against the rock barrier.

There was such wild confusion along that line of water sprayed rocks that he had no idea of how the engagement was going. But so far the gorp showed no signs of having had enough.

Dane was shaken out of his absorption by another scream. One, he was sure, which had not come from any Salariki throat. He got to his feet. Rip was stationed four men beyond him. Yes, the tall Astrogator-apprentice was there, outlined against torch flare. Ali? No—there was the assistant Engineer. Weeks? But Weeks was picking his way back along the reef toward the shore, haste expressed in every line of his figure. The scream sounded for a second time, freezing the Terrans.

“Come back—!” That was Weeks gesturing violently at the shore and something floundering in the protecting circle of the reef. The younger Salariki who had been feeding the fire were now clustered at the water’s edge.

Ali ran and with a leap covered the last few feet, landing reckless knee deep in the waves. Dane saw light strike on his rod as he swung it in a wide arc to center on the struggle churning the water into foam. A third scream died to a moan and then the Salariki dashed into the sea, their nets spread, drawing back with them through the surf a dark and now quiet mass.

The fact that at least one gorp had managed to get on the inner side of the reef made an impression on the rest of the native hunters. After an uncertain minute or two Groft gave the signal to withdraw—which they did with grisly trophies. Dane counted seven gorp bodies—which did not include the prisoner ashore. And more might have slid into the sea to die. On the other hand two Salariki were dead—one had been drawn into the sea before Dane’s eyes—and at least one was badly wounded. But who had been pulled down in the shallows—some one sent out from the Queen with a message?

Dane raced back along the reef, not waiting to pull up his torch, and before he reached the shore Rip was overtaking him. But the man who lay groaning on the sand was not from the Queen. The torn and bloodstained tunic covering his lacerated shoulders had the I-S badge. Ali was already at work on his wounds, giving temporary first aid from his belt kit. To all their questions he was stubbornly silent—either he couldn’t or wouldn’t answer.

In the end they helped the Salariki rig three stretchers. On one the largest, the captive gorp, still curled in a round carapace protected ball, was bound with the net. The second supported the wounded Salarik clansman and onto the third the Terrans lifted the I-S man.

“We’ll deliver him to his own ship,” Rip decided. “He must have tailed us here as a spy—” He asked a passing Salarik as to where they could find the Company spacer.

“They might just think we are responsible,” Ali pointed out. “But I see your point. If we do pack him back to the Queen and he doesn’t make it, they might say that we fired his rockets for him. All right, boys, let’s up-ship—he doesn’t look too good to me.”

With a torch-bearing Salarik boy as a guide, they hurried along a path taking in turns the burden of the stretcher. Luckily the I-S ship was even closer to the sea than the Queen and as they crossed the slagged ground, congealed by the break fire, they were trotting.

Though the Company ship was probably one of the smallest Inter-Solar carried on her rosters, it was a third again as large as the Queen—with part of that third undoubtedly dedicated to extra cargo space. Beside her their own spacer would seem not only smaller, but battered and worn. But no Free Trader would have willingly assumed the badges of a Company man, not even for the command of such a ship fresh from the cradles of a builder.

When a man went up from the training Pool for his first assignment, he was sent to the ship where his temperament, training and abilities best fitted. And those who were designated as Free Traders would never fit into the pattern of Company men. Of late years the breech between those who lived under the strict parental control of one of the five great galaxy wide organizations and those still too much of an individual to live any life but that of a half-explorer-half-pioneer which was the Free Trader’s, had widened alarmingly. Antagonism flared, rivalry was strong. But as yet the great Companies themselves were at polite cold war with one another for the big plums of the scattered systems. The Free Traders took the crumbs and there was not much disputing—save in cases such as had arisen on Sargol, when suddenly crumbs assumed the guise of very rich cake, rich and large enough to attract a giant.

The party from the Queen was given a peremptory challenge as they reached the other ship’s ramp. Rip demanded to see the officer of the watch and then told the story of the wounded man as far as they knew it. The Eysie was hurried aboard—nor did his shipmates give a word of thanks.

“That’s that.” Rip shrugged. “Let’s go before they slam the hatch so hard they’ll rock their ship off her fins!”

“Polite, aren’t they?” asked Weeks mildly.

“What do you expect of Eysies?” Ali wanted to know. “To them Free Traders are just rim planet trash. Let’s report back where we are appreciated.”

They took a short cut which brought them back to the Queen and they filed up her ramp to make their report to the Captain.

But they were not yet satisfied with Groft and his gorp slayers. No Salarik appeared for trade in the morning—surprising the Terrans. Instead a second delegation, this time of older men and a storm priest, visited the spacer with an invitation to attend Paft’s funeral feast, a rite which would be followed by the formal elevation of Groft to his father’s position, now that he had revenged that parent. And from remarks dropped by members of the delegation it was plain that the bearing of the Terrans who had joined the hunting party was esteemed to have been in highest accord with Salariki tradition.

They drew lots to decide which two must remain with the ship and the rest perfumed themselves so as to give no offense which might upset their now cordial relations. Again it was mid-afternoon when the Salariki escort sent to do them honor waited at the edge of the wood and Mura and Tang saw them off. With a herald booming before them, they traveled the beaten earth road in the opposite direction from the trading center, off through the forest until they came to a wide section of several miles which had been rigorously cleared of any vegetation which might give cover to a lurking enemy. In the center of this was a twelve-foot-high stockade of the bright red, burnished wood which had attracted Weeks on the shore. Each paling was the trunk of a tree and it had been sharpened at the top to a wicked point. On the field side was a wide ditch, crossed at the gate by a bridge, the planking of which might be removed at will. And as Dane passed over he looked down into the moat that was dry. The Salariki did not depend upon water for a defense—but on something else which his experience of the previous night had taught him to respect. There was no mistaking that shade of purple. The highly inflammable scum the hunters had burnt from the top of the waves had been brought inland and lay a greasy blanket some eight feet below. It would only be necessary to toss a torch on that and the defenders of the stockade would create a wall of fire to baffle any attackers. The Salariki knew how to make the most of their world’s natural resources.

Chapter VI

DUELIST’S CHALLENGE

Inside the red stockade there was a crowded community. The Salariki demanded privacy of a kind, and even the unmarried warriors did not share barracks, but each had a small cubicle of his own. So that the mud brick and timber erections of one of their clan cities resembled nothing so much as the comb cells of a busy beehive. Although Paft’s was considered a large clan, it numbered only about two hundred fighting men and their numerous wives, children and captive servants. Not all of them normally lived at this center, but for the funeral feasting they had assembled—which meant a lot of doubling up and tenting out under makeshift cover between the regular buildings of the town. So that the Terrans were glad to be guided through this crowded maze to the Great Hall which was its heart.

As the trading center had been, the hall was a circular enclosure open to the sky above but divided in wheel-spoke fashion with posts of the red wood, each supporting a metal basket filled with imflammable material. Here were no lowly stools or trading tables. One vast circular board, broken only by a gap at the foot, ran completely around the wall. At the end opposite the entrance was the high chair of the chieftain, set on a two step dais. Though the feast had not yet officially begun, the Terrans saw that the majority of the places were already occupied.

They were led around the perimeter of the enclosure to places not far from the high seat. Van Rycke settled down with a grunt of satisfaction. It was plain that the Free Traders were numbered among the nobility. They could be sure of good trade in the days to come.

Delegations from neighboring clans arrived in close companies of ten or twelve and were granted seats, as had been the Terrans, in groups. Dane noted that there was no intermingling of clan with clan. And, as they were to understand later that night, there was a very good reason for that precaution.

“Hope all our adaption shots work,” Ali murmured, eyeing with no pleasure at all the succession of platters now being borne through the inner opening of the table.

While the Traders had learned long ago that the wisest part of valor was not to sample alien strong drinks, ceremony often required that they break bread (or its other world equivalent) on strange planets. And so science served expediency and now a Trader bound for any Galactic banquet was immunized, as far as was medically possible, against the evil consequences of consuming food not originally intended for Terran stomachs. One of the results being that Traders acquired a far flung reputation of possessing bird-like appetites—since it was always better to nibble and live, than to gorge and die.

Groft had not yet taken his place in the vacant chieftain’s chair. For the present he stood in the center of the table circle, directing the captive slaves who circulated with the food. Until the magic moment when the clan themselves would proclaim their overlord, he remained merely the eldest son of the house, relatively without power.

As the endless rows of platters made their way about the table the basket lights on the tops of the pillars were ignited, dispelling the dusk of evening. And there was an attendant stationed by each to throw on handsful of aromatic bark which burned with puffs of lavender smoke, adding to the many warring scents. The Terrans had recourse at intervals to their own pungent smelling bottles, merely to clear their heads of the drugging fumes.

Luckily, Dane thought as the feast proceeded, that smoke from the braziers went straight up. Had they been in a roofed space they might have been overcome. As it was—were they entirely conscious of all that was going on around them?

His reason for that speculation was the dance now being performed in the center of the hall—their fight with the gorp being enacted in a series of bounds and stabbings. He was sure that he could no longer trust his eyes when the claw knife of the victorious dancer-hunter apparently passed completely through the chest of another wearing a grotesque monster mask.

As a fitting climax to their horrific display, three of the men who had been with them on the reef entered, dragging behind them—still enmeshed in the hunting net—the gorp which Dane had stunned. It was uncurled now and very much alive, but the pincer claws which might have cut its way to safety were encased in balls of hard substance.

Freed from the net, suspended by its sealed claws, the gorp swung back and forth from a standard set up before the high seat. Its murderous jaws snapped futilely, and from it came an enraged snake’s vicious hissing. Though totally in the power of its enemies it gave an impression of terrifying strength and menace.

The sight of their ancient foe aroused the Salariki, inflaming warriors who leaned across the table to hurl tongue-twisting invective at the captive monster. Dane gathered that seldom had a living gorp been delivered helpless into their hands and they proposed to make the most of this wonderful opportunity. And the Terran suddenly wished the monstrosity had fallen back into the sea. He had no soft thoughts for the gorp after what he had seen at the reef and the tales he had heard, but neither did he like what he saw now expressed in gestures, heard in the tones of voices about them.

A storm priest put an end to the outcries. His dun cloak making a spot of darkness amid all the flashing color, he came straight to the place where the gorp swung. As he took his stand before the wriggling creature the din gradually faded, the warriors settled back into their seats, a pool of quiet spread through the enclosure.

Groft came up to take his position beside the priest. With both hands he carried a two handled cup. It was not the ornamented goblet which stood before each diner, but a manifestly older artifact, fashioned of some dull black substance and having the appearance of being even older than the hall or town.

One of the warriors who had helped to bring in the gorp now made a quick and accurate cast with a looped rope, snaring the monster’s head and pulling back almost at a right angle. With deliberation the storm priest produced a knife—the first straight bladed weapon Dane had seen on Sargol. He made a single thrust in the soft underpart of the gorp’s throat, catching in the cup he took from Groft some of the ichor which spurted from the wound.

The gorp thrashed madly, spattering table and surrounding Salariki with its life fluid, but the attention of the crowd was riveted elsewhere. Into the old cup the priest poured another substance from a flask brought by an underling. He shook the cup back and forth, as if to mix its contents thoroughly and then handed it to Groft.

Holding it before him the young chieftain leaped to the table top and so to stand before the high seat. There was a hush throughout the enclosure. Now even the gorp had ceased its wild struggles and hung limp in its bonds.

Groft raised the cup above his head and gave a loud shout in the archaic language of his clan. He was answered by a chant from the warriors who would in battle follow his banner, chant punctuated with the clinking slap of knife blades brought down forcibly on the board.

Three times he recited some formula and was answered by the others. Then, in another period of sudden quiet, he raised the cup to his lips and drank off its contents in a single draught, turning the goblet upside down when he had done to prove that not a drop remained within. A shout tore through the great hall. The Salariki were all on their feet, waving their knives over their heads in honor to their new ruler. And Groft for the first time seated himself in the high seat. The clan was no longer without a chieftain. Groft held his father’s place.

“Show over?” Dane heard Stotz murmur and Van Rycke’s disappointing reply:

“Not yet. They’ll probably make a night of it. Here comes another round of drinks—”

“And trouble with them,”—that was Captain Jellico being prophetic.

“By the Coalsack’s Ripcord!” That exclamation had been jolted out of Rip and Dane turned to see what had so jarred the usually serene Astrogator-apprentice. He was just in time to witness an important piece of Sargolian social practice.

A young warrior, surely only within a year or so of receiving his knife, was facing an older Salarik, both on their feet. The head and shoulder fur of the older fighter was dripping wet and an empty goblet rolled across the table to bump to the floor. A hush had fallen on the immediate neighbors of the pair, and there was an air of expectancy about the company.

“Threw his drink all over the other fellow,” Rip’s soft whisper explained. “That means a duel—”

“Here and now?” Dane had heard of the personal combat proclivities of the Salariki.

“Should be to the death for an insult such as that,” Ali remarked, as usual surveying the scene from his chosen role as bystander. As a child he had survived the unspeakable massacres of the Crater War, nothing had been able to crack his surface armor since.

“The young fool!” that was Steen Wilcox sizing up the situation from the angle of a naturally cautious nature and some fifteen years of experience on a great many different worlds. “He’ll be mustered out for good before he knows what happened to him!”

The younger Salarik had barked a question at his elder and had been promptly answered by that dripping warrior. Now their neighbors came to life with an efficiency which suggested that they had been waiting for such a move, it had happened so many times that every man knew just the right procedure from that point on.

In order for a Sargolian feast to be a success, the Terrans gathered from overheard remarks, at least one duel must be staged sometime during the festivities. And those not actively engaged did a lot of brisk betting in the background.

“Look there—at that fellow in the violet cloak,” Rip directed Dane. “See what he just laid down?”

The nobleman in the violet cloak was not one of Groft’s liege men, but a member of the delegation from another clan. And what he had laid down on the table—indicating as he did so his choice as winner in the coming combat, the elder warrior—was a small piece of white material on which reposed a slightly withered but familiar leaf. The neighbor he wagered with, eyed the stake narrowly, bending over to sniff at it, before he piled up two gem set armlets, a personal scent box and a thumb ring to balance.

At this practical indication of just how much the Terran herb was esteemed Dane regretted anew their earlier ignorance. He glanced along the board and saw that Van Rycke had noted that stake and was calling their Captain’s attention to it.

But such side issues were forgotten as the duelists vaulted into the circle rimmed by the table, a space now vacated for their action. They were stripped to their loin cloths, their cloaks thrown aside. Each carried his net in his right hand, his claw knife ready in his left. As yet the Traders had not seen Salarik against Salarik in action and in spite of themselves they edged forward in their seats, as intent as the natives upon what was to come. The finer points of the combat were lost on them, and they did not understand the drilled casts of the net, which had become as formalized through the centuries as the ancient and now almost forgotten sword play of their own world. The young Salarik had greater agility and speed, but the veteran who faced him had the experience.

To Terran eyes the duel had some of the weaving, sweeping movements of the earlier ritual dance. The swift evasions of the nets were graceful and so timed that many times the meshes grazed the skin of the fighter who fled entrapment.

Dane believed that the elder man was tiring, and the youngster must have shared that opinion. There was a leap to the right, a sudden flurry of dart and retreat, and then a net curled high and fell, enfolding flailing arms and kicking legs. When the clutch rope was jerked tight, the captured youth was thrown off balance. He rolled frenziedly, but there was no escaping the imprisoning strands.

A shout applauded the victor. He stood now above his captive who lay supine, his throat or breast ready for either stroke of the knife his captor wished to deliver. But it appeared that the winner was not minded to end the encounter with blood. Instead he reached out a long, befurred arm, took up a filled goblet from the table and with serious deliberation, poured its contents onto the upturned face of the loser.

For a moment there was a dead silence around the feast board and then a second roar, to which the honestly relieved Terrans added spurts of laughter. The sputtering youth was shaken free of the net and went down on his knees, tendering his opponent his knife, which the other thrust along with his own into his sash belt. Dane gathered from overheard remarks that the younger man was, for a period of time, to be determined by clan council, now the servant-slave of his overthrower and that since they were closely united by blood ties, this solution was considered eminently suitable—though had the elder killed his opponent, no one would have thought the worse of him for that deed.

It was the Queen’s men who were to provide the next center of attraction. Groft climbed down from his high seat and came to face across the board those who had accompanied him on the hunt. This time there was no escaping the sipping of the potent drink which the new chieftain slopped from his own goblet into each of theirs.

The fiery mouthful almost gagged Dane, but he swallowed manfully and hoped for the best as it burned like acid down his throat into his middle, there to mix uncomfortably with the viands he had eaten. Weeks’ thin face looked very white, and Dane noticed with malicious enjoyment, that Ali had an unobtrusive grip on the table which made his knuckles stand out in polished knobs—proving that there were things which could upset the imperturbable Kamil.

Fortunately they were not required to empty that flowing bowl in one gulp as Groft had done. The ceremonial mouthful was deemed enough and Dane sat down thankfully—but with uneasy fears for the future.

Groft had started back to his high seat when there was an interruption which had not been foreseen. A messenger threaded his way among the serving men and spoke to the chieftain, who glanced at the Terrans and then nodded.

Dane, his queasiness growing every second, was not attending until he heard a bitten off word from Rip’s direction and looked up to see a party of I-S men coming into the open space before the high seat. The men from the Queen stiffened—there was something in the attitude of the newcomers which hinted at trouble.

“What do you wish, sky lords?” That was Groft using the Trade Lingo, his eyes half closed as he lolled in his chair of state, almost as if he were about to witness some entertainment provided for his pleasure.

“We wish to offer you the good fortune desires of our hearts—” That was Kallee, the flowery words rolling with the proper accent from his tongue. “And that you shall not forget us—we also offer gifts—”

At a gesture from their Cargo-master, the I-S men set down a small chest. Groft, his chin resting on a clenched fist, lost none of his lazy air.

“They are received,” he retorted with the formal acceptance. “And no one can have too much good fortune. The Howlers of the Black Winds know that.” But he tendered no invitation to join the feast.

Kallee did not appear to be disconcerted. His next move was one which took his rivals by surprise, in spite of their suspicions.

“Under the laws of the Fellowship, O, Groft,” he clung to the formal speech, “I claim redress—”

Ali’s hand moved. Through his growing distress Dane saw Van Rycke’s jaw tighten, the fighting mask snap back on Captain Jellico’s face. Whatever came now was real trouble.

Groft’s eyes flickered over the party from the Queen. Though he had just pledged cup friendship with four of them, he had the malicious humor of his race. He would make no move to head off what might be coming.

“By the right of the knife and the net,” he intoned, “you have the power to claim personal satisfaction. Where is your enemy?”

Kallee turned to face the Free Traders. “I hereby challenge a champion to be set out from these off-worlders to meet by the blood and by the water my champion—”

The Salariki were getting excited. This was superb entertainment, an engagement such as they had never hoped to see—alien against alien. The rising murmur of their voices was like the growl of a hunting beast.

Groft smiled and the pleasure that expression displayed was neither Terran—nor human. But then the clan leader was not either, Dane reminded himself.

“Four of these warriors are clan-bound,” he said. “But the others may produce a champion—”

Dane looked along the line of his comrades—Ali, Rip, Weeks and himself had just been ruled out. That left Jellico, Van Rycke, Karl Kosti, the giant jetman whose strength they had to rely upon before, Stotz the Engineer, Medic Tau and Steen Wilcox. If it were strength alone he would have chosen Kosti, but the big man was not too quick a thinker—

Jellico got to his feet, the embodiment of a star lane fighting man. In the flickering light the scar on his cheek seemed to ripple. “Who’s your champion?” he asked Kallee.

The Eysie Cargo-master was grinning. He was confident he had pushed them into a position from which they could not extricate themselves.

“You accept challenge?” he countered.

Jellico merely repeated his question and Kallee beckoned forward one of his men.

The Eysie who stepped up was no match for Kosti. He was a slender, almost wand-slim young man, whose pleased smirk said that he, too, was about to put something over on the notorious Free Traders. Jellico studied him for a couple of long seconds during which the hum of Salariki voices was the threatening buzz of a disturbed wasps’ nest. There was no way out of this—to refuse conflict was to lose all they had won with the clansmen. And they did not doubt that Kallee had, in some way, triggered the scales against them.

Jellico made the best of it. “We accept challenge,” his voice was level. “We, being guesting in Groft’s holding, will fight after the manner of the Salariki who are proven warriors—” He paused as roars of pleased acknowledgment arose around the board.

“Therefore let us follow the custom of warriors and take up the net and the knife—”

Was there a shade of dismay on Kallee’s face?

“And the time?” Groft leaned forward to ask—but his satisfaction at such a fine ending for his feast was apparent. This would be talked over by every Sargolian for many storm seasons to come!

Jellico glanced up at the sky. “Say an hour after dawn, chieftain. With your leave, we shall confer concerning a champion.”

“My council room is yours,” Groft signed for a liege man to guide them.

Chapter VII

BARRING ACCIDENT

The morning winds rustled through the grass forest and, closer to hand, it pulled at the cloaks of the Salariki. Clan nobles sat on stools, lesser folk squatted on the trampled stubble of the cleared ground outside the stockade. In their many colored splendor the drab tunics of the Terrans were a blot of darkness at either end of the makeshift arena which had been marked out for them.

At the conclusion of their conference the Queen’s men had been forced into a course Jellico had urged from the first. He, and he alone, would represent the Free Traders in the coming duel. And now he stood there in the early morning, stripped down to shorts and boots, wearing nothing on which a net could catch and so trap him. The Free Traders were certain that the I-S men having any advantage would press it to the ultimate limit and the death of Captain Jellico would make a great impression on the Salariki.

Jellico was taller than the Eysie who faced him, but almost as lean. Hard muscles moved under his skin, pale where space tan had not burned in the years of his star voyaging. And his every movement was with the liquid grace of a man who, in his time, had been a master of the force blade. Now he gripped in his left hand the claw knife given him by Groft himself and in the other he looped the throwing rope of the net.

At the other end of the field, the Eysie man was industriously moving his bootsoles back and forth across the ground, intent upon coating them with as much of the gritty sand as would adhere. And he displayed the supreme confidence in himself which he had shown at the moment of challenge in the Great Hall.

None of the Free Trading party made the mistake of trying to give Jellico advice. The Captain had not risen to his command without learning his duties. And the duties of a Free Trader covered a wide range of knowledge and practice. One had to be equally expert with a blaster and a slingshot when the occasion demanded. Though Jellico had not fought a Salariki duel with net and knife before, he had a deep memory of other weapons, other tactics which could be drawn upon and adapted to his present need.

There was none of the casual atmosphere which had surrounded the affair between the Salariki clansmen in the hall. Here was ceremony. The storm priests invoked their own particular grim Providence, and there was an oath taken over the weapons of battle. When the actual engagement began the betting among the spectators had reached, Dane decided, epic proportions. Large sections of Sargolian personal property were due to change hands as a result of this encounter.

As the chief priest gave the order to engage both Terrans advanced from their respective ends of the fighting space with the half crouching, light footed tread of spacemen. Jellico had pulled his net into as close a resemblance to rope as its bulk would allow. The very type of weapon, so far removed from any the Traders knew, made it a disadvantage rather than an asset.

But it was when the Eysie moved out to meet the Captain that Rip’s fingers closed about Dane’s upper arm in an almost paralyzing grip.

“He knows—”

Dane had not needed that bad news to be made vocal. Having seen the exploits of the Salariki duelists earlier, he had already caught the significance of that glide, of the way the I-S champion carried his net. The Eysie had not had any last minute instruction in the use of Sargolian weapons—he had practiced and, by his stance, knew enough to make him a formidable menace. The clamor about the Queen’s party rose as the battle-wise eyes of the clansmen noted that and the odds against Jellico reached fantastic heights while the hearts of his crew sank.

Only Van Rycke was not disturbed. Now and then he raised his smelling bottle to his nose with an elegant gesture which matched those of the befurred nobility around him, as if not a thought of care ruffled his mind.

The Eysie feinted in a opening which was a rather ragged copy of the young Salarik’s more fluid moves some hours before. But, when the net settled, Jellico was simply not there, his quick drop to one knee had sent the mesh flailing in an arc over his bowed shoulders with a good six inches to spare. And a cry of approval came not only from his comrades, but from those natives who had been gamblers enough to venture their wagers on his performance.

Dane watched the field and the fighters through a watery film. The discomfort he had experienced since downing that mouthful of the cup of friendship had tightened into a fist of pain clutching his middle in a torturing grip. But he knew he must stick it out until Jellico’s ordeal was over. Someone stumbled against him and he glanced up to see Ali’s face, a horrible gray-green under the tan, close to his own. For a moment the Engineer-apprentice caught at his arm for support and then with a visible effort straightened up. So he wasn’t the only one—He looked for Rip and Weeks and saw that they, too, were ill.

But for a moment all that mattered was the stretch of trampled earth and the two men facing each other. The Eysie made another cast and this time, although Jellico was not caught, the slap of the mesh raised a red welt on his forearm. So far the Captain had been content to play the defensive role of retreat, studying his enemy, planning ahead.

The Eysie plainly thought the game his, that he had only to wait for a favorable moment and cinch the victory. Dane began to think it had gone on for weary hours. And he was dimly aware that the Salariki were also restless. One or two shouted angrily at Jellico in their own tongue.

The end came suddenly. Jellico lost his footing, stumbled, and went down. But before his men could move, the Eysie champion bounded forward, his net whirling out. Only he never reached the Captain. In the very act of falling Jellico had pulled his legs under him so that he was not supine but crouched, and his net swept but at ground level, clipping the I-S man about the shins, entangling his feet so that he crashed heavily to the sod and lay still.

“The whip—that Lalox whip trick!” Wilcox’s voice rose triumphantly above the babble of the crowd. Using his net as if it had been a thong, Jellico had brought down the Eysie with a move the other had not foreseen.

Breathing hard, sweat running down his shoulders and making tracks through the powdery red dust which streaked him, Jellico got to his feet and walked over to the I-S champion who had not moved or made a sound since his fall. The Captain went down on one knee to examine him.

“Kill! Kill!” That was the Salariki, all their instinctive savagery aroused.

But Jellico spoke to Groft. “By our customs we do not kill the conquered. Let his friends bear him hence.” He took the claw knife the Eysie still clutched in his hand and thrust it into his own belt. Then he faced the I-S party and Kallee.

“Take your man and get out!” The rein he had kept on his temper these past days was growing very thin. “You’ve made your last play here.”

Kallee’s thick lips drew back in something close to a Salarik snarl. But neither he nor his men made any reply. They bundled up their unconscious fighter and disappeared.

Of their own return to the sanctuary of the Queen Dane had only the dimmest of memories afterwards. He had made the privacy of the forest road before he yielded to the demands of his outraged interior. And after that he had stumbled along with Van Rycke’s hand under his arm, knowing from other miserable sounds that he was not alone in his torment.

It was some time later, months he thought when he first roused, that he found himself lying in his bunk, feeling very weak and empty as if a large section of his middle had been removed, but also at peace with his world. As he levered himself up the cabin had a nasty tendency to move slowly to the right as if he were a pivot on which it swung, and he had all the sensations of being in free fall though the Queen was still firmly planeted. But that was only a minor discomfort compared to the disturbance he remembered.

Fed the semi-liquid diet prescribed by Tau and served up by Mura to him and his fellow sufferers, he speedily got back his strength. But it had been a close call, he did not need Tau’s explanation to underline that. Weeks had suffered the least of the four, he the most—though none of them had had an easy time. And they had been out of circulation three days.

“The Eysie blasted last night,” Rip informed him as they lounged in the sun on the ramp, sharing the blessed lazy hours of invalidism.

But somehow that news gave Dane no lift of spirit. “I didn’t think they’d give up—”

Rip shrugged. “They may be off to make a dust-off before the Board. Only, thanks to Van and the Old Man, we’re covered all along the line. There’s nothing they can use against us to break our contract. And now we’re in so solid they can’t cut us out with the Salariki. Groft asked the Captain to teach him that trick with the net. I didn’t know the Old Man knew Lalox whip fighting—it’s about one of the nastiest ways to get cut to pieces in this universe—”

“How’s trade going?”

Rip’s sunniness clouded. “Supplies have given out. Weeks had an idea—but it won’t bring in Koros. That red wood he’s so mad about, he’s persuaded Van to stow some in the cargo holds since we have enough Koros stones to cover the voyage. Luckily the clansmen will take ordinary trade goods in exchange for that and Weeks thinks it will sell on Terra. It’s tough enough to turn a steel knife blade and yet it is light and easy to handle when it’s cured. Queer stuff and the color’s interesting. That stockade of it planted around Groft’s town has been up close to a hundred years and not a sign of rot in a log of it!”

“Where is Van?”

“The storm priests sent for him. Some kind of a gabble-fest on the star-star level, I gather. Otherwise we’re almost ready to blast. And we know what kind of cargo to bring next time.”

They certainly did, Dane agreed. But he was not to idle away his morning. An hour later a caravan came out of the forest, a line of complaining, burdened orgels, their tiny heads hanging low as they moaned their woes, the hard life which sent them on their sluggish way with piles of red logs lashed to their broad toads’ backs. Weeks was in charge of the procession and Dane went to work with the cargo plan Van had left, seeing that the brilliant scarlet lengths were hoist into the lower cargo hatch and stacked according to the science of stowage. He discovered that Rip had been right, the wood for all its incredible hardness was light of weight. Weak as he still was he could lift and stow a full sized log with no great difficulty. And he thought Weeks was correct in thinking that it would sell on their home world. The color was novel, the durability an asset—it would not make fortunes as the Koros stones might, but every bit of profit helped and this cargo might cover their fielding fees on Terra.

Sinbad was in the cargo space when the first of the logs came in. With his usual curiosity the striped tom cat prowled along the wood, sniffing industriously. Suddenly he stopped short, spat and backed away, his spine fur a roughened crest. Having backed as far as the inner door he turned and slunk out. Puzzled, Dane gave the wood a swift inspection. There were no cracks or crevices in the smooth surfaces, but as he stopped over the logs he became conscious of a sharp odor. So this was one scent of the perfumed planet Sinbad did not like. Dane laughed. Maybe they had better have Weeks make a gate of the stuff and slip it across the ramp, keeping Sinbad on ship board. Odd—it wasn’t an unpleasant odor—at least to him it wasn’t—just sharp and pungent. He sniffed again and was vaguely surprised to discover that it was less noticeable now. Perhaps the wood when taken out of the sunlight lost its scent.

They packed the lower hold solid in accordance with the rules of stowage and locked the hatch before Van Rycke returned from his meeting with the storm priests. When the Cargo-master came back he was followed by two servants bearing between them a chest.

But there was something in Van Rycke’s attitude, apparent to those who knew him best, that proclaimed he was not too well pleased with his morning’s work. Sparing the feelings of the accompanying storm priests about the offensiveness of the spacer Captain Jellico and Steen Wilcox went out to receive them in the open. Dane watched from the hatch, aware that in his present pariah-hood it would not be wise to venture closer.

The Terran Traders were protesting some course of action that the Salariki were firmly insistent upon. In the end the natives won and Kosti was summoned to carry on board the chest which the servants had brought. Having seen it carried safely inside the spacer, the aliens departed, but Van Rycke was frowning and Jellico’s fingers were beating a tattoo on his belt as they came up the ramp.

“I don’t like it,” Jellico stated as he entered.

“It was none of my doing,” Van Rycke snapped. “I’ll take risks if I have to—but there’s something about this one—” he broke off, two deep lines showing between his thick brows. “Well, you can’t teach a sasseral to spit,” he ended philosophically. “We’ll have to do the best we can.”

But Jellico did not look at all happy as he climbed to the control section. And before the hour was out the reason for the Captain’s uneasiness was common property throughout the ship.

Having sampled the delights of off-world herbs, the Salariki were determined to not be cut off from their source of supply. Six Terran months from the present Sargolian date would come the great yearly feast of the Fifty Storms, and the priests were agreed that this year their influence and power would be doubled if they could offer the devout certain privileges in the form of Terran plants. Consequently they had produced and forced upon the reluctant Van Rycke the Koros collection of their order, with instructions that it be sold on Terra and the price returned to them in the precious seeds and plants. In vain the Cargo-master and Captain had pointed out that Galactic trade was a chancy thing at the best, that accident might prevent return of the Queen to Sargol. But the priests had remained adamant and saw in all such arguments only a devious attempt to raise prices. They quoted in their turn the information they had levered out of the Company men—that Traders had their code and that once pay had been given in advance the contract must be fulfilled. They, and they alone, wanted the full cargo of the Queen on her next voyage, and they were taking the one way they were sure of achieving that result.

So a fortune in Koros stones which as yet did not rightfully belong to the Traders was now in the Queen’s strong-room and her crew were pledged by the strongest possible tie known in their Service to set down on Sargol once more before the allotted time had passed. The Free Traders did not like it, there was even a vaguely superstitious feeling that such a bargain would inevitably draw ill luck to them. But they were left with no choice if they wanted to retain their influence with the Salariki.

“Cutting orbit pretty fine, aren’t we?” Ali asked Rip across the mess table. “I saw your two star man sweating it out before he came down to shoot the breeze with us rocket monkeys—”

Rip nodded. “Steen’s double checked every computation and some he’s done four times.” He ran his hands over his close cropped head with a weary gesture. As a semi-invalid he had been herded down with his fellows to swallow the builder Mura had concocted and Tau insisted that they take, but he had been doing a half a night’s work on the plotter under his chief’s exacting eye before he came. “The latest news is that, barring accident, we can make it with about three weeks’ grace, give or take a day or two—”

“Barring accident—” the words rang in the air. Here on the frontiers of the star lanes there were so many accidents, so many delays which could put a ship behind schedule. Only on the main star trails did the huge liners or Company ships attempt to keep on regularly timed trips. A Free Trader did not really dare to have an inelastic contract.

“What does Stotz say?” Dane asked Ali.

“He says he can deliver. We don’t have the headache about setting a course—you point the nose and we only give her the boost to send her along.”

Rip sighed. “Yes—point her nose.” He inspected his nails. “Goodbye,” he added gravely. “These won’t be here by the time we planet here again. I’ll have my fingers gnawed off to the first knuckle. Well, we lift at six hours. Pleasant strap down.” He drank the last of the stuff in his mug, made a face at the flavor, and got to his feet, due back at his post in control.

Dane, free of duty until the ship earthed, drifted back to his own cabin, sure of part of a night’s undisturbed rest before they blasted off. Sinbad was curled on his bunk. For some reason the cat had not been prowling the ship before take-off as he usually did. First he had sat on Van’s desk and now he was here, almost as if he wanted human company. Dane picked him up and Sinbad rumbled a purr, arching his head so that it rubbed against the young man’s chin in an extremely uncharacteristic show of affection. Smoothing the fur along the cat’s jaw line Dane carried him back to the Cargo-master’s cabin.

With some hesitation he knocked at the panel and did not step in until he had Van Rycke’s muffled invitation. The Cargo-master was stretched on the bunk, two of the take off straps already fastened across his bulk as if he intended to sleep through the blast-off.

“Sinbad, sir. Shall I stow him?”

Van Rycke grunted an assent and Dane dropped the cat in the small hammock which was his particular station, fastening the safety cords. For once Sinbad made no protest but rolled into a ball and was promptly fast asleep. For a moment or two Dane thought about this unnatural behavior and wondered if he should call it to the Cargo-master’s attention. Perhaps on Sargol Sinbad had had his equivalent of a friendship cup and needed a check-up by Tau.

“Stowage correct?” the question, coming from Van Rycke, was also unusual. The seal would not have been put across the hold lock had its contents not been checked and rechecked.

“Yes, sir,” Dane replied woodenly, knowing he was still in the outer darkness. “There was just the wood—we stowed it according to chart.”

Van Rycke grunted once more. “Feeling top-layer again?”

“Yes, sir. Any orders, sir?”

“No. Blast-off’s at six.”

“Yes, sir.” Dane left the cabin, closing the panel carefully behind him. Would he—or could he—he thought drearily, get back in Van Rycke’s profit column again? Sargol had been unlucky as far as he was concerned. First he had made that stupid mistake and then he got sick and now—And now—what was the matter? Was it just the general attack of nerves over their voyage and the commitments which forced their haste, or was it something else? He could not rid himself of a vague sense that the Queen was about to take off into real trouble. And he did not like the sensation at all!

Chapter VIII

HEADACHES

They lifted from Sargol on schedule and went into Hyper also on schedule. From that point on there was nothing to do but wait out the usual dull time of flight between systems and hope that Steen Wilcox had plotted a course which would cut that flight time to a minimum. But this voyage there was little relaxation once they were in Hyper. No matter when Dane dropped into the mess cabin, which was the common meeting place of the spacer, he was apt to find others there before him, usually with a mug of one of Mura’s special brews close at hand, speculating about their landing date.

Dane, himself, once he had thrown off the lingering effects of his Sargolian illness, applied time to his studies. When he had first joined the Queen as a recruit straight out of the training Pool, he had speedily learned that all the ten years of intensive study then behind him had only been an introduction to the amount he still had to absorb before he could take his place as an equal with such a trader as Van Rycke—if he had the stuff which would raise him in time to that exalted level. While he had still had his superior’s favor he had dared to treat him as an instructor, going to him with perplexing problems of stowage or barter. But now he had no desire to intrude upon the Cargo-master, and doggedly wrestled with the microtapes of old records on his own, painfully working out the why and wherefor for any departure from the regular procedure. He had no inkling of his own future status—whether the return to Terra would find him permanently earthed. And he would ask no questions.

They had been four days of ship’s time in Hyper when Dane walked into the mess cabin, tired after his work with old records, to discover no Mura busy in the galley beyond, no brew steaming on the heat coil. Rip sat at the table, his long legs stuck out, his usually happy face very sober.

“What’s wrong?” Dane reached for a mug, then seeing no pot of drink, put it back in place.

“Frank’s sick—”

“What!” Dane turned. Illness such as they had run into on Sargol had a logical base. But illness on board ship was something else.

“Tau has him isolated. He has a bad headache and he blacked out when he tried to sit up. Tau’s running tests.”

Dane sat down. “Could be something he ate—”

Rip shook his head. “He wasn’t at the feast—remember? And he didn’t eat anything from outside, he swore that to Tau. In fact he didn’t go dirt much while we were down—”

That was only too true as Dane could now recall. And the fact that the steward had not been at the feast, had not sampled native food products, wiped out the simplest and most comforting reasons for his present collapse.

“What’s this about Frank?” Ali stood in the doorway. “He said yesterday that he had a headache. But now Tau has him shut off—”

“But he wasn’t at that feast.” Ali stopped short as the implications of that struck him. “How’s Tang feeling?”

“Fine—why?” The Com-tech had come up behind Kamil and was answering for himself. “Why this interest in the state of my health?”

“Frank’s down with something—in isolation,” Rip replied bluntly. “Did he do anything out of the ordinary when we were off ship?”

For a long moment the other stared at Shannon and then he shook his head. “No. And he wasn’t dirt-side to any extent either. So Tau’s running tests—” He lapsed into silence. None of them wished to put their thoughts into words.

Dane picked up the microtape he had brought with him and went on down the corridor to return it. The panel of the cargo office was ajar and to his relief he found Van Rycke out. He shoved the tape back in its case and pulled out the next one. Sinbad was there, not in his own private hammock, but sprawled out on the Cargo-master’s bunk. He watched Dane lazily, mouthing a silent mew of welcome. For some reason since they had blasted from Sargol the cat had been lazy—as if his adventures afield there had sapped much of his vitality.

“Why aren’t you out working?” Dane asked as he leaned over to scratch under a furry chin raised for the benefit of such a caress. “You inspect the hold lately, boy?”

Sinbad merely blinked and after the manner of his species looked infinitely bored. As Dane turned to go the Cargo-master came in. He showed no surprise at Dane’s presence. Instead he reached out and fingered the label of the tape Dane had just chosen. After a glance at the identifying symbol he took it out of his assistant’s hand, plopped it back in its case, and stood for a moment eyeing the selection of past voyage records. With a tongue-click of satisfaction he pulled out another and tossed it across the desk to Dane.

“See what you can make out of this tangle,” he ordered. But Dane’s shoulders went back as if some weight had been lifted from them. The old easiness was still lacking, but he was no longer exiled to the outer darkness of Van Rycke’s displeasure.

Holding the microtape as if it were a first grade Koros stone Dane went back to his own cabin, snapped the tape into his reader, adjusted the ear buttons and lay back on his bunk to listen.

He was deep in the intricacy of a deal so complicated that he was lost after the first two moves, when he opened his eyes to see Ali at the door panel. The Engineer-apprentice made an emphatic beckoning wave and Dane slipped off the ear buttons.

“What is it?” His question lacked a cordial note.

“I’ve got to have help.” Ali was terse. “Kosti’s blacked out!”

“What!” Dane sat up and dropped his feet to the deck in almost one movement.

“I can’t shift him alone,” Ali stated the obvious. The giant jetman was almost double his size. “We must get him to his quarters. And I won’t ask Stotz—”

For a perfectly good reason Dane knew. An assistant—two of the apprentices—could go sick, but their officers’ continued good health meant the most to the Queen. If some infection were aboard it would be better for Ali and himself to be exposed, than to have Johan Stotz with all his encyclopedic knowledge of the ship’s engines contract any disease.

They found the jetman half sitting, half lying in the short foot or so of corridor which led to his own cubby. He had been making for his quarters when the seizure had taken him. And by the time the two reached his side, he was beginning to come around, moaning, his hands going to his head.

Together they got him on his feet and guided him to his bunk where he collapsed again, dead weight they had to push into place. Dane looked at Ali—

“Tau?”

“Haven’t had time to call him yet.” Ali was jerking at the thigh straps which fastened Kosti’s space boots.

“I’ll go.” Glad for the task Dane sped up the ladder to the next section and threaded the narrow side hall to the Medic’s cabin where he knocked on the panel.

There was a pause before Craig Tau looked out, deep lines of weariness bracketing his mouth, etched between his eyes.

“Kosti, sir,” Dane gave his bad news quickly. “He’s collapsed. We got him to his cabin—”

Tau showed no sign of surprise. His hand shot out for his kit.

“You touched him?” At the other’s nod he added an order. “Stay in your quarters until I have a chance to look you over—understand?”

Dane had no chance to answer, the Medic was already on his way. He went to his own cabin, understanding the reason for his imprisonment, but inwardly rebelling against it. Rather than sit idle he snapped on the reader—but, although facts and figures were dunned into his ears—he really heard very little. He couldn’t apply himself—not with a new specter leering at him from the bulkhead.

The dangers of the space lanes were not to be numbered, death walked among the stars a familiar companion of all spacemen. And to the Free Trader it was the extra and invisible crewman on every ship that raised. But there were deaths and deaths—And Dane could not forget the gruesome legends Van Rycke collected avidly as his hobby—had recorded in his private library of the folk lore of space.

Stories such as that of the ghostly “New Hope” carrying refugees from the first Martian Rebellion—the ship which had lifted for the stars but had never arrived, which wandered for a timeless eternity, a derelict in free fall, its port closed but the warning “dead” lights on at its nose—a ship which through five centuries had been sighted only by a spacer in similar distress. Such stories were numerous. There were other tales of “plague” ships wandering free with their dead crews, or discovered and shot into some sun by a patrol cruiser so that they might not carry their infection farther. Plague—the nebulous “worst” the Traders had to face. Dane screwed his eyes shut, tried to concentrate upon the droning voice in his ears, but he could not control his thoughts nor—his fears.

At a touch on his arm he started so wildly that he jerked the cord loose from the reader and sat up, somewhat shamefaced, to greet Tau. At the Medic’s orders he stripped for one of the most complete examinations he had ever undergone outside a quarantine port. It included an almost microscopic inspection of the skin on his neck and shoulders, but when Tau had done he gave a sigh of relief.

“Well, you haven’t got it—at least you don’t show any signs yet,” he amended his first statement almost before the words were out of his mouth.

“What were you looking for?”

Tau took time out to explain. “Here,” his fingers touched the small hollow at the base of Dane’s throat and then swung him around and indicated two places on the back of his neck and under his shoulder blades. “Kosti and Mura both have red eruptions here. It’s as if they have been given an injection of some narcotic.” Tau sat down on the jump seat while Dane dressed. “Kosti was dirt-side—he might have picked up something—”

“But Mura—”

“That’s it!” Tau brought his fist down on the edge of the bunk. “Frank hardly left the ship—yet he showed the first signs. On the other hand you are all right so far and you were off ship. And Ali’s clean and he was with you on the hunt. We’ll just have to wait and see.” He got up wearily. “If your head begins to ache,” he told Dane, “you get back here in a hurry and stay put—understand?”

As Dane learned all the other members of the crew were given the same type of inspection. But none of them showed the characteristic marks which meant trouble. They were on course for Terra—but—and that but must have loomed large in all their minds—once there would they be allowed to land? Could they even hope for a hearing? Plague ship—Tau must find the answer before they came into normal space about their own solar system or they were in for such trouble as made a broken contract seem the simplest of mishaps.

Kosti and Mura were in isolation. There were volunteers for nursing and Tau, unable to be in two places at once, finally picked Weeks to look after his crewmate in the engineering section.

There was doubling up of duties. Tau could no longer share with Mura the care of the hydro garden so Van Rycke took over. While Dane found himself in charge of the galley and, while he did not have Mura’s deft hand at disguising the monotonous concentrates to the point they resembled fresh food, after a day or two he began to experiment cautiously and produced a stew which brought some short words of appreciation from Captain Jellico.

They all breathed a sigh of relief when, after three days, no more signs of the mysterious illness showed on new members of the crew. It became routine to parade before Tau stripped to the waist each morning for the inspection of the danger points, and the Medic’s vigilance did not relax.

In the meantime neither Mura nor Kosti appeared to suffer. Once the initial stages of headaches and blackouts were passed, the patients lapsed into a semi-conscious state as if they were under sedation of some type. They would eat, if the food was placed in their mouths, but they did not seem to know what was going on about them, nor did they answer when spoken to.

Tau, between visits to them, worked feverishly in his tiny lab, analyzing blood samples, reading the records of obscure diseases, trying to find the reason for their attacks. But as yet his discoveries were exactly nothing. He had come out of his quarters and sat in limp exhaustion at the mess table while Dane placed before him a mug of stimulating caf-hag.

“I don’t get it!” The Medic addressed the table top rather than the amateur cook. “It’s a poison of some kind. Kosti went dirt-side—Mura didn’t. Yet Mura came down with it first. And we didn’t ship any food from Sargol. Neither did he eat any while we were there. Unless he did and we didn’t know about it. If I could just bring him to long enough to answer a couple of questions!” Sighing he dropped his weary head on his folded arms and within seconds was asleep.

Dane put the mug back on the heating unit and sat down at the other end of the table. He did not have the heart to shake Tau into wakefulness—let the poor devil get a slice of bunk time, he certainly needed it after the fatigues of the past four days.

Van Rycke passed along the corridor on his way to the hydro, Sinbad at his heels. But in a moment the cat was back, leaping up on Dane’s knee. He did not curl up, but rubbed against the young man’s arm, finally reaching up with a paw to touch Dane’s chin, uttering one of the soundless, mews which were his bid for attention.

“What’s the matter, boy?” Dane fondled the cat’s ears. “You haven’t got a headache—have you?” In that second a wild surmise came into his mind. Sinbad had been planet-side on Sargol as much as he could, and on ship board he was equally at home in all their cabins—could he be the carrier of the disease?

A good idea—only if it were true, then logically the second victim should have been Van, or Dane—whereas Sinbad lingered most of the time in their cabins—not Kosti. The cat, as far as he knew, had never shown any particular fondness for the jetman and certainly did not sleep in Karl’s quarters. No—that point did not fit. But he would mention it to Tau—no use overlooking anything—no matter how wild.

It was the sequence of victims which puzzled them all. As far as Tau had been able to discover Mura and Kosti had nothing much in common except that they were crewmates on the same spacer. They did not bunk in the same section, their fields of labor were totally different, they had no special food or drink tastes in common, they were not even of the same race. Frank Mura was one of the few descendants of a mysterious (or now mysterious) people who had had their home on a series of islands in one of Terra’s seas, islands which almost a hundred years before had been swallowed up in a series of world-rending quakes—Japan was the ancient name of that nation. While Karl Kosti had come from the once thickly populated land masses half the planet away which had borne the geographical name of “Europe.” No, all the way along the two victims had only very general meeting points—they both shipped on the Solar Queen and they were both of Terran birth.

Tau stirred and sat up, blinking bemusedly at Dane, then pushed back his wiry black hair and assumed a measure of alertness. Dane dropped the now purring cat in the Medic’s lap and in a few sentences outlined his suspicion. Tau’s hands closed about Sinbad.

“There’s a chance in that—” He looked a little less beat and he drank thirstily from the mug Dane gave him for the second time. Then he hurried out with Sinbad under one arm—bound for his lab.

Dane slicked up the galley, trying to put things away as neatly as Mura kept them. He didn’t have much faith in the Sinbad lead, but in this case everything must be checked out.

When the Medic did not appear during the rest of the ship’s day Dane was not greatly concerned. But he was alerted to trouble when Ali came in with an inquiry and a complaint.

“Seen anything of Craig?”

“He’s in the lab,” Dane answered.

“He didn’t answer my knock,” Ali protested. “And Weeks says he hasn’t been in to see Karl all day—”

That did catch Dane’s attention. Had his half hunch been right? Was Tau on the trail of a discovery which had kept him chained to the lab? But it wasn’t like the Medic not to look in on his patients.

“You’re sure he isn’t in the lab?”

“I told you that he didn’t answer my knock. I didn’t open the panel—” But now Ali was already in the corridor heading back the way he had come, with Dane on his heels, an unwelcome explanation for that silence in both their minds. And their fears were reinforced by what they heard as they approached the panel—a low moan wrung out of unbearable pain. Dane thrust the sliding door open.

Tau had slipped from his stool to the floor. His hands were at his head which rolled from side to side as if he were trying to quiet some agony. Dane stripped down the Medic’s under tunic. There was no need to make a careful examination, in the hollow of Craig Tau’s throat was the tell-tale red blotch.

“Sinbad!” Dane glanced about the cabin. “Did Sinbad get out past you?” he demanded of the puzzled Ali.

“No—I haven’t seen him all day—”

Yet the cat was nowhere in the tiny cabin and it had no concealed hiding place. To make doubly sure Dane secured the panel before they carried Tau to his bunk. The Medic had blacked out again, passed into the lethargic second stage of the malady. At least he was out of the pain which appeared to be the worst symptom of the disease.

“It must be Sinbad!” Dane said as he made his report directly to Captain Jellico. “And yet—”

“Yes, he’s been staying in Van’s cabin,” the Captain mused. “And you’ve handled him, he slept on your bunk. Yet you and Van are all right. I don’t understand that. Anyway—to be on the safe side—we’d better find and isolate him before—”

He didn’t have to underline any words for the grim-faced men who listened. With Tau—their one hope of fighting the disease gone—they had a black future facing them.

They did not have to search for Sinbad. Dane coming down to his own section found the cat crouched before the panel of Van Rycke’s cabin, his eyes glued to the thin crack of the door. Dane scooped him up and took him to the small cargo space intended for the safeguarding of choice items of commerce. To his vast surprise Sinbad began fighting wildly as he opened the hatch, kicking and then slashing with ready claws. The cat seemed to go mad and Dane had all he could do to shut him in. When he snapped the panel he heard Sinbad launch himself against the barrier as if to batter his way out. Dane, blood welling in several deep scratches, went in search of first aid. But some suspicion led him to pause as he passed Van Rycke’s door. And when his knock brought no answer he pushed the panel open.

Van Rycke lay on his bunk, his eyes half closed in a way which had become only too familiar to the crew of the Solar Queen. And Dane knew that when he looked for it he would find the mark of the strange plague on the Cargo-master’s body.

Chapter IX

PLAGUE!

Jellico and Steen Wilcox pored over the few notes Tau had made before he was stricken. But apparently the Medic had found nothing to indicate that Sinbad was the carrier of any disease. Meanwhile the Captain gave orders for the cat to be confined. A difficult task—since Sinbad crouched close to the door of the storage cabin and was ready to dart out when food was taken in for him. Once he got a good way down the corridor before Dane was able to corner and return him to keeping.

Dane, Ali and Weeks took on the full care of the four sick men, leaving the few regular duties of the ship to the senior officers, while Rip was installed in charge of the hydro garden.

Mura, the first to be taken ill, showed no change. He was semi-conscious, he swallowed food if it were put in his mouth, he responded to nothing around him. And Kosti, Tau, and Van Rycke followed the same pattern. They still held morning inspection of those on their feet for signs of a new outbreak, but when no one else went down during the next two days, they regained a faint spark of hope.

Hope which was snapped out when Ali brought the news that Stotz could not be roused and must have taken ill during a sleep period. One more inert patient was added to the list—and nothing learned about how he was infected. Except that they could eliminate Sinbad, since the cat had been in custody during the time Stotz had apparently contracted the disease.

Weeks, Ali and Dane, though they were in constant contact with the sick men, and though Dane had repeatedly handled Sinbad, continued to be immune. A fact, Dane thought more than once, which must have significance—if someone with Tau’s medical knowledge had been able to study it. By all rights they should be the most susceptible—but the opposite seemed true. And Wilcox duly noted that fact among the data they had recorded.

It became a matter of watching each other, waiting for another collapse. And they were not surprised when Tang Ya reeled into the mess, his face livid and drawn with pain. Rip and Dane got him to his cabin before he blacked out. But all they could learn from him during the interval before he lost consciousness was that his head was bursting and he couldn’t stand it. Over his limp body they stared at one another bleakly.

“Six down,” Ali observed, “and six to go. How do you feel?”

“Tired, that’s all. What I don’t understand is that once they go into this stupor they just stay. They don’t get any worse, they have no rise in temperature—it’s as if they are in a modified form of cold sleep!”

“How is Tang?” Rip asked from the corridor.

“Usual pattern,” Ali answered, “He’s sleeping. Got a pain, Fella?”

Rip shook his head. “Right as a Com-unit. I don’t get it. Why does it strike Tang who didn’t even hit dirt much—and yet you keep on—?”

Dane grimaced. “If we had an answer to that, maybe we’d know what caused the whole thing—”

Ali’s eyes narrowed. He was staring straight at the unconscious Com-tech as if he did not see that supine body at all. “I wonder if we’ve been salted—” he said slowly.

“We’ve been what?” Dane demanded.

“Look here, we three—with Weeks—drank that brew of the Salariki, didn’t we? And we—”

“Were as sick as Venusian gobblers afterwards,” agreed Rip.

Light dawned. “Do you mean—” began Dane.

“So that’s it!” flashed Rip.

“It might just be,” Ali said. “Do you remember how the settlers on Camblyne brought their Terran cattle through the first year? They fed them salt mixed with fansel grass. The result was that the herds didn’t take the fansel grass fever when they turned them out to pasture in the dry season. All right, maybe we had our ‘salt’ in that drink. The fansel-salt makes the cattle filthy sick when it’s forced down their throats, but after they recover they’re immune to the fever. And nobody on Camblyne buys unsalted cattle now.”

“It sounds logical,” admitted Rip. “But how are we going to prove it?”

Ali’s face was black once more. “Probably by elimination,” he said morosely. “If we keep our feet and all the rest go down—that’s our proof.”

“But we ought to be able to do something—” protested Shannon.

“Just how?” Ali’s slender brows arched. “Do you have a gallon of that Salariki brew on board you can serve out? We don’t know what was in it. Nor are we sure that this whole idea has any value.”

All of them had had first aid and basic preventive medicine as part of their training, but the more advanced laboratory experimentation was beyond their knowledge and skill. Had Tau still been on his feet perhaps he could have traced that lead and brought order out of the chaos which was closing in upon the Solar Queen. But, though they reported their suggestion to the Captain, Jellico was powerless to do anything about it. If the four who had shared that upsetting friendship cup were immune to the doom which now overhung the ship, there was no possible way for them to discover why or how.

Ship’s time came to have little meaning. And they were not surprised when Steen Wilcox slipped from his seat before the computer—to be stowed away with what had become a familiar procedure. Only Jellico withstood the contagion apart from the younger four, taking his turn at caring for the helpless men. There was no change in their condition. They neither roused nor grew worse as the hours and then the days sped by. But each of those units of time in passing brought them nearer to greater danger. Sooner or later they must make the transition out of Hyper into system space, and the jump out of warp was something not even a veteran took lightly. Rip’s round face thinned while they watched. Jellico was still functioning. But if the Captain collapsed the whole responsibility for the snap-out would fall directly on Shannon. An infinitesimal error would condemn them to almost hopeless wandering—perhaps for ever.

Dane and Ali relieved Rip of all duty but that which kept him chained in Wilcox’s chair before the computers. He went over and over the data of the course the Astrogator had set. And Captain Jellico, his eyes sunk in dark pits, checked and rechecked.

When the fatal moment came Ali manned the engine room with Weeks at his elbow to tend the controls the acting-Engineer could not reach. And Dane, having seen the sick all safely stowed in crash webbing, came up to the control cabin, riding out the transfer in Tang Ya’s place.

Rip’s voice hoarsened into a croak, calling out the data. Dane, though he had had basic theory, was completely lost before Shannon had finished the first set of co-ordinates. But Jellico replied, hands playing across the pilot’s board.

“Stand-by for snap-out—” the croak went down to the engines where Ali now held Stotz’s post.

“Engines ready!” The voice came back, thinned by its journey from the Queen’s interior.

“Ought-five-nine—” That was Jellico.

Dane found himself suddenly unable to watch. He shut his eyes and braced himself against the vertigo of snap-out. It came and he whirled sickeningly through unstable space. Then he was sitting in the laced Com-tech’s seat looking at Rip.

Runnels of sweat streaked Shannon’s brown face. There was a damp patch darkening his tunic between his shoulder blades, a patch which it would take both of Dane’s hands to cover.

For a moment he did not raise his head to look at the vision plate which would tell him whether or not they had made it. But when he did familiar constellations made the patterns they knew. They were out—and they couldn’t be too far off the course Wilcox had plotted. There was still the system run to make—but snap-out was behind them. Rip gave a deep sigh and buried his head in his hands.

With a throb of fear Dane unhooked his safety belt and hurried over to him. When he clutched at Shannon’s shoulder the Astrogator-apprentice’s head rolled limply. Was Rip down with the illness too? But the other muttered and opened his eyes.

“Does your head ache?” Dane shook him.

“Head? No—” Rip’s words came drowsily. “Jus’ sleepy—so sleepy—”

He did not seem to be in pain. But Dane’s hands were shaking as he hoisted the other out of his seat and half carried-half led him to his cabin, praying as he went that it was only fatigue and not the disease. The ship was on auto now until Jellico as pilot set a course—

Dane got Rip down on the bunk and stripped off his tunic. The fine-drawn face of the sleeper looked wan against the foam rest, and he snuggled into the softness like a child as he turned over and curled up. But his skin was clear—it was real sleep and not the plague which had claimed him.

Impulse sent Dane back to the control cabin. He was not an experienced pilot officer, but there might be some assistance he could offer the Captain now that Rip was washed out, perhaps for hours.

Jellico hunched before the smaller computer, feeding pilot tape into its slot. His face was a skull under a thin coating of skin, the bones marking it sharply at jaw, nose and eye socket.

“Shannon down?” His voice was a mere whisper of its powerful self, he did not turn his head.

“He’s just worn out, sir,” Dane hastened to give reassurance. “The marks aren’t on him.”

“When he comes around tell him the co-ords are in,” Jellico murmured. “See he checks course in ten hours—”

“But, sir—” Dane’s protest failed as he watched the Captain struggle to his feet, pulling himself up with shaking hands. As Thorson reached forward to steady the other, one of those hands tore at tunic collar, ripping loose the sealing—

There was no need for explanation—the red splotch signaled from Jellico’s sweating throat. He kept his feet, holding out against the waves of pain by sheer will power. Then Dane had a grip on him, got him away from the computer, hoping he could keep him going until they reached Jellico’s cabin.

Somehow they made that journey, being greeted with raucous screams from the Hoobat. Furiously Dane slapped the cage, setting it to swinging and so silencing the creature which stared at him with round, malignant eyes as he got the Captain to bed.

Only four of them on their feet now, Dane thought bleakly as he left the cabin. If Rip came out of it in time they could land—Dane’s breath caught as he made himself face up to the fact that Shannon might be ill, that it might be up to him to bring the Queen in for a landing. And in where? The Terra quarantine was Luna City on the Moon. But let them signal for a set-down there—let them describe what had happened and they might face death as a plague ship.

Wearily he climbed down to the mess cabin to discover Weeks and Ali there before him. They did not look up as he entered.

“Old Man’s got it,” he reported.

“Rip?” was Ali’s crossing question.

“Asleep. He passed out—”

“What!” Weeks swung around.

“Worn out,” Dane amended. “Captain fed in a pilot tape before he gave up.”

“So—now we are three,” was Ali’s comment. “Where do we set down—Luna City?”

“If they let us,” Dane hinted at the worst.

“But they’ve got to let us!” Weeks exclaimed. “We can’t just wander around out here—”

“It’s been done,” Ali reminded them brutally and that silenced Weeks.

“Did the Old Man set Luna?” After a long pause Ali inquired.

“I didn’t check,” Dane confessed. “He was giving out and I had to get him to his bunk.”

“It might be well to know.” The Engineer-apprentice got up, his movements lacking much of the elastic spring which was normally his. When he climbed to control both the others followed him.

Ali’s slender fingers played across a set of keys and in the small screen mounting on the computer a set of figures appeared. Dane took up the master course book, read the connotation and blinked.

“Not Luna?” Ali asked.

“No. But I don’t understand. This must be for somewhere in the asteroid belt.”

Ali’s lips stretched into a pale caricature of a smile. “Good for the Old Man, he still had his wits about him, even after the bug bit him!”

“But why are we going to the asteroids?” Weeks asked reasonably enough. “There’re Medics at Luna City—they can help us—”

“They can handle known diseases,” Ali pointed out. “But what of the Code?”

Weeks dropped into the Com-tech’s place as if some of the stiffening had vanished from his thin but sturdy legs. “They wouldn’t do that—” he protested, but his eyes said that he knew that they might—they well might.

“Oh, no? Face the facts, man,” Ali sounded almost savage. “We come from a frontier planet, we’re a plague ship—”

He did not have to underline that. They all knew too well the danger in which they now stood.

“Nobody’s died yet,” Weeks tried to find an opening in the net being drawn about them.

“And nobody’s recovered,” Ali crushed that thread of hope. “We don’t know what it is, how it is contracted—anything about it. Let us make a report saying that and you know what will happen—don’t you?”

They weren’t sure of the details, but they could guess.

“So I say,” Ali continued, “the Old Man was right when he set us on an evasion course. If we can stay out until we really know what is the matter we’ll have some chance of talking over the high brass at Luna when we do planet—”

In the end they decided not to interfere with the course the Captain had set. It would take them into the fringes of solar civilization, but give them a fighting chance at solving their problem before they had to report to the authorities. In the meantime they tended their charges, let Rip sleep, and watched each other with desperate but hidden intentness, ready for another to be stricken. However, they remained, although almost stupid with fatigue at times, reasonably healthy. Time was proving that their guess had been correct—they had been somehow inoculated against the germ or virus which had struck the ship.

Rip slept for twenty-four hours, ship time, and then came into the mess cabin ravenously hungry, to catch up on both food and news. And he refused to join with the prevailing pessimistic view of the future. Instead he was sure that their own immunity having been proven, they had a talking point to use with the medical officials at Luna and he was eager to alter course directly for the quarantine station. Only the combined arguments of the other three made him, unwillingly, agree to a short delay.

And how grateful they should be for Captain Jellico’s foresight they learned within the next day. Ali was at the com-unit, trying to pick up Solarian news reports. When the red alert flashed on throughout the ship it brought the others hurrying to the control cabin. The code squeaks were magnified as Ali switched on the receiver full strength, to be translated as he pressed a second button.

“Repeat, repeat, repeat. Free Trader, Solar Queen, Terra Registry 65-724910-Jk, suspected plague ship—took off from infected planet. Warn off—warn off—report such ship to Luna Station. Solar Queen from infected planet—to be warned off and reported.” The same message was repeated three times before going off ether.

The four in the control cabin looked at each other blankly.

“But,” Dane broke the silence, “how did they know? We haven’t reported in—”

“The Eysies!” Ali had the answer ready. “That I-S ship must be having the same sort of trouble and reported to her Company. They would include us in their report and believe that we were infected too—or it would be easy to convince the authorities that we were.”

“I wonder,” Rip’s eyes were narrowed slits as he leaned back against the wall. “Look at the facts. The Survey ship which charted Sargol—they were dirt-side there about three-four months. Yet they gave it a clean bill of health and put it up for trading rights auction. Then Cam bought those rights—he made at least two trips in and out before he was blasted on Limbo. No infection bothered him or Survey—”

“But you’ve got to admit it hit us,” Weeks protested.

“Yes, and the Eysie ship was able to foresee it—report us before we snapped out of Hyper. Sounds almost as if they expected us to carry plague, doesn’t it?” Shannon wanted to know.

“Planted?” Ali frowned at the banks of controls. “But how—no Eysie came on board—no Salarik either, except for the cub who showed us what they thought of catnip.”

Rip shrugged. “How would I know how they did—” he was beginning when Dane cut in:

“If they didn’t know about our immunity the Queen might stay in Hyper and never come out—there wouldn’t be anyone to set the snap-out.”

“Right enough. But on the chance that somebody did keep on his feet and bring her home, they were ready with a cover. If no one raises a howl Sargol will be written off the charts as infected, I-S sits on her tail fins a year or so and then she promotes an investigation before the Board. The Survey records are trotted out—no infection recorded. So they send in a Patrol Probe. Everything is all right—so it wasn’t the planet after all—it was that dirty old Free Trader. And she’s out of the way. I-S gets the Koros trade all square and legal and we’re no longer around to worry about! Neat as a Salariki net-cast—and right around our collective throats, my friends!”

“So what do we do now?” Weeks wanted to know.

“We keep on the Old Man’s course, get lost in the asteroids until we can do some heavy thinking and see a way out. But if I-S gave us this prize package, some trace of its origin is still aboard. And if we can find that—why, then we have something to start from.”

“Mura went down first—and then Karl. Nothing in common,” the old problem faced Dane for the hundredth time.

“No. But,” Ali arose from his place at the com-unit. “I’d suggest a real search of first Frank’s and then Karl’s quarters. A regular turn out down to the bare walls of their cabins. Are you with me?”

“Fly boy, we’re ahead of you!” Rip contributed, already at the door panel. “Down to the bare walls it is.”

Chapter X

E-STAT LANDING

Since Mura was in the isolation of ship sick bay the stripping of his cabin was a relatively simple job. But, though Rip and Dane went over it literally by inches, they found nothing unusual—in fact nothing from Sargol except a small twig of the red wood which lay on the steward’s worktable where he had been fashioning something to incorporate in one of his miniature fairy landscapes, to be imprisoned for all time in a plasta-bubble. Dane turned this around in his fingers. Because it was the only link with the perfumed planet he couldn’t help but feel that it had some importance.

But Kosti had not shown any interest in the wood. And he, himself, and Weeks had handled it freely before they had tasted Graft’s friendship cup and had no ill effects—so it couldn’t be the wood. Dane put the twig back on the work table and snapped the protecting cover over the delicate tools—never realizing until days later how very close he had been in that moment to the solution of their problem.

After two hours of shifting every one of the steward’s belongings, of crawling on hands and knees about the deck and climbing to inspect perfectly bare walls, they had found exactly nothing. Rip sat down on the end of the denuded bunk.

“There’s the hydro—Frank spent a lot of time in there—and the storeroom,” he told the places off on his fingers. “The galley and the mess cabin.”

Those had been the extent of Mura’s world. They could search the storeroom, the galley and the mess cabin—but to interfere with the hydro would endanger their air supply. It was for that very reason that they now looked at each other in startled surmise.

“The perfect place to plant something!” Dane spoke first.

Rip’s teeth caught his underlip. The hydro—something planted there could not be routed out unless they made a landing on a port field and had the whole section stripped.

“Devilish—” Rip’s mobile lips drew tight. “But how could they do it?”

Dane didn’t see how it could have been done either. No one but the Queen’s own crew had been on board the ship during their entire stay on Sargol, except for the young Salarik. Could that cub have brought something? But he and Mura had been with the youngster every minute that he had been in the hydro. To the best of Dane’s memory the cub had touched nothing and had been there only for a few moments. That had been before the feast also—

Rip got to his feet. “We can’t strip the hydro in space,” he pointed out the obvious quietly.

Dane had the answer. “Then we’ve got to earth!”

“You heard that warn-off. If we try it—”

“What about an Emergency station?”

Rip stood very still, his big hands locked about the buckle of his arms belt. Then, without another word, he went out of the cabin and at a pounding pace up the ladder, bound for the Captain’s cabin and the records Jellico kept there. It was such a slim chance—but it was better than none at all.

Dane shouldered into the small space in his wake to find Rip making a selection from the astrogation tapes. There were E-Stats among the asteroids—points prospectors or small traders in sudden difficulties might contact for supplies or repairs. The big Companies maintained their own—the Patrol had several for independents.

“No Patrol one—”

Rip managed a smile. “I haven’t gone space whirly yet,” was his comment. He was feeding a tape into the reader on the Captain’s desk. In the cage over his head the blue Hoobat squatted watching him intently—for the first time since Dane could remember showing no sign of resentment by weird screams or wild spitting.

“Patrol E-Stat A-54—” the reader squeaked. Rip hit a key and the wire clicked to the next entry. “Combine E-Stat—” Another punch and click. “Patrol E-Stat A-55—” punch-click. “Inter-Solar—” this time Rip’s hand did not hit the key and the squeak continued—”Co-ordinates—” Rip reached for a steelo and jotted down the list of figures.

“Got to compare this with our present course—”

“But that’s an I-S Stat,” began Dane and then he laughed as the justice of such a move struck him. They did not dare set the Queen down at any Patrol Station. But a Company one which would be manned by only two or three men and not expecting any but their own people—and I-S owed them help now!

“There may be trouble,” he said, not that he would have any regrets if there was. If the Eysies were responsible for the present plight of the Queen he would welcome trouble, the kind which would plant his fists on some sneering Eysie face.

“We’ll see about that when we come to it,” Rip went on to the control cabin with his figures. Carefully he punched the combination on the plotter and watched it be compared with the course Jellico had set before his collapse.

“Good enough,” he commented as the result flashed on. “We can make it without using too much fuel—”

“Make what?” That was Ali up from the search of Kosti’s quarters. “Nothing,” he gave his report of what he had found there and then returned to the earlier question. “Make what?”

Swiftly Dane outlined their suspicions—that the seat of the trouble lay in the hydro and that they should clean out that section, drawing upon emergency materials at the I-S E-Stat.

“Sounds all right. But you know what they do to pirates?” inquired the Engineer-apprentice.

Space law came into Dane’s field, he needed no prompting. “Any ship in emergency,” he recited automatically, “may claim supplies from the nearest E-Stat—paying for them when the voyage is completed.”

“That means any Patrol E-Stat. The Companies’ are private property.”

“But,” Dane pointed out triumphantly, “the law doesn’t say so—there is nothing about any difference between Company and Patrol E-Stat in the law—”

“He’s right,” Rip agreed. “That law was framed when only the Patrol had such stations. Companies put them in later to save tax—remember? Legally we’re all right.”

“Unless the agents on duty raise a howl,” Ali amended. “Oh, don’t give me that look, Rip. I’m not sounding any warn-off on this, but I just want you to be prepared to find a cruiser riding our fins and giving us the hot flash as bandits. If you want to spoil the Eysies, I’m all for it. Got a stat of theirs pinpointed?”

Rip pointed to the figures on the computer. “There she is. We can set down in about five hours’ ship time. How long will it take to strip the hydro and re-install?”

“How can I tell?” Ali sounded irritable. “I can give you oxgy for quarters for about two hours. Depends upon how fast we can move. No telling until we make a start.”

He started for the corridor and then added over his shoulder: “You’ll have to answer a com challenge—thought about that?”

“Why?” Rip asked. “It might be com repairs bringing us in. They won’t be expecting trouble and we will—we’ll have the advantage.”

But Ali was not to be shaken out of his usual dim view of the future. “All right—so we land, blaster in hand, and take the place. And they get off one little squeak to the Patrol. Well, a short life but an interesting one. And we’ll make all the Video channels for sure when we go out with rockets blasting. Nothing like having a little excitement to break the dull routine of a voyage.”

“We aren’t going to, are we—” Dane protested, “land armed, I mean?”

Ali stared at him and Rip, to Dane’s surprise, did not immediately repudiate that thought.

“Sleep rods certainly,” the Astrogator-apprentice said after a pause. “We’ll have to be prepared for the moment when they find out who we are. And you can’t re-set a hydro in a few minutes, not when we have to keep oxgy on for the others. If we were able to turn that off and work in suits it’d be a quicker job—we could dump before we set down and then pile it in at once. But this way it’s going to be piece work. And it all depends on the agents at the Stat whether we have trouble or not.”

“We had better break out the suits now,” Ali added to Rip’s estimate of the situation. “If we set down and pile out wearing suits at once it will build up our tale of being poor wrecked spacemen—”

Sleep rods or not, Dane thought to himself, the whole plan was one born of desperation. It would depend upon who manned the E-Stat and how fast the Free Traders could move once the Queen touched her fins to earth.

“Knock out their coms,” that was Ali continuing to plan. “Do that first and then we don’t have to worry about someone calling in the Patrol.”

Rip stretched. For the first time in hours he seemed to have returned to his usual placid self. “Good thing somebody in this spacer watches Video serials—Ali, you can brief us on all the latest tricks of space pirates. Nothing is so wildly improbable that you can’t make use of it sometime during a checkered career.”

He glanced over the board before he brought his hand down on a single key set a distance apart from the other controls. “Put some local color into it,” was his comment.

Dane understood. Rip had turned on the distress signal at the Queen’s nose. When she set down on the Stat field she would be flaming a banner of trouble. Next to the wan dead lights, set only when a ship had no hope of ever reaching port at all, that signal was one every spacer dreaded having to flash. But it was not the dead lights—not yet for the Queen.

Working together they brought out the space suits and readied them at the hatch. Then Weeks and Dane took up the task of tending their unconscious charges while Rip and Ali prepared for landing.

There was no change in the sleepers. And in Jellico’s cabin even Queex appeared to be influenced by the plight of its master, for instead of greeting Dane with its normal aspect of rage, the Hoobat stayed quiescent on the floor of its cage, its top claws hooked about two of the wires, its protruding eyes staring out into the room with what seemed closed to a malignant intelligence. It did not even spit as Dane passed under its abode to pour thin soup into his patient.

As for Sinbad, the cat had retreated to Dane’s cabin and steadily refused to leave the quarters he had chosen, resisting with tooth and claw the one time Dane had tried to take him back to Van Rycke’s office and his own hammock there. Afterwards the Cargo-apprentice did not try to evict him—there was comfort in seeing that plump gray body curled on the bunk he had little chance to use.

His nursing duties performed for the moment, Dane ventured into the hydro. He was practiced in tending this vital heart of the ship’s air supply. But outfitting a hydro was something else again. In his cadet years he had aided in such a program at least twice as a matter of learning the basic training of the Service. But then they had had unlimited supplies to draw on and the action had taken place under no more pressure than that exerted by the instructors. Now it was going to be a far more tricky job—

He went slowly down the aisle between the banks of green things. Plants from all over the Galaxy, grown for their contribution to the air renewal—as well as side products such as fresh fruit and vegetables, were banked there. The sweet odor of their verdant life was strong. But how could any of the four now on duty tell what was rightfully there and what might have been brought in? And could they be sure anything had been introduced?

Dane stood there, his eyes searching those lines of greens—such a mixture of greens from the familiar shade of Terra’s fields to greens tinged with shades first bestowed by other suns on other worlds—looking for one which was alien enough to be noticeable. Only Mura, who knew this garden as he knew his own cabin, could have differentiated between them. They would just dump everything and trust to luck—

He was suddenly aware of a slight movement in the banks—a shivering of stem, quiver of leaf. The mere act of his passing had set some sensitive plant to register his presence. A lacy, fern-like thing was contracting its fronds into balls. He should not stay—disturbing the peace of the hydro. But it made little difference now—within a matter of hours all this luxuriance would be thrust out to die and they would have to depend upon canned oxgy and algae tanks. Too bad—the hydro represented much time and labor on Mura’s part and Tau had medical plants growing there he had been observing for a long time.

As Dane closed the door behind him, seeing the line of balled fern which had marked his passage, he heard a faint rustling, a sound as if a wind had swept across the green room within. The imagination which was a Trader’s asset (when it was kept within bounds) suggested that the plants inside guessed—With a frown for his own sentimentality, Dane strode down the corridor and climbed to check with Rip in control.

The Astrogator-apprentice had his own problems. To bring the Queen down on the circumscribed field of an E-Stat—without a guide beam to ride in—since if they contacted the Stat they must reveal their own com was working and they would have to answer questions—was the sort of test even a seasoned pilot would tense over. Yet Rip was sitting now in the Captain’s place, his broad hands spread out on the edge of the control board waiting. And below in the engine room Ali was in Stotz’s place ready to fire and cut rockets at order. Of course they were both several years ahead of him in Service, Dane knew. But he wondered at their quick assumption of responsibility and whether he himself could ever reach that point of self-confidence—his memory turning to the bad mistake be had made on Sargol.

There was the sharp note of a warning gong, the flash of red light on the control board. They were off automatic, from here on in it was all Kip’s work. Dane strapped down at the silent com-unit and was startled a moment later when it spat words at him, translated from space code.

“Identify—identify—I-S E-Stat calling spacer—identify—”

So compelling was that demand that Dane’s fingers went to the answer key before he remembered and snatched them back, to fold his hands in his lap.

“Identify—” the expressionless voice of the translator droned over their heads.

Rip’s hands were on the control board, playing the buttons there with the precision of a musician creating some symphonic masterpiece. And the Queen was alive, now quivering through her stout plates, coming into a landing.

Dane watched the visa plate. The E-Stat asteroid was of a reasonable size, but in their eyes it was a bleak, torn mote of stuff swimming through vast emptiness.

“Identify—” the drone heightened in pitch.

Rip’s lips were compressed, he made quick calculations. And Dane saw that, though Jellico was the master, Rip was fully fit to follow in the Captain’s boot prints.

There was a sudden silence in the cabin—the demand had stopped. The agents below must now have realized that the ship with the distress signals blazing on her nose was not going to reply. Dane found he could not watch the visa plate now, Rip’s hands about their task filled his whole range of sight.

He knew that Shannon was using every bit of his skill and knowledge to jockey them into the position where they could ride their tail rockets down to the scorched rock of the E-Stat field. Perhaps it wasn’t as smooth a landing as Jellico could have made. But they did it. Rip’s hands were quiet, again that patch of darkness showed on the back of his tunic. He made no move from his seat.

“Secure—” Ali’s voice floated up to them.

Dane unbuckled his safety webbing and got up, looking to Shannon for orders. This was Rip’s plan they were to carry through. Then something moved him to give honor where it was due. He touched that bowed shoulder before him.

“Fin landing, brother! Four points and down!”

Rip glanced up, a grin made him look his old self. “Ought to have a recording of that for the Board when I go up for my pass-through.”

Dane matched his smile. “Too bad we didn’t have someone out there with a tri-dee machine.”

“More likely it’d be evidence at our trial for piracy—” their words must have reached Ali on the ship’s inter-com, for his deflating reply came back, to remind them of why they had made that particular landing. “Do we move now?”

“Check first,” Rip said into the mike.

Dane looked at the visa-plate. Against a background of jagged rock teeth was the bubble of the E-Stat housing—more than three-quarters of it being in the hollowed out sections below the surface of the miniature world which supported it, as Dane knew. But a beam of light shown from the dome to center on the grounded Queen. They had not caught the Stat agents napping.

They made the rounds of the spacer, checking on each of the semi-conscious men. Ali had ready the artificial oxgy tanks—they must move fast once they began the actual task of clearing and restocking the hydro.

“Hope you have a good story ready,” he commented as the other three joined him by the hatch to don the suits which would enable them to cross the airless, heatless surface of the asteroid.

“We have a poisoned hydro,” Dane said.

“One look at the plants we dump will give you the lie. They won’t accept our story without investigation.”

Dane was aroused. Did Ali think he was a stupid as all that? “If you’d take a look in there now you’d believe me,” he snapped.

“What did you do?” Ali sounded genuinely interested.

“Chucked a heated can of lacoil over a good section. It’s wilting down fast in big patches.”

Rip snorted. “Good old lacoil. You drink it, you wash in it, and now you kill off the Hydro with it. Maybe we can give the company an extra testimonial for the official jabber and collect when we hit Terra. All right—Weeks,” he spoke to the little man, “you listen in on the com—it’s tuned to our helmet units. We’ll climb into these pipe suits and see how many tears we can wring out of the Eysies with our sad, sad tale.”

They got into the awkward, bulky suits and squeezed into the hatch while Weeks slammed the lock door at their backs and operated the outer opening. Then they were looking out across the ground, still showing signs of the heat of their landing, and lighted by the dome beam.

“Nobody hurrying out with an aid and comfort kit,” Rip’s voice sounded in Dane’s earphones. “A little slack aren’t they?”

Slack—or was it that the Eysies had recognized the Queen and was preparing the sort of welcome the remnant of her crew could not withstand? Dane, wanting very much in his heart to be elsewhere, climbed down the ladder in Rip’s wake, both of them spotlighted by the immovable beam from the Stat dome.

Chapter XI

DESPERATE MEASURES

Measured in distance and time that rough walk in the ponderous suits across the broken terrain of the asteroid was a short one, measured by the beating of his own heart, Dane thought it much too long. There was no sign of life by the air lock of the bubble—no move on the part of the men stationed there to come to their assistance.

“D’you suppose we’re invisible?” Ali’s disembodied voice clicked in the helmet earphones.

“Maybe we’ll wish we were,” Dane could not forego that return.

Rip was almost to the air lock door now. His massively suited arm was outstretched toward the control bar when the com-unit in all three helmets caught the same demand:

“Identify!” The crisp order had enough snap to warn them that an answer was the best policy.

“Shannon—A-A of the Polestar,” Rip gave the required information. “We claim E rights—”

But would they get them? Dane wondered. There was a click loud in his ears. The metal door was yielding to Rip’s hand. At least those on the inside had taken off the lock. Dane quickened pace to join his leader.

Together the three from the Queen crowded through the lock door, saw that swing shut and seal behind them, as they stood waiting for the moment they could discard the suits and enter the dome. The odds against them could not be too high, this was a small Stat. It would not house more than four agents at the most. And they were familiar enough with the basic architecture of such stations to know just what move to make. Ali was to go to the com room where he could take over if they did meet with trouble. Dane and Rip would have to handle any dissenters in the main section. But they still hoped that luck might ride their fins and they could put over a story which would keep them out of active conflict with the Eysies.

The gauge on the wall registered safety and they unfastened the protective clasps of the suits. Standing the cumbersome things against the wall as the inner door to the lock rolled back, they walked into Eysie territory.

As Free Traders they had the advantage of being uniformly tunicked—with no Company badge to betray their ship or status. So that could well be the “Polestar” standing needle slim behind them—and not the notorious “Solar Queen.” But each, as he passed through the inner lock, gave a hitch to his belt which brought the butt of his sleep rod closer to hand. Innocuous as that weapon was, in close quarters its effects, if only temporary, was to some purpose. And since they were prepared for trouble, they might have a slight edge over the Eysies in attack.

A Company man, his tunic shabby and open in a negligent fashion at his thick throat, stood waiting for them. His unhelmeted head was grizzled, his coarse, tanned face with heavy jowls bristly enough to suggest he had not bothered to use smooth-cream for some days. An under officer of some spacer, retired to finish out the few years before pension in this nominal duty—fast letting down the standards of personal regime he had had to maintain on ship board. But he wasn’t all fat and soft living, the glance with which he measured them was shrewdly appraising.

“What’s your trouble?” he demanded without greeting. “You didn’t I-dent coming in.”

“Coms are out,” Rip replied as shortly. “We need E-Hydro—”

“First time I ever heard it that the coms were wired in with the grass,” the Eysies’s hands were on his hips—in close proximity to something which made Dane’s eyes narrow. The fellow was wearing a flare-blaster! That might be regulation equipment for an E-Stat agent on a lonely asteroid—but he didn’t quite believe it. And probably the other was quick on the draw too.

“The coms are something else,” Rip answered readily. “Our tech is working on them. But the hydro’s bad all though. We’ll have to dump and restock. Give you a voucher on Terra for the stuff.”

The Eysie agent continued to block the doorway into the station. “This is private—I-S property. You should hit the Patrol post—they cater to you F-Ts.”

“We hit the nearest E-Stat when we discovered that we were contaminated,” Rip spoke with an assumption of patience. “That’s the law, and you know it. You have to supply us and take a voucher—”

“How do I know that your voucher is worth the film it’s recorded on?” asked the agent reasonably.

“All right,” Rip shrugged. “If we have to do it the hard way, we’ll cargo dump to cover your bill.”

“Not on this field.” The other shook his head. “I’ll flash in your voucher first.”

He had them, Dane thought bitterly. Their luck had run out. Because what he was going to do was a move they dared not protest. It was one any canny agent would make in the present situation. And if they were what they said they were, they must readily agree to let him flash their voucher of payment to I-S headquarters, to be checked and okayed before they took the hydro stock.

But Rip merely registered a mild resignation. “You the Com-tech? Where’s your unit? I’ll indit at once if you want it that way.”

Whether their readiness to co-operate allayed some of the agent’s suspicion or not, he relaxed some, giving them one more stare all around before he turned on his heel. “This way.”

They followed him down the narrow hall, Rip on his heels, the others behind.

“Lonely post,” Rip commented. “I’d think you boys’d get space-whirly out here.”

The other snorted. “We’re not star lovers. And the pay’s worth a three month stretch. They take us down for Terra leave before we start talking to the Whisperers.”

“How many of you here at a time?” Rip edged the question in casually.

But the other might have been expecting it by the way he avoided giving a direct answer. “Enough to run the place—and not enough to help you clean out your wagon,” he was short about it. “Any dumping you do is strictly on your own. You’ve enough hands on a spacer that size to manage—”

Rip laughed. “Far be it from me to ask an Eysie to do any real work,” was his counter. “We know all about you Company men—”

But the agent did not take fire at that jib. Instead he pushed back a panel and they were looking into com-unit room where another man in the tunic of the I-S lounged on what was by law twenty-four hour duty, divided into three watches.

“These F-Ts want to flash a voucher request through,” their guide informed the tech. The other, interested, gave them a searching once-over before he pushed a small scriber toward Rip.

“It’s all yours—clear ether,” he reported.

Ali stood with his back to the wall and Dane still lingered in the portal. Both of them fixed their attention on Rip’s left hand. If he gave the agreed upon signal! Their fingers were linked loosely in their belts only an inch or so from their sleep rods.

With his right hand Rip scooped up the scribbler while the Com-tech half turned to make adjustments to the controls, picking up a speaker to call the I-S headquarters.

Rip’s left index finger snapped across his thumb to form a circle. Ali’s rod did not even leave his belt, it tilted up and the invisible deadening stream from it centered upon the seated tech. At the same instant Dane shot at the agent who had guided them there. The latter had time for a surprised grunt and his hand was at his blaster as he sagged to his knees and then relaxed on the floor. The Tech slumped across the call board as if sleep had overtaken him at his post.

Rip crossed the room and snapped off the switch which opened the wire for broadcasting. While Ali, with Dane’s help, quietly and effectively immobilized the Eysies with their own belts.

“There should be at least three men here,” Rip waited by the door. “We have to get them all under control before we start work.”

However, the interior of the bubble, extending as it did on levels beneath the outer crust of the asteroid, was not an easy place to search. An enemy, warned of the invasion, could easily keep ahead of the party from the Queen, spying on them at his leisure or preparing traps for them. In the end, afraid of wasting time, they contented themselves with locking the doors of the corridor leading to the lower levels, making ready to raid the storeroom they had discovered during their search.

Emergency hydro supplies consisted mainly of algae which could be stored in tanks and hastily put to use—as the plants now in the Queen took much longer to grow even under forcing methods. Dane volunteered to remain inside the E-Stat and assemble the necessary containers at the air lock while the other two, having had more experience, went back to the spacer to strip the hydro and prepare to switch contents.

But, when Rip and Ali left, the younger Cargo-apprentice began to find the bubble a haunted place. He took the sealed containers out of their storage racks, stood them on a small hand truck, and pushed them to the foot of the stairs, up which he then climbed carrying two of the cylinders at a time.

The swish of the air current through the narrow corridors made a constant murmur of sound, but he found himself listening for something else, for a footfall other than his own, for the betraying rasp of clothing against a wall—for even a whisper of voice. And time and time again he paused suddenly to listen—sure that the faintest hint of such a sound had reached his ears. He had a dozen containers lined up when the welcome signal reached him by the com-unit of his field helmet. To transfer the cylinders to the lock, get out, and then open the outer door, did not take long. But as he waited he still listened for a sound which did not come—the notice, that someone besides himself was free to move about the Stat.

Not knowing just how many of the supply tins were needed, he worked on transferring all there were in the storage racks to the upper corridor and the lock. But he still had half a dozen left to pass through when Rip sent a message that he was coming in.

Out of his pressure suit, the Astrogator-apprentice stepped lightly into the corridor, looked at the array of containers and shook his head.

“We don’t need all those. No, leave them—” he added as Dane, with a sigh, started to pick up two for a return trip. “There’s something more important just now—” He turned into the side hall which led to the com room.

Both the I-S men had awakened. The Com-tech appeared to accept his bonds philosophically. He was quiet and flat on his back, staring pensively at the ceiling. But the other agent had made a worm’s progress half across the room and Rip had to halt in haste to prevent stepping on him.

Shannon stooped and, hooking his fingers in the other’s tunic, heaved him back while the helpless man favored them with some of the ripest speech—and NOT Trade Lingo—Dane had ever heard. Rip waited until the man began to run down and then he broke in with his pleasant soft drawl.

“Oh, sure, we’re all that. But time runs on, Eysie, and I’d like a couple of answers which may mean something to you. First—when do you expect your relief?”

That set the agent off again. And his remarks—edited—were that no something, something F-T was going to get any something, something information out of him!

But it was his companion in misfortune—the Com-tech—who guessed the reason behind Rip’s question.

“Cut jets!” he advised the other. “They’re just being soft-hearted. I take it,” he spoke over the other agent’s sputtering to Rip, “that you’re worried about leaving us fin down—That’s it, isn’t it?”

Rip nodded. “In spite of what you think about us,” he replied, “We’re not Patrol Posted outlaws—”

“No, you’re just from a plague ship,” the Com-tech remarked calmly. And his words struck his comrade dumb. “Solar Queen?”

“You got the warn-off then?”

“Who didn’t? You really have plague on board?” The thought did not appear to alarm the Com-tech unduly. But his fellow suddenly heaved his bound body some distance away from the Free Traders and his face displayed mixed emotions—most of them fearful.

“We have something—probably supplied,” Rip straightened. “Might pass along to your bosses that we know that. Now suppose you tell me about your relief. When is it due?”

“Not until after we take off on the long orbit if you leave us like this. On the other hand,” the other added coolly, “I don’t see how you can do otherwise. We’ve still got those—” with his chin he pointed to the com-unit.

“After a few alterations,” Rip amended. The bulk of the com was in a tightly sealed case which they would need a flamer to open. But he could and did wreak havoc with the exposed portions. The tech watching this destruction spouted at least two expressions his companion had not used. But when Rip finished he was his unruffled self again.

“Now,” Rip drew his sleep rod. “A little rest and when you wake it will all be a bad dream.” He carefully beamed each man into slumber and helped Dane strip off their bonds. But before he left the room he placed on the recorder the voucher for the supplies they had taken. The Queen was not stealing—under the law she still had some shadow of rights.

Suited they crossed the rough rock to the ship. And there about the fins, already frozen into brittle spikes was a tangle of plants—the rich result of years of collecting.

“Did you find anything?” Dane asked as they rounded that mess on their way to the ladder.

Rip’s voice came back through the helmet com. “Nothing we know how to interpret. I wish Frank or Craig had had a chance to check. We took tri-dees of everything before we dumped. Maybe they can learn something from these when—”

His voice trailed off leaving that “when” to ring in both their minds. It was such an important “when.” When would either the steward or the Medic recover enough to view those tri-dee shots? Or was that “when” really an ominous “if?”

Back in the Queen, sealed once more for blast-off, they took their stations. Dane speculated as to the course Rip had set—were they just going to wander about the system hoping to escape notice until they had somehow solved their problem? Or did Shannon have some definite port in mind? He did not have time to ask before they lifted. But once they were space borne again he voiced his question.

Rip’s face was serious. “Frankly—” he began and then hesitated for a long moment before he added, “I don’t know. If we can only get the Captain or Craig on their feet again—”

“One thing,” Ali materialized to join them, “Sinbad’s back in the hydro. And this morning you couldn’t get him inside the door. It’s not a very good piece of evidence—”

No, it wasn’t but they clung to it as backing for their actions of the past few hours. The cat that had shown such a marked distaste for the company of the stricken, and then for the hydro, was now content to visit the latter as if some evil he has sensed there had been cleansed with the dumping of the garden. They had not yet solved their mystery but another clue had come into their hands.

But now the care of the sick occupied hours and Rip insisted that a watch be maintained by the com—listening in for news which might concern the Queen. They had done a good job at silencing the E-Stat, for they had been almost six hours in space before the news of their raid was beamed to the nearest Patrol post.

Ali laughed. “Told you we’d be pirates,” he said when he listened to that account of their descent upon the I-S station. “Though I didn’t see all that blaster work they’re now raving about. You’d think we fought a major battle there!”

Weeks growled. “The Eysies are trying to make it look good. Make us into outlaws—”

But Rip did not share in the general amusement at the wild extravagation of the report from the ether. “I notice they didn’t say anything about the voucher we left.”

Ali’s cynical smile curled. “Did you expect them to? The Eysies think they have us by the tail fins now—why should they give us any benefit of the doubt? We junked all our boosters behind us on this take-off, and don’t forget that, my friends.”

Weeks looked confused. “But I thought you said we could do this legal,” he appealed to Rip. “If we’re Patrol Posted as outlaws—”

“They can’t do any more to us than they can for running in a plague ship,” Ali pointed out. “Either will get us blasted if we happen into the wrong vector now. So—what do we do?”

“We find out what the plague really is,” Dane said and meant every word of it.

“How?” Ali inquired. “Through some of Craig’s magic?”

Dane was forced to answer with the truth. “I don’t know yet—but it’s our only chance.”

Rip rubbed his eyes wearily. “Don’t think I’m disagreeing—but just where do we start? We’ve already combed Frank’s quarters and Kosti’s—we cleaned out the hydro—”

“Those tri-dee shots of the hydro—have you checked them yet?” Dane countered.

Without a word Ali arose and left the cabin. He came back with a microfilm roll. Fitting it into the large projector he focused it on the wall and snapped the button.

They were looking at the hydro—down the length of space so accurately recorded that it seemed they might walk straight into it. The greenery of the plants was so vivid and alive Dane felt that he could reach out and pluck a leaf. Inch by inch he examined those ranks, looking for something which was not in order, had no right to be there.

The long shot of the hydro as it had been merged into a series of sectional groupings. In silence they studied it intently, using all their field lore in an attempt to spot what each one was certain must be there somewhere. But they were all handicapped by their lack of intimate knowledge of the garden.

“Wait!” Weeks’ voice scaled up. “Left hand corner—there!” His pointing hand broke and shadowed the portion he was calling to their attention. Ali jumped to the projector and made a quick adjustment.

Plants four and five times life size glowed green on the wall. What Weeks had caught they all saw now—ragged leaves, stripped stems.

“Chewed!” Dane supplied the answer.

It was only one species of plant which had been so mangled. Other varieties in the same bank showed no signs of disturbance. But all of that one type had at least one stripped branch and two were virtual skeletons.

“A pest!” said Rip.

“But Sinbad,” Dane began a protest before the memory of the cat’s peculiar actions of the past weeks stopped him. Sinbad had slipped up, the hunter who had kept the Queen free of the outré alien life which came aboard from time to time with cargo, had not attacked that which had ravaged the hydro plants. Or if he had done so, he had not, after his usual custom, presented the bodies of the slain to any crew member.

“It looks as if we have something at last,” Ali observed and someone echoed that with a sigh of heartdeep relief.

Chapter XII

STRANGE BEHAVIOR OF A HOOBAT

“All right, so we think we know a little more,” Ali added a moment later. “Just what are we going to do? We can’t stay in space forever—there’re the small items of fuel and supplies and—”

Rip had come to a decision. “We’re not going to remain space borne,” he stated with the confidence of one who now saw an open road before him.

“Luna—” Weeks was plainly doubtful.

“No. Not after that warn-off. Terra!”

For a second or two the other three stared at Rip agape. The audacity and danger of what he suggested was a little stunning. Since men had taken regularly to space no ship had made a direct landing on their home planet—all had passed through the quarantine on Luna. It was not only risky—it was so unheard of that for some minutes they did not understand him.

“We try to set down at Terraport,” Dane found his tongue first, “and they flame us out—”

Rip was smiling. “The trouble with you,” he addressed them all, “is that you think of earth only in terms of Terraport—”

“Well, there is the Patrol field at Stella,” Weeks agreed doubtfully. “But we’d be right in the middle of trouble there—”

“Did we have a regular port on Sargol—on Limbo—on fifty others I can name out of our log?” Rip wanted to know.

Ali voiced a new objection. “So—we have the luck of Jones and we set down somewhere out of sight. Then what do we do?”

“We seal ship until we find the pest—then we bring in a Medic and get to the bottom of the whole thing,” Rip’s confidence was contagious. Dane almost believed that it could be done that way.

“Did you ever think,” Ali cut in, “what would happen if we were wrong—if the Queen really is a plague carrier?”

“I said—we seal the ship—tight,” countered Shannon. “And when we earth it’ll be where we won’t have visitors to infect—”

“And that is where?” Ali, who knew the deserts of Mars better than he did the greener planet from which his stock had sprung, pursued the question.

“Right in the middle of the Big Burn!”

Dane, Terra born and bred, realized first what Rip was planning and what it meant. Sealed off was right—the Queen would be amply protected from investigation. Whether her crew would survive was another matter—whether she could even make a landing there was also to be considered.

The Big Burn was the horrible scar left by the last of the Atomic Wars—a section of radiation poisoned land comprising hundreds of square miles—land which generations had never dared to penetrate. Originally the survivors of that war had shunned the whole continent which it disfigured. It had been close to two centuries before men had gone into the still wholesome land laying to the far west and the south. And through the years, the avoidance of the Big Burn had become part of their racial instinct as they shrank from it. It was a symbol of something no Terran wanted to remember.

But Ali now had only one question to ask. “Can we do it?”

“We’ll never know until we try,” was Rip’s reply.

“The Patrol’ll be watching—” that was Weeks. With his Venusian background he had less respect for the dangers of the Big Burn than he did for the forces of Law and order which ranged the star lanes.

“They’ll be watching the route lanes,” Rip pointed out. “They won’t expect a ship to come in on that vector, steering away from the ports. Why should they? As far as I know it’s never been tried since Terraport was laid out. It’ll be tricky—” And he himself would have to bear most of the responsibility for it. “But I believe that it can be done. And we can’t just roam around out here. With I-S out for our blood and a Patrol warn-off it won’t do us any good to head for Luna—”

None of his listeners could argue with that. And, Dane’s spirits began to rise, after all they knew so little about the Big Burn—it might afford them just the temporary sanctuary they needed. In the end they agreed to try it, mainly because none of them could see any alternative, except the too dangerous one of trying to contact the authorities and being summarily treated as a plague ship before they could defend themselves.

And their decision was ably endorsed not long afterwards by a sardonic warning on the com—a warning which Ali who had been tending the machine passed along to them.

“Greetings, pirates—”

“What do you mean?” Dane was heating broth to feed to Captain Jellico.

“The word has gone out—our raid on the E-Stat is now a matter of history and Patrol record—we’ve been Posted!”

Dane felt a cold finger drawn along his backbone. Now they were fair game for the whole system. Any Patrol ship that wanted could shoot them down with no questions asked. Of course that had always been a possibility from the first after their raid on the E-Stat. But to realize that it was now true was a different matter altogether. This was one occasion when realization was worse than anticipation. He tried to keep his voice level as he answered:

“Let us hope we can pull off Rip’s plan—”

“We’d better. What about the Big Burn anyway, Thorson? Is it as tough as the stories say?”

“We don’t know what it’s like. It’s never been explored—or at least those who tried to explore its interior never reported in afterwards. As far as I know it’s left strictly alone.”

“Is it still all ‘hot’?”

“Parts of it must be. But all—we don’t know.”

With the bottle of soup in his hand Dane climbed to Jellico’s cabin. And he was so occupied with the problem at hand that at first he did not see what was happening in the small room. He had braced the Captain up into a half-sitting position and was patiently ladling the liquid into his mouth a spoonful at a time when a thin squeak drew his attention to the top of Jellico’s desk.

From the half open lid of a microtape compartment something long and dark projected, beating the air feebly. Dane, easing the Captain back on the bunk, was going to investigate when the Hoobat broke its unnatural quiet of the past few days with an ear-splitting screech of fury. Dane struck at the bottom of its cage—the move its master always used to silence it—But this time the results were spectacular.

The cage bounced up and down on the spring which secured it to the ceiling of the cabin and the blue feathered horror slammed against the wires. Either its clawing had weakened them, or some fault had developed, for they parted and the Hoobat came through them to land with a sullen plop on the desk. Its screams stopped as suddenly as they had begun and it scuttled on its spider-toad legs to the microtape compartment, acting with purposeful dispatch and paying no attention to Dane.

Its claws shot out and with ease it extracted from the compartment a creature as weird as itself—one which came fighting and of which Dane could not get a very clear idea. Struggling they battled across the surface of the desk and flopped to the floor. There the hunted broke loose from the hunter and fled with fantastic speed into the corridor. And before Dane could move the Hoobat was after it.

He gained the passage just in time to see Queex disappear down the ladder, clinging with the aid of its pincher claws, apparently grimly determined to catch up with the thing it pursued. And Dane went after them.

There was no sign of the creature who fled on the next level. But Dane made no move to recapture the blue hunter who squatted at the foot of the ladder staring unblinkingly into space. Dane waited, afraid to disturb the Hoobat. He had not had a good look at the thing which had run from Queex—but he knew it was something which had no business aboard the Queen. And it might be the disturbing factor they were searching for. If the Hoobat would only lead him to it—

The Hoobat moved, rearing up on the tips of its six legs, its neckless head slowly revolving on its puffy shoulders. Along the ridge of its backbone its blue feathers were rising into a crest much as Sinbad’s fur rose when the cat was afraid or angry. Then, without any sign of haste, it crawled over and began descending the ladder once more, heading toward the lower section which housed the Hydro.

Dane remained where he was until it had almost reached the deck of the next level and then he followed, one step at a time. He was sure that the Hoobat’s peculiar construction of body prevented it from looking up—unless it turned upon its back—but he did not want to do anything which would alarm it or deter Queex from what he was sure was a methodical chase.

Queex stopped again at the foot of the second descent and sat in its toad stance, apparently brooding, a round blue blot. Dane clung to the ladder and prayed that no one would happen along to frighten it. Then, just as he was beginning to wonder if it had lost contact with its prey, once more it arose and with the same speed it had displayed in the Captain’s cabin it shot along the corridor to the hydro.

To Dane’s knowledge the door of the garden was not only shut but sealed. And how either the stranger or Queex could get through it he did not see.

“What the—?” Ali clattered down the ladder to halt abruptly as Dane waved at him.

“Queex,” the Cargo-apprentice kept his voice to a half whisper, “it got loose and chased something out of the Old Man’s cabin down here.”

“Queex—!” Ali began and then shut his mouth, moving noiselessly up to join Dane.

The short corridor ended at the hydro entrance. And Dane had been right, there they found the Hoobat, crouched at the closed panel, its claws clicking against the metal as it picked away useless at the portal which would not admit it.

“Whatever it’s after must be in there,” Dane said softly.

And the hydro, stripped of its luxuriance of plant life, occupied now by the tanks of green scum, would not afford too many hiding places. They had only to let Queex in and keep watch.

As they came up the Hoobat flattened to the floor and shrilled its war cry, spitting at their boots and then flashing claws against the stout metal enforced hide. However, though it was prepared to fight them, it showed no signs of wishing to retreat, and for that Dane was thankful. He quickly pressed the release and tugged open the panel.

At the first crack of its opening Queex turned with one of those bursts of astounding speed and clawed for admittance, its protest against the men forgotten. And it squeezed through a space Dane would have thought too narrow to accommodate its bloated body. Both men slipped around the door behind it and closed the panel tight.

The air was not as fresh as it had been when the plants were there. And the vats which had taken the places of the banked greenery were certainly nothing to look at. Queex humped itself into a clod of blue, immovable, halfway down the aisle.

Dane tried to subdue his breathing, to listen. The Hoobat’s actions certainly argued that the alien thing had taken refuge here, though how it had gotten through—? But if it were in the hydro it was well hidden.

He had just begun to wonder how long they must wait when Queex again went into action. Its clawed front legs upraised, it brought the pinchers deliberately together and sawed one across the other, producing a rasping sound which was almost a vibration in the air. Back and forth, back and forth, moved the claws. Watching them produced almost a hypnotic effect, and the reason for such a maneuver was totally beyond the human watchers.

But Queex knew what it was doing all right, Ali’s fingers closed on Dane’s arm in a pincher grip as painful as if he had been equipped with the horny armament of the Hoobat.

Something, a flitting shadow, had rounded one vat and was that much closer to the industrious fiddler on the floor. By some weird magic of its own the Hoobat was calling its prey to it.

Scrape, scrape—the unmusical performance continued with monotonous regularity. Again the shadow flashed—one vat closer. The Hoobat now presented the appearance of one charmed by its own art—sunk in a lethargy of weird music making.

At last the enchanted came into full view, though lingering at the round side of a container, very apparently longing to flee again, but under some compulsion to approach its enchanter. Dane blinked, not quite sure that his eyes were not playing tricks on him. He had seen the almost transparent globe “bogies” of Limbo, had been fascinated by the weird and ugly pictures in Captain Jellico’s collection of tri-dee prints. But this creature was as impossible in its way as the horrific blue thing dragging it out of concealment.

It walked erect on two threads of legs, with four knobby joints easily detected. A bulging abdomen sheathed in the horny substance of a beetle’s shell ended in a sharp point. Two pairs of small legs, folded close to the much smaller upper portion of its body, were equipped with thorn shack terminations. The head, which constantly turned back and forth on the armor plated shoulders, was long and narrow and split for half its length by a mouth above which were deep pits which must harbor eyes, though actual organs were not visible to the watching men. It was a palish gray in color—which surprised Dane a little. His memory of the few seconds he had seen it on the Captain’s desk had suggested that it was much darker. And erect as it was, it stood about eighteen inches high.

With head turning rapidly, it still hesitated by the side of the vat, so nearly the color of the metal that unless it moved it was difficult to distinguish. As far as Dane could see the Hoobat was paying it no attention. Queex might be lost in a happy dream, the result of its own fiddling. Nor did the rhythm of that scraping vary.

The nightmare thing made the last foot in a rush of speed which reduced it to a blur, coming to a halt before the Hoobat. Its front legs whipped out to strike at its enemy. But Queex was no longer dreaming. This was the moment the Hoobat had been awaiting. One of the sawing claws opened and closed, separating the head of the lurker from its body. And before either of the men could interfere Queex had dismembered the prey with dispatch.

“Look there!” Dane pointed.

The Hoobat held close the body of the stranger and where the ashy corpse came into contact with Queex’s blue feathered skin it was slowly changing hue—as if some of the color of its hunter had rubbed off it.

“Chameleon!” Ali went down on one knee the better to view the grisly feast now in progress. “Watch out!” he added sharply as Dane came to join him.

One of the thin upper limbs lay where Queex had discarded it. And from the needle tip was oozing some colorless drops of fluid. Poison?

Dane looked around for something which he could use to pick up the still jerking appendage. But before he could find anything Queex had appropriated it. And in the end they had to allow the Hoobat its victim in its entirety. But once Queex had consumed its prey it lapsed into its usual hunched immobility. Dane went for the cage and working gingerly he and Ali got the creature back in captivity. But all the evidence now left were some smears on the floor of the hydro, smears which Ali blotted up for future research in the lab.

An hour later the four who now comprised the crew of the Queen gathered in the mess for a conference. Queex was in its cage on the table before them, asleep after all its untoward activity.

“There must be more than just one,” Weeks said. “But how are we going to hunt them down? With Sinbad?”

Dane shook his head. Once the Hoobat had been caged and the more prominent evidence of the battle scraped from the floor, he had brought the cat into the hydro and forced him to sniff at the site of the engagement. The result was that Sinbad had gone raving mad and Dane’s hands were now covered with claw tears which ran viciously deep. It was plain that the ship’s cat was having none of the intruders, alive or dead. He had fled to Dane’s cabin where he had taken refuge on the bunk and snarled wild eyed when anyone looked in from the corridor.

“Queex has to do it,” Rip said. “But will it hunt unless it is hungry?”

He surveyed the now comatose creature skeptically. They had never seen the Captain’s pet eat anything except some pellets which Jellico kept in his desk, and they were aware that the intervals between such feedings were quite lengthy. If they had to wait the usual time for Queex to feel hunger pangs once more, they might have to wait a long time.

“We should catch one alive,” Ali remarked thoughtfully. “If we could get Queex to fiddle it out to where we could net it—”

Weeks nodded eagerly. “A small net like those the Salariki use. Drop it over the thing—”

While Queex still drowsed in its cage, Weeks went to work with fine cord. Holding the color changing abilities of the enemy in mind they could not tell how many of the creatures might be roaming the ship. It could only be proved where they weren’t by where Sinbad would consent to stay. So they made plans which included both the cat and the Hoobat.

Sinbad, much against his will, was buckled into an improvised harness by which he could be controlled without the handler losing too much valuable skin.

And then the hunt started at the top of the ship, proceeding downward section by section. Sinbad raised no protest in the control cabin, nor in the private cabins of the officers’ thereabouts. If they could interpret his reactions the center section was free of the invaders. So with Dane in control of the cat and Ali carrying the caged Hoobat, they descended once more to the level which housed the hydro galley, steward’s quarters and ship’s sick bay.

Sinbad proceeded on his own four feet into the galley and the mess. He was not uneasy in the sick bay, nor in Mura’s cabin, and this time he even paced the hydro without being dragged—much to their surprise as they had thought that the headquarters of the stowaways.

“Could there only have been one?” Weeks wanted to know as he stood by ready with the net in his hands.

“Either that—or else we’re wrong about the hydro being their main hideout. If they’re afraid of Queex now they may have withdrawn to the place they feel the safest,” Rip said.

It was when they were on the ladder leading to the cargo level that Sinbad balked. He planted himself firmly and yowled against further progress until Dane, with the harness, pulled him along.

“Look at Queex!”

They followed Weeks’ order. The Hoobat was no longer lethargic. It was raising itself, leaning forward to clasp the bars of its cage, and now it uttered one of its screams of rage. And as Ali went on down the ladder it rattled the bars in a determined effort for freedom. Sinbad, spitting and yowling refused to walk. Rip nodded to Ali.

“Let it out.”

Tipped out of its cage the Hoobat scuttled forward, straight for the panel which opened on the large cargo space and there waited, as if for them to open the portal and admit the hunter to its hunting territory.

Chapter XIII

OFF THE MAP

Across the lock of the panel was the seal set in place by Van Rycke before the spacer had lifted from Sargol. Under Dane’s inspection it showed no crack. To all evidence the hatch had not been opened since they left the perfumed planet. And yet the hunting Hoobat was sure that the invading pests were within.

It took only a second for Dane to commit an act which, if he could not defend it later, would blacklist him out of space. He twisted off the official seal which should remain there while the freighter was space borne.

With Ali’s help he shouldered aside the heavy sliding panel and they looked into the cargo space, now filled with the red wood from Sargol. The redwood! When he saw it Dane was struck with their stupidity. Aside from the Koros stones in the stone box, only the wood had come from the Salariki world. What if the pests had not been planted by I-S agents, but were natives of Sargol being brought in with the wood?

The men remained at the hatch to allow the Hoobat freedom in its hunt. And Sinbad crouched behind them, snarling and giving voice to a rumbling growl which was his negative opinion of the proceedings.

They were conscious of an odor—the sharp, unidentifiable scent Dane had noticed during the loading of the wood. It was not unpleasant—merely different. And it—or something—had an electrifying effect upon Queex. The blue hunter climbed with the aid of its claws to the top of the nearest pile of wood and there settled down. For a space it was apparently contemplating the area about it.

Then it raised its claws and began the scraping fiddle which once before had drawn its prey out of hiding. Oddly enough that dry rasp of sound had a quieting effect upon Sinbad and Dane felt the drag of the harness lessen as the cat moved, not toward escape, but to the scene of action, humping himself at last in the open panel, his round eyes fixed upon the Hoobat with a fascinated stare.

Scrape-scrape—the monotonous noise bit into the ears of the men, gnawed at their nerves.

“Ahhh—” Ali kept his voice to a whisper, but his hand jerked to draw their attention to the right at deck level. Dane saw that flicker along a log. The stowaway pest was now the same brilliant color as the wood, indistinguishable until it moved, which probably explained how it had come on board.

But that was only the first arrival. A second flash of movement and a third followed. Then the hunted remained stationary, able to resist for a period the insidious summoning of Queex. The Hoobat maintained an attitude of indifference, of being so wrapped in its music that nothing else existed. Rip whispered to Weeks:

“There’s one to the left—on the very end of that log. Can you net it?”

The small oiler slipped the coiled mesh through his calloused hands. He edged around Ali, keeping his eyes on the protuding protruding bump of red upon red which was his quarry.

“—two—three—four—five—” Ali was counting under his breath but Dane could not see that many. He was sure of only four, and those because he had seen them move.

The things were ringing in the pile of wood where the Hoobat fiddled, and two had ascended the first logs toward their doom. Weeks went down on one knee, ready to cast his net, when Dane had his first inspiration. He drew his sleep rod, easing it out of its holster, set the lever on “spray” and beamed it at three of those humps.

Rip seeing what he was doing, dropped a hand on Weeks’ shoulder, holding the oiler in check. A hump moved, slid down the rounded side of the log into the narrow aisle of deck between two piles of wood. It lay quiet, a bright scarlet blot against the gray.

Then Weeks did move, throwing his net over it and jerking the draw string tight, at the same time pulling the captive toward him over the deck. But, even as it came, the scarlet of the thing’s body was fast fading to an ashy pink and at last taking on a gray as dull as the metal on which it lay—the complete camouflage. Had they not had it enmeshed they might have lost it altogether, so well did it now blend with the surface.

The other two in the path of the ray had not lost their grip upon the logs, and the men could not advance to scoop them up. Not while there were others not affected, free to flee back into hiding. Weeks bound the net about the captive and looked to Rip for orders.

“Deep freeze,” the acting-commander of the Queen said succinctly. “Let me see it get out of that!”

Surely the cold of the deep freeze, united to the sleep ray, would keep the creature under control until they had a chance to study it. But, as Weeks passed Sinbad on his errand, the cat was so frantic to avoid him, that he reared up on his hind legs, almost turning a somersault, snarling and spitting until Weeks was up the ladder to the next level. It was very evident that the ship’s cat was having none of this pest.

They might have been invisible and their actions non-existent as far as Queex was concerned. For the Hoobat continued its siren concert. The lured became more reckless, mounting the logs to Queex’s post in sudden darts. Dane wondered how the Hoobat proposed handling four of the creatures at once. For, although the other two which had been in the path of the ray had not moved, he now counted four climbing.

“Stand by to ray—” that was Rip.

But it would have been interesting to see how Queex was prepared to handle the four. And, though Rip had given the order to stand by, he had not ordered the ray to be used. Was he, too, interested in that?

The first red projection was within a foot of the Hoobat now and its fellows had frozen as if to allow it the honor of battle with the feathered enemy. To all appearances Queex did not see it, but when it sprang with a whir of speed which would baffle a human, the Hoobat was ready and its claws, halting their rasp, met around the wasp-thin waist of the pest, speedily cutting it in two. Only this time the Hoobat made no move to unjoint and consume the victim. Instead it squatted in utter silence, as motionless as a tri-dee print.

The heavy lower half of the creature rolled down the pile of logs to the deck and there paled to the gray of its background. None of its kind appeared to be interested in its fate. The two which had been in the path of the ray, continued to be humps on the wood, the others faced the Hoobat.

But Rip was ready to waste no more time. “Ray them!” he snapped.

All three of their sleep rods sprayed the pile, catching in passing the Hoobat. Queex’s pop eyes closed, but it showed no other sign of falling under the spell of the beam.

Certain that all the creatures in sight were now relatively harmless, the three approached the logs. But it was necessary to get into touching distance before they could even make out the outlines of the nightmare things, so well did their protective coloring conceal them. Wearing gloves Ali detached the little monsters from their holds on the wood and put them for temporary safekeeping—during a transfer to the deep freeze—into the Hoobat’s cage. Queex, they decided to leave where it was for a space, to awaken and trap any survivor which had been too wary to emerge at the first siren song. As far as they could tell the Hoobat was their only possible protection against the pest and to leave it in the center of infection was the wisest course.

Having dumped the now metal colored catch into the freeze, they held a conference.

“No plague—” Weeks breathed a sigh of relief.

“No proof of that yet,” Ali caught him up short. “We have to prove it past any reasonable doubt.”

“And how are we going to do—?” Dane began when he saw what the other had brought in from Tau’s stores. A lancet and the upper half of the creature Queex had killed in the cargo hold.

The needle pointed front feet of the thing were curled up in its death throes and it was now a dirty white shade as if the ability to change color had been lost before it matched the cotton on which it lay. With the lancet Ali forced a claw away from the body. It was oozing the watery liquid which they had seen on the one in the hydro.

“I have an idea,” he said slowly, his eyes on the mangled creature rather than on his shipmates, “that we might have escaped being attacked because they sheered off from us. But if we were clawed we might take it too. Remember those marks on the throats and backs of the rest? That might be the entry point of this poison—if poison it is—”

Dane could see the end of that line of reasoning. Rip and Ali—they couldn’t be spared. The knowledge they had would bring the Queen to earth. But a Cargo-master was excess baggage when there was no reason for trade. It was his place to try out the truth of Ali’s surmise.

But while he thought another acted. Weeks leaned over and twitched the lancet out of Ali’s fingers. Then, before any of them could move, he thrust its contaminated point into the back of his hand.

“Don’t!”

Both Dane’s cry and Rip’s hand came too late. It had been done. And Weeks sat there, looking alone and frightened, studying the drop of blood which marked the dig of the surgeon’s keen knife. But when he spoke his voice sounded perfectly natural.

“Headache first, isn’t it?”

Only Ali was outwardly unaffected by what the little man had just done. “Just be sure you have a real one,” he warned with what Dane privately considered real callousness.

Weeks nodded. “Don’t let my imagination work,” he answered shrewdly. “I know. It has to be real. How long do you suppose?”

“We don’t know,” Rip sounded tired, beaten. “Meanwhile,” he got to his feet, “we’d better set a course home—”

“Home,” Weeks repeated. To him Terra was not his own home—he had been born in the polar swamps of Venus. But to All Solarians—no matter which planet had nurtured them—Terra was home.

“You,” Rip’s big hand fell gently on the little oiler’s shoulder, “stay here with Thorson—”

“No,” Weeks shook his head. “Unless I black out, I’m riding station in the engine room. Maybe the bug won’t work on me anyway.”

And because he had done what he had done they could not deny him the right to ride his station as long as he could during the grueling hours to come.

Dane visited the cargo hold once more. To be greeted by an irate scream which assured him that Queex was again awake and on guard. Although the Hoobat was ready enough to give tongue, it still squatted in its chosen position on top of the log stack and he did not try to dislodge it. Perhaps with Queex planted in the enemies’ territory they would have nothing to fear from any pests not now confined in the deep freeze.

Rip set his course for Terra—for that plague spot on their native world where they might hide out the Queen until they could prove their point—that the spacer was not a disease ridden ship to be feared. He kept to the control cabin, shifting only between the Astrogator’s and the pilot’s station. Upon him alone rested the responsibility of bringing in the ship along a vector which crossed no well traveled space lane where the Patrol might challenge them. Dane rode out the orbiting in the Com-tech’s seat, listening in for the first warning of danger—that they had been detected.

The mechanical repetition of their list of crimes was now stale news and largely off-ether. And from all traces he could pick up, they were lost as far as the authorities were concerned. On the other hand, the Patrol might indeed be as far knowing as its propaganda stated and the Queen was running headlong into a trap. Only they had no choice in the matter.

It was the ship’s inter-com bringing Ali’s voice from the engine room which broke the concentration in the control cabin.

“Weeks’ down!”

Rip barked into the mike. “How bad?”

“He hasn’t blacked out yet. The pains in his head are pretty bad and his hand is swelling—”

“He’s given us our proof. Tell him to report off—”

But the disembodied voice which answered that was Weeks’.

“I haven’t got it as bad as the others. I’ll ride this out.”

Rip shook his head. But short-handed as they were he could not argue Weeks away from his post if the man insisted upon staying. He had other, and for the time being, more important matters before him.

How long they sweated out that descent upon their native world Dane could never afterwards have testified. He only knew that hours must have passed, until he thought groggily that he could not remember a time he was not glued in the seat which had been Tang’s, the earphones pressing against his sweating skull, his fatigue-drugged mind being held with difficulty to the duty at hand.

Sometime during that haze they made their landing. He had a dim memory of Rip sprawled across the pilot’s control board and then utter exhaustion claimed him also and the darkness closed in. When he roused it was to look about a cabin tilted to one side. Rip was still slumped in a muscle cramping posture, breathing heavily. Dane bit out a forceful word born of twinges of his own, and then snapped on the visa-plate.

For a long moment he was sure that he was not yet awake. And then, as his dazed mind supplied names for what he saw, he knew that Rip had failed. Far from being in the center—or at least well within the perimeter of the dread Big Burn—they must have landed in some civic park or national forest. For the massed green outside, the bright flowers, the bird he sighted as a brilliant flash of wind coasting color—those were not to be found in the twisted horror left by man’s last attempt to impress his will upon his resisting kind.

Well, it had been a good try, but there was no use expecting luck to ride their fins all the way, and they had had more than their share in the E-Stat affair. How long would it be before the Law arrived to collect them? Would they have time to state their case?

The faint hope that they might aroused him. He reached for the com key and a second later tore the headphones from his appalled ears. The crackle of static he knew—and the numerous strange noises which broke in upon the lanes of communication in space—but this solid, paralyzing roar was something totally new—new, and frightening.

And because it was new and he could not account for it, he turned back to regard the scene on the viewer with a more critical eye. The foliage which grew in riotous profusion was green right enough, and Terra green into the bargain—there was no mistaking that. But—Dane caught at the edge of Com-unit for support. But—What was that liver-red blossom which had just reached out to engulf a small flying thing?

Feverishly he tried to remember the little natural history he knew. Sure that what he had just witnessed was unnatural—un-Terran—and to be suspect!

He started the spy lens on its slow revolution in the Queen’s nose, to get a full picture of their immediate surroundings. It was tilted at an angle—apparently they had not made a fin-point landing this time—and sometimes it merely reflected slices of sky. But when it swept earthward he saw enough to make him believe that wherever the spacer had set down it was not on the Terra he knew.

Subconsciously he had expected the Big Burn to be barren land—curdled rock with rivers of frozen quartz, substances boiled up through the crust of the planet by the action of the atomic explosives. That was the way it had been on Limbo—on the other “burned-off” worlds they had discovered where those who had preceded mankind into the Galaxy—the mysterious, long vanished “Forerunners”—had fought their grim and totally annihilating wars.

But it would seem that the Big Burn was altogether different—at least here it was. There was no rock sterile of life outside—in fact there would appear to be too much life. What Dane could sight on his limited field of vision was a teeming jungle. And the thrill of that discovery almost made him forget their present circumstances. He was still staring bemused at the screen when Rip muttered, turned his head on his folded arms and opened his sunken eyes:

“Did we make it?” he asked dully.

Dane, not taking his eyes from that fascinating scene without, answered: “You brought us down. But I don’t know where—”

“Unless our instruments were ‘way off, we’re near to the heart of the Burn.”

“Some heart!”

“What does it look like?” Rip sounded too tired to cross the cabin and see for himself. “Barren as Limbo?”

“Hardly! Rip, did you ever see a tomato as big as a melon—At least it looks like a tomato,” Dane halted the spy lens as it focused upon this new phenomena.

“A what?” There was a note of concern in Shannon’s voice. “What’s the matter with you, Dane?”

“Come and see,” Dane willingly yielded his place to Rip but he did not step out of range of the screen. Surely that did have the likeness to a good, old fashioned earth-side tomato—but it was melon size and it hung from a bush which was close to a ten foot tree!

Rip stumbled across to drop into the Com-tech’s place. But his expression of worry changed to one of simple astonishment as he saw that picture.

“Where are we?”

“You name it,” Dane had had longer to adjust, the excitement of an explorer sighting virgin territory worked in his veins, banishing fatigue. “It must be the Big Burn!”

“But,” Rip shook his head slowly as if with that gesture to deny the evidence before his eyes, “that country’s all bare rock. I’ve seen pictures—”

“Of the outer rim,” Dane corrected, having already solved that problem for himself. “This must be farther in than any survey ship ever came. Great Spirit of Outer Space, what has happened here?”

Rip had enough technical training to know how to get part of the answer. He leaned halfway across the com, and was able to flick down a lever with the very tip of his longest finger. Instantly the cabin was filled with a clicking so loud as to make an almost continuous drone of sound.

Dane knew that danger signal, he didn’t need Rip’s words to underline it for him.

“That’s what’s happened. This country is pile ‘hot’ out there!”

Chapter XIV

SPECIAL MISSION

That click, the dial beneath the counter, warned them that they were as cut off from the luxuriance outside as if they were viewing a scene on Mars or Sargol from their present position. To go beyond the shielding walls of the spacer into that riotous green world would sentence them to death as surely as if the Patrol was without, with a flamer trained on their hatch. There was no escape from that radiation—it would be in the air one breathed, strike though one’s skin. And yet the wilderness flourished and beckoned.

“Mutations—” Rip mused. “Space, Tau’d go wild if he could see it!”

And that mention of the Medic brought them back to the problem which had earthed them. Dane leaned back against the slanting wall of the cabin.

“We have to have a Medic—”

Rip nodded without looking away from the screen.

“Can one of the flitters be shielded?” The Cargo-apprentice persisted.

“That’s a thought! Ali should know—” Rip reached for the inter-com mike. “Engines!”

“So you are alive?” Ali’s voice had a bite in it. “About time you’re contacting. Where are we? Besides being lopsided from a recruit’s scrambled set-down, I mean.”

“In the Big Burn. Come top-side. Wait—how’s Weeks?”

“He has a devil’s own headache, but he hasn’t blacked out yet. Looks like his immunity holds in part. I’ve sent him bunkside for a while with a couple of pain pills. So we’ve made it—”

He must have left to join them for when Rip answered: “After a fashion,” into the mike there was no reply.

And the clang of his boot plates on the ladder heralded his arrival at their post. There was an interval for him to view the outer world and accept the verdict of the counter and then Rip voiced Dane’s question:

“Can we shield one of the flitters well enough to cross that? I can’t take the Queen up and earth her again—”

“I know you can’t!” the acting-engineer cut in. “Maybe you could get her off world, but you’ll come close to blasting out when you try for another landing. Fuel doesn’t go on forever—though some of you space jockeys seem to think it does. The flitter? Well, we’ve some spare rocket linings. But it’s going to be a job and a half to get those beaten out and reassembled. And, frankly, the space whirly one who flies her had better be suited and praying loudly when he takes off. We can always try—” He was frowning, already busied with the problem which was one for his department.

So with intervals of snatched sleep, hurried meals and the time which must be given to tending their unconscious charges, Rip and Dane became only hands to be directed by Ali’s brain and garnered knowledge. Weeks slept off the worst of his pain and, though he complained of weakness, he tottered back on duty to help.

The flitter—an air sled intended to hold three men and supplies for exploring trips on strange-worlds—was first stripped of all non-essentials until what remained was not much more than the pilot’s seat and the motor. Then they labored to build up a shielding of the tough radiation dulling alloy which was used to line rocket tubes. And they could only praise the foresight of Stotz who carried such a full supply of spare parts and tools. It was a task over which they often despaired, and Ali improvised frantically, performing weird adjustments of engineering structure. He was still unsatisfied when they had done.

“She’ll fly,” he admitted. “And she’s the best we can do. But it’ll depend a lot on how far she has to go over ‘hot’ country. Which way do we head her?”

Rip had been busy with a map of Terra—a small thing he had discovered in one of the travel recordings carried for crew entertainment.

“The Big Burn covers three quarters of this continent. There’s no use going north—the devastated area extends into the arctic regions. I’d say west—there’s some fringe settlements on the sea coast and we need to contact a frontier territory. Now do we have it straight—? I take the flitter, get a Medic and bring him back?”

Dane cut in at that point. “Correct course! You stay here. If the Queen has to lift, you’re the only one who can take her off world. And the same’s true for Ali. I can’t ride out a blast-off in either the pilot’s or the engineer’s seat. And Weeks is on the sick list. So I’m elected to do the Medic hunting—”

They were forced to agree to that. He was no hero, Dane thought, as he gave a last glance about his cabin early the next morning. The small cubby, utilitarian and bare as it was, never looked more inviting or secure. No, no hero, it was merely a matter of common sense. And although his imagination—that deeply hidden imagination with which few of his fellows credited him—shrank from the ordeal ahead, he had not the slightest intention of allowing that to deter him.

The space suit, which had been bulky and clumsy enough on the E-Stat asteroid under limited gravity, was almost twice as poorly adapted to progression on earth. But he climbed into it with Rip’s aid, while Ali lashed a second suit under the seat—ready to encase the man Dane must bring back with him. Before he closed the helmet, Rip had one last order to give, along with an unexpected piece of equipment. And, when Dane saw that, he knew just how desperate Shannon considered their situation to be. For only on life or death terms would the Astrogator-apprentice have used Jellico’s private key, opened the forbidden arms cabinet, and withdrawn that blaster.

“If you need it—use this—” Rip’s face was very sober.

Ali arose from fastening the extra suit in place. “It’s ready—”

He came back into the corridor and Dane clanked out in his place, settling himself behind the controls. When they saw him there, the inner hatch closed and he was alone in the bay.

With tantalizing slowness the outer wall of the spacer slid back. His hands blundering with the metallic claws of the gloves, Dane buckled two safety belts about him. Then the skeleton flitter moved to the left—out into the glare of the early day, a light too bright, even through the shielded viewplates of his helmet.

For some dangerous moments the machine creaked out and down on the landing cranes, the warning counter on its control panel going into a mad whirl of color as it tried to record the radiation. There came a jar as it touched the scorched earth at the foot of the Queen’s fins.

Dane pressed the release and watched the lines whip up and the hatch above snap shut. Then he opened the controls. He used too much energy and shot into the air, tearing a wide gap through what was luckily a thin screen of the matted foliage, before he gained complete mastery.

Then he was able to level out and bore westward, the rising sun at his back, the sea of deadly green beneath him, and somewhere far ahead the faint promise of clean, radiation free land holding the help they needed.

Mile after mile of the green jungle swept under the flitter, and the flash of the counter’s light continued to record a land unfit for mankind. Even with the equipment used on distant worlds to protect what spacemen had come to recognize was a reasonably tough human frame, no ground force could hope to explore that wilderness in person. And flying above it, as well insulated as he was, Dane knew that he could be dangerously exposed. If the contaminated territory extended more than a thousand miles, his danger was no longer problematical—it was an established fact.

He had only the vague directions from the scrap of map Rip had uncovered. To the west—he had no idea how far away—there stretched a length of coastline, far enough from the radiation blasted area to allow small settlements. For generations the population of Terra, decimated by the atomic wars, and then drained by first system and then Galactic exploration and colonization, had been decreasing. But within the past hundred years it was again on the upswing. Men retiring from space were returning to their native planet to live out their remaining years. The descendants of far-flung colonists, coming home on visits, found the sparsely populated mother world appealed to some basic instinct so that they remained. And now the settlements of mankind were on the march, spreading out from the well established sections which had not been blighted by ancient wars.

It was mid-afternoon when Dane noted that the green carpet beneath the flitter was displaying holes—that small breaks in the vegetation became sizable stretches of rocky waste. He kept one eye on the counter and what, when he left the spacer, had been an almost steady beam of warning light was now a well defined succession of blinks. The land below was cooling off—perhaps he had passed the worst of the journey. But in that passing how much had he and the flitter become contaminated? Ali had devised a method of protection for the empty suit the Medic would wear—had that held? There were an alarming number of dark ifs in the immediate future.

The mutant growths were now only thin patches of stunted and yellowish green. Had man penetrated only this far into the Burn, the knowledge of what lay beyond would be totally false. This effect of dreary waste might well discourage exploration.

Now the blink of the counter was deliberate, with whole seconds of pause between the flashes. Cooling off—? It was getting cold fast! He wished that he had a com-unit. Because of the interference in the Burn he had left it behind—but with one he might be able now to locate some settlement. All that remained was to find the seashore and, with it as a guide, flit south towards the center of modern civilization.

He laid no plans of action—this whole exploit must depend upon improvisation. And, as a Free Trader, spur-of-the-moment action was a necessary way of life. On the frontier Rim of the Galaxy, where the independent spacers traced the star trails, fast thinking and the ability to change plans on an instant were as important as skill in aiming a blaster. And it was very often proven that the tongue—and the brain behind it—were more deadly than a flamer.

The sun was in Dane’s face now and he caught sight of patches of uncontaminated earth with honest vegetation—in place of the “hot” jungle now miles behind. That night he camped out on the edge of rough pasturage where the counter no longer flashed its warning and he was able to shed the suit and sleep under the stars with the fresh air of early summer against his cheek and the smell of honest growing things replacing the dry scent of the spacer and the languorous perfumes of Sargol.

He lay on his back, flat against the earth of which he was truly a part, staring up into the dark, inverted bowl of the heavens. It was so hard to connect those distant points of icy light making the well remembered patterns overhead with the suns whose rays had added to the brown stain on his skin. Sargol’s sun—the one which gave such limited light to dead Limbo—the sun under which Naxos, his first Galactic port, grew its food. He could not pick them out—was not even sure that any could be sighted from Terra. Strange suns, red, orange, blue green, white—yet here all looked alike—points of glitter.

Tomorrow at dawn he must go on. He turned his head away from the sky and grass, green Terran grass, was soft beneath his cheek. Yet unless he was successful tomorrow or the next day—he might never have the right to feel that grass again. Resolutely Dane willed that thought out of his mind, tried to fix upon something more lulling which would bring with it the sleep he must have before he went on. And in the end he did sleep, deeply, dreamlessly, as if the touch of Terra’s soil was in itself the sedative his tautly strung nerves needed.

It was before sunrise that he awoke, stiff, and chilled. The dryness of pre-dawn gave partial light and somewhere a bird was twittering. There had been birds—or things whose far off ancestors had been birds—in the “hot” forest. Did they also sing to greet the dawn?

Dane went over the flitter with his small counter and was relieved to find that they had done a good job of shielding under Ali’s supervision. Once the suit he had worn was stored, he could sit at the controls without danger and in comfort. And it was good to be free of that metal prison.

This time he took to the air with ease, the salt taste of food concentrate on his tongue as he sucked a cube. And his confidence arose with the flitter. This was the day, somehow he knew it. He was going to find what he sought.

It was less than two hours after sunrise that he did so. A village which was a cluster of perhaps fifty or so house units strung along into the land. He skimmed across it and brought the flitter down in a rock cliff walled sand pocket with surf booming some yards away, where he would be reasonably sure of safe hiding.

All right, he had found a village. Now what? A Medic—A stranger appearing on the lane which served the town, a stranger in a distinctive uniform of Trade, would only incite conjecture and betrayal. He had to plan now—

Dane unsealed his tunic. He should, by rights, shed his space boots too. But perhaps he could use those to color his story. He thrust the blaster into hiding at his waist. A rip or two in his undertunic, a shallow cut from his bush knife allowed to bleed messily. He could not see himself to judge the general effect, but had to hope it was the right one.

His chance to test his acting powers came sooner than he had anticipated. Luckily he had climbed out of the hidden cove before he was spotted by the boy who came whistling along the path, a fishing pole over his shoulder, a basket swinging from his hand. Dane assumed an expression which he thought would suggest fatigue, pain, and bewilderment and lurched forward as if, in sighting the oncoming boy, he had also sighted hope.

“Help—!” Perhaps it was excitement which gave his utterance that convincing croak.

Rod and basket fell to the ground as the boy, after one astounded stare, ran forward.

“What’s the matter!” His eyes were on those space boots and he added a “sir” which had the ring of hero worship.

“Escape boat—” Dane waved toward the sea’s general direction. “Medic—must get to Medic—”

“Yes, sir,” the boy’s basic Terran sounded good. “Can you walk if I help you?”

Dane managed a weak nod, but contrived that he did not lean too heavily on his avidly helpful guide.

“The Medic’s my father, sir. We’re right down this slope—third house. And father hasn’t left—he’s supposed to go on a northern inspection tour today—”

Dane felt a stab of distaste for the role being forced upon him. When he had visualized the Medic he must abduct to serve the Queen in her need, he had not expected to have to kidnap a family man. Only the knowledge that he did have the extra suit, and that he had made the outward trip without dangerous exposure, bolstered up his determination to see the plan through.

When they came out at the end of the single long lane which tied the houses of the village together, Dane was puzzled to see the place so deserted. But, since it was not within his role of dazed sufferer to ask questions, he did not do so. It was his young guide who volunteered the information he wanted.

“Most everyone is out with the fleet. There’s a run of red-backs—”

Dane understood. Within recent times the “red-backs” of the north had become a desirable luxury item for Terran tables. If a school of them were to be found in the vicinity no wonder this village was now deserted as its fleet went out to garner in the elusive but highly succulent fish.

“In here, sir—” Dane found himself being led to a house on the right. “Are you in Trade—?”

He suppressed a start, shedding his uniform tunic had not done much in the way of disguise. It would be nice, he thought a little bitterly, if he could flash an I-S badge now to completely confuse the issue. But he answered with the partial truth and did not enlarge.

“Yes—”

The boy was flushed with excitement. “I’m trying for Trade Service Medic,” he confided. “Passed the Directive exam last month. But I still have to go up for Prelim psycho—”

Dane had a flash of memory. Not too many months before not the Prelim psycho, but the big machine at the Assignment Center had decided his own future arbitrarily, fitting him into the crew of the Solar Queen as the ship where his abilities, knowledge and potentialities could best work to the good of the Service. At the time he had resented, had even been slightly ashamed of being relegated to a Free Trading spacer while Artur Sands and other classmates from the Pool had walked off with Company assignments. Now he knew that he would not trade the smallest and most rusty bolt from the solar Queen for the newest scout ship in I-S or Combine registry. And this boy from the frontier village might be himself as he was five years earlier. Though he had never known a real home or family, scrapping into the Pool from one of the children’s Depots.

“Good luck!” He meant that and the boy’s flush deepened.

“Thank you, sir. Around here—Father’s treatment room has this other door—”

Dane allowed himself to be helped into the treatment room and sat down in a chair while the boy hurried off to locate the Medic. The Trader’s hand went to the butt of his concealed blaster. It was a job he had to do—one he had volunteered for—and there was no backing out. But his mouth had a wry twist as he drew out the blaster and made ready to point it at the inner door. Or—his mind leaped to another idea—could he get the Medic safely out of the village? A story about another man badly injured—perhaps pinned in the wreckage of an escape boat—He could try it. He thrust the blaster back inside his torn undertunic, hoping the bulge would pass unnoticed.

“My son says—”

Dane looked up. The man who came through the inner door was in early middle age, thin, wiry, with a hard, fined-down look about him. He could almost be Tau’s elder brother. He crossed the room with a brisk stride and came to stand over Dane, his hand reaching to pull aside the bloody cloth covering the Trader’s breast. But Dane fended off that examination.

“My partner,” he said. “Back there—pinned in—” he jerked his hand southward. “Needs help—”

The Medic frowned. “Most of the men are out with the fleet. Jorge,” he spoke to the boy who had followed him, “go and get Lex and Hartog. Here,” he tried to push Dane back into the chair as the Trader got up, “let me look at that cut—”

Dane shook his head. “No time now, sir. My partner’s hurt bad. Can you come?”

“Certainly.” The Medic reached for the emergency kit on the shelf behind him. “You able to make it?”

“Yes,” Dane was exultant. It was going to work! He could toll the Medic away from the village. Once out among the rocks on the shoreline he could pull the blaster and herd the man to the flitter. His luck was going to hold after all!

Chapter XV

MEDIC HOVAN REPORTS

Fortunately the path out of the straggling town was a twisted one and in a very short space they were hidden from view. Dane paused as if the pace was too much for an injured man. The Medic put out a steadying hand, only to drop it quickly when he saw the weapon which had appeared in Dane’s grip.

“What—?” His mouth snapped shut, his jaw tightened.

“You will march ahead of me,” Dane’s low voice was steady. “Beyond that rock spur to the left you’ll find a place where it is possible to climb down to sea level. Do it!”

“I suppose I shouldn’t ask why?”

“Not now. We haven’t much time. Get moving!”

The Medic mastered his surprise and without further protest obeyed orders. It was only when they were standing by the flitter and he saw the suits that his eyes widened and he said:

“The Big Burn!”

“Yes, and I’m desperate—”

“You must be—or mad—” The Medic stared at Dane for a long moment and then shook his head. “What is it? A plague ship?”

Dane bit his lip. The other was too astute. But he did not ask why or how he had been able to guess so shrewdly. Instead he gestured to the suit Ali had lashed beneath the seat in the flitter. “Get into that and be quick about it!”

The Medic rubbed his hand across his jaw. “I think that you might just be desperate enough to use that thing you’re brandishing about so melodramatically if I don’t,” he remarked in a calmly conversational tone.

“I won’t kill. But a blaster burn—”

“Can be pretty painful. Yes, I know that, young man. And,” suddenly he shrugged, put down his kit and started donning the suit. “I wouldn’t put it past you to knock me out and load me aboard if I did say no. All right—”

Suited, he took his place on the seat as Dane directed, and then the Trader followed the additional precaution of lashing the Medic’s metal encased arms to his body before he climbed into his own protective covering. Now they could only communicate by sight through the vision plates of their helmets.

Dane triggered the controls and they arose out of the sand and rock hollow just as a party of two men and a boy came hurrying along the top of the cliff—Jorge and the rescuers arriving too late. The flitter spiraled up into the sunlight and Dane wondered how long it would be before this outrage was reported to the nearest Plant Police base. But would any Police cruiser have the hardihood to follow him into the Big Burn? He hoped that the radiation would hold them back.

There was no navigation to be done. The flitter’s “memory” should deposit them at the Queen. Dane wondered at what his silent companion was now thinking. The Medic had accepted his kidnapping with such docility that the very ease of their departure began to bother Dane. Was the other expecting a trailer? Had exploration into the Big Burn from the seaside villages been more extensive than reported officially?

He stepped up the power of the flitter to the top notch and saw with some relief that the ground beneath them was now the rocky waste bordering the devastated area. The metal encased figure that shared his seat had not moved, but now the bubble head turned as if the Medic were intent upon the ground flowing beneath them.

The flicker of the counter began and Dane realized that nightfall would find them still air borne. But so far he had not been aware of any pursuit. Again he wished he had the use of a com—only here the radiation would blanket sound with that continuous roar.

Patches of the radiation vegetation showed now and something in the lines of the Medic’s tense figure suggested that these were new to him. Afternoon waned as the patches united, spread into the beginning of the jungle as the counter was once more an almost steady light. When evening closed in they were not caught in darkness—for below trees, looping vines, brush, had a pale, evil glow of their own, proclaiming their toxicity with bluish halos. Sometimes pockets of these made a core of light which pulsed, sending warning fingers at the flitter which sped across it.

The hour was close on midnight before Dane sighted the other light, the pink-red of which winked through the ghastly blue-white with a natural and comforting promise, even though it had been meant for an entirely different purpose. The Queen had earthed with her distress lights on and no one had remembered to snap them off. Now they acted as a beacon to draw the flitter to its berth.

Dane brought the stripped flyer down on the fused ground as close to the spot from which he had taken off as he could remember. Now—if those on the spacer would only move fast enough—!

But he need not have worried, his arrival had been anticipated. Above, the rounded side of the spacer bulged as the hatch opened. Lines swung down to fasten their magnetic clamps on the flitter. Then once more they were air borne, swinging up to be warped into the side of the ship. As the outer port of the flitter berth closed Dane reached over and pulled loose the lashing which immobilized his companion. The Medic stood up, a little awkwardly as might any man who wore space armor the first time.

The inner hatch now opened and Dane waved his captive into the small section which must serve them as a decontamination space. Free at last of the suits, they went through one more improvised hatch to the main corridor of the Queen where Rip and Ali stood waiting, their weary faces lighting as they saw the Medic.

It was the latter who spoke first. “This is a plague ship—”

Rip shook his head. “It is not, sir. And you’re the one who is going to help us prove that.”

The man leaned back against the wall, his face expressionless. “You take a rather tough way of trying to get help.”

“It was the only way left us. I’ll be frank,” Rip continued, “we’re Patrol Posted.”

The Medic’s shrewd eyes went from one drawn young face to the next. “You don’t look like desperate criminals,” was his comment. “This your full crew?”

“All the rest are your concern. That is—if you will take the job—” Rip’s shoulders slumped a little.

“You haven’t left me much choice, have you? If there is illness on board, I’m under the Oath—whether you are Patrol Posted or not. What’s the trouble?”

They got him down to Tau’s laboratory and told him their story. From a slight incredulity his expression changed to an alert interest and he demanded to see, first the patients and then the pests now immured in a deep freeze. Sometime in the middle of this, Dane, overcome by fatigue which was partly relief from tension, sought his cabin and the bunk from which he wearily disposed Sinbad, only to have the purring cat crawl back once more when he had lain down.

And when he awoke, renewed in body and spirit, it was in a new Queen, a ship in which hope and confidence now ruled.

“Hovan’s already got it!” Rip told him exultantly. “It’s that poison from the little devils’ claws right enough! A narcotic—produces some of the affects of deep sleep. In fact—it may have a medical use. He’s excited about it—”

“All right,” Dane waved aside information which under other circumstances, promising as it did a chance for future trade, would have engrossed him, to ask a question which at the moment seemed far more to the point. “Can he get our men back on their feet?”

A little of Rip’s exuberance faded. “Not right away. He’s given them all shots. But he thinks they’ll have to sleep it off.”

“And we have no idea how long that is going to take,” Ali contributed.

Time—for the first time in days Dane was struck by that—time! Because of his training a fact he had forgotten in the past weeks of worry now came to mind—their contract with the storm priests. Even if they were able to clear themselves of the plague charge, even if the rest of the crew were speedily restored to health, he was sure that they could not hope to return to Sargol with the promised cargo, the pay for which was already on board the Queen. They would have broken their pledge and there could be no hope of holding to their trading rights on that world—if they were not blacklisted for breaking contract into the bargain. I-S would be able to move in and clean up and probably they could never prove that the Company was behind their misfortunes—though the men of the Queen would always be convinced that that fact was the truth.

“We’re going to break contract—” he said aloud and that shook the other two, knocked some of their assurance out of them.

“How about that?” Rip asked Ali.

The acting-engineer nodded. “We have fuel enough to lift from here and maybe set down at Terraport—if we take it careful and cut vectors. We can’t lift from there without refueling—and of course the Patrol are going to sit on their hands while we do that—with us Posted! No, put out of your heads any plan for getting back to Sargol within the time limit. Thorson’s right—that way we’re flamed out!”

Rip slumped in his seat. “So the Eysies can take over after all?”

“As I see it,” Dane cut in, “let’s just take one thing at a time. We may have to argue a broken contract out before the Board. But first we have to get off the Posted hook with the Patrol. Have you any idea about how we are going to handle that?”

“Hovan’s on our side. In fact if we let him have the bugs to play with he’ll back us all the way. He can swear us a clean bill of health before the Medic Control Center.”

“How much will that count after we’ve broken all their regs?” Ali wanted to know. “If we surrender now we’re not going to have much chance, no matter what Hovan does or does not swear to. Hovan’s a frontier Medic—I won’t say that he’s not a member in good standing of their association—but he doesn’t have top star rating. And with the Eysies and the Patrol on our necks, we’ll need more than one medic’s word—”

But Rip looked from the pessimistic Kamil to Dane. Now he asked a question which was more than half statement.

“You’ve thought of something?”

“I’ve remembered something,” the Cargo-apprentice corrected. “Recall the trick Van pulled on Limbo when the Patrol was trying to ease us out of our rights there after they took over the outlaw hold?”

Ali was impatient. “He threatened to talk to the Video people and broadcast—tell everyone about the ships wrecked by the Forerunner installation and left lying about full of treasure. But what has that to do with us now—? We bargained away our rights on Limbo for the rest of Cam’s monopoly on Sargol—not that it’s done us much good—”

“The Video,” Dane fastened on the important point, “Van threatened publicity which would embarrass the Patrol and he was legally within his rights. We’re outside the law now—but publicity might help again. How many earth-side people know of the unwritten law about open war on plague ships? How many who aren’t spacemen know that we could be legally pushed into the sun and fried without any chance to prove we’re innocent of carrying a new disease? If we could talk loud and clear to the people at large maybe we’d have a chance for a real hearing—”

“Right from the Terraport broadcast station, I suppose?” Ali taunted.

“Why not?”

There was silence in the cabin as the other two chewed upon that and he broke it again:

“We set down here when it had never been done before.”

With one brown forefinger Rip traced some pattern known only to himself on the top of the table. Ali stared at the opposite wall as if it were a bank of machinery he must master.

“It just might be whirly enough to work—” Kamil commented softly. “Or maybe we’ve been spaced too long and the Whisperers have been chattering into our ears. What about it, Rip, could you set us down close enough to Center Block there?”

“We can try anything once. But we might crash the old girl bringing her in. There’s that apron between the Companies’ Launching cradles and the Center—. It’s clear there and we could give an E signal coming down which would make them stay rid of it. But I won’t try it except as a last resort.”

Dane noticed that after that discouraging statement Rip made straight for Jellico’s record tapes and routed out the one which dealt with Terraport and the landing instructions for that metropolis of the star ships. To land unbidden there would certainly bring them publicity—and to get the Video broadcast and tell their story would grant them not only world wide, but system wide hearing. News from Terraport was broadcast on every channel every hour of the day and night and not a single viewer could miss their appeal.

But first there was Hovan to be consulted. Would he be willing to back them with his professional knowledge and assurance? Or would their high-handed method of recruiting his services operate against them now? They decided to let Rip ask such questions of the Medic.

“So you’re going to set us down in the center of the big jump-off?” was his first comment, as the acting-Captain of the Queen stated their case. “Then you want me to fire my rockets to certify you are harmless. You don’t ask for very much, do you, son?”

Rip spread his hands. “I can understand how it looks to you, sir. We grabbed you and brought you here by force. We can’t make you testify for us if you decide not to—”

“Can’t you?” The Medic cocked an eyebrow at him. “What about this bully boy of yours with his little blaster? He could herd me right up to the telecast, couldn’t he? There’s a lot of persuasion in one of those nasty little arms. On the other hand, I’ve a son who’s set on taking out on one of these tin pots to go star hunting. If I handed you over to the Patrol he might make some remarks to me in private. You may be Posted, but you don’t look like very hardened criminals to me. It seems that you’ve been handed a bad situation and handled it as best you know. And I’m willing to ride along the rest of the way on your tail blast. Let me see how many pieces you land us in at Terraport and I’ll give you my final answer. If luck holds we may have a couple more of your crew present by that time, also—”

They had had no indication that the Queen had been located, that any posse hunting the kidnapped Medic had followed them into the Big Burn. And they could only hope that they would continue to remain unsighted as they upped-ship once more and cruised into a regular traffic lane for earthing at the port. It would be a chancy thing and Ali and Rip spent hours checking the mechanics of that flight, while Dane and the recovering Weeks worked with Hovan in an effort to restore the sleeping crew.

After three visits to the hold and the discovery that the Hoobat had uncovered no more of the pests, Dane caged the angry blue horror and returned it to its usual stand in Jellico’s cabin, certain that the ship was clean for Sinbad now confidently prowled the corridors and went into every cabin of storage space Dane opened for him.

And on the morning of the day they had planned for take-off, Hovan at last had a definite response to his treatment. Craig Tau roused, stared dazedly around, and asked a vague question. The fact he immediately relapsed once more into semi-coma did not discourage the other Medic. Progress had been made and he was now sure that he knew the proper treatment.

They strapped down at zero hour and blasted out of the weird green wilderness they had not dared to explore, lifting into the arch of the sky, depending upon Rip’s knowledge to put them safely down again.

Dane once more rode out the take-off at the com-unit, waiting for the blast of radiation born static to fade so that he could catch any broadcast.

“—turned back last night. The high level of radiation makes it almost certain that the outlaws could not have headed into the dangerous central portion. Search is now spreading north. Authorities are inclined to believe that this last outrage may be a clew to the vanished ‘Solar Queen,’ a plague ship, warned off and Patrol Posted after her crew plundered an E-Stat belonging to the Inter-Solar Corporation. Anyone having any information concerning this ship—or any strange spacer—report at once to the nearest Terrapolice or Patrol station. Do not take chances—report any contact at once to the nearest Terrapolice or Patrol station!”

“That’s putting it strongly,” Dane commented as he relayed the message. “Good as giving orders for us to be flamed down at sight—”

“Well, if we set down in the right spot,” Rip replied, “they can’t flame us out without blasting the larger part of Terraport field with us. And I don’t think they are going to do that in a hurry.”

Dane hoped Shannon was correct in that belief. It would be more chancy than landing at the E-Stat or in the Big Burn—to gauge it just right and put them down on the Terraport apron where they could not be flamed out without destroying too much, where their very position would give them a bargaining point, was going to be a top star job. If Rip could only pull it off!

He could not evaluate the niceties of that flight, he did not understand all Rip was doing. But he did know enough to remain quietly in his place, ask no questions, and await results with a dry mouth and a wildly beating heart. There came a moment when Rip glanced up at him, one hand poised over the control board. The pilot’s voice came tersely, thin and queer:

“Pray it out, Dane—here we go!”

Dane heard the shrill of a riding beam, so tearing he had to move his earphones. They must be almost on top of the control tower to get it like that! Rip was planning on a set down where the Queen would block things neatly. He brought his own fingers down on the E-E-Red button to give the last and most powerful warning. That, to be used only when a ship landing was out of control, should clear the ground below. They could only pray it would vacate the port they were still far from seeing.

“Make it a fin-point, Rip,” he couldn’t repress that one bit of advice. And was glad he had given it when he saw a ghost grin tug for a moment at Rip’s full lips.

“Good enough for a check-ride?”

They were riding her flaming jets down as they would on a strange world. Below the port must be wild. Dane counted off the seconds. Two—three—four—five—just a few more and they would be too low to intercept—without endangering innocent coasters and groundhuggers. When the last minute during which they were still vulnerable passed, he gave a sigh of relief. That was one more point on their side. In the earphones was a crackle of frantic questions, a gabble of orders screaming at him. Let them rave, they’d know soon enough what it was all about.

Chapter XVI

THE BATTLE OF THE VIDEO

Oddly enough, in spite of the tension which must have boiled within him, Rip brought them in with a perfect four fin-point landing—one which, under the circumstances, must win him the respect of master star-star pilots from the Rim. Though Dane doubted whether if they lost, that skill would bring Shannon anything but a long term in the moon mines. The actual jar of their landing contact was mostly absorbed by the webbing of their shock seats and they were on their feet, ready to move almost at once.

The next operation had been planned. Dane gave a glance at the screen. Ringed now about the Queen were the buildings of Terraport. Yes, any attempt to attack the ship would endanger too much of the permanent structure of the field itself. Rip had brought them down—not on the rocket scarred outer landing space—but on the concrete apron between the Assignment Center and the control tower—a smooth strip usually sacred to the parking of officials’ ground scooters. He speculated as to whether any of the latter had been converted to molten metal by the exhausts of the Queen’s descent.

Like the team they had come to be the four active members of the crew went into action. Ali and Weeks were waiting by an inner hatch, Medic Hovan with them. The Engineer-apprentice was bulky in a space suit, and two more of the unwieldy body coverings waited beside him for Rip and Dane. With fingers which were inclined to act like thumbs they were sealed into what would provide some protection against any blaster or sleep ray. Then with Hovan, conspicuously wearing no such armor, they climbed into one of the ship’s crawlers.

Weeks activated the outer hatch and the crane lines plucked the small vehicle out of the Queen, swinging it dizzily down to the blast scored apron.

“Make for the tower—” Rip’s voice was thin in the helmet coms.

Dane at the controls of the crawler pulled on as Ali cast off the lines which anchored them to the spacer.

Through the bubble helmet he could see the frenzied activity in the aroused port. An ant hill into which some idle investigator had thrust a stick and given it a turn or two was nothing compared with Terraport after the unorthodox arrival of the Solar Queen.

“Patrol mobile coming in on southeast vector,” Ali announced calmly. “Looks like she mounts a portable flamer on her nose—”

“So.” Dane changed direction, putting behind him a customs check point, aware as he ground by that stand, of a line of faces at its vision ports. Evasive action—and he’d have to get the top speed from the clumsy crawler.

“Police ‘copter over us—” that was Rip reporting.

Well, they couldn’t very well avoid that. But at the same time Dane was reasonably sure that its attack would not be an overt one—not with the unarmed, unprotected Hovan prominently displayed in their midst.

But there he was too sanguine. A muffled exclamation from Rip made him glance at the Medic beside him. Just in time to see Hovan slump limply forward, about to tumble from the crawler when Shannon caught him from behind. Dane was too familiar with the results of sleep rays to have any doubts as to what had happened.

The P-copter had sprayed them with its most harmless weapon. Only the suits, insulated to the best of their makers’ ability against most of the dangers of space, real and anticipated, had kept the three Traders from being overcome as well. Dane suspected that his own responses were a trifle sluggish, that while he had not succumbed to that attack, he had been slowed. But with Rip holding the unconscious Medic in his seat, Thorson continued to head the crawler for the tower and its promise of a system wide hearing for their appeal.

“There’s a P-mobile coming in ahead—”

Dane was irritated by that warning from Rip. He had already sighted that black and silver ground car himself. And he was only too keenly conscious of the nasty threat of the snub nosed weapon mounted on its hood, now pointed straight at the oncoming, too deliberate Traders’ crawler. Then he saw what he believed would be their only chance—to play once more the same type of trick as Rip had used to earth them safely.

“Get Hovan under cover,” he ordered. “I’m going to crash the tower door!”

Hasty movements answered that as the Medic’s limp body was thrust under the cover offered by the upper framework of the crawler. Luckily the machine had been built for heavy duty on rugged worlds where roadways were unknown. Dane was sure he could build up the power and speed necessary to take them into the lower floor of the tower—no matter if its door was now barred against them.

Whether his audacity daunted the P-mobile, or whether they held off from an all out attack because of Hovan, Dane could not guess. But he was glad for a few minutes of grace as he raced the protesting engine of the heavy machine to its last and greatest effort. The treads of the crawler bit on the steps leading up to the impressive entrance of the tower. There was a second or two before traction caught and then the driver’s heart snapped back into place as the machine tilted its nose up and headed straight for the portal.

They struck the closed doors with a shock which almost hurled them from their seats. But that engraved bronze expanse had not been cast to withstand a head-on blow from a heavy duty off-world vehicle and the leaves tore apart letting them into the wide hall beyond.

“Take Hovan and make for the riser!” For the second time it was Dane who gave the orders. “I have a blocking job to do here.” He expected every second to feel the bit of a police blaster somewhere along his shrinking body—could even a space suit protect him now?

At the far end of the corridor were the attendants and visitors, trapped in the building, who had fled in an attempt to find safety at the crashing entrance of the crawler. These flung themselves flat at the steady advance of the two space-suited Traders who supported the unconscious Medic between them, using the low-powered anti-grav units on their belts to take most of his weight so each had one hand free to hold a sleep rod. And they did not hesitate to use those weapons—spraying the rightful inhabitants of the tower until all lay unmoving.

Having seen that Ali and Rip appeared to have the situation in hand, Dane turned to his own self-appointed job. He jammed the machine on reverse, maneuvering it with an ease learned by practice on the rough terrain of Limbo, until the gate doors were pushed shut again. Then he swung the machine around so that its bulk would afford an effective bar to keep the door locked for some very precious moments to come. Short of using a flamer full power to cut their way in, no one was going to force an entrance now.

He climbed out of the machine, to discover, when he turned, that the trio from the Queen had disappeared—leaving all possible opposition asleep on the floor. Dane clanked on to join them, carrying in plated fingers their most important weapon to awake public opinion—an improvised cage in which was housed one of the pests from the cargo hold—the proof of their plague-free state which they intended Hovan to present, via the telecast, to the whole system.

Dane reached the shaft of the riser—to find the platform gone. Would either Rip or Ali have presence of mind enough to send it down to him on automatic?

“Rip—return the riser,” he spoke urgently into the throat mike of his helmet com.

“Keep your rockets straight,” Ali’s cool voice was in his earphones, “It’s on its way down. Did you remember to bring Exhibit A?”

Dane did not answer. For he was very much occupied with another problem. On the bronze doors he had been at such pains to seal shut there had come into being a round circle of dull red which was speedily changing into a coruscating incandescence. They had brought a flamer to bear! It would be a very short time now before the Police could come through. That riser—

Afraid of overbalancing in the bulky suit Dane did not lean forward to stare up into the shaft. But, as his uncertainty reached a fever pitch, the platform descended and he took two steps forward into temporary safety, still clutching the cage. At the first try the thick fingers of his gloved hand slipped from the lever and he hit it again, harder than he intended, so that he found himself being wafted upward with a speed which did not agree with a stomach, even one long accustomed to space flight. And he almost lost his balance when it came to a stop many floors above.

But he had not lost his wits. Before he stepped from the platform he set the dial on a point which would lift the riser to the top of the shaft and hold it there. That might trap the Traders on the broadcasting floor, but it would also insure them time before the forces of the law could reach them.

Dane located the rest of his party in the circular core chamber of the broadcasting section. He recognized a backdrop he had seen thousands of times behind the announcer who introduced the news-casts. In one corner Rip, his suit off, was working over the still relaxed form of the Medic. While Ali, a grim set to his mouth, was standing with a man who wore the insignia of a Com-tech.

“All set?” Rip looked up from his futile ministrations.

Dane put down the cage and began the business of unhooking his own protective covering. “They were burning through the outer doors of the entrance hall when I took off.”

“You’re not going to get away with this—” that was the Com-tech.

Ali smiled wearily, a stretch of lips in which there was little or no mirth. “Listen, my friend. Since I started to ride rockets I’ve been told I wasn’t going to get away with this or that. Why not be more original? Use what is between those outsize ears of yours. We fought our way in here—we landed at Terraport against orders—we’re Patrol Posted. Do you think that one man, one lone man, is going to keep us now from doing what we came to do? And don’t look around for any reinforcements. We sprayed both those rooms. You can run the emergency hook-up singlehanded and you’re going to. We’re Free Traders—Ha,” the man had lost some of his assurance as he stared from one drawn young face to another, “I see you begin to realize what that means. Out on the Rim we play rough, and we play for keeps. I know half a hundred ways to set you screaming in three minutes and at least ten of them will not even leave a mark on your skin! Now do we get Service—or don’t we?”

“You’ll go to the Chamber for this—!” snarled the tech.

“All right. But first we broadcast. Then maybe someday a ship that’s run into bad luck’ll have a straighter deal than we’ve had. You get on your post. And we’ll have the play back on—remember that. If you don’t give us a clear channel we’ll know it. How about it, Rip—how’s Hovan?”

Rip’s face was a mask of worry. “He must have had a full dose. I can’t bring him around.”

Was this the end of their bold bid? Let each or all of them go before the screen to plead their case, let them show the caged pest. But without the professional testimony of the Medic, the weight of an expert opinion on their side, they were licked. Well, sometimes luck did not ride a man’s fins all the way in.

But some stubborn core within Dane refused to let him believe that they had lost. He went over to the Medic huddled in a chair. To all appearances Hovan was deeply asleep, sunk in the semi-coma the sleep ray produced. And the frustrating thing was that the man himself could have supplied the counter to his condition, given them the instructions how to bring him around. How many hours away was a natural awaking? Long before that their hold on the station would be broken—they would be in the custody of either Police or Patrol.

“He’s sunk—” Dane voiced the belief which put an end to their hopes. But Ali did not seem concerned.

Kamil was standing with their captive, an odd expression on his handsome face as if he were striving to recall some dim memory. When he spoke it was to the Com-tech. “You have an HD OS here?”

The other registered surprise. “I think so—”

Ali made an abrupt gesture. “Make sure,” he ordered, following the man into another room. Dane looked to Rip for enlightenment.

“What in the Great Nebula is an HD OS?”

“I’m no engineer. It may be some gadget to get us out of here—”

“Such as a pair of wings?” Dane was inclined to be sarcastic. The memory of that incandescent circle on the door some twenty floors below stayed with him. Tempers of Police and Patrol were not going to be improved by fighting their way around or over the obstacles the Traders had arranged to delay them. If they caught up to the outlaws before the latter had their chance for an impartial hearing, the result was not going to be a happy one as far as the Queen’s men were concerned.

Ali appeared in the doorway. “Bring Hovan in here.” Together Rip and Dane carried the Medic into a smaller chamber where they found Ali and the tech busy lashing a small, lightweight tube chair to a machine which, to their untutored eyes, had the semblance of a collection of bars. Obeying instructions they seated Hovan in that chair, fastening him in, while the Medic continued to slumber peacefully. Uncomprehendingly Rip and Dane stepped back while, under Ali’s watchful eye, the Com-tech made adjustments and finally snapped some hidden switch.

Dane discovered that he dared not watch too closely what followed. Inured as he thought he was to the tricks of Hyperspace, to acceleration and anti-gravity, the oscillation of that swinging seat, the weird swaying of the half-recumbent figure, did things to his sight and to his sense of balance which seemed perilous in the extreme. But when the groan broke through the hum of Ali’s mysterious machine, all of them knew that the Engineer-apprentice had found the answer to their problem, that Hovan was waking.

The Medic was bleary-eyed and inclined to stagger when they freed him. And for several minutes he seemed unable to grasp either his surroundings or the train of events which had brought him there.

Long since the Police must have broken into the entrance corridor below. Perhaps they had by now secured a riser which would bring them up. Ali had forced the Com-tech to throw the emergency control which was designed to seal off from the outer world the entire unit in which they now were. But whether that protective device would continue to hold now, none of the three were certain. Time was running out fast.

Supporting the wobbling Hovan, they went back into the panel room and under Ali’s supervision the Com-tech took his place at the control board. Dane put the cage with the pest well to the fore on the table of the announcer and waited for Rip to take his place there with the trembling Medic. When Shannon did not move Dane glanced up in surprise—this was no time to hesitate. But he discovered that the attention of both his shipmates was now centered on him. Rip pointed to the seat.

“You’re the talk merchant, aren’t you?” the acting commander of the Queen asked crisply. “Now’s the time to shout the Lingo—”

They couldn’t mean—! But it was very evident that they did. Of course, a Cargo-master was supposed to be the spokesman of a ship. But that was in matters of trade. And how could he stand there and argue the case for the Queen? He was the newest joined, the greenest member of her crew. Already his mouth was dry and his nerves tense. But Dane didn’t know that none of that was revealed by his face or manner. The usual impassiveness which had masked his inner conflicts since his first days at the Pool served him now. And the others never noted the hesitation with which he approached the announcer’s place.

Dane had scarcely seated himself, one hand resting on the cage of the pest, before Ali brought down two fingers in the sharp sweep which signaled the Com-tech to duty. Far above them there was a whisper of sound which signified the opening of the play-back. They would be able to check on whether the broadcast was going out or not. Although Dane could see nothing of the system wide audience which he currently faced, he realized that the room and those in it were now visible on every tuned-in video set. Instead of the factual cast, the listeners were about to be treated to a melodrama which was as wild as their favorite romances. It only needed the break-in of the Patrol to complete the illusion of action-fiction—crime variety.

A second finger moved in his direction and Dane leaned forward. He faced only the folds of a wall wide curtain, but he must keep in mind that in truth there was a sea of faces before him, the faces of those whom he and Hovan, working together, must convince if he were to save the Queen and her crew.

He found his voice and it was steady and even, he might have been outlining some stowage problem for Van Rycke’s approval.

“People of Terra—”

Martian, Venusian, Asteroid colonist—inwardly they were still all Terran and on that point he would rest. He was a Terran appealing to his own kind.

“People of Terra, we come before you to ask justice—” from somewhere the words came easily, flowing from his lips to center on a patch of light ahead. And that “justice” rang with a kind of reassurance.

Chapter XVII

IN CUSTODY

“To those of you who do not travel the star trails our case may seem puzzling—” the words were coming easily. Dane gathered confidence as he spoke, intent on making those others out there know what it meant to be outlawed.

“We are Patrol Posted, outlawed as a plague ship,” he confessed frankly. “But this is our true story—”

Swiftly, with a flow of language he had not known he could command, Dane swung into the story of Sargol, of the pest they had carried away from that world. And at the proper moment he thrust a gloved hand into the cage and brought out the wriggling thing which struck vainly with its poisoned talons, holding it above the dark table so that those unseen watchers could witness the dramatic change of color which made it such a menace. Dane continued the story of the Queen’s ill-fated voyage—of their forced descent upon the E-Stat.

“Ask the truth of Inter-Solar,” he demanded of the audience beyond those walls. “We were no pirates. They will discover in their records the vouchers we left.” Then Dane described the weird hunt when, led by the Hoobat, they had finally found and isolated the menace, and their landing in the heart of the Big Burn. He followed that with his own quest for medical aid, the kidnapping of Hovan. At that point he turned to the Medic.

“This is Medic Hovan. He has consented to appear in our behalf and to testify to the truth—that the Solar Queen has not been stricken by some unknown plague, but infested with a living organism we now have under control—” For a suspenseful second or two he wondered if Hovan was going to make it. The man looked shaken and sick, as if the drastic awaking they had subjected him to had left him too dazed to pull himself together.

But out of some hidden reservoir of strength the Medic summoned the energy he needed. And his testimony was all they had hoped it would be. Though now and then he strayed into technical terms. But, Dane thought, their use only enhanced the authority of his description of what he had discovered on board the spacer and what he had done to counteract the power of the poison. When he had done Dane added a few last words.

“We have broken the law,” he admitted forthrightly, “but we were fighting in self-defense. All we ask now is the privilege of an impartial investigation, a chance to defend ourselves—such as any of you take for granted on Terra—before the courts of this planet—” But he was not to finish without interruption.

From the play-back over their heads another voice blared, breaking across his last words:

“Surrender! This is the Patrol. Surrender or take the consequences!” And that faint sighing which signaled their open contact with the outer world was cut off. The Com-tech turned away from the control board, a sneering half smile on his face.

“They’ve reached the circuit and cut you off. You’re done!”

Dane stared into the cage where the now almost invisible thing sat humped together. He had done his best—they had all done their best. He felt nothing but a vast fatigue, an overwhelming weariness, not so much of body, but of nerve and spirit too.

Rip broke the silence with a question aimed at the tech. “Can you signal below?”

“Going to give up?” The fellow brightened. “Yes, there’s an inter-com I can cut in.”

Rip stood up. He unbuckled the belt about his waist and laid it on the table—disarming himself. Without words Ali and Dane followed his example. They had played their hand—to prolong the struggle would mean nothing. The acting Captain of the Queen gave a last order:

“Tell them we are coming down unarmed—to surrender.” He paused in front of Hovan. “You’d better stay here. If there’s any trouble—no reason for you to be caught in the middle.”

Hovan nodded as the three left the room. Dane, remembering the trick he had pulled with the riser, made a comment:

“We may be marooned here—”

Ali shrugged. “Then we can just wait and let them collect us.” He yawned, his dark eyes set in smudges. “I don’t care if they’ll just let us sleep the clock around afterwards. D’you really think,” he addressed Rip, “that we’ve done ourselves any good?”

Rip neither denied nor confirmed. “We took our only chance. Now it’s up to them—” He pointed to the wall and the teeming world which lay beyond it.

Ali grinned wryly. “I note you left the what-you-call-it with Hovan.”

“He wanted one to experiment with,” Dane replied. “I thought he’d earned it.”

“And now here comes what we’ve earned—” Rip cut in as the hum of the riser came to their ears.

“Should we take to cover?” Ali’s mobile eyebrows underlined his demand. “The forces of law and order may erupt with blasters blazing.”

But Rip did not move. He faced the riser door squarely and, drawn by something in that stance of his, the other two stepped in on either side so that they fronted the dubious future as a united group. Whatever came now, the Queen’s men would meet it together.

In a way Ali was right. The four men who emerged all had their blasters or riot stun-rifles at ready, and the sights of those weapons were trained at the middles of the Free Traders. As Dane’s empty hands, palm out, went up on a line with his shoulders, he estimated the opposition. Two were in the silver and black of the Patrol, two wore the forest green of the Terrapolice. But they all looked like men with whom it was better not to play games.

And it was clear they were prepared to take no chances with the outlaws. In spite of the passiveness of the Queen’s men, their hands were locked behind them with force bars about their wrists. When a quick search revealed that the three were unarmed, they were herded onto the riser by two of their captors, while the other pair remained behind, presumably to uncover any damage they had done to the Tower installations.

The police did not speak except for a few terse words among themselves and a barked order to march, delivered to the prisoners. Very shortly they were in the entrance hall facing the wreckage of the crawler and doors through which a ragged gap had been burned. Ali viewed the scene with his usual detachment.

“Nice job,” he commended Dane’s enterprise. “They’ll have a moving—”

“Get going!” A heavy hand between his shoulder blades urged him on.

The Engineer-apprentice whirled, his eyes blazing. “Keep your hands to yourself! We aren’t mine fodder yet. I think that the little matter of a trial comes first—”

“You’re Posted,” the Patrolman was openly contemptuous.

Dane was chilled. For the first time that aspect of their predicament really registered. Posted outlaws might, within reason, be shot on sight without further recourse to the law. If that label stuck on the crew of the Queen, they had practically no chance at all. And when he saw that Ali was no longer inclined to retort, he knew that fact had dawned upon Kamil also. It would all depend upon how big an impression their broadcast had made. If public opinion veered to their side—then they could defend themselves legally. Otherwise the moon mines might be the best sentence they dare hope for.

They were pushed out into the brilliant sunlight. There stood the Queen, her meteor scarred side reflecting the light of her native sun. And ringed around her at a safe distance was what seemed to be a small mechanized army corps. The authorities were making very sure that no more rebels would burst from her interior.

Dane thought that they would be loaded into a mobile or ‘copter and taken away. But instead they were marched down, through the ranks of portable flamers, scramblers, and other equipment, to an open space where anyone on duty at the visa-screen within the control cabin of the spacer could see them. An officer of the Patrol, the sun making an eye-blinding flash of his lightning sword breast badge, stood behind a loud speaker. When he perceived that the three prisoners were present, he picked up a hand mike and spoke into it—his voice so being relayed over the field as clearly as it must be reaching Weeks inside the sealed freighter.

“You have five minutes to open hatch. Your men have been taken. Five minutes to open hatch and surrender.”

Ali chuckled. “And how does he think he’s going to enforce that?” he inquired of the air and incidentally of the guards now forming a square about the three. “He’ll need more than a flamer to unlatch the old girl if she doesn’t care for his offer.”

Privately Dane agreed with that. He hoped that Weeks would decide to hold out—at least until they had a better idea of what the future would be. No tool or weapon he saw in the assembly about them was forceful enough to penetrate the shell of the Queen. And there were sufficient supplies on board to keep Weeks and his charges going for at least a week. Since Tau had shown signs of coming out of his coma, it might even be that the crew of the ship would arouse to their own defense in that time. It all depended upon Weeks’ present decision.

No hatch yawned in the ship’s sleek sides. She might have been an inert derelict for all response to that demand. Dane’s confidence began to rise. Weeks had picked up the challenge, he would continue to baffle police and Patrol.

Just how long that stalemate would have lasted they were not to know for another player came on the board. Through the lines of besiegers Hovan, escorted by the Patrolmen, made his way up to the officer at the mike station. There was something in his air which suggested that he was about to give battle. And the conversation at the mike was relayed across the field, a fact of which they were not at once aware.

“There are sick men in there—” Hovan’s voice boomed out. “I demand the right to return to duty—”

“If and when they surrender they shall all be accorded necessary aid,” that was the officer. But he made no impression on the Medic from the frontier. Dane, by chance, had chosen better support than he had guessed.

“Pro Bono Publico—” Hovan invoked the battle cry of his own Service. “For the Public Good—”

“A plague ship—” the officer was beginning. Hovan waved that aside impatiently.

“Nonsense!” His voice scaled up across the field. “There is no plague aboard. I am willing to certify that before the Council. And if you refuse these men medical attention—which they need—I shall cite the case all the way to my Board!”

Dane drew a deep breath. That was taking off on their orbit! Not being one of the Queen’s crew, in fact having good reason to be angry over his treatment at their hands, Hovan’s present attitude would or should carry weight.

The Patrol officer who was not yet ready to concede all points had an answer: “If you are able to get on board—go.”

Hovan snatched the mike from the astonished officer. “Weeks!” His voice was imperative. “I’m coming aboard—alone!”

All eyes were on the ship and for a short period it would seem that Weeks did not trust the Medic. Then, high in her needle nose, one of the escape ports, not intended for use except in dire emergency opened and allowed a plastic link ladder to fall link by link.

Out of the corner of his eye Dane caught a flash of movement to his left. Manacled as he was he threw himself on the policeman who was aiming a stun rifle into the port. His shoulder struck the fellow waist high and his weight carried them both with a bruising crash to the concrete pavement as Rip shouted and hands clutched roughly at the now helpless Cargo-apprentice.

He was pulled to his feet, tasting the flat sweetness of blood where a flailing blow from the surprised and frightened policeman had cut his lip against his teeth. He spat red and glowered at the ring of angry men.

“Why don’t you kick him?” Ali inquired, a vast and blistering contempt sawtoothing his voice. “He’s got his hands cuffed so he’s fair game—”

“What’s going on here?” An officer broke through the ring. The policeman, on his feet once more, snatched up the rifle Dane’s attack had knocked out of his hold.

“Your boy here,” Ali was ready with an answer, “tried to find a target inside the hatch. Is this the usual way you conduct a truce, sir?”

He was answered by a glare and the rifleman was abruptly ordered to the rear. Dane, his head clearing, looked at the Queen. Hovan was climbing the ladder—he was within arm’s length of that half open hatch. The very fact that the Medic had managed to make his point stick was, in a faint way, encouraging. But the three were not allowed to enjoy that small victory for long. They were marched from the field, loaded into a mobile and taken to the city several miles away. It was the Patrol who held them in custody—not the Terrapolice. Dane was not sure whether that was to be reckoned favorable or not. As a Free Trader he had a grudging respect for the organization he had seen in action on Limbo.

Sometime later they found themselves, freed of the force bars, alone in a room which, bare walled as it was, did have a bench on which all three sank thankfully. Dane caught the warning gesture from Ali—they were under unseen observation and they must have a listening audience too—located somewhere in the maze of offices.

“They can’t make up their minds,” the Engineer-apprentice settled his shoulders against the wall. “Either we’re desperate criminals, or we’re heroes. They’re going to let time decide.”

“If we’re heroes,” Dane asked a little querulously, “what are we doing locked up here? I’d like a few earth-side comforts—beginning with a full meal—”

“No thumb printing, no psycho testing,” Rip mused. “Yes, they haven’t put us through the system yet.”

“And we decidedly aren’t the forgotten men. Wipe your face, child,” Ali said to Dane, “you’re still dribbling.”

The Cargo-apprentice smeared his hand across his chin and brought it away red and sticky. Luckily his teeth remained intact.

“We need Hovan to read them more law,” observed Kamil. “You should have medical attention.”

Dane dabbed at his mouth. He didn’t need all that solicitude, but he guessed that Ali was talking for the benefit of those who now kept them under surveillance.

“Speaking of Hovan—I wonder what became of that pest he was supposed to have under control. He didn’t bring the cage with him when he came out of the Tower, did he?” asked Rip.

“If it gets loose in that building,” Dane decided to give the powers who held them in custody something to think about, “they’ll have trouble. Practically invisible and poisonous. And maybe it can reproduce its kind, too. We don’t know anything about it—”

Ali laughed. “Such fun and games! Imagine a hundred of the dear creatures flitting in and out of the broadcasting section. And Captain Jellico has the only Hoobat on Terra! He can name his own terms for rounding up the plague. The whole place will be filled with sleepers before they’re through—”

Would that scrap of information send some Patrolmen hurtling off to the Tower in search of the caged creature? The thought of such an expedition was, in a small way, comforting to the captives.

An hour or so later they were fed, noiselessly and without visible attendants, when three trays slid through a slit in the wall at floor level. Rip’s nose wrinkled.

“Now I get the vector! We’re plague-ridden—keep aloof and watch to see if we break out in purple spots!”

Ali was lifting thermo lids from the containers and now he suddenly arose and bowed in the direction of the blank wall. “Many, many thanks,” he intoned. “Nothing but the best—a sub-commander’s rations at least! We shall deliver top star rating to this thoughtfulness when we are questioned by the powers that shine.”

It was good food. Dane ate cautiously because of his torn lip, but the whole adventure took on a more rose-colored hue. The lapse of time before they were put through the usual procedure followed with criminals, this excellent dinner—it was all promising. The Patrol could not yet be sure how they were to be handled.

“They’ve fed us,” Ali observed as he clanged the last dish back on a tray. “Now you’d think they’d bed us. I could do with several days—and nights—of bunk time right about now.”

But that hint was not taken up and they continued to sit on the bench as time limped by. According to Dane’s watch it must be night now, though the steady light in the windowless room did not vary. What had Hovan discovered in the Queen? Had he been able to rouse any of the crew? And was the spacer still inviolate, or had the Terrapolice and the Patrol managed to take her over?

He was so very tired, his eyes felt as if hot sand had been poured beneath the lids, his body ached. And at last he nodded into naps from which he awoke with jerks of the neck. Rip was frankly asleep, his shoulders and head resting against the wall, while Ali lounged with closed eyes. Though the Cargo-apprentice was sure that Kamil was more alert than his comrades, as if he waited for something he thought was soon to occur.

Dane dreamed. Once more he trod the reef rising out of Sargol’s shallow sea. But he held no weapon and beneath the surface of the water a gorp lurked. When he reached the break in the water-washed rock just ahead, the spidery horror would strike and against its attack he was defenseless. Yet he must march on for he had no control over his own actions!

“Wake up!” Ali’s hand was on his shoulder, shaking him back and forth with something close to gentleness. “Must you give an imitation of a space-whirly moonbat?”

“The gorp—” Dane came back to the present and flushed. He dreaded admitting to a nightmare—especially to Ali whose poise he had always found disconcerting.

“No gorps here. Nothing but—”

Kamil’s words were lost in the escape of metal against metal as a panel slide back in the wall. But no guard wearing the black and silver of the Patrol stepped through to summon them to trial. Van Rycke stood in the opening, half smiling at them with his customary sleepy benevolence.

“Well, well, and here’s our missing ones,” his purring voice was the most beautiful sound Dane thought he had ever heard.

Chapter XVIII

BARGAIN CONCLUDED

“—and so we landed here, sir,” Rip concluded his report in the matter-of-fact tone he might have used in describing a perfectly ordinary voyage, say between Terraport and Luna City, a run of no incident and dull cargo carrying.

The crew of the Solar Queen, save for Tau, were assembled in a room somewhere in the vastness of Patrol Headquarters. Since the room seemed a comfortable conference chamber, Dane thought that their status must now be on a higher level than that of Patrol Posted outlaws. But he was also sure that if they attempted to walk out of the building that effort would not be successful.

Van Rycke sat stolidly in his chosen seat, fingers of both hands laced across his substantial middle. He had sat as impassively as the Captain while Rip had outlined their adventures since they had all been stricken. Though the other listeners had betrayed interest in the story, the senior officers made no comments. Now Jellico turned to his Cargo-master.

“How about it, Van?”

“What’s done is done—”

Dane’s elation vanished as if ripped away by a Sargolian storm wind. The Cargo-master didn’t approve. So there must have been another way to achieve their ends—one the younger members of the crew had been too inexperienced or too dense to see—

“If we blasted off today we might just make cargo contract.”

Dane started. That was it! The point they had lost sight of during their struggles to get aid. There was no possible chance of upping the ship today—probably not for days to come—or ever, if the case went against them. So they had broken contract—and the Board would be down on them for that. Dane shivered inside. He could try to fight back against the Patrol—there had always been a slight feeling of rivalry between the Free Traders and the space police. But you couldn’t buck the Board—and keep your license and so have a means of staying in space. A broken contract could cut one off from the stars forever. Captain Jellico looked very bleak at that reminder.

“The Eysies will be all ready to step in. I’d like to know why they were so sure we had the plague on board—”

Van Rycke snorted. “I can supply you five answers to that—for one they may have known the affinity of those creatures for the wood, and it would be easy to predict as a result of our taking a load on board—or again they may have deliberately planted the things on us through the Salariki—But we can’t ever prove it. It remains that they are going to get for themselves the Sargolian contract unless—” He stopped short, staring straight ahead of him at the wall between Rip and Dane. And his assistant knew that Van was exploring a fresh idea. Van’s ideas were never to be despised and Jellico did not now disturb the Cargo-master with questions.

It was Rip who spoke next and directly to the Captain. “Do you know what they plan to do about us, sir?”

Captain Jellico grunted and there was a sardonic twist to his mouth as he replied, “It’s my opinion that they’re now busy adding up the list of crimes you four have committed—maybe they had to turn the big HG computer loose on the problem. The tally isn’t in yet. We gave them our automat flight record and that ought to give them more food for thought.”

Dane speculated as to what the experts would make of the mechanical record of the Queen’s past few weeks—the section dealing with their landing in the Big Burn ought to be a little surprising. Van Rycke got to his feet and marched to the door of the conference room. It was opened from without so quickly Dane was sure that they had been under constant surveillance.

“Trade business,” snapped the Cargo-master, “contract deal. Take me to a sealed com booth!”

Contracts might not be as sacred to the protective Service as they were to Trade, but Trade had its powers and since Van Rycke, an innocent bystander of the Queen’s troubles, could not legally be charged with any crime, he was escorted out of the room. But the door panel was sealed behind him, shutting in the rest with the unspoken warning that they were not free agents. Jellico leaned back in his chair and stretched. Long years of close friendship had taught him that his Cargo-master was to be trusted with not only the actual trading and cargo tending, but could also think them out of some of the tangles which could not be solved by his own direct action methods. Direct action had been applied to their present problem—now the rest was up to Van, and he was willing to delegate all responsibility.

But they were not left long to themselves. The door opened once more to admit star rank Patrolmen. None of the Free Traders arose. As members of another Service they considered themselves equals. And it was their private boast that the interests of Galactic civilization, as represented by the black and silver, often followed, not preceded the brown tunics into new quarters of the universe.

However, Rip, Ali, Dane, and Weeks answered as fully as they could the flood of questions which engulfed them. They explained in detail their visit to the E-Stat, the landing in the Big Burn, the kidnapping of Hovan. Dane’s stubborn feeling of being in the right grew in opposition to the questioning. Under the same set of circumstances how would that Commander—that Wing Officer—that Senior Scout—now all seated there—have acted? And every time they inferred that his part in the affair had been illegal he stiffened.

Sure, there had to be law and order out on the Rim—and doubly sure it had to cover and protect life on the softer planets of the inner systems. He wasn’t denying that on Limbo, he, for one, had been very glad to see the Patrol blast their way into the headquarters of the pirates holed up on that half-dead world. And he was never contemptuous of the men in the field. But like all Free Traders he was influenced by a belief that too often the laws as enforced by the Patrol favored the wealth and might of the Companies, that law could be twisted and the Patrol sent to push through actions which, though legal, were inherently unfair to those who had not the funds to fight it out in the far off Council courts. Just as now he was certain that the Eysies were bringing all the influence they had to bear here against the Queen’s men. And Inter-Solar had a lot of influence.

At the end of their ordeal their statements were read back to them from the recording tape and they thumb signed them. Were these statements or confessions, Dane mused. Perhaps in their honest reports they had just signed their way into the moon mines. Only there was no move to lead them out and book them. And when Weeks pressed his thumb at the bottom of the tape, Captain Jellico took a hand. He looked at his watch.

“It is now ten hours,” he observed. “My men need rest, and we all want food. Are you through with us?”

The Commander was spokesman for the other group. “You are to remain in quarantine, Captain. Your ship has not yet been passed as port-free. But you will be assigned quarters—”

Once again they were marched through blank halls to the other section of the sprawling Patrol Headquarters. No windows looked upon the outer world, but there were bunks and a small mess alcove. Ali, Dane, and Rip turned in, more interested in sleep than food. And the last thing the Cargo-apprentice remembered was seeing Jellico talking earnestly with Steen Wilcox as they both sipped steaming mugs of real Terran coffee.

But with twelve hours of sleep behind them the three were less contented in confinement. No one had come near them and Van Rycke had not returned. Which fact the crew clung to as a ray of hope. Somewhere the Cargo-master must be fighting their battle. And all Van’s vast store of Trade knowledge, all his knack of cutting corners and driving a shrewd bargain, enlisted on their behalf, must win them some concessions.

Medic Tau came in, bringing Hovan with him. Both looked tired but triumphant. And their report was a shot in the arm for the now uneasy Traders.

“We’ve rammed it down their throats,” Tau announced. “They’re willing to admit that it was those poison bugs and not a plague. Incidentally,” he grinned at Jellico and then looked around expectantly, “where’s Van? This comes in his department. We’re going to cash in on those the kids dumped in the deep freeze. Terra-Lab is bidding on them. I said to see Van—he can arrange the best deal for us. Where is he?”

“Gone to see about our contract,” Jellico reported. “What’s the news about our status now?”

“Well, they’ve got to wipe out the plague ship listing. Also—we’re big news. There’re about twenty video men rocketing around out in the offices trying to get in and have us do some spot broadcasts. Seems that the children here,” he jerked his thumb at the three apprentices, “started something. An inter-solar invasion couldn’t be bigger news! Human interest by the tankful. I’ve been on Video twice and they’re trying to sign up Hovan almost steady—”

The Medic from the frontier nodded. “Wanted me to appear on a three week schedule,” he chuckled. “I was asked to come in on ‘Our Heroes of the Starlines’ and two Quiz programs. As for you, you young criminal,” he swung to Dane, “you’re going to be fair game for about three networks. It seems you transmit well,” he uttered the last as if it were an accusation and Dane squirmed. “Anyway you did something with your crazy stunt. And, Captain, three men want to buy your Hoobat. I gather they are planning a showing of how it captures those pests. So be prepared—”

Dane tried to visualize a scene in which he shared top billing with Queex and shuddered. All he wanted now was to get free of Terra for a nice, quiet, uncomplicated world where problems could be settled with a sleep rod or a blaster and the Video screen was unknown.

Having heard of what awaited them without, the men of the Queen were more content to be incarcerated in the quarantine section. But as time wore on and the Cargo-master did not return, their anxieties awoke. They were fairly sure by now that any penalty the Patrol or the Terrapolice would impose would not be too drastic. But a broken contract was another and more serious affair—a matter which might ground them more effectively than any rule of the law enforcement bodies. And Jellico took to pacing the room, while Tang and Wilcox who had started a game of four dimensional chess made countless errors of move, and Stotz glared moodily at the wall, apparently too sunk in his own gloomy thoughts to rise from the mess table in the alcove.

Though time had ceased to have much meaning for them except as an irritating reminder of the now sure failure of their Sargolian venture, they marked the hours into a second full day of detention before Van Rycke finally put in appearance. The Cargo-master was plainly tired, but he showed no signs of discomposure. In fact as he came in he was humming what he fondly imagined was a popular tune.

Jellico asked no questions, he merely regarded his trusted officer with a quizzically raised eyebrow. But the others drew around. It was so apparent that Van Rycke was pleased with himself. Which could only mean that in some fantastic way he had managed to bring their venture down in a full fin landing, that somehow he had argued the Queen out of danger into a position where he could control the situation.

He halted just within the doorway and eyed Dane, Ali, and Rip with mock severity. “You’re baaaad boys,” he told them with a shake of the head and a drawl of the adjective. “You’ve been demoted ten files each on the list.”

Which must put him on the bottom rung once more, Dane calculated swiftly. Or even below—though he didn’t see how he could fall beneath the rank he held at assignment. However, he found the news heartening instead of discouraging. Compared to a bleak sentence at the moon mines such demotion was absolutely nothing and he knew that Van Rycke was breaking the worst news first.

“You also forfeit all pay for this voyage,” the Cargo-master was continuing. But Jellico broke in.

“Board fine?”

At the Cargo-master’s nod, Jellico added. “Ship pays that.”

“So I told them,” Van Rycke agreed. “The Queen’s warned off Terra for ten solar years—”

They could take that, too. Other Free Traders got back to their home ports perhaps once in a quarter century. It was so much less than they had expected that the sentence was greeted with a concentrated sigh of relief.

“No earth-side leave—”

All right—no leave. They were not, after their late experiences so entranced with Terraport that they wanted to linger in its environs any longer than they had to.

“We lose the Sargol contract—”

That did hurt. But they had resigned themselves to it since the hour when they had realized that they could not make it back to the perfumed planet.

“To Inter-Solar?” Wilcox asked the important question.

Van Rycke was smiling broadly, as if the loss he had just announced was in some way a gain. “No—to Combine!”

“Combine?” the Captain echoed and his puzzlement was duplicated around the circle. How did Inter-Solar’s principal rival come into it?

“We’ve made a deal with Combine,” Van Rycke informed them. “I wasn’t going to let I-S cash in on our loss. So I went to Vickers at Combine and told him the situation. He understands that we were in solid with the Salariki and that the Eysies are not. And a chance to point a blaster at I-S’s tail is just what he has been waiting for. The shipment will go out to the storm priests tomorrow on a light cruiser—it’ll make it on time.”

Yes, a light cruiser, one of the fast ships maintained by the big Companies, could make the transition to Sargol with a slight margin to spare. Stotz nodded his approval at this practical solution.

“I’m going with it—” That did jerk them all up short. For Van Rycke to leave the Queen—that was as unthinkable as if Captain Jellico had suddenly announced that he was about to retire and become a kelp farmer. “Just for the one trip,” the Cargo-master hastened to assure them. “I smooth their vector with the storm priests and hand over so the Eysies will be frozen out—”

Captain Jellico interrupted at that point. “D’you mean that Combine is buying us out—not just taking over? What kind of a deal—”

But Van Rycke, his smile a brilliant stretch across his plump face, was nodding in agreement. “They’re taking over our contract and our place with the Salariki.”

“In return for what?” Steen Wilcox asked for them all.

“For twenty-five thousand credits and a mail run between Xecho and Trewsworld—frontier planets. They’re far enough from Terra to get around the exile ruling. The Patrol will escort us out and see that we get down to work like good little space men. We’ll have two years of a nice, quiet run on regular pay. Then, when all the powers that shine have forgotten about us, we can cut in on the trade routes again.”

“And the pay?” “First or second class mail?” “When do we start?”

“Standard pay on the completion of each run—Board rates,” he made replies in order. “First, second and third class mail—anything that bears the government seal and out in those quarters it is apt to be anything! And you start as soon as you can get to Xecho and relieve the Combine scout which has been holding down the run.”

“While you go to Sargol—” commented Jellico.

“While I make one voyage to Sargol. You can spare me,” he dropped one of his big hands on Dane’s shoulder and gave the flesh beneath it a quick squeeze. “Seeing as how our juniors helped pull us out of this last mix-up we can trust them about an inch farther than we did before. Anyway—Cargo-master on a mail run is more or less a thumb-twiddling job at the best. And you can trust Thorson on stowage—that’s one thing he does know.” Which dubious ending left Dane wondering as to whether he had been complimented or warned. “I’ll be on board again before you know it—the Combine will ship me out to Trewsworld on your second trip across and I’ll join ship there. For once we won’t have to worry for awhile. Nothing can happen on a mail run.” He shook his head at the three youngest members of the crew. “You’re in for a very dull time—and it will serve you right. Give you a chance to learn your jobs so that when you come up for reassignment you can pick up some of those files you were just demoted. Now,” he started briskly for the door, “I’ll tranship to the Combine cruiser. I take it that you don’t want to meet the Video people?”

At their hasty agreement to that, he laughed. “Well, the Patrol doesn’t want the Video spouting about ‘high-handed official news suppression’ so about an hour or so from now you’ll be let out the back way. They put the Queen in a cradle and a field scooter will take you to her. You’ll find her serviced for a take-off to Luna City. You can refit there for deep space. Frankly the sooner you get off-world the happier all ranks are going to be—both here and on the Board. It will be better for us to walk softly for a while and let them forget that the Solar Queen and her crazy crew exists. Separately and together you’ve managed to break—or at least bend—half the laws in the books and they’d like to have us out of their minds.”

Captain Jellico stood up. “They aren’t any more anxious to see us go than we are to get out of here. You’ve pulled it off for us again, Van, and we’re lucky to get out of it this easy—”

Van Rycke rolled his eyes ceilingward. “You’ll never know how lucky! Be glad Combine hates the space I-S blasts through. We were able to use that to our advantage. Get the big fellows at each others’ throats and they’ll stop annoying us—simple proposition but it works. Anyway we’re set in blessed and peaceful obscurity now. Thank the Spirit of Free Space there’s practically no trouble one can get into on a safe and sane mail route!”

But Cargo-master Van Rycke, in spite of knowing the Solar Queen and the temper of her crew, was exceedingly over-optimistic when he made that emphatic statement.

The End.

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The Liberation of Earth (Full Text) by William Tenn

This is the full text of a classic science fiction story called the “Liberation of Earth” by William Tenn. It was first published in the May 1953 issue of the Future Science Fiction monthly magazine, this amusing, insightful and thought-provoking satire of human pretentiousness in a galactic environment. Indeed; the Earth is invaded by warring very-superior, very-different and very-uncaring aliens, with very terrifying results. This was one of the best stories of the distinguished university professor Philip Klass (1920-2010). He was the author of some 60-odd excellent science-fiction stories, mostly under the pen-name of William Tenn.

LIBERATION OF EARTH

THIS, THEN is the story of our liberation. Suck air and grab clusters. Heigh-ho, here is the tale.

August was the month, a Tuesday in August. These words are meaningless now, so far have we progressed; but many things known and discussed by our primitive ancestors, our unliberated, unreconstructed forefathers, are devoid of sense to our free minds.

Still the tale must be told, with all of its incredible place-names and vanished points of reference.

Why must it be told? Have any of you a better thing to do? We have had water and weeds and lie in a valley of gusts. So rest, relax and listen. And suck air, suck air.

On a Tuesday in August, the ship appeared in the sky over France in a part of the world then known as Europe. Five miles long the ship was, and word has come down to us that it looked like an enormous silver cigar.

The tale goes on to tell of the panic and consternation among our forefathers when the ship abruptly materialized in the summer-blue sky. How they ran, how they shouted, how they pointed!
How they excitedly notified the United Nations, one of their chiefest institutions, that a strange metal craft of incredible size had materialized over their land. How they sent an order here to cause military aircraft to surround it with loaded weapons, gave instructions there for hastily-grouped scientists, with signaling apparatus, to approach it with friendly gestures. How, under the great ship, men with cameras took pictures of it; men with typewriters wrote stories about it; and men with concessions sold models of it.

All these things did our ancestors, enslaved and unknowing, do.
Then a tremendous slab snapped up in the middle of the ship and the first of the aliens stepped out in the complex tripodal gait that all humans were shortly to know and love so well. He wore a metallic garment to protect him from the effects of our atmospheric peculiarities, a garment of the opaque, loosely-folded type that these, the first of our liberators, wore throughout their stay on Earth.

Speaking in a language none could understand, but booming deafeningly through a huge mouth about halfway up his twenty-five feet of height, the alien discoursed for exactly one hour, waited politely for a response when he had finished, and, receiving none, retired into the ship.

That night; the first of our liberation! Or the first of our first liberation, should I say? That night, anyhow! Visualize our ancestors scurrying about their primitive intricacies: playing ice-hockey, televising, smashing atoms, red-baiting, conducting giveaway shows and signing affidavits—all the incredible minutiae that made the olden times such a frightful mass of cumulative detail in which to live—as compared with the breathless and majestic simplicity of the present.

THE BIG question, of course, was —what had the alien said? Had he called on the human race to surrender? Had he announced that he was on a mission of peaceful trade and, having made what he considered a reasonable offer—for, let us say, the north polar ice-cap—politely withdrawn so that we could discuss his terms among ourselves in relative privacy? Or, possibly, had he merely announced that he was the newly appointed ambassador to Earth from a friendly and intelligent race—and would we please direct him to the proper authority so that he might submit his credentials?

Not to know was quite maddening.

Since decision rested with the diplomats, it was the last possibility which was held, very late that night, to be most likely; and early the next morning, accordingly, a delegation from the United Nations waited under the belly of the motionless star-ship. The delegation had been instructed to welcome the aliens to the outermost limits of its collective linguistic ability. As an additional earnest of mankind’s friendly intentions, all military craft patrolling the air about the great ship were ordered to carry no more than one atom-bomb in their racks, and to fly a small white flag—along with the U.N. banner and their own national emblem.

Thus, did our ancestors face this, the ultimate challenge of history.

When the alien came forth a few hours later, the delegation stepped up to him, bowed, and, in the three official languages of the United Nations —English, French and Russian—asked him to consider this planet his home. He listened to them gravely, and then launched into his talk of the day before—which was evidently as highly charged with emotion and significance to him, as it was completely incomprehensible to the representatives of world government.

Fortunately, a cultivated young Indian member of the secretariat detected a suspicious similarity between the speech of the alien and an obscure Bengali dialect whose anomalies he had once puzzled over. The reason, as we all know now, was that the last time Earth had been visited by Aliens of this particular type, humanity’s most advanced civilization lay in a moist valley in Bengal; extensive dictionaries of that language had been written, so that speech with the natives of Earth would present no problem to any subsequent exploring-party.

However, I move ahead of my tale, as one who would munch on the succulent roots before the dryer stem. Let me rest and suck air for a moment. Heigh-ho, truly those were tremendous experiences for our kind.

You, sir, now you sit back and listen. You are not yet of an age to Tell the Tale. I remember, well enough do I remember how my father told it, and his father before him. You will wait your turn as I did; you will listen until too much high land between water holes blocks me off from life.

Then you may take your place in the juiciest weed-patch and, reclining gracefully between sprints, recite the great epic of our liberation to the carelessly exercising young.

PURSUANT to the young Hindu’s suggestions, the one professor of comparative linguistics in the world capable of understanding and conversing in this peculiar version of the dead dialect, was summoned from an academic convention in New York where he was reading a paper he had been working on for eighteen years: An Initial Study of Apparent Relationships Between Several Past Participles in Ancient Sanskrit and an Equal Number of Noun Substantives in Modern Szechuanese.

Yea, verily, all these things—and more, many more—did our ancestors in their besotted ignorance contrive to do. May we not count our freedoms indeed?

The disgruntled scholar, minus—as he kept insisting bitterly—some of his most essential word-lists, was flown by fastest jet to the area south of Nancy which, in those long-ago days, lay in the enormous black shadow of the alien space-ship.

Here he was acquainted with his task by the United Nations delegation, whose nervousness had not been allayed by a new and disconcerting development. Several more aliens had emerged from the ship carrying great quantities of immense, shimmering metal which they proceeded to assemble into something that was obviously a machine—though it was taller than any skyscraper man had ever built, and seemed to make noises to itself like a talkative and sentient creature. The first alien still stood courteously in the neighborhood of the profusely perspiring diplomats; ever and anon he would go through his little speech again, in a language that had been almost forgotten when the cornerstone of the library of Alexandria was laid. The men from the U.N. would reply, each one hoping desperately to make up for the alien’s lack of familiarity with his own tongue by such devices as hand-gestures and facial expressions. Much later, a commission of anthropologists and psychologists brilliantly pointed out the difficulties of such physical communication with creatures possessing—as these aliens did—five manual appendages and a single, unwinking compound eye of the type the insects rejoice in.

The problems and agonies of the professor as he was trundled about the world in the wake of the aliens, trying to amass a usable vocabulary in a language whose peculiarities he could only extrapolate from the limited samples supplied him by one who must inevitably speak it with the most outlandish of foreign accents—these vexations were minor indeed compared to the disquiet felt by the representatives of world government. They beheld the extra-terrestrial visitors move every day to a new site on their planet and proceed to assemble there a titanic structure of flickering metal which muttered nostalgically to itself, as if to keep alive the memory of those faraway factories which had given it birth.

True, there was always the alien who would pause in his evidently supervisory labors to release the set little speech; but not even the excellent manners he displayed, in listening to upwards of fifty-six replies in as many languages, helped dispel the panic caused whenever a human scientist, investigating the shimmering machines, touched a projecting edge and promptly shrank into a disappearing pinpoint. This, while not a frequent occurrence, happened often enough to cause chronic indigestion and insomnia among human administrators.

FINALLY, having used up most of his nervous-system as fuel, the professor collated enough of the language to make conversation possible. He—and, through him, the world—were thereupon told the following:

The aliens were members of a highly-advanced civilization which had spread its culture throughout the entire galaxy. Cognizant of the limitations of the as-yet-underdeveloped animals who had latterly become dominant upon Earth, they had placed us in a sort of benevolent ostracism. Until either we or our institutions would have evolved to a level permitting, say, at least associate membership in the galactic federation (under the sponsoring tutelage, for the first few millennia, of one of the older, more widespread and more important species in that federation)—until that time, all invasions of our privacy and ignorance —except for a few scientific expeditions conducted under conditions of great secrecy—had been strictly forbidden by universal agreement.

Several individuals who had violated this ruling—at great cost to our racial sanity, and enormous profit to our reigning religions—had been so promptly and severely punished that no known infringements had occurred for some time. Our recent growth-curve had been satisfactory enough to cause hopes that a bare thirty or forty centuries more would suffice to place us on applicant status with the federation.

Unfortunately, the peoples of this stellar community were many, and varied as greatly in their ethical outlook as their biological composition. Quite a few species lagged a considerable social distance behind the Dendi, as our visitors called themselves. One of these, a race of horrible, worm-like organisms known as the Troxxt—almost as advanced technologically as they were retarded in moral development—had suddenly volunteered for the position of sole and absolute ruler of the galaxy. They had seized control of several key suns, with their attendant planetary-systems, and, after a calculated decimation of the races thus captured, had announced their intention of punishing with a merciless extinction all species unable to appreciate from these object-lessons the value of unconditional surrender.

In despair, the galactic federation had turned to the Dendi, one of the oldest, most selfless, and yet most powerful of races in civilized space, and commissioned them—as the military arm of the federation—to hunt down the Troxxt, defeat them wherever they had gained illegal suzerainty, and destroy forever their power to wage war.

This order had come almost too late. Everywhere the Troxxt had gained so much the advantage of attack, that the Dendi were able to contain them only by enormous sacrifice. For centuries now, the conflict had careened across our vast island universe. In the course of it, densely-populated planets had been disintegrated; suns had been blasted into novae; and whole groups of stars ground Into swirling cosmic dust. A temporary stalemate had been reached a short while ago, and—reeling and breathless—both sides were using the lull to strengthen weak spots in their perimeter.

Thus, the Troxxt had finally moved into the till-then peaceful section of space that contained our solar-system —among others. They were thoroughly uninterested in our tiny planet with its meager resources; nor did they care much for such celestial neighbors as Mars or Jupiter. They established their headquarters on a planet of Proxima Centaurus—the star nearest our own sun—and proceeded to consolidate their offensive-defensive network between Rigel and Aldebaran. At this point in their explanation, the Dendi pointed out, the exigencies of interstellar strategy tended to become too complicated for anything but three-dimensional maps; let us here accept the simple statement, they suggested, that it became immediately vital for them to strike rapidly, and make the Troxxt position on Proxima Centaurus untenable—to establish a base inside their lines of communication.

The most likely spot for such a base was Earth.

THE DENDI apologized profusely for intruding on our development, an intrusion which might cost us dear in our delicate developmental state. But, as they explained—in impeccable pre-Bengali—before their arrival we had, in effect, become (all unknowingly) a satrapy of the awful Troxxt. We could now consider ourselves liberated.

We thanked them much for that.

Besides, their leader pointed out proudly, the Dendi were engaged in a war for the sake of civilization itself, against an enemy so horrible, so obscene in its nature, and so utterly filthy in its practices, that it was unworthy of the label of intelligent life. They were fighting, not only for themselves, but for every loyal member of the galactic federation; for every small and helpless species; for every obscure race too weak to defend itself against a ravaging conqueror. Would humanity stand aloof from such a conflict?

There was just a slight bit of hesitation as the information was digested. Then—“No!” humanity roared back through such mass-communication media as television, newspapers, reverberating jungle drums and mule-mounted backwoods messenger. “We will not stand aloof! We will help you destroy this menace to the very fabric of civilization! Just tell us what you want us to do!”

Well, nothing in particular, the aliens replied with some embarrassment. Possibly in a little while there might be something—several little things, in fact—which could be quite useful; but, for the moment, if we would concentrate on not getting in their way when they serviced their gun-mounts, they would be very grateful, really…

This reply tended to create a small amount of uncertainty among the two billion of Earth’s human population. For several days afterwards, there was a planet-wide tendency—the legend has come down to us—of people failing to meet each other’s eyes, an evident discomfort in looking at any other person directly.

But then Man rallied from this substantial punch to his pride. He would be useful, be it ever so humbly. to the race which had liberated him from potential subjugation by the ineffably ugly Troxxt. For this, let us remember well our ancestors! Let us hymn their sincere efforts amid their ignorance!

All standing armies, all air and sea fleets, were reorganized into guard-patrols around the Dendi weapons: no human might approach within two miles of the murmuring machinery, without a pass counter-signed by the Dendi. Since they were never known to sign such a pass during the entire period of their stay on this planet, however, this loophole-provision was never exercised as far as is known; and the immediate neighborhood of the extraterrestrial weapons became and remained thenceforth antiseptically free of two-legged creatures.

COOPERATION with our liberators took precedence over all other human activities. The order of the day was a slogan first given voice by a Harvard Professor of Government in a querulous radio round-table on “Man’s Place in a Somewhat Over-Civilized Universe.”

“Let us forget our individual egos and collective conceits,” the professor cried at one point. “Let us subordinate everything—to the end that the freedom of the Solar System in general, and Earth in particular, must and shall be preserved!”

Despite—and possibly because of—its mouth-filling qualities, this slogan was repeated everywhere.

Still, it was difficult sometimes to know exactly what the Dendi wanted—partly because of the limited number of interpreters of the only Earth-tongue the aliens knew, that were available to the heads of the various sovereign states, and partly because of their leader’s tendency to vanish into his ship after ambiguous and equivocal statements—such as the curt admonition to “Evacuate Washington!”

On that occasion, both the Secretary of State and the American President, himself, perspired through five hours of a July day in all the silk-hatted, stiff-collared, dark-suited diplomatic regalia that the barbaric past demanded of political leaders who would deal with the representatives of another people. They waited and wilted beneath the enormous ship—which no human had ever been invited to enter, despite the wistful hints constantly thrown out by university professors and aeronautical designers—they waited patiently and wetly for the Dendi leader to emerge and let them know whether he had meant the State of Washington or Washington, D. C.

The tale comes down to us at this point as a tale of glory. The capitol building taken apart in a few days, and set up almost intact in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains; the missing Archives, that were later to turn up in the Children’s Room of a Public Library in Duluth, Iowa; the bottles of Potomac River water carefully borne westward and ceremoniously poured into the circular concrete ditch built around the President’s mansion (from which unfortunately it was to evaporate within a week because of the relatively low humidity of the region)—all these are proud moments in the galactic history of our species, from which not even the later knowledge that the Dendi wished to build no gun-site on the spot, nor even an ammunition dump, but merely a recreation-hall for their troops, could remove any of the grandeur of our determined cooperation and most willing sacrifice.

There is no denying, however, that the ego of our race was greatly damaged by the discovery, in the course of a routine journalistic interview, that the aliens totaled no more powerful a group than a squad; and that their leader, instead of the great scientist and key military-strategist that we might justifiably have expected the Galactic Federation to furnish for the protection of Terra, ranked as the interstellar equivalent of a buck sergeant.

That the President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and the Navy, had waited in such obeisant fashion upon a mere non-commissioned officer was hard for us to swallow; but that the impending Battle of Earth was to have a historical dignity only slightly higher than that of a patrol action was impossibly humiliating.

AND THEN there was the matter of “lendi.”

The aliens, while installing or servicing their planet-wide weapon system, would occasionally fling aside an evidently-unusable fragment of the talking metal. Separated from the machine of which it had been a component, the substance seemed to lose all those qualities which were deleterious to mankind and retain several which were quite useful indeed. For example, if a portion of the strange material were attached to any terrestrial metal—and insulated carefully, with standard dielectrics, from contact with other substances—it would, in a few hours, itself become exactly the metal that it touched, whether that happened to be zinc, gold or pure uranium.

This stuff—”lendi”, men had heard the aliens call it—was shortly in frantic demand in an economy ruptured by constant and unexpected emptyings of its most important industrial-centers.
Everywhere the aliens went, to and from their weapon-sites, hordes of ragged humans stood chanting—well outside the two-mile limit— “Any lendi, Dendi?”

All attempts by law-enforcement agencies of the planet to put a stop to this shameless, wholesale begging were useless—especially since the Dendi themselves seemed to get some unexplainable pleasure out of scattering tiny pieces of lendi to the scrabbling multitude. When policemen and soldiery began to join the trampling, murderous dash to the corner of the meadows, wherein had fallen the highly-versatile and garrulous metal, governments gave up.

Mankind almost began to hope for the attack to come, so that it would be relieved of the festering consideration of its own patent inferiorities. A few of the more fanatically-conservative among our ancestors probably even began to regret liberation.

They did, children; they did! Let us hope that these would-be troglodytes were among the very first to be dissolved and melted down by the red flame-balls. One cannot, after all, turn one’s back on progress!

Two days before the month of September was over, the aliens announced that they had detected activity upon one of the moons of Saturn. The Troxxt were evidently threading their treacherous way inward through the solar system. Considering their vicious and deceitful propensities, the Dendi warned, an attack from these worm-like monstrosities might be expected at any moment.

Few humans went to sleep as the night rolled up to and past the meridian on which they dwelt. Almost all eyes were lifted to a sky carefully denuded of clouds by watchful Dendi. There was a brisk trade in cheap telescopes and bits of smoked glass in some sections of the planet; while other portions experienced a substantial boom in spells and charms of the all-inclusive, or omnibus, variety.

THE TROXXT attacked in three cylindrical black ships simultaneously; one in the Southern Hemisphere, and two in the Northern. Great gouts of green flame roared out of their tiny craft; and everything that this flame touched imploded into a translucent, glass-like sand. No Dendi was hurt by these, however, and from each of the now-writhing gun-mounts there bubbled forth a series of scarlet clouds which pursued the Troxxt hungrily, until forced by a dwindling velocity to fall back upon Earth.

Here they had an unhappy after-effect. Any populated area into which these pale pink cloudlets chanced to fall was rapidly transformed into a cemetery—a cemetery, if the truth be told as it has been handed down to us, that had more the odor of the kitchen than the grave. The inhabitants of these unfortunate localities were subjected to enormous increases of temperature. Their skin reddened, then blackened; their hair and nails shriveled; their very flesh turned into liquid and boiled off their bones. Altogether a disagreeable way for one-tenth of the human race to die.

The only consolation was the capture of a black cylinder by one of the red clouds. When, as a result of this, it had turned white-hot and poured its substance down in the form of a metallic rainstorm, the two ships assaulting the Northern Hemisphere abruptly retreated to the asteroids into which the Dendi—because of severely-limited numbers—steadfastly refused to pursue them.

In the next twenty-four hours the aliens—resident aliens, let us say—held conferences, made repairs to their weapons and commiserated with us. Humanity buried its dead. This last was a custom of our forefathers that was most worthy of note; and one that has not, of course, survived into modern times.

By the time the Troxxt returned, Man was ready for them. He could not, unfortunately, stand to arms as he most ardently desired to do; but he could and did stand to optical instrument and conjurer’s oration.

Once more the little red clouds burst joyfully into the upper reaches of the stratosphere; once more the green flames wailed and tore at the chattering spires of lendi; once more men died by the thousands in the boiling backwash of war. But this time, there was a slight difference: the green flames of the Troxxt abruptly changed color after the engagement had lasted three hours; they became darker, more bluish. And, as they did so, Dendi after Dendi collapsed at his station and died in convulsions.

The call for retreat was evidently sounded. The survivors fought their way to the tremendous ship in which they had come. With an explosion from her stern jets that blasted a red-hot furrow southward through France, and kicked Marseilles into the Mediterranean, the ship roared into space and fled home ignominiously.

Humanity steeled itself for the coming ordeal of horror under the Troxxt.

THEY WERE truly worm-like in form. As soon as the two night-black cylinders had landed, they strode, from their ships, their tiny segmented bodies held off the ground by a complex harness supported by long and slender metal crutches. They erected a dome-like fort around each ship—one in Australia and one in the Ukraine—captured the few courageous individuals who had ventured close to their landing-sites, and disappeared back into the dark craft with their squirming prizes.

While some men drilled about nervously in the ancient military patterns, others poured anxiously over scientific texts and records pertaining to the visit of the Dendi—in the desperate hope of finding a way of preserving terrestrial independence against this ravening conqueror of the star-spattered galaxy.

And yet all this time, the human captives inside the artificially-darkened spaceships (the Troxxt, having no eyes, not only had little use for light but the more sedentary individuals among them actually found such radiation disagreeable to their sensitive, unpigmented skins) were not being tortured for information—nor vivisected in the earnest quest of same on a slightly higher level—but educated.

Educated in the Troxxtian language, that is.

True it was that a large number found themselves utterly inadequate for the task which the Troxxt had set them, and temporarily became servants to the more successful students. And another, albeit smaller, group developed various forms of frustration hysteria—ranging from mild unhappiness to complete catatonic depression—over the difficulties presented by a language whose every verb was irregular, and whose myriads of prepositions were formed by noun-adjective combinations derived from the subject of the previous sentence. But, eventually, eleven human beings were released, to blink madly in the sunlight as certified interpreters of Troxxt.

These liberators, it seemed, had never visited Bengal in the heyday of its millennia-past civilization.

Yes, these liberators For the Troxxt had landed on the sixth day of the ancient, almost mythical, month of October. And October the Sixth is, of course, the Holy Day of the Second Liberation. Let us remember, let us revere. If only we could figure out which day it is on our calendar!

THE TALE the interpreters told caused men to hang their heads in shame and gnash their teeth at the deception they had allowed the Dendi to practice upon them.

True, the Dendi had been commissioned by the Galactic Federation to hunt the Troxxt down and destroy them. This was largely because the Dendi were the Galactic Federation. One of the first intelligent arrivals on the interstellar scene, the huge creatures had organized a vast police-force to protect them and their power against any contingency of revolt that might arise in the future. This police-force was ostensibly a congress of all thinking lifeforms throughout the galaxy; actually, it was an efficient means of keeping them under rigid control.

Most species thus-far discovered were docile and tractable, however; the Dendi had been ruling from time immemorial, said they—very well, then, let the Dendi continue to rule. Did it make that much difference?

But, throughout the centuries, opposition to the Dendi grew—and the nuclei of the opposition were the protoplasm-based creatures. What, in fact, had come to be known as the Protoplasmic League.
Though small in number, the creatures whose life-cycles were derived from the chemical and physical properties of protoplasm varied greatly in size, structure and specialization. A galactic community deriving the main wells of its power from them would be a dynamic instead of a static place, where extra-galactic travel would be encouraged—instead of being inhibited, as it was at present because of Dendi fears of meeting a superior civilization. It would be a true democracy of species—a real biological republic—where creatures of adequate intelligence and cultural development would enjoy a control of their destinies at present experienced by the silicon-based Dendi alone.

To this end, the Troxxt—the only important race which had steadfastly refused the complete surrender of armaments demanded of all members of the Federation—had been implored by a minor member of the Protoplasmic League to rescue it from the devastation which the Dendi intended to visit upon it, as punishment for an unlawful exploratory excursion outside the boundaries of the galaxy.

Faced with the determination of the Troxxt to defend their cousins in organic chemistry, and the suddenly-aroused hostility of at least two-thirds of the interstellar peoples, the Dendi had summoned a rump meeting of the Galactic Council; declared a state of revolt in being; and proceeded to cement their disintegrating rule with the blasted life-forces of a hundred worlds. The Troxxt, hopelessly out-numbered and out-equipped, had been able to continue the struggle only because of the great ingenuity and selflessness of other members of the Protoplasmic League, who had risked extinction to supply them with newly-developed secret weapons.

Hadn’t we guessed the nature of the beast from the enormous precautions it had taken to prevent the exposure of any part of its body to the intensely-corrosive at m o s p h e r e of Earth? Surely the seamless, barely-translucent suits which our recent visitors had worn for every moment of their stay on our world should have made us suspect a body-chemistry developed from complex silicon compounds rather than those of carbon?

Humanity hung its collective head and admitted that the suspicion had never occurred to it.

Well, the Troxxt admitted generously, we were extremely inexperienced and possibly a little too trusting. Put it down to that. Our naivety, however costly to them—our liberators—would not be allowed to deprive us of that complete citizenship which the Troxxt were claiming as the birthright of all.

But as for our leaders, our probably-corrupted, certainly irresponsible leaders…

THE FIRST executions of U.N. officials, heads of states and pre-Bengali interpreters as “Traitors to Protoplasm”—after some of the lengthiest and most nearly-perfectly-fair trials in the history of Earth—were held a week after G-J Day, the inspiring occasion on which—amidst gorgeous ceremonies—humanity was invited to join, first the Protoplasmic League and thence the New and Democratic Galactic Federation of All Species, All Races.

Nor was that all.

Whereas the Dendi had contemptuously shoved us to one side as they went about their business of making our planet safe for tyranny, and had—in all probability—built special devices which made the very touch of their weapons fatal for us, the Troxxt—with the sincere friendliness which had made their name a byword for democracy and decency wherever living creatures came together among the stars—our Second Liberators, as we lovingly called them, actually preferred to have us help them with the intensive, accelerating labor of planetary defense.

So men’s intestines dissolved under the invisible glare of the forces used to assemble the new, incredibly-complex weapons; men sickened and died, in scrabbling hordes, inside the mines which the Troxxt had declared were deeper than any we had dug hitherto; men’s bodies broke open and exploded in the undersea oil-drilling sites which the Troxxt had declared were essential.

Children’s schooldays were requested, too, in such collecting drives as “Platinum Scrap for Procyon” and “Radioactive Debris for Deneb.” Housewives also were implored to save on salt whenever possible—this substance being useful to the Troxxt in literally dozens of incomprehensible ways—and colorful posters reminded: “Don’t salinate—sugarfy!”

And over all—courteously caring for us like an intelligent parent—were our mentors, taking their giant supervisory strides on metallic crutches, while their pale little bodies lay curled in the hammocks that swung from each paired length of shining leg.

Truly, even in the midst of a complete economic paralysis caused by the concentration of all major productive facilities on other-worldly armaments and despite the anguished cries of those suffering from peculiar industrial injuries which our medical men were totally unequipped to handle, in the midst of all this mind-wracking disorganization, it was yet very exhilarating to realize that we had taken our lawful place in the future government of the galaxy and were even now helping to make the Universe Safe for Democracy.

BUT THE Dendi returned to smash this idyll. They came in their huge, silvery space-ships and the Troxxt, barely warned in time, just managed to rally under the blow and fight back in kind. Even so, the Troxxt ship in the Ukraine was almost immediately forced to flee to its base in the depths of space. After three days, the only Troxxt on Earth were the devoted members of a little band guarding the ship in Australia. They proved, in three or more months, to be as difficult to remove from the face of our planet as the continent itself; and since there was now a state of close and hostile siege, with the Dendi on one side of the globe, and the Troxxt on the other, the battle assumed frightful proportions.

Seas boiled; whole steppes burned away; the climate itself shifted and changed under the grueling pressure of the cataclysm. By the time the Dendi solved the problem, the planet Venus had been blasted from the skies in the course of a complicated battle-maneuver, and Earth had wobbled over as orbital substitute.

The solution was simple: since the Troxxt were too firmly-based on the small continent to be driven away; the numerically-superior Dendi brought up enough fire-power to disintegrate all of Australia into an ash that muddied the Pacific. This occurred on the twenty-fourth of June, the Holy Day of First Reliberation.

A day of reckoning for what remained of the human race, however.

How could we have been so naive, the Dendi wanted to know, as to be taken in by the chauvinistic pro-protoplasm propaganda?

Surely, if physical characteristics were to be the criteria of our racial empathy, we would not orient ourselves on a narrow chemical basis! The Dendi life-plasma was based on silicon instead of carbon, true, but did not vertebrates—appendaged vertebrates, at that, such as we and the Dendi—have infinitely more in common, in spite of a minor biochemical difference or two, than vertebrates and legless, armless, slime-crawling creatures who happened, quite accidentally, to possess an identical organic substance?

As for this fantastic picture of life in the galaxy… Well! The Dendi shrugged their quintuple shoulders as they went about the intricate business of erecting their noisy weapons all ever the rubble of our planet. Had we ever seen a representative of these protoplasmic races the Troxxt were supposedly protecting? No, nor would we. For as soon as a race—animal, vegetable or mineral—developed enough to constitute even a potential danger to the sinuous aggressors, its civilization was systematically dismantled by the watchful Troxxt. We were in so primitive a state that they had not considered it at all risky to allow us the outward seeming of full participation.

Could we say we had learned a single useful piece of information about Troxxt technology—for all of the work we had done on their machines, for all of the lives we had lost in the process? No, of course not! We had merely contributed our mite to the enslavement of far-off races who had done us no harm.

There was much that we had cause to feel guilty about, the Dendi told us gravely—once the few surviving interpreters of the pre-Bengali dialect had crawled out of hiding. But our collective onus was as nothing compared to that borne by “vermicular collaborationists”—those traitors who had supplanted our martyred former leaders. And then there were the unspeakable individual humans who had had linguistic traffic with creatures destroying a two-million-year-old galactic peace!

Why, killing was almost too good for them, the Dendi murmured as they killed them.

WHEN THE Troxxt ripped their way back into possession of Earth some eighteen months later, bringing us the sweet fruits of the Second Reliberation—as well as a complete and most convincing rebuttal of the Dendi—there were few humans found who were to accept with any real enthusiasm the responsibilities of newly-opened and highly-paid positions in language, science and government.

Of course, since the Troxxt, in order to reliberate Earth, had found it necessary to blast a tremendous chunk out of the northern hemisphere, there were very few humans to be found. in the first place…

Even so, many of these committed suicide rather than assume the title of Secretary-General of the United Nations when the Dendi came back for the glorious Re-Reliberation, a short time after that. This was the liberation, by the way, which swept the deep collar of matter off our planet, and gave it what our forefathers came to call a pear-shaped look.

Possibly it was at this time—possibly a liberation or so later—that the Troxxt and the Dendi discovered the Earth had become far too eccentric in its orbit to possess the minimum safety conditions demanded of a Combat Zone. The battle, therefore, zig-zagged coruscatingly and murderously away in the direction of Aldebaran.

That was nine generations ago, but the tale that has been handed down from parent to child, to child’s child, has lost little in the telling. You hear it now from me almost exactly as I heard it. From my father I heard it as I ran with him from water-puddle to distant water-puddle, across the searing heat of yellow sand. From my mother I heard it as we sucked air and frantically grabbed at clusters of thick green weed, whenever the planet beneath us quivered in omen of a geological spasm that might bury us in its burned-out body, or a cosmic gyration that threatened to fling us into empty space.

Yes, even as we do now did we do then, telling the same tale, running the same frantic race across miles of unendurable heat for food and water; fighting the same savage battles with the giant rabbits for each other’s carrion—and always, ever and always, sucking desperately at the precious air. which leaves our world in greater quantities with every mad twist of its orbit.
Naked, hungry and thirsty came we into the world, and naked, hungry and thirsty do we scamper our lives out upon it, under the huge and never-changing sun.

The same tale it is, and the same traditional ending it has as that I had from my father and his father before him. Suck air, grab clusters and hear the last holy observation of our history:
“Looking about us, we can say with pardonable pride that we have been about as thoroughly liberated as it is possible for a race and a planet to be!”

The End

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