Such Stuff As Dreams...
 Analog – January 1968
(1968)*
Sterling E. Lanier

The entrance exam for the mysterious Survey & Contact division didn't take long—but it was a dilly, and everlasting as Death if you flubbed it!

-

	Commander William Jahangir Powers had reached a point where he was more than simply bored and annoyed.

	He was neither a fool, nor a person who lived solely for physical was action. He was a combat veteran with a distinguished service record and at the age of thirty-six, a very good officer indeed. His opinion of himself was only fair, but he had never felt outclassed by too many of his fellows. Now, however, he was feeling extremely angry.

	He looked around for the fiftieth time. The room in which he sat was small and contained a plain desk and chair, a drab sofa and a monotone rug. He had come in the only door visible in the gray wall and now had been sitting for an hour on the sofa. Across the room behind the desk, sat a fat, stupid-looking woman of about fifty, with gray hair tied up in a bun and a mottled complexion. She had a figure like a lard can and wore a smocklike dress of olive green, ill-suited to her complexion. She might have been from Earth and might not. Humanoids capable of interbreeding with Terrans had been found four times elsewhere, possibly due to independent evolution. No one knew. In any event, this one was slowly writing something by hand on a pad, and had not even looked up when he had come in. She had grunted a few words, waved at the sofa, and continued writing, as she was still doing.

	Powers stretched and yawned. His trim black-and-silver uniform felt sticky, and he was unpleasantly warm. The temperature must be at least 85° Farenheit in the small office, and he wondered where he was and grew thoughtful. Survey & Contact had a strange reputation among the regular services and did little by accident. He decided to mention it—the heat.

	"Always this hot in here, Madam?"

	An opaque, beady gaze lifted from the desk and focused on him. A nasal whine answered.

	"Survey & Contact maintains perfect temperature control throughout Headquarters. We cannot be continually annoyed and questioned by visitors if any work is to be done." With that, the woman resumed her slow progress with the scriber, paying Powers no further attention.

	Feeling silly at having spoken, he examined his wristchron—2:00 p.m., local time. He had been in the office almost two hours, waiting and doing nothing.

-

	When the order to report to Survey & Contact Headquarters had appeared on his desk early that same morning, he had been processing some routine requests for equipment. The official summons was blunt and directed him to be at the entrance—which entrance was not stated—at 11:45 a.m. When he had finished reading it, he suddenly realized that it was already 10:00 a.m., local time, and also that he had no idea where on Sirius Prime Base the Survey front office was located. He examined the summons and found it had no directions on it and also no time or date of dispatch, which for an official document was unusual, to say the least. To add to his annoyance, as he stared at the thin sheet of buff paper, it began to dissolve before his astonished eyes. In two seconds a little dust was the only evidence that any such document had appeared on his desk!

	All at once, the strange nature of Survey & Contact had again struck him. He had never met a Survey man or other being, and knew of no one else who had, either. All the rest of the services had an awesome respect for the branch, but no one seemed to know much about it. It was supposed to be open to any serving officer or enlisted man, but aside from the idea that it both contacted new races and functioned as a super intelligence net, little detail was really grasped by the rest of the galaxy. He could not remember when the idea of applying had first entered his mind, but the mystery was certainly in itself a factor.

	Survey & Contact recruited humans and nonhumans as well. Everyone knew that a being capable of serving in Survey & Contact category was the absolute top, but it was still almost impossible to find out anything concrete about the corps. A veil of silence existed about its operations and makeup.

	Intrigued and curious, Powers had patiently begun to amass a file of his findings about Survey, commencing the day he had first formally applied for entry, and a strange file it was. He had first transcribed every service rumor he had ever heard about Survey accomplishments, and then gone looking for more solid material. All his recent leaves had been spent in archives and dusty libraries. The interstellar newspaper files had been combed for any item, however fragmentary. And service files to which he had regular access were also scanned, as far as his rank would carry him without direct authorization from above.

	The picture which had emerged made the strangeness of Survey & Contact both more interesting and more baffling than ever. Their personnel were paid triple service standard, for one thing! Secretive though the branch might be, this item had to be published in the annual appropriations of the Unified Services.

	Public interest was obviously minimized and diverted by someone. News stories often said little more than that a new world had been visited or opened to trade by Survey & Contact. Gradually, as Powers' interest grew, he realized that entities, human and otherwise, of the Division must be located everywhere, all through the services and in civilian life as well. But the anonymity was fantastic.

	Omnipresent, but invisible, Survey & Contact seemed to be all about, had a hand in everything, but was never seen or even acknowledged, except in the sparsest and least-revealing way. Further, Survey & Contact apparently seemed to have its own ships, bases and equipment. No one ever seemed to have seen any of these either, or at least would acknowledge it. A whole new world!

-

	Within his own service, Powers had heard, on good authority, of at least three major crises in which battle fleets had been held ready. They were never needed. "S. & C. got in first" was the story in each case. The crises had simply evaporated and the fleets had then been taken off the standby list. Powers had friends in the regular intelligence outfits, but on questioning, they knew less than he.

	Powers' ultimate decision to join was based not only on what he had learned of the extraordinary work of the Mystery Division, but also on his own increasing boredom. A bachelor, with each increase in rank, his desk grew fuller and his planet-side duty longer. His personal initiative and drive seemed to him to grow lazier as well. At the time when the Survey legend began to grow upon his mind, he was actually thinking of leaving the Space Force and looking for a more exciting civilian career, if only to stop the walls of routine closing in. The less he could find out about Survey, the more attractive the idea had become, until finally it had assumed the force of nothing less than a compulsion.

	His own application for the Division had been made over a Galac year earlier. Since then, he had continued his duties as a commander, Sirian Combine Space Force, without any real hint as to what had become of the request. But official forms had begun to appear on his desk at Sirius Prime, where he was serving a hitch at Grand Base Communications, and he had dutifully filled them out. They were mostly psychological questionnaires and almost all had been meaningless, at least to him. All had borne the magic title of Survey & Contact on their covers however, and so he had doggedly persisted.

	One had ordered him to write an essay about the joys of dying of thirst! "Stress the appeal and pleasure of water deprivation," the form said. Another asked him how —in two thousand words or less— he would explain a new color to someone who had not seen it. Still another stated that he must imagine he was the survivor of an aerial disaster on his own planet, Terra, and that he had managed to save a two-month old baby. He and his charge had parachuted to an uninhabited island in the Tropics. A list of the plant and animal life on and around the island was attached. Problem—in a thousand words or less—how to feed the baby.

	The endless questions and tests, which seemed to have no clear, discernible reason behind them, had finally begun to get him down. Only the fact that they all emanated from the legendary Survey & Contact Division had made him persevere, giving them the fullest and best attention of which he was capable. Somewhere, he forced himself to believe, a picture must be building up of his personality, brains, and all other attributes, and these bizarre exams and essays were just more steps on the road. He simply had to assume this.

	Thus, when he had stared at the dust of the vanishing message on his desk, he got two new ideas. One, he was suddenly and absolutely sure that the summons was genuine, and two, that it would never be either confirmed or repeated. The disappearing paper was one little touch of mystery, maybe to simply pique his curiosity, perhaps yet another test of some kind. At any rate, it had to be pursued at once.

	Powers had moved quickly in the next hour, very quickly indeed. He had called for directions through the Command Center, asking for the planetary location of Survey & Contact Headquarters. The stupidest clerk he had ever encountered had taken twenty minutes to find and report the location, which then turned out to be on the far side of the same continent which housed Command Division. Raging with impatience, Powers had ordered a special, one-man jet sled, and this also had been unaccountably delayed.

	Using the highest speed possible, he had been exactly three minutes late when he braked down on a deserted landing strip near a quiet, blue arm of the ocean. Behind the strip rose a bulging, blobby gray building which seemed to have no basic design at all, and which showed no visible windows or doors. However, as Powers got out of the sled and narrowed his eyes against the sunlight, a figure appeared around a corner of the building, and moved slowly out to meet him.

-

	As a commander in the Combine Navy, Powers had seen some strange members of the military services, but this specimen was outstanding. As he came to a leisurely halt in front of Powers, he brought a hand up in a sloppy salute.

	He was a tall, powerfully-built, blond man in the green uniform of a sergeant, Special Landing Forces, and appeared to be a Terran. His insignia was tarnished, his boots dirty, and he needed a shave, the yellow stubble showing through a tanned skin. His whole posture was casual and insulting. He said nothing, just stood and blinked sleepily.

	Keeping his temper barely under control, Powers returned the salute.

	"At ease, Sergeant ... if you aren't already. Is this place Survey & Contact, or an abandoned supply dump?"

	"This is it," said the tall one lazily. "You got orders here?"

	"Call me 'Sir,' " blared Powers. "I am Commander William Powers, and the orders were ... well, they were verbal. Now brace up and take me inside before I get those stripes yanked off and charge you with being insolent as well as dirty and unshaven on duty."

	The sergeant gulped and straightened up a little. "Sorry, Sir, I haven't had any field duty for a long time. Guess you get out of practice, huh, Sir? You got any luggage I can carry, Sir?"

	Powers stared coldly at the man, but could read nothing in his eyes except stupidity and fright. How could Survey & Contact have an eight ball like this around to welcome visitors, he wondered? He merely waved toward the building and they set off across the dusty landing strip, the sergeant in front.

	The N.C.O. marched straight to an apparently blank wall and leaned on it. Silently, a door appeared, a black rectangular opening in the gray smoothness. The sergeant stood to one side and indicated that Powers precede him. It was not until Powers was in the corridor beyond that he realized the door behind him was closing. As he spun around, he heard a malicious cackle from outside.

	"You're a hell of an officer. Three minutes late, yet!"

	Then the door shut, as silently as it had opened. There was no knob or button on the inside.

	Fuming, but also deciding to waste no more time, Powers had walked forward along a dimly-lit corridor, blank, gray walls revealing no opening. After about a mile of meaningless curves, all appearing the same, and passing nothing but a thousand atomo bulbs in the metal ceiling, he had suddenly emerged into the office in which he now sat. And had been sitting. And sitting ...

	The sour-faced prune behind the desk had spoken exactly twice, the first time when he came raging through the door.

	"Commander Powers?" she had whined in Universal. "You are late. Please sit down and do not disturb me. I have work to do." The second time had been when he had commented on the heat.

	Inwardly, he continued to seethe. The whole day so far had been one foul-up after another. Nothing had gone right from the moment he had received the message in his office. And now, after months of filling out gibberish forms and tests devised by lunatics calling themselves psychologists, he had finally cracked the portals of the fabulous Survey & Contact Branch. Hah! A madhouse staffed by rejects and morons! The minute someone in authority appeared he would politely ask the way out, leave and withdraw his application for Survey Service.

	As he brooded over the wasted time and energy he had expended, a dull ache in his midsection reminded him that he needed lunch. He decided to check the time again and examined his wristchron. It still said 2:00 p.m. Annoyed, he held it to his ear. The thin hum of the atom battery was silent. Stopped! Sweet suffering epaullets! He had put in a new battery only two months before and they were good for three years! One more stinking item to add to a wasted day.

	Across the now stifling room, the elderly woman continued to slowly scrawl on her pad. Powers decided that she had one of the most unpleasant faces he had ever seen. As he studied it for the fiftieth time, he suddenly thought it looked not only revolting but strangely familiar. Where in the cosmos could he have seen her before? Whatever the memory was, it evaded him, and he stared at the featureless brown wall again, determined not to speak. By God, if they wanted to annoy him, he would not be annoyed. An officer of the Senior Service had more control than that. He began to formulate abstract math problems in his head, his eyes fixed and unseeing.

	At some indeterminate time later, Powers suddenly tensed, every sense alert. He was a graduate of the Lyran Nerve Training School, and his body had unmistakably sounded a subtle warning. It took a split second to identify what his system was being alerted against, and this was too long for him to take action or hold his breath. Sleep gas! Subtly it had filtered into the room and he was already going under. His last memory before he lost consciousness was one of surprise, because his eyes registered the flabby hag across the room writing steadily away, obviously unaffected. Then he passed out.

-

	When he woke, it was with full consciousness of what had occurred, and he came to his feet with a rush, only to relax. He was in the same office as before, overheated, bare walls and desk, nothing changed. He was still hungry, sweating and irritated, but now had a headache as well. Then his eyes steadied on the figure behind the desk and he grew alert again.

	A short, fat man with a long, droopy nose, again presumably Terran like himself, was smiling at him. The man was bald, looked about sixty years old -and wore a featureless coverall of gray. Two scribers were clipped to his pocket, but nothing else gave a clue to his position in life. Powers studied the face in front of him and felt repelled. In lean, hard condition himself, the sight of the bloated body disgusted him and so did the oleaginous smile which was fixed on the sweating, jowled face.

	The man spoke, using Slavang, the language of Terra, fluently, but with a guttural and unpleasant accent. Powers noticed that the smile never reached the cold, black eyes and readied himself again, sitting down as he did so and trying to appear at ease.

	"I have a few questions, Commander," the man said. "Please answer them promptly and don't waste my time being indignant. You asked to be here, you know, we didn't send for you. You applied for Survey & Contact voluntarily." There was nothing pleasant about the thick, grating voice or the words, but the meaningless smile never left the fat countenance.

	Powers gasped audibly because the other's statement had taken the wind out of his sails. His protest and request to withdraw his application died stillborn. After all, he had volunteered. Steadying himself, he nodded, incapable of calm speech.

	With no more preamble, the fat man began a stream of brutally personal questions, noting the answers on a pad in front of him.

	Did Powers like women? Sexually? What other ways? Was he sexually attracted to men? Had he ever been? Which women had he been attracted to? Where? Under what circumstances? How? What forms of love-making did he prefer? Had he experimented with women of other races than his own Caucasoid strain? With men? With creatures of other races? From other worlds? Did he go to joy houses? Alone?

	Bill Powers was a healthy, and perfectly normal male, a bachelor, but no celibate. The stream of questions began to really disgust him, as they passed from personal to prurient, from clinical to obscene, while all the time the fat smile and the jet eyes never wavered. Biting his lip, Powers managed to contain himself, although barely, and continued his increasingly terse answers. Just when he felt that his patience was about to snap completely the questions stopped. The fat man folded his notebook pad and tucked it into a side pocket. Then he rubbed his fleshy hands together and placed them on the desk, before addressing Powers.

	"Do you still wish to continue your application for Survey & Contact, Commander? If so, I must tell you that you are in mortal danger."

	Hungry, hot, furious and baffled, Powers stared back at the cold eyes. Despite his intense irritation, he was conscious suddenly that he was being told the exact truth. The greasy smile had disappeared from his interrogator's face and the short figure had assumed both a menace and a dignity it had not previously possessed. The annoying accent was still present, but the voice was unmistakably sincere.

	Powers thought hard for a moment. "Can I ask what you mean?" he said.

	"You may ask, indeed," said the fat man. "My answer may not satisfy you. The next step in interrogation is a test, but a physical test—a survival test. I can give you no details whatsoever about it, but I can say this. Failure is lethal. Every member, real member, or Field Agent, of Survey & Contact, excluding hired help, has passed it. If you choose, you may return, as of this minute to your normal duties, and your regular service. There will be no mark on your record. You may become a Fleet Admiral and a very good one. But your application file for this branch will be closed and never reopened." He paused and then continued.

	"There is one final point. The records of those who have failed this next test are also closed. Failure in this test, you see, means death. The percentage of failures is 37.9. I can allow you, by Survey & Contact regulations, our private regulations, exactly three minutes for a decision."

	The words rang hollowly in the small room. 37.9! Failure is death! Powers thought desperately. This was insane. Get out of here quickly and forget the whole business. No one but a madman would consider such a lethal proposal. He looked up and heard the fat man speaking.

	"All failures die. They are marked as dying in the line of duty. A full pension is paid to any person or persons designated."

	Powers stared at the floor again, his strong hands clenching and opening convulsively. This was the end of the line. To hell with courage. Get out now, Powers!

	He looked up and met the fat man's stare evenly, conscious even as he did so that breakfast might have been his last meal.

	"I'll do it," he said flatly. "Do I sign anything, any release?"

	He thought he detected a flicker of something, possibly respect in the jet eyes, but he couldn't be sure.

	"Not necessary," was the answer. "The service regulations cover it. The test starts—now!"

	Powers felt the Sleep gas hit again, but as he went under he knew surprise, for he could hear the fat man still talking, this time with no accent at all.

	"Good luck, Son, and remember —never give up ... never!"

	Then all faded out again and was gone.

-

	As he came awake, he was conscious of two things, the light and coolness. As he opened his eyes, a third, an up-and-down motion, was added to the other sensations. Finally, the fact that he was dripping wet was brought home to him with a vengeance as his head was suddenly buried in water, which made him choke. Fighting clear of it into the air, he spat out the liquid, finding that it was salt and bitter-tasting as well, and sat up, staring about him.

	He was sitting on a tiny raft, a crude thing, low and awash in the water. Made of a few logs, loosely lashed together with what looked like vegetable fibers, the raft rode soggily on a dirty-looking sea. The ropes holding it together looked frayed and creaked audibly as the waves lifted the raft.

	The water was dark and scummy-looking and the waves were mild. Overhead, a cloudy, brown sky hid the sun, but enough dim light came through so that Powers could see fairly well in every direction.

	Looking down, he saw that he was almost naked, wearing only issue cloth shorts and a belt. He was barefoot. From the belt hung a short, heavy dagger, and he slipped the two-edged blade out of its metal sheath with satisfaction, testing its sharpness on his thumb.

	Then he stood up, balancing carefully on the two center logs of the four-log raft, and slowly turning his head. He could see nothing in any direction but one, save water. About a mile away, a rocky island rose out of the ocean, its sides sheer and menacing. No other object broke the limited horizon. A black structure which looked artificial and not natural crowned the island's height.

	Sitting down, Powers drew his knife and cut off a tiny piece of wood from one of the logs. The wood was soft, waterlogged almost, but would still float. Throwing the chip over the side, he re-sheathed the knife and watched the movement of the piece of wood with one eye, while estimating the distance to the island with the other.

	At the same time his mind was racing furiously. He assumed automatically that he had been knocked out by the Sleep gas, put in deep freeze and dumped on an alien planet. Unless, of course, he was in some monstrous environmental testing lab maintained by Survey & Contact for the purpose. This latter was possible though unlikely, from the sheer amount of space involved.

	He checked the wood chip until it was out of sight and tried to estimate his speed. He was drifting at about one knot on a current right for the island, which was almost certainly no accident. Looking up, he could see it clearly in the gray light, even from a sitting position, and decided the raft would bring him to shore in about two hours, if nothing changed.

	A faint drizzle, imperceptible almost as a mist, began to fall, but, although his exposed skin felt chilly, he was not acutely uncomfortable. The ocean, or whatever it was, seemed about 72° Farenheit and the air perhaps 10° cooler. He could survive a long time under such conditions. He was conscious of mild thirst but it was only mild, and the fact that he had missed lunch could be dismissed also. He might have been in deep freeze a month or ten seconds but he felt perfectly fit.

-

	Keeping an eye on the island, already perceptibly closer, he began a careful examination of the raft. All the survival courses he had ever taken had stressed utilization of whatever unlikely materials were available. He could hear the instructor now at Grand Base O.C.S. during the castaway's course.

	"Beings, remember! Examine and catalog what is available at once! If an emergency strikes, there will be no time!"

	So far, nylon shorts and belt, metal buckle, seven-inch, two-edged knife, its metal sheath clipped to the belt, plus a sagging raft.

	Just how sagging, he soon discovered. It was breaking up. The lashings as he had thought, were tattered bits of some plant fiber rope, and very few were still holding. Even as he watched, a section snapped, -worn out by time and hard usage, and a log drifted away. The raft was only minutes away from dissolution with three logs left.

	He thought quickly. Where in the universe could he be? Was that grimy-looking ocean dangerous? Although it tasted unpleasant, the flavor was more that of a dirty tide pool than something poisonous. But if harmless, what lived in it? It looked capable of concealing anything, and for the first time a thrill of fear ran through him. He could die on this test: almost half the applicants had, according to the fat man.

	Another fiber parted and the two logs supporting Powers' weight began to come apart at one end of the raft. At the same time paralysis seized him, numbing his muscles and sapping his nerve to the breaking point in a split second.

	Out of the gentle curve of a wave, black and shining, a high, pointed fin had appeared mysteriously, no more than a few yards from the left side of the disintegrating raft. It stood at least a yard out of the water, the droplets gleaming from its smooth surface and then subsided as silently as it had come, leaving a man gaping at the dark water, frozen with a fear so stark and awful that his heart had almost stopped beating.

	As a boy, Powers had been taken on a vacation to the South Pacific by his parents, to Rarotonga, and while swimming one day he had seen a native of the island seized and devoured by a huge Tiger shark, the clear water revealing every nasty detail. He never had got over it, and while not afraid of water, had never gone swimming alone since, nor entered any but clear, cold water, and fenced at that, if in an ocean. Now all the horrors rushed back and the screams of the long-dead native beat again upon his eardrums. He must be on Terra, some lost backwater of his own planet, and in front of him cruised a monster capable of shredding him apart in one bite.

	But it was only for a second that he was bereft of control. A lifetime's arduous training and discipline overrode the panic, and he began to function as a reasoning being once more. He felt self-contempt wash out much of the fear.

	A quick glance showed that the raft was almost gone. The two former center logs were tightly secured only at one end, by a loose strand in the middle where he crouched, and not at all at the other end behind him. He drew his knife, holding it blade up and looked at the island.

	It now lay between one half and one quarter mile away. And for the first time he could see the black object which sprawled upon its peak. And this confirmed his decision. He was on Earth, on Terra itself. For before him, plainly visible, towered an ancient house, huge, colored in grays and blacks, with peaked roofs and chimneys and what looked like a myriad, black, gaping windows, staring out over the misty ocean.

	Even as Powers fixed the identity of the house in his mind, the logs beneath him began to move apart. There was no delaying the decision, and while a tiny part of his mind still cowered in fear, shrieking "you'll be killed," it was overridden by his will.

	He dived cleanly into the black water, and struck out for the island, using a side stroke which allowed him to keep his knife in his right hand.

	As he rose on the first gentle wave, his stroke faltered. Two waves away, directly ahead and between him and the island, rose the towering dorsal fin. Now it had risen clear out of the water, and a six-foot length of shining black skin showed the back of whatever carried it.

	But Powers had been driven too far by will, and in any case, could not now turn back if he wished. He had no place to go and knew it, except forward. He continued to stroke smoothly, straight for the island and the fin, too, although that had silently vanished again. His body seemed one giant nerve ending, keyed up to the surge of water against his skin which would give a useless warning of the monster's rush. But his knife was ready as ever, and he was prepared at least to leave a gash on its hide. A wave broke gently over his head, filling his open mouth with the taste of the water, salty and unpleasant, but his steady stroke never varied. On and on he went, numbing his imagination, swimming steadily and slowly for what seemed eternity.

-

	And suddenly, he was there. His feet scraped bottom, and, hardly able to believe it, he staggered ashore on to a pebbled beach under the towering face of rock, and fell on the hard stones, his knees giving way from the strain and his heart pounding with relief.

	It was at least five minutes, he estimated, before he could sit up. The prospect before him was not inviting, but at least he was on dry land and unharmed.

	He was on a tiny beach, about ten yards long by eight deep, surrounded on all sides by walls of bleak, granitelike stone. No seaweed or shells lay on the margin to mark a tideline, and further back, no plants of any sort grew. He got up and began to examine his landing place carefully, noting absently that the light seemed to be decreasing. It must be evening, but the low cloud bank hid any trace of stars or sun, and the light was not that of a normal evening, anyway. His belief that he had been transported to Terra wavered for a moment, while he searched the desolate shingle for a clue as to where he might be.

	The house! All at once the great house on the headland came back into his mind. He must be right below it. Even if it were empty, there would at least be shelter, and possibly food and water. There ought to be water at any rate.

	Gloomily he studied the bleak walls of his temporary prison. The damp rock did not even have lichen growing on it. There was no other sign of life on the shore. He looked out to sea, but the visibility was far lower than when he had arrived. It was not night, but a gloomy dusk which now covered the waters.

	Once again he circumnavigated the grim little beach, this time looking for footholds on the cliff. Above the center of the shingle, at its broadest point, the black face of the frowning rock actually leaned out, casting a deeper shadow, but at no place, even on the sides, was there a trace of footing. He found a small pool of water at one place, apparent seepage from the dank stones above, but it was evil-smelling and undrinkable.

	This left the beach. Carefully, he waded out to the right-hand edge, holding on to the cliff as he did so. Where the cliff ended, his probing foot went down and he drew back hastily. He still could not see around the cliff. Looking out to sea again, he suddenly saw the great, black fin. It lay, almost motionless in the gentle swell, about fifteen yards off shore, a silent sentinel.

	Shuddering involuntarily, he stepped quickly back on the beach and sat down. A gentle breeze had come up and the misty rain still fell, but the wind was barely audible and the regular plash of the tiny waves on the shingle was the only sound he could hear.

	Sound! Perhaps the strange house was not empty! Springing up as the thought came to him, Powers yelled, funneling his hands around his mouth. Three times he bellowed, "Help," and then stood waiting, his ears straining. After a minute's silence, he tried again, and again stood listening.

	This time he felt sure he heard something, but the answer was neither what he was expecting, nor was it reassuring.

	From far above him there seemed to quaver for an instant a brief, high sound, somewhere between a wail and a shriek. It only lasted a moment, rising to an almost inaudible tremolo, and then abruptly ceased, so that Powers was left wondering if he had really heard anything at all. In the end, he decided that he had, but also that he could derive little comfort from the sound. Whatever made it did not have human vocal chords, and there had been an element of want and hunger in the keening cry which had impressed itself most thoroughly in the stiff hairs on the back of his skull. Something strange, eerie and half-remembered had come into his mind, leaving him momentarily shaken and nerveless.

	He stood for a moment, arms rigidly folded, cursing the Survey & Contact Division under his breath and adding a final epithet for himself and his own stupidity in volunteering. Then, once again, he rallied and began to review the known facts he had to work with.

-

	He was marooned on a rocky island, and there was an odd old-fashioned house. The house looked Terran, but the sea around the island tasted weird. Still, there was a monster shark offshore. But was it a shark? Other planets produced remarkably similar adaptations. Powers was neither a biologist nor an ecologist but he had done a lot of reading and he had seen similar life forms listed from several other worlds beside Earth. And now, there was that chilling sound his shouting had evoked from the clifftop. Some deep-buried memory, perhaps ancestral in nature, told him plainly that the sound he had heard was never produced by anything that walked on Earth. And yet there was that haunting sense of familiarity. Where was he?

	Abruptly dismissing further speculation as profitless, he walked over to the left-hand end of the beach and began to wade out, as he had done earlier on the other side. The sheer cliff of the island came down just as sharply here, but to his delight he could wade around the corner of the cliff in no more than a foot or two of murky water.

	Peering cautiously around the el-bow of rock, he found he could see about a dozen yards clearly. There was no corresponding beach on the other side, but at first glance there appeared to be a slight inward angle to the cliff face, offering possible hand-holds for climbing.

	Ever so carefully, keeping his left hand on the rock, he waded out, shuffling his naked feet, so as not to step into a pothole, or a sudden dropoff into deep water. He glanced once out to sea, but this time there was no sign of the fin.

	About twenty feet along from the corner of the bay, he found what he was looking for. A narrow crack angled up the cliff on a steep, but not impossible, slant and, moreover, the cliff drew back a little, so that peering up, he could see the dark line which marked its top, even now through the brown and baffling dusk.

	He decided to take one more precaution and waded inch by inch out into the water directly in front of the crack. As he expected, it deepened within two yards. Satisfied, he waded back to the base of the crack. If he became stuck higher up on his climb, he could at least leap out into the sea and try to make the little bay again by swimming.

	Then he stood breathing deeply for a moment and said a silent prayer. At length, he began to climb. He did not like climbing heights and never had. In fact he dreaded it, but he was in good condition and his nerves were under rigid control. Keeping his face to the wall and looking up, not down, he made slow but steady progress. He had learned the basic elements of climbing long before in various survival schools, and he was surprised how easily they returned when needed from the depths of his memory. At one point a considerable distance above the sea, the crack widened suddenly into a narrow chimney, and he braced himself on both sides automatically, going up like an inchworm.

	He felt the strain of unused muscles only slightly, but it was a relief to discover a small ledge fifty feet up the chimney on which he could sit and take a breather. The ledge had room only for his buttocks and his legs hung over the drop, but he could rest his back and relax, at least momentarily.

	Looking out over the strange sea, he felt a chill, not of his skin, but from deep inside. What was this uncanny place? The light had faded even more, and although the fine rain had now stopped, the visibility was still dropping. And yet it was not a true night, but rather a dark, gloomy evening, which nevertheless maintained some odd, diffused source of light, never entirely absent. The wind had risen until it was audible as a faint moan, which added to the increasing unease in Powers' mind. He was conscious of a feeling of forlornness, of being hopelessly lost and adrift, which he had never felt before, and against which he had to continually brace himself if he were to keep going.

	He gathered his feet under him on the ledge and got set to resume his progress up the cleft. Looking up, he saw with some surprise that the cliff edge was not very far away. He looked down briefly and estimated that he must have climbed at least two hundred feet, and now had another eighty or so to go. A brief wave of nausea made him turn quickly away to his task and he started to climb again.

	Now he looked neither up nor down. Despite his rest on the ledge, he was becoming tired and he didn't dare use up any reserves of nervous energy getting frightened by heights. He just climbed, feeling for handholds and levering himself up in a steady, undeviating motion. The wind ruffled his hair, bringing no coolness, but rather a nasty feeling of delicate fingers probing for him, and its soughing on the damp rocks seemed to have a malignant note.

-

	The clifftop came as a shock. His outflung arm, searching vainly for a new grip, encountered nothingness and a brief spasm of panic struck him before he looked up and saw the line of the top only a foot above his head, dark against the lighter sky. Drawing on a last store of energy, he gave a mighty heave and snapped his body over the top in one motion, to lie gasping on the moist ground. He lay face down, panting, the sweat pouring from his body, dead to everything but the need to rest.

	When his starved lungs had finally fulfilled their need for air and his overstrained muscles stopped their spasmodic twitching, he sat up and stared about him, now cold again from congealed perspiration.

	He was lying on the cliff's edge, at the bottom of a gentle slope. A yard from his position, a verge of brownish, tussocky grass led into a tangled mass of shrubbery and bushlike vegetation, with here and there a low tree, all tossing in the rising wind, their colors a variety of duns and brownish shades.

	Rising out of the scrub and wood, about a half mile away, was the house he had seen from the sea, an enormous structure of peaked and crenellated roofs, broken chimneys and countless windows, black pits of emptiness in the gray walls.

	As he stared at it, he saw that flecks of reddish light now played here and there over both the building and the surrounding foliage, and looking up, saw a vast dim, red moon had appeared, partly veiled by flying murk and cloud. It gave little light, and only added a mottled effect to the landscape, which was unpleasant enough anyway. The view now appeared both spectral and unclean, in some manner which disturbed the inner part of his being. The moon was far larger than that of Terra, but blank and featureless where the surface showed.

	Looking at the house once again, Powers felt a tug of memory. Somewhere, he had a feeling, he had seen it before, and in some connection he did not like to recall. The feeling was momentary and he suppressed it quickly. Whatever the place looked like, he had to have shelter, for as the sweat cooled on his skin, he was aware of an icy chill which penetrated to his bones, and at the same time, thirst, not a severe problem until now, made itself felt as a sharp pang.

	He stood up and unsheathing his knife stepped on to the edge of the shaggy grass. His bare feet, which were now sore from many small cuts, registered that it felt greasy and unpleasant, but it seemed to contain no thorns or brambles. In only a few steps he had crossed it and entered the shadow of the shrubbery. For as he entered it, he had realized that this was the correct word. He was in the ruins of some mighty garden or estate, surrounding the huge and apparently empty house like a barrier to keep out intruders. A few more cautious steps confirmed this view. He could not identify the low, wind tossed bushes around him or the larger trees that jutted up from their midst, but the whole appearance of the place was unmistakable.

	As he stared about him in the strange half-light, he began to pick out overgrown paths, heavy with rank grass here and there through the bushes. In one place through the trees a faint gleam flickered momentarily as lighter than the rest, and seemed to speak of stone. As the identification registered on his forebrain, so, too, did his now acute thirst. Gardens should contain fountains, which meant stonework.

-

	Stumbling slightly over the longer grass stems, he headed in the direction of the faint gleam. He found a dim, overgrown path which led that way, although winding here and there through the dark vegetation. Soon he emerged in an open space, and there, sure enough, was water.

	It was a dark, round pool, perhaps twenty feet across, oily and repellent in aspect, backed by the broken wall of whitish stone, which he had seen in the distance. Patches of some bloated weed lay here and there on the still surface. The slimy, light brown roots of some water plant sprawled on the edge and spilled up and over into the rank grass which surrounded the verge.

	Still, it was water and presumably fresh, and he now badly needed water. Crouching, one wary eye on the house, which now lay much closer and to his right front, he left the bushes and moved toward the nearest part of the silent pool.

	As he did so, a strange and terrible thing happened. The fat, ropy tendrils of ochre weed which he had seen lying on the brink of the stonework lifted suddenly and began to wave and oscillate in the air, like monstrous feelers trying to grasp some unimaginable prey.

	He was no more than a yard or two from the water when it happened, but drew back convulsively to the edge of the bushes, and numb, stared at the thick dancing tentacles which whipped and vibrated all around the edge of the pool to a height of six feet. He had never seen a more disgusting sight, and he felt almost physically sick. Even as he watched, the movements began to slowly die down, until in a few moments the pool was once more still under the evil rusty moonlight, as calm as when he had first appeared.

	He stood a moment more in concentrated thought. Whether animal or plant, the evil-looking guardian of the pool had clearly been somehow alerted by his approach. To try and get a drink from the water now would be madness, particularly since he had only a knife.

	What particularly annoyed him, even more than his painful thirst, was his own fright. Since waking from the Sleep gas, he had been conscious of recurrent waves of fear passing through his system. Although he had mastered them and gone on, over one menace and obstacle to yet another, they were still surging against his inner being. As he raised his eyes to the great house, frowning above him, the fear returned again, so strongly that his body shook as if with an ague.

	His mind fought the fear back, and he held his fist out stiffly until its trembling subsided and the dagger point ceased to waver. Helping him muster strength was a renewed feeling of rage, rage at Survey & Contact for dumping a man in this ghastly place and using the forces of some unknown area as a trap for an almost defenseless man.

-

	Once again he started for the house. Skirting the neighborhood of the uncanny pool, he kept in the shadow of the trees and moved around the water in a wide circle. Although he watched carefully, he could not see any movement from the strange inhabitant which lurked there.

	On the far side of the open space, he found, as he had expected, a continuation of the path which had brought him thus far. The tussocky grass was now knee-high, but the opening was unmistakable, and pointed straight up the slope toward the house.

	As he entered the gap in the trees, the wind rose from a moan to a shriek, and glancing up, he saw the moon clearly, with only a few racing scuds of cloud to shield it. Then he knew that it was no moon he had ever seen before. It was not only a far larger orb, but the sickly red of its light was an actual color he had never before glimpsed.

	Looking down again, he moved steadily on down the lane of windswept trees. He was not on Terra, but on something alien, some lost planet. But then, the house! How had that come here? Even as he pondered it, it appeared before him.

	Clearly delineated in the moonlight, now grown brighter, it stood, less than a hundred yards away, across another belt of brown grass. The trees thinned back on both sides and so far as he could see, approached the place nowhere closer than the distance which separated him from the walls.

	He had not realized the sheer bulk of the huge, stone building or its countless convolutions until now. It had four rows of windows in the main body, which was directly in front of him, but wings led off on both sides and innumerable towers, separate roofs and chimneys broke the outline. Here and there, small balconies and walks with black doorways behind them broke the outline of the walls. The place could have housed an army, he thought and realized that if it had ever done so it had been long ago. For the house walls were crumbling, piles of rock and rubble marking where weaker parts had long ago crashed to ruin. Holes were visible in the slanted main roof, and many of the chimneys were gaunt fingers of stone with two or three sides missing. Windows here and there were irregular in outline, as if etched out of their true shape by time's acid. And over all brooded a feeling of age, desolation and decay.

	And more, of menace. As Powers swept the vast building with his gaze, he was suddenly and sharply aware of that. The monstrous pile might be crumbling and falling to the ground, but there was life somewhere about, inimical life, horrible in purpose. His brain, sent this message by some subtle chemistry of the body, filed and accepted the fact, and he steeled himself for an encounter, crouching to earth under a low shrub as he did so.

	And suddenly he saw something. To his left, where a wing of the house extended beyond his vision, in one place a walk had been built into an angle of the building, at the highest level of windows and doors, just before the peaked roof actually started to rise. A crumbling stone balustrade marked the line of the walk along a fifty-yard stretch of the wall. His eyes, alerted by a half-seen flicker of movement, switched left and centered on the walkway.

	Along it, at speed, came a great dark shape, moving at a lumbering yet fluid pace. It was hard to see details, but before the body passed from sight into a dark doorway further down the balcony, Powers had received several impressions.

	One was of size. The thing he had seen was at least the size of a Terran bear, and not unlike it in outline and movement. But the head, in the one glimpse he had caught, was rounded and without visible ears. It had seemed to move on all fours, but he had an ugly and innate feeling that it could move on two almost as easily.

	The total impression given him was one of mind-chilling stealth and ferocity, schooled into his brain by previous encounters with alien forms of life on a dozen worlds. Nowhere had he seen anything like this, and yet he knew it was dangerous, hideously dangerous, on the instant.

	All these sensations flooded into his mind in a split second. Even as they were recorded, his ears were assailed by a cry, coming from behind him in the dark and tangled wilds of the forlorn and abandoned garden. It was, he realized instantly, the same noise he had heard when calling for help at the foot of the cliff, a shrieking wail, rising above the wind and dying away in a high, piercing tremolo. But it was now far louder and nearer. As he crouched, numbed by a new terror, it sounded again, closer still.

	With the simultaneous realization that it must be on his track, Powers darted from cover, his limbs galvanized by desperation. Better the house and its lurking occupant than meeting the author of that horrid sound in the open. In the house, he had a chance at least to take cover. He raced for the building, momentarily not knowing or caring what might be hidden there, and hurled himself through an open ground floor window head first in a spaceman's roll. He hit with a thud on a stone floor, the breath driven out of his body, but still clutching the knife in the ready position.

	Sparked by adrenalin, he staggered to his feet and peered out of one corner of the window, hoping to gain a view of whatever was following him. As he tried to muffle his gasps for breath and quiet his twitching nerves, he raked the space in front of the windows with his eyes. But only the tossing bushes in which he had recently sheltered, swaying in the wind, met his gaze. Under the fitful light of the red moon, the lank grasses waved undisturbed. Of whatever made that uncanny wail, no trace presented itself.

-

	He swung back into the room of a sudden, damning himself internally for a careless fool. As he peered from the window, anything might have stolen upon him from the inner doorway of the small chamber in which he found himself. It was solid stone, walls, floor, ceiling, with no trace of any furnishings, the floor only faintly dusty. A man-sized doorway opened on to dimness beyond, but no door was in evidence.

	Moving silently, but with every nerve thrilling, Powers went to the opening and peered into the dark beyond. His eyes were now well-accustomed to the poor light, and he found that he could see clearly.

	The small room gave upon a long, high corridor, unlit except for patches of lessened dimness marking other doors. In both directions it ran away into darkness, but one glimpse off to the right gave him a flash of hope. This was a gap in the corridor wall which looked like the base of a stair.

	Once more checking the corridor for sound or movement, and finding neither, he gripped the knife firmly and ventured out of the room, moving slowly along to the right, every muscle taut as a wire.

	Underfoot, the stone felt slimy and cold, but it was smooth and well-worn, presenting no obstacle to silent movement.

	He passed the doorways of several rooms, four of them lit by the moonlight outside, to his right, and two on the inner wall, dark as tombs. In each case he braced himself for a sudden assault from one of the openings as he passed, but nothing happened and he soon found himself at the foot of the stair which he had hoped for before starting.

	It was narrow, also of stone and seemed perfectly sound. It wound in a tight spiral and pausing at the foot, he tried to see up. He listened, to the point of straining his eardrums.

	No sound broke the silence but the faint noise of the wind, outside, now muffled by the house walls. But another sense, one long-used, screamed "Beware" in his mind, and he continued to stand frozen while his tired and overwrought brain sought to identify it.

	It was—scent! Musky, abominable and mephitic, a strange odor hung about the stairway. It was not strong, as if whatever had made it had not been present recently, but it was not stale either.

	Powers had no doubt what the origin was and felt the panic rising to the surface again. The black bulk he had seen on the upper stories of the house had been here, and could use the stair.

	He began to mount, testing each worn and greasy step and finding it firm beneath his sore feet. He nerved himself as he passed the small landing of the second floor, but heard and saw nothing. He went on.

	Nothing happened at the third floor either, but he had no trouble realizing that his passage might still have been marked by a silent listener. Narrow windows, set high in the wall of the stairwell, gave some light, but he could not see out of them and could only continue his progress. He was acutely sensitive to each minute scuff of his feet on the smooth steps, his own breathing, which he fought to keep even and the noise of the wind outside, as it hummed around the house.

	He arrived at the fourth landing, and far down inside his being, felt better. Some heritage from tree-dwelling ancestors made heights seem safer, he mused to himself, even as he stood waiting and listening.

-

	The stairs climbed no higher. One doorway opened off the landing, just as in the ground floor, a rectangle of blackness. He tried to catch the elusive and acrid odor he had detected earlier, but it was gone. Gripping his knife, he passed through the doorway and found himself in another corridor.

	This one appeared even longer than the one on the ground floor of the house, and it was far better lit. Not only were there windows admitting the rays of the red moon, but breaks in the roof were numerous as well, and the passage had piles of rubble here and there on its floor. The noise of the wind seemed suddenly louder, almost a yell as it raced through the many openings and surged down the length of the whole building.

	For no particular reason, Powers turned right rather than left and began a slow reconnaissance of the corridor, watching for any place that might provide at least a temporary shelter, in which he could hide until daybreak. If there is such a thing as day in this place, said his weary mind.

	He passed a doorway on his right, no different from any other, when he halted suddenly and spun back. There had been an actual door, and his tired brain had failed to register it. It was hung on great metal hinges and stood solidly, a great, unadorned mass of a seeming black wood, opening on the room or inward side. There was no bolt or lock.

	He checked the corridor again, saw and heard nothing and then moved quickly into the room. Unlike the other he had seen, it was not completely empty. Several large timbers, fragments of old beams, lay scattered on the floor, and a large wooden chest, minus its top, stood in one corner, under the window.

	Powers summoned his last reserves of energy and by sheer strength managed to close the heavy door on its harshly grating hinges. The noise he made terrified him but there was no help for it. Dragging over the largest fragment of beam, he made a sturdy brace against it, and then sat down, facing the window and the moonlight. He noted idly, while listening, that a small hatch was set in one wall, the left, which might communicate with some forgotten pantry and that it seemed to have something dark like rotted velvet stuffed back in its recesses. A vague unease about the texture of what he had noted in passing made him look back again. And this time he saw movement where the material had been.

	Into the room, slowly and with infinite caution there came a hand. It was five fingered and each huge finger was tipped with a polished claw. The hand and the colossal arm behind it were furred in black, close-lying pelage, which he had mistaken for velvet. It moved slowly and stealthily in his direction, already as long as his leg and twice as big around. With it came a wave of the foul and sickening odor.

	Frozen momentarily, he saw his error. The hatch he had seen was actually a connecting window to the next room and he had awakened what was lying there when he moved the beams and braced the door.

	A great gust of fury awakened in his exhausted body. Just when he had found a shelter, some hideous thing sought to devour him! Within a bare second of his moment of discovery, he sprang across the room and with his knife, slashed at the groping black limb, aiming at the inner elbow, and hoping to sever a tendon.

	The arm jerked back like lightning, and simultaneously, he was almost deafened by a scream of rage and pain which shook him physically with its sheer volume.

	He leaped back, alert, his gaze fixed on the little window and saw, framed in its square, filling it from side to side, the visage which guided the arm.

-

	The face was twice the size of a man's and rather like that of a colossal cat. Black fur covered it to the blunt, naked muzzle, which was damp and wet. The eyes were huge, red and lambent, with vertical, black pupils, and he could just see tiny, upright ears on the sides of the great head. The wide, lipless mouth opened and again he was deafened by that awful cry, even as he saw the terrible teeth, a row of razor-sharp carnassials. The stench of the brute filled the room like a fog, but as he poised, ready for further battle, he saw with satisfaction that dark drops and pools on the floor showed his own power. He waited, tired but alert, for the monster's next move, his eyes fixed on that dreadful face.

	As he waited for the next attack, the beast screamed again. But the cry was different, higher and wailing, even though it still left the man shaking from sheer vibration. And all the time, the strange eyes never left him, their stare of concentrated malignancy seeming to will him to remain, to freeze there and never move.

	And even as that thought crossed his mind, a faint sound from outside came to his ears through the window, and he knew the bitter taste of his own folly. He had ignored all the warnings, the scream in the garden as he entered the house, the almost simultaneous shape on the balcony that he had watched, and now the familiar wailing howl from the wounded animal, followed by the scrape of claws outside. The balcony ran outside this very room, and there were two hunters, not one!

	All this flashed through his mind as he was moving. The beast in the next room could never get through the connecting window. All he had to do was stay out of its reach. He dropped his knife and spinning to the old chest he had noted in the far corner, lidless and battered, he stooped and with a convulsive effort raised it from the ground. Half hurling and half pushing it, he aimed it straight at the outer window and his timing could not have been better, although it was largely luck.

	As the second hideous head rose to the window level, preparing to scramble in, a hundred pounds of ancient but solid wood struck it squarely with all the force a tired but powerful and desperate man could put behind it.

	A massive crunch was followed by an awful, choked-off snarl and scrabbling sounds and then the window was clear again. From far below came the sound of something heavy hitting the ground with a squashy impact.

	Powers had fallen to his knees, and, still on them, turned to face his original enemy. But the small connecting window was also empty. Must get up, he thought, and find that knife. But he could not rise. And the room was getting darker, much darker. His strong body was at last betraying him, when he needed it most, giving way to all the physical effort that had been demanded of it, giving way to the hours of fear and tension, the lack of food and water. The other one will come in the window, said his mind: fight! Once more he tried to rise and do battle and actually managed to totter erect, even as the room went completely black and he knew that he was falling forward. He never even felt the floor as he hit.

	Which, under the circumstances, was not really too surprising.

-

	"He's coming out now," said a voice. "The last shot should do it. Keep his arm immobilized as long as that tube is in it. Twenty more units of Adrenergon before his balance is built up again."

	Powers was aware of being alive and comfortable even before opening his eyes. He felt tired. But pleasantly so, and cool and clean as well. Something soft covered his recumbent body and a pleasant odor, fresh and bracing, was in the air he breathed. Stretching ever so slightly, still only partly awake, he felt his right arm immobilized and the feeling brought all his memories back in a wave, causing him to try to sit up, his eyes open with shock.

	"Easy, easy, Commander." A firm hand on his chest and another on his left shoulder kept him from moving. A tall, blond man of his own age was smiling down at him, his arms restraining any movement. Powers blinked stupidly at him and then stared past him at the others in the large room. All present, but one, wore white coveralls.

	A short, elderly man with an aquiline, clean-shaven face and a stubble of cropped, gray hair stood grinning at the foot of Powers' bed. Next to him, also smiling pleasantly, was a handsome gray-haired woman. And lounging against the far wall was the tall figure of a Lyran, wearing service Blacks with no insignia, his great goggling eyes fixed oddly on Powers' face, his greenish tail curled neatly around one leg, making his race look even more than usual like monstrous parodies of Terrestrial chameleons.

	Powers lay back under his white sheet, idly noting the bustle of a group of human technicians, farther back still, who were moving some massive equipment from the room on silent wheels. He also noted the tube inserted in his arm and leading to a hospital intravenous feeding unit.

	"O.K.," said the blond man who had been holding him down. "Stay quiet, don't move and you can talk. We're here to answer questions. But let me say one thing first. You graduated."

	A sense of lassitude almost stopped Powers from answering, but he was too curious.

	"Where was it? What planet was I on?"

	The older man at the bed's foot answered. "No one will ever land there, or ever has, Commander. You are its first, last and only inhabitant and always will be."

	"That's impossible," said Powers. "How did you get me there? How did you get me away? And what about those black demons and the ..." He stopped, because all those in the room were smiling except the Lyran who could not, and he was emitting the leaking-kettle noise which passed for laughter with his race. A light began to gleam in Powers' eyes and his mind started to race furiously. He was in a hospital. Had he ever left it?

	"He's getting it," said the woman. "Let's put him out of his misery quickly. Commander, you have spent six Galac hours, no more, battling the deadliest dangers, the most vicious adversaries in the galaxy, as well as surmounting the worst obstacles known to man. But none of us can ever really go where you have gone, see what you have seen or do what you have done.

	"You see," she continued pleasantly, "You have fought monsters of your own creating, battled difficulties existing only in your own imagination, dredged from the worst horrors of your subconscious fears and dreads. You have never left this building, never moved a muscle in actuality, except to tense one occasionally." She paused.

-

	"I'll take over," the older man said. "Ever see the clown who was just holding you, Commander?"

	Powers glanced at the tall, blond man, then shook his head. This would take a whole lot of time to sort out.

	"Think of him in a dirty uniform, unshaven and with Landing Force insignia."

	Powers stared again, then smiled in recognition.

	"Yes, I remember. He met my flier at the building. Why?"

	"Annoyed you, didn't he?" was the question.

	"Yes, he did. So did that hag in the office and that toadstool of a psychiatrist. Again why? What does it prove?"

	This time he flushed when he saw them all grinning.

	"Yes," smiled the woman. "I'm the hag. Dr. Anna Fradkin at your service. We're rather good at disguise around here. I was made up as a grade-school teacher you once had and whom you loathed. Pretty good research, eh? The ex-sergeant, very ex, is Inspector Jared Morgan of the Terran Criminal Police. Sakh Mazzechaz of Lyra Seven is against the wall. And our toadstool psychiatrist with the disgusting interest in sex is at the foot of your bed. Galac Rear Admiral Dulip Singh, to be formal."

	Powers could only gape at this point, but the smiling flag officer helped ease his bewilderment.

	"Look, Powers, relax. You are now, and only now, a Galac Field Agent of Survey & Contact. You've passed the final tests. There's a lot more to learn but it's school work, although some of it can be rough.

	"Survey & Contact has a very small corps. Human and nonhuman, and we're a minority, there are only about three thousand Field Agents. Not many for a galaxy, largely unexplored, eh?

	"You've been tested for over a year. Your mail has been read, your messages, oral and written, monitored. You've been spied on, checked, watched and studied. Those forms and tests you filled out were like the one seventeenth or whatever of an iceberg that appears above water. We know you pretty well. Frankly, we planted the original idea of joining us in a thousand, subtle ways. We do it all the time, although most never get here at all. We are always looking for new people. The good ones are scarce.

	"If we had found anything we didn't like, you'd never have joined. It would have been harmless, but you would have lost interest. We have some pretty good psych people, too. Survey & Contact still would be a mystery to you, and not an interesting one at that.

	"All right, we had brought you to a certain point. We could go no farther. The final test was devised by ... well, never mind, some day you'll learn, if you live that long.

	"Anyway, this morning was it. Disappearing messages, late fliers, no lunch, endless waiting, a busted chron, dirty, unkempt sergeants, nasty prying about sex, alternate jolts of gas, we arranged all of it. Getting a picture? Then, bingo, a threat of death and you're out like a light again. You're strapped in, the electronics wizards connect their gadgets, and you're on your own. In the worst possible place you can think of. The bottom of your own subconscious dread, fighting the demon world of your own Id! You see, a world, even a universe, that you loathe and fear can be induced, forced to appear in your mind.

	"Don't ask me how it's done. That's not my area. You may have a leaning that way yourself. If so, we'll find it. But to get back to the point, you were on a ghastly world filled with childhood fear symbols, half-remembered ghost stories, everything you personally were afraid of, most afraid of, I should say— like that house. A search of your early childhood on Terra disclosed that you had to pass one on your way to school, an empty, old, 'haunted' house that looked like that, and it must have scared Hell out of you so you brought it back. We could follow you on some of it by means of instruments, but you'll have to tell us the rest later. We need the data for our files.

	"At any rate, we had you, irritated, tired, enraged, frustrated, and—keyed up to the highest nervous pitch, which is the only point to all the petty irritations, we had you on, or in as I said, this awful place. You had to fight or go under. Now get this. Those statistics I gave you back in the office were absolutely truthful. You could have been killed. A lot of good men and women have been. So have many other entities. Some minds simply cannot take what they call up out of their own depths. It's the last, ultimate test for a flaw. If you can keep coming, never stop, and never let up, against the worst in your own subconscious, you can't be stopped by anything. Killed, physically, of course, but not stopped." He paused. "Any questions?"

	Powers felt numbed and overwhelmed by what he had heard, but he still had things to ask.

	"What happens now, Sir, about my regular service, I mean?"

	"You'll be transferred, probably to Supply & Requisitions. And be promoted steadily in grade. We have no rank, only assignments. Today you obey me. Tomorrow—the reverse. You may make admiral, but I doubt it. Too impetuous.

	"And then you'll go to school. Our school. And go to work. But no one will ever know. What else?"

	"Well, the gentle being from Lyra, has he something special to say to me?"

	"Oh, him." Admiral Singh turned and winked at Mazzechaz, who politely snapped a nictitating membrane in a return gesture.

	"Seems he wants you for a partner. He liked your total profile in our files. We all have them, partners, that is, to begin with, sometimes permanently. Don't know what he saw in you, myself. More?"

	Powers sat up and stared at the faces around him. It all seemed unbelievable, but it must be true.

	"Is this graduation, Sir?"

	"All you'll ever get, Son. Now we'll clear out, let you get some rest. Oh, yes, one more thing." The admiral assumed a rigid posture, a deadpan expression.

	"Do you still want to join?"

	Powers was awfully tired, but he managed to rise to the occasion.

	"Hell, yes, it beats work, I guess."

	There was a long silence from all those around the bed and then the tall Lyran spoke for the first time, in a sibilant whisper.

	"Welcome, Brother."

The End