Les exhaled wearily. "Eight-five-eleven-six," he said.

The old lips stirred, the old machinery of Tom's mind began turning slowly.

"Eight . . . f—ive . . ." The pale eyes blinked slowly. "Elevensix," Tom finished in a breath, then straightened himself proudly.

Yes, good, he thought—very good. They wouldn't fool him tomorrow; he'd beat their murderous law. His lips pressed together and his hands clasped tightly on the white table cloth.

"What?" he said then, refocusing his eyes as Les said something. "Speak up," he said, irritably. "Speak up."

"I gave you another sequence," Les said quietly. "Here, I'll read it again."

Tom leaned forward a little, ears straining.

"Nine-two-sixteen-seven-three," Les said.

Tom cleared his throat with effort. "Speak slower," he told his son. He hadn't quite gotten that. How did they expect anyone to retain such a ridiculously long string of numbers?

"What, what?" he asked angrily as Les read the numbers again.

"Dad, the examiner will be reading the questions faster than I'm reading them. You—"

"I'm quite aware of that," Tom interrupted stiffly. "Quite aware. Let me remind you . . . however, this is . . . not a test. It's study, it's for study. Foolish to go rushing through everything. Foolish. I have to learn this —this . . . this test," he finished, angry at his son and angry at the way desired words hid themselves from his mind.

Les shrugged and looked down at the test again. "Nine-two-sixteen-seven-three," he read slowly. "Nine-two-six-seven—" "Sixteen-seven, Dad." "I said that." "You said six, Dad."

"Don't you suppose I know what I said!" Les closed his eyes a moment. "All right, Dad," he said. "Well, are you going to read it again or not?" Tom asked him sharply.

Les read the numbers off again and, as he listened to his father stumble through the sequence, he glanced into the living room at Terry.

She was sitting there, features motionless, sewing. She'd turned off the radio and he knew she could hear the old man faltering with the numbers.

All right, Les heard himself saying in his mind as if he spoke to her. All right, I know he's old and useless. Do you want me to tell him that to his face and drive a knife into his back? You know and I know that he won't pass the test. Allow me, at least, this brief hypocrisy. Tomorrow the sentence will be passed. Don't make me pass it tonight and break the old man's heart.

"That's correct, I believe," Les heard the dignified voice of his father say and he refocused his eyes on the gaunt, seamed face.

"Yes, that's right," he said, hastily.

He felt like a traitor when a slight smile trembled at the corners of his father's mouth. I'm cheating him, he thought.

"Let's go on to something else," he heard his father say and he looked down quickly at the sheet. What would be easy for him? he thought, despising himself for thinking it.

"Well, come on, Leslie," his father said in a restrained voice. "We have no time to waste."

Tom looked at his son thumbing through the pages and his hands closed into fists. Tomorrow, his life was in the balance and his son just browsed through the test paper as if nothing important were going to happen tomorrow.

"Come on, come on," he said peevishly.

Les picket-up a pencil that had string attached to it and drew a half-inch circle on a piece of blank paper. He held out the pencil to his father.

"Suspend the pencil point over the circle for three minutes," he said, suddenly afraid he'd picked the wrong question. He'd seen his father's hands trembling at meal times or fumbling with the buttons and zippers of his clothes.

Swallowing nervously, Les picked up the stop watch, started it, and nodded to his father.

Tom took a quivering breath as he leaned over the paper and tried to hold the slightly swaying pencil above the circle. Les saw him lean on his elbow, something he wouldn't be allowed to do on the test; but he said nothing.

He sat there looking at his father. Whatever color there had been was leaving the old man's face and Les could see clearly the tiny red lines of broken vessels under the skin of his cheeks. He looked at the dry skin, creased and brownish, dappled with liver spots. Eighty years old, he thought—what does a man feel when he's 80 years old?

He looked in at Terry again. For a moment, her gaze shifted and they were looking at each other, neither of them smiling or making any sign. Then Terry looked back to her sewing.

"I believe that's three minutes," Tom said in a taut voice.

Les looked down at the stop watch. "A minute and a half, Dad," he said, wondering if he should have lied again.

"Well, keep your eyes on the watch then," his father said, perturbedly, the pencil penduluming completely out of the circle. "This is supposed to be a test, not a—a—a party."

Les kept his eyes on the wavering pencil point, feeling a sense of utter futility at the realization that this was only pretense, that nothing they did could save his father's life.

At least, he thought, the examinations weren't given by the sons and daughters who had voted the law into being. At least he wouldn't have to stamp the black inadequate on his father's test and thus pronounce the sentence.

The pencil wavered over the circle edge again and was returned as Tom moved his arm slightly on the table, a motion that would automatically disqualify him on that question.

"That watch is slow!" Tom said in a sudden fury.

Les caught his breath and looked down at the watch. Two and a half minutes. "Three minutes," he said, pushing in the plunger.

Tom slapped down the pencil irritably. "There," he said. "Fool test anyway." His voice grew morose. "Don't prove a thing. Not a thing."

"You want to do some money questions, Dad?"

"Are they the next questions in the test?" Tom asked, looking over suspiciously to check for himself.

"Yes," Les lied, knowing that his father's eyes were too weak to see even though Tom always refused to admit he needed glasses. "Oh, wait a second, there's one before that," he added, thinking it would be easier for his father. "They ask you to tell time."

"That's a foolish question," Tom muttered. "What do they—"

He reached across the table irritably and picked up the watch and glanced down at its face. "Ten fifteen," he said, scornfully.

Before Les could think to stop himself, he said, "But it's 11:15, Dad."

His father looked, for a moment, as though his face had been slapped. Then he picked up the watch again and stared down at it, lips twitching, and Les had the horrible premont-tion that Tom was going to insist it really was 10:15.

"Well, that's what I meant," Tom said abruptly. "Slipped out wrong. Course it's 11:15, any fool can see that. Eleven fifteen. Watch is no good. Numbers too close. Ought to throw it away. Now—"

Tom reached into his vest pocket and pulled out his own gold watch. "Here's a watch," he said, proudly. "Been telling perfect time for . . . sixty years! That's a watch. Not like this."

He tossed Les's watch down contemptuously and it flipped over on its flfce and the crystal broke.

"Look at that," Tom said quickly, to cover the jolting of embarassment. "Watch can't take anything."

He avoided Les's eyes by looking down at his own watch. His mouth tightened as he opened the back and looked at Mary's picture; Mary when she was in her thirties, golden-haired and lovely.

Thank God, she didn't have to take tests, he thought—at least she was spared that. Tom had never thought he could believe that Mary's accidental death at 57 was fortunate, but that was before the tests.

He closed the watch and put it away.

"You just leave that watch with me, tonight," he said grumpily. "I'll see you get a decent . . . uh, crystal tomorrow."

"That's all right, Dad. It's just an old watch."

"That's all right," Tom said. "That's all right. You just leave it with me. I'll get you a decent . . . crystal. Get you one that won't break, one that won't break. You just leave it with me."

Tom did the money questions then, questions like How many quarters in a five dollar bill? and If I took 36 cents from your dollar, how much change would you have left?

They were written questions and Les sat there timing his father. It was quiet in the house, warm. Everything seemed very normal and ordinary with the two of them sitting there and Terry sewing in the living room.

That was the horror.

Life went on as usual. No one spoke of dying. The government sent out letters and the tests were given and those who failed were requested to appear at the government center for their injections. The law operated, the death rate was steady, the population problem was contained—all officially, impersonally, without a cry or a sensation.

But it was still loved people who were being killed.

"Never mind hanging over that watch," his father said. "I can do these questions without you . . . hanging over that watch."

"Dad, the examiners will be looking at their watches." "The examiners are the examiners," Tom snapped. "You're not an examiner." "Dad, I'm trying to help y—"

"Well, help me then, help me. Don't sit there hanging over that watch."

"This is your test, Dad, not mine," Les started, a flush of anger creeping up his cheeks. "If—"

"My test, yes, my test!" his father suddenly raged. "You all saw to that, didn't you? All saw to it that—that—"

Words failed again, angry thoughts piling up in his brain.

"You don't have to yell, Dad." "I'm not yelling!"

"Dad, the boys are sleeping!" Terry suddenlv broke in.

"I don't care if—!" Tom broke off suddenly and leaned back in the chair, the pencil falling unnoticed from his fingers and rolling across the table cloth. He sat shivering, his thin chest rising and falling in jerks, his hands twitching uncontrollably on his lap.

"Do you want to go on, Dad?" Les asked, restraining his nervous anger.

"I don't ask much," Tom mumbled to himself. "Don't ask much in life."

"Dad, shall we go on?"

His father stiffened. "If you can spare the time," he said with slow, indignant pride. "If you can spare the time."

Les looked at the test paper, his fingers gripping the stapled sheets rigidly. Psychological questions? No, he couldn't ask them. How did you ask your 80-year-old father his views on sex?—your flint-surfaced father to whom the most innocuous remark was "obscene."

"Well?" his father asked in a rising voice.

"There doesn't seem to be anymore," Les said. "We've been at it almost four hours now."

"What about all those pages you just skipped?'-'

"Most of those are for the the physical, Dad."

He saw his father's lips press together and was afraid Tom was going to say something about that again. But all his father said was, "A fine friend. Fine friend."

"Dad, you—"

Les's voice broke off. There was no point in talking about it anymore. Tom knew perfectly well that Doctor Trask couldn't make out a bill of health for this test the way he'd done for the^hree tests previous.

Les knew how frightened and insulted the old man was because he'd have to take off his clothes and be exposed to doctors who would probe and tap and ask offensive questions. He knew how afraid Tom was of the fact that when he re-dressed, he'd be watched from a peephole and someone would mark on a chart how well he dressed himself. He knew how it frightened his father to know that, when he ate in the government cafeteria at the midpoint of the day-long examination, eyes would be watching him again to see if he dropped a fork or a spoon or knocked over a glass of water or dribbled gravy on his shirt.

"They'll ask you to sign your name and address," Les said, wanting his father to forget about the physical and knowing how proud Tom was of his handwriting.

Pretending that he grudged it, the old man picked up the pencil and wrote. I'll fool them, he thought as the pencil moved across the page with strong, sure motions.

Mr. Thomas Parker, he wrote, 2719 Brighton Street, Blairtown, New York.

"And the date," Les said.

The old man wrote, January 17, 2003, and something cold moved in the old man's vitals. Tomorrow was the test.

They lay beside each other, neither of them sleeping. They had barely spoken while undressing and when Les had leaned over to kiss her goodnight she'd murmured something he didn't hear.

Now he turned over on his side with a heavy sigh and faced her. In the darkness, she opened her eyes and looked over at him.

"Asleep?" she asked softly.

"No."

He said no more. He waited for her to start.

But she didn't start and, after a few moments, he said, "Well, I guess this is . . . it." He finished weakly because he didn't like the words; they sounded ridiculously melodramatic.

Terry didn't say anything right away. Then, as if thinking aloud, she said, "Do you think there's any chance that—"

Les tightened at the words because Jie knew what she was going to say.

"No," he said. "He'll never pass."

He heard Terry swallowing. Don't say it, he thought, pleadingly. Don't tell me I've been saying the same thing for fifteen years. I know it. I said it because I thought it was true.

Suddenly, he wished he'd signed the Request For Removal years before. They needed desperately to be free of Tom; for the good of their children and themselves. But how did you put that need into words without feeling like a murderer? You couldn't say: I hope the old man fails, I hope they kill him. Yet anything else you said was only a hypocritical substitute for those words because that was exactly how you felt.

Medical terms, he thought—charts about declining crops and lowered standard of living and hunger ratio and degrading health level—they'd used all those as arguments to support passage of the law. Well, they were lies—obvious, groundless lies. The law had been passed because people wanted to be left alone, because they wanted to live their own lives.

"Les, what if he passes?" Terry said.

He felt his hands tightening on the mattress.

"Les?"

"I don't know, honey," he said.

Her voice was firm in the darkness. It was a voice at the end of patience. "You have to know," it said.

He moved his head restlessly on the pillow. "Honey, don't push it," he begged. "Please."

"Les, if he passes that test it means five more years. Five more years, Les. Have you thought what that means?"

"Honey, he can't pass that test."

"But, what if he does?"

"Terry, he missed three-quarters of the questions I asked him tonight. His hearing is almost gone, his eyes are bad, his heart is weak, he has arthritis." His fist beat down hopelessly on the bed. "He won't even pass the physical," he said, feeling himself tighten in self-hatred for assuring her that Tom was doomed.

If only he could forget the past and take his father for what he was now—a helpless, mid-jading old man who was ruining.,their lives. But it was hard to forget how he'd loved and respected his father, hard to forget the hikes in the country, the fishing trips, the long talks at night and all the many things his father and he had shared together.

That was why he'd never had the strength to sign the request. It was a simple form to fill out, much simpler than waiting for the five-year tests. But it had meant signing away the life of his father, requesting the government to dispose of him like some unwanted garbage. He could never do that.

And yet, now his father was 80 and, in spite of moral upbringing, in spite of life-taught Christian principles, he and Terry were horribly afraid that old Tom might pass the test and live another five years with them—another five years of fumbling around the house, undoing instructions they gave to the boys, breaking things, wanting to help but only getting in the way and making life an agony of held-in nerves.

"You'd better sleep," Terry said to him.

He tried to but he couldn't. He lay staring at the dark ceiling and trying to find an answer but finding no answer.

The alarm went off at 6. Les didn't have to get up until 8 but he wanted to see his father off. He got out of bed and dressed quietly so he wouldn't wake up Terry.

She woke up anyway and looked up at him from her pillow. After a moment, she pushed up on one elbow and looked sleepily at him.

"I'll get up and make you some breakfast," she said.

"That's all right," Les said. "You stay in bed."

"Don't you want me to get up?"

"Don't bother, honey," he said. "I want you to rest."

She lay down again and turned away so Les wouldn't see her face. She didn't know why she began to cry soundlessly; whether it was because he didn't want her to see his father or because of the test. But she couldn't stop. All she could do was hold herself rigid until the bedroom door had closed.

Then her shoulders trembled and a sob broke the barrier she had built in herself.

The door to his father's room was open as Les passed. He looked in and saw Tom sitting on the bed, leaning down and fastening his dark shoes. He saw the gnarled fingers shaking as they moved over the straps.

"Everything all right, Dad?" Les asked.

His father looked up in surprise. "What are you doing up this hour?" he asked.

"Thought I'd have breakfast with you," Les told him.

For a moment they looked at each other in silence.

Then his father leaned over the shoes again. "That's not necessary," he heard the old man's voice telling him.

"Well, I think I'll have some breakfast anyway," he said and turned away so his father couldn't argue.

"Oh ... Leslie."

Les turned.

"I trust you didn't forget to leave that watch out," his
father said. "I intend to take it to the jeweler's today and
have a decent decent crystal put on it, one that

won't break."

"Dad, it's just an old watch," Les said. "It's not worth a nickel."

His father nodded slowly, one palm wavering before him as if to ward off argument. "Never-the-less," he stated slowly, "I intend to—"

"All right, Dad, all right. I'll put it on the kitchen table."

His father broke off and looked at him blankly a moment. Then, as if it were impulse and not delayed will, he bent over his shoes again.

Les stood for a moment looking down at his father's gray hair, his gaunt, trembling fingers. Then he turned away.

The watch was still on the dining room table. Les picked it up and took it in to the kitchen table. The old man must have been reminding himself about the watch all night, he thought. Otherwise he wouldn't have managed to remember it.

He put fresh water in the coffee globe and pushed the buttons for two servings of bacon and eggs. Then he poured two glasses of orange juice and sat down at the table.

About fifteen- minutes later, his father came down wearing his dark blue suit, his shoes carefully polished, his nails manicured, his hair slicked down and combed and brushed. He looked very neat and very old as he walked over to the coffee globe and looked in.

"Sit down, Dad," Les said. "I'll get it for you."

"I'm not helpless," his father said. "Stay where you are."

Les managed a smile. "I put some bacon and eggs on for us," he said.

"Not hungry," his father replied.

"You'll need a good breakfast in you, Dad."

"Never did eat a big breakfast," his father said, stiffly, still facing the stove. "Don't believe in it. Not good for the stomach."

Les closed his eyes a moment and across his face moved an expression of hopeless despair. Why did I bother getting up? he asked himself defeatedly. All we do is argue.

No. He felt himself stiffening. No, he'd be cheerful if it killed him.

"Sleep all right, Dad?" he asked.

"Course I slept all right," his father answered. "Always sleep fine. Fine. Did you think I wouldn't because of a—"

He broke off suddenly and turned accusingly at Les. "Where's that watch?" he demanded.

Les exhaled wearily and held up the watch. His father moved jerkily across the linoleum, took it from him and looked at it a moment, his old lips pursed.

"Shoddy workmanship," he said. "Shoddy." He put it carefully in his side coat pocket. "Get you a decent crystal," he muttered. "One that won't break."

Les nodded. "That'll be swell, Dad."

The coffee was ready then and Tom poured them each a cup. Les got up and turned off the automatic griller. He didn't feel like having bacon and eggs either now.

He sat across the table from his stem-faced father and felt hot coffee trickling down his throat. It tasted terrible but he knew that nothing in the world would have tasted good to him that morning.

"What time do you have to be there, Dad?" he asked to break the silence.

"Nine o'clock," Tom said.

"You're sure you don't want me to drive you there?"

"Not at all, not at all," his father said as though he were talking patiently to an irritably insistent child. "The tube is good enough. Get me there in plenty of time."

"All right, Dad," Les said and sat there staring into his

"Sadie's going to be with us for quite a while."

"As smug as that, eh?" The engineer turned away from the mike. His voice, though still ■audible, grew tiny. "Well, general, there you are. She ticks."

"Ought to," was the faint reply. "We were beginning to sweat. She cost four billion to develop."

The engineer's voice had a grin in it. "Where do we go from here? Mars? Or the moon?"

"Sadie is our top, boy. And we're lucky to have her. The new Congress is tired of our costly little experiment, and wants to reduce taxes. The new President thinks the development of weapons leads to war. He doesn't like war, and so in this year of 1969—"

He must have thought better of what he intended to say. There was silence, though not for long. Gregory's faraway voice said, "What's next?"

"Dive," said the general.

The engineer's voice approached the mike:

"Morlake."

"I heard."

"Okay. See if you can hit O'Ryan."

Morlake grinned. The three test pilots of Kane Field played a game against the famous racist publisher. Each time they dived they chose as target the Star-Telegram building, which peered seventy stories into the sky beside the flat, dead-looking waters of Lake Michigan. The idea was, if anything went wrong, they might as well take O'Ryan and his penthouse into hell with them. And they meant it too, after a fashion.

The plane began to shudder. At eighty miles the jets were silent and useless, and the hammering of the rockets was a sharp sound carried by the metallic frame. The rockets were not meant to carry the load alone. All the smoothness^fras gone from his marvellous machine. Morlake paused for a final look at the universe.

It was tremendously, unnaturally dark outside. The stars were pinpoints of intense brightness, that did not twinkle or glitter. The sun, far to his left, was only approximately round. Streamers of flame and fire mist made it appear lopsided and unnatural. A quarter moon rode the blackness directly overhead.

The S29A, moving very slowly, not more than a hundred miles an hour, was over Chicago now. The city was lost in haze, quite invisible to the naked eye. But on the radar screen every building was etched, and there was no mistaking the Star-Telegram structure. Morlake waited until the hairline sights directed under his seat were touching the shadow of the building, and then he carefully tilted the nose of the plane downward.

He was in no hurry, but presently the front aiming device was pointed directly at the image on the radar screen. The speedometer was edged over to a thousand miles an hour, when there was a dazzlingly bright flash in the sky behind and above him. Something big and hot as hell itself flashed past him, and began to recede into the distance below.

Morlake cringed involuntarily. He had time to think: A meteorite! Speed about fourteen hundred miles an hour. Below him, the bright flame fuzzed and winked out. He stared at it astounded, removed his foot from the accelerator; and then, there, twenty feet away, was the object. And it was not a meteorite at all.

Morlake gazed at the thing in blank horror, as the radio embedded in the cushions beside bis ears clicked on, and Gregory's voice shouted:

"Morlake, we've just got word: New York, Washington, scores of cities destroyed in the last ten minutes by giant atomic bombs. Morlake—get away from Chicago with Sadie. She's our only working S29A. Morlake, you hear me?"

He heard, but he couldn't speak. He sat frozen to the controls, glaring at the atomic bomb twenty feet away.

After a blank period, Morlake stirred like a sick dog. His reflexes began to function in a dream-like fashion. His eyes shifted heavily over the instrument board. Slowly, he grew aware that the world around was becoming brighter. A faint dawn glimmered in the distance to either side, and the blaze of light below was like a vast fire bowl into which the bomb and the ship were falling.

He thought: the flame that had seared his ship when 42

the bomb first passed him—that must have been its forward rocket tubes slowing the thing so that it wouldn't burn up from sheer speed in the thick atmosphere lower down.

The thought passed as though it had never been, as if the thin, shrieking wind building up outside had torn it from his brain. In its place, a formless mind stuff, seeking shape, pressed and quivered inside him. Plans too fleeting to be comprehended multiplied and coalesced. Impersonal plans involving death for his body. Impersonal, because the city below was not his city. No one in it knew him or cared about him, not even a secondary girl friend. He hated the place. Windy, dirty, wretched, miserable, hot in summer, cold in winter . . . No, there was nothing there, nothing at all. But the yeast of plans fermented with violence and direction.

"Morlake, damn your soul, answer me!"

Answer me, answer me, answer me! Over all the mad schemes that were now springing full-grown into his head, one took precedence. If he could deflect the bomb into the lake, five million people would have a chance for life.

He knew better. Even as he shoved his plane over on fingers of wan jetfire, and felt the metal frame jar against the bomb, he knew that the greater bombs needed only to fall into the vicinity of the cities. Direct hits were unnecessary.

But he pushed with the plane's vertical jets. His body shrank, expecting the blow of radiation. And at first nothing happened. There was not enough air to give power even to those superjets.

"Morlake, for God's sake, where are you?"

He was tj^a.intent for words to reach him. He had a fear that he would push the plane too hard, and that the curved fuselage would roll itself away from the streamlined bomb. Delicate manipulation, touch, pressure, oh, so delicate.

The movement began slowly. He noticed it first on the hairline sighting device in front of him. O'Ryan was no longer directly below. At that instant of infinitesimal success, the bottom of the bomb flashed white fire. One burst only, but it jarred his precious contact. He felt his machine slip clear of the bomb, and with a shock he saw that his sights were once more pointing straight at the newspaper skyscraper.

The bomb has reacted to his pressure. It must be on a beam, and couldn't be diverted. Almost instantly, the bomb offered one more surprise. As he sat in a haze of uncertainty as to his next move, it sent a flare of light billowing over the S29A. Morlake shrank, and then the light was gone. He had no time to think about it, because—

"Morlake, you damned idiot, save Sadie!"

Anger, despair, hate, frustration and the beginning of insanity—all were in that shout. Morlake would have ignored it too, would have been almost unaware, but at that split instant his gaze touched the altimeter. Twenty miles. Only twenty miles to earth.

The fever of his purpose burned out of him. Suddenly, he thought of Sadie as those desperate men at Kane Field were thinking of her. Sadie, the sleek, the gorgeous, Sadie of the high tail, the first of a fleet not yet built.

He spurted his forward jets. And saw the bomb sink below him. Instantly, it was gone into the mist. He began to turn, to try to pull her out of her dive. Three times he blanked out, and came to again, dizzy but alive. Finally, the plane was level. Morlake brought her nose up, and climbed on a long slant at an acceleration that clenched his body.

Behind him, below him, there was a glare as of a thousand times ten thousand suns. A supernal blaze it was, unmatched in the sidereal universe" except by the unthinkable fires of a Nova-O sun at its moment of ultimate explosion.

Catastrophe for a continent! Forty million people in fifty major cities died in a space of not more than thirty minutes. It was later estimated that each of the bombs dropped generated flash heats of forty thousand billion degrees centigrade. Everywhere, the forces released were too great to be confined. The balance of a hemisphere was shaken. Earthquakes convulsed regions that had never known a tremor. And all that afternoon and night the ground settled and quivered with a violence that had not been paralleled in the history of mankind.

By mid-aftemoon of the first day, a stricken people had begun to rally and reintegrate. Senator Milton Tor-mey, recovering from food poisoning in Florida, brought together two aged, ailing Congressmen in a resort hotel, and the three issued a manifesto ordering a six-month period of martial law. In Berlin, General Wayne, commanding American forces in Germany, demanded that all countries in Europe and Asia open their borders to American planes. Delay or refusal would be construed as a confession of guilt, and would bring instant retaliation from secret American atomic bomb bases and from the navy.

The national guard was called out. Radar and sonar stations were put on battle alert, and throughout the night hastily-armed men and women stared sleeplessly up into the skies, waiting for the paratroop armies that would surely arrive with the dawn to conquer a devastated nation.

Morning broke over the thousand horizons of America, and the sky and land were still untouched by alien sounds and alien purposes. The sun came up out of the east. People were able to look at their red-eyed neighbors, and to realize that the complete end of their world was not yet at hand. After a week the enemy had still shown no sign. It took a month for American plane patrols, fleets of planes and divisions of men to discover that no nation on earth was organizing for war. Everywhere, peaceful scenes met the frenzied searchers. They retreated finally, reluctandy, from lands they had so summarily entered^

Day by day it grew clearer that the enemy had struck a mortal blow at Earth's most powerful nation. And he had done it so skillfully that he was going to get away with it.

Twice, Morlake, returning to base after his wild flight, made the sweep over Kane Field. The first time, he was past before he recognized the super-airfield. The second time he savored the desolation.

The surface buildings, the control towers, the markers, the lights were down. Planes in twisted heaps on the field and beyond. The wreckage spread into the distance southward as far as he could see! Planes and parts in every degree of destruction, sections of metal buildings, chunks of cement, of brick, of plastic and glass, and miles of splintered lumber. A giant had trod this land.

Morlake settled his machine on its vertical jets, like a helicopter, near one of the underground entrances. As he came down, he saw a score of human figures sprawled almost at the mouth of the entrance. When he rolled nearer, they ceased to look so human. He glanced away quickly, and carefully guided his machine between them and the shelter.

A fierce wind was blowing as he climbed to the ground, but except for that, silence lay over the military air hub of the continent. He stepped gingerly over the wreckage of the underground entrance, and made his way down cracked steps. Plexiglass lights glowed in the upper corridors, untouched by the secondary violence that had raged through the corridors themselves.

Everywhere the walls were smashed. Ceilings had crashed down, and he could hear the remote thunder of loosened girders and earth and cement, tumbling to form barriers in the depths of the supposedly impregnable chambers. Morlake fumbled past two such partial obstacles, came to a third that blocked his passage completely. Then, as the ceiling a few yards behind him rumbled ominously, he began his retreat to the surface.

He reached the open air, breathing hard, and forced himself out of pity to examine the less damaged bodies. All were dead. He floated around the field, landing a dozen times to search shells of buildings, and to peel into underground entrances. He found two men whose pulses flickered with faint life.

They failed to react to the stimulants in his first aid kit, so he loaded them into the jet. Up on the air again, he turned on his radio, and at first the ether seemed silent. It was only when he turned the volume almost to full that a faraway voice scratched through to him. It kept fading out, but each time it came back in, so that he did not lose the continuity:

". . . People in cities over fifty thousand are ordered to leave, but all merchants in those cities must remain in their stores. Repeat: merchants must remain. Those who leave without authorization will be shot . . . Sell your goods to anyone who comes in, rationing all customers . . . One suit, one blanket. Groceries, about two weeks supply....

"People in cities or towns of less than fifty thousand, stay at home. Understand—stay at home! . . . Repeat emergency warning to people on Lake Michigan. A tidal wave is sweeping up from Chicago at a speed of approximately four hundred miles an hour. All shore towns will be destroyed. Wait for nothing. Leave at once!

". . . Flash! London. Great Britain announces declaration of war against unknown enemy. Other countries following ..."

Morlake's mind couldn't hold to the words. The selectivity was too poor, the voice a mere segment of a remote sound. And besides, the first stunned calm was slipping from him. He sat in his plane, thinking of millions of men and women whose bodies had been reduced not to ashes but to atoms ... He was profoundly relieved when he reached his first destination, a small military airport near a sizeable city in Iowa. The two men were rushed off to the local hospital. While his machine was being refueled, Morlake had a brief conference with three worried executive officers. They agreed that his best course was to fly to one of the secret bases,sij* was to them that he mentioned for the first time that he had seen the Chicago bomb.

All three men grew excited, and he had a hard time getting away. They were certain that experts would be able to make much of his experience.

It was some time before he was allowed to approach the secret field. His radio roared with alarms and warnings that he "must leave at once." He insisted that the commanding officer be informed of his presence, and finally he was permitted to set his machine down into a cavernous elevator, and was drawn underground.

He was ushered into the office of General Herrold, and at that time he made only a brief report. He told the general the circumstances under which he had seen the Chicago bomb, and paused, waiting for the flood of questions he expected.

For a long time the old man looked at him, but he asked for no details. And Morlake was being ushered into his quarters on the next tier down before the meaning of the man's thin-lipped hostility penetrated. "By God," he thought, "he didn't believe me!"

It was staggering, but it couldn't be helped. No matter how incredible it sounded, it was his duty to tell what had happened.

He wrote his report as best he could, then phoned the general's office that it was ready. After some delay he was told to remain in his quarters, that an officer would come for the report. That was chilling, but Morlake pretended to see nothing wrong. When the officer had come and gone with the document, Morlake lay down, conscious of unutterable weariness. But his brain was too active for sleep.

Reaction to all the straining tensions of the day took the form of blank horror, of a frank disbelief in what his eyes had seen. Slowly, his emotions became more personal. He began to picture the possibilities of his own situation here, where a suspicious martinet was in command. "Damn him," he thought in a fury. "All the radar stations designed to spot bombs coming down near cities must have been destroyed. And that leaves only what I saw."

But what did this experience prove? It was the one major clue, so far, to the identity of the enemy. And it seemed valueless.

Weeks had still to pass before he would realize how tremendous a clue it really was.

"Order in the court."

The hastily convened court-martial was about to begin.

"It is the intention of the prosecution," said the judge advocate after the preliminaries were over, "to bring evidence that will establish one or the other of two charges against Captain Morlake. The first charge is that he did not, as he has claimed, see an atomic bomb, and that in fact, his purpose was to procure cheap notoriety for himself out of a nation's most profound agony. It is the opinion of the prosecution that, if the court finds him guilty of this charge, the penalties should be severe in proportion to the monstrousness of the disaster that has befallen our country.

"The second charge," the judge advocate continued, "is more serious. It assumes that Captain Morlake did, in fact, see the bomb, as he has stated, but that he has deliberately falsified his report, or else was grossly negligent in failing to observe the direction from which the bomb was coming."

For Morlake, the deadly part was that he knew no one. He was not permitted to subpoena character witnesses from fields to which men he had known had been scattered. By the time the two rocket experts had testified, he recognized that he was doomed. Shortly after his arrest, when one of his guards had whispered that fully half the officers of the secret field had lost members of their families in the bombing, he realized what weight of emotion was against him. These men, twisted by disaster, could not feel, see, or think straight.

The crisis came swiftly after he himself was called to the stand.

"There is no doubt in your mind," the judge advocate said, "that what ypu saw was an atomic bomb?" "It was an atomic bomb." "And it was coming straight down?" "Yes, it was. Absolutely straight." "This was about how high above the ground?" "At least seventy-five miles." Pause; then, gravely:

"Captain Morlake, you have heard experts testify that any bomb accurately aimed from any point on the earth's surface would have been describing a parabolic curve of some kind at the height?" "I have heard the witnesses."

"And what do you conclude from their testimony?"

Morlake was firm. "A short time ago I was convinced that our rocket science was superior to that of any other country. Now, I know that we've been surpassed."

"That is your sole comment on the death of forty million Americans. We have been surpassed."

Morlake swallowed hard, but he controlled himself. "I did not say that. The bomb was coming straight down."

"Hadn't you better think that over, Captain?"

Insinuating words. He knew what they wanted. In the short time since the trial had been scheduled, the prosecution had had several bright ideas. The previous night they had come to him with drawings of hypothetical trajectories of bombs. Every drawing was on a map of the world, and there were three different points of origin illustrated. If he would agree that the bomb had been slanting slightly in any one of the three directions, he would be a hero.

"You still have an opportunity, Captain," said the judge advocate silkily, "of being of great service to your country."

Morlake hesitated miserably. "I'm sorry," he said at last, stiff with fear, "but I cannot change my testimony. It was coming straight down."

The sentence was thirty years, and he was lucky. Within a month of his trial men were being hanged from lamp posts, and sedition trials sprouted like weeds over a land that could not discover its attacker.

On the ninety-fourth morning, Morlake put on his fatigue suit as usual. He had only the vaguest sense of ever having done anything else, the routine was so much a part of him. On the way to breakfast he glanced at the bulletin board, where the day's work sheet had already been posted. Ploughing the east field. Planting potatoes in the valley. Repairing the east fence. Cleaning the stables. Transferring feed to a new barn.

It was the usual pattern, with only one thing missing.

His own name was not attached to any one of the details. Immediately after breakfast he reported the omission to the day sergeant.

"Okay, you go along with the potato planting detail."

Morlake went, telling himself that, if his name were ever again missing from the board, he would report to the office of the clerks who made up the work sheet.

It wasn't that the work hadn't been good for him. He had always been as hard as nails, and his internal muscles were so perfectly balanced and organized that, in all the army air forces, he had proved by actual test that he could withstand more acceleration than any other man.

And he felt better now, healthier, more awake, more alive, more appreciative of life. But he didn't like planting potatoes. The army farm used the old, primitive method of bending down to place each seed-spud by hand ... By noon, he was sweating and tired.

The mid-day dinner was eaten in the field. Men squatted on the grass with their plates and cups. And the chatter took exactly the same form as on the day before, and the day before that, and so on back into infinity.

"The bombs . . ." "Hey, did you hear what that new guy said the other day, about somebody staggering out of an undamaged basement in New York City?" "Some character in the Middle West is saying that bombs could only have come from the Moon . . ." ". . . It's the Chinese, or I'll be dipped in . . ." "I'll put my money in Russia . . ." "Hell, if I was General Wayne in Berlin, I'd—"

The detail sergeant climbed lazily to his feet. "Okay, generals, up and at those potatoes, before the bugs move in "

The afterncxm lengthened. About four o'clock a car detached itself from the haze that hid the farm buildings five miles to the north. It came lazily along a dirt road, disappearing behind trees and into gullies, but always it came into view again, each time nearer, and obviously as puzzling to the detail sergeant as to the prisoners. The sergeant and his corporal walked slowly towards the road as the car approached, and stood waiting for it.

Up, down, up, down—The remaining guards kept things moving. The ploughs whuffed and thudded through the soil folding the fresh dirt over the seed potatoes. The horses champed and swished their tails. One of them noisily passed water. Up down, up, down—Morlake, sweating and breathing hard, alternated the rhythmic movement with glances at the nearing car and with his own thoughts.

Of the various articles and newpaper editorials that he had read in the farm library, only one, it seemed to Morlake, contained a sensible idea: The purpose of the bombing had not been to destroy the nation or conquer it, but simply to change its political character. With the vociferous, noisy, highly-educated, politically conscious people of America's world-cities out of the way, power would revert to the isolationist agricultural communities. Every capitalistic state in the world would benefit from the markets from which American industry would have to withdraw. And the dozen Communist states had their own reasons for appreciating the end of American influence in Europe, Africa and Asia.

If the enemy were not discovered for several years, it was likely that the elected representatives of cautious farm states would not dare to retaliate. Already, old prejudices were showing. The South reinstituted Jim Crow-ism. And there was no one to stop them.

Only three facts were known about the aggressor: He existed. He had left no clues in his own countries. And he had dropped his bombs straight down onto at least one city.

Unfortunately, the one man who believed the third item was Robert Morlake, and so far his sole thought was that the bombs must have been launched from the Moon . . . Morlake smiled wryly. He could imagine himself trying to convince other men that they must go to the Moon to find out the name of their enemy.

"Morlake!"

Morlake straightened slowly and turned. It was the corporal who had gone with the sergeant to the car. In the near distance, the machine was turning noisily around. Morlake saluted.

"Yessir?"

"You're wanted at the office. You weren't supposed to come out on a detail this morning. "Come along."

Five minutes later, Morlake knew that he was being presented with an opportunity, to escape.

What had happened Morlake discovered gradually. On the East Coast, General Mahan Clark, ranking staff officer surviving, declared martial law on the afternoon of the bombing. For three months he worked eighteen to twenty hours a day, to integrate the shattered armed forces and to organize the country. Railway, telephone and telegraph lines were repaired, and postal services resumed. Priorities and rationings were instituted, and an industrial census taken.

At the end of seventy days he had a picture of the country's resources. By the eightieth day, industries that needed each other's products were being coordinated on a vast scale. Troops patrolled cities and towns; a national curfew was put into effect; severe penalties were invoked-against mobs and mob leaders. Mass hangings of known Communists ceased. People with foreign accents were still being molested, but the cases grew more isolated daily.

From the eighty-fifth to the eighty-eighth day, the general took a holiday, during which time he played dice, ate, rested and slept, and listened only to emergency reports. Back at his headquarters, he moved into a new office.

"From now on," he told reporters, "I'll delegate all except a minimum of administrative work. I will devote my attention to picking up technical matters at the highest level. I'nt^n engineer, not a politician. What I want to know is, what the hell happened to our advanced stuff on the day of the bombing? Where is it, and who's alive that knows something about it?"

Late in the afternoon of the ninety-first day, he looked up bleary-eyed from a mass of papers, and called in an adjutant.

"There's a report here that S29A was scheduled for a 53

test flight on B-day. Was the test made? If so, what happened?"

Nobody knew until the following morning, when a lieutenant produced a report form Field R3 in Texas that the S29A had landed there a few hours after the destruction of its base, Wayne Field, ninety-two days before.

"Who the hell," said Clark, "is the misbegotten incompetent in charge of R3? Herrold? Oh!"

He subsided. He had once been under Herrold's command, and one observed certain amenities with former superiors. Later, though, he remarked to a ranking officer: "Herrold is an old fool. If a man under him has twice as much sense as another, he can't tell the difference. Drive, ability, leadership—he can't see them." He scowled. "Well, the best bet, I suppose, is to have the machine brought here. Inform Herrold, will you?"

The order for the plane caused a turmoil in the upper officialdom of Field R3. No one there could fly the ship.

"It's a special plane," an air-force major explained to General Herrold. "I remember that the man who was to test it had to go to the factory and learn all kinds of preliminary things before he was even allowed to warm her jets. The difficulties, I understand, derive from an intricate combination of rocket and jet drives."

"Oh!" said General Herrold. He thought about it for some minutes, then, "It wouldn't take you long," he suggested, "to learn to fly it, would it?"

The big young man shrugged. "I've been flying jets for years—" he began.

He was interrupted. "Uh, Major Bates," Herrold said, "the officer in question, Captain Robert Morlake, is in prison for a most heinous offence. It would be a grave setback for discipline if he were freed merely because he can fly a plane. Accordingly, I shall have him brought here, and no doubt he can teach you to fly the plane in a day or so. I want you to hold no conversations with him except on purely technical matters. You will carry a gun, and remember that the plane is more valuable than the man."

Bates saluted. "I'll handle him, sir," he said confidently.

The moment the S29A was high enough, Morlake zipped her over into a power dive. Behind him, Major Bates clawed for the nearest handhold;-,

"Hey!" he yelled. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

Morlake wasn't sure. He had decided at the moment he was sentenced to virtual life imprisonment that he would not accept the verdict of the court. But exactly what was going to happen now he didn't know.

"Now, look, Morlake," Bates said in a voice that trembled slightly, "this is not going to get you anywhere. There's hardly any fuel in the tanks."

That was why he had wasted no time. Morlake said nothing, but sat blank-brained, waiting events. The day was clear as glass, the earth below plainly visible. It looked closer than it was.

"For God's Sake, man!" he other's nerve was tottering badly. "You swore you still stood by your oath of allegiance to the United States."

Morlake broke his silence. "I do."

"Then what—"

"I happen to be the only man who knows how to find the enemy. If I let myself stay locked up, I'd be violating my oath."

It sounded wild even to Morlake. It probably seemed pure insanity to Bates. And Morlake did not fool himself. He felt emotional about this. It was not reasoned, objective, what he was doing. He had had a three-month's taste of a life sentence of hard labor, and the passionate beliefs he held, his justification for this, were rooted as much in horror of his fate as in patriotism.

The bomb had come straight down. If, as the experts maintained, jfcouldn't have come from Earth, then it had come from'Tab Moon. Since that was not an idea to which Americans would take easily, it was up to the one man who knew the facts to persuade them.

His thought ended. He jumped, as he saw that the ground was really rushing towards him now. Behind him:

"Morlake, for God's sake, what do you want?"

"Your gun."

"Do you intend to kill me?"

"Don't be a fool. Hurry."

The earth was a huge valley, with rearing hills no longer looking so flat. Morlake felt the gun shoved past his shoulder. He snatched at it, shouting:

"Get back! Back, away from me!"

He knew that would be hard, like climbing the side of a house. But he waited while the sweating officer fumbled away from his seat. He could hear the man cursing with fear. And his own heart was pounding, his body rigid, when at last he came out of his dive, and began to climb towards the black regions of the stratosphere.

The stars were as bright as jewels before he leveled off and began his race with the diminishing supply of fuel. At the machine's most economical speed, thirty-five miles a minute, he sped through the darkness above an ocean of light.

He had two intermingled hopes: That he would be able to reach Kane Field and that he would find it deserted. The first hope was realized as the field swam into view in the distance. The second ended in dismay, as he saw that the entire area swarmed with men, with tractors, cranes, trucks and piles of material.

Morlake came down from behind a low hill some distance from the nearest group of workers.

"Get out!" he said to Bates.

"I'll see you hanged for this!" the big man snarled. But he got out. He did not move off immediately nor did Morlake. There was a prolonged silence, then:

"Tell them," Morlake said, "that I'm taking the plane because—because—" He paused. He felt a desperate desire to justify himself. He went on, "Tell them the top speed of Sadie is 67 miles a minute, and that she can climb 80 miles in 7 minutes plus, but tell them—" He hesitated, for if his words were given publicity, the unknown enemy would read them also— "tell them not to waste any more time building duplicates of Sadie. She isn't fast enough, she can't go high enough to reach the men who dropped the atomic bombs. And that's why I'm taking her. Because she's only a second-rater, and therefore worthless. Goodby."

He waved his hand. The vertical jets hissed with power.

The machine reared slowly, then the rockets fired several bursts, and the ground began to flow below like a tremendously swift river. Morlake headed over the hills, straight towards a place where there had once been pipes leading up from an underground fuel tank. Men were working there amid a tangle of twisted metal, but some order had already been established. He landed.

A foreman, a slim, rugged-looking young man, came over, and said, "Sure, we've got all the fuel you want. None of the tanks were busted by the earthquakes. Roll her over this way."

He was in no hurry, but talkative, curious. While his men attached piping to the tanks Morlake indicated, he asked pointed questions, which Morlake answered or evaded with a laugh. He knew how to talk to this kind of man, and the only trouble was that out of the corner of one eye, he saw Bates come into sight over the hill, and flag down a truck. The truck headed swiftly toward Morlake. When it was a third of a mile away, Morlake climbed into the plane.

"Thanks," he said.

The foreman waved cheerfully. "Give my regards to the general."

The truck was tooting its horns madly as the S29A became airborne.

Morlake's sense of exultation did not last long. He had enough fuel to fly around the earth. But his problem was to convince the people in authority that only by continuing the abandoned moon project could they ever again hope to be free of danger. Where, how would he start? What ought his pattern of action to be?

When he came right down to it, he hadn't really given that much (fcyppjht,

Nine bullet-proof cars drew up before General Clark's headquarters one day some ten months after the bombing. There was a scurrying of men from the first four and the last four. Everywhere guns showed prominently, as the guards drew a cordon around the center car. As soon as the maneuvers were completed, a flunkey hurried forward and graciously opened the door of the big machine. Then he moved back.

Senator Tormey stepped out. He frowned as he saw that no one had yet come out of the general's office to meet him. Then as the general himself appeared in the doorway, a smile wreathed the handsome though heavy face, and he walked over and shook hands with the officer.

"Got all the Morlake stuff ready to show me?" he asked.

"All ready," Clark nodded. "I'd have invited you to see it before if I'd known you were interested."

Tormey took that as an apology. He had come a long way in the past four months. On B-day he had called for martial law, to last for six months, and had then found that the army was not prepared to turn the government over to him at the specified time. The available press and radio echoed with the senator's protests. He had no ambitions himself, but it was time for the government to be returned to civilians. As the ranking survivor of the federal congress, it was his duty—and so on. And so on and so on.

That was the beginning. And as army ruthlessness, as personified by tens of thousands of officers, had as usual alienated ninety per cent of the population, the senator was soon riding a crest of protest meetings, of which the army, in the person of General Clark, finally took cognizance.

The senator was invited to headquarters, and taken into the confidence of the military. He became a habitual member of General Clark's dice club, and his advice was sought on every important administrative problem. It was the army's bid for civilian support, and it seemed to work.

"This way," said General Clark, "to what we call the Morlake room."

It was a small room. There was a desk and a chair in it, and a filing cabinet. On one wall was a huge map of North America, with pins stuck into it. The red pins indicated that Robert Morlake had definitely been seen in those areas. The green pins meant that he had "almost certainly" been in the vicinity. The yellow pins were rumors, and the blue pins represented points at which a plane resembling S29A had been observed. Each pin was numbered and the numbers referred to a card index file, which contained a synopsized history of the hunt for Robert Morlake. The index itself was based on files of documents, which were kept in a cabinet beside the map.

"At first," General Clark explained. "Morlake's idea seemed to be to contact old friends of his. On the second day after refueling at Kane Field, he approached the residence of Professor Glidden in California. . . ."

After watching Glidden Grove one whole day, Morlake got up at dawn and walked two miles to where the low, long building of Dr. Glidden's research institute spread beside the banks of a winding stream. A caretaker was puttering beside the open door of a stucco, Holly-woodish laboratory. He answered Morlake's query curiously:

"Dormart? He lives with the professor. I guess the cook will be up by this time. That's the house, over there."

It was a glassed, tree-sheltered bungalow. As Morlake strode along a walk lined with towering shrubs, a woman emerged from a side path that led up from the creek, and they almost collided.

It was the woman who was startled. Morlake said nothing. Ninety-four days on the prison farm had frozen his nerves.

The woman was dark-haired and blue-eyed; she wore a wrap-around dressing gown and a bathing cap. "Mr. Dor-man," she ecrfeed. "Oh, you mean the secretary." Her manner became indifferent. "Probably still in bed. It's a habit of people like that to sleep until it's time to punch the clock."

Her tone was carelessly contemptuous. Morlake, who had been about to pass on politely, paused for a second look. She was not the world's most beautiful woman, but it seemed to him that he had never seen a more passionate face. Her lips were full and sensuous, her eyes large and bright, her manner immensely assured.

"Aren't you a litde early," she asked, "for visiting the help?"

She was irritating, and Morlake didn't like her at all. "May I by any chance," he asked, "be speaking to Professor Glidden?"

The remark pleased her, for she laughed. She stepped confidently up to him, and hooked her arm in his. She said, "I'll ask the cook which room is your friend's. You mustn't mind me too much. I like to get up when the birds start singing, and it makes me cross to have to wait five hours before there's anybody to talk to. I'm the physical type. Immense energy; and the only reason my brain is any good at all is because I never worry. Do you know anything about endocrinology?"

"Never heard of it," said Morlake, truthfully.

"Thank God," said the woman. She added, "I've been swimming in the old swimming hole—enlarged by damming, cemented into a pool, and improved by a ten-thousand-dollar heating system for cool days and nights. Just a litde gadget of the professor's, hot and cold running water. Would you like to know all the local gossip? I've only been a guest twenty-four hours, but I already know everything there is to know here."

Morlake did not doubt it. He was beginning to be fascinated. It cost him an effort to keep his mind to his purpose. The woman said: "The world is absolutely wretched, detestable and incorrigible. Here it is little more than three months after B-day, and—"

"After what?".

"Bomb day. That's what the army calls it. You can't go on saying 'the day the atomic bombs were dropped,' or 'day of the catastrophe.' You can't even expect people to remember that B-day was July 17th, can you?"

She did not wait for an answer, for they had reached the house.

"Wait here," she said. "I'll slip into my bedroom, and open the living-room door for you."

Morlake did not wait. The moment she disappeared around the corner, he followed. It had taken him a minute to catch on, but he was too conscious of danger to be fooled by a fast-talking woman. She had recognized him, and she would probably telephone the police before opening the front door.

There were three patio doors, along the side and all of them were unlocked, but only the third one opened into an unoccupied room.

He knew it was possible that the woman had snatched up a gun in passing, but he was beyond that kind of fear. . . . The situation in the living-room was ideal for melodrama. She was at the phone, her back to him, saying urgently, "Keep trying! There must be an answer!" Morlake put his hand over the mouthpiece, and took the receiver from her instantly acquiescent fingers. For a long moment the woman sat frozen, and then slowly she turned and looked at him, her eyes widened.

Morlake did not replace the receiver, but stood there holding it tightly. He said in a monotone:

"How did you recognize me?"

She. shrugged. "Newspaper pictures all over the house. Your friend, Dorman, talking about you, saying he can't believe you're guilty. But you are, aren't you? I've seen desperate men before."

Where? Morlake wondered, but all he said was:

"Who were you phoning?"

"The police, of course."

Answering that required no thought.

"The police would have replied—" he began. And then he stopped, as the operator's voice sounded from the earphone. He jerked the instrument up. "Yes," he said. "Hello."

"The party jfie lady called does not answer," trilled the female voiced

Morlake said, "Are you sure you have the right number?" Beside him the woman gasped. Before he could guess her intention, she reached down, snatched the cord, and, with a jerk that must have jarred her body, tore the wires out of the box....

In the Morlake room at supreme headquarters, General

Clark paused in his narrative. Senator Tormey said slowly:

"Who was the woman? Did you find out?"

The officer shook his head. "I can't remember the alias she used at Glidden Grove, but that name and a dozen others that she employed are all in the index there." Clark motioned toward the cabinet.

"You think she was after Morlake?"

"Definitely."

"How did she happen to be at that particular spot within two days after Morlake's escape?"

"That," said the general, "was what worried Morlake. Then and there he abandoned his plan to approach old friends of his, and attempt, through them, to build up the nucleus of his organization. He realized that he had been forestalled by a group that had anticipated his plans and made a thorough study of his life history. When we came on the scene we found that virtually every friend he ever possessed had been under surveillance on that morning. A hundred different methods were used to gain intimate access to the different people involved. It was very thorough."

"How do you account for their preparation?" The senator was standing with closed eyes.

"It is our opinion," said Clark, "that they intended to rescue him from the prison farm and kill him."

"But how did they know about him?"

The general hesitated. "Our theory there is a little wild, but the men who have gone over Morlake's written statement and court-martial evidence grew interested in the flare of light that enveloped the plane immediately after the bomb had rebuffed Morlake's attempt to throw it off-course. We think that that light was used to take a television picture of the S29A.

"Oh!" Tormey was silent. Finally, "What did Morlake do next?"

It was Morlake who broke the silence in the living room of Professor Glidden's bungalow. "Where is your car?" he said.

The woman seemed resigned. "I'll get my car keys, and drive you back to your plane. I suppose that's where you're heading."

He went with her, conscious that he could trust no one, now that he knew. And that there wasn't time to talk to Dan Dorman, or to ask the questions he had intended to ask Dan's employer, Professor Glidden. He had come to Dan first of all, because of his connection with the world-famous physicist. Depressing to be here at the spot, and realize that he had to leave without having accomplished anything.

Ten minutes later, the woman parked the car a hundred feet from where Sadie was drawn up under trees. "It's a pretty plane," she said. "How fast can it go?"

"Just over a hundred miles a minute," said Morlake carelessly. "Get out."

"W-what?" She must have thought he was going to kill her, for she turned pale. "Please," she begged, "I'm as innocent as you are. I know nothing."

Morlake gazed at her curiously, but he said nothing. Let her sweat for a minute. He didn't have time to question her, and so he couldn't judge how deeply she was involved. Not that it would have made any difference. He was neither judge nor executioner. He locked the car doors, then slipped the keys into his pocket. He saw that the woman had regained control.

"It's only two miles," she said. "I ought to get there before breakfast. Goodby and—good luck."

He sent the plane straight up until the world was black, and stars were points of light above him. Then he flashed out over the Pacific, and, turning, came back in, coasting over trees straight into a deep arroyo. His new hiding place was less than half a mile from Manakee, California, the town four^rniles from Glidden Grove, where the telephone exchangemusf be located.

A bus coming along the nearby highway made his trip easy, and enabled him to inquire about the location of the exchange. . . . There were three girls at the switchboard. One of them, a washed-out looking blonde, said:

"Something went wrong with the line, so I drove in. Did you get the party?"

"Yep, I got her, then I couldn't get you."

Another woman! Morlake felt a thrill, then a sharp anxiety. It was as he had feared. The connection had been established. He hesitated, but there was no drawing

"Will you call again?" "Sure. Got the number?"

Morlake was as ready for that as he could be. "Let me see. Hmmm, can't think of it offhand. But I have it here somewhere."

As he began to search aimlessly through his pockets, he saw that she was examining her notebook. She looked up.

"Never mind, I wrote it down. Lucy Desjardins, 476 Hartford Street, Crestolanto 9153."

For a moment Morlake could only trust himself to nod, then it was time to speak again.

"Just a moment," he said.

"Yes?"

"Did the party, uh, say anything, when you couldn't get her through to me?"

"Yeah, she said it didn't matter or something like that."

"Oh!" said Morlake. "In that case don't bother." He mustered a laugh. "She's a damned touchy woman. I don't want to get her down on me again."

He went out, perspiring but momentarily relieved and jubilant. The feeling didn't last long. The woman had said it didn't matter. That meant she had understood. The gang would be swinging into action.

He hailed a cruising taxi, and had it take him to the suburbs. As soon as it was out of sight, he raced along the highway and across the fields to his machine. The moment he was inside the cockpit, he turned on the radar, and waited.

At first there was nothing. The sky was empty, except for a haze of immensely high clouds. After thirty-seven minutes, a shadow darkened the screen. It was too far away, too high to form a clear image. But it was unmistakable, and it moved along with great speed at a height of about a hundred and twenty-five miles.

Morlake kept spinning his radio dial, and suddenly it caught and stopped, as a voice said:

". . . Got away, looks like. We've been east and north and south, and out over the water, and there's not a sign of anything moving. His machine must be capable of far greater speed than we believed."

The answering voice was faint. "Don't give up. Take nothing for granted."

A third voice broke in loudly, "Hey, who's that talking. This is army station Miklaw. Identify yourself."

There was a faint laugh from the nearest voice, then silence.

For Morlake, hiding, waiting, planning, in the arroyo near Manakee, time passed slowly. It was a strangely sad period, one man alone wondering how he could convince a nation that he was right and their leaders were wrong. Ghosts of forty million dead adults and children haunted his dreams, but already the fact that they had existed was a shadowy fact in his mind. To him, who had no family, and who had had the experience of friends dying in a war, death was not the ogre that it was to those who had never been trained to face it.

Far more real than the death that had struck was the knowledge that out there somewhere on the surface of the Earth, cunning devil-men were waiting for the slightest hint that their identity had been discovered that, to save themselves, they must be prepared to rend the entire Earth.

Their leaders would deny all accusations, would charge a conspiracy, and, with the tremendous advantage of control of the Moon, would be able to launch bombs toward any target at will.

Morlake qu^led at the picture, and knew that his new plan to seek brit the gang must parallel and complement his greater purpose of forcing a reluctant people to crawl up from the caves of fear into which their minds had collapsed, up to the special bravery or imagination that would be needed for the conquest of space.

At dawn, on his third morning in the arroyo, Morlake made sure the radar screen was blank, and then flew in a great circle around the Capistrano radar station of the army, to Crestolanto. He spent all that day watching 476 Hartford Street. It was a plain two-story structure, and during the morning it showed no sign of life. About mid-afternoon, a woman came out of the front door and walked to the nearby market. It was not the woman who had been visiting Professor Glidden's home, but a slim, distinguished-looking young woman with hair slightly greying at the temples.

When she had come back, he wrote a letter to General Clark, describing what he intended to do. He mailed the letter shortly after dark, and then he waited for black night. It was half-past nine by his watch when he crawled through a window, and moved stealthily toward the living-room, where a light was visible through a partly open door....

Senator Tormey asked, "And then what happened?" General Clark shook his head. "We have no direct information."

He pointed to a red pin rooted in a small west-coast city.

"There, Morlake made one of his four attempts to interest the general public. According to our reports, a woman did all the preliminary advertising for a lecture Morlake intended to give. According to our information, it was this second woman. The lecture was a flop. About a dozen people turned up, most of them old women, who thought it was a new religion, in which the Moon had been proved to be heaven."

"Then it would appear that Morlake and this, uh, nameless woman joined forces."

"Never," said the general, "have I had reports of a bolder couple. They were quite cautious at first. Now they're absolutely fearless."

The senator was silent. He wore contact lenses, behind which his intense blue eyes gleamed with alert fires.

General Clark walked to a window, and gazed out past the formal park toward the distant blue of hills. Without looking around he said:

"Last night you asked me about Morlake, and I invited you to come here. This is in line with the army's policy of cooperating with elected representatives of the people. As you know, we intend to permit the congressional elections next fall and the presidential elections in 1972 and so the country will resume its normal democratic functioning. What you dp not know is that, though the elections will be held as scheduled, the announcement about them was made with the intention of lulling the enemy."

From behind him, Tormey said slowly, "I don't think I understand."

The general turned to face the bigger man. "When Morlake escaped with S29A, I received a garbled account of what had happened. It was so garbled, in fact, the loss of the plane so important, that I flew to Texas by jet, saw the court-martial papers of Morlake, and began to realize what tremendous information had been bottled up. Naturally, I relieved Herrold of bis command instantly, and by the end of the week we had the information which I have described. Better still, our radar station at Capis-tranp saw the image of the enemy spaceship which was searching for Morlake, and so we had definite evidence that what he stated in his letter was correct.

"When Capistrano saw it, the spaceship was about two hundred miles up. They couldn't estimate the speed, but it was terrific."

He went on matter-of-factly:

"Normally, we might have paid no attention to such a report. So many, many reports come in hour after hour to all military districts. But at this time, on the basis of Morlake's written statement to General Herrold, our experts decided that they had narrowed the possible origins of the bombs to three:

"Two of jtient werp the likeliest points on Earth. If we decided on emier bf these, we*d have to assume that our men or our instruments for detecting radioactivity were at fault. We rejected these possibilities because the piles necessary for the creation of vast quantities of radioactive materials could not escape detection. That left the third alternative, which assumed the bombs to be of extraterrestrial origin. I accordingly ordered the resumption of the moon project, which—as you know—had actually completed nearly 30 ships when Congress cut off its funds."

Senator Tormey said gravely, "I regret that I had something to do with that cut-off, but it was a matter of too much deficit spending."

"Unfortunately," said the General, "one of the storage places for the spaceships was in Georgia, and that entire base was destroyed by a direct hit. Twenty-two spaceships were destroyed. However, there is another storage area —it would be unwise for me to tell you where it is."

"Perhaps, I could inspect them," said the senator. "How many ships are there?"

"Five."

"That many?" Tormey sounded impressed.

"They'll be operational next week," said General Clark.

The senator made a strange sound. It was not a word, and he did not repeat it. Instead, he walked unevenly to a chair and sat down.

"General," he mumbled at last, "you make me dizzy. You mean that all this uproar about Morlake has been unnecessary?"

"Very necessary," Clark was deadly serious. "His desperate efforts to get us to do something made it look as if we were paying no attention to him. We even ridiculed Morlake's propaganda. Personally, I think Morlake caught on, but right now I'd give a lot to have a talk with him. The time has come for coordinated action."

The senator said blankly, "But this means war."

"We'll smash them in one day," Clark said coldly. "No one else has dared to mobilize, for fear of rousing our suspicion. We'll put a million men into their cities overnight. We'll execute every man who had anything to do with the bombing of this country. For once, no one will have an excuse."

"And all this in about two weeks?"

"Possibly less."

There was a long silence. At last the senator climbed to his feet.

"It seems kind of funny after that, to talk of social activity, but are you still having your crap game tonight?" "We don't dare change our habits now."

"How many will be there?" "Six, besides yourself."

"Wonder if I could bring along a yourlg friend of my wife's?"

"Why, sure. Which rerninds me. When is your lady coming down here?"

Tormey smiled. "Couldn't fell you. She thinks I ought to retire from politics, and therefore she won't establish an official residence. She's pretty much of a traveler."

They parted on that note.

"Gentlemen," said Senator Tormey, "this is my friend, Morley Roberts."

There was a grunting response. Morlake sat down, and watched the dice bounce briskly from the far end of the table. He did riot look immediately at General Clark, but concentrated on making his first bet. Presently, he picked up his winnings for .the' roll, and pressed his arm ever so lightly against the gun in his shoulder holster. It was still there/ready for the crisis which ought to come in a few minutes. "

He lost twice in a row, and then won three times on his own roll. As he gave up the dice finally, he took his first good look at General Clark. A pair of eyes as sharp as his own met that one searching glance. The general said casually:

"So it's me you're here to contact, Roberts?"

Morlake brought his hand to the edge of the table, with the fingers held slightly downward and barely touching the surface. From there it was one foot to his gun.

He said steadily:

''General, y^r*re a smart man, but you haven't figured it quite right.'^*¹

There was an undertone in his voice, the beginning of tension, the beginning of deadly intent. Like darkness blotting out day, the atmosphere of the room changed. Some of the officers looked at each other, puzzled. Senator Tormey said:

"It's getting warm in here. Uh, I'll call one of my guards and have him open the windows wider."

"I'll do it, sir." Morlake was on his feet, without waiting for acquiescence.

He examined the windows and, as he had expected, the "glass" was a bullet-proof plastic. What he did then was rooted in a profound discovery he had made during the previous six months: the discovery that if you say you will do something and then go and do something similar, no one will notice the difference—for a while.

Without a qualm, he closed and locked the three windows, and then he returned to the table. The dice rolled whitely against the background of the green cloth. Senator Tormey won from several of the officers. As he was raking in it, General Clark said:

"Morley Roberts. The name is familiar, but it is the face that makes a better identification. Suppose we change the name around a little, and say Robert Morlake, former Captain, army air forces, court-martialed, thirty years at hard labor. Am I getting warm?"

The general's voice went up, "Wait, gentlemen!" The men at the table froze, two with their chairs pushed back, one with a hand under his coat. The senator was the first to relax. He was sitting at the side of the table, and he hummed a small tune under his breath. Clark said softly:

"You came here tonight as the guest of Senator Tormey. I presume he knows who you are."

"I'm sure," Morlake said, "that the senator must have recognized me, but you will know better than I if he's made inquiries about me in the last two days. But now I'd better hurry. Gentlemen, this is a dangerous moment, not because of me directly—I'm only a catalytic agent— but because my appearance gave a certain person an opportunity to carry out a previously conceived plan.

"It was my intention," Morlake went on, "that he should use me for this purpose so that I might use him for mine.

"A brief case history is in order: Picture a wealthy congressman, unscrupulous and with unlimited ambitions. It is very easy for him to think of himself as a man of destiny, frustrated by the stupidity of others. Having become senator, he discovered in two successive presidential campaigns that he had no chance to become chief of state. His wife began to realize shortly after she married him in 1964 that his rage at his failure was irrational, his lust for revenge completely unbalanced, But she didn't guess at the meaning of his schemes nor at the purpose of the organization he set up in the South until B-Day; the total violence and hate in thé man—she told me—was concealed by a superficial courtesy and a courtly manner. As you know, he was in a safe place on B-Day—very fortuitous. Afterwards, his main opposition was the army. It was clever of him to authorize martial law—which would have been done anyway. It was clever because he was later able to use it in his propaganda."

Morlake paused, and smiled to relax his eyes, to loosen his body, because the moment had come.

"His big opportunity came—it seemed to him—when I appearedon the scene, as guest of his wife. He saw it as his chance to kill General Clark and his staff, and throw the blame on me.. L,,.of course, the highly publicized escaped army convict, would also be found dead, and—"

Mprlake broke off. He said, "What's the matter, senator, has-your nerve gone? You're not going to go down like a weakling, are you?"

The sweat was almost a mask on the heavy face. Tormey brought his hand up, and put it in his vest pocket. He fumbled for a long moment. Morlake said:

"I see, senator, that you're activating your little radio, calling your agents outside."

As if to punctuate the words, there was a crash of bullets on the window. Everybody except Morlake jumped. Morlake said tantalizingly:

"Too bad."

He reached,.across the table, and snatched a tiny instrument frojLthe senator's vest pocket. The man grabbed angrily at hisniand; 6ut he was too slow.

"Hmmm," said Morlake. "One of the printed variety."

With a visible effort, the other man straightened. "Never heard such nonsense," he snarled. "You've arranged this drama with bullets against the window. If you think such a simple scheme is going to work against me, you're—"

He stopped. His eyes, staring straight into Morlake's widened. He must have realized that his denials were meaningless here, that the plans already boiling in his mind, to use the radio and the press, his control of the party, of the country, his skill at propaganda—all that meant nothing to this deadly young man. He had not even time to cry out in sudden terrified realization of his fate.

The two shots that Morlake fired broke the big man's lungs. Tormey slumped over on the table, then slid down to the floor. Morlake paid no attention to the armed officers in the room. They could have shot him as he knelt beside the dying man, but his very helplessness was his safeguard. They watched, their bodies rigid, and they must have been restrained, too, by the knowledge that he had acted with remorseless logic.

Morlake neither saw nor worried. The senator's eyes were open and staring widely. There was blood on his lips.

"Senator, what is the name of the enemy?"

That got them. General Clark came closer. An officer who had gone to calm the guards at the door half turned back into the room. Even Senator Tormey stiffened.

"You can go to hell," he muttered.

Morlake said, "Hurry, man, you've only got a minute—a minute."

The horror of that struck deep. The thick face twisted. "Die!" the senator mumbled. "Why—I'm going to die." The idea seemed to grow on him. He struggled, gasping for breath, then subsided. He lay so still for a second that he looked dead. His eyes opened wearily. He looked up, and mumbled:

"Was that my wife ... at Crestolanto, in that house?"

Morlake nodded. "She used your organization. She received all California reports. That enabled her to locate me no matter which local agent saw me first. She had decided that if I came to Crestolanto she would ask me to help her. It was she who toured the country with me for all those weeks."

General Clark dropped down beside Morlake. "Senator," he said, "for God's sake, the name of the country, the enemy?"

The dying man looked at him with the beginning of a sneer on his lips.

"We got even with you nigger lovers, didn't we?" he
said. He laughed a satanic laughter, that ended hideously
in a gush of blood. Slowly, the big head grew limp, the
eyes though still open took on^ sightless glare. A dead
man lay on the floor. ;

The two men, Clark and Morlake, climbed to their feet. Morlake said in a low voice, "Gentlemen, you have your answer." He saw they still did not comprehend what he had suspected for long now.

General Clark was grim- "When I think we've been giving him our inmost secrets for months—" He choked, and held out his hand. "Thanks."

Morlake said nothing. His first sharp sense of victory was yielding to an intense gloom. He grew aware that the older man's penetrating gaze was on him. Clark misread his expression.

"I know what's ailing you," Clark said. "But you're wrong. We have .spaceships." He described the planned attack on the Moon.

Morlake nodded, but his depression remained. Such an attack-would be necessary, to locate the launching sites of the bombs, and to find out where and how in America Tormeyand his group had obtained them. But that was incidental. He accepted Tormey's last words literally.

The first atomic war had been, not an international, but a civil war. And now that Tormey was dead, the gang would scatter. A gang of race-prejudiced Americans.

The war was over. Irrevocably.

The name "Melchior" is identified with the world renowned singer, ^Lauritz Melchior who is well known for his successÊQtiflts: thé^Metropolitan Opera, in motion pictures and on television.

The name "Melchior" is identified by science fiction movie fans as the writer and director of such films as THE ANGRY RED PLANET and THE TIME TRAVELERS. Ib Melchior, the son of the famous singer has had much of his words made available to the public by the New York Post.

This story reveals some of the brutal facts about rac-

"~ " If This Goes On

ing and about our own human nature as well. Ts modern sport so very much different from the sport of the Roman arenas? Is there any difference at all between the gladiator and the boxer; the charioteer and . . .

port without being frightened by it. As usual, it was a sheaf of papers some six inches thick. He knew by now, he was not expected to read it. (No humqn could.) Still, it was amusing to glance through it.

There was the usual list of predictable crimes: frauds of all sorts, larcenies, riots, manslaughters, arsons.

He looked for one particular heading and felt a slight shock at finding it there at all, then another one at seeing two entries. Not one, but two. Two first-degree murders. He had not seen two in one day in all his term as Chairman so far.

He punched the knob of the two-way intercom and waited for the smooth face of his co-ordinator to appear on the screen.

"Ali," said Gulliman. "There are two first-degrees this day. Is there any unusual problem?"

"No, sir." The dark-complexioned face with its sharp, black eyes seemed restless. "Both cases are quite low probability."

"I_sknow that," said Gulliman. "I observed that neither probability-is higher than 15 per cent. Just the same, Multivac has a reputation to maintain. It has virtually wiped out crime, and the public judges that by its record on first-degree murder which is, of course, the most spectacular crime."

Ali Othman nodded. "Yes, sir. I quite realize that."

"You also realize, I hope," Gulliman said, "that I don't want a single consummated case of it during my term. If any other crime slips through, I may allow excuses. If a first-degree murder slips through, I'll have your hide. Understand?"

"Yes, sir. The complete analyses of the two potential murders are^afee&dy at the district offices involved. The potential crnmSafs arid victims'are under observation. I have rechecked the probabilities of consummation and they are already dropping."

"Very good," said Gulliman, and broke connection.

He went back to the list with an uneasy feeling that perhaps he had been overpompous. —But then, one had to be firm with these permanent civil-service personnel and make sure they didn't imagine they were running everything, including the Chairman. Particularly this Othman, who had been working with Multivac since both were considerably younger, and had a proprietary air that could be infuriating.

To Gulliman, this matter of crime was the political chance of a lifetime. So far, no Chairman had passed through his term without a murder taking place somewhere on Earth, some time. The previous Chairman had ended with a record of eight, three more {more, in fact) than under his predecessor.

Now Gulliman intended to have none. He was going to be, he had decided, the first Chairman without any murder at all anywhere on Earth during his term. After that, and the favorable publicity that would result—

He barely skimmed the rest of the report. He estimated that there were at least two thousand cases of prospective wife-beatings listed. Undoubtedly, not all would be consummated. But the incidence was dropping and the consummations were dropping even more quickly.

Multivac had added wife-beating to its list of predictable crimes only some five years ago and the average man was not yet accustomed to the thought that if he planned to wallop his wife, it would be known in advance. As the conviction percolated through society, woman would first suffer fewer bruises and then, eventually, none.

Some husband-beatings were on the list, too, Gulliman noticed.

Ali Othman closed connections and stared at the screen from which Gulliman's jowled and balding head had departed. Then he looked across at his assistant, Rafe Leemy and said, "What do we do?"

"Don't ask me. He's worried about just a lousy murder or two."

"It's an awful chance trying to handle this thing on our own. Still if we tell him, he'll have a first-class fit. These elective politicians have their skins to think of, so he's bound to get in our way and make things worse."

Leemy nodded his head and put a thick lower lip between his teeth. "Trouble is, though, what if we miss out? It would just about be the end of the world, you know."

"If we miss out, who cares what happens to us? We'll just be part of the general catastrophe." Then he said in a more lively manner, "But > hell, the probability is only 12.3 per cent. On anything else, except maybe murder, we'd let the probabilities rise a bit before taking any action at all. There could still be spontaneous correc-

tion;

"I wouldn't count on it," said Leemy dryly.

"I don't intend to. I was just pointing the fact out. Still, at this probability, I suggest we confine ourselves to simple observation for the moment. No one could plan a crime like this alone; there must be accomplices."

"Multivac didn't name any."

"I know. Stiil-r-'' His voice trailed off.

So they stared at the details of the one crime not included on the list handed out to Gulliman; the one crime much worse than first-degree murder; the one crime never»before attempted in the history of Multivac; and wondered what to do.

Ben Manners considered himself the happiest sixteen-year-old in Baltimore. This was, perhaps, doubtful. But he was certainly one of the happiest, and one of the most excited.

At least, he was one of the handful admitted to the galleries of the stadium, during the swearing-in of the eighteen-year-olds. His older brother was going to be sworn in so his parents had applied for spectator's tickets and they had allowed Ben to do so, too. But when Multivac chose,;among all the applicants, it was Ben who

would be sworn himself, but

watching big brother Michael now was the next best thing.

His parents had dressed him (or supervised the dressing, at any rate) with all care, as representative of the family and sent him off with numerous messages for Michael, who had left days earlier for preliminary physical and neurological examinations.

The stadium was on the outskirts of town and Ben, just bursting with self-importance, was shown to his seat. Below him, now, were rows upon rows of hundreds upon hundreds of eighteen-year-olds (boys to the right, girls to the left), all from the second district of Baltimore. At various times in the year, similar meetings were going on all over the world, but this was Baltimore, this was the important one. Down there (somewhere) was Mike, Ben's own brother.

Ben scanned the tops of heads, thinking somehow he might recognize his brother. He didn't, of course, but then a man came out on the raised platform in front of all the crowd and Ben stopped looking to listen.

The man said, "Good afternoon, swearers and guests. I am Randolph T. Hoch, in charge of the Baltimore ceremonies this year. The swearers have met me several times now during the progress of the physical and neurological portions of this examination. Most of the task is done, but the most important matter is left. The swearer himself, his personality, must go into Multivac's records.

"Each year, this requires some explanation to the young people reaching adulthood. Until now" (he turned to the young people before him and his eyes went no more to the gallery) "you have not been adult; you have not been individuals in the eyes of Multivac, except where you were especially singled out as such by your parents or your government.

"Until how, when the time for the yearly up-dating of information came, it was your parents who filled in the necessary data on you. Now the time has come for you to take over that duty yourself. It is a great honor, a great responsibility. Your parents have told us what schooling you've had, what diseases, what habits; a great many things. But now you must tell us a great deal more; your innermost thoughts; your most secret deeds.

"This is hard to do the first time, embarrassing even, but it must be done. Once it is done, Multivac will have a complete analysis of all of you in its files. It will understand your actions and reactions. It will even be able to guess with fair accuracy at your future actions and reactions.

"In this way, Multivac will protect you. Jf you are in danger of accident, it will know. If someone" plans harm to you, it will know. If you plan harm, it will know and you will be stopped in time so that it will not be necessary to punish you.

"With its knowledge of all of you, Multivac will be able to help Earth adjust its economy and its laws for the good of all. If you have a personal problem, you may come to Multivac with it and with its knowledge of all of you, Multivac will be able to help you.

"Now you will have many forms to fill out. Think carefully and answer all questions as accurately as you can. Do not hold back through shame or caution. No one will ever know your answers except Multivac unless it becomes necessary to learn the answers in order to protect you. And then only authorized officials of the government will know.

"It may occur to you to stretch the truth a bit here or there. Don't do this. We will find out if you do. All your answers put together form a pattern. If some answers are false, they will not fit the pattern and Multivac will discover them. If all your answers are false, there will be a distorted pattern of a type that Multivac will recognize. So you must tell the truth."

Eventually, it was all over, however; the form-filling; the ceremonies and speeches that followed. In the evening, Ben, standing tiptoe, finally spotted Michael, who was still carrying the robes he had worn in the "parade of the adults." They greeted one another with jubilation.

They shared a light supper and took the expressway home, alive and'alight with the greatness of the day.

They were nHfeiprepared, then, ior the sudden transition of the home-coming. It was a numbing shock to both of them to be stopped by a cold-faced young man in uniform outside their own front door; to have their papers inspected before they could enter their own house; to find their own parents sitting forlornly in the living room, the mark of tragedy on their faces.

Joseph Manners, looking much older than he had that morning, looked out of his puzzled, deep-sunken eyes at his sons (one with the robes of new adulthood still over his arm) and said, "I seem to be under house arrest."

Bernard Gulliman could not and did not read the entire report. He read only the summary and that was most gratifying, indeed.

A whole generation, it seemed, had grown up accustomed to the fact that Multivac could predict the commission of major crimes. They learned that Corrections agents would be on the scene before the crime could be committed. They found out that consummation of the crime led to inevitable punishment. Gradually, they were convinced that there was no way anyone could outsmart Multivac.

The result was, naturally, that even the intention of crime fell off. And as such intentions fell off and as Multivac's capacity was enlarged, minor crimes could be added to the list it would predict each morning, and these crimes, too, were now shrinking in incidence.

So Gulliman had ordered an analysis made (by Multivac, naturally) of Multivac's capacity to turn its attention to the problem of predicting probabilities of disease incidence. Doctors might soon be alerted to individual patients who might grow diabetic in the course of the next year, or suffer an attack of tuberculosis or grow a cancer.

An ounce of prevention—

And the report was a favorable one!

After that, the roster of the day's possible crimes arrived and there was not a first-degree murder on the list.

Gulliman put in an intercom call to Ali Othman in high good humor. "Othman, how do the numbers of crimes in the daily lists of the past week average compared with those in my first week as Chairman?"

It had gone down, it turned out, by 8% and Gulliman was happy indeed. No fault of his own, of course, but the electorate would not know that. He blessed his luck that he had come in at the right time, at the very climax of Multivac, when disease, too, could be placed under its all-embracing and protecting knowledge. Gulliman would prosper by this.

Othman shrugged his shoulder?. "Well, he's happy."

"When do we break the bubble?" said Leemy. "Putting Manners under observation just raised the probabilities and house arrest gave it another boost."

"Don't I know it?" said Othman peevishly. "What I don't know is why."

"Accomplices, maybe, like you said. With Manners in trouble, the rest have to strike at once or be lost."

"Just the other way around. With our hand on one, the rest would scatter for safety and disappear. Besides, why aren't the accomplices named by Multivac?"

"Well, then, do we tell Gulliman?"

"No, not yet. The probability is still only 17.3 per cent. Let's get a bit- more drastic first."

Elizabeth Manners said to her younger son, "You go to your room, Ben."

"But what's it all about, Mom?" asked Ben, voice breaking at this strange ending to what had been a glorious day.

"Please!"

He left reluctantly, passing through the door to the stairway, walking up it noisily and down again quietly.

And Mike Manners, the older son, the new-minted adult and the hope of the family, said in a voice and tone that mirrored his brother's, "What's it all about?"

Joe Manners said, "As heaven is my witness, son, I don't know. I haven't done anything."

"Well, sure^gu'haveji't done anything." Mike looked at his small-boned, mild-mannered father in wonder. "They must be here because you're thinking of doing something."

"I'm not."

Mrs. Manners broke in angrily, "How can he be thinking of doing something worth all—all this?" She cast her arm about, in a gesture toward the enclosing shell of government men about the house. "When I was a little girl, I remember the father of a friend of mine was working in a bank, and they once called him up and said to leave the money alone and he did. It was fifty thousand dollars. He hadn't really taken it. He was just thinking about taking it. They didn't keep those things as quiet in those days ,.s they do now; the story got out. That's how I know about it."

"But I mean," she went on, rubbing her plump hands slowly together, "that was fifty thousand dollars; fifty— thousand—dollars. Yet all they did was call him; one phone call. What could your father be planning that would make it worth having a dozen men come down and close off the house?"

Joe Manners said, eyes rilled with pain, "I am planning no crime, not even the smallest. I swear it."

Mike, filled with the conscious wisdom of a new adult, said, "Maybe it's something subconscious, Pop. Some resentment against your supervisor."

"So that I would want to kill him? Nol"

"Won't they tell you what it is, Pop?"

His mother interrupted again, "No, they won't. We've asked. I said they were ruining our standing in the community just being here. The least they could do is tell us what it's all about so we could fight it, so we could explain."

"And they wouldn't?"

"They wouldn't."

Mike stood with his legs spread apart and his hands deep in his pockets. He said, troubled, "Gee, Mom, Multi-vac doesn't make mistakes."

His father pounded his fist helplessly on the arm of the sofa. "I tell you I'm not planning any crime."

The door opened without a knock and a man in uniform walked in with sharp, self-possessed stride. His face had a glazed, official appearance. He said, "Are you Joseph Manners?"

Joe Manners rose to his feet. "Yes. Now what is it you want of me?"

"Joseph Manners, I place you under arrest by order of the government," and curtly he showed his identification as a Corrections officer. "I must ask you to come with me."

"For what reason? What have I done?" >»,

"I am not at liberty to discuss, that."

"But I can't be arrested just for planning a crime even if I were doing that. To be arrested I must actually have done something. You can!t arrest me otherwise. It's against the law."

The officer was impervious to the logic. "You will have to come with me."

Mrs. Manners shrieked and fell on the couch, weeping hysterically. Joseph Manners could not bring himself to violate the code drilled into him all his life by actually resisting an officer, but he hung back at least, forcing the Corrections officer to use muscular power to drag him forward. „....■>'

And Manners called out as he went, "But tell me what it is. Just tell me. If. I knew— Is it murder? Am I supposed to be planning murder?"

The door closed behind him and Mike Manners, white-faced and-suddenly feeling not the least bit adult, stared first at the door, then at his weeping mother.

Ben Manners, behind the door and suddenly feeling quite adult, pressed his lips tightly together and thought he knew exactly what to do.

If Multivac took away, Multivac could also give. Ben had been at the ceremonies that very day. He had heard this man, Randolph Hoch, speak of Multivac and all that Multivac could do. It could direct the government and it could also unbend and help out some plain person who came to it for help.

Anyone could,,»ask help of Multivac and anyone meant Ben. Neither h^^otherv nor Mike were in any condition to stop him now, and he had s'6me money left of the amount they had given him for his great outing that day. If afterward they found him gone and worried about it, that couldn't be helped. Right now, his first loyalty was to his father.

He ran out the back way and the officer at the door cast a glance at his papers and let him go.

Harold Quimby handled the complaints department of the Baltimore substation of Multivac. He considered himself to be a member of that branch of the civil service that was most important of all. In some ways, he may have been right, and those who heard him discuss the matter would have had to be made of iron not to feel impressed.

For one thing, Quimby would say, Multivac was essentially an invader of privacy. In the past fifty years, mankind had had to acknowledge that its thoughts and impulses were no longer secret, that it owned no inner recess where anything could be hidden. And mankind had to have something in return.

Of course, it got prosperity, peace, and safety, but that was abstract. Each man and woman needed something personal as his or her own reward for surrendering privacy, and each one got it. Within reach of every human being was a Multivac station with circuits into which he could freely enter his own problems and questions without control or hindrance, and from which, in a matter of minutes, he could receive answers.

At any given moment, five million individual circuits among the quadrillion or more within Multivac might be involved in this question-and-answer program. The answer might not always be certain, but they were the best available, and every questioner knew the answer to be the best available and had faith in it. That was what counted.

And now an anxious sixteen-year-old had moved slowly up the waiting line of men and women (each face in that line illuminated by a different mixture of hope with fear or anxiety or even anguish—always with hope predominating as the person stepped nearer and nearer to Multivac).

Without looking up, Quimby took the fiUed-out form being handed him and said, "Booth 5-B."

Ben said, "How do I ask the question, sir?"

Quimby looked up then, with a bit of surprise. Pre-adults did not generally make use of the service. He said kindly, "Have you ever done this before, son?"

"No, sir."

Quimby pointed to the model on his desk. "You use this. You see how it works? Just like a typewriter. Don't you try to write or print anything by hand. Just use the machine. Now you take booth 5-B, and if you need help, just press the red button and someone will come. Down that aisle, son, on the right."

He watched the youngster go down the aisle and out of view and smiled. No one was ever turned away from Multivac. Of course, there was always a certain percentage of trivia: people who asked personal questions about their neighbors or obscene questions about prominent personalities; college youths trying to outguess their professors or thinking it clever to stump Multivac by asking it Russell's class-of-all-classes paradox and so on.

Multivac could take care Of all that. It needed no help.

Besides, each question and answer was filed and formed but another item in the fact assembly for each individual. Even the most trivial question and the most impertinent, insofar as it reflected the personality of the questioner, helped humanity by helping Multivac know about humanity.

Quimby turned his attention to the next person in line, a middle-aged woman, gaunt and angular, with the look of trouble in her eye.

Ali Othman strode the length of his office, his heels thumping desperately on the carpet. "The probability still goes up. It's 22.4 per cent now. Damnation! We have Joseph Manners under actual arrest and it still goes up." He was perspiring freely.

Leemy turned away from the telephone. "No confession yet. He's under Psychic Probing and there is no sign of crime. Hfem'ay be telling the truth."

Othman said, "Is Multivac crazy then?"

Another phone sprang to life. Othman closed connections quickly, glad of the interruption. A Corrections officer's face came to life in the screen. The officer said, "Sir, are there any new directions as to Manners' family? Are they to be allowed to come and go as they have been?"

"What do you mean, as they have been?"

"The original instructions were for the house arrest of Joseph Manners. Nothing was said of the rest of the family, sir."

"Well, extend it to the rest of the family until you are informed otherwise."

"Sir, that is the point. The mother and older son are demanding information about the younger son. The younger son is gone and they claim he is in custody and wish to go to headquarters to inquire about it."

Othman frowned and said in almost a whisper, "Younger son? How young?"

"Sixteen, sir," said the officer.

"Sixteen and he's gone. Don't you know where?"

"He was allowed to leave, sir. There were no orders to hold him."

"Hold the line. Don't move." Othman put the line into suspension, then clutched at his coal-black hair with both hands and shrieked, "Fool! Fool! Fool!"

Leemy was startled. "What the hell?"

"The man has a sixteen-year-old son," choked out Othman. "A sixteen-year-old is not an adult and he is not filed independently in Multivac, but only as part of his father's file." He glared at Leemy. "Doesn't everyone know that until eighteen a youngster does not file his own reports with Multivac but that his father does it for him? Don't I know it? Don't you?"

"You mean Multivac didn't mean Joe Manners?" said Leemy.

"Multivac meant his minor son, and the youngster is gone, now. With officers three deep around the house, he calmly walks out and goes on you know what errand."

He whirled to the telephone circuit to which the Corrections officer still clung, the minute break having given Othman just time enough to collect himself and to assume a cool and self-possessed mien. (It would never have done to throw a fit before the eyes of the officer, however much good it did in purging his spleen.)

He said, "Officer, locate the younger son who has disappeared. Take every man you have, if necessary. Take every man available in the district, if necessary. I shall give the appropriate orders. You must find that boy at all costs." "Yes, sir."

Connection was broken. Othriian said, "Have another rundown on the probabilities, Leemy."

Five minutes later, Leemy said, "It's down to 19.6 per cent. It's down."

Othman drew a long breath. "We're on the right track at last."

Ben Manners sat in Booth 5-B and punched out slowly, "My name is Benjamin Manners, number MB-71833412. My father, Joseph Manners, has been arrested but we don't know what crime he is planning. Is there any way we can help him?"

He sat arid waited. He might be only sixteen but he was old enough to know that somewhere those words were being whirled into the most complex structure ever conceived by man; that a trillion facts would blend and co-ordinate into a whole, and that from that whole, Multi-vac would abstract the best help.

The machine clicked and a card emerged. It had an answer on it, a long answer. It began, "Take the expressway to Washington, D.C. at once. Get off at' the Connecticut Avenue stop. You will find a special exit, labeled "Multivac" with a guard. Inform the guard you are a special courier for Dr. Trumbull and he will let you enter.

"You will be in a corridor. Proceed along it till you reach a small door labeled 'Interior.' Enter and say to the men inside, 'Message for Doctor Trumbull' You will be allowed to pass. Proceed on—"

It went on* in this fashion. Ben could not see the application t<*§his question, but, he had complete faith in Multivac. He left at a run, heading for the expressway to Washington.

The Corrections officers traced Ben Manners to the Baltimore station an hour after he had left. A shocked Harold Quimby found himself flabbergasted at the number and importance of the men who had focused on him in the search for a sixteen-year-old.

"Yes, a boy," he said, "but I don't know where he went to after he was through here. I had no way of knowing that anyone was looking for him. We accept all comers here. Yes, I can get the record of the question and answer."

They looked at the record and televised it to Central Headquarters at once.

Othman read it through, turned up his eyes, and collapsed. They brought him to almost at once. He said to Leemy weakly, "Have them catch that boy. And have a copy of Multivac's answer made out for me. There's no way any more, no way out. I must see Gulliman now."

Bernard Gulliman had never seen Ali Othman as much as perturbed before, and watching the co-ordinator's wild eyes now sent a trickle of ice water down his spine.

He stammered, "What do you mean, Othman? What do you mean, worse than murder?"

"Much worse than just murder."

Gulliman was quite pale. "Do you mean assassination of a high government official?" (It did cross his mind that he himself—)

Othman nodded. "Not just a government official. The government official."

"The Secretary-General?" said Gulliman in an appalled whisper.

"More than that, even. Much more. We deal with a plan to assassinate Multivac!" "WHAT!"

"For the first time in the history of Multivac, the computer came up with the report that it itself was in danger."

"Why was I not at once informed?"

Othman half-truthed out of it. "The matter was so unprecedented, sir, that we explored the situation first before daring to put it on official record."

"But Multivac has been saved, of course? It's been saved?"

"The probabilities of harm have declined to under 4 per cent. I am waiting for the report now."

"Message for Dr. Trumbull," said Ben Manners to the 102

man on the high stool, working carefully on what looked like the controls of a stratojet cruiser, enormously magnified.

"Sure, Jim," said the man. "Go" ahead."

Ben looked at his instructions and hurried on. Eventually, he would find a tiny control lever which he was to shift to a DOWN position at a moment when a certain indicator spot would light up red.

He heard an agitated voice behind him, then another, and suddenly, two men had him by his elbows. His feet were lifted off the floor.

One man said, "Come with us, boy."

Ali Othman's face did not noticeably lighten at the news, even though Gulliman said with great relief, "If we have the boy,-then Multivac is safe."

"For the moment."

Gulliman put a trembling hand to his forehead. "What a half hour I've had. Can you imagine what the destruction of Multivac for even a short time would mean? The government would have collapsed; the economy broken down. It would have meant devastation worse—" His head snapped up, "What do you mean for the moment?"

"The boy, this Ben Manners, had no intention of doing harm. He and his family must be released and compensation for false imprisonment given them. He was only following Multivac's instructions in order to help his father and it's done that. His father is free now."

"Do you mean Multivac ordered the boy to pull a lever under circumstances that would burn out enough circuits to require a month's repair work? You mean Multivac

those instructions but selected the Manners family in the first place because Ben Manners looked exactly like one of Dr. Trumbull's pages so that he could get into Multivac without being stopped."

"What do you mean the family was selected?"

"Well, the boy would have never gone to ask the question if his father had not been arrested. His father would never have been arrested if Multivac had not blamed him for planning the destruction of Multivac. Multivac's own action started the chain of events that almost led to Multivac's destruction."

"But there's no sense to that," said Gulliman in a pleading voice. He felt small and helpless and he was virtually on his knees, begging this Othman, this man who had spent nearly a lifetime with Multivac, to reassure him.

Othman did not do so. He said, "This is Multivac's first attempt along this line as far as I know. In some ways, it planned well. It chose the right family. It carefully did not distinguish between father and son to send us off the track. It was still an amateur at the game, though. It could not overcome its own instructions that led it to report the probability of its own destruction as increasing with every step we took down the wrong road. It could not avoid recording the answer it gave the youngster. With further practice, it will probably learn deceit. It will learn to hide certain facts, fail to record certain others. From now on, every instruction it gives may have the seeds in it of its own destruction. We will never know. And however careful we are, eventually Multivac will succeed. I think, Mr. Gulliman, you will be the last Chairman of this organization."

Gulliman pounded his desk in fury. "But, why, why, why? Damn you, why? What is wrong with it? Can't it be fixed?"

"I don't think so," said Othman, in soft despair. "I've never thovight about this before. I've never had the occasion to until this happened, but now that I think of it, it seems to me we have reached the end of the road because Multivac is too good. Multivac has grown so complicated, its reactions are no longer those of a machine, but those of a living thing."

"You're mad, but even so?"

"For fifty years and more we have been loading humanity's troubles on Multivac, on this living thing. We've asked it to care for us, all together and each individually. We've asked it to take all our secrets into itself; we've asked it to absorb our evil and guard us against it. Each of us brings his troubles to it, adding his bit to the bur-
den. Now we are planning to load the burden of human
disease on Multivac, too." „

Othman paused a moment, then burst out, "Mr. Gul-liman, Multivac bears all the troubles of the world on its shoulders and it is tired."

"Madness. Midsummer madness," muttered Gulliman.

"Then let me show you something. Let me put it to the test. May I have permission to use the Multivac circuit line here in your office?"

"Why?"

"To ask it a question no one has ever asked Multivac before?"

"Will you do it harm?" asked Gulliman in quick alarm. •

"No. But it will tell us what we want to know." The Chairman .hesitated a trifle. Then he said, "Go ahead."

Othman used the instrument on Gulliman's desk. His fingers "punched out the question with deft strokes: "Multivac, ..what do you yourself want more than anything else?"

The moment between question and answer lengthened unbearably, but neither Othman nor Gulliman breathed.

And there was a clicking and a card popped out. It was a small card. On it, in precise letters, was the answer:

"I want to die."

Fritz Leibe^, a Hugo winner and Guest of Honor at a World ScietitifrFictiSh Convention, son of the well-known Shakespearean actor—Fritz Leiber, Sr.—has been famous in his own right for many years. His CONJURE WIFE, a witch story, appeared twice as a motion picture (the latest was BURN, WITCH, BURN) and once on television. For some years he was working on the editoral staff of Science Digest, and more recently he was writing the Buck Rogers comic strips. But his real claim to fame is sampled here, in a story which pictures a dialog of science vs art in a dramatic, exciting yarn set in the not too distant future when the world is sitting much closer to the edge of atomic destruction than it is today.

whole point. I'd never do such a thing. I never have."

"Then you shouldn't have boasted," the fat man said. "And you shouldn't have fooled around with Councilman Classen's daughter."

At the name, Ellenby came oukof his trance and looked sharply at Madson, who said indignantly, "I wasn't fooling around with Vera-Ellen, whatever her crazy father says. She came to my office because she has poetic ability and I wanted to encourage it."

"Yeah, so she'd encourage you," the fat man finished. "That girl's wild enough already, which I suppose is what you mean by poetic ability. And in this town, her father's word counts." He hitched up his belt. "And now, professors, it's time you started."

Madson and,Ellenby looked at each other doubtfully. The young man with'the squirtgun raised its acid-etched muzzle. The fat man looked hard at Madson and Ellenby. "I think I hear alarm clocks going off," he said quietly.

They watched the two men trudge a hundred yards, watched Ellenby shift the rolled-up towel under his elbow to the other side, watched Madson pause to thumb tobacco into a pipe and glance carelessly back, then shove the pipe in his pocket and go on hurriedly.

"Couple of pretty harmless coots, if you ask me," the young man with the shotgun observed.

"Sure," the fat man agreed, "but we got to remember peoples' feelings and keep Ozona straight. We don't like mobs or fear or girls gone wild."

The young man with the shotgun grinned. "That Vera-Ellen," he murmured, shaking his head.

"You better keep your mind off her too," the fat man said sourly. "She's wild enough without anybody to encourage her pftgric ability or anything else. It's a good thing we gave those two their walking papers."

"They'll probably walk right into the arms of the Harvey gang," the young man with the squirtgun remarked, "especially if they try to short-cut."

"Pretty small pickings for Harvey, those two," the young man with the shotgun countered.

"Which won't please him at all."

The fat man shrugged. "Their own fault. If only they'd 109

had sense enough to keep their mouths shut. Early in life."

"They don't seem to realize it's 1993," said the young man with the shotgun.

The fat man nodded. "Come on," he said, turning back toward the town and the coolness. "We've done our duty."

The young man with the squirtgun took a last look. "There they go, Art and Science," he observed with satisfaction. "Those two subjects always did make my head ache."

On the hot road Madson began to stride briskly. His nostrils flared. "Smell the morning air," he commanded. "It's good, good!"

Ellenby, matching his stride with longer if older legs, looked at him with mild wonder.

"Smell the hot sour grass," Madson continued. "It's things like this man was meant for, not machines and formulas. Look at the dew. Have you seen the dew in years? Look at it on that spiderweb!"

The physicist paused obediently to observe the softly twinkling strands. "Perfect catenaries," he murmured.

"What?"

"A kind of curve," Ellenby explained. "The locus of the focus of a parabola rolling on a straight line."

"Locus-focus hocus-pocus!" Madson snorted. "Reducing the wonders of Nature to chalk marks. It's disgusting."

Suddenly each tiny drop of dew turned blood-red. Ellenby turned his back on the spiderweb, whipped a crooked little brass tube from an inside pocket and squinted through it.

"What's that?" Madson asked.

"Spectroscope," Ellenby explained. "Early morning spectra of the sun are fascinating."

Madson huffed. "There you go. Analyzing. Tearing beauty apart. It's a disease." He paused. "Say, won't you hurt your eyes?"

Turning back, Ellenby shook his head. "I keep a smoked glass on it," he said. "I'm always hoping that some day I'll get a glimpse of an atomic bomb explosion."

"You mean to say you've missed all the dozens they dropped on this country? That's tog bad.'*'

"The ball of fire's quite fleering. The opportunities haven't been as good as you think."

"But you're a physicist, aren't you? Don't you people have all sorts of lovely photographs to gloat over in your laboratories?"

"Atomic bomb spectra were never declassified," Ellenby told him wistfully. "At least not in my part of the project. I've never seen one."

"Well, you'll probably get your chance," Madson told him harshly. "If you've been reading your dirty telefax, you'll know the Hot Truce is coming to a boil. And the Angeles area will be a prime target." Ellenby nodded mutely.

They trudged on. The sun began to beat on their backs like an open fire. Ellenby turned up his collar. He watched his companion thoughtfully. Finally he said, "So you're the Madson who wrote those Enemies of Science stories about a world ruled by poets. It never occurred to me back at Ozona. And that nonfiction book about us—what was it called?"

"Murderers of Imagination," Madson growled. "And it would have been a good thing if you'd listened to my warnings instead of going on building machines and dissecting Nature and destroying all the lovely myths that make life worthwhile."

"Are you sure that Nature is so lovely and kind?" Ellenby ventured. Madson did not deign to answer.

They passed a crossroad leading, the battered sign said, one way to B^mdale, 4he other to San Bernardino. They were perhaps a hundred yards beyond it when Ellenby let go a little chuckle. "I have a confession to make. When I was very young I wrote an article about how children shouldn't be taught the Santa Claus myth or any similar fictions."

Madson laughed sardonically. "A perfect member of your dry-souled tribe! Worrying about Santa Claus, when all the while something very different was about to come flying down from over the North Pole and land on our housetops."

"We did try to warn people about the intercontinental missiles," Ellenby reminded him.

"Yes, without any success. The last two reindeer— Donner and Blitzen!"

Ellenby nodded glumly, but he couldn't keep a smile off his face for long. "I wrote another article too—it was never published—about how poetry is completely pointless, how rhymes inevitably distort meanings, and so on."

Madson whirled on him with a peal of laughter. "So you even thought you were big enough to wreck poetry!" He jerked a limp, thinnish volume from his coat pocket. "You thought you could destroy this!"

Ellenby's expression changed. He reached for the book, but Madson held it away from him. Ellenby said, "That's Keats, isn't it?"

"How would you know?"

Ellenby hesitated. "Oh, I got to like some of his poetry, quite a while after I wrote the article." He paused again and looked squarely at Madson. "Also, Vera-Ellen was reading me some pieces out of that volume. I guess you'd loaned it to her."

"Vera-Ellen?" Madson's jaw dropped.

Ellenby nodded. "She had trouble with her geometry. Some conferences were necessary." He smiled. "We physicists aren't such a dry-souled tribe, you know."

Madson looked outraged. "Why, you're old enough to be her father!"

"Or her husband," Ellenby replied coolly. "Young women are often attracted to father images. But all that can't make any difference to us now."

"You're right," Madson said shortly. He shoved the poetry volume back in his pocket, squeezed the sweat out of his eyes, and looked around with impatience. "Say, you're going to New Angeles, aren't you?" he asked, and when Ellenby nodded uncertainly, said, "Then let's cut across the fields. This road is taking us out of our way." And without waiting for a reply he jumped across the little ditch to the left of the road and into the yellowing wheat field. Ellenby watched him for a moment, then hitched his rolled towel further up under his arm and followed.

It was stifling in the field. The wheat seemed to paralyze any stray breezes. Their boo£s"hissed against the dry stems. Far off they heard a lazy drumming. After a while they came to a wide, briniful irrigation ditch. They could see that some hundreds- of feet ahead it was crossed by a little bridge. They followed the ditch.

Ellenby felt strangely giddy, as if he were looking at everything through a microscope. That may have been due to the tremendous size of the wheat, its spikes almost as big as corncobs, the spikelets bigger than kernels—rich orange stuff taut with flour. But then they came to a section marred by larger and larger splotches of a powdery purple blight.

The lazy drumming became louder. Ellenby was the first to see the low-swinging helicopter with its thick, trailing plume of greenish mist. He knocked Madson on the shoulder and both men started to run. Purple dust puffed. Once Ellenby stumbled and Madson stopped to jerk him-to his feet. Still they would have escaped except that the copter swerved toward them. A moment later they were, enveloped in sweet oily fumes.

Madson heard jerring laughter, glimpsed a grotesquely long-nosed face peering down from above. Then, through the cloud, Ellenby squeaked, "Don't breathe!" and Madson felt himself dragged roughly into the ditch. The water closed over him with a splash.

Puffing and blowing, he came to his feet—the water hardly reached his waist—to find himself being dragged by Ellenby toward the bridge. It was all he could do to keep his footing on the muddy bottom. By the time he got breath engugfa to.voice his indignation, Ellenby was saying, "That's far enough. Thcstuff's settling away from us. Now strip and scrub yourself."

Ellenby unrolled the towel he'd held tightly clutched to his side all the while, and produced a bar of soap. In response to Madson's question he explained, "That fungicide was probably TTTR or some other relative of the nerve-gas family. They are absorbed through the skin."

Seconds later Madson was scouring his head and chest.

He hesitated at his trousers, muttering, "They'll probably have me for indecent exposure. Claim I was trying to start a nudist colony as well as a free-love cult." But Ellenby's warning had been a chilly one.

Ellenby soaped Madson's back and he in turn soaped the older man's ridgy one.

"I suppose that's why he had an elephant's nose," Madson mused.

"What?"

"Man in the copter," Madson explained. "Wearing a respirator."

Ellenby nodded and made them move nearer the bridge for a change of water.

They started to scrub their clothes, rinse and wring them, and lay them on the bank to dry. They watched the copter buzzing along in the distance, but it didn't seem inclined to come near again. Madson felt impelled to say, "You know, it's your chemist friends who have introduced that viciousness into the common man's spirit, giving him horrible poisons to use against Nature. Otherwise he wouldn't have tried to douse us with that stuff."

"He just acted like an ordinary fanner to me," Ellenby replied, scrubbing vigorously.

"Think we're safe?" Madson asked.

Ellenby shrugged. "We'll discover," he said briefly.

Madson shivered, but the rhythmic job was soothing. After a bit he began to feel almost playful. Lathering his shirt, he got some fine large bubbles, held them so he could see their colors flow in the sunlight.

"Tiny perfect worlds of every hue," he murmured. "Violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red."

"And dead black," Ellenby added.

"You would say something like that!" Madson grunted. "What did you think I was talking about?"

"Bubbles."

"Maybe some of your friends' poisons have black bubbles," Madson said bitingly. "But I was talking about these."

"So was I. Give me your pipe."

The authority in Ellenby's voice made Madson look 114

around startledly. "Give me your pipe," Ellenby repeated firmly, holding out his hand.

Madson fished it out of the pocket of°the trousers he was about to wash and handed if over. Ellenby knocked out the soggy tobacco, swished it in the water a few times, and began to soap the inside of the bowl.

Madson started to object, but, "You'd be washing it anyway," Ellenby. assured him. "Now look here, Madson, I'm going to blow a bubble and I want you to watch. I want you to observe Nature for all you're worth. If poets and physicists have one thing in common it's that they're both supposed to be able to observe. Accurately."

He took a breath. "Now see, I'm going to hold the pipe mouth down and let the bubble hang from it, but with one side of the bowl tipped up a bit, so that the strain on the bubble's skin- will be greatest on that side."

He blew a big bubble, held the pipe with one hand and pointed with a finger of the other. "There's the place to watch now. There!" The bubble burst.

"What was that?" Madson asked in a new voice. "It really was black for an instant, dull like soot."

"A bubble bursts because its skin gets thinner and thinner," Ellenby said. "When it gets tiiin enough it shows colors, as interference eliminates different wavelengths. With yellow eliminated it shows violet, and so on. But finally, just for a moment at the place where it's going to break, the skin becomes only one molecule thick. Such a monomolecular layer absorbs all light, hence shows as dead black."

"Everything's got a black lining, eh?"

"Black can be beautiful. Here, I'll do it again."

Madson put *bj[s hand on Ellenby's shoulder to steady himself. Ths^feiwere standing hip-deep in water, their bodies still flecked with suds. Their heads were inches from the new bubble. As it burst a voice floated down to them.

"Is this the Ozona Faculty Kindergarten?" They whirled around, simultaneously crouching in the water.

"Vera-Ellen, what are you doing here?" Madson demanded.

"Watching the kiddies play," the girl on the bridge replied, running a hand through her touseled violet hair. She looked down at her slacks and jacket. "Wish I'd brought my swim suit, though I gather it wouldn't be expected."

"Vera-Ellen!" Madson said apprehensively.

"It doesn't look very inviting down there, though," she mused. "Guess I'll wait for Aqua Heaven at New Angeles."

"You're going to New Angeles?" Ellenby put in. It is not easy to be conversationally brilliant while squatting chest deep in muddy water, acutely conscious of the absence of clothes.

Vera-Ellen nodded lazily, leaning on the railing. "Going to get me a city job. With its reduced faculty Ozona holds no more intellectual interest for me. Did you know math's going to be made part of the Home Eck department, Mr. Ellenby?"

"But how did you know that we—"

"Daughter of the man who got you run out of town ought to now what the old bully's up to. And if you're worrying that they'll come after me and find us together, I'll just head along by myself."

Madson and Ellenby both protested, though it is even harder to protest effectively than to be conversationally brilliant while squatting naked in coffee-colored water.

Vera-Ellen said, "All right, so quit playing and let's get on. You have fb tell me all about New Angeles and the kind of jobs we'll get."

"But—?"

"Modest, eh? I'm afraid Pa wouldn't count it in your favor. But all right." She turned her back and sauntered to the other side of the bridge.

Madson and Ellenby cautiously climbed out of the ditch, brushed the water from their skins, and wormed into their soggy clothes.

"We've got to persuade her to go back," Madson whispered.

"Vera-Ellen?" Ellenby replied and raised his eyebrows. Madson groaned softly.

"Cheer up," Ellenby said. And he seemed in a cheer-
ful humor himself when they climbed to the bridge.
"Vera-Ellen," he said, "we've beeu having an argument
as to whether man ruined Nature Or Nature ruined man to
start with." >

"Is this a class, Mr. Ellenby?"

"Of sorts," he told her. Behind him Madson snorted, flipping his Keats to dry the pages. They started off together.

"Well," said Vera-Ellen, "I like Nature and I like . . . human beings. And I don't feel ruined at all. Where's the argument?"

"What about the bombs?" Madson demanded automatically. "By man our physicist here means Technology. Whereas I mean—", _v

"Oh, the bombs,"'she said with a shrug. "What sort of job do you think I should get in New Angeles?"

"Well . . ." Madson began.

"Say, I'm getting hungry," she raced on, turning to Ellenfey., _

"So am I," he agreed.

They looked at the road ahead. A jagged hill now hid all but the tips of the spires of New Angeles. On the top of the hill was a tremendous house with sagging roofs of cracked tiles, stucco walls dark with rain stains and green with moss yet also showing cracks, and windows of age-blued glass, some splintered, flashing in the sun, which tempted Ellenby to whip out his spectroscope.

Curving down from the house came a weedy and balding expanse that had obviously once been a well-tended lawn. A few, iStalwart patches of thick grass held out tenaciously, -d^..

Pale-trunked eucalyptus trees towered behind the house and to either side of the road where it curved over the hill.

In a hollow at the foot of the one-time lawn, just where it met the road, something gleamed. As Madson, Ellenby and Vera-Ellen tramped forward, they saw it was an old automobile, one of the jet antiques that were the rage around 1970—in fact, a Lunar '69. Corning closer Ellenby realized that it had custom-built features, such as jet brakes and collision springs.

A man with an odd cap was poking a probe into the air intake, while in the back seat a woman was sitting, shadowed by a hat four feet across. At the sound of their footsteps the man whirled to his feet, quickly enough though unsteady. He stared at them, wagging the probe. Just at that moment something that looked like an animated orange furpiece leaped from the tonneau.

"George!" the woman cried. "Widgie's got away."

The small flattish creature came on in undulating bounds. It was past the man in the cap before he could turn. It headed for Ellenby, then changed direction. Mad-son made an impulsive dive for it, but it widened itself still more and sailed over him straight into Vera-Ellen's arms.

They walked toward the car. Widgje wriggled, Vera-Ellen stroked his ears. He seemed to be a flying fox of some sort. The man eyed them hostilely, raising the probe. Madson stared puzzledly at the cap. Out of his older knowledge Ellenby whispered an explanation: "Chauffeur."

The woman stood in the back seat, swaying slightly. She was wearing a white swim suit and dark teleglasses under her hat. At first she seemed a somewhat ravaged thirty. Then they began to see the rest of the wrinkles.

She received Widgie from Vera-Ellen, shook him out and tucked him under her arm, where he hung limply, moving his tiny red eyes.

"Come in with me, my dear," she told Vera-Ellen. "George, put down that crazy pole. Pay no attention to George—he can't recognize gentlefolk when he sees them, especially when he's drunk. Gentlemen, she continued, waving graciously to Madson and Ellenby, "you have the thanks of Rickie Vickson." As she pronounced the name she surveyed them sharply. Her gaze settled on Ellenby. "You know me, don't you?"

"Certainly," he answered instantly. "You were my first —my favorite straight 3D star."

"Are you in 3D?" Vera-Ellen asked, a sudden gleam in her eyes.

"Was, my dear," Rickie said grandly. She ogled Ellen-by through the fish-eye glasses. "Ah, straight 3D," she sighed. "Simple video-audio in d^pth—there was a great art-form." She began to sway again and they caught the reek of alcohol. "You know, {gentlemen, it was handies that ruined my career. I had the looks and the voice, but I lacked the touch. Something in me shrank from the whole idea—be still, Widgie—and the girls with itchy fingers took over. But I'm talking too much about myself. It's hot and you wonderful gentlemen must be thirsty. Here, have a—"

The chauffeur glared at her as she reached fumblingly down into the tonneau. She caught the look and quailed slightly. ' ' , _vr>

"—sandwich," she finished, coming up with a shiny can.

Madson accepted.it-from her, clicking the catch. The top popped four feet in the air, followed lazily by the uppermost sandwich which he caught deftly. He handed the can to Ellenby, who served himself and handed it up to Vera-Ellen. Soon all three of them were munching.

"Miss Vkkson," Vera-Ellen asked between mouthfuls, "do you think I could get a job in broadcast entertainment?"

Rickie looked at her sideways, leaning away to focus. "Not with that ghastly atomglow hair," she said. "Violet is old hat this year—it's either black, blonde or bald. But give me your hand, my dear."

"Going to tell my fortune?"

"After a fashion." She held up Vera-Ellen's hand, squeezing and prodding it thoughtfully, as if she were testing, the carcas&^F an alleged spring chicken. Then she nodded. "You^rdb. Good strong hand, that's all that's needed, so you can really crunch the knuckles of the bohunks. They love it rough. Of course the technicians could step up the power when they broadcast your hand-squeeze, but the addicts don't feel it's the same thing." She looked sourly at her own delicate claws. "Yes, my dear, you'll have a chance in handies if you don't mind cuddling with two million dirty-minded bohunks every night and if Rickie Vickson's still got any entree at the studios." She made a face and dipped again into the tonneau, apparently to gulp something, for the chauffeur's glare was intensified.

"You're from New Angeles?" Madson asked politely when Rickie came up beaming.

"Old Angeles," she corrected. "My home's in a contaminated area. After 3D lighting I've never been afraid of hard radiations. But this time my psychic counselor told me—Widgie, I'm going to put you away in a nice little urn—that the bombs are going to miss New Angeles and fall on Old. That's why George is jetting me to the mountains. Others drink to still their fears. I do something about it—too."

"You mean you're going away from the studio?" Vera-Ellen demanded incredulously while Ellenby mumbled "Bombs?" through a mouthful of sandwich.

"Of course," Rickie nodded. "Don't you know? Russia's touched a match to the Hot Truce. You charming gentlemen should keep up with these things."

"You see, I told you!" Madson said to Ellenby. "One
more victory for science!" v

"Miss Vickson, we better be getting on," the chauffeur interrupted, speaking for the first time. His voice was drunkenly thick. "We aren't out of the fusion fringe by a long shot and I don't like the looks of this place."

Rickie ignored him. Ellenby asked, "Was the news about Russia telefaxed?"

"Of course not." Rickie's smile was scornful. "They never tell the real truth these days. But they said to get out of our houses, and what else could that mean?"

"Miss Vickson, we better—" George began again.

"Quiet, George," Rickie ordered.

George groaned faintly, shrugged his shoulders, and reached out an arm to her without looking. Rickie handed him a red, limp plastic bottle. Just as he was putting it to his lips, he jerked as if stung, vaulted into the car, and began to stamp and punch at the controls.

With a mighty pouf the jet took hold. Ellenby skittered away from the hot blast. The Lunar '69 jumped forward.

Things hissed and snicked through the air. From nowhere, men began to appear. With a great lurch the car gained the road, roared toward the bridge. Vera-Ellen jumped up as if to get out, then was thrown back into the tonneau. Rickie lunged forward across the seat to save the red bottle. Her four-foot hat leaped upward, hesitated, and then spun off like a flying saucer.

A man rose from the wheat near the bridge. As the car jounced across it, he leveled a rapid-fire weapon. But just as he got it trained on the car, Rickie's hat landed on him. He went over backwards, firing at the sky.

Madson and Ellenby looked around in bewilderment. There must have been a dozen men. As they stared, another bunch came hurrying down the ruined lawn from the house on the hill.

The man by the bridge got up, went over to Rickie's hat and stamped on it.

Madson and Ellenby jumped as the sky-climbing missiles from his gun pattered down around them. When they looked around again, the men from the house on the hill weredosing in.

Their leader was about five feet tall, but thick. His head had -been formed in a bullet mold, bis features looked drop-forged.

"I'm Harvey," he told them blankly. "What you got?"

Harvey's people wore everything from evening dress to shorts. There were even two women (who drifted toward Harvey) one in a. gold kimono, the other in an off-the-bosom frock of filthy white lace. Everybody was armed.

"What you got?" Harvey repeated sharply. "I know you're loaded,^! saw you talking with that rich-witch in the jet." H^lQoked. them over and grabbed at Mad-son's side pocket. "Books, huh!"" he said like a hangman, dangling the Keats by a stray page. Then he turned to Ellenby. "Come on, Skinny," he said, "shell out."

When Ellenby hesitated, two of Harvey's men grabbed him, dumped him, and passed the contents of his pockets to their chief. When the spectroscope turned up, Harvey grinned. The eyes of his people twinkled in anticipation.

"Science gadget, huh?" he said. "Folks, there's been too much science in the world and too many words. Any minute now, more bombs are gonna fall. I do my humble bit to help 'em. I'm a great little junkman." He let the brass tube fall to the ground and lifted his foot. "Blow it a good-bye kiss, Skinny."

"Wait," Madson said abruptly, taking a step toward Harvey. "Don't do it." Then the poet's eyes grew wide and alarmed, as if he hadn't known he was going to say it.

Breaths sucked in around them. Harvey's turret head slowly turned toward Madson, its expression seemingly vacuous. "Why not?" Harvey whispered.

"Don't pay any attention to my friend," Ellenby interjected rapidly. "He just said that on account of me. Actually he hates science as much as you do. Don't—"

"Shaddup!" Harvey roared. Then his voice instantly went low again. "Ain't nobody hates science more'n me, but ain't nobody tells me so. Shoulda kept your mouth shut, Skinny. Now there's gonna be more'n gadgets stomped, more'n books tore."

Silence came except for the faint sucks of breath, the faint scuffle of shoes on grit as Harvey's people slowly moved in. Ellenby stood helplessly, yet at the same time he felt a widening and intensification of his sensory powers. He was aware of the delicately lace-edged tree shadows cast from the hill ahead by the westering sun. At the other limit of his vision the copter no longer trailed its green caterpillar; for some reason it was buzzing closer along the road. At the same time he was conscious with a feverish clarity of the page by which Harvey dangled the Keats, and without reading the words he saw the lines:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Suddenly the slowly advancing faces seemed to freeze and Ellenby was aware of something spectral and ominous about the yellowing sunlight and the whole acid-etched scene around him. It was something more than the physical threat to him and Madson—it was some-
thing that seemed to well up menacingly from the
ground under his feet. ^.

There was a sudden faint thunder and even as something inside Ellenby said, "That &n't it, that isn't what the sky's waiting for," he saw the chrome muzzle of the Lunar '69 bulleting toward' them across the bridge with Vera-Ellen's violet mop above the wheel.

But even as the braking blasts gouted out redly from under the hood and the car crunched toward a stop in their midst, even as Harvey's people broke to either side and pistols popped with queerly toylike reports, the thunder multiplied until it was impossible that the Lunar '69 was causing it, until it was like the thunder of a thousand invisible jets crushing the air around them. The sky shifted, rocked. The road shook. There came a shock that numbed Ellenby's feet and sent everyone around him reeling, and a pounding, smashing sound that made any remembered noise seem puny.

The'X-unar '69, which had stopped a dozen feet from Ellenby, was" pitching and tossing like a silver ship in a storm. Vera-Ellen was gripping the steering wheel with one hand and motioning to him frantically with the other. In the seat beyond her Rickie Vickson was jouncing as if in a merry-go-round chariot.

Ellenby lurched as a hand clutched his shoulder and a staggering Madson howled in his ear through the tumult, "Now you've got your rotten bombs!" Between him and the car Harvey's bullet head reared up and as suddenly dropped away. Looking down, Ellenby saw that a chasm four feet wide had split the road between him and the car. Its, walls were raw, smoking earth and rock. Down it Ellenjj-y Saw vanishing, in one frozen moment, Harvey and theKeats and the little brass spectroscope.

Then Ellenby realized he had grabbed Madson by the shoulder and thrown the two of them forward and shouted "Jump!" For a moment the chasm gaped beneath them and a white little face stared upward. Then the chasm closed with a giant crunch and Ellenby's hand caught the side of the heaving car and he pitched into the back seat.

Through the diminishing thunder and shaking there came the toy roar of the car's jet and a new movement tipped him backward and he was looking toward the hill and it was getting bigger. He tried to put his feet down and felt something bulk under them. For a moment he thought it was Madson, but Madson was beside him on the seat, and then he saw it was George. He looked up and Rickie Vickson was watching him from where she was crouched in the front seat, her eyes without the tele-glasses looking as foxy as Widgie's, whom she was holding close to her wrinkle-etched cheek.

"Vera-Ellen had to conk him," she explained, her gaze dipping to George. "The bum tried to betray us."

The pitching of the car had given way to a steady forward lunge. Ellenby nodded dully at Rickie and hitched himself around and looked back.

Harvey's people were scattering like ants through a dust cloud rising from the road.

The house on the hill still stood, though there were more and larger cracks in it and a nimbus of whiter dust around it.

By the bridge the copter had crashed and was flaming brightly. A tiny figure was running away from it.

Ellenby's face slowly lightened with understanding.

"We were on the San Andreas Rift," he said softly. "Madson, that wasn't the bombs at all. That wasn't Technology or Man." A smile trembled on his lips. "That was Nature. An earthquake."

Madson was the first to comment. "All right," he said, "it was Nature—Nature showing her disgust for Man."

"An idea like that is the sheerest animism," Ellenby reacted automatically. "Now if you try analyzing—"

"Analyzing!" Madson snorted with a touch of the old fire. "You scientists are always—"

"Whoa, boys," Rickie Vickson interrupted. "If it hadn't been for that little quake to confuse things, Vera-Ellen couldn't have snatched you out no matter how pretty she tried. And I'm in no mood for arguments now. I'm not the arty type and all the science I know is what my psychic counselor tells me. Widgie, quit pounding your heart; it's all over now."

Ellenby touched her arm. "Do I understand," he asked, "that Vera-Ellen made you turn back just 'to save us?"

"Of course not," Rickie assured'him. "Her father and his pals tried to stop us a couple' of miles back. They'd been radioed by a farmer in a copter and had the road blocked. George wanted to hand you all over to Vera-Ellen's father, but we conked George—he's such a weakling—and got away. Picking you up was an afterthought."

Vera-Ellen flashed a wicked smile over her shoulder.

Ellenby realized he was feeling vastly contented. He started to lift his feet off George, then settled them more comfortably. He looked at the violet-topped new chauffeur handling the Lunar as if she'd never done anything else, and she picked that moment to flash him another half friendly, half insulting grin. He nudged Madson and said, "We'll continué bur argument later—all our argument.", Madson looked at him sharply and almost grinned too. Ellenby-wondered idly what jobs they had for poets and physicists in 3D and handie studios.

Rickie Vickson's eyes widened. "Say," she said, "if they were just warning us about that little old earthquake, then Old Angeles isn't radioactive—I mean any more radioactive than it's ever been."

"Oh boy," Vera-Ellen crowed as the car topped the hill and the blue spires came back in sight, "New Angeles, here we come."

Sherwood Springer has been a professional newspaper man for many^/ears. He is not well known in the science fiction worldjot a large output; However, of all the stories presented here, his story book science fiction readers as though an atomic bomb was dropped in their laps.

The hyper-tense tightrope on which our world is balanced poses a continued threat to our very existence. The possibility that our entire population might indeed be wiped out frequently seems more than just a writer's fantasy.

Repopulating the world might very well become the responsibility of a few survivors. What happens when those survivors are a solitary man and his three children? And, unlike the Bible, there is....

could possibly rate me this job? I never won any medals. Nobody ever called me 'the brain.' Never went to college. Read western stories and science fiction whan I was a kid instead of doing homework. Didn'tg'6 to church after I grew up, or think much about it. ^ever killed anybody, of course, or kicked a dog, but I guess I did plenty of other things God would have raised His eyebrow about if He'd been watching. And physically, you've got to admit that plain Jim Clay doesn't look much like Charles Atlas. Seems to me I got in here on a fluke."

"Jim!" She grasped his shoulders sharply, her eyes lev-elly trapping his. "That's nonsense. In the first place, you are here, and the choice, if choice it was, has been made, and all the self-deprecation in the world isn't going to give our descendants a different ancestor."

"No.but-^"

"Has it occurredto you," she went on doggedly, "that maybe it makes a great deal of sense? You said something just now that reveals more about you than you realize. Kicking a dog, in your mind, is as heinous as murder. That's your great quality, Jim—kindness. Tell me, the civilization we knew—why is it lying around us as dead as . . . Gomorrah? Those great brains you admire were building atomic piles, computing machines and planes that flew faster than sound, but were they doing anything about intolerance and selfishness and the greed for power? It seems to me trifles like 'loving thy neighbor' were sort of lost in the shuffle. Maybe God finally decided to let man wipe himself out and then start all over again—this time with the little things . . . like kindness."

A cold wind from the sea began to stir the leaves of the eucalyptus tfee beside the house. The bearded man shivered slightjajarid drew his jacket collar more snugly about his throatTHe glanced up at the night sky, dusty with swarming stars. Even the heavens were different then, he thought. Back in '68 the moon itself had difficulty getting through sometimes. He smiled grimly. Man had solved the smog problem at last.

Twenty-one years. His mind sped down the long time track to that morning he had met Ann Banning. He was then working for Cal Tech, which was doing some experimentation for NASA. The government wanted to know what the physical and psychological effects on the human nervous system might be when a male and female were put in a hermetically sealed chamber that had been prepared to simulate as closely as possible the interior of an interplanetary rocket.

Jim Clay had been picked as the male half of the team, and Ann Banning was the other half. Ann was an accomplished research scientist in her own right who had insisted she be permitted to make the test. She was 37; he was 39. How little importance he had attached to those figures at the time, yet how desperately serious they became later when destiny began its mocking game.

How symbolic was the closing of the air lock that shut them off from the world of May, 1968, the civilization they were never to see again. The Cold War had met a new danger in China and Africa. Too many nations were already in possession of atomic weapons. The fear of war was now a real thing. The people of the world waited, scarcely breathing at times . . . waited for the bombs. When would they drop? The atom bombs, the hydrogen bombs, the dreaded nerve gas? Fear crept like a serpent among the nations. Who would be first to strike? Who would be stricken?

The answer soared in a high arc across the Pole on the night of May 7, three days after Ann and Jim had entered the space room.

One bomb.

That was all. It exploded just south of Berkeley, California, on the edge of the bay. Approximately .071 of a second later the world ended for two and a half billion people.

The scientists had erred. The bomb had been a gesture, a warning; the nerve gas it contained was a modified type. Thousands would be temporarily paralyzed but few fatalities would result. America must be shown how vulnerable it was.

By what deadly miscalculation the catalyst was unforeseen the world would never know. But catalyst there was, and the resulting chain reaction in the atmosphere swept the globe with the speed of light. From America to the Orient, from pole to pole, in ships, in homes, in offices and factories, in the deepest caverns, wherever the breath of an atom linked air to air, the Wight struck. Paralysis. The nerve system congealed, lungs struggled vainly to function, and suffocation p/as followed by death —quickly in most cases, days later in others. Only the comparative handful of humanity who happened to be in pressure cabins, submerged submarines, air locks and similar sealed compartments escaped the initial wave of devastation. But these had no way of knowing the doom that awaited them. Planes landed, underseas craft surfaced, locks were opened. And death was waiting.. ..

Strangely enough, man alone of all the animal kingdom found breathing fatal. The oxygen content of the atmosphere remained undisturbed and, although several other species among the higher mammals were temporarily affected, scarcely a death resulted.

Gradually, as the days passed, the deadly vapor dissipated. The slow absorption by soil, sea and stone demonstrated once more nature's wily resourcefulness in coping with unnatural and contra-survival developments. By the fourth week in May the atmosphere's lethal content had dropped well within the tolerance level.

Like the spinning facets in a kaleidoscope, memories flared momentarily, then scurried to merge with other memories in a spiraling montage, as the bearded man waited on the hillside. The unforgettable bewilderment as he and Ann had emerged from the space room to find a laboratory peopled with corpses, the rapidly mounting horror as they sped from room to room, and finally the numbing shock as they stepped outdoors and their ears registered the most stunning fact of all. The campus, and the great city beyohd,'"lay wrapped in an incredible, unnatural silence.

Their search for survivors in the days that followed was grimly dogged, but the mounting stench of death that hung like a pall over the Los Angeles kettle drove them finally to flight. Northward over the mountains they went, transportation presenting little difficulty. Automobiles by the thousands were to be had for the taking. The material world was theirs. Many vehicles, of course, had been damaged or demolished in final crashes, but the number was comparatively small. Occasionally they encountered road blocks caused by multiple collisions but they were able to bypass these in most cases, or as a last resort, they could always trudge past on foot and take possession of another car farther on—as they did when gasoline ran low.

On through Bakersfield, Fresno and Modesto, with hope dying within them. The San Francisco area was fetid, and they realized without crossing the bridge there would be no life there. As they turned right toward Berkeley, determined to push north and eastward across the Sierras, they discovered the crater. It was that, coupled with the threatening communique of the enemy revealed in one of the last editions of now defunct newspapers, that had enabled Ann to formulate an hypothesis which explained the disaster. But its scope was still far from suspected. There must be life to the east. Telephones and radios were dead, it was true, but as evidence that was not necessarily conclusive.

He could write, the man thought, a new Genesis of their wanderings during the year that followed. Over Dormer Pass they went, down into Reno, the long trek across the wastelands to the east, St. Louis, Chicago, and on across Pennsylvania to the mighty tomb that was now New York. New England. On their return through the South despair rode with them and a realization of the stupendous responsibility to the race that might be theirs. They began to discuss it as mile after mile of desolation disappeared behind them.

"Have you tried to think," Ann asked him one day, "what it means if we've been wrong all along, and the rest of the world is just like this?"

He grinned wryly, making an effort to speak lightly. "Of course. It means we're elected Adam and Eve II ... and with no Garden of Eden."

"I'm quite serious, Jim. We've got to begin thinking— as no one has ever had to think before."

He eyed her with assumed incomprehension, reluctant to tackle the problem that was beginning to loom in his own mind. "What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean. It's possible that we're the last people alive."

"There must be others somewhere." He emphasized
the word stubbornly. '

"I hope so." She laid a hand on his arm. "But, Jim, we must begin thinking on the basis of facts we know. We've found no one. It's been almost a year. If the people in Europe or Asia survived, why haven't they sent ships or planes to investigate our silence? Why haven't we been able to pick up foreign broadcasts on battery radios?"

"Maybe their planes did come over," he countered. "Maybe we just weren't in the right place at the right time to see them."

"You don't believe that, and you know I don't believe it, either." Her fingers tightened on his arm. "Jim," she said in a low voice as his eyes left the road for a moment to meet hers, "let's face it. Our time is running out. I've given this more thought than you know. I'll be thirty-nine years olid in the fall."

She fell silent for a while and then suddenly the man saw with terrible clarity what she meant. "That means » . ." he began, then his voice trailed off.

"Four or five years," she finished for him. "Seven or eight at the most."

They drove on in silence for a time, each wrapped in his own thoughts. Mississippi lowland was rolling by. Meridian lay behind them; its bodies, no longer either black or white, had reached equality at last, the equality of bones. Furred and feathered scavengers, insects and decomposition, name's efficient decontamination crew, had completed their work, and once again the air was sweet.

"We're no longer children," she resumed at last. "And we're facing something no one ever faced before. I've learned to love you, Jim. It wasn't hard to do. In fact, I can scarcely see how I could have avoided it under the circumstances. We've spent about eleven months together and it looks as if there's no logical alternative to our living together in the future. Maybe it's time we began to think in terms of that future."

Jim was silent for many minutes. "It's a funny thing, Ann," he said finally. "I can remember reading several science fiction yarns long, long ago. They ended with a man and a girl gazing into the sunset, or maybe the dawn, the last two people on earth, or the only two people on some planet, and they were looking forward brightly to founding a new race. The stories always ended there, I mean, and it was sort of frustrating. I wanted to know what happened after that, and it almost seemed as if the writers never had the courage to tell you."

Ann smiled grimly. "Now you're going to get your answers the hard way."

He resisted the impulse to grin as he went on doggedly, "I mean, here we are alone in the world. After a while we have two or three children. They grow up. Then what?"

She hesitated before answering. "That's a decision we have to make," she said gently, "before we have the two or three children."

He shook his head.

"But suppose we do decide to have them. What happens then? Where are their children coming from? You can't mate brother and sister. Look at the idiots that have been born just because cousins married."

"That's the decision I mentioned. Genetics wasn't my field but I know a little about the subject. You're not altogether right about the idiots. Idiots have been born to cousin matings, I'll grant you, but thousands have also been born to couples who were not even distantly related. Heredity is a matter of genes, passed down from generation to generation, and whether your child is an idiot or not depends most on whether the black gene of idiocy runs in both blood lines. If it runs in yours, and the girl is also your cousin, it will probably be found in hers too. A mating, in that case, would be almost sure to bring out the worst.

"But suppose you took healthy, intelligent parents who were both free of black genes. The chances are their children would be superior to the ones born from the average marriage. And if you bred these superior children there's do reason to suppose the third generation would be a bit less superior. A dominant strain strengthens itself. Surely you remember something of what the farmers, and breeders were doing with animals and crops?'*'

"You almost make it sound all right," Jim admitted. "But how do we know about these Black genes? You and I might be crawling with them."

Ann was forced to smile at his words. "We'll see. When we get to Jackson I want you to find a bookstore or library. I think we can get the information we need, and then we can take inventory."

She put her head on his shoulder.

Jackson, like scores of other cities they had seen, bore desolate black scars of the fifes that had raged in the days that followed¹ the bomb. But the business section, one of the most modern in the South, was, strangely enough, almost intact. While An^ was busily scanning store fronts, Jim slowly piloted their vehicle along the almost deserted main streets.

"There!"-she cried suddenly. "Stop, Jim."

The huge gasoline tanker they had picked up in Birmingham as a solution to the increasing problem of fuel evaporation, ground to a halt and, as Jim set the brake, Ann climbed down from the cab and made for the doorway of a bookstore. When she reappeared thirty minutes later she carried seven or eight volumes under her arm.

They lunched on interminable canned chicken and canned fruit and soon were rumbling off again toward the west, with Ann deeply engrossed in the books. Occasionally, as she skimmed over page after page, she would look up and comment pn some information she encountered.

"How much cjoyOu know about Cleopatra?" she asked, after a long mtervaToi reading.

"Well," Jim smiled hesitantly, "she was a little before my time, but I hear she was a pretty sharp tomato."

"It might interest you to know that the parents of your 'sharp tomato' were brother and sister."

"They were?" There was frank astonishment in Jim's tone.

"They were. And not only that, but their parents were 135

brother and sister. And so on back for six generations."

"My God," Jim said in awe. "How did they get away with it?"

"It wasn't a matter of getting away with it. It was accepted as custom among the Pharaohs. The rulers in ancient Peru felt the same way about it, too, and married their own sisters whenever it was possible. And if you want to go back to Bible days, Abraham married his half-sister, and Moses, his aunt."

Jim digested it slowly. "Sounds immoral to me."

"That's why we've got to talk about it," Ann went on. "We've got to change our whole idea of what's moral and what's immoral. We have to realize that moral standards are arbitrary and change when customs and conditions change. A year ago there were a hundred and sixty million people in this country, and there were laws that said cousins couldn't marry. Now there are two people, and to say that conditions have changed is putting it mildly. As a matter of fact, there's no one left even to issue us a marriage license."

"So we save two bucks."

"You see! You don't seem to have a bit of trouble adjusting to that. It's just another step to what lies ahead for our children."

"Maybe you're right," Jim admitted grudgingly, but he was reluctant to relinquish his deeply embedded feeling.

They drove on toward Shreveport, and Ann resumed her reading. The sun had set and dusk was obscuring the landscape as they entered the outskirts of a small Louisiana town. Jim soon slowed the tanker to a crawl, his eyes peering ahead for the familiar sign. It was a lesson they had learned long ago, in searching for places to spend the night. The bomb had struck Berkeley shortly after midnight; it had been 3 A.M. on the east coast, and 2 A.M. here. The vast majority of Americans east of the Rockies had died in their sleep. Jim and Ann had found by grim experience that there was one place that invariably provided beds free from grisly remains. Furniture stores.

He spotted the sign a few moments later, under the once proud lettering, "J. J. Beauregard & Sons," and Jim pulled to the curb.

That night, while rows of bedsteads and dusty bureaus threw jet shadows on the walls, Ann and Jim sat near their gasoline camp lantern and took the strangest inventory in history.

"It amounts to this," Ann explained. "Are we going to become the Adam and Eve of a new race of human beings, or will we just live out our lives as the last two people on earth, and then let the dogs and the ants take over? I know little of your folks and you know less of mine. If it develops there is a serious genetic fault in our blood lines, it may be far better to let the whole thing drop right here, rather than pass on untold misery to unborn generations."

"Seems to me," Jim put in, "people have been having babies for a good many years, and I can't remember anybody who ever got so worked up over whether they ought to have babies as,.we- are. We'll work out our own problems; let our children handle theirs."

"Jim!" she said sharply. "That's not the point. We've been over this before, and you know it's not our children I'm thinking about. We could have babies just as other people did,^- without ^considering the possibilities. But those other people's children grew up, remember, and then married someone who lived down the street or over in Burbank. Well, there is no Burbank now, and there is no down the street. You can see what I mean. It's the third generation we've got to think of."

"O.K.," Jim acquiesced resignedly, as he fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette. "Let's get on with it."

Ann leaned over and kissed him gently on the cheek. "My poor, long-suffering Adam."

They got on _twith it. Ann opened one of the books to a page she had^gg^eared. the beginning of a long list of the particular genes that science had demonstrated were responsible for most of the hereditary ills of mankind.

"For once," Ann began, "we must be completely honest with ourselves. If either of us is, or has been, affected by any of the conditions listed here we must make a note of it. Our parents and grandparents, too—let's rack our memory of them, and other members of our family trees. Think hard while I call the roll.

"Diabetes."

Their answers were both negative. "Insanity, or feeblemindedness." Again negative.

"Epilepsy. There seems to be some dispute about this one's being hereditary, but let's not skip it."

"Nope," Jim said. "No epilepsy." Ann added her "No" and they went on.

"Deaf-mutism."

Negative.

"Spastic paralysis.'*

Negative.

"Hemophilia."

"No royalty in my blood," Jim grinned. "Strictly peasant."

Ann returned his grin and then continued through the other serious diseases and on into the almost ^terminable array of minor hereditary defects.

It was revealed that Ann had affixed ear lobes. Her father and one grandfather had been partly bald. Jim confessed partial color blindness. His father had been hard of hearing late in life and a brother had astigmatism. It was odd that the single "black" gene common to both their families was one considered relatively rare. Webbed toes. Jim recalled two cases, an aunt and a cousin, who were born with that peculiarity involving the two smallest toes on each foot. Ann's mother had had six-toed feet, the small toes and the super-numerary toes growing as one.

"That's a dominant qualified characteristic," Ann pointed out. "Even though neither of us shows it, it may pop up later on. Do you think," she managed a mock plaintiveness, "that we should risk it? Picture the world five thousand years from now—two billion people. All web-footed." Her laughter held a new note, and Jim, who had not quite shared her tension throughout the inventory, suddenly perceived the strain she had been under.

"Maybe they could develop it," he said, keeping his face stony. "If they could grow webbed arms, they could learn to fly."

Then, as she threw him one brief incredulous glance, 138

he, too, broke down, and their laughter echoed together from the shadow fretted walls.

They pushed rapidly westward ,,riow, their objective clear in mind. Fort Worth, El Paso, Phoenix, across the hot desert miles to Indio, and finally, a full three weeks from that night in J. J. Beauregard's, they limped into the huge sprawling silence that was Los Angeles.

They had seen cows grazing along the San Gabriel River a few miles to the east, and, after two days of rec-onnoitering among the fire-ravaged ruins of the metropolis, they decided to return to that area. There, in a modest but well-built rancho, they set up their home. Water still flowed in the mains, and a super food market stood undamaged on the highway a scant half mile to the north. There was neither gas nor electricity but an enclosed patio provided a barbecue pit for cooking purposes, and within a few days Jim was able to locate and install a gasoline powered home lighting plant. The fuel itself, he knew, fwould be available in almost inexhaustible quantities in the "storage tanks that dotted this region, after more accessible sources had run dry.

Months sped away. New problems of wresting a living from a deserted and non-producing world confronted them almost daily, and it seemed to Jim and Ann that they were eternally faced with so much more to do than there was time for. Many evenings were spent in study. Ann had amassed a comprehensive library of technical and reference books, and, at her urging, Jim joined her in adding to their store of knowledge. One of the books they carefully devoured was a big leather-bound volume on "Obstetrics."

^'Doctor" EJiib-£lay-> delivered their first baby the following summer. A girl. They named her Esther after Ann's mother, and Ann pretended disappointment at finding the baby didn't have six toes. Jim, on his part, stroked his chin thoughtfully after the ordeal was over, and seemed deliberating a momentously grave decision.

"Do you suppose," he mused, eyeing the husky infant speculatively, "they really do bounce?"

When Charlotte, their second child, was born seventeen months later, it was a different story. Complications arose which taxed Jim's knowledge and resources to their limit. For weeks Ann lay on the verge of death, and Jim, desperately drawing on the almost super-human stamina with which he suddenly seemed endowed, grappled night and day with the malignant forces that threatened to break up humanity's tiny nucleus. He pored over the medical books, caught his sleep in brief naps, and never left the room containing Ann and the two babies, except for the briefest of intervals. He had tethered one of their cows in a grassy patch near the patio, insuring a supply of fresh milk, and other necessities were close at hand.

Finally, late in January, Jim, haggard now, knew the gruelling battle had been won. Ann's fever abated suddenly one morning and she awoke with the ghost of the old sparkle in her eye. She reached for his hand and pulled him closer.

"Bend down, you old quack," she smiled wanly. "Put that thermometer away. I want to be kissed."

During Ann's convalescence and in the months that followed, some measure of their old spirit returned. They were able to joke once more about their tasks and minor setbacks. But somehow there was a difference now. Underneath, both knew, there was an indefinable feeling of unsureness, of sham, about their jocularity. From month to month they postponed, nor even mentioned, the discussion that both knew would be inevitable. The foetus of fear had begun to grow in both their hearts.

Charlotte was two years old when it happened. Ann, almost from that first day of horror nearly five years before, had realized the importance of keeping some record of time, and she had scrupulously marked off the days in her Utile notebook throughout all the months they had been together. During her period of delirium, of course, the task had fallen to Jim, and although secretly he could never be certain he hadn't missed a day here and there, to Ann he maintained steadfastly that he hadn't been remiss.

Thus it was, when Ann entered the room bearing a huge frosty cake and announced, "Gather 'round, everybody.

Charlotte is two!" Jim smiled slyly to himself and added for no ears but his own: "Give or take a day."

That evening, after the children were asleep, Ann stood
by the bay window and watched _e torrential winter rain
turn the slope in front of the rancho into a pattern of
rushing yellow rivers. '

"Our time is running out, Jim," she said quietly as he joined her at the window. "The roads are breaking up with every rain." As his eyes followed hers out into the darkness and storm he sensed the solemn allegory her tone conveyed. The world of man was crumbling, the ties that bound them to civilization were fraying and snapping one by one, and their hopes, their faith in the Plan, these, too, had strangely dimmed.

"It's fear, Jim!" she said suddenly and fiercely. "Fear. We've got to drive it out." She turned to him, a grim light of decision in her eyes. "We haven't talked of it. We've been thinking, of ourselves. Oh, Lord, the time we've wasted. We must hurry, Jim. We've got to try again." She buried her face on his chest, but he was able to hear the whisper that followed. "We've got to have a boy, dear God. We've got to have a boy."

His arms encircled her, and they stood like that for seemingly interminable minutes as the rain beat .against the glass and fled in defeated rivulets outside the sill.

"You mean more to me, darling," Jim said at last, "then posterity does. I almost lost you once, remember?"

"I know," she murmured. Then she looked up and met his eyes. "It's been my fault. It seemed so much easier to put things off and forget. But we're forgetting, too, there's Esther and Charlotte now. What of them? You see, we have to go on. Lhope we're not too late."

Jim knew iteras', useless to try to sway her. . . .

Their trurd cnfld was born the week before Thanksgiving, five and one-half years after the bomb. Esther, now a precocious girl of almost four, proved of much more help than Jim had dreamed possible. She performed quickly the little chores and errands that had distracted the "Doctor" when Charlotte had been born; in addition she attended to the needs of her younger sister almost singlehandedly.

But at best it was another nightmare. Ann fought for life with a dogged tenacity, and Jim, his forebodings crystalized, knew that this would be their last. At dawn on the third day a thin wail heralded the arrival of the new world's fifth bit of humanity. Ann, in a brief period of consciousness, sought Jim's eyes, appealing for an answer to the mute question burning deep in her own. He smiled reassuringly, but the message she read there was not to be concealed by his dissembling.

The baby was another girl.

Ann survived, but she needed surgery that Jim had not the skill to perform. This time she did not recover. The next five years of her life were spent almost entirely in bed and in a wheelchair Jim had secured for her. The children were growing up, however, and she took over the teaching duties of the household, as if her handicap were of no import. The bedroom was converted into a part-time schoolroom, complete with blackboard, globe, and shelves of books, and five days a week Esther and Charlotte bent studiously over their pursuit of the three R's.

"Books," Ann said to Jim one day, "will be the key to the future, as they are to the past. Adam and Eve had to start from scratch; we have the knowledge of the ages at our fingertips. Reading must not die."

"But—" Jim started to object before he was able to check the protesting voice of his subconscious.

Ann smiled cunningly. "I know what you were going to say, Jim. But you're wrong. I haven't given up," She would say no more, and it was a puzzled man who left the room shortly after. It was his first inkling of the destiny that lay ahead.

Ann died on a day in March that was so beautiful it seemed that Nature had deliberately marshaled all her most priceless handiwork to provide a farewell of superlative loveliness to the departing. After several days of fog and rain the skies had cleared suddenly and only a few fantastically white clouds drifted across a sky of sheerest cobalt. Velvety breezes danced out of the southland, laden with the sweet scents of new spring blooms, and grass and trees vied with each other to see which could provide the more sparkling green background for
the vermillion and gold, the crimson, azure and purple of
the riotous flowers. ^

Esther was nine. Intelligent, tails "and performing the work of an adult, she was developed far beyond her years. She had entered that morning with her mother's breakfast, when the latter gestured Weakly toward a table.

"Put the tray down, dear," she said. "Go and bring your sisters."

Charlotte and Little Ann, now five, pushed puzzled faces into the room a moment later. It was too early for their customary classes, and Esther, a few steps behind them, had given no reason for the summons.

"Come closer, girls," the mother beckoned. "I have much to say, and you must listen and remember." She closed her eyes a, moment and then began, while the children stood in a silent semi-circle by the bed. She talked in a low voice^for a long time, principally to Esther, halting now and again to touch her tongue to her drying lips. Little Ann was whimpering when she had finished, but the two older girls remained dry-eyed, stoically fighting against the impending reality.

"Leave me now for a little while," Ann requested. "I must speak to Jim."

Brown visaged, lean as ever, his sandy hair now sprinkled with gray, Jim strode in a few minutes later, closing the door softly behind him. He crossed to the bed and, with much concern in his eyes, reached for her left wrist.

Ann smiled wanly. "Forget the pulse, Jim. We may not have much time."

He started up ,as if to turn toward the medicine shelf, but^she stoppejUiun quickly.

"No, please! There is something much more important now."

He let her pull him down beside her on the bed. Their eyes met for a long moment. Then she spoke in a voice that seemed to come a long way from within and beyond her frail body.

"I've failed you, Jim. We'll never have the son we planned . . . the son the world depended on. I think God must have arranged it this way ... to see if the race of man had the courage to go on in spite of the failure of the Plan. I've been reading the Bible again, Jim . . . It's still the world's most comforting book. Do you remember in Genesis? 'And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.' Cain found a wife there, and they begat and begat. It's different now. Have you wondered where our girls will go to find husbands this time? Have you?"

Uncomfortable at the trend of her words, Jim sat staring at the tendons on the back of his fist as he tensed and relaxed them at nervous intervals.

"I've failed you, Jim," she repeated. "You must give me your oath you will not fail me. The Plan needs revision."

Incredulous suspicion stirring deep within him, he raised his eyes questioningly to hers.

"We have no land of Nod, Jim. But there will still be a man . . . and, in a few years, a woman . . . three women. You see, God did not intend that our race should perish from ... the earth."

Ann's voice faltered and a strange grayness began to
pervade her face. In sudden fear the man bent closer.
"Hold me," she said, barely above a whisper. "It's getting
... so cold." As Jim's arms tightened about her, the
whisper seemed to recede farther and farther into the
misty recesses of some fathomless corridor. "Tighter . . ."
it seemed to plead from a vast distance. "Tighter . . .
tighter____ "

Then it was gone, and the graying man could only lie there, choked with a numbing grief that knew no outlet.

Ann was buried in the shadow of the rose arbor behind the house. They held a simple ceremony, with Jim reading from a worn Bible held in taut fingers while the girls stood in a silent row, their arms cradling their flowered tributes. Later Jim laboriously tore up a path of Arizona flagstones to erect a cairn over her grave.

The months sped by. Packs of wild dogs ranging the countryside year by year were growing more ravenous and menacing. The two older girls had become proficient with rifles, and scores of the marauders were slain, but
more and more Jim realized they would soon have to move
from the unprotected rancho. _t **,

He dimly remembered some of the-¹ homes he had seen in the Hollywood Hills, and one bright morning he set out on an exploring expedition to the west. The place he chose was perfectly preserved and secure as a fortress. It was perched on a shelf halfway up the hillside, sheer mountain at its back and concrete retaining walls dropping away a full twenty feet to the roadway below. Steps leading to the shelf were protected by a heavy grilled gate.

Automobile batteries had long ago become useless, but Jim had rigged a booster to get the vehicles operating. On trips away from the rancho he either left the motor running continuously or simply parked on a sharp grade. A truck was commandeered and prepared for use, and the move begun. The roads, however, had fallen into a hopeless state of disrepair, and the many trips across town were painfully slow. The livestock was also transported, and Jim installed the animals on other shelves below the house. In all, the operation consumed five days.

Little Ann was thirteen now, tow-headed, and gangly, but a full adult in the measure of her duties. Cooking was her special love, and for more than a year she had been in full charge of the kitchen and household duties. Charlotte, always more frail than her sisters, was the student. Learning had become a mania with her, and her mother's fine library provided drink for her avidly thirsting brain. At fifteen, she was journal-keeper and barber for the family, musician, dentist and veterinarian, doctor and nurse.,

Esther, sixteen now, was fast developing into womanhood. Sun-bronzed and tall, with the wide-spaced gray eyes of her father and the firm chin and rich dark hair of her mother, Esther gave promise of the striking beauty that was soon to be hers. She made little effort, however, to enhance that beauty, preferring, instead, to spend her days at Jim's side, aiding him in the heavier out-door tasks of gardening, building, repairing, hauling, hunting and caring for the animals and fowl, tasks so necessary for their existence.

As season continued to merge imperceptibly into season in Southern California's characteristic way, Jim fell to seeking solitude under the stars after the long day's labors were completed. For hour after hour he would keep his vigil on the edge of the parapet, his eyes roving the shadowy reaches of the valley while the constellations above him wheeled in slow measured majesty toward the west. "Watching for lights," he had explained, but somehow he knew there would be no lights. His real search lay deep within his own heart, and the parapet was his Gethsemane. It was there he must find an answer, some measure of peace for his troubled soul.

Months passed, and the spirit of Ann began to live for him during those hours of his strange loneliness. At times she seemed so near he felt he could hear her comforting whisper, or if he moved his hand he could touch her warm, smooth skin. Thus, it seemed, that drowsy night in August, that Ann's arms tenderly embraced him and her lips stealthily crept across his cheek until they met and clung to his own. His eyes were closed and somewhere far within him rang a voice in wild, clear song: "Ann . . . Ann... ." The kiss ended, but the dream lingered. The girl in his arms was still Ann, but the quiet voice that began speaking was suddenly Esther's.

"I'll be eighteen tomorrow, Jim. I read mother's last letter tonight."

"Letter?" Jim repeated numbly, struggling to distinguish reality from dream.

"You never knew, did you? She wrote a long series of them, and every birthday, I've opened one, just as I promised her. Tonight was the last. She taught me so much, Jim . . . how to be a woman, and many things I could never tell you. Above all, she was afraid you would forget a promise. .. ."

In the silence that followed, Jim marveled anew at the indomitable purpose of the woman, at her incredible foresight, even in little things. The letters. And his name. From the very beginning she had taught the girls to address him as Jim. Never dad or father. It had seemed a trifling eccentricity then . . . now the subtle significance emerged in startling clarity.

Esther kissed him lightly once mqre, and then snuggled close to his breast.

"You old faker," she murmuíted. "I believe you really would have fogotten. I'm going to see that you don't."

Far to the west, in the direction of Pacific Palisades, another wild dog sent his mournful howl wafting toward the stars. The bearded man, startled from his revery, turned his head once more to regard the shadowed house behind him. Eucalyptus and Jacaranda leaves were quivering and clicking in the west wind, and the man realized suddenly how chill the night had become.

Then abruptly his awareness of all those things vanished.

His eyes had caught, the quick thin panel of light from the house that told him a door had been opened and swiftly shut. He leaped up expectanüy as a white-frocked figuré flew across the lawn.

"Jim, Jim, it's over!" Little Ann gasped as she raced into his arms and hugged him with childish intensity. "Charlotte says you can stop your pacing now, and come in."

"But how is—?" he began, as the teen-ager disengaged herself suddenly and began tugging at his arm.

"Come on," she urged. "Everybody's peachy-dory. Hurry!"

"But tell me—" he persisted, trying to resist her bubbling exuberance, "is it... is it a—?"

"Oh!" she trilled, as if surprised at his stupidity. " 'Course, it's a' boy. What'd you think?"

Jim let hftfitelf be led toward the house. A dreamlike current engulfed him and he seemed being borne on the crest of a great river, outward and upward toward the dim reaches of eternity. The parapet and the Valley of Shapes, the sea winds and the crying of wild dogs, the dark vigils and the restless turbulence in his soul, to their last vestige seemed retreating into a distant and forgotten past.

,.. The race of man would live again.

Though George Frederic is new to the science fiction field, his writing has been appearing in the men's magazines, under a dozen different pen-names, for the last five years. Some of his stories, including the following, have been reprinted several times. This little horror story has never been available to the sci-fi reader until now.

If the cold war continues into a hot one, and if a man wanted to keep a little island of culture, it is highly possible that he might be a man like Revis Montrey, a man with...

and bis face was good-natured. "Hey, Brian, how about it? No hard feelings, huh?"

Brian turned away. He said frigidly, "Why should there be hard feelings? It's my duty to enforce regulations until the Homeward is down."

"God damn—" Mellen muttered under his breath at Brian's rigid back, and even Ellie looked troubled. Then Mellen made a useless movement and started toward the front of the ship.

"Come on. I expect Caldwell will be wanting us," he said tightly, and propelled himself in quick, wrathful jerks toward the forward lounge.

The technique of braking into atmosphere had been perfected a hundred years before the old Starward rose from Earth to aim at Centaurus. However, it was new to the Homeward's crew, and the tediousness of the process set nerves to jittering. Only Brian, strapped into one of the skyhooks in the lounge, was really calm, and Ellie, in the cradle next to his, absorbed a little of bis calm confidence; Brian Kearns had been trained aboard the Homeward for twelve years before the trip began.

It had taken four generations for the stranded crew of the original ship, the Starward, to repair the hyperdrives smashed in landing, and to wrest from the soil of Q Centauri fourth planet—Terra Two, they called it-enough cerberum to take a pilot crew back to earth with news of their success. A hundred and thirty years, subjective time. Taking account of the time-lags engendered by their hyperspeeds, it was entirely possible that four or five hundred years had elapsed, objectively, on the planet their ancestors had left. Ellie, looking across at Brian's calm face, at his mouth that persisted in grinning with some personal, individual elation when he thought himself unwatched, wondered if he felt no regrets at all. Ellie struggled with a moment of blinding homesickness, remembering their last view of the little dark planet spinning around the red star. They had left a growing colony of 400 souls, a world to which they could never return, for, after five years of subjective time in hyperspeeds, it was entirely possible that everyone they had known on Terra Two had already lived out a full lifetime.

But Brian's thoughts were moving forward, not backward, and he could not keep them to himself.

"I suppose by now they've discovered a better method for braking into atmosphere," he mused. "If anybody's watching us, down there, we probably look like living fossils—and I suppose we are. In their world, we'll be so obsolete that we'll feel like stone-age man!"

"Oh, I don't know," Ellie protested. "People don't change—"

"But civilizations do," Brian insisted. "There was less than a hundred years between the first rocket to Luna and the launching of the Starward. That's how fast a scientific civilization can move."

"But how can you be sure they've moved along those lines?" Ellie wanted'to know.

"Have you ever heard of time-binding?" he asked derisively.' "When each generation accumulates the knowledge of the one before it, progress is a perfectly cumulative, straightforward thing. When the Starward left—"

"Brian—" she began, but he rushed on: "I grant you that man progressed at random for thousands of years, but when he acquired the scientific method, it was less than a hundred years from jet plane to rocketship. A race which had interstellar travel could progress in only one direction. If we wanted to take the time, we could sit down with an electronic calculator and add it all up, and predict exactly what we'd find down there."

"It seems," Ellie said slowly, "That you're leaving out the human element. The crew of the Starward were all scientists, hand-picked for compatibility, and the Terra Two colony is probably the nearest thing to a homogeneous society that ever existed. You can't make that kind of predictions for a normally populated planet."

"The human element—"

"Will you two quit it?" shouted Langdon Forbes angrily from his skyhook. "I'm trying not to get spacesick, but Kearns sounding off about progress is about all I can take! Does he have to pick a time when we're strapped in, and can't get away?"

Brian grumbled something unintelligible and lapsed into morose silence. Ellie reached dragging fingers, newly clumsy, toward him, but he pushed the hand away.

A dismal wailing came from beneath Eliie's skyhook; Einstein was getting reacquainted with gravity, and didn't like it. Ellie scooped up the miserable little animal and held it cuddled tight against her straps. It was silent in the lounge; the steady, low vibration of the atomic drives was a sound already so deeply embedded in their consciousness that they did not think of it as sound at all. There was still no feeling of motion, but there was an unpleasant, dragging sensation as the enormous starship made its wide braking circles, first grazing the atmosphere for a second or two, as it swung elliptically, like a crazy comet; then entering atmosphere for a few seconds, then a full minute, then a few minutes—coming "down" in slow, careful spirals.

"I hope they've found some way to put artificial gravity in spaceships," Judy Keretsky moaned, halHaughing, from the skyhook where she swung, upside down, from what was now the ceiling of the lounge. Her long, curly hair fell down over her head in a thick curtain; she alone of starship's crew did not keep her hair clipped functionally short. She batted futilely at the waving curls as she walled, "Oh, my poor head, I'm getting di-i-izzy up here!"

"You're getting dizzy! What about this poor catl" Ellie jibed.

"Say, whose idea was it to bring that animal along, anyhow?" someone demanded.

"Very valuable contribution to science," Judy burlesqued. "Why didn't you bring a pair of them, Ellie!"

"Brian wouldn't let her," Marcia van Schreeven jeered, with an undertone of bitterness.

Ellie patted Einstein's darkish fur defensively, reminding Marcia in her peaceful voice: "Einstein is one of the third gender. When conditions are right, he'll reproduce in the first and second."

"Lucky animal," Brian said half-seriously, and Ellie glanced at him with unusual shyness as she murmured, "Well, Einstein will be unique on Earth, anyhow!"

"You'll see things much weirder than Einstein," Brian said offhandedly. "We've only been-bn one planet, and by now, Earth has probably colonized all the nearer stars. The people of Earth will be cosmopolitan in the largest sense—"

"Speaking of Earth," Langdon forcibly headed him off before he could hold forth again, "where on the planet are we going to set this thing down?"

"We won't know that till we contact the surface," Judy said irritably, batting her hair back. "We have the map the Firsts gave us, but it's unthinkable that the old spaceport at Denver would still be in use, and if it is, it would probably be so,changed that we wouldn't know how to land—and too crowded for an IS ship this size."

"You've been listening to Brian," Langdon grinned. "According to him,- ifs a wonder we haven't already bumped into the local rocket for the second galaxy!"

Brian ignored the confusion of technical terms and answered seriously "That's why I suggested landing on Mars. There are enough desert areas, on Mars where we could have landed without any danger of damaging urbanized sections. I doubt if the population there is quite so centralized—"

"Well, why didn't we?" Marcia queried sharply, and Langdon, frowning, twisted his head to her. "We tried to radio them from space," he answered, "but they evidently didn't pick up our signals. So Caldwell and Mellen decided to bring us in to Earth instead of wasting time braking in at Mars and maybe having to pick up again. We haven't enough fuel for more than one landing and pick-up."

"We could certainly have refueled at Mars—" Brian began, but was interrupted by an apologetic cough from the loudspeaker in the centre of the lounge.

"Hey, Kearns," it said in a puzzled rasp. "Brian Kcarns, come on up forward, will you? Kearns, please come up to the front control room, if you can."

Brian scowled, and started painfully unbuckling the straps on his skyhook. "Now what does Mellen want—" he wondered aloud.

"What's the matter?" Judy squeaked, "Are we in trouble?"

"Oh, hush!" Ellie commanded. "If we are, we'll be told!" She watched, with vague disquiet, as Brian crawled over the side of his skyhook and abruptly tumbled two feet, not very hard, to the floor. "Weight's on the axis now," he announced wryly to no one in particular. "Good thing 1 wasn't up where Judy is, or I'd have broken my neck! Somebody will have to lift her down—"

Judy squeaked again, but Ellie snapped at her: "Just stay where you are until we find out what's going on!" and watched, disturbed, as Brian crawled clumsily on hands and knees across the wall which lay along the central axis of the starship and therefore "down." He pushed at the refractory sphincter lock—it worked perfectly only in free fall—and forced his head and shoulders through into the forward control room.

Tom Mellen, his short hair brisding upright around his head, twisted around as Brian wriggled his shoulders through. "We've tried to raise them by FM, AM and wavicle," he said, scowling, "but they don't answer. Not a sign of a signal. What do you think of that, Brian?"

Brian looked deliberately around the cabin. Paula Sandoval, strapped in before the navigation instruments, hunched her bare, tanned shoulders and refused to meet his eyes; Caldwell, the gray-haired veteran who had repaired the atomic rockets, grinned truculently. Mellen's face was puzzled and defensive.

"I said it off Mars," Brian told them, "and I say it again; we're just wasting time trying to raise them with any communication devices aboard. By now, they're probably using something so far beyond radio or wavicles that they can't pick us up. Their equipment would be too fine for our clumsy primitive devices to—"

"Clumsy primitive—" Caldwell broke off, visibly summoning patience, and Mellen interrupted fiercely. "Look, Keams, there are just so many ways of transmitting electric impulses."

"The first spacemen said that all fuels had to be chemical or atomic, didn't they?" Brian snapped. "And we came on cerberum. The world didn't end when the Star-ward left! You've got to realize that_vwe've»i)een stranded in what amounts to a time-warp for five hundred years or so, and we're hopelessly obsolete!'}

"Maybe so . . ." Mellen said slowly, and waggled the switch again. Brian irritably flipped it shut.

"Why keep fussing with it, Tom? If they'd picked up our signals, they'd have answered by now. Have you seen any rockets entering or leaving?"

"Nothing larger than twelve centimeters since we entered the orbit," Mellen told him.

Brian frowned. "Where are we, Paula?"

The girl gave him a venomous look, but she glanced at her instruments and replied, "Orbiting at forty miles, velocity five pointtSBCfh.p.s."

Kearns glanced at Caldwell. "You're the captain."

"In a limited sense;* Caldwell said slowly, and returned his steady gaze. "That's why I wanted you up here. There are two things we can do. We can go down under the cloud layer and maybe risk getting shot at—to find a place to set down, or else go on a permanent orbit, and send somebody down in the pickup."

"The pickup," Brian decided immediately. "Can you imagine trying to land a ship this size without instructions from outside? For all we know, there may be laws about landing spaceships. The pickup can set down in a few square yards. Whoever goes down can locate a spaceport big enough to handle the Homeward and see about getting the necessary permissions."

"You're overlooking one thing." Mellen forced the words out. "Suppose they haven't any spaceports!"

"They'd ha^tamto have spaceports, Tom," Caldwell protested, "even for interplanetary ships." And Brian added, "It's impossible that we'd have been the only interstellar ship—"

"That isn't what I mean," Mellen protested. "Surely one of the planets, Mars or Earth, would have picked up our signals. Someone must use radio for something, even if it's purely local. That is, if there's anyone down there at alll"

Brian snorted laughter. "You mean some kind of end-of-the-world disaster?" he asked, elaborately sarcastic, but Mellen took him seriously. "Something like that."

"There's one way we can find out," Caldwell interrupted, "Do you want to take the pickup down, Brian? We won't be using the IS drives again—there's nothing more you can do aboard."

"I'll go," Brian said shortly, but he could barely conceal his eagerness, and even forgot his animosity toward Mellen for a minute. "Shall I take Tom to handle the radio?"

Caldwell frowned, and answered half practically and half tactfully, "I'll need Tom, and Paula too, to bring the ship down when we're ready. Langdon can handle the radio in the pickup. And take a couple of others too; Mellen may or may not be right, but I don't think any crew members ought to go down alone until we know exactly what we'll find down there."

Caldwell's seriousness made little impression on Brian, but he realized that he would need someone to pilot the pickup in any case; his own training had fitted him only to handle the complex interstellar drives. And Langdon should, they decided, keep the radio at his fingertips, to report instantly to the Homeward in case of any unforeseen events.

So it was Ellinor Wade who took the controls of the small jet-driven stratoplane which had been designed for ship-to-surface shuttling, and used during the final stages of repair on the Homeward. She let the small plane sink through the thick clouds, and asked, "Where do we want to set down?"

Langdon bent over the carefully copied map. "Judy's scribbled all over this thing," he complained. "But try North America, midwest. That's where the first rocket ranges were built, and we all speak English, after a fashion."

"Unless the language has changed too much," Brian murmured. Ellie frowned as she brought the swift little jet down, arcing across an unfamiliar land-mass; Brian and Langdon squeezed their hands to their eyes as the clouds thinned, for the sudden blaze of yellow light was like a stab in the eyeballs. Lighting aboard ship, of
course, was keyed to the familiar crimson noon of Terra
Two, under which the crew had lived all tbeir lives. Ellie
squinted over the instrument panel', using an unladylike
word under her breath. %

The ship dived over rolling hills, and Brian let out his breath slowly as the serried ^regular skyline of massive buildings cleaved the horizon, and said in an edgy voice, "I was beginning to wonder if Mellen had been right about those atomic deserts!"

Ellie warned, "From what the Firsts have told us, I don't care to get tangled up in a city airport! Let's find an open space and set down there." She headed northward from the city, and asked, "Have either of you seen anything that looks like transportation? Planes, rockets, anything oh the gfourid?"

"Nothing at all with the naked eye," Langdon frowned, "and nothing moving that beeps the radar. And I've been watching pretty close."

"Funny . . ." Ellie murmured.

From "this height everything was clear, and as they swerved groundward, details became sharply incised in miniature: wide plowed fields, scattered, toy-like houses, clusters of small buildings. There seemed to be animals in the fields. Langdon smiled. "Just like home," he said happily, meaning Terra Two. "Regular rural community, except that everything looks green!"

"That's this ridiculous yellow fight!" Ellie said, absently, and Brian scoffed, "Just like home! Better get set for a shock, Langdon!"

"It might be you that gets the shock," Langdon answered unexpectedly, and peered over Ellie's shoulder at the controls. $ibe grdund's leve} here, Ellie."

The pickup bumped ground and rolled gently; Lang-don's fingers moved delicately on the radio panel, and he made a brief report in staccato speech while Brian unsealed the door. Strange smells wafted into the cabin, and the three crowded together in the entrance, eyes squinted against the stabbing light, strangely reluctant, at the last, to set foot on the unfamiliar soil.

"It's cold. . . ." Ellie shivered in her thin garment.

Langdon looked down, dismayed. "You've set down in somebody's grainfield!" he reproached. Food was still conserved carefully on Terra Two, more from habit than from serious privation; Man's conquest of the new planet was uncertain, and the colony took no chances. The three felt a twinging guilt as they looked down at the blackened spears of grain, and Ellie clutched at Brian's arm. "Someone's coming—" she faltered.

Across the evenly plowed ridges, between rows of ripening wheat, a boy of thirteen walked, steadily and unhurried. He was not very tall, but looked sturdy; his face was deeply tanned under square-cut dark hair, and he was wearing a loose shirt and breeches tucked into low boots, all the same rich deep-brown color. Even Brian was silent as the boy advanced to the very foot of the pickup plane, paused and looked up at it, then glanced up indifferently at the three in the doorway, and began to move around to the tail, toward the smoking jets.

Brian quickly dropped Ellie's hand and scrambled to the ground. "Hey there!" he called, forgetting the prepared speech on his hps. "Better not go around there, it's dangerous—hot!"

The boy desisted at once, turning to gaze at him, and after a moment he said in slurred but perfectly understandable English, "I saw the streak, and hoped that a meteor had fallen." He laughed, turned and began to walk away from them.

Brian looked blankly up at Ellie and Langdon. The man jumped down and gave Ellie a hand as she called after the boy "Please—wait a minute—"

He looked around, politely, and before his indifferent courtesy Brian felt the words melting from his hps. It was Langdon who finally said, in an empty voice, "Where can we—We have a message for the—the Government. Where can we get—transportation—to the City?"

"The City?" The boy stared. "What for? Where did you come from? The—the City?"

Brian quietly assumed command of the situation again. "We are from the first Centaurian expedition, the Starward" he said. "We, or rather our ship, left this planet hundreds of years ago."

"Oh?" The boy smiled in a friendly way, "Well, I suppose you are glad to be back. Over" that hill," he pointed, "you will find a road which goes toward the City." He turned again, this time with a definite air of finality, and started to walk away.

The three travelers stared at one another in blank indignation. Brian finally took a step forward and shouted: "Hey, come back here!"

With an irritated jerk of his head, the boy turned. "Now what do you want?" he demanded.

Ellie said conciliatingly, "This is only the pickup of our ship. We have to—to find someone who can tell us where to bring the spaceship down. As you can see," she gestured toward the,, ruined wheat, "our jets have destroyed a part of the crop here. Our spaceship is much larger, and we don't want-to do any more damage. Perhaps your father—"

The boy's face, puzzled at first, had cleared while she was talking. "My father is not in our village now," he informed them, "but if you will come with me, I will take you to my'grandfather."

"If you could tell us where the nearest spaceport is—" Brian suggested.

The boy frowned. "Spaceport?" he repeated. "Well, maybe my grandfather can help you."

He turned again, and led the way across the field. Langdon and Ellie followed at once; Brian hung back, looking uneasily at the pickup. The boy glanced over bis shoulder. "You need not be anxious about your plane," he, called, laugjimg. "It's too large to be stolen!"

Brian stiffened; the boy's attitude was just derisive enough to put him on the defensive. Then, realizing the futility of anger, he broke into a run to catch up with the others. When he came near them, the boy was saying, a little sulkily, "I thought that I would be fortunate enough to find a fallen meteor! I have never seen a meteorite." Then, making a tardy attempt to remember his manners, he added politely, "Of course, I have never seen a spaceship either—" but it was evident that a spaceship was a very poor substitute.

Elbe's thinly shod feet stumbled on the uneven ground, and all three were glad when they came out on a smoothed road which wound between low flowering trees. There seemed to be no vehicles of any kind for the road was just wide enough to permit the four to walk abreast The boy's walk was rapid, and he kept moving, almost unconsciously, ahead of them, then looking back and deliberately slowing his steps. Once when he had forged ahead, Langdon murmured, "Evidently vehicular traffic has been completely diverted from rural neighborhoods!" and Brian whispered, "This is incredible! Either the boy's half-witted, or else even the children here are so blasS that the first star-expedition doesn't mean anything to them!"

"I wouldn't be too sure," Ellie said slowly. "There's something that we don't understand. Let's not try to figure things out ahead, Brian. Let's just take them as they come."

Muscles virtually unused for nearly five years were aching by the time the narrow road wound into a village of low clustered houses, built of what seemed to be grayish field stone. A profuse display of flowers bloomed in elaborate geometrical patterns around nearly every doorstep, and little groups of children, dressed in smocks of dark yellow or pale reddish-gray, were chasing one another haphazardly on the lawns, shouting something rhythmic and untuneful. Most of the houses had low trel-lised porches, and women in short fight dresses sat in little groups on the porches. The street was not paved, and the women did not appear busy; their low-pitched conversation was a musical hum, and all down the street the three strangers could hear a sound of singing. A man's voice, singing in a low, monotonous rise and fall of notes. It was toward this sound of singing that the boy led them, up the steps of a porch which was not trellised but roofed, and through an open door.

They stepped into a wide, light room. Two walls seemed to open in slatted shutters, giving a view of an evenly patterned garden; on another wall was a large fireplace, where embers flickered quietly, and there was a gleaming kettle of some light, brilliant metal swung on a crane over the embers. It reminded Brian of a picture in one of his oldest history books, and he blinked at the anachronism. The other furniture in the room was unfamiliar, low cushioned seats built against the walls, and a few closed doors on the fourth wall. From an inner room, the singing filled the house: a baritone voice, rich and resonant, rising and falling in slow, unfamiliar harmonic patterns.

The boy called: "Grandpa!"

The singer finished one of the odd phrases; then the song ceased, and. the three strangers heard slow, deliberate steps behind the closed door. It swung back, and a tall old man came-out into the main room.

He looked like the boy. His hair was clipped short, but grew down along his cheeks, although his chin was shaven clean; he wore a shirt and breeches of the same rich brown, and his feet were thrust into slippers of stiched leather. He looked strong and vigorous; his hands, tanned and knotty, were extremely well-kept, though somewhat stained, and he stood very erect, surveying them with great composure, while his deep-set dark eyes studied them from their clipped and tended hair to their rubber-sandaled feet. The composure gradually gave way to a quizzical smile, and he came forward a few steps. His voice was a singer's voice, full and very strong.

"Be welcome, friends. You are home. Destry, who are our guests?" ³*»~ -"

The boy said calmly, "They came down in a spaceship, grandpa, or rather, part of one. That streak wasn't a meteor at all. They said they wanted to go to the City. So I brought them along to you instead."

The man's face did not change by a fraction. Brian had been looking for surprise, or some more tangible emotion, but the man only surveyed them equably.

"Please be seated," he invited graciously. "I am Hard Frobisher, friends, and this is my grandson Destry."

The three sank on one of the cushioned seats, feeling a litde like children in their first learning-period before the Firsts. Only Brian had presence of mind enough to murmur their names.

"Brian Kearns—Ellinor Wade—Langdon Forbes—"

The old man repeated the names, bowing courteously to Ellie, at which the girl could barely conceal her amazement. He inquired, smiling, "Can I be of assistance to you?"

Brian stood up. "The boy didn't tell you, sir, but we're from the first Centaurus expedition—the Starward."

"Oh?" A faint flicker of interest crossed Hard Frobish-er's face. "That was a good long time ago, I am told. Did the Barbarians have some means, then, of prolonging life beyond its appointed limits?"

Brian's patience had already gone a long way beyond its appointed limits, and now, abruptly, it deserted him.

"Look, sir. We're from the first expedition into interstellar space. The first. None of us left Earth on the Starward. We weren't born. Our hyperspeeds, if you know what they are—which I'm beginning to doubt— threw us into a time-lag. There's no need to call us Barbarians, either. The ship's drives were smashed when they landed, and we've been four generations, four generations, getting it in operable condition tQ come back to Earth. None of us has ever been on Earth before. We're strangers here, understand? We have to ask our way around. We asked a civil question. Now if we could kindly have a civil answer—"

Hard Frobisher raised a placating hand. "I am sorry," he said calmly. "I didn't understand. Just what do you want me to do about it?"

Brian made a visible attempt to keep bis temper. "Well, first, we want to get in touch with the authorities. Then I want to find a place where we can bring our spaceship down—"

Frobisher was frowning, and Brian fell silent. "Frankly," the old man said, "I don't know whom you'd contact about a thing like that. There is plenty of open

land to the south, nearer the city, where you might land your ship—"

"Now look—" Brian started, but Langdon touched his arm. So Brian only asked, "If you eould tell us how to get in touch with the Government . . . ?"

"Well," the old man said neutrally, "there are three governors in our village, but they only regulate the school hours, and make.rules about locking houses. I wouldn't want to bother them about something foolish like this. I don't think they'd have much to say about your ... oh yes, spaceship."

That silenced Brian and Langdon completely. Ellie, feeling as if they were being tangled into a giant spider-web, asked desperately, "Could we go to some other, perhaps some larger place?"

Frobisher looked at her, frankly puzzled.

"It's half a day's walk to Carney," he said, "and when you got there, they*w6uid tell you the same thing. You are perfectly welcome to put your spaceship down on our barrens, if you want to."

Brian stiffened belligerently. "Now let's get this straight. There's a city over there. There must be someone there in authority!"

"Oh, the City!" Frobisher's voice held dismissal, "Nobody's lived in any of the cities for years! Why would you want to go there?"

Langdon said, baffled, "Look, Mr. Frobisher. We've come all the way from Centaurus, to bring Earth the news about our expedition. We'd expected to be surprised at what we found—after all, it has been a long time since the Starward left. But are we supposed to understand from this run-afound you're giving us that there's nobody to listen^ftat the' first of the interstellar expeditions doesn't mean anything to anyone?"

"Should it?" asked Frobisher, and his face was even more baffled than Brian's. "I can understand your personal predicament somewhat—after all, you've come a long way, but why? Didn't you like it where you were? There is only one reason why people move from one place to another—and it seems to me that you have overdone it."

The room was silent. Hard Frobisher stood up, looking indecisively at his guests, and Brian half expected him to repeat Destry's move and walk away, uninterested; but he merely went to the fireplace and peered into the kettle.

"Food is prepared," he remarked. "Can I invite you to join us? Good food is ill-seasoned by dissension, and there is no wisdom in an empty belly."

Brian and Langdon just sat and looked dumbly at Frobisher. It was Elbe who said firmly, "Thank you, Mr. Frobisher," and dug an elbow into Brian's ribs, whispering savagely, "Behave yourself!"

The boy Destry came and helped his grandfather bring food from the fireplace and from an inner room; he conducted the strangers to seats around a sort of table. The food was unfamiliar and not altogether pleasant to the strangers, accustomed to the elaborate synthetics of the ship; Brian, altogether out of humor, made almost no effort to conceal his distaste, and Langdon ate listlessly; Hard and Destry ate with the unfeigned appetite of men who spend much time in the open air, and neither spoke much during the meal except to urge food upon their guests. Ellie, finding the curious liquids and semisolids fascinating, if strange, tasted them with an interested professional curiosity, wondering how they were prepared.

It was not very long before Hard Frobisher nodded to Destry, and the boy rose and began taking dishes from the table. Frobisher pushed back his chair and turned to Brian. "We can now discuss your problem, if you wish," he said pleasantly. "Full stomachs make wise decisions." He glanced at Ellie, smiling. "I regret that there is no woman in my house to entertain you while we talk, young lady," he said regretfully, and Ellie dropped her eyes. On the Homeward—as on Terra Two—men and women were equals and neither deferred to the other. Hard's polite deference was new, and his bland assumption that she could have no part in their talk was a somewhat distasteful surprise. Langdon clenched his fists, while Brian seemed about to explode. Ellie summed up the situation at a glance, and swiftly intervened by rising and glancing shyly at Destry. "Can I help you?" she offered diffidently, the boy grinned.

"Sure, come ahead," he told her. "You cafry the dishes and I'll bring the kettle."

Frobisher settled back, taking a leather pouch from his pocket and meticulously stuffing a pipe of carved amber which swiftly revised Langdon's ideas of the present level of civilization. Smoking was a habit on Terra Two as well; only the smell of the tobacco was unfamiliar. Both young men stifled coughs and refused his offer of the sack, taking out their own grayish cigarettes and inhaling the sweetish-sour smoke avidly to shut out the rank stench of the pipe. Somewhere, behind closed doors, they heard a splashing of water and the uncertain falsetto of the boy's voice, mingled with Elbe's merry soprano laughter. Brian scowled and leaned forward, his arms on his knees.

"See here, Mr. Frobisher," he said truculendy. "I know you are trying to be hospitable, but if you don't mind, let's talk business. We have to bring the ship down, and" after that—?' He stopped and stared at the floor, wondering suddenly if he were on some kind of reservation for half-wits. No: the room was tastefully, if simply, furnished; everything was plain, but nothing crude. The wood of the furniture was beautifully stained and polished, and the hand-woven rug on the floor matched the thick draperies at the slatted windows. The house showed comfort, even a moderated luxury, and Frobisher's accents were those of a cultured man. Nor was he merely an eccentric, judging from what Brian had briefly seen of the other houses and the glimpsed people. Destry badnt seemed surprised at the plane— he'd "known wh#Sk-»was/ and yet it hadn't impressed him. No, it wasn't savagery. But it was radically different from what he had expected, and the change bewildered him. He looked up at one of the many pictures which hung about the room, and there, for the first time, sensed a note of eccentricity; they were mostly sketches of birds, very precisely drawn, but the colors were combined in a fashion which only a madman could endure. . . . Then Brian realized that it was this bright, unfamiliar light which made the colors bizarre to him, and simultaneously he became conscious that his eyes were stinging and watering, and that he had a violent headache. He rested his forehead on his clenched hands, closing his eyes.

"It isn't that you aren't welcome here," Frobisher said thoughtfully, pulling at his pipe. "We realize that there is only one reason why you would leave your home planet, and that would, of course, be because you were unhappy there. And so we understand—"

"Of all the stupid, unjustified assumptions—" Brian began furiously, then checked himself. What was happening to his caution? He and Langdon were effectively cut off from the rest of the crew; they couldn't afford to get into trouble. He rubbed his aching eyes.

"Sorry, Mr. Frobisher," he said tiredly. "I didn't mean to be offensive."

"No offense taken," Frobisher assured him. "And certainly none was intended by me. Am I mistaken—"

"We came here for one reason," Langdon informed him. "To advance man's knowledge of the world outside the solar system. In other words, to finish what the Firsts started."

"And, judging by appearances—" Brian's voice was bitter "—we've wasted our time!"

"Yes, I'm afraid you have." Something new in Fro-bisher's voice made both young men look up. "Whether you realize it or not, I am quite aware of your problems, Mr. Kearns. I have read a good deal about the Bar—excuse me, about the past." He tapped his pipe meditatively on a projecting comer of the fireplace. "I suppose it would be impossible for you to return to Centaurus in your lifetimes?"

Brian bit his Up. "In our lifetimes—no, not impossible," he answered, "but in the lifetimes of anyone we had known, assuming that we could get back. Our fuel reserves are not great—" He looked questioning^ at Frobisher.

"Then I don't quite know what to do with you," the old man said, and there was a genuine personal concern in his voice. And that friendly concern was the last thing needed to bring Brian to critical mass. Ignoring the warning pressure of Langdon's hand on his knee, he stood up.

"Look, Frobisher," he said tensely^ "jusf'who in hell gave you the authority to make thi6 decision, anyhow?"

Frobisher's face did not change* by a fraction. "Why, you landed in our field and my grandson brought you here."

"So you're just taking responsibility for the whole matter? Do you rule Earth?"

The man's mouth dropped open. "Do I rule . . . Ha, ha, ha!" Frobisher leaned back in his chair, holding his sides and rocking suddenly with uncontrollable laughter. "Do 1 rule . . ." He collapsed into chuckles again, his mirth literally shaking the floor, arid the large expansive laughter was so infectious' tiiaj-Langdon finally glanced up with a faint, puzzled grin, arid even the worst of Brian's fury began to drain away a^ little. "I'm sorry," Frobisher said weakly at last, and there were tears in his eyes. "But that—that is the funniest thing I've heard since spring sowing! Dq. 1 ... ha, ha, ha, ha! Wait until I tell my son —I'm sorry, Mr. Kearns, I can't help it. Do I rule Earth!" he chuckled, again, "Heavens forbid! I have enough trouble ruling my grandson!" He laughed again, irrepress-ibly. Brian couldn't see what was so funny and said so.

With an effort, Frobisher controlled his laughter and his eyes sobered—but not much—as he looked at Brian. "You did come to me," he pointed out, "and that makes it my responsibility. I'm not a man to evade responsibility or refuse you hospitality, but frankly, I wish you had found somebody else!" A tiny snort of laughter escaped him again, "I can ^ee, you'll make trouble here! But if you don't listen to m^ ^ipu'lLpnly have to find somebody else, and I'm afraid tnti Whoever you found would tell you just about the same thing!" He smiled, and the anxious friendliness in his face took the edge from Brian's anger, although annoyed puzzlement remained.

Frobisher added quietly, "There is no reason that Norten village shouldn't have this problem, as well as any other." He stood up. "I expect the remainder of your ship's crew will be anxious about you. Do I assume correctly that you have a communication device?" At Langdon's exasperated nod, Frobisher twitched a loose coat I from a peg. "Then why not report to them? We can talk further on the way—you don't mind if I come, do you?" "No, not at all," Brian said weakly. "Not at all."

Mindful of Caldwell's words about not getting separated, Brian insisted that Ellie should accompany them back to the pickup. Destry, apparently uninterested, at first refused his grandfather's invitation to join them, then changed his mind. He ran to fetch a warm jacket, but, surprisingly, instead of donning it, he laid it about Elbe's shoulders. "She's cold," he explained briefly to his grandfather, and without waiting for thanks, strode ahead of them, along the road.

The sun was dropping westward, and the light was almost unbearable; Brian's eyes were squinted tight, and Langdon's forehead furrowed in deep-plowed lines; Ellie held one hand across her forehead, and Brian put his arm around her.

"Headache, darling?" he asked tenderly.

She grimaced. "Will we get used to this light, do you think, or are we going to have to put up with this all along?"

Langdon said wryly, "I suppose the Firsts felt like this under Theta Centauri!"

Ellie smiled faintly. "No one spread out a welcome for them."

Frobisher walked ahead of them, with long, swinging steps, and Brian said in a savage undertone, "I still think this whole thing is an elaborate bluff of some sort. Or else we're on a primitive reservation. The whole world can't be like thisl"

"Oh, don't be silly," Ellie said wearily, rubbing her aching eyes. "How could anyone have known that we'd choose to land here?"

Some of the women on the porches called familiarly to Frobisher, and he waved gaily to them in return, but no one paid any attention to the strangers, except for one plump woman, her hair in curly sausages all over her head, who waddled from her steps and toward the road. "I see you have guests, Hard," she called. cheerfully. "If your house is too full, mine is empty!" >

Frobisher faced around, smiling. "Your hospitality may be required," he said. "There are others, and they have come a long way."

The woman looked at Ellie with a sharp female glance, noting her fair cropped hair, the smooth spun-synthetic coverall beneath the boy's jacket, the molded sandals and bare legs. Then she put out a fat warm hand. "Are you planning to settle in our village, my dear?" she asked.

"They haven't decided," Frobisher answered noncom-mittally, but Elbe said with a shy, impulsive friendliness, "I do hope so!" and.squeezed the offered hand.

"Well, I hope so toolbar. It isn't often we have young neighbors," the plump woman replied. "You and your husband" (Ellie blushed *at^vthe forthright archaism) "be sure and call on us, now, if you need anything before you get settled.'*-She smiled and waddled back to her doorway.

Langdon said, low-voiced^ "It's like being on Terra Two, except that everything—everything—"

Brian said, "There must have been some inconceivable disaster! Culturally, they're a thousand years behind the world when the Starward left. Why, even Terra Two is more civilized than they seem to be! Cooking with fire— and these little villages—and the cities empty—"

"Oh, I don't know," Ellie murmured surprisingly. "How do you measure culture? Isn't it possible that they've progressed in ways we don't know anything about? The difference might be in viewpoint."

Brian shook his hetfd stubbornly.

"It's fegression,⁵*fte-protested, but Ellie had no time to answer, for they had come within sight of the pickup, and Frobisher dropped back to walk with them.

"There is your plane," he said. "Do you intend to communicate from here, or will you rejoin your spaceship?"

Brian and Langdon looked at one another. "We haven't thought about it," Langdon said at last, "but—Brian— without a spaceship or at least a radio beaming device, how are they going to land?"

Brian frowned. "I don't know much about rockets," he said at last; "the hyperdrives are my job. How much landing room do they need?"

Langdon said, troubled, "Paula and Caldwell, between them, could land the Homeward in great-grandfather Kearns's biochemistry lab, if they had to, without breaking a test tube. But they'd have to have a fix. If they land blind, they're apt to set down right on the village." He paused, and clarified, "That is, if they just aim at our general direction from what we transmit here."

"In that case," Brian suggested, "we'd better take up the pickup and rejoin the ship—and hunt up a good big desert to land blind."

"Rejoining the ship would be quite a problem in this light," Ellie said, troubled. "It's going to be dark in less than an hour, I'd say—and I have a feeling that we're going to find ourselves completely night-blind."

Frobisher had considerately withdrawn while they were talking, and Brian snapped, "What's the matter with your brain, Ellie? You can go around to sunward, and match velocities with the Homeward there!"

"But then we might not find this place again," Langdon said surprisingly, and Ellie added, "If we go hurtling all around the planet, who knows if we'd find this again?"

"For the love of—who cares!"

"I do," said Langdon firmly. "According to Frobisher, conditions are pretty much the same everywhere, and— I kind of like that old guy, Brian. I like it here. I'd like to land here. Maybe settle down here."

Brian stared. "Are you crazy?"

Langdon said, "Not at all. If we want to look around after the Homeward is down, fine—we have the pickup, we can do all the exploring we want to. We've plenty of fuel for the pickup. We're down, let's stay down."

Brian's face lost a litde of its self-confidence; it was the first time that any of the crew had ever questioned his judgment, although many had resented his methods. He shrugged in a sudden futile misery. "I'm outvoted! And anyhow I resigned command when the atomics went on! Settle it with Caldwell by radio!" He lurched away from them and around toward the other side of the pickup. He heard the staccato bark of the radio inside, but paid no
attention until he suddenly became conscious of Elbe,
close beside him. + -

She raised her face, with an affectionate smile. Brian, even distracted by a thousand irritated thoughts, found time to wonder at the new mystery/of her fair hair in the golden sun: the red was dimmed dut, here, and the short curls seemed a pure, delicate silver; she was very white and fragile in this new light, and Brian reached impulsively to pull her close. She responded eagerly, her arms going around him and her face lifted with a simplicity that he had not quite expected.

"Journey's end," she said gently. "We've waited a long time for this, Brian. «ven if that electronic calculator was off-beam about what- we'^ find down here. Kiss me, you idiot."

The strength in his anrjis,. was astonishing, and she gave a little cry. "Hey, I'm not-used to weighing so much, take it easy—" she protested, laughing and the laughter trailed away as he^bent his head dpwn to hers. She was conscious of the sun in her eyes, of the physical fatigue from unaccustomed exercise, and the dragging feel of too much gravity—Terra Two was a small, light world. There was a crushing urgency in Brian's arms, and he strained her desperately close for a frantic minute, then abrupdy pushed her away, his voice roughened.

"Where did Frobisher go? Damn it, Ellie, I need a clear head right now! The way it looks, we'll have the rest of our lives for that kind of thing!"

Hurt, but sensing the plea for help that begged her from behind the facade of his. taut control, Ellie swallowed the pain of jthe personaTrejection, and forced herself to think beyond the inuneoflR^mftment. "He -and Destry went to see how much of the grain had been ruined—"

"Hell, we can pay for the grain. There they come now—" Brian kicked out at a stalk of wheat, a curiously futile movement, and said in an odd, quenched voice, looking at his foot, "It's going to take months for us to get back in shape, after so long in free fall. We're coordinated all wrong for such much gravity. Notice the way Frobisher walks? Like he owned the world—" Resentment and envy mingled in his voice, and he stopped, then finished in a surprised tone, "—or as much of it as he wants!"

He said abruptly as the grandfather and grandson joined them, "Mr. Frobisher, we'll be glad to pay for what wheat we ruined."

"I would not have mentioned it," Frobisher said, and for the first time there was something like respect in his voice, "but it shows a good spirit that you have mentioned it. I have abundance, and you will have much to do after your crew lands. But if you insist upon payment, you can contribute task-work next season, after you are settled."

Brian was puzzled, but decided not to press the point. Langdon rejoined them, and he asked, "What did Caldwell say?"

"He'll try it, if we'll fix up some kind of radio beam," Langdon responded. "Where do you want us to land, Mr. Frobisher?"

Hard Frobisher began to draw a sketch-map with a long stick in the dirt. "Over that rise—"

"We'll move the pickup over there," Ellie decided, then abruptly proffered the invitation, "Ride over there with us?"

Hard Frobisher looked speculatively at the plane, then toward the horizon. "Oh, it isn't a long walk," he said, but Destry said eagerly, "I believe I'd like it, grandpa."

The old man smiled deprecatingly. "The young are enthusiastic, Miss Wade," he said, almost in apology, "but —very well."

Brian logged another point of bewilderment. Could any educated humans be so trusting? Even on Terra Two, a well-united colony, there was a certain individual wariness, and strangers—how did Frobisher and Destry know they wouldn't be kidnaped?

It was an incredible relief to get back inside the pickup and switch on the familiar crimson light. Destry expressed mild surprise at the lighting, but Frobisher asked no questions and did not seem impressed when the pickup rose straight upward and circled before relanding at the edge of the large barren tract where they were to bring the Homeward down. At only one point in the whole maneuver did Frobisher show the slightest surprise, and that was when Ellie took the controls; he glanced at Brian, then at Langdon, and then, in frank amazement, at the small slim girl at the controls; but he/made, no comment.

They landed, and Langdon touched the radio. Brian took it from his hand. "Hello? Hellqjhe Homeward? Kearns talking. That you, Tom?"

Tom Mellen's husky voice, very far away, asked thinly, "Was I right about no spaceports?"

"You were." Brian did not elaborate.

"We've got the direction of your beam. But Paula says if we follow it in, we'll land straight on the pickup. And if we don't, how are we going to hit the spot you've picked out for us?" Tom sounded puzzled. "In the last few seconds of braking, thjs hulk isn't very easy to steer."

"Hell!" Brian swbfe^'Hold on a minute!" He explained the situation briefly to Langdon. "I told you so!"

Langdon said grimly£<*There's only one way to handle it. Take the fuel out of the pickup—impact would blow it up—move it out where we want them to land, and let them land on it. The pickup's expendable. The crew isn't. They'd land hard, but the crew will be in skyhooks, and Caldwell in a crash cockpit. Nobody'll be hurt."

"We're going to need the pickup later," Brian argued stubbornly.

"Well, have you a better idea?" Langdon asked. "If they follow the beam in part way, and try to swerve in the last few seconds, they're apt to miscalculate by a degree or two, and burn up the village."

"I still think we ought to hunt up a good-sized desert," Brian insisted. ^

Destry interruntedLJuddenly, in a tone of disgust, "Say, when you want akingrisher to dive, "you throw a hunk of bread where you want him to dive—you don't stand and hold it! If your ratio—what is it—beam comes from that," he gestured at the transmitter, "why not just rip that thing out of the plane, fix it to send out a steady signal, and take it out where you want your spaceship to land? It won't hurt the spaceship to land on anything that small, will it?"

Brian stared at the boy in amazement for a minute, and Langdon's mouth dropped open.

"Destry," Ellie said after a brief silence, "you have the makings of a scientist."

"Look," the boy said uncomfortably. "The idea may not be much good, but why insult me?"

"It is good," Langdon interrupted. "I don't know why I didn't think of it myself, except that I'm half-witted in this light! Brian, that's it. Ellie, while I send word to Mellen—before I rip this out—get under the seat and find the radio kit; I may have to resolder a few wires. Looks like we'll be in the dark by the time we finish, too; better get out the small lamps. Come on, get busy—" He nipped the switch open. "Homeward? Forbes speaking. Tom? Listen, in about twenty minutes we'll have a fix set up—"

Brian and Ellie were struggling to lift the heavy seat; the unaccustomed gravity made it almost impossible to budge. Destry caught one end and heaved it up easily, and Ellie and Brian bent over the equipment stored there. The girl murmured in Brian's ear, "There goes your theory about regression! That kid knew what he was talking about."

Brian snorted. "And used an analogy from natural history! It was obvious enough, knowing the purpose of the radio. If either Langdon or I had been dunking, we'd have hit on it."

Ellie did not answer; there seemed no use in making Brian angry again. She went and stood watching Langdon working swiftly and expertly to dismantle and readjust the radio set to emit a self-contained, steady signal. He had to switch on the lights in the pickup before he finished, and before the impromptu homing device was completed, the sun had gone down. As they stood in the doorway of the pickup, Langdon scowled.

"I can't see my hand before my eyes!" he protested, and took one of the small red handlamps Elbe handed him. He looked at it disgustedly. "I can set the signal up with this, yes—but I don't know the lay of the land!" He gestured to the vast empty tract of barren land, and added, "I'll get lost there, or set it up on a side hill!"

Destry volunteered: "I know this place like my own hand—I'll come along and find a flat space."

"Need any help?" Brian offered, but Langlfon shook his head. "No thanks. No sense in both' of us getting tangled up in this murk." He picked up the homing device and, with Destry, moved away across.the field which, to Brian and Ellie, was inky-dark, although in actuality it was bathed in clear moonlight. They stood in the door of the pickup, straining their eyes for the reddish, bobbing glimmer of Langdon's light, and Ellie shuddered in the rough warmth of Destry's coat. Brian's arm stole round her in the darkness.

She said tremulously "What would have happened if we'd gone in atMars!"

Frobisher^ behindVthem, drew a harsh breath. "You're certainly lucky you' didn't!" he said thankfully. "You couldn't have lived there three days, unless you stayed with your ship—I asSurne the ship is self-contained?"

"Oh,, yes," Brian told him. "But—Mars was a sizable colony when the Starwazd left!"

Frobisher shrugged. "Everybody came in from Mars before the spacers stopped running. There's no water there at all, now."

Brian murmured, ". . . and by now you should have had all the planets colonized, and reached most of the nearer stars!"

The older man's voice lost its pleasant inflection. "You say some very surprising things, Mr. Kearns," he said dryly. "You don't say that we could have colonized the planets—which, of course, is true—but that we should have. Do you mind telling me why? The planets are not exactly suited fg^irman habitation, except this one—and I would hate to nave'to live on any other."

Brian asked almost savagely "You mean there is no space travel?"

"Why, no," Frobisher said slowly. "No one cares to go to the planets."

"But ... the planets had already been reached, conquered, when the Starward left!"

Frobisher shrugged. "The Barbarians did a great many things which we regard as stupid," he said. "But why should it be called conquest, to encourage men to go out to worlds for which they are not biologically adapted? I have read much about the Barbarians, their insatiable egotism, their idle, childish curiosity, their continual escapism and refusal to face their problems, but—forgive me for saying this, no personal offense is intended—I had never believed it until today!"

Elbe took Brian's arm before he could answer. "Look there, Langdon's signaling—they must have the transmitter set up," she said, and moved her lamp in a wide circle. Before long, Langdon and Destry emerged from the bath of inky darkness, and sank down on the ground, in the little flood of reddish light from the pickup's windows. "That did it," Langdon said. "Now we sit and wait while Paula pinpoints the beam, and Caldwell will put her down right where we want."

"I hope somebody remembers to look after Einstein," Ellie worried. "I'd hate to have him break his neck in the last few seconds of the trip!"

"Judy will take care of him," Langdon reassured, and they waited in the red-cast darkness. Brian was mustering all the arguments he had heard from the Firsts about the necessity that had backed developing space travel.

"What about overpopulation? What about diminishing food supplies and natural resources?"

Frobisher's laugh was loud in the darkness. "Certainly not even the Barbarians expected to find natural food supplies on Mars or Venus!" he chuckled. "Interstellar travel might have solved it, but at prohibitive cost. Still, once man decided to stop squandering natural resources on vast theoretical projects, and throwing them irrecoverably out into space, that problem was easily solved."

"But what forced the decision?" Brian asked almost timidly.

"I wouldn't know," Frobisher said thoughtfully, "but when a decision is really necessary, as a rule, some one makes it. Probably the overpopulation reached such extremes—the solar system as a whole, of course, since Earth had to feed Mars and Venus too—that for one or two whole generations, every able-bodied man and woman had to put all his efforts into food-making instead of theoretical astronomy or whatever they called it. And by the time they had that problem solved, people were thinking of science in terms of human benefits,!and probably realized that their resources could^be handled more efficiently here on Earth. That—I mean thinking in terms of cost and human benefits—did* away with war, too. It doesn't take long for attitudes to grow up. Then, too, during the overpopulated generations, the population was almost entirely neurotic. The scientists of that day simply made it possible, I imagine, for women to avoid having the children they didn't want anyway, so that no one had children except the healthy-minded women whose primary interest was in children. The neurotic death-wish in the others effectively reduced the population in only two or three generations;.. You might say that the neurotics committed race suicitJe. Is that your ship, or another of Destry's meteors?"

They scrambled down, stumbling in the darkness, as the incredible rocket-roar sounded, and, on a collapsing telescope-of fife, the Momeward screamed down to its resting-place. Brian, standing between Destry and Ellie, wondered—but was too weary and too overexcited to ask —if Destry still regretted his failure to find a meteor.

Explanations, introductions and much rapid-fire conversation made the landing a babble of noise. "Hey, we're here!"

"Who thought up that homing device?" "Hey, I'm bJindJ No light on this planet? Couldn't we have landed t<S*»award?" "What, in China?" "Damned gravity, I can't walk!"

"Ellie!" (More imperatively than the other voices.) "Come here and get this devil-ridden cat of yours!"

Ellie dashed to Judy, who was carrying the squirming Einstein as she stumbled, clumsy-footed, down the ladder. "Here, take this animal!" she said crossly. "He's pulling my hair out by the roots!" She shoved the thick curls back over her shoulder, and fretted, "Hair's a worse nuisance in gravity than out of it!"

Ellie gently unwound her pet's suckers from Judy's ringlets, and the animal clung to her shoulder, squirming in crazy anticipation, struggling to get to the ground. She climbed the ladder painfully, wondering if she would ever adjust to the heavy gravity again, and, shoving into the lounge, ripped a strip of cloth from her skyhook to make a leash for the little animal. It was docile, but the prospect of running freely might tempt it to wildness.

As she came down again, she heard Frobisher's rich voice. "I offer the hospitality of our village and my home, for as long as you wish."

Stumbling on the final rung, Ellie almost fell against Mel-len and Paula, standing silently in each other's arms at its foot. Their faces glowed dimly in the reddish shimmer from the open door of the ship, and a pang of envy stabbed through Ellie. They had only one emotion about the landing. They didn't care what they found—they were here, and together. She turned swiftly, not wanting to violate their moment, but Tom looked up at her and smiled with a joyfulness that made his gaunt good-natured face almost handsome. Paula reached out and hugged Ellie, cat and all. "It's all over!" she whispered jubilantly. "We're here!" But her dark eyes were a little sad, too, as she added, "I only wish there was some way we could let—our mothers and fathers—know that we came safely."

"They would be sure of that," Ellie comforted softly.

Tom Mellen scowled. "What's Kearns sounding off about now? Shush, girls—"

Brian was protesting, "Look, we can't all go. Some of us ought to stay aboard the Homeward. I suggest that we sleep aboard, and visit the village in the morning—"

"You stay if you like," Caldwell said mutinously. "I've seen enough of the Homeward for a lifetime!"

Then open rebellion burst out. Little Judy set off the reaction by proclaiming violently, "If I ever go aboard the Homeward again, they'll have to carry me and tie me!" and Mellen shouted, "The trip's over and we're private citizens again, Kearns, so stop pulling your rank on us!" In the storm of voices, the Centaurian cat went wild and clawed its way from Ellie's shoulder, tumbling with a queer, staggering gait across the rough dark grass. Elbe screamed, "Catch him, catch himl" and Paula made a grab for the creature, but missed^ to trip and fall in the darkness. She lay there, laughing hysterically, watching the cat as it dived into the ring of lights. It stumbled and weaved on its spindly legs, thrusting pouch and tail weirdly to balance against the unfamiliar gravity; it sniffed the grass, with a musical caterwauling, then rolled over and over in the dark grass of the barrens, like a crazy asteroid tumbling in a wildly erratic orbit.

Brian didn't have a chance after that. The Homeward's crew, barely more than adolescents, and semi-hysterical anyway with release from strain and the euphoria of journey's end, laymen the grass and rolled and stretched like children, paying less, than no attention to Brian's harangue. By the time*Eliie had managed to recapture the staggering Einstein, and the laughter-drunk youngsters had calmed a little, Brian had only one desire; to restore some semblance of dignity to" himself and his crew. Livid and all but speechless, he tersely requested Caldwell, the calmest of the group, to accept Frobisher's hospitality on behalf of all, and watched, leaning somberly against the ladder, as they trooped away, guided by Destry with a lantern, still laughing wildly at nothing, and hanging on to each other's hands in the darkness to keep from falling."

Hard Frobisher walked steadily toward him, and on an impulse Brian asked him, "Would you like to come aboard?"

Hard answered unexpectedly, "Yes, I believe I'd be interested to see^the inside of your ship," and followed Brian up the raftler, "navigating the rungs with more ease than Brian himself, and into the lounge.

He looked curiously at the skyhooks and the complicated recreation devices, inspected the cabins without much comment, gave an interested hum in the Food Culture department. Finally Brian led him upward, into the enormous cabin where he himself had spent most of the voyage, handling the incredibly complex IS drives.

And here, before the tremendous machinery, Frobisher seemed at last impressed. He broke his silence with a wondering, "And you—you know all about this—this gim-crackery?"

Since the IS drives weighed upwards of a hundred tons, Brian laughed tolerantly at this understatement. "Yes, I'm a drive technician. I spent some time training."

"It must take a lifetime to learn all this!"

Brian condescended, "No, only about twelve years."

"Twelve years!" Frobisher repeated. "Twelve years, and how many—four?—on the way here, wasted on a room full of machines!" And now Brian uncomfortably recognized the emotion in his voice. It was pity. "You poor boy," Frobisher said, and repeated "Poor boy! To waste sixteen years on these metal levers and things! No wonder you are—" He broke off, perhaps aware of the tightness of Brian's clenched jaw.

Brian said in a low and deadly voice, "Oh, don't stop there! No wonder I am—what"

"Neurotic," Frobisher said quietly. "Of eourse you must give youself some reason why you have not wasted your life." And sadly he shook his head. "Fortunately you are still young—"

"This ship," Brian said stiffly, "is the greatest accomplishment of the human race! If I live to be twice your age, I shall never—" Abruptly he rose and flicked a switch. The great dome cleared, and the immense magnifiers brought down the newly blossoming stars so that the man and boy stood under a vast, blazing galaxy of fire. "Damn it," Brian said huskily and his voice caught. "Man, we brought this little ship across nine light-years of nothing, nothing, nothing! We stepped on worlds where no human being had ever been before! You can't make out that that's nothing! It's the biggest thing humanity ever did—and I had the privilege to be part of it—" He was stammering, and, aware of it, he stopped.

Frobisher looked sad and embarrassed. "Poor lad, and what for? What did you, personally, get from it? What good did it do—not you alone—any single human being?"

Brian shouted suddenly," "You senile, half-witted old imbecile, I don't suppose you ever heard of abstract knowledge!"

"It isn't wholly unknown to me," Frobisher said coldly, but added, again with the same anxious friendliness, "Well my boy, I suppose you believe as you've been taught—but can you show me one single human, now or in the past, who was benefited by the trip of *the Starward, except in his personal vanity? I think, if you carefully examined the matter, you'd find that the building, launching and cost of the Starward defrauded quite a large number of people."

Brian said almost desperately, "Individuals don't matter. Knowledge—any knowledge—is for the good of the race as a whole—to lift humanity out of the mud of the sea bottom—toward the stars—"

"I can't breathe such thin air," Frobisher said lightly. "The mud is much more comfortable."

"And where would_vyou be," Brian almost shouted, "if your remote ancestor, had never crawled down a tree trunk because he was.,,comfortable where he was?"

"Why," Frobisher returned, looking up at the stars that were billiant in the dome, "I should be very happily scratching, myself and swinging by my tail. Do you think the great apes have any ambition to be human? Unfortunately,. I've come too far to be happy in a treetop or a cave. But it seems to me that it's important, for any individual human, to find the absolute minimum with which he can recover that state of effortless happiness he lost when he left the treetops. Do you know what this ship reminds me of?"

"No!" Brian snapped.

"A brontosaurus." Frobisher did not elaborate, and in surly silence Brian snapped a switch. The stars went out. "Come on," he muttered, "let's get out of here."

Brian slept that night. At daybreak he stole into the room where the six women of the crew were sleeping, and quietly woke them; one by one, wrapping themselves sleepily in blankets, they tiptoed into the men's bedroom, where the crew gathered close, listening to Brian's soft, savage whispers.

"Kids, we've got to do something—anything to get away from this madhouse!"

"Go easy, Brian," Mellen interrupted. "That's strong language, and I don't like it. These people aren't crazy, from what we saw and heard last night. They think we're a little off course, though."

Caldwell muttered, "They're probably right. They used to say that being too long in space drove men crazy."

Brian said bitterly, "You all seem insane!"

"I don't blame them," Ellie said unexpectedly. "What is the good of going shooting all over the galaxy? It was fine, back in the days when it made people happy, but these people are happy without it."

"Brian's right, of course," said Don Isaacs, a quiet boy who had never grown too friendly with any of the crew except Marcia, and who never had much to say. "But there's this. Let's be practical. We're here. We can't go back to Terra Two. And we can't start reforming them. So let's just make the best of it."

Mellen said shortly, "Good for you, Don. And one more thing: if Kearns keeps shooting off his big mouth, we're apt to land in the local equivalent of the lock-up, for disturbing the peace or something. The peace seems to be valued pretty highly around here."

"But what are we going to do?" Brian wanted to know. "We can't just live here, can we?"

"And why not?" Paula's voice was defiant, and Judy murmured, "There aren't as many gadgets and things as there are on Terra Two, but it's certainly a better place then the Ship!"

Mellen pulled Paula's small shadowy form upright beside him. "I don't know why you came on the trip, Brian," he said. "But I came for one reason: because the Firsts trained me for it, and because if I'd begged off, somebody else would have had to. This isn't home, but it's as close to it as we're apt to find. I like it. Paula and I are going to settle down, and build a house or something."

Langdon added, "It's no secret that Judy and I and Don and Marcia,—" he paused, "and Brian and Ellie too —have been waiting a lot longer than we wanted to wait. There are a couple of hundred people in this village. Nice people, too, I'll bet. I like that old fellow. He reminds me of great-grandpa Wade. Anyhow, that's almost as many as they have on Terra Two. And I'll bet they don't all spend their time knocking themselves out, synthesizing food and exploring and cataloguing the whole planet^either!"

"They certainly don't!" Ellie slid/' her a'rm through Brian's. "They are, now, where Terra Two is, without the struggle. They've conquered the planet. They can quit trying."

But Mellen murmured derisively, "Kearns is heartbroken! He wanted to find mechanical computers telling everybody when to spit, and robots doing all the housework!"

"Yes____ " Brian said thickly. "I guess I did_______ "

He turned his back on them and slammed out.

Ellie thrust her way through the others and ran out into the new day. She plunged her way through the gradually thinning darknesk'after.his retreating shadow, and found him, huddled at the^foot of the pickup. She knelt close to him and put her warm.hands over his cold ones.

"Brian—oh, my deafest—"

"Elliej, Ellie!" He flung his arms around her, hiding his head against her thin dr^ss. The girl held him tight, without speaking. How young he was, she thought, how very young. He'd started training for this work before he could read. Twelve years, training for the biggest job in the world he knew. And now it all collapsed under him.

Brian said bitterly, "It's the waste, Ellie. Why—we might as well have stayed on Terra Two!"

"That's exactly what Frobisher said," Ellie told him gently. She glanced at the reddening clouds in the east, and such a wave of homesickness wrenched at her that she nearly sobbed.

"Ellie—why?" he insisted. "Why? What makes a culture just stop, gcjjflead, stagnant? They were right on the borders of conqwSmg' the whole universe! What made them stop?" The agonized earnestness of the question made Ellie's voice very tender.

"Maybe they didn't stop, Brian. May they just progressed in another direction. Space travel was right for the culture we knew—or maybe it wasn't. Remember what the Firsts told us, about the Russo-Venusian War, and the Mars Raids? These people—maybe they've achieved what all cultures were looking for, and never found."

"Utopia!" Brian sneered, and pushed her away.

"No," said Ellie very low, and put her arms about him again. "Arcadia."

"You're just the same, anyway. . . . Ellie, whatever happens, don't you leave me too—" he begged.

"I won't," she promised. "Never. Look, Brian, the sun's coming up. We should go back."

"Yeah, big day ahead," he said, and his mouth was too young to twist into such bitter lines. Then it relaxed, and he smiled and pulled her close to him.

"Not just yet. . ."

Paula and Ellie stood on a knoll, near the abandoned Homeward, and watched the skeletal houses going up almost visibly beneath them. "The entire village has turned out!" Paula marveled. "Our house will be finished before night!"

"I'm glad there was land near the village for us," Ellie murmured. "Don't you feel as if you'd always lived here? And in only four months!"

The dark girl's face was sad. "Ellie, can't you do anything to keep Brian from—from sounding off at Tom? One day Tom will up and paste him one, and then you know what will nappen to us!"

Ellie sighed". "And I'd hate to have either of us turned out of the village! It isn't all Brian's fault, Paula—" But then she paused, smiled sadly, and finished "I'm afraid he usually starts it, though. I'll do what I can, of course—"

"Brian is crazy!" Paula said emphatically. "Ellie—is it really true, that you and Brian will go on living in the Homeward!" She glanced distastefully at the black mass of the starship, and went on, "Why do you stand for it?"

"I'd live with Brian in a worn-out hydroponics tank, Paula. You would too, if it were Tom," Ellie said wearily. "And Brian's right, some one should keep the ship from being dismantled. Any of you had the same choice."

Paula murmured "I like our house better, especially now—" and she put her head close to Ellie and whispered. Ellie hugged her delightedly, then asked, "Are you feeling all right, Paula?"

The girl hesitated before answering: "I/tell myself it's all my imagination," she said at/last. "This planet belonged to our ancestors, our race* my body should adapt to it easily. But after being borni and growing up on Terra Two where I weighed half what I do here, and then so long in free fall—I know it's hard for all of us, this gravity, but since the baby . . . My body is one damned enormous ache, night and day!"

"You poor thing—" Ellie put an arm around her friend. "And I think I have troubles because my eyes still hurt in this light!"

Judy, heavy-footed, puffed up the slope. She had wound her heavy hair into a^coil on her neck, and would have been pretty, in hef^Iight synthetic ship's overall, had her eyes been less painfu|jy ..screwed up against the brilliant sunlight. "Lazy things, she called gaily. "The men are hungry!"

"In a minute," Ellie^ answered, but did not move. She still found it more convenient to prepare food in the culture units of the Homeward, but disliked doing so now. However, oh occasions such as today, when the villagers had turned out en masse, making a holiday of building the five new houses, it would make it easy to feed almost three hundred.

Langdon and Brian came up the hill, Hard Frobisher striding easily beside them. Langdon squinted at the woman and finally pretended to identify Judy. "You women are getting spoiled," he teased. "On Terra Two, you'd be working along with the men, Judy!"

Judy tossed jigr head. "I enjoy being spoiled," she said pertly, "and I"fWl&ve enough to do, learning what women do here!"

There was a derisive twist in Brian Kearns's smile. "I came off lucky," he commented sourly. "Ellie at least had training for this kind of life. What about you, Paula, are you sorry not to be playing nurse to your electronic calculator?"

Paula gave an eloquent shrug. "The women of the Star-ward chose to be scientists and were chosen because they were scientists! I learned navigation because my grandmother learned to fix a cyclotron before she had her babies on Terra Two! I'm shedding no tears."

"Well, suppese you two come and have a lesson in food culture," Ellie admonished, and the three women turned toward the ship. At the foot of the ladder, however, Ellie paused. "Paula, dear, you shouldn't climb these steps now. Go on back, we'll manage by ourselves," she offered gently, and Paula gratefully turned back to rejoin the men.

Meanwhile, Frobisher sat looking down at the rising houses. "Soon you will be part of our village," he commented. "I think you have all done well."

Brian nodded curtly in acknowledgment. He had not been prepared to find the village operating as a self-contained colony, very much like the one at Terra Two— the crew of the Homeward had expected to re-enter the complex financial structure of the world the Starward had left. But the system seemed simplicity itself. Every man owned as much land as he, alone, was able to work, and owned whatever else he made with his own hands. A man gave his work wherever it was needed, and in return was entitled to take what he needed; food from those who grew it, clothes from those who made them, and so forth. Whatever he needed beyond the necessities of life must be earned by industry, good management and private arrangements. Brian found the system easy and congenial, even enjoying the job he did—a carpenter in Norten had. given him work, and Brian, whose training had familiarized him with tools and machinery, had found no trouble in adapting his specialized skills to carpentry and building. There was always building going on somewhere in the village, it seemed. Brian made a good living.

And yet, for all its simplicity, the system seemed remarkably inefficient. Brian said, looking down at the sprawled houses, "I would think it would be easier if you had some kind of central distribution system."

"It's been tried, often," the old man-answered patiently. "Every few years, a group of villages will consolidate, to exchange services, or set up communication systems for private individuals, or distribute foods that can't be grown locally, or luxury goods of one kind or another. But that means devising a means of exchange, and keeping account of credits, and so forth. As a rule, the disadvantages are so much greater than the advantages-that 1he consolidation breaks down again within a yeaf or two."

"But there's no law against it?"^,<Brian asked.

"Oh, no!" Frobisher sounded shocked. "What would be the sense of that? The purpose of the whole system is to leave each man as free as possible! Most places are just about like Morten—the maximum of comfort, and the minimum of trouble."

Brian murmured, "I should think, then, that you'd want all kinds of labor-saving devices. You cook with fire— isn't it easier to have food culture units, such as we have on the Ship?"

Frobishej:. ga^e- the matter grave attention. "Well, a wood fire imparts^ 'fine flavor to food," he remarked. "Most people prefer ij. And a cook must take pride in what she cooks, or wtfy cook at all? And, although food culture units may be easier, if one is lazy, for those who use theta, no, one wants to take the time to manufacture them. One man can build a fireplace in a day, with a neighbor to help, and cook with it for the rest of his life. For a food culture unit, a man would have to spend years in learning to build it, and dozens of skilled and unskilled workers take months to build it; and, in order to make them cheaply enough for one man to buy, millions of them must be made, which means hundreds and thousands of people crowded together, just making them, having no time to grow or cook their own food, or live their own lives. The cost is too high. It's more trouble than it's worth." ^

Langdon askjj^jjlm. suddenly, "Just what is the population now?"

Frobisher frowned. "You people certainly are full of questions! Who knows? Collectively, people are nothing but statistics, which are no good to anyone. People are individuals. A few years ago, a philosopher in Carney— that's where Destry was born—worked out what he called the critical factor in population: the point where a village becomes too large to be efficient as a self-contained unit, and starts to break down. It's a nice problem, if you're interested in abstract mathematics—which I'm not."

"But I am," Paula said behind them, lowering herself carefully to the grass beside the men. "It sounds interesting."

Frobisher looked at her with fatherly friendliness. "You and Tom can come with me, next time I go to Carney," he invited. "I'll introduce you to Tuck—but all I know is, if a village gets too large, it's more trouble than convenience, and about half the population will go away and start a new one, or move to a smaller place."

"It doesn't sound very workable," Brian said with sour skepticism.

"It works," Frobisher answered equably. "That's the final test of any theory—hullo, here's Tom. We're not lying down on the job, Tom—just waiting for the women to bring dinner."

Mellen thrust a penciled scrap of paper into Lang-don's hands. "Is Judy around? I can't read this—her writing is half Russian and half Arabic!"

"She's in the ship with Kearns's wife," Frobisher answered, not noticing how Paula winced at the word which, on Terra Two, had acquired an ignominious connotation of servitude and sexual inferiority. The three men from the Homeward tried to ignore the vulgarity, and Langdon gave a self-conscious laugh. "I think I can translate for you."

"What have you got there?" Brian asked, interested against his will—Judy had been an electrician aboard the Homeward, responsible for all lighting circuits, and her work was capable and excellent. He squinted toward the paper. Langdon scowled. "I can't see a thing in this cussed sunlight! What's it supposed to be, Tom?"

"Wiring diagram. There are red bulbs in the Homeward, and Judy's going to put lighting in our house—and yours, too. Didn't she tell you?"

"I thought you'd both gone allout on the primitive life," Brian muttered. Langdon snorted mockingly, and Mellen clenched his fists, then relaxed, with an easy grin.

"It's a free country," he said. Then suddenly he added, "Brian, it's none of my business, but are you and Ellie really going to stick to this damn foolishness? You'll be
lonely up here. We could start on a house for you to-
morrow." f

"Somebody's got to keep the sriip from being dismantled," Brian said stiffly. "And th'ftt reminds me, if Judy's going to do any wiring, she'd/better use spare parts. No more trying to dismantle the "drive units!"

Langdon laughed softly, but Mellen's face darkened in annoyance. He said shortly, "You aren't captain any more. The Homeward isn't your personal property, Brian."

"I'm aware of that," Brian rasped. "Neither does it belong to the crew collectively. It's being held in trust. And since nobody else has any sense of responsibility, I'm acting as caretaker."

Frobisher locked jyp as if he were about to speak, but Paula forestaUed^^fiffi, asking gently, "What for? We've no fuel, we'll never takejjfLagain."

The nightmare settled down on Brian again. He was fighting—but fighting an intangible, unresisting opponent! If they had. been malicious, it would have been easier. They weren't malicious, they were only stupid—unable to understand just why the Homeward must be safeguarded as their only link with civilized life. A year or two, he thought grimly, and they'll realize just what I'm doing, and why. Just now, this primitivism is hew, novel. But they are basically intelligent, sooner or later they will get tired of this. They can't live from day to day, like the villagers—but how do the villagers live this way? Fro-bisher's a cultured man. Destry's a bright boy. How can they stand it, living like nice clean animals?

"What deep imponderable are you mediating?" Ellie mocked his serious expression with a gay grimace, and thrust a bask^^urtd* his hands, loaded with hot food. "Langdon, Paula, Mr. Frobisher—all hands needed to carry food. Here, Destry, you take a basket too," she commanded, handing one to the boy. "Bring this down to the village, now. Dinner is ready .And hurry up before it all gets cold."

Brian absent-mindedly picked up a biscuit-like cake of protein and munched at it as they descended the hill, his mind still halfway circling the continual problem. Ellie offered her basket, in turn, to Destry and Frobisher, and the old man politely took a cake, but Destry shook his head. "Thanks, I don't care for synthetics, Ellie."

"Destry!" His grandfather said with unnecessary sharpness, while Ellie murmured, "I didn't know you'd ever tasted them."

Destry stumbled over a rock in the path and used a couple of unfamiliar expletives; by the time he had picked himself up, retrieved the luckily unhurt basket, and apologized unnecessarily for the words he had used—he might have saved the trouble, for Ellie had never heard them and did not know whether they were sacred or profane— Ellie had forgotten her question for another.

"Have you ever been out of Nörten, Destry?"

"Once or twice. I went to Carney with my father, when he went to teach a man there how to weave a rug. He weaves beautiful rugs—much better ones than ours."

"I see," Ellie murmured.

"He wanted me to come with him this time, but one place is pretty much like another, and I had my gardens to look after, so I stayed with grandpa. Besides, I had to—" Destry abruptly stopped. They were nearing the site of the new houses, and he called loudly "Dinner!" and watched the villagers swarm off their scaffolds and beams. He took one of the baskets and scooted away to hand it around.

The food from the Homeward's culture units was distributed, and the villagers ate it with polite thanks, but without much enthusiasm; only the children seemed to enjoy the elaborate synthetics, and even the Homeward's crew seemed to have lost their taste for it. Brian, sitting on a half-finished wooden step and munching absent-mindedly, abruptly made a face and flung the cake into the grass. Ellie cooked better, he decided, without the food machines. She liked the primitive cooking, and he had to admit she did it well. Still he felt disquieted. The food culture units synthesized their food out of a raw carbon, water, and almost infinitesimal amounts of raw chemicals; the whole process of growing food seemed, to Brian, wasteful and inefficient. It took so much time. Of course, he reflected, it was pleasant, outdoor work, and the people who did it seemed to enjoy it. It wasn't so confining as standing over the machines^ and you didn't grow so deathly bored, month after month, with nothing to do except push a lever now and then, and between the lever-pushings, scan films and play endlessly complicated mental games. Brian had been expert at a certain three-dimensional board game which had to be played with the aid of an electronic computation device; now he felt a curiously disloyal thought that his proficiency had been born of boredom. When you enjoyed your work, he thought, you didn't have to invent things to do in your spare time.

But I enjoyed my work, he told himself in confusion, I enjoyed working on the IS units. Didn't I? '^,.^_v

Furiously scattering the remaining synthetics on his disposable plate, he crumpled up the bit of plastic and flung it angrily away, grabbing up his tools—the new hammer, plane, and level which the village smith had made in exchange for roofing a chicken-house and repairing his cellar steps—and shouted to Caldwell.

"Come .on, let's get back at work, I want to get this floor laid by sundown!" He walked catlike across the empty beams, squatted where he had left off, and began sliding boards into place and nailing them with fierce, angrily precise blows.

He was still tersely angry and short-worded when, a few weeks later,, he walked down through the village, a bqx in his hahBs.* The houses were completed now, even to the steps, arSibUgh still scantily furnished—Brian was still working, after each day's work, helping Caldwell build furniture.

He turned in at one still-raw, trampled muddy lawn, where brief spikes of summer grass were just beginning to peep through the wet earth, and knocked roughly.

Paula, a loose hand-woven smock wrapped about her body—she was beginning to grow clumsy and heavy now —opened the door, and her squinted, drawn face relaxed suddenly in a quick impulsive smile which made Brian feel ashamed and almost defensive.

"Brian—yes, Ellie's here, but—" She paused, hesitant, then invited shyly, "Won't you come in for a few minutes? We don't see much of you."

"I came down to see Tom—" Brian said uneasily, and followed Paula into the large reddish-lighted room. Before the fireplace he saw, to his intense dismay, that not only Ellie was there with Tom Mellen, but Langdon and Judy, Marcia and Don Isaacs, Destry, and—Hard Frobisher. Frobisher! It seemed that Hard Frobisher was continually underfoot, as if the crew of the Homeward needed his continual surveillance, assistance, advice! Brian frowned in annoyance; Frobisher acted like a self-appointed guardian to the newcomers. Yet it was impossible not to like the old fellow, even when he inquired genially, "And what have you in that big, interesting box, Mr. Kearns?"

"Just more of our top-heavy science," Brian said rudely, and, undoing the box, took from it several pairs of red-lensed glasses in bent-plastic frames. He handed one pair to Mellen and donned one himself. "Turn out these lights, and see if these help any in the sun, will you?"

Tom looked at the glasses, puzzled, for a moment, then hooked the frames behind his ears and switched out the red lights, stepping to the west door and looking into the setting sun. Then he turned, grinning.

"They work, all right! What did you do, Brian? Just red glass wouldn't work—remember, we tried it?"

Brian shrugged. "There's a polarized layer inside. I couldn't find selenium, so 1 used an oxide of gold for the red color. It's a thin quartz filter ... oh, never mind. I'd have had them before, but it took a damned long time to grind them."

Langdon took a pair from the box. "That's right," he said slowly. "I remember, Miguel Kearns made lenses for some of the old Starward instruments, when they broke, and when we were duplicating instruments for the trip. Did you help him?"

"Some," Brian returned. He met Frobisher's eyes, and said truculently, "So you have no use for science. Well, as you pointed out yourself, it's a free country, and my crew have been going around with sore eyes—and I don't like it!"

Paula's strained face relaxed as. she slipped the filter glasses over her eyes, and she smiled. "This is wonderful, Brian," she said, and Elbe's face 'glowed with pride. Langdon mocked in a friendly voice, "The old fellow's human after all!" and flung a companionable arm around Brian's shoulders. "When are you and Ellie going to come down off your lofty peak and live with the rest of the pack?"

Brian stiffened, but the tone of approbation warmed him, and he came back, half-unwilling, to the fireplace, and listened to Frobisher, who said, laughing faintly, "It isn't science itself we don't like. It's the use of science as an end in itself, rather than a means. I mentioned a bron-tosaurus. I assume vpu know what that is?"

"We had them*afiye, on Terra Two—or something like them. They're big, but not dangerous—they're too dumb." Brian told him. * *

"Exactly," Frobisher said. "But they're not much good to themselves, are they?" He smiled; then his face sobered. "The brontosaurus, with his titanic body-mass, had outgrown the logical use of a development which had, originally, been good and useful. Science," he proceeded, "was developed to make life easier for man. The individual man. The light body-armor of the Barbarian soldier was developed of more formidable weapons, and finally the armor had to be so cumbersome that the armored man must be lifted on his horse with a derrick. And if he fell down—well, there he was. It helped along the army, as a unit—but it certainly made life a mess, for the individual. And science gave so much time and thought to units —the Nation^'the Race, Humanity-as-a-Whole—that it laid terrific bmffehs on' humanity as individuals. To benefit the monster of Humanity-as-a-Whole, they even fought wars—which killed off humanity, individually, at a fearful rate. Eventually—well, the knight fell down inside his armor, and couldn't get up again. I think the collapse started even before the Starward left. The brontosaurus died along with his protective nuisances, but nature was a little kinder to men—individually. Humanity-as-a-Whole died out pretty thoroughly, even as a concept. The individuals who were left knew enough not to start the whole dreary process all over again. Science took its rightful place with the other arts and crafts—instead of using it to serve a hypothetical whole, we use each art, or science, to enrich the personal, private life of each individual." He gestured around the room. "The sawmill and pottery. Tom's red lighting in here. And—your red-lensed glasses, Brian. I think the time has come when I can tell you why—"

But Brian had already risen, and flung away from him.

"I didn't come down here to be lectured!" he shouted at Frobisher, and strode to the door. "There are the glasses, Tom. You hand them out. Tell everybody not to break them; they take forever to grind."

The door slammed behind him.

Now that he had defied Frobisher, he felt a little better, but as the days came and went, he felt tormented by the uselessness of his life. He spent more and more time in vicious, expert hammering and sawing—in solitude, now—at furniture, finding a sort of satisfaction in substituting physical activity for insoluble mental problems; Ellie never dared to broach the subject of moving away from the Homeward again, until one night when Brian was sitting hunched over in the former lounge, listlessly watching Einstein clamber around the axis beams. The Cen-taurian cat's suckers were not strong enough to support his weight, in this gravity; he had developed a queer shambling gait on his hind feet, amusing to watch, but clumsy and painful, and Ellie picked up her pet and patted him as she passed through the lounge.

"Poor Einstein doesn't know what to make of this," she observed. "Gravity, in here where there ought to be no gravity at all. He'd be happier in a regular house."

"I suppose so," Brian said sourly. "I suppose you would too. But look, Ellie; the crew would dismantle the ship inside a year or two."

"Well, why not let them?" Ellie asked, matter-of-factly.

Brian shrugged, helplessly. "I suppose, sooner or later 222

—but still, some day Terra Two will go out into space again, too—they haven't reverted to savagery!"

Ellie only smiled. "It won't happen in*fcur lifetime."

"You're worse than the othersr" Brian shouted in sudden furious anger. She only murmured uncritically, "Come in and have dinner."

Brian morosely rose and followed her. He had to edge by a machine, suddenly stumbled over Einstein, and exploded violently, "It's too damn cramped in here!"

Ellie did not answer, and Brian finally said, "I suppose —it won't happen in our lifetime, no."

"What are you going to do then, pass this great secret on to your sons?" Ellie inquired, and Brian started to answer before apprehending the dry irony in her voice. It had taken him twelve years to learn even the basics of interstellar operation. '

He applied himself grimly to his food; but his mood softened as he ate," and he finally looked up and said, "Frobisher can like it or not, but I'll make a scientist out of Destry yet. The kid's always underfoot. Ever since you taught me to fly the pickup—I took him up one day, and let him take the controls for a few minutes; they aren't very complicated." He spoke with a sort of satisfaction; it was a point of self-respect in his continual struggle to maintain himself in Frobisher's presence. "The boy's nuts on airplanes. He must have read a lot in old books."

Ellie asked suddenly, "I wonder what Destry's father is like?"

Brian scoffed, "He makes rugs!"

Ellie looked unconvinced. "Maybe he makes the rugs the way Frobisher paints those birds he has all over the house. Loofesifeat, Ifound in Frobisher's bookcase. Destry loaned it to me when I asked him." She handed him a book, nicely handbound in red cloth. Brian opened it curiously, skipping over the name—John D. Frobisher— penned neatly on the cover. He had seen few books in Norten village, and those were mostly blank-books filled with recipes, musical notations, or diaries—diary-keeping was a favorite pastime among young people here. But this was printed, and filled with elaborate, exquisitely reproduced diagrams which reminded Brian of Judy's scrawls when she was working out a wiring diagram. He tried to read a page or two, but, although the language was only loosely technical, Brian's education had been so rigidly specialized that the vocabulary was beyond him. He shut it up, and asked, "Did you show this to Judy?"

"Yes. It's a text, she says, on radio and radar, and not an elementary one either."

"Funny . . ." Brian mused.

"Here's something funnier," Ellie said. "Have you seen Caldwell lately? Or Marcia and Don Isaacs?"

"Come to think of it, I haven't. I never saw much of Don, though—"

"They went away, that night you and Frobisher had a fight. Marcia told me they were going so that Don could work in another village. That's what they always say— like Destry's father. People seem to come and go, here, all the time! Almost every day, somebody picks up a clean shirt and a pair of stockings, and walks off down the road. And nobody sees him again for three or four months—then he walks in again, as casually as I do when I go down to Paula's and back!"

"And the standard of living . . ." Brian mused "comfortable enough—but primitive—"

Ellie laughed. "Oh, Brian! We were happy enough on Terra Two, without quite so much. The ship is super-mechanized. We're spoiled—we've developed a lot of artificial wants—"

"Frobisher converting you, too?" he asked glumly.

Her laugh was gay. "Maybe."

Brian was silent, staring at the book. He felt trapped. It was an insidious poison, the temptation to relax, rest, dream and die in this—Ellie had called it Arcadia, but a fragment of poetry from an old book in the ship's library teased his brain; not Arcadia, he thought drearily, but the isle of the lotus eaters, who tasted the poison flower and forgot all that they had been before. . . .

The words of the ancient poet sang insidiously in his brain. He rose and fetched the book from behind a panel in the lounge, and sat with it on his knees, the words of defeat staring him in the face.

Hateful is the dark-blue sky,

Vaulted o'er the dark-blue sea;

Death is the end of life; ah,- why'**

Should life all labor be?

Let us alone; Time drivetn onward fast . , .

How could a man who had mastered space live like this, in animal content, year after year? He wondered if among the lotus eaters there had been anyone who had refused the poison—and finally eaten it from starvation, or because he could not endure the loneliness of being the only sane man among a crew abandoned to their dreams?

Let us alone ... . what pleasure can we have

To war with evil? Is there any peace

In ever climbing up the climbing wave?

Give us long re'st or death, dark death or dreamful

6<1S&* • • •

Brian scowled and let the book fall to the floor. There was nothing easy about life in Norten! In the last few days, weeks, months, he had worked harder than ever in his life. His hands, once sensitive and smooth; alert to the quiver of a lever, were hard and calloused and brown. And yet there was something satisfying about it. He no longer found himself inventing elaborate leisure-time pursuits, no longer felt impelled by continual anxiety about his crew, lest some minor infringement of a rule should lead to catastrophe. And Ellie—he had Ellie, and that, if nothing else, was something to hold him here.

And yet—*after he had crossed space—his body thrived, but^lte-brairr was starving. Or was it, he asked himself. He'd gotten almost as much satisfaction—the guilty thought came—out of seeing hi* crew's eyes get well again, with the special glasses he'd made, as he had had in piloting the Homeward safely through a dangerous cloud of radio-active gas. Maybe—again the guili —maybe more.

The glasses. But they couldn't go around wearing red goggles for the rest of their lives. There ought to be some way of gradually altering the filters, maybe at monthly intervals, so that they became gradually accustomed to the light. He pulled a stylus toward him, vainly rummaged for a loose sheet of paper, then irritably climbed into his old control room, search, and at last slid open the moving panel over the log book. His hands hesitated at the vandalism, then he shrugged and swore —the voyage was finished, the log book closed out! He ripped a blank sheet from the back, sat down then and there on the edge of the skyhook, and began to sketch out, roughly, a plan for glasses with changeable filters.

The yellow dawn was a glare in the sky when he finally came down; Ellie was sleeping in the cabin, her curly hair scattered over her face, and he quietly tiptoed past her and down the ladder. The air was cold and clear, and he stretched and yawned, suddenly realizing that he was very sleepy.

Against the brightening sky, a man's form was silhouetted as he gradually came over the knoll, and Tom Mellen called to him, "Is that you, Brian?" and came toward him with swinging strides. He had long ago discarded the shorts and sandals of the ship in favor of boots and long dyed breeches, and he wore one of his uniform shirts tucked into them. The ship's synthetics were not long-wearing or practical, although they were simply produced, but a few of the younger women in Norten had liked the thin pretty stuff, and exchanged lengths of it for the sturdier and more practical handmade variety.

As he came near, Brian asked him, "Where are you going so early?"

"I'm going to work awhile in another town," Tom told him casually. "I've a letter to a friend of Frobisher's. I came up to ask a favor. I don't suppose Elbe's up yet? Well, don't bother her, but—" He paused, then added, "I meant for Paula to come along with me. But she's not very well, and she doesn't want to be with strangers. She'd particularly miss Ellie. But I hate to have her alone—"

Brian said abruptly, "Tom, we're going to move down into the village. I've—" He glanced around at the Homeward and all his pent-up resentment suddenly spilled over and he shouted, "I'm tired of caretaking the damned old —brontosaurus! I'm through!"

Tom whistled. "What's gotten info' you? I thought you were dedicated to maintaining a niée snug little island of culture." Then at Brian's expression, the sarcasm left his voice, and he said eagerly, "Brian, if you mean that, why don't you and Ellie move down with Paula while I'm gone? I'll be back before the baby comes, and we can get started on a house for you two."

Brian stood thinking it over for a minute, and finally nodded. "All right. I'm sure Elbe will want to; she worries about Paula."

Tom stood looking at the ground. "Well, I'll shove along and tell Paula tQ_T expect you, and then I'll get on my way." He paused,' then said, low-voiced, "Brian—I thought, on the ship, you. were just throwing your rank, about—well, about the'girls. But now—" He stopped again, and said finally, embarrassed, "You know the baby was—started—before we landed?"

"I guessed that," Brian said coldly.

"I thought it was all right because we'd be landing within a month or two. But now—and the change in gravity, I'm afraid—if Paula and I had had the sense to wait—Judy's pregnant, you know, and she's not having any trouble at all, while Paula—" He stopped, and finally got out, "I guess I owe you an apology, Brian."

"You might better apologize to Paula," Brian said, but he had appreciated the spirit in which Tom spoke. So Tom finally realized that Brian had a good reason for what he'd done!

Tom added quietly, "I owe an apology for something else, 'too, Brianf'llV my fault they've been leaving you out of things around here. I had the idea you were still trying to rehabilitate the natives."

"Don't bother apologizing," Brian said frigidly. So Tom had missed the point after all! "I'm not particularly interested in 'things around here,' and sooner or later I expect the natives will need rehabilitating, as you put it. When that day comes, I'll be here."

Mellen's mouth hardened. "I guess Frobisher's right about you!" he said tightly. "So long, then." He put out his hand, rather unwillingly, and Brian shook it, without enthusiasm. He watched as Tom descended the hill, wondering where he was going and why. Was it just part of \ the local irresponsibility? Tom was irresponsible anyhow —the way he'd behaved toward Paula was shameful. And who, here, was going to look after her? The local witch-doctor? He scowled, and went in to tell Ellie about their impending move.

VIII

Paula was almost pathetically grateful for Ellie's company, and even Einstein settled down near the new fireplace as cozily as any of the ordinary Norten cats with^ whom he had a continual feud. Brian located a site' for the house he intended to build and, aided by Destry, began a rough workshop of fieldstone. In return for the boy's help, Brian took him, nightly, into the dome of the Homeward and taught him the names and positions of the fixed stars. The boy was filling a blank-book with astronomical data; Brian offered to present him with one of the astronomy texts duplicated in the ship, but Destry politely refused the gift. "I like to make my own. That way I'm sure of what's in it," he explained.

Brian himself was painstakingly perfecting his lens-grinding equipment. The workshop had gradually become his refuge, and, now that he knew he was working on something which was worth doing, he slowly began to come out of the closed shell he had originally thrown about himself, forbidding intimacy with the life of the village. He relaxed from the painstaking lens-grinding by beginning something he had not done since his early teens: glass-blowing. He made a set of fancy bottles for Ellie, and when Judy admired them, made one for her as well. Both Ellie and Judy had many friends in the village, and within a few weeks Brian found that so many men and women were asking him to make them that he could switch his full-time work from carpentry to glass-making. There was a potter in the village, who made extremely fine crockery, but at present the local glass-maker was

—again the omnipresent phrase—"working in another vil-
lage." Brian found the work congenial, and felt that he
had approval. , ***

However, privately, anxiety piled on anxiety. He actually saw very little of Paula, for there was still a certain stiffness between them; however, he felt disturbed at her obvious weakness. Ellie, too, was expecting a child by now, although aa yet she had told no one but him, and Paula's condition filled him with panic for Ellie.

There had not been a medical man on the Homeward: none of them had ever been ill. Marcia had nominally been responsible for their health, but even Marcia wasn't here now. And judging from what litde talk Brian had heard here in Norten, it was simply a matter of any woman's, helping out when asked. Ellie had vigorously defended 'the' system when Brian attacked it, protesting that having children was a natural function, and that the medical arid surgical atmosphere with which the Terra Two colony surrounded it was enough to make any woman neurotic. Brian was unconvinced; that might be true when" everything was normal, but Paula definitely needed care. He wondered how Ellie could be so unconcerned; Paula was her closest friend.

But even Brian was not prepared for the suddenness with which mere anxiety turned to disaster. At noon that day Paula -was her usual self: pale and pathetically heavy of step, but gay and bright-eyed. In the evening she was quieter than usual, and went to bed early. And some time during the night Brian was roused by Ellie's hand on his shoulder and her scared voice: "Brian—wake up!"

Brian drew himself upright, instantly alert, seeing Ellie's tensely drawn face^and hearing the near-hysteria in her voice. "'It's Paula**4'»ve never seen anything like it—she was all right this evening—oh, Brian, please come!"

Brian pulled a robe about his shoulders, thinking, what could have happened so suddenly? He heard the low, incessant moans even before he stepped into the inner room and stopped, aghast at Paula's face. It was altogether drained of color; even the lips were white and sunken, but a curious dark line marred their edges. She had always been excessively thin, but now her hands seemed suddenly shrunken into claws, and when Brian touched one, it was fire-hot. Brian cast his mind rapidly over where little he had been taught about the relationship of gravity and pregnancy—just enough to know that in free fall, a dangerous condition could develop suddenly. He wished he had known more, but they had taught him just enough that he was thoroughly convinced of the wisdom of enforcing strict celibacy in spaceship personnel. His brain, strictly specialized for one limited aspect of science, retained only a few fragments of knowledge. They fluttered and teased at the edge of his mind: imperfect placental junction without the cohesive effect of gravity, hormone malfunction under the added strain of pregnancy, extensive damage to internal tissues—all this was at free fall conditions. But what about Paula, who was adapted to the light gravity of Terra Two, whose child had actually been conceived in free fall, and who was being brutally punished by the dragging gravity of Earth? Something in the delicate balance of cohesions had evidently kicked loose. Brian looked down at the unconscious girl and spoke violently.

"Damn Mellen for an insubordinate idiot!"

"Where's Tom?" Paula whispered rackingly. "I want Tom!" The feverish bony fingers clutched at Brian's, and she begged "I want Tom!" Her eyes opened, but she was looking past Brian into space. Brian felt the old cold anger knotting inside him. He bent over and promised quietly, "I'll get him."

Elbe whispered, "But—I don't know where he's gone, Brian. Paula might be—"

Brian straightened savagely. "I'll find him if I have to take my fists to Frobisher! Thank God we still have the pickup! And I'll find out where Don and Marcia were sent; yes, sent! All along I've had the feeling—"

"Brian—" Ellie caught at his hand, but he pushed her away. "Frobisher's going to listen to me for once! He can damn science all he wants to. But if Paula dies on our hands because nobody on this dark-ages planet knows what to do for her, then by the living God I'm going to personally raise such hell in this god-forsaken little Utopia of theirs that Frobisher and his pals will snap out of their daydream and start living like human beings again!" Without another word he strode out^f the room, dressed hastily and went out of the house, his long-repressed anger boiling up and stiffening his back as he hurried toward the village. He^ went up Frobisher's steps and across his porch at asingle bound, thrust the door open without knocking, arid stormed inside.

"Frobisher!" he bellowed unceremoniously.

In the darkness there was a surprised noise, then steps, a door flung open and a light shining in Brian's eyes— and Hard Frobisher, half-dressed, came swiftly into the main room. Another opening door showed the half-naked Destry, surprised and angry. Frobisher's face, dim in the firelight, was surprised, too, but there was no anger, and he asked calhily,;"Is something wrong?"

And as always, MS calm brought Brian's anger to the exploding point. "You'|e right there's something wrong," he raged, and advanced on Frobisher so violently that the old man retreated a step or two. "I've got a girl on my hands who looks as Jf she were going to die," Brian roared, "Arid I want to know where on this devil-ridden planet you packed Tom off to, and where Marcia's gone! And then I want to know if there's a decent medical man anywhere in this damned backward dark-ages Utopia of yours!"

Frobisher's face swiftly lost its calm.

"Tom's wife?"

"And there's no need to talk smut!" Brian shouted, "Paula!"

"Paula Sandoval, then, if you like it better. What's the trouble?"

"I doubt if Vbu'd understand," Brian snapped, but Frobisher said sTe*fefiiy","I suppose it's the gravity sickness. Tom mentioned it before he left. It's easy to get hold of him. Destry—" He turned to the boy in the doorway. "Quick, go down and get the Center on the wire. Tell them to fly Mellen back here, inside an hour if they can. And—where's your father, Destry? This sounds like something for him."

Destry had disappeared inside his room while his grandfather was talking; almost instantly he came out again, stuffing his shirt into trousers. "He was in the Marilla Center last week, too," Destry said quickly, "but he's in Slayton now. And there's no regular transit plane there. Hey, Mr. Kearns—" He turned quickly to Brian. "You can fly the Homeward's plane now, can't you? Or shall we get Langdon? They'll fly Tom in from the Marilla Center, but we'll have to fly over and pick up my father."

"What the—what the hell—!" Brian started, but Destry was already hurrying down a flight of stairs. Hard Frobisher put a compulsive hand on Brian's shoulder and shoved him after the boy. Brian stumbled on the steps and blinked in the raw light of an electric arc-bulb. On a rough wood workbench, with Destry's notebooks and a few ordinary boy-type oddments, the stupefied Brian recognized what was unmistakably a radio transmitter. And not a simple one. Destry was already adjusting earphones and making a careful calibration of an instrument which looked handmade but incredibly delicate. He moved a key and said in a hurriea voice, "Marilla Center, please, second-class priority, personal. Hello —Betty? You've got a man in the Center working on radio? Mellen? That's the man. This is Destry Frobisher talking from Norten. Fly him over here—as fast as you can make it. His wife's ill—yes, I know, but it's a special case. Thanks—" A long pause. "Thanks again, but we'll manage. Look, Betty, I have to get Slayton. Clear the stations, will you?" Another pause, and he said, "My father. Why? Oh—thanks, Betty, thanks a lot. Tell them we'll bring a plane over there for him." He closed the key and ripped off the headphone, standing up, and Brian exploded again.

"Just what's going on?" he demanded. "What kind of a bluff have you people been putting up on us?"

"No bluff," Frobisher said calmly. "I've told you, all along, that we use science, in its proper place. I've tried to tell you, two or three times, but you always shouted at me and shut me up before I could explain. Tom Mellen has been working in one of the Centers for a month. Didn't you wonder why he wasn't worried about leaving Paula, in her state of health? He's known that if any serious complication developed, he'd be sent for right away." He turned and started toward the stairs. "Don't you realize this is the first time you've^ever shown the slightest personal concern for anyone or* anything?' Before this, you've been concerned jXfith scientific accomplishments for their own sake. Now* look, you can stand here staring like a brainless fool/or you can come with me to the Center to fetch my sori—Destry's father—who is one of the most skillful medical men in this section." As Brian stood stonestill, unable to move before the onslaught of ideas, Frobisher urgently took his arm. "Snap out of it!" he commanded harshly. "I can fly a plane, but I would hate to have to manage that jet of yours! And I'll have to come with you, because you don't know the way! Destry, you stay close to the radio, just in case," he added. :-_v

Brian, too dazed^F%&"speak, stumbled with him across the dark fields toward tjie pickup, but by the time they reached it, his reactions %ere in operable condition; he climbed in at the controls, advised Frobisher to fasten a safety strap, put the pickup in the air, and listened intelligently to Frobisher's" instructions for reaching the place he called- Slayton Center. Then he turned his head.

"Look," he said grimly, "I'm a little stunned. Just what has been going on?"

Frobisher looked equally puzzled. "What do you mean?"

"All this—"

"Oh, this!" Frobisher dismissed it with a shrug. "You
had fire extinguishers on your spaceship, I remember.
Did you keep them but on your dinner tables, or did you
leave them out of* sight until they were needed in a
hurry?" 4m**.\ *-

"I mean—you let me go on thinking that people here didn't know much about science—"

"Listen, Kearns," Frobisher said abruptly, "you've been jumping to conclusions all along. Now don't jump to another one, that we've been bluffing, and concealing our civilization from you. We live the way we like to live."

"But radio—planes—you have all those things, and yet—"

Frobisher said, with barely concealed disgust, "You have the Barbarian viewpoint, I see. Radio, for instance. We use it for emergency needs. The Barbarians used to listen to keep from doing things—I know, they even had radio with pictures, and used to sit and listen and look at other people doing things instead of doing them themselves. Of course, they had rather primitive lives—"

"Primitive!" Brian interrupted. "You have airplanes, and yet people walk—"

Frobisher said irritably, "Why not? Where is there to go in such a hurry—as long as we have fast transport for those few times when it is really necessary?"

"But even when the Starward left, each man had bis own private 'copter—"

"Private baby carriage!" Frobisher snorted. "When I go anywhere, I go on my feet like a man! Stupid, primitive Barbarians, living huddled in cities like big mechanical caves, never seeing the world they lived in, hidden away behind glass and steel and seeing their world on television screens and through airplane windows! And to make all those things they had to live huddled in their caves and do dirty smelly jobs with metal nuts and bolts, and never see what they were doing, never have any pride or skill—they hved like dirty animals! And what for? Mass men for mass production—to produce things they didn't need, to have money to buy other things they didn't need! Top-heavy brontosaurs! Who wants to live that way, or do that kind of work7 There are a few craftsmen who build airplanes, or design them, because that's what they would rather do, and they'd be unhappy if they couldn't. They're artisans. And we can always use a few planes. But there aren't many, so we keep the planes for necessary work. And most people Uke doing simpler things, things with personal satisfaction. We don't force them to mass-produce airplanes simply because it's possible!" He checked his vehemence with an almost apologetic cough. "I didn't mean to get angry—that's the Slayton Center down there. You can land inside that rectangle of lights."

Brian set the pickup down easily—it seemed to be rolling over a velvety carpet—and they got down and walked, in silence, across the darkly luxuriant grass, toward a low frame building of dark wood. Inside, by the warm glow of a fireplace, a man sat p.t a large table, lighted by an expertly rigged system of _;miniature spotlights, looking down at what appeared to be a large relief map. A headphone was on his ears; he glanced up as they came through the door, but motioned them into silence, listening intently, and after a moment groped blindly into a box fixed on the side of the desk and came out with a large black pin which he stabbed accurately into the relief map. "Tornado reported between Carney and Manila. All right, then, ring off and send Robinson up to put a bomb in the center of it before it hits the farms out that way." He replaced the headphone, and inquired courteously. ^MWhat .can I do for you gentlemen?"

"Hello, Halleck," Hard Frobisher said, and, advancing to the desk, shook hands with the man, "This is Brian Kearns—came in from space."

"Oh, are they still coming in, down your way? The last One we had here was in my grandfather's time," the man Halleck observed casually. "No, come to think of it, down there in Marilla they have a man called Mellen, been working the weather station. Do you know him, Mr. Kearns? I'm glad to meet you."

Brian murmured something noncommittal, and looked around, dazed. Halleck added, "I suppose you came to pick up Dr. Frobisher? He's on his way over. Won't you sit down?"

"Thanks." Frobisher sank down in a comfortable armchair, motioned Brian into another. The man at the desk hung up his headset and came to stand by Frobisher's

When do you come up

"Not for a month or so. You'll be off by then?"

"I should say so! I've a couple of good cows calving, and I want to be home."

"Those blacks?" Frobisher asked. "Drive a few through Norten some day, and we'll see if we can't make a deal. I could use a good bull, and there are some new families with children, could use a milk cow."

Brian didn't try to follow the conversation after that;

it seemed to be mostly about cows and the luck a mutual friend was having in breeding chickens which laid black-shelled eggs. Frobisher finally took pity on his blank face. "He's never been at a Center, before, Halleck," he told the stranger, who grinned. "Pretty dull, aren't they, Mr. Kearns? I'm always glad to come up here when it's time, but I'm always glad to get back to the farm."

Brian said, "I'm a little stunned at all this—" and added, "I'd understood your—your civilization wasn't scientific—"

"It isn't," Frobisher said sternly. "It definitely is not. We use science; it doesn't use us. Science, Mr. Keams, is no longer the plaything of powerful warmongers, nor is it enslaved to an artificial standard of living, keyed to an unhealthy, neurotic population who want to be continually amused, rocked in a cradle of overstimulation! It is not a plaything for pressure groups, so-called educators, fanatics, adolescents, egocentric exhibitionists, or lazy women! Men are no longer under pressure to buy the products of commercialized science to create employment and keep the cities running. Anyone who's interested, and who has talents and skills which go beyond day-to-day living, which is more than half of the population, spends a few months every year doing the things which need doing, not just in science. Halleck here knows more about weather conditions than anyone else in the South Plains. About four months out of the year, he sits over there, or works out in a weather plane, fighting tornados before they get started, working on reforestation, handling drought conditions. The rest of the year, he lives like anybody else. Everybody lives an easy, balanced life. Man's a small animal, and has to have a small horizon. There's a definite limit to his horizon, which is why a village breaks down and starts having internal trouble when it gets too big. But groups of people, as a whole, have to have some idea of the world over the horizon, if they're going to avoid the development of false ideas, superstitions and fears of strangers. So every man leads a secure, balanced life in the small horizon of his village, where he is responsible for himself, and responsible to every person he knows—and also, if he is capable, he lives a larger life beyond the village, working for others—but still and always for individuals, not for ideals." Brian opened his mouth to- speak,*but Frobisher quietly forestalled him. "And before he can work in the Centers, he has to prove himself ^áas a responsible individual in the villages. There's a place waiting for you, Brian. How would you like to teach a course in the mechanics of interstellar space?"

"What?" Brian spluttered. "You mean—space travel?"

Frobisher laughed heartily. He glanced at his watch and said inconsequentially, "My son will probably be here in a few minutes—but still, I've time to explain—"

He turned to Brian again. "For two or three months a year," he reminded him. "There is always a use for knowledge, whether-Ave can use it immediately or not. Our present way^of life won't endure forever. At best it's an interim devjc%a probationary period, a sort of resting stage while rhán returns to sanity before he starts climbing again. Some day, man will probably take to space again; even the, stars, but this time, we hope he'll do it with a sense of perspective, counting the cost and weighing it against individual advantages." He paused, and added quietly, "I think he will."

After a long silence, he added, "I'm a historian. Back in the First Renaissance, man was starting to outgrow his atavistic notion about survival of the strong and powerful instead of the best. Then, unluckily for Europe, and also unluckily for the Redmen, the so-called New World was discovered. It's always easier to escape across a frontier, and drive your misfits out instead of learning to live with your problems. When that frontier was finally conquered, njan had. a second chance to learn to live with himseliaria with what he'd done. Instead, after wars and all kinds of trouble, he escaped again, this time to the planets. But he couldn't escape from himself —and eventually that frontier was filled up to the saturation point, too. So he escaped again, this time by launching the Starward—but that time he went just one step too far. And then the crash came. Every man had the choice: die in his armor, or take it off." He grinned. "I thought for a while, Brian, that you were a brontosaur."

Brian mopped his forehead. "I feel pretty extinct," he murmured.

"Well, you can try teaching interstellar mechanics for awhile. The rest of the time—"

"Say—" Brian interrupted anxiously. "I don't have to start right away, do I? I'm fixing up a new set of lenses for the crew—"

Frobisher laughed, heartily and kindly, and put a hand on his shoulder. "Take your own time, my boy. The stars won't be bridged again for centuries. It's a lot more important to get your crew's eyes in good condition again." He rose abruptly. "Good—here is John, and I suppose by now, Mellen's on his way to Paula."

Brian quickly got to his feet as a tall dark-haired man in a white jacket came into the room. Even in the dim light the resemblance to Frobisher was obvious; he looked like an older, maturer Destry. Frobisher introduced the men, and Dr. John Frobisher gave Brian's hand a quick, hand shake.

"Glad to meet you, Keams. Tom Mellen spoke about you, last time I was in Marilla. Shall we be on our way?" As they turned outward, and crossed the lighted airfield, he and his father spoke in low tones, and for once Brian had nothing to say. Even his thoughts were not working as he put the pickup in the air. The reversal had been too fast. Then, abruptly, a memory hit him and he turned his head around to ask sharply, "Listen here, if you can receive radio signals, how is it that no one answered the Homeward's call from space!"

Frobisher looked a trifle embarrassed. He said gently, at last, "We use a special, tight-beam transmission. Your signals are the old wide-band ones, and they came in as bursts of static."

For some reason Brian felt incredibly relieved, and his relief exploded in laughter.

"I told Tom our radio devices would be obsolete" . . . he choked.

"Yes," Frobisher said quietly. "Obsolete, only in a way you hadn't planned for. The whole crew of the Homeward was obsolete—and you've been on probation all along. But you've come out of that now, I think. Wait a bit—don't go on to Nörten just yet. Turn north—just a mile or two. There's something I want you to see." Brian protested, "Paula—"

John Frobisher leaned forward/"Mellen's wife—" and this time Brian did not bridle at the vulgarism, "—will be all right, Kearns. We don't get the gravity sickness very often, now, but any danger in it was knocked out even before the spacers quit running. The girl's probably uncomfortable, and it looks terrible, but it isn't dangerous. We'll have her fixed up within an hour."

And somehow Brian's anxiety slid away. The words didn't mean much to him, but his training had taught him one thing, at least; he recognized competence when he met it, and it was in every inflection of John Fro-bisher's voice.'Acquiescently he swung the ship to the northeast. The rismg sun broke in a wave of brightness over the horizon, revealing the far-away line of ruined buildings that looked down drearily over a too-flat strip of disjnal, barren land where nothing grew, a straight level plain of gray concrete. For miles it seemed to stretch away; Brian, flying low, could see the grass that pushed its way upward through the cmmbluig concrete, the dreary gap-windowed buildings softened a little by ivy. And then he saw them: eight tall regular shapes, straight and still gleaming a little. . . .

"There are only two laws in our culture," Frobisher
said quietly. "One is that no man shall enslave another.
And the second—" he paused, looking straight at Brian,
"—is that no man shall enslave himself. Which is why we
have never destroyed these ships. This was the old space-
port, Brian. Does it look very majestic? Would you care
tojand?" .

Brian lookea7 fhiiiking: this was what he had expected to see first. And yet, somehow, this was what seemed greatest to him: that man, having created this monster, should have the common sense to abandon its dreary domination—and the courage to leave it there. Men destroy only what they fear.

"Come on," Brian said steadily. "Quit riding me. Let's

get back home-------- and I do mean home. There's a sick

girl waiting for you, doctor. And even if it isn't dangerous,

they're going to be worrying until you tell them it isn't." Abruptly he gunned the jets and turned the ship southeast toward Norten Village, into the rising sun. He was not aware that he had passed the final test. He was thinking about Paula, and about Ellie, waiting and worrying. He knew in the back of his mind that he'd come back here some day, look around a little, maybe even mourn a little; you couldn't put away the biggest part of your life. But he wouldn't come right away. He had work to do.

The pickup of the Homeward flew away, into the morning. Yet behind them the mighty symbols remained, cold and masterful, a promise and a threat: eight great star-ships, covered from nose to tail with green-growing moss and red rust.

Willy Ley is well-known to anybody who has read much about rocketry. Since the 1920's he has been interested, actively, in rockets and space travel, and was an early member of the German Rocket Society, out of which Hitler got his major rocket scientists during World War II. But it was during the rise of Hitler that Mr. Ley decided that it might be better to leave his homeland and seek his fortune elsewhere.

In the years that followed, Mr. Ley has made himself nationally and internationally famous with his books on rocketry. He has done a series of small books for children, telling them of the secrets of rockets and space ships, of interplanetary travel. For years he has been doing a column for GALAXY MAGAZINE titled FOR YOUR INFORMATION. His book, THE CONQUEST OF SPACE was loosely adapted and made into the movie with the same name, produced by George Pal. He has been technical advisor for many movies and appeared in Walt Disney's MAN IN SPACE.

Like many of the authors here included, Mr. Ley has been a Guest of Honor at a science fiction convention, which reveals both his and the field's closeness.

The following is the only article to be presented in this volume. Because of his sober and intelligent outlook about the future, coupled with his extensive knowledge in matters of science and where science "might lead us, Mr. Ley is a natural choice to turn to for an,honest and logical look into ...