heat that we could hardly bear a stitch of clothing on our backs and we were perpetually bathed in a sweat which evaporated almost before it had left our pores. Water, whether for drinking, washing or any other purpose, was rationed to three cups per person per day; food was almost as short; and the sewerage system had, to all intents and purposes, ceased to work. As a result, we were naked, filthy, hungry, thirsty, degraded and lost. And the smell? O Mother, how we stank!

Even when we were nearly overcome, suffocated in our own effluent, it was not possible to seek relief outside the dome. No-one could live outside without a space-suit and, in my city, we had thirteen hundred suits between forty thousand inhabitants. Also, we who lived in the midst of the city's stench for a period had grown to dislike but tolerate that stench. But anyone who breathed the pure oxygen of a suit-system for more than a few minutes had to re-accustom themselves to the stink on their return and more than one man had fainted dead away when the face-plate of his helmet had been removed.

After the April raids had destroyed one of the North American domes and, in pursuit of his defensive stategy, the king had recalled the Luna garrison; then we had to support a fresh influx of refugees and our conditions deteriorated still further. My room was twelve feet long by ten feet wide by eight feet high and I had to share it with fifteen other people. For most of the time the electricity failed and we were left for hours in the foetid, airless, simmering darkness. The surface of everything we touched was slimy with our own sweat and we were unable to move without colliding with another hot, clammy body. At night we slept sardine-fashion, head to toe alternating, packed together and broiling in our own generated body-heat. We were men and women together and I have heard ignorant men snigger about this. But anyone who sees immorality in our actions can never have been forced to live as we did. Each man and woman was too weak, depressed and immersed in his or her own woes to spare any thought for the opposite sex. To me, the women who flanked me every night were no more than two factors contributing to my discomfort. Sex, modesty and morality were obsessions from a long-lost, long-dead, almost forgotten past.

I have heard those same cynical citizens of the Empire ask why we did not surrender if things were so bad. Such men can have no idea of the one bright spark of motivation which still burned within us all - our faith in our mission on Earth. One theme, part historical and part religious, ran through our schooling and dominated our thinking. We were told that the settlers who went to the Far Stars, our distant ancestors, had carried with them an idealized vision of that Mother Earth which had given them birth. But the Empire of Sirius, being so near and ruling the Earth, had forgotten, or grown contemptuous of that ideal. The result was the relatively easy seizure of the Solar System by the lizard-like Throngi, five hundred years ago. Even as we suffered in the domes we did not lose our pride in our immediate forefathers who, a hundred years before, had made the Great Pilgrimage from the Far Stars to Earth, driven out the Throngi, founded the Kingdom of Terra and built the Temple which was the shrine of humans throughout the galaxy. We worshipped Earth and we venerated our ancestors. Even at the height of our degradation we still gathered in the streets for morning service, to sing the old pilgrim songs and pray for the continuation of humanity's reign on Terra. For us it was a holy war.

Unfortunately, the Throngi believe that it was from Earth that the cosmic currents carried the spores of intelligent life to all quarters of the galaxy. Though their religion is different they hold Earth to be sacred, as we do, since it is the Fountain of Life. When they returned to the attack, ten years ago, it was a struggle in which matters of belief and principle collided. Neither side would give or receive quarter; nor would either side admit defeat.

TWO

When the siege entered its tenth month, nine weeks after we had taken in our quota of refugees, conditions entered into their lowest ebb. Our hair grew long and, becoming filthy and matted, formed weird Gorgon masks of greasy, snake-like locks, out of which suspicious eyes glared with an unnatural brightness. Starting rib-cages and pot-bellies attested to our malnutrition, as did arms and legs so thin that they could quite easily be encircled by finger and thumb. We had long since lost all semblance of civilization in our appearance. Now, under the perpetual twilight of the dome's dimming lights, we seemed to be losing all traces of our individuality. First the differences between the age-groups blurred and became less apparent; then the differences between the sexes. Finally one ceased to notice any differences in height or build. It was as if we were each mirror-images, one of another. Mentally, too, we were sinking into the same common persona. We had stopped talking to one another and concerted action was carried on by means of some group instinct which gradually usurped the function of individual will or initiative. Time elongated itself into an arid desert, or became compressed into the passage of a blink. Actions taking less than a few minutes to perform seemed to fill days of our lives, while the events of days melted into the impression of a few seconds. The only thing which broke the monotony and prevented the trance from becoming a coma, was the daily act of worship. But that was a mutual emotional purging which merged the individual still further in the group. My memory of the time before I entered the city disappeared and with it my misery, since misery demands the memory of happiness to give it point. Then the king's message came to shake us from our inertia.

THREE

When the view-screens lit up and the fanfare came from the speakers, it was so long since they had been in use that few people realized what was happening. Some were so divorced from reality as to continue on their way as if nothing had happened, trapped in the daily routine. Others were terrified at the sudden noise and light and bolted for their homes under the impression that the Throngi were upon us. As for myself, the summons brought me to the surface as if, after months in free fall, I suddenly found the ground beneath my feet. Bemused, but fully aware, I stared up at the nearest view-screen, hanging from the underside of the dome. Without any announcement or warning, the king's face appeared.

King Asleck was little more than a boy. He had been only nine when he succeeded his father and he had been straightway plunged into the ten year war with Throngi. Never physically strong, it had been plain for some time that he was dying, killed by the strain and constant worry. Ill as he was, however, he looked considerably better than we did. He was hollow-cheeked and sunken-eyed but he did not have the skeleton face and glittering eyes of the starving. His hair was tidily cut and he wore a high-necked silk tunic, with the globe and crescent Pilgrim's badge on its breast. Conditions in the royal palace were obviously better than in the other cities. But it was impossible to feel envious of Asleck.

'My people,' he said. 'It makes me very sad that I am unable to visit you and share your troubles at this time. But, as you know, communications are difficult enough; transport is nearly impossible in the present situation. Besides which, for reasons of state, I must of necessity remain here where I can guide our war effort. But, because I cannot be with you in person, it does not mean that you are not always in my thoughts.

'And it is because I appreciate your difficulties that I have now decided to reverse the policy of defence which we instituted two years ago. Tomorrow, all the capital ships of the Terran fleet, under the command of Admiral Abran Loossi, will make a final, determined bid to smash the Throngian blockade. If they are successful they will proceed to Proxima Centauri to appeal for military and material aid from the Emperor of Sirius. If they should fail then we have made our last bid and must endure to the end.

'I ask you all to pray to the Mother of All that She guides us to success in this last endeavour.'

Then the band played "Earth it is of thee' and we sang. And the king's image faded from the screen.

A few of us, a pitiful few, seemed to respond to the lifeline of hope thrown us by the king. We made a few futile gestures towards tidying ourselves; gestures that were immediately negated by the conditions in which we existed. We began to talk to one another again and one or two voices were heard uplifted in song. But for the vast majority it was as if they had not heard a word the king had said. During the night which followed I tried to talk about the fleet's chances to my fifteen room-mates. But in answer to my words they stared at me glassy-eyed.

Yet there were enough who were aware and involved to fill the observation gallery at day-break. We were silent now and did not look at one another, only through the glass at the sky. The sun was shining but, with the atmosphere gone, the sky was black and full of stars. We were too far round the curvature of the Earth to be able to see the fleet ascend from the Tibetan Plateau. But we had all seen space-battles before and knew what to expect. We kept on watching and waiting.

In mid-morning it came, from a point to the left of the moon as we looked at it - a thin haze spreading across the sky and dimming the stars in that quarter. This was the after-blast of the first disrupter broadside fired between the two fleets. Then, as the few particles which existed in space became charged, the thin mist became brighter in quality. Finally, more than a tenth of the sky we could see was covered by a lurid patch - white-yellow at the fringe but blood-red at the heart, and shot with all the colours of the spectrum.

All this was more than a million miles distant so that it was a silent and detail-less battle we were watching. Yet no-one could tear themselves away from the spectacle and we stared into space for the entire afternoon. As the day wore on the patch slipped westward to the horizon, following the sun as the Earth's rotation carried the battle out of our sight.

As the patch neared the horizon it was dimming noticeably and it was obvious that the heat of batde had passed. Then, not long after sunset, the entire sky sparkled like the interference on a cathode ray tube, as the burning wrecks of the Terran fleet were pushed back into Earth's gravitational pull by the victorious Throngi. There was no delusion on our part. We never for one moment tried to pretend that these were Throngi ships. We knew from their size and the way they burned that they were ours. The fragments fell in an orbital girdle around the Earth and several fell within sight of the dome - red-hot sheets of metal blazing wildly while any oxygen remained within them to feed the flames. Then it was over and our hopes were dashed - it seemed for ever.

FOUR

With the death of that last, glorious hope, it seemed that more people than ever lapsed into a mood of deepest apathy. Yet I could not. It was like waking from a nightmare. Although you are unutterably weary and tired, you dare not go back to sleep in case you re-enter that nightmare. I knew now that there seemed no escape and that we would probably all die, either here or in a Throngian abattoir. Yet, if such were to be my fate, I wanted, quixotically, to be fully aware of it and not half-anaesthetized as were my fellows.

My defiance led me to the exhibition of some sense of amour propre. I forced my thirst to relinquish one cup of water a day which I devoted to getting some of the grime off my body. I found a pair of scissors and hacked off the tangle of my hair and beard. I even tried to wear a pair of dungarees, but my body-heat and sweat caused the material to chafe me and brought on a rash. So I stripped again but still managed to feel more human and less animal than before.

Only one message came after the destruction of our fleet. It was made by Bodwin, Lord of Luna and Chancellor of the kingdom. The gravity of his expression and the sorrow explicit in his voice might have led one to believe that he merely mourned the failure of the fleet about which he expressed his, regrets. But then he went on to say, 'Within twelve hours of receiving the news, our beloved King Asleck was dead.

'We, the council of magnates, have elected in his place Gie Loossi, Lord of Ceres. To secure the succession King Gie is to marry the Lady Lesina Flandray, sister to the late king. However, since King Gie was already married to the Lady Dinana Loossi, the marriage was celebrated according to the Capellan marital customs of King Gie's forbears. Lady Lesina will be known as Lesina Loossi, wife and queen-consort. Lady Din-ana will be known as Dinana Loossi, second Lady and companion of the royal bed-chamber.

The council of magnates calls on all cities, through their mayors, to pledge their loyalty to the king and his ladies. The king is dead - Long live the king and preserve him from his enemies.'

In a few idle days which remained I can remember wondering what the council was thinking of. It was well known that, whereas Abran Loossi, the admiral who had led that last futile attack, was a brave, if ignorant, man, his brother Gie was nothing but an arrant fool. And as for the two ladies who now shared his throne, their reputations had once made gossip-fodder for every space-captain who plied within the orbit of Pluto. The puzzle occupied my mind for a few days and was then banished by an event of much more importance. For the plague struck.

Bred in our filthy bodies and the stagnant sewers, the disease erupted in one night and had struck down and killed thousands within a matter of days. A handful of medical men struggled hard to overcome it but their efforts were doomed before they started. Not only was the sheer magnitude of the outbreak beyond them but they had no clear idea as to what disease it was they were fighting. It was quite a common affliction but the germs which caused it had been so mutated by the latent radiation as to make it incurable without laboratory and research facilities which we just did not possess. And the death roll doubled daily.

We could not bury the bodies since the floor of the dome was made of solid concrete. Nor could we cremate them since fuel was so short. Instead, the dead and dying lay where they fell, often rotting for days, until such time as an able-bodied man equipped with a space-suit could spare the time to drag the body outside the dome.

One after another my room-mates died while I remained immune - perhaps because of my recent interest in personal hygiene. As they fell ill I took my turn in caring for them, a care which was helped by the fact that, as our members grew less we had more water to spare so that I could sponge them down when they grew feverish and I had the liquid I needed for all my additional labour; for very few were able or willing to help. As I say, I think my immunity was partly due to my cleansing activities of the past few weeks. But I think I was also helped by the comparative activity of my mind. People caught the disease like sheep going unprotesting to the slaughter and then lay down happily to die. Even the still-fit, watched uncaring with their blank eyes, as people fell around them.

The plague raged for a fortnight until there was hardly anyone left to die. The streets emptied and the air cooled to the extent that we who were left had to resume the wearing of outer garments. There had not been a morning service for over a week and, for the first time, I began to feel the imminence of our defeat by the Throngi. After the heat and noise, a chill and silence had fallen over the city which seemed to be the chill and silence of death.

On the day that the last of my room-mates died I pushed his body in a hand-cart across the now-empty city, on my way to the main air-lock and his burial. The place where the suits were kept was deserted and the lock was unmanned. So, on my own initiative, I took down a suit and put it on and, working the mechanism myself, took my companion under the arms and dragged him outside.

Beyond the dome the only thing which had once dominated the landscape was the space-ship owned by the city. Now however, one's attention was drawn, not to the slender shape of the ship, but to the great mound of the dead which rose out of the plain like a man-made mountain - the death-roll had been so heavy. Usually, in the silent solitude of the open ground, that mound was an oppressive and ever-present magnet for one's eyes. Today, in sharp contrast to the deserted city streets, my attention was distracted by the numbers of people moving about. The space about the dome was almost hectically busy and the tiny radio in my helmet crackled with the number of conversations proceeding.

I ignored them, although several figures moved towards me. I went about my sad task of disposing of poor Joe, dropping his body on the heap. I would have liked toy have said the Office of Rest for him. But I knew neither his surname, titles or planet of origin - so I was unable to observe the forms (Earth have him in Her care). But I bowed my head for a moment or two.

'You have managed to survive the plague?' The voice boomed in my helmet, loud and clear with proximity. I turned. I thought that in the past few weeks I had grown to know all the active inhabitants of the city but this man was a stranger to me. I looked more closely at his suit, which bore an unfamiliar blue chequer pattern, and I saw that the globe and crescent of his badge was surmounted by the small crown which meant that he was in the royal service. My eyes left him for a second and I glanced quickly around. Then I saw that close behind the city's ship stood another, so close as to appear a trick of the light to an unguarded eye. Then, by looking even closer, I could see that there was a fair sprinkling of the blue check suits among the crowd which moved across the space between city, ships and dead. It seemed that we had visitors.

'Yes,' I said finally, in answer to his question.

'Have you any space-going experience?' was his inconsequential rejoinder.

'I was astrogator-videist in the service of my Lord Tel-fan of Ganymede,' I replied. 'Before the Throngi attacks became too pressing for commercial flights, that is.'

'Thank the Mother for that,' he said. 'The king has recalled all those ships which remain planetside and he wants each city to crew its own ship. My men are searching the dome now but, until you turned up, the only men we had found who had ever been in space were two pilear mechanics. Unless we find someone fairly soon it looks as though you will become captain of your city's ship ... by default.'

And the only man they found was an ex-purser who had retired from the Sirian run more than twenty years previously. That's all I can say. I wish I could describe my feelings and the reactions of my fellow-citizens; how we evacuated the city and prepared the ship. But it is all a blank in my memory. To leave the dome after so long and in such a manner as to suggest that a strong organization still existed elsewhere; the change in our circumstances was too great and too sudden to be assimilated at once. We stood around waiting for the word to be given that all were out of the city except the dead and dying. There were some two hundred of us at the finish -men relieved to be leaving the dome at last; men hating the dome but shocked by being torn from a place to which they had become rooted by the depth of their experience there; men who were dismayed to find a population of forty thousand whittled away to the complement of a smallish space-ship.

At last the word was given to my informant and he turned to me, 'So you are our senior officer,' he said. *We can give you a skeleton crew to help you get your ship back to Everest. But after that we shall expect you to train your own fellow-citizens to work the ship.'

I nodded and gathered together my motley force, together with the half-dozen men who would actually pilot the ship. Then we shut our doors against that reproachful mountain of dead.

FIVE

The ship lifted easily enough, with our sister-ship following closely. And the lights of the deserted city began to wink out as its cybernetic guardians sensed the removal of living charges from their care. Then, suddenly the entire dome mushroomed up in a gout of smoke and flame. Over the loudspeaker a voice said unemotionally, 'We were sorry to have to do that but it is essential that we do not leave the Throngi a foothold on the planet. You may consider it, if you like, as an hygienic way of disposing of the dead.' There was silence from my companions. I think they felt the shock of our departure all the more for their umbilical link with the past being cut so brutally. Personally, I was too bound up in the sheer joy of flight to spare a thought for the city.

I had once studied for my master's certificate and, although I had only faced the control panel of a trainer and, although it was five years since I had last left Earth, all my acquired know-lege came flooding back within seconds of liftoff. Aided by two lieutenants from the royal ship, I was soon handling the controls with assurance and, as we felt the first stomach-turning surge of free-fall, I felt freer and cleaner than I had for many months; even though we were tied to an orbital trajectory and did not touch true space.

Below us the devastated face of Earth revealed her scars. Everywhere we looked the land shone deep blue with the burns of radiation. And if you looked up you could see that electric blue mirrored in the dots and dashes which were the ion-trails of patrolling Throngi ships mounting blockade. It was a narrow course we had to steer between the deadliness below and the menace above.

But my astrogator was a minor genius. We required no course corrections and we started our descent at the exact point where the Everest ground-crew could pick us up with their tractor-beams and lower us gently on to the ground-pad. And that was a work requiring some delicacy because the pad bristled with ships like a sea of frozen metal. The impression of numbers was an illusion I know. There were, I think, one hundred and thirty cities left on Earth, and not all of them had been able to contribute their ships. There were about as many royal ships left after the fleet had been destroyed. So there were, at most, three hundred ships on that field. But in their serried ranks they seemed to stretch to the horizon in a city of shining spires having sprung up overnight like mushrooms in a culture-bed.

Before the tubes were fully cool, men were spilling out of the lock, eager after their long incarceration to see Everest -'shrine and fleshpot of the pilgrim planet' as an historian once called the capital. Very conscious of my new-found dignity I followed more slowly; but no less eagerly. However I found my previous informant waiting for me at the foot of the elevator shaft. He now introduced himself as Lieutenant Cori of the royal navy.

'My men will look after your crew,' he said. 'But I'm afraid that you are expected to attend the audience the king is giving to the city captains. So I must take you there. Then I'll show you your quarters and, after that perhaps we can see something of the city.'

I followed him across the pad towards the towering buildings of the royal palace. At first I thought that there might be some trouble in the air system of my suit, or that the altitude might have affected me because the distant perspective seemed to advance and recede. Then, as the singing in my ears increased in pitch, the face-plate of my helmet started to mist up as my body-heat increased in fever. Far, far, far away I heard Cori say something and then there was nothing but the floor rising to meet me. My last conscious thought was regret that immunity should only be apparent and should only persist until such time as the promise of release had been dangled tantalizingly before me.

In the time which followed I relived my two years in the bubble city. I thought I was dead and transported to some hell modelled for me alone. But there were occasional flashes of lucidity which told me I only dreamt and that, somewhere outside myself, the world went on. Like a fish peering out of his bowl I used to stare up into a circular world which was at times fringed with the heads of watchers, sometimes inhabited by only one or two. Sometimes I could see nothing but ceiling, but there were voices there, far away and muffled so that I could not understand them.

Then there came a longer period of consciousness when I became aware of the tank in which I lay, bathed in a nutrient solution with innumerable wires taped to my body. The faces were there again, peering over the rim of the tank and this time I distinctly heard one say, 'Here's one who will live. I think we could have him out of there now.'

And hands reached in towards me. But, as they detached the wires from my skin I lost consciousness again.

Later I woke in a small darkened room. For the first time I was in full possession of my faculties; I knew where I was and what I had gone through. At first I thought I was alone but I heard a slight sound and, turning my head, I saw a man rise from where he had been sitting and come to my bedside. As the light fell on his face I recognized him and an instinctive prompter in my mind made me sit up in has presence.

'Please lie back,' he said. 'You will only harm yourself. And, since the king has stripped me of my titles and estates, I no longer have the right to demand your courtesy. I am no longer Lord Bodwin of Luna, but merely Bodwin Tomos, a spaceship captain. A post which, by the way, I have gained at your expense. While you were ill your crew elected me as captain. With you as my first officer, of course, if you should live.'

Through a throat, cracked and dry through non-use, I managed to say that I would be honoured. Then we began to talk.

During the next few days Bodwin was never far from my room. His interest was due partly, I think, to his sympathy for me; partly out of interest in a man with whom he must work closely. But largely it was because he could talk freely to me and work some of the resentment out of his system. It was known that the Brothers of the Hospital would never allow the king's spy-phones to be placed in their cells. Therefore the corridors of the hospital were thronged with the demoted nobility come to talk in safety to those, like myself, who had been stricken by the plague - though, thank the Good Mother, in a place where the cure was known for all but the most extreme cases.

I learnt a lot from Bodwin in those few days. I learnt for example that the magnates had originally chosen Gie as king because they felt that a weak king would leave the administration of the kingdom in their hands. They had devised a plan whereby the ships of Earth would be collected together to act as an evacuation fleet - it was felt that after the plague had swept the cities there were too few people left to defend an Earth which was no longer really worth defending. But the shadow-king had suddenly found a will of his own. This overfoolish man was torn between the conflicting ambitions of his two wives and was eager to make his own mark upon life. He had therefore devised a plan whereby, instead of leaving under flag of truce, the fleet would lift and plunge toward the sun. It was hoped that the Throngi would believe that they were set either on mass-suicide or on panic-stricken escape. Then, when the fleet was hidden by the glare and radiation of the sun, they would double back and take the Throngi in the rear.

Of course the magnates, led by Bodwin, had protested. But the king felt himself to be strong. The palace guard was fanatically devoted to him (or his wives - both were said to have a taste for young, handsome guardsmen and to be liberal with their favours). Also, three out of the nine seemed to favour the course of death and glory. Bodwin of Luna, Telfan of Ganymede, Sebor Saturnini, Thack Pitor of Transmundu, the Priestess Elfoten and the Lady Pantar of Venus - all these were deprived of their titles and rights and, together with their associates, forced to make what terms they could to secure places with the fleet. My crew had chosen Bodwin as their captain, despite his expressed wish to do no more than serve in the humblest capacity. And indeed, they and I were pleased to have him. We knew we had to follow the fleet but we knew that with Bodwin as captain there would be no foolhardy, albeit glorious gestures.

SIX

I was present on two occasions when there was a confrontation between King Gie and Bodwin. The first was three days after I was let out of hospital, and we attended a reception given by the king for all captains and first officers in the fleet. Bodwin had not wanted to go but his former colleagues, who had been demoted with him, persuaded him to attend so that we could make one last stand against the king's plans. I, for one, was glad when he decided to attend since I was eager to see this king we had been given.

The reception was held in the great hall of the royal palace where, at the height of the kingdom's glory, one glittering occasion had followed another. The present occasion was far from glittering and most certainly not happy. An atmosphere of hate and distrust pervaded the hall so that as we entered it we felt our nerves tense in response. The people were separated into two quite distinct camps. On the one hand were the Terran born. Once the most loyal of the king's subjects the death of Asleck had marked a watershed in our loyalties. Years of conflict and compromise with the Throngi had turned us into realists. When the last of the line of kings which had been installed by the Pilgrims had passed away it was as we woke to that reality and realized what a barren future we faced. Asleck was the personification of an ideal but Gie meant nothing to us and we merely wanted to leave, without fuss.

But opposite us were ranged the newcomers; young men for the most part who had come to Earth in the last few years still burning with zeal and ambition. They had never seen a green and fruitful Earth, only its shattered ghost. But they were the fanatic sons of fanatics who had been told that the greatest allegiance known to Man was his loyalty to Earth. And if they were shown a burnt-out clinker and told that that was Earth they were perfecdy capable of transferring their loyalties to it quite blindly.

The Terran-born magnates had installed Gie Loossi as king intending him to be a mouthpiece without any power. But to the newcomers Gie, as a Capellan, was one of themselves and they gave their loyalty to him so enthusiastically that they gave him that power that the old aristocracy would have denied him. No wonder then that relations were strained - I do believe that there was less difference in attitude between we Terrans and the Throngi than there was between us and the newcomers.

The king's wives were not there - thank the Mother. They hated each other, despised their husband and ignored everyone else. Any group of which they and he formed part bore within it the seeds of violence. So it was a relief to see them absent. But the king's eminence grise was there. Renal of Chatlan was another newcomer who had managed to worm his way into exalted circles by way of his gaiety, charm and bravery in battle. But if he was gay, he was flippant; if he was charming, he was insincere; and if he was brave, he was sadistically cruel. He also hated the Throngi with an unreasoned lust which had often led him into treachery in his dealings with them. He it was, without a doubt, who had put the plan of attack into Gie's mind. The king's wives could never have thought of it since the Lady Dinana asked for nothing more than to hold court on Everest while there was food to eat and air to breathe; while the Lady Lesina, as a member of the Flandray dynasty, agreed with the Terran-born - though she would never demean herself to say so.

As soon as Bodwin entered the hall the conflict resolved itself. The newcomers ranged themselves behind the king -or rather they ranged themselves behind the puppet of Renal the puppetmaster. And, because of Bodwin's lineage and his prestige as ex-Chancellor, he had become the natural champion of the Terran-born. The crowd was now divided physically as well as figuratively, with a clear alleyway showing between both sides in which stood Gie, Renal, Bodwin and I, slightly in advance of our respective supporters. The origi-inal plan had been for King Gie to address the assembly but now he spoke instead, directly to Bodwin.

'My lo . . . Captain Bodwin. This difference between us hurts us all. Won't you be reconciled to me. Rejoin the Council and help us to lead the fleet against the enemy.'

"Your majesty,' boomed Bodwin, ensuring that his voice could be heard throughout the hall, 'I ask for nothing more than to return to my natural allegiance and take my place on the Council. Then I could help you in the negotiations with the Throngi which will obtain our honourable withdrawal from this planet.'

'Retreat?' shouted an incredulous voice from the opposing crowd, while another yelled, 'You would negotiate with the Throngi?'

•Yes,' was the simple answer and there was an instant babble among the newcomers, several voices being heard to say, 'Compromise.'

*Every man must compromise to Kve,' Bodwin said and the angry voices grew angrier. For a moment my blood ran cold. Little more than three years previously, on King Gie's home planet, a returning pilgrim had been torn to pieces by the crowd, merely for suggesting that the Throngi were not totally evil.

TJo you mean,' said Gie, 'that you would desert the Earth and betray the Mother?'

'And can you not see that Earth is dead?' retorted Bodwin.

"No-one believes now that the Mother is identical with the Earth. She is a part of each of us - Her children. Let's go back to the Far Stars and work for the Glory of Man - not for a barren lump of rock.'

'Traitor' ... 'Blasphemer' ... 'Throngi-lover!' It was an animal cry with an underlying note of malicious aggression. I really think they might have attacked us if Bodwin had not turned on his heel and led us from the hall. As he reached the door the king called after him, 'You will return to your ships and you will accompany the fleet. Or stand forsworn as traitors.'

Telfan, former Lord of Ganymede and once my overlord, came up to Bodwin as we left the ante-chamber and whispered urgently, 'Why not make a break for the ships. We could perhaps come to an agreement with the Throngi and get to Centauri; the Sirian Emperor is bound to give us refuge.'

*No,' said Bodwin, and his voice was full of regret, 'I hate this futile gesture as much as you and if we were still on the Council I could not be associated with it. But since I am ordered to go by the king I helped to elect myself, I cannot in honour shirk my duty without being forsworn as he says. I cannot dictate to your conscience but I think we must go. Then, if we come through this alive, then will be the time to go to Centauri.'

Walking in his wake, I told myself that I too had once had a sense of honour and duty but it could not survive long if I were continually offered hope, only to have it snatched from me. Especially now, when we seemed doomed to die on an enterprise everyone whose opinion I respected agreed was fatal. Yet, at the same time, I had to admit that if I were offered the chance of escape I doubted that I would take it. Reason was strong but sentiment was more powerful.

SEVEN

The last fleet ever assembled by the Kingdom of Terra lifted from the Tibetan Plateau on the Eve of Ecclestation Day, in the hundred and seventh year of the Foundation. Every man left on Earth was involved and every ship. This was the final commitment. It was a brave affair, with flags flying and banners waving, the cheers of-the crowd and the bands playing - though, with no atmosphere, all had to be electronically simulated. The crews gathered by their ships in parade order while the king walked proudly by, followed by his wives and his closest associates. Renal of Chatlan prominent among them. They swaggered past in their own auras of optimism while we who looked on remained convinced of the imminence of our own deaths.

The fleet lifted gracefully enough, leaving the summit of the mountain deserted except for the golden figure of the Mother atop Her shrine. No explosion shook that out of existence. Whether we succeeded or failed the Shrine of Earth was too holy for us to bear the taint of sacrilege into battle after having destroyed it. We took our last look at Her upraised arm which flashed in the sun. Then we shut our eyes to the sights of Earth and turned our gaze outwards.

The computers hummed and chattered vigorously because our course was a matter of the utmost precision. We were set to an elliptical orbit sharply within that of earth, which would graze the outer fringes of the sun and then take us deep into space and back in the rear of the blockading Throngi. In the calculation of that orbit we could afford no mistakes because the passage of the sun was critically measured. Too far out and we would lose the element of surprise we needed, too near and we would be unable to escape the solar gravitational pull. Our lives and the success of the entire enterprise depended on the hair's breadth calculations of each ship's computers.

At first all went well. The Throngi expected that we would do either one of two things. We were either coming out to fight in which case half the Throngi fleet waited for us in a Translunar orbit. Or we were making a run for Proxima Cen-tauri in which case we would switch to interstellar drive as soon as we hit free fall. The other half of the Throngi fleet was already beyond Pluto, matching our potential F.T.L. velocity in readiness to intercept. When we did neither of these things they were nonplussed. The few patrol-ships which still blocked our path were blasted out of our way without difficulty and we were away from Earth, leaving a divided and confused enemy behind us.

The hours which followed were as boring as space-flight can be. At five-minute intervals the pilot ship of the fleet would drone out the time, the orbital distance, any course corrections and always the same ending - 'No pursuit.' Except for the astrogator-techs there was nothing for us to do; we just sat and waited.

We crossed the Venusian orbit, then the Mercurian. Then it began to get hot.

After our years in the domes I think we had all acquired a certain immunity to excessive heat and at first we did not notice how the thermometer had soared. It was Bodwin, who had spent the last few years in the comparative coolness of Everest, who first noticed the heat and commented on it. Then, even the most hardened began to notice. It first became apparent in the discomfort involved in touching a metal surface. But as we came more and more under the sun's influence it began to affect the air so that it seemed to move sluggishly and lie on one's body like a blanket. Our lungs turned into fiery bellows gasping for breath and that breath-lessness affected our movements and lowered a red veil before our eyes.

Bodwin's voice swam rather than cut through the fug. 'I think we would feel more comfortable if we stripped.' So we relieved ourselves of our clinging uniforms, retaining only our boots - since the first man to step on the metal floor with his bare feet had screamed with the pain. It was as if the wheel had come full circle from our time in the domes when we stood naked, the sweat running down our bodies in a glistening torrent and, falling to the floor, evaporating on contact with the hot floor so that each of us moved in a self-made, calf-high fog of steam.

The voice of our unemotional pilot came over the intercom, 'It is recommended that you move radiation screens to solside of your vessels. We are about to commence the transit.'

(About to commence? Surely it was nearly over?)

Having stripped, and having moved the screens between us and the sun, we gained some temporary relief. But it was merely temporary and with every moment we lost the respite we had won.

It was as we began to feel weak again under the glare; when we were totally committed to the solar orbit, that the alarm bells shattered the thick silence and a voice over the intercom began to shout 'Red - Echo - Three - eight - four.' Then another voice cut in with 'Red - Echo - Three - eight -eight.' Then there was another voice with another sighting and then another, and another until the air, what with the bells and the voices, throbbed with a palpable sound which ultimately mingled with the crude crackle of a space-disrupter. The Throngi had found us.

The voice of the king as commander-in-chief cut across the voices of the look-outs. 'You will prepare for action,' he said, 'Combat suits Will be worn and stations will be manned at all times.'

The heat was hardly bearable when our bodies could breathe. Now we had to smother them in the harsh folds of our suits and isolate ourselves in our oven-like prisons. Then we must creep into the foetid bolt-holes of the disrupter-ports to peer in vain through sweat-blurred sights. Under the sun's glare the viewscreens were inoperative and the echo-scanners little better. Yet we had to seek out the minute blips which were Throngi ships with our faulty equipment. Since the Throngi are not affected by vacuum, heat or radiation and since they are quite careless of individual life, their combat-ships are little else but a motor and a basic framework within which the pilot can sit, quite exposed except for the oxygen masks over his gills. As a result their inertia is almost nonexistent and they are infinitely manoeuvrable. We were forced by our orbital path to wallow on along our pre-ordained course while the enemy could weave in and out of the fleet like birds through trees. One sweated away to get a Throngian in your sights and, before the trigger could be pulled, the ship was gone; and might be a hundred miles away. One or two Throngi vessels disappeared in gouts of energy but the white mist shot through with a purple-black told me that our losses were more like four to their one - and theirs were one-man ships while ours were crewed by two hundred each.

After an hour of battle I was spelled by one of the crew and I made my way back to the main cabin where Bodwin stood at the control panel, involved in a vigorous debate with someone over the intra-ship system. I only caught the tail-end of the conversation which Bodwin ended with the words, 'It is'the only thing we can do then - if that's your opinion.' He broke contact and turned to face me, looking as weary as I felt. 'The drive-techs report that the engine is in a near-critical state,' he said, 'It only needs one more disrupter beam to score a direct hit on us and the whole ship goes up. I'm going to have to move some of the radiation screens to face the enemy.' I nodded my agreement without fully understanding what it was he was suggesting. In fact I only began to grasp it when I heard the great protective fans begin to rotate about the ship, leaving whole stretches of our side exposed to the full glare of the sun.

How long, O Mother, did it last? I do not know. I was certainly not fully conscious for the rest of that rime, though it seems I carried out my duties well enough. But every movement had to be carefully considered and, in execution one's body shrieked in protest. We were slowly beginning to die and must surely have done so if our ships had not emerged from their flirtation with the sun.

The temperature went down so much more slowly than it had risen that it was a very long time before we realized that it was cooler. It was only when the Throngi attacks lessened and we had time to think that the fact sank in. The heat lessened, the attacks ceased and we half-extricated ourselves from our suits and sat down to let our jangled nerves unwind. And, as our viewscreens cleared, a voice yelled over the intercom, 'Halt.'

We gave the order and brought the ship to a halt and our eyes went to the screens. Behind and to one side was a blazing segment of the sun filling our horizon. Around us was the Terran fleet, once diamond-shaped in formation but tattered now as if the diamond had been inexpertly cut. At the periphery of our vision were the light interceptors of the Throngi, hovering like jackals round a herd of dying cattle. But ahead of us was a glowing siver crescent - the assembled Throngi fleet in full strength. Our hopes of a surprise attack were long since gone. Now, if we wanted to escape we would have to fight for it.

That voice, that lisp so symptomatic of everything that was weak and poor in King Gie, spoke softly to us, 'The Aurelia, the Day-Break, Artemis,'' he went on to list twelve ships, 'These ships will lead an attack on the exact centre of the enemy line in the hope that we can divide the two wings of his fleet. The rest of the fleet will follow in close support.'

Aboard the Day-Break we looked hard at one another. It was obvious that we were being detailed to form a suicide squad in the hope that before we were destroyed we would succeed in blasting a hole through the alien fleet. It was equally obvious that the twelve ships mentioned were those which contained those members of the nobility demoted for arguing with the king. Even at this time Gie Loossi had time to vent some personal spite on his enemies.

As Bodwin understood the full significance of the message, he seemed to straighten himself and I remembered his stated reason for accepting his demotion so tamely. He believed the mission was doomed to failure which is why he argued against it. His family pride would not permit him to be associated with a futile gesture. But that pride equally dictated that he should serve his elected king so long as the responsibility for giving the orders lay elsewhere. He half-smiled now as destiny called him. He bent to the communicator and made swift arrangements with the eleven other captains. Then he gave a collective order to the drive-tech, 'Run engines and damp them.'

The muffled drone of the engines grew to a bellow, to a protesting shriek as the dampers prevented the released energy from escaping through the tubes; storing up our potential acceleration like a miser's hoard. Then, 'Engineers. Gun them.' The lever slammed home; the dampers blew out and we leapt from rest at a speed which created a force in excess of iog. I slammed back in my seat and blacked out for a second.

When I came to, the ship was tearing towards the line of Throngi ships and collision seemed imminent. Yet, just as that line of waiting ships loomed enormous in our view-screens, it suddenly went away. With a speed as great as ours the Throngi commander moved his ships out of our path so that when our disrupters opened up they poured their energies into the blackness of outer space. We flashed through the gap before we had realized what had happened and, such was our momentum, that we, were two thousand miles out before we brought our ships to a halt. And by that time, the gap was closed again.

Twelve ships out of three hundred, we stopped in that vast emptiness and watched the Throngi fleet close in on the king's ships as a net closes on a shoal of fish. Bodwin sat in mute astonishment and it was I who leant forward and gave the command to proceed to Centauri. There was nothing we could do. The king's position was beyond redemption now. We must now go to the Empire to tell the galaxy of the loss of Mother Earth, to raise the ransom for those who would be captured and to live out our lives in penitential shame for our part in that loss.

EIGHT

The second time that I saw Bodwin and King Gie come face-to-face was about a year after we had arrived in the Empire following the fall of Earth.

We were not well received. The Sirian Empire was the successor state to the first Terran Interstellar Confederacy. To the Sirians therefore, the Far Stars which had broken with the Confederacy during the Interregnum, were inhabited by barbarians. The Empire had tolerated the Kingdom of Terra since it had been founded at their invitation to form a buffer-state between the heart worlds of the Empire and the Rimward planets of the Throngi. Also, since a century of proximity had given Terran society overtones of Sirian civilization, we were perhaps a little more tolerable to them than the newcomers and pilgrims. But we refugees were an embarrassment to them as well as causing some resentment since our story brought the pilgrims flooding in from the Far Stars, all hoping to use the Empire as a springboard to launch a new pilgrimage which would rescue Earth from the Throngi.

But, if the Sirians resented us, we were hated by the pilgrims. They came to the planets of Proxima Centauri horrified at the decadence they had found on the heart worlds of the Empire; utterly shocked that under the protection of the Imperial Trade Commission, Throngi could freely walk the streets of the capital. Then they found us and focused all their resentment on us. For ten years they had neglected us while we had held the Throngi at bay with dwindling resources. Only when Earth was lost did they discover how precious its possession was to them. And the greater their neglect of Earth, the more they hated us for losing it.

So we hid ourselves away and tried to live as obscurely as we were able. So it was several months after the event before we heard that Gie had come to Centauri. For, despite the parismony of the Empire, the ransom had been collected and paid and the leading prisoners freed. NNkh Hmmhh, the Throngian admiral had treated them with the greatest courtesy; all except for Renal of Chatlan whom he had personally torn apart and eaten for his war crimes against the Throngi. King Gie he had looked after in his own household and had permitted him to leave, even before the ransom arrived, conditional upon Gie's oath never to bear arms against the Throngi again.

When we had the news of the non-aggression agreement we almost expected King Gie to join us in our small colony of pariahs. For surely the pilgrims would shun him for making such an agreement. Yet, though he came to us, it was in a most unexpected fashion.

The door-caller warbled one evening as we were preparing to go to bed. I shared rooms at that time with Bodwin, Telfan and three former fellow-citizens. It was one of the latter who went to the door and came back with a figure muffled in the enveloping cloak of a Centauran Watchman. And that was King Gie. We all six bowed our heads in respect since, despite our opinion of him, he was still, by title, king of Terra. We stood foolishly silent for a few minutes, conscious of the constraint of our last meeting. Then the king said, 'My Lord Bodwin I shall come straight to the point. I want you to resume your tides and allegiance and come with me. My soldiers have seized the satellites of Pluto. They are under siege by the Throngi but they can hold out until such time as the Fleet of Pilgrimage can be assembled. We have our beachhead and we can regain Earth but we need the experience and help of yourself and Lord Telfan here.' 'But your oath ...' protested Bodwin.

'It was given under duress, to aliens who do not follow the Mother. Can such an oath be binding?'

I held my breath. I gathered Gie's speech was supposed to be conciliatory but, knowing Bodwin's mind, I expected him to say something which would gain us a lifetime of ostracism. To my astonishment, Bodwin went down on his knees and began to declaim the oath of allegiance. When'he rose Telfan took his place and while Gie's attention was held I took Bod-win by the arm.

'My Lord,' I said, 'what do you mean to do? You know that you regard all hopes based on Earth as futile. Why pander to those hopes?'

He looked towards me but his gaze was distant, 'At least it gives a meaning to life which we have lost here. You and I were born to serve Earth and, though our reason tells us that Earth is dead, we can no more sever our ties with the planet than we can deny our ancestors' blood. Why did you suffer for so long in your city? Why did we follow the King into the sun? There was no reason for what we did except our own belief that it was right.'

So, in the end, I kneeled to King Gie. In a few days the new fleet will blast off towards Pluto and the relief of the garrison. And from there, we shall try to rescue an Earth which, intrinsically, is not worth one of the thousands of lives which will be lost in its rescue. Yet it proves, I suppose, that faith, emotion and loyalty are stronger bonds than reason. I certainly know of no rational reason why I should go. But you - you who have read this statement and know what we said and thought and did. You tell me why we do it.

T—b

and he fell backwards, disintegrating, quite washing away his discussion, savage discussion of multi-value logic, with Charteris. Also, she was troubled because she thought she saw a dog scuttle by wearing a red and black tie. Bombardment of images. They stood in a web of alternatives.

Phil Brasher said, 'I ought to kill Charteris.' Charteris was eating up his possible future at an enormous pace. Brasher saw himself spent, like that little rat Robbins, who had stood as saint and had not been elected. This new man, whom he had at first welcomed as a disciple, was as powerful as the rising sun, blanking Brasher's mind. He no longer got the good images from the future. It was dead, there was a dead area, all he saw was that damned Christmas cactus which he loathed for its meaninglessness, like flowers on a grave. So he generated hate and said powerfully and confusedly to Charteris, 'I ought to kill Charteris.'

'Wait, first wait,' said Colin Charteris, in his slightly accented and perfect English. 'Think of Ouspensky's personality photographs. You have many alternatives. We are all rich in alternatives.' He had been saying that all afternoon, during this confused walk, as he knew. The damp smudged crowded city, matured to the brown nearest black, gave off this rich aura of possibilities, which Brasher clearly was not getting. Charteris had glimpsed the world-plan, the tides of the future, carried them within him, was not so much superior to as remote from the dogged Brasher and Brasher's pale-thighed wife, Angeline. There were many alternatives; that was what he would say when next he addressed the crowds. A power was growing in him; he stood back modest and amazed to see it and recognize its sanctity. Brasher grabbed his wet coat and waved a fist in his face, an empty violent man saying, 'I ought to kill you!' Traffic roared by them, vehicles driven by drivers seeing visions, on something called Inner Relief Road.

The irrelevant fist in his face; in his head, the next oration. You people - you midland people are special, chosen. I have come from the south of Italy to tell you so. The roads are built, we die on them and live on them, neural paths made actual. The Midlands of England is a special region; you must rise and lead Europe. Less blankly put than that, but the ripeness of the moment would provide the right words, and there would be a song, Charteris we cry! He could hear it although it was not yet written. Not lead but deliver Europe. Europe is laid low by the psychedelic bombs; even neutral France cannot help, because France clings to old nationalist values. I was an empty man, a materialist, waiting for this time. You have the alternatives now.

You can think in new multi-value logics, because that is the pattern of your environment. The fist swung at him. Ange-line's face was taking in the future, traffic-framed. It seemed to me I was travelling aimlessly until I got here.

'I was just passing through on my way to Scotland, belting up the motorway. But I stopped here because here is my destiny. Think in fuzzy sets. There is no either-or, black-white dichotomy any more. There is only a spectrum of par-tiallys. Live by this, as I do - you will win. We have to think new. It's easy in this partially country.'

But Brasher was hitting him. He looked at the fist, saw all its lines and tensions as Brasher had never seen it,'a fist less human than many of the natural features of the man-formed landscape in this wonderful traffic-tormented area. A fist struck him on the jaw.

Even in this extreme situation, Charteris thought, multi-value logic is the Way. I am chopsing something between being hit and not being hit; I am not being hit very much.

He heard Angeline screaming to her husband to stop. She seemed not to have been affected by the P.C.A. Bomb, the Psycho-Chemical Aerosols that had sprayed most of Europe, including Britain, in the Acid Head War. But it was difficult to tell; the effects were so intricate. Charteris had a theory that women were less affected than men. He liked Angeline, but disliked her screaming. Bombardment of images, linked to her scream - theory of recurrence? - especially toads and the new animal in the dead trees at home.

There was a way to stop the screaming without committing oneself to asking her to cease. Charteris clutched at Brasher's ancient blue coat, just as the older man was about to land another blow. Behind Brasher, on the other side of Inner Relief, was an old building of the drab ginger stone of Leicestershire, to which a modern glass-and-steel porch had been tacked. A woman was watering a potted plant in it. All was distinct to Charteris as he pulled Brasher forward and then heaved him backward into Inner Relief.

The lorry coming from the north swerved out. The old Cortina blazing along towards it spun across the narrow verge, swept away the glass-and-steel porch, and was itself hit by a post office van which had driven out to avoid the lorry. The lorry, still bucking across the road, hit another oncoming car which could not stop in time. Another vehicle, its brakes squealing, ran into the wall within feet of where Charteris and Angeline stood, and crumpled up. A series of photographs, potentialities multiplying or cancelling.

'So many alternatives,' Charteris said wonderingly. He was interested to see that Brasher had disappeared, bits of him distributed somewhere among the wreckage. He remembered a multiple crash he had seen on the autostrada near Milano. This was much richer, and he saw a tremendous Tightness in the shape of wreckage; it was like a marvellous - he said it to the girl, 'It is like a marvellous complex work of sculpture, where to the rigorous man-formed shapes is added chance. The art of the fortuitous.'

She was green and drab, swaying on her heels. He tried looking closely at the aesthetic effect of this colour-change, and recalled from somewhere in his being a sense of pity. She was hurt, shocked, although he saw a better future for her. He must perform a definite action of some sort: remove her from the scene.

She went unprotestingly with him.

'I think Charteris is a saint. He has spoken with great success in Rugby and Leicester,' Burton said.

'He has spoken with great success in Rugby and Leicester,' Robbins said, thinking it over. Robbins was nineteen, his hair very long and dirty; he had been an art student; his psychedelic-disposed personality had disintegrated under the effect of being surrounded by acid heads, although he was not personally caught by the chemicals. Burton had been a third-yearer, had turned agent, ran the pop group, the Escalation, operated various happenings; he had run Robbins as a saint with some reward, until Robbins had deflated one morning into the role of disciple. They lived with a couple of moronic girls in old housing in the middle of Loughborough, overlooking the rear of F. W. Woolworth's. All round the town was new building, designed to cope with the fast-growing population; but the many conflicting eddies of society had sent people gravitating towards -the old core. The straggle of universities and technical colleges stood in marshy fields. It was February.

'Well, he spoke with great success in Leicester,' Burton said.

'Ay, he did that. Mind you, I was a success in Leicester,' Robbins said.

TJon't run down Leicester,' Greta said. 'I came from there. At least, my uncle did. Did I ever tell you my Dad was a Risparían? An Early Risparían. My Mum would not join.'

Burton dismissed all reminiscence with a sweep of his hand. He lit a reefer and said, 'We are going to have a crusade.'

He could see it. Charteris was good. He was foreign and people were ready for foreigners. Foreigners were exotic. And Charteris had this whole thing he believed in. People could take it in. Charteris was writing a book.

The followers were already there. Brasher's following. Charteris beat Brasher at any meeting. You'd have to watch Brasher. The man thought he was Jesus Christ. Even if he is Jesus Christ, my money's on Charteris. Colin Charteris. Funny name for a Jugoslav!

'Let's make a few notes about it,' he said. 'Robbins, and you Gloria.'

•Greta.'

'Greta, then. A sense of place is what people want - something tangible among all the metaphysics. Charteris actually likes this bloody dump. I suppose it's new to him. We'll take him round, tape-record him. Where's the tape-recorder?' He was troubled by images and a presentiment that they would soon be driving down the autobahns of Europe. He saw the sign to Frankfurt.

'I'll show him my paintings,' Robbins said. 'And he'll be interested about the birds.'

'What about the birds?'

'A sense of place. What they do, you know, like the city.' They liked the city, the birds. He had watched, down where the tractor was bogged down in the muddy plough, the landscape the brown nearest black under the thick light. It was the sparrows and starlings, mainly. There were more of them in the towns. They nested behind the neon signs, over the fish and chip shops, near the Chinese restaurants, for warmth, and produced more babies than the ones in the country, learning a new language. The seagulls covered the ploughed field. They were always inland. You could watch them, and the lines of the grid pencilled on the sky. They were evolving, giving up the sea. Or maybe the sea had shrivelled up and gone. God knows what the birds are up to, acid-headed like everything else.

'What are you talking about?' She loved him really, but you had to laugh.

'We aren't the only ones with a population explosion. The birds too. Remember that series of paintings I did of birds, Burton? Flowers and weeds, too. Like a tide. Pollination explosion.'

'Just keep it practical, sonnie. Stick to buildings, eh?' Maybe he could unzip his skull, remove the top like a wig, and pull that distracting Frankfurt sign out of his brain.

'The pollination explosion,' Charteris said. 'That's a good title. I write a poem called The Pollination Explosion. The idea just came into my head. And the time will come when, like Judas, you try to betray me.'

Angeline was walking resting on his arm, saying nothing. He had forgotten where he had left his red Banshee; it was a pleasure walking through the wet, looking for it. They strolled through the new arcade, where one or two shops functioned on dwindling supplies. A chemist's; Get Your Inner Relief Here; a handbill for the Escalation, Sensational and Smelly. Empty shells where the spec builder had not managed to sell shop frontage, all crude concrete, marked by the fossil-imprints of wooden battens. Messages in pencil or blue crayon.

young ive snoged here, bill hopkins only loves me,

cunt scrubber. What was a cunt scrubber? Something like a loofah, or a person? Good opening for bright lad!

The Banshee waited in the rain by a portly group of dustbins. It was not locked. They turned out an old man sheltering inside it.

'You killed my husband,' Angeline said, as the engine started. The garage up the road gave you quintuple Green Shields on four gallons. Nothing ever changed except thought.

Thought was new every generation, and she heard wild music playing.

'The future lies fainting in the arms of the present.'

"Why don't you listen to what I'm saying, Colin? You're not bloody mad, are you? You killed my husband and I want to know what you're going to do about it!'

'Take you home.' They were moving now. Although his face ached, he felt in a rare joking mood.

'I don't live out this direction.'

'Take you to my home. My place. I've started making a new model for thought. You came once, didn't you? It's not town, not country. You can't say which it is; that's why I like it - it stands for all I stand for. Things like art and science have just spewed forth and swallowed up everything else. There's nothing now left that's non-art or non-science. My place is neither urban nor non-urban. Fuzzy set. Look outwards, Angeline! Wonderful!'

'You Serbian bastard! There may have been a war, the country may be ruined, but you can't get away with murder! You'll die, they'll shoot you.' There was no conviction in her voice; his sainthood was drowning her old self.

'No, I shall live. I haven't fulfilled my purpose yet/ They were easing on to the Inner Relief. Behind them, ambulances and a fire engine and police cars and breakdown vans were nuzzling the debris. 'I've seen reality, Angeline. And I myself have materialized into the inorganic, and so am indestructible.'

The words astonished him. Since he had come to England, the psychedelic effect had gained on him. He had ceased to think what he was saying; the result was he surprised himself, and this elation fed back into the system Every thought multiplied into a thousand. He pursued them all on deep levels, struggling with them as they propagated in their deep burrows away from the surface. Another poem: On the Spontaneous Generation of Ideas During Conversation. Spontag-ions Ideal Convertagion. The Conflation of Spontagion in Idations. Agenbite of Auschwitz.

'Inwit, the dimlight of my deep Loughburrows. That's how I materialized, love! Loughborough is me, my brain, here -we are in my brain, it's all me. I am projecting Loughborough. All its thoughts are mine.' It was true. He knew what other people were thinking, or at least shared their bombardment of images.

'Don't be daft - it's raining again!' But she sounded frightened.

They swerved past concrete factories, long drab walls, filling stations.

Ratty little shops now giving up; no more News of the World. Grey stucco urinal. A railway bridge, iron painted yellow, advertising Ind Coope, sinister words to him. Then rows of terrace houses, time-devoured. A complete sentence yet to be written into his bods; he saw his hand writing the truth is in static instants. Then the semis. More bridges, side roads, iron railings, the Inner Relief yielding to fast dual-carriage out on to the motorway, endless roads crossed over it on primitive pillars. Railways, some closed, canals, some sedge-filled, a poor sod pushing a sack of potatoes across a drowning allotment on the handlebars of his bike, footpaths, cyclepaths.

Geology. Strata of different man-times. Each decade of the past still preserved in some gaunt monument. Even the motorway itself yielded clues to the enormous epochs of ante-psychedelic time: bridges cruder, more massive in earliest epoch, becoming almost graceful later, less sick-yellow; later still, metal; different abutment planes, different patterns of drainage in the under-flyover bank, bifurcated like enormous Jurassic fern-trees. Here we distinguish by the characteristic of this mediumweight aggregate the Wimpey stratum; while, a little further along, in the shade of these cantilevers, we distinguish the beginning of the McAlpine seam. The spread of that service area, of course, belongs characteristically to the Taylor Woodrow Inter-Glacial, Further was an early electric generating station with a mock-turkish dome, desolate in a field. All art. Pylons, endlessly, too ornate for the cumbersome land.

The skies were lumped and flaky with cloud, Loughborough skies. Squirting rain and diffused lighting. No green yet in the hedges. The brown nearest black. Beautiful....

'We will abolish that word beautiful. It implies ugliness in an Aristotelian way. There are only gradations in between. No ugliness.'

"There's the word "ugliness", so there must be something to attach it to, mustn't there?'

'Stop quoting Lewis Carroll at me!' 'I'm not!'

'You should have allowed me to give you the benefit of the doubt.'

He flicked away back on to his own side of the motorway, narrowly missing an op-art Jag, its driver screaming over the wheel. I drive by fuzzy sets, he thought admiringly. The two cars had actually brushed; between hitting and not-hitting were many degrees. He had sampled most of them. It was impossible to be safe - watering your potted plant, which was really doing well. A Christmas cactus it could be, you were so proud of it. The Cortina, Consortina, buckling against -you'd not even seen it, blazing in a moment's sun, Christ, just sweeping the poor woman and her pathetic litde porch right away in limbo!

'Never live on Inner Relief.' Suddenly light-hearted and joking.

'Stop getting at me! You're really rather cruel, aren't you?' 'Jebem te sunce! Look, Natrina - I mean, Angelina, I love you.'

'You don't know what it means!'

'So? I'm not omniscient yet. I don't have to know what it is to do it, do I ? I'm just beginning. Burton's group, Escalation Limited, I'll write songs for them. How about Truth Lies in Static Instants? Or When We're Intimate in the Taylor Woodrow Inter-Glacial. No, no - Accidents and Aerodynamics Accrete into Art. No, no, sorry! Then how about ... ha, I Do My Personal Thinking In Pounds Sterling? Or Ouspensky Ran Away With My Baby. Good job I gave up my NUNSACS job. Too busy. Look - zbogom, missed him! Maybe get him tomorrow! Must forget these trivialities, which others can perform. I'm just so creative at present, look, Angelina—'

''It's Angeline. Rhymes with "mean".'

■'My lean angel mean, Meangeline. I'm so creative. And I feel the gift in you too as you struggle out of old modes to wards areas of denser feeling. Anyhow, see that church of green stone? We're there. Partially there.'

And this partial country was neither inhabitable nor uninhabitable. It functioned chiefly as an area to move through; it was a dimensional passage, scored, chopped up by all the means the centuries had uncovered of annihilating the distance between Loughborough and the rest of Europe, rivers, roads, rails, canals, dykes, lanes, bridges, viaducts. The Banshee bumped over a hump-backed bridge,, nosed along by the municipal dump, and rolled to a stop in front of a solitary skinned house. A squadron of diabolical lead birds sprang up to the roof, from instant immobility to instant immobility, on passage from wood to city. The slates were broken by wind and birds. Sheer blindness had built this worthy middle-class house here, very proper and some expense spared in the days before the currency had gone decimal. It stood in its English exterior plumbing as if in scaffolding. A land dispute perhaps. No one knew. The proud owner had gone, leaving the local council easy winners, to celebrate their triumph in a grand flurry of rubbish which now lapped into the front garden, eroded, rotting intricate under the creative powers of decay. Caught by the fervour of it, the Snowcem had fallen off the brick, leaving a leprous dwelling, blowing like dandruff round the porch. And she looked up from the lovely cactus -he had admired it so much, bless him, a good husband - just in time to see the lorry sliding across the road towards her. And then, from behind, the glittering missile of the northbound car....

Charteris leant against the porch, covering his eyes to escape the repetitive image.

'It was a conflux of alternatives in which I was trapped. I so love the British - you don't understand! I wouldn't hurt anyone.... I'm going to rule by—'

'You can't bring him back by being sorry.'

'Her, the woman with the cactus! Her! Her! Who was she?'

The Escalation had taken over the old Army Recruiting Office in Ashby Road. Their surroundings had influenced two of their most successful songs, 'Braid on the Inside of Your Britches' and 'A Platoon of One'. There were four of them, four shabby young men, sensational and smelly, called, for professional purposes, Phil, Bill, Ruby and Featherstone-Haugh; also Barnaby, who worked the background tapes to make supplementary noise or chorus. They were doing the new one. They could hear the ambulances still squealing in the distance, and improvised a number embodying the noise called 'Lost My Ring In the Ring Road'. Bill thought they should play it below, or preferably on top of, 'Sanctions, Sanctions'; they decided to keep it for a flip side. They began to rehearse the new one.

Bank all my money in slot machines These new coins are strictly for spending Old sun goes on its rounds Now since we got the metric currency I do my personal thinking in pounds We haven't associated

Since twelve and a half cents of this new money Took over from the half-crowns Life's supposed to be negotiable, ain't it? But I do my personal thinking in pounds

Greta and Flo came in, with Robbins and Burton following. Burton had lost his lovely new tie, first one he ever had. He was arguing that Charteris should speak publicly as soon as possible - with the group at Nottingham on the following night; Robbins was arguing that there had been a girl at the art college called Hyperthermia. Greta was saying she was going home.

'Great, boys, great, break it up! You've escalated, like I mean you are now a choir, not just'a group, okay? At Nottingham tomorrow night, you're a choir, see? So we hitch our fortunes to Colin Charteris, tomorrow's saint, the author of Fuzzy Sets.'

'Oh, he's on about sex again! I'm going home,' said Greta, and went. Her mum lived only just down the road in a little house on the Inner Relief; Greta didn't live there any more, but they had not quarrelled, just drifted gently apart on the life-death stream. Greta liked squalor. What she could not take was the clutter of indoor plants with which her mother hedged her life.

Sister, they've decimalized us

All of the values are new

Bet you the twenty-cent piece in my hip

When I was a child on that old £.s.d.

There was a picture of a pretty sailing ship

Sailing on every ha'penny....

They were used to Burton's madness. He had got them the crowds. They needed the faces there, the noise, the interference, the phalanx of decibels the audience threw back at them in self-defence, needed it all, and the stink and empathy, really to give out. In the last verse, The goods you buy with this new coinage, they could have talk-chant as counterpoint instead of instrument between lines. Maybe even Saint Charteris would go for that. Saint Loughborough? Some people said he was a communist, but he was all the things they needed. He could even give them songs. They looked back too much. The future and its thoughts they needed. Lips close, New pose, . Truth lies in static instants. Well, it had possibilities.

As Charteris laboured at his masterwork, cutting, superimposing, annotating, Angeline wandered about the house. A tramp lived upstairs in the back room. She avoided him. The front room upstairs was empty because it was so damp where the rain poured in. She stood on the bare boards staring out at the sullen dead sea with shores of city rubbish, poor quality rubbish, supporting flocks of gulls, their beaks as cynical as the smile of the serpent from which they had originated. The land so wet, so dark, the brown nearest black, late February and the trains all running late with the poor acid-head drivers forgetting their duties, chasing their private cobwebs. Nobody Was human any more. She would be better advised to take L.S.D. and join the majority, forget the old guilt theories. Charteris gave her hope because he thought the situation was good and could be improved within fuzzy limits.

Wait till you read 'Man the Driver', he told Phil Brasher. You will see. No more conflict in society once man recognizes that he always was a hunter. The modern hunter has become a driver. His main efforts do not go towards improving his lot, but towards complicating ways of travel. In his head is a multi-value motorway. Now, in the post-war period, he is free to drive down any lane he wants. No external frictions or restrictions any more. Thus spake Charteris. She had felt compelled to listen, thus possibly accomplishing Phil's death. There had been a rival group setting up in the cellars of Loughborough, the Mellow Bellows. They had taken one title out of thin air: There's a fairy with an Areopagitica, No external frictions or restrictions, We don't need law or war or comfort or that bourgeois stuff, No external frictions or restrictions. Of course, they did say he was a communist or something. What we needed was freedom to drive along our life lines where we would, give or take the odd Brasher. More irrational fragments of the future hit her: through him, of course; a weeping girl, a - a baked bean standing like a minute scruple in the way of self-fulfilment.

She wanted him to have her, if she could square her conscience about Phil. He was okay, but - yes, a change was so, so welcome. Sex, too, yes, if he didn't want too much of it. He was clean-looking; good opening for bright young lad - where had she overheard that?! Well, it was self-defence.

The gulls rose up from the mounds of rotting refuse. There was a dog down there, running, free, so free, companion of man. Perhaps now man was going to be as free as his companion.

Tears trickling down her cheek. Even if it proved a better way of life, good things would be lost. Sorry, Phil, I loved you all I could for six years, but I'm going to bed with him if he wants me. It's you I'm going to betray, not him, if I can make it, because he really has something. I don't know if he is Loughborough, but he is a sort of saint. And you did hit him first. You always were free with your fists. She went downstairs. Either that running dog wore a tie or she was going acid head like the others.

'It's a bastard work, a mongrel,' he said. He was eating something out of a can; that was his way, no meals, only snack, the fuzzy feeder. 'I'm a mongrel, aren't I? Some Gurd-jieff, more Ouspensky, less Marshall McLuchan, time-obsessed passages from The Great Chain of Being, no zen or all that -no Englishmen, but it's going to spread from England out, we'll all take it, unite all Europe at last. America's ready, too. The readiest place, always.'

'If you're happy.' She touched him. He had dropped a
baked bean on to the masterwork. It almost covered a word
that might be 'self-fulfilment'. _t

'See those things crawling in the bare trees out there? Elms, are they? Birds as big as turkeys crawling in the trees, and toads and that new animal. I often see it. There is an intention moving them, as there is in us. They seem to keep their distance.'

'Darling, you're in ruins, your mind, you should rest!'

'Yes. Happiness is an out-moded concept. Say, think, "tension-release", maintain a sliding scale, and so you do away with sorrow. Get me, you just have a relief from tension, and that's all you need. Nothing so time-consuming as happiness. If you have sorrow, you are forced to seek its opposite, and vice versa, so you should try to abolish both. I must speak to people, address them. You have some gift I need. Come around with me, Angelina ?'

She put her arms about him. There was some stale bread on the table, crumbs among the books he was breaking up and crayoning. Activity all the time. 'Darling.'

When the Escalation came along, the two of them were lying on the camp-bed, limbs entangled, not actually copulating.

Greta wept, supported by two of the group. Featherstone-Haugh touched a chord on his balalaika and sang, 'Her mother was killed by a sunlit Ford Cortina.'

'Man the Driver,' Chapter Three. Literature of the Future Affecting Feeling of the Future. Ouspensky's concept of mental photographs postulates many photographs of the personality taken at characteristic moments; viewed together, these photographs will form a record by which man sees himself to be different from his common conception of himself - and truer. So, they will suggest the route of life without themselves having motion. The truth is in static instants; it is arrived at through motion. There are many alternatives. Fiction to be mental photographs, motion to be supplied purely by reader. Action a blemish as already in existence. Truth thus like a pile of photos, self-cancelling for self-fulfilment, multi-valued. Impurity of decision one of the drives towards such truth-piles; the Ouspenskian event of a multiple crash on a modern motorway is an extreme example of such impurities.

Wish for truth involved here. Man and landscape interfuse, science presides.

Charteris stood at the window listening to the noise of the group, looking out at the highly carved landscape. Hedges and trees had no hint of green, were cut from iron, their edges jagged, ungleaming with the brown nearest black, although the winds drove rain shining across the panorama. Vehicles scouring down the roads trailed spume. The earlier nonsense about the terrors of the population explosion; one learned to live with it. But mistakes were still being made. The unemployed were occupied, black Midland figures like animated sacks, planting young trees in groupings along the grand synclines and barrows of the embankments and cuttings and underpasses, thereby destroying the geometry, mistakenly interfusing an abstract of nature back into the grand equation. But the monstrous sky, squelching light out of its darkest corners, counteracted this regressive step towards out-dated reality moulds. The P.C.A. bombs had squirted from the skies; it was their region.

There was a picture of a pretty sailing ship Sailing every ha'penny

The goods you buy with this new coinage Weren't made any place I heard of They give out the meagrest sounds But I don't hear a thing any longer Since I did my personal thinking in pounds

I had a good family life and a loving girl But I had to trade them in for pounds

The damned birds were coming back, too, booking their saplings, ready to squirt eggs into the first nests at the first opportunity. They moved in squadrons, heavy as lead, setded over the mounds of rubbish, picking out the gaudy Omo packets. They had something planned, they were motion without truth, to be hated. He had heard them calling to each other in nervous excitement, 'Omo, Omo'. Down by the shores of the dead sea, they were learning to read, a hostile art. And the new animal was among them by the dead elms.

Angeline was comforting Greta, Burton was turning the pages of 'Man the Driver', thinking of a black and red tie he had worn, his only tie. Words conveyed truth, he had to admit, but that damned tie had really sent him. He thought he had tied it round the neck of a biack dog proceeding down Ashby Road. Spread the message.

'Greet, you didn't hear of a dog involved in this pile-up?'

'Leave her alone,' Angeline said. 'Let her cry it out.'

'He did it, you know,' Greta wept. 'You can't have secrets in this city any more. Well, it's more of an urban aggregation than a city, really, I suppose. He pushed the whole chain of events into being, piled up all them lorries, killed my mum and everything.'

'I know,' Angeline said. The heart always so laden.

Great crowds in Nottingham to greet the Escalation, teenagers blurry in the streets, hardly whispering, the middle-aged, the old, the crippled and the halt, all those who had not died from falling into fires or ditches or roads, all those who had not wandered away after the aerosols drifted down, all those who had not opened their spongy skulls with can-openers to let out the ghosts and the rats. All were hot for the Escalation.

At half-term, the boys, sensational and smelly, had the crowds throwing noise back at them. Burton stood up, announced Saint Charteris, asked if anyone had seen a stray dog wearing a red and black tie. The Escalation howled their new anthem.

Adsolescent Loughborough

With slumthing to live through

Charteris we cry

Is something to live by

He had scarcely thought out what he was going to say. It seemed so apparent that he felt it did not need uttering. The slav dreamers, Ouspensky and the rest, sent him travelling with his message through to this outpost of Europe. Obviously, if the message had validity, it was shaped by the journey and the arrival. In Metz, in France, he had realized the world was a web of forces. Their minds, their special Midland minds had to become repositories of thinking also web-like, clear but indefinite. If they wanted exterior models, the space-time pattern of communication-ways with which their landscape was riddled functioned as a valuable master plan. All the incoherent aspirations that filled their lives would then fall into place. The empty old nineteenth-century houses built by new classes which now stood rotting in ginger stone on hillsides, while carriageways either approached or receded like levels of old lakes, were not wasted; they functioned as landmarks. Nothing should be discarded; but the New Thought would re-orient everything, as the ginger stone mansions or the green stone churches were re-oriented by the changing dynamic of the landscape. He was the Aristotle of the New Thought. The Fourth World System, Man the Driver, would appear soon.

Greta stood up and screamed, 'He killed my mother! He caused the multiple accident on the Inner Relief. Kill him!'

White-faced Angeline said from the platform for all to hear, 'And he killed my husband, Phil Brasher.' But it was sin whether she spoke or not; she worked by old moralities, where someone was always betrayed.

Their faces all turned to his face, seeking meaning.

'It's true! The lorry was sweeping along the great artery from Glasgow down to Naples. In Naples, they will also mourn. We are all one people now, and although this massive region of yours is as special as the Adriatic Coast or the Dutch Lowlands, or the Steppes of central Asia, the similarity is also in the differences. You know of my life, that I was a communist, coming from Montenegro in Jugoslavia, that I lived long in the south of Italy, that I dreamed all my life of England. Now I arrive here and fatal events begin, spreading back along my trail. See how in this context even death is multi-valued, the black nearest brown. Brasher falling back into the traffic was a complex event from which the effects still radiate. We shall all follow that impulse. The Escalation and I are now setting out on a motor-crusade down through our Europe, the autobahns. All of you come too, a moving event to seize the static instant of truth! Come too! There are many alternatives.'

They were crying and cheering. It would take on truth, be a new legend, a new communication in the ceaseless dialogue. Even Angeline thought, Perhaps he will really give us something to live by. It surely can't really matter, can it, whether there was a dog with a tie or not; the essential thing was that I saw it and stand by that. So it doesn't matter whether he is right or not; just stay in the Banshee with him.

He was talking again, the audience were cheering, the group were improvising a driving song about a Midland-minded girl at the wheel of a sunlit automobile. An ambiguity about whether they meant the steering or the driving wheel.

langdon Jones

the great clock

Langdon Jones is an unusual combination of hard common-sense and impassioned romanticism that combines to produce such well-remembered stories as / Remember, Anita . . . and The Music Makers. He is also an obsessive collector of outre clocks and sleeps in a room full of ticks and clanks and chimes that would drive anyone else quite mad. These clocks are the inspiration for one of his best stories, reprinted here, in which the mechanical details of his monstrous clock are used to create a powerful mood and tell us something of Jones's personal ideas about the nature of time . ..

ONE

The light of the sky could be seen dimly through the small slits in the ceiling of the Great Chamber. The Great Clock worked.

The Pendulum swung slowly in its giant arc and with every tick, the whole Clock shuddered. The Great Wheel, rose above the rest of the Clock mechanism in a great and static arc and the Fast Wheel whirled, humming, its sound rising above the noises made by the workings of the clock. The other wheels turned at their various speeds, some smoothly, while some advanced one notch with every tick of the Clock. Pins engaged, wedges dropped, springs uncoiled. On the floor was thrown a shadow of wheels which formed an abstract pattern.

And the man sleeping naked on the pallet at the Posterior Wall stirred a little.

TWO

He was awakened by the whistle of the clock within the Clock. It was fixed on one wall of the Great Chamber. It was made of wood and the sound of its ticking was lost in the constant sounds of the Great Clock. It was powered by a weight on a long chain, the other end of the chain having a metal loop through which projected the end of a lever coming through the wall. At this moment the lever, powered in some way by the Great Clock, was lowering itself smoothly, pulling down the free end of chain and winding up the clock. Below the clock, projecting upwards from the floor was a four-foot metal flue pipe. The whistle was coming from this, a deafening note that was calling him to his duties. He covered his ears against the raucous sound. Eventually the note began to drop in volume and pitch, for a second broke down the octave to its fundamental, and then became quiet except for the hiss of escaping air. Behind the wooden wall could be heard intensive creaking as the giant bellows exhausted themselves. The Clock ticked.

It was a thunderous sound, and it shook his body there on the pallet. It was a sound composed of a million sounds, some too high, others too low to be heard. But the high sounds irritated the ear-drums and the low ones stirred the bowels. The sounds that could be heard were a million. Metallic and wooden, high and low, muffled and clear, they all combined in a shattering rumble that made thought impossible. The tick was composed primarily of four separate sounds that peaked at intervals of about half a second. At the end of each tick, a creak from somewhere high in the building ran up the scale to silence.

When the echoes had died away he could hear the other sounds of the Clock. The whole Chamber was alive with noise. There were creakings all around; cogs met with metallic clashes; wooden parts knocked hollowly. From high in the Chamber on the opposite side to his pallet the Fast Wheel hummed loudly.

He opened his eyes. Light was filtering in dimly through the two tiny slits in the ceiling of the Great Chamber. He could see the black outlines of the Great Wheel where it vaulted overhead, partly obscured by a supporting column. He groaned, then sat up on the pallet, looking across towards the clock on the wall. The clock was made entirely of wood, and only one hand pointed towards the irregular marks scored around the edge of the dial. The irregular marks indicated the times at which he had to perform his duties; they extended three-quarters round the face. When the hand reached the marks, the bellows, now filling slowly behind the wall, would drop a short distance and the metal flue pipe would give a short call. The hand was about five degrees from the first mark, and this gave him a short while to eat his breakfast. He wondered dully if there was a little man inside the wall-clock, just getting up, ready for his day's work maintaining the mechanism.

The Clock ticked.

When the floor had stopped vibrating, he got up and walked across the Great Chamber. Dust rose in acrid clouds about him, making him sneeze. He urinated in the corner, lifting his nose against the sharp smells that arose from the intersection of the walls that he always used for this purpose. Then he turned and walked back past the pile of bones in the other corner, skulls like large pieces of yellow putty, twigs of ribs, half buried by dust, and made his way to the door on the far side of the Chamber, moving among the bronzed supports of the Clock mechanism as he did so. He arrived at the low arched door and turned the iron handle, pushing open the wooden slab with effort.

The Clock ticked.

Now he was in the Small Chamber. The room was about nine feet long by seven wide, and was lined by wooden planks. The whole of the left hand side of the small Chamber was covered by a mass of wheels, thousand upon thousand, interlocking in frightening complexity. He had never tried to work out their arrangement and purpose; he just knew that they were an integral part of the workings of the Great Clock. The wheels were plain-rimmed - not cogged - and were of silver metal. They varied in size from about four feet down to one inch, and were all turning at varied rates. They whirred and clicked softly as they worked. The sounds of the Clock were muffled here in the Small Chamber, with the door closed, and only the tick was still just as disturbing, as disruptive to logical thought. The Clock ticked.

He watched the chains from the wheels disappearing through the myriad holes in the wooden walls at either end of the Chamber. Some of the wheels were partly obscured, with just a tiny segment of their arc appearing through the space between the ceiling and the left hand wall. Once, he had wondered whether he saw all the wheels or whether in fact there were more, many more, stretching away upwards and downwards.

The rest of the room was taken up mainly by the only compromise to his welfare, apart from the pallet in the Great Chamber. There was a wooden table and a small wooden chair. On the table were three objects, all of metal, a plate, spoon and a heavy goblet. At the far end of the Chamber by the cupboard set into the wall were two silver faucets. Above the faucets were two wheels of iron, to which worn wooden handles were attached.

The Clock ticked.

He walked across the Chamber and picked the plate off the table. He placed it on the floor below the nearer of the faucets. He stood up and began to turn the wheeled handle. A white mash poured out of the wide mouth of the faucet and slopped into the plate. After he had turned the handle about ten complete revolutions there was a click, the handle spun free and no more mash came from the mouth. He picked up the plate and carried it back to the table, burying the spoon upright in the mash. Then he repeated the performance with the goblet and the other faucet, and filled the vessel with cold water.

The Clock ticked.

He settled down listlessly and began to spoon the mash into his mouth. It was completely tasteless, but he accepted it as he accepted everything else. The Clock ticked five times before he had finished his meal. He left half the mash and inverted the plate over the primitive drain in the floor. Rotting food from previous meals still remained, and at one time the stench would have appalled him.

A short, sharp blast from the pipe informed him that it was time for his duties to start. There was a lot of work in front of him. A vague memory floated into his mind of when he used to eat all the mash and still have a little time to relax quiedy before starting his work. Now he toyed with his food, and needed less.

The Clock ticked and dispersed the thought.

He walked with heavy steps over to the cupboard and opened the door. Inside were his tools. To the left was a rack of hammers for testing the wheels. They ranged in size from a tiny hammer all of metal, the head of which was about the size of the first joint of his little finger, to a giant sledge-hammer with a large iron head and a thick wooden-shaft, which was used for testing the Great Wheel. The trolley was just as he bad left it the previous night. Everything was just as he had left it. The trolley was made of black cracked wood with iron wheels. On it was a giant drum with an opened top. A great faucet extended down from the top of the cupboard above the drum, and now the container was filled with yellow sweetly-smelling grease. Every night it was the same.

The Clock ticked.

On a shelf on the right was a can, below yet another, small, faucet, and the can was now filled by the dark translucent beauty of thin oil. He lifted the hammers from the rack and slowly placed them on the trolley beside the drum. He lifted down the oil can and placed that on the rack designed for the purpose.

He grasped the pulling rail, and began to heave the trolley backwards out of the cupboard. His body strained with the effort. Surely, at one time it had all been easier ...

The clock ticked.

The trolley was finally right out of the cupboard, and he walked round it, so that he would be able to push it from the back. Before he started pushing, he suddenly realized that he had forgotten to move the table out of the way. He sighed deeply and walked back to the table, folding up the legs and resting it on its side against the walls.

'Getting old ...' he muttered, '... getting old ...' Those were the first words he had spoken in a long time, and his voice sounded thin and weak. He pushed the trolley through the Small Chamber, past the whirring wheels. His last duty of the day would be to oil those wheels. He realized that he had forgotten to open the door, opened it, and pushed the trolley into the Great Chamber. He stopped the trolley at the point where he always stopped it. The Clock ticked.

He went up to the nearer of the wheels. It was a large wheel, about five feet in diameter. Most of the wheel could be seen clearly, unobscured by other mechanism, and the black metal was pitted, as if by age. He selected the correct hammer, a large one, weighing several pounds, and swung it into contact with the edge of the wheel. The wheel shivered, and rang like a gong. Satisfied, he placed the hammer back on the trolley, and pushed it on a little further. On he went, wheel after wheel. Some of the wheels boomed hollowly, others tinkled like tiny bells. Never had they done otherwise.

When he came to the first supporting column, he selected the second largest hammer. The column was of a diameter of about a foot, and it was made of a golden metal, either copper or brass. Later these columns would have to be cleaned.

The Clock ticked exactly at the moment he swung the hammer. But after the sounds had died away, the column still reverberated with a shrill brightness. Now he had come to the Fast Wheel. There was a wooden ladder set against its supports, and he picked up the oil can and began to mount the ladder.

The Fast Wheel was different from most of the others. It was difficult to observe, owing to its rate of travel, but the lack of fuzziness at the edges indicated that it possessed no cogs. It appeared to be a double wheel, having two rims, its spokes tapering inwards to the single hub. It was driven by a taut chain which was an insubstantial blur that stretched to a hole in the Anterior Wall, opposite his pallet. The ladder vibrated with the wheel's motion, and air fanned his face strongly as he climbed upwards. The wheel ran in oil, and a reservoir arched above it with two ducts that fell past its eigh-teen-inch radius to the hub. The hum of the wheel was almost intolerable at this closeness.

The Clock ticked and for a couple of seconds drowned the hum of the Fast Wheel.

He poured half the contents of the oil can into the reservoir, then quickly descended the ladder. Now there was just the Great Wheel and then four smaller cogs over the other side of the mechanism. He picked the largest hammer from the trolley and dragged it across the floor. The Great Wheel was only exposed at one point, and then only about a foot of its surface. This was about the nearest it was possible for him to get to the Anterior Wall. The Great Wheel was about a foot thick and was constructed of matt black metal; a foot from where it disappeared into the space between the floor and the Anterior Wall the other mechanism of the Clock terminated. He dragged the hammer into a convenient position and tensed the muscles of his arms and stomach. The Clock ticked.

He swung in an imaginary back stroke, the hammer not moving, then, reaching as far back as he could and starting to swing forward, transformed the stroke into actuality by dragging the hammer along the floor towards the wheel. The head lifted just before the hammer came into contact with the black metal. It hit, and his stomach was churned by the deep vibration of the Great Wheel. Along with the almost subsonic fundamental, an upper partial screamed briefly. The sounds almost made him vomit, but he checked this and instead coughed the dust from his throat. During the time when his duties always seemed to be much easier and quicker, and he had time to spare, he had watched the twenty-foot Great Wheel very carefully for long periods, and had never seen it move a fraction of an inch.

The Clock ticked as he walked away.

He went to his trolley and plunged his hands into the drum, withdrawing two gobs of grease. He went up to Great Wheel again and slapped the grease into the reservoir at its side. There would be more points to grease later in the day.

Now there were just the other four cogs to test, and then it would be time to check the Meter.

The flue pipe blew piercingly.

Shock raced through his body, and the grunt he made was lost in the sounds of the Clock. Had he been so slow? He never remembered having a job unfinished when the time came to begin the next He looked unbelievingly at the clock on the wall; the hand stood unquestionably at the second of the scored marks.

For a moment he was lost; his knees trembled and his body shook. What should he do? Should he finish his job or hurry to check the Meter? Normally he liked checking the Meter;

there was rarely any need to make an adjustment, the pointer always resting at the zero position. This meant that he would have at least fifteen minutes to himself. But now he was in an agony of uselessness, for the first time being faced with a decision. A thought began to bubble up through his shocked mind, and forced itself into consciousness for a fraction of a second. WHY?

The Clock ticked, dissolving the thought in a torrent of sound.

He decided to check the Meter. He could always come back and sound the remaining four wheels, it would mean losing a little of the precious spare time, but that didn't matter.

He wiped his greasy hands on his thighs and walked across to the Posterior Wall and the little panel behind which lay the Meter. He pulled aside the wooden panel with effort, and then groaned in dismay. The Meter read at minus two.

He plunged into panic, an adjustment would have to be made. When would he have time to sound the remaining four wheels? He would have to hurry. He pulled aside the adjacent panel with trembling hands. He stepped inside the lift and began to turn the large wheeled handle. The Great Chamber was lost to view as the lift began- to travel down the shaft. Little light filtered down the Chamber, but he was able to see the joints in the wood of the shaft. Going down, he was fighting the counterweight and the work was much more difficult. He wished that he was coming up, the adjustment having been made.

After what seemed like hours, the dim light of the Pendulum Well travelled up the open front of the lift and he stopped.

The Clock ticked, very slightly muffled at this depth.

He clambered out of the lift and then finally stood upright in the Pendulum Well. The Well was vast. It stretched up and up, many times his own height, and the top was marked by a light rectangle where the mouth of the Well met the lighter Great Chamber at the very front of the Clock. Cogs jutted blackly above, and the tall cylinder of the Pendulum Rod inclined itself gracefully and slowly towards one side of the Well. Once he had wondered on the unusual nature of the Escapement Mechanism. The Escapement itself appeared to be almost independent of the Pendulum, its action only being triggered by the Pendulum's motion. The Pendulum swung freely for almost its whole arc, and the Escapement Lever only inclined at the extremes of its swing. At the top the Escapement Lever quivered, preparing for its giant pivoting movement, and its sound came to him like a clanking of great chains. The Pendulum had a wide arc, about forty-five degrees, and at the moment it was reaching the peak of its swing. The Pendulum was so vast that at this point of its swing it scarcely seemed to be moving. It was only when the Bob was whistling past his head at the bottom of its swing that he could really appreciate how fast it was moving.

At the top of the Clock the Escapement quivered again. The Pendulum had slowed now and seemed to be poised impossibly, hanging without movement, a vast distance from him. There was a rumble and, with a screech of metal, the Escapement Lever roused itself and began to pivot its great weight. With a shattering crash, it fell heavily into its new position.

And the Clock ticked.

Now the Pendulum was moving back again, increasing speed second by second.

The walls of the Pendulum Well were, like the Small Chamber, lined by planks of wood, although black. The sounds of the Clock came to him here with a wooden consistency as they were reflected and diffused by the Well. On Ihe near side of the Well, iron rungs were set into the wall, which would enable him to reach the giant bulk of the Weight. He glanced up, and his gaze met the dark shadow that loomed overhead. He stepped forward into the path of the rapidly approaching Pendulum Bob, which would pass about a foot above his head. At the far end of the Well was another ladder which led up to a platform far above, which would enable him to meet the Bob as it rose up to the top of its swing, and from which he would step on to the Bob to carry out the adjustment.

From its highest point, above the Escapement Mechanism, to a point about one sixth of the way down the Well, the Pendulum Rod consisted of a cylinder of shining golden metal, probably brass, with a diameter of about four feet. From there to the Bob, a distance at least fifty feet, it was made up of a frame of several smaller tubes of various coloured metals, probably some kind of temperature compensation. The Bob itself was a ten-foot lens of grey metal, tapering at the edges to knife-blade-thinness. As the Pendulum rushed through the air, eddies formed on alternate sides like the ripples running along a flag, setting the Pendulum, as it rode the turbulence, into vibration.

And the Pendulum sang.

A deep, clear ringing vibration filled the Well, like an organ note, but with a chiming quality that continued instead of fading. He felt the vibration through the soles of his feet as he stood there on the wooden floor. He kept his mouth slightly slack, for if his teeth touched together they would buzz unpleasantly with a higher version of the same note.

The Bob was now rushing down upon him, and with a sudden gust of air, it was past him and away, climbing rapidly towards the peak of its swing.

With a shock he realized that there was no time to stand here watching. There were still four wheels left unsounded. He turned, and began to climb the nearer ladder. There was a catwalk leading round the Well past the Weight, and he always came this way to check on the Weight as he passed. After a long time of climbing the iron rungs he eventually arrived at the catwalk. The Weight was a vast bulk to his rear; he was fortunate that he had come down at this time, for often the Weight was further towards the floor, or too high, which necessitated painful manoeuvring on the rungs.

He turned and looked at the Weight. It was a block of black metal, about two feet deep and four feet high, and it stretched the width of the Well. It was supported by thin wire, which branched out from a single strand far up the Well and culminated in hundreds of strands spread out in an angular delta. At the top of the Weight was a complex of cogs, the largest of which was about six inches across, the smallest about half an inch, and some of them were revolving quite rapidly. The fine wire passed up and down in the complex of wheels, circling some of them. These grooved wheels turned as the wire moved round them, and the vast Weight was lowering itself, so slowly that its motion could scarcely be seen.

The Clock ticked.

He glanced at the Pendulum, now at the fullest extent of its swing at the far end of the Well. He would be able to get to the platform in one-and-a-half strokes, by which time the Bob would be in the correct position for him to mount it. He began to move along the catwalk, his bare feet pattering on the wooden planks. There was no safety rail and he kept close to the wall, as he was now about twenty feet from the floor. As the Pendulum overtook him on its way back, the Bob dropped to far below his level, and then began to climb past him.

The Clock ticked before he reached the corner of the Well.

Past the corner he went, and he walked across the width of the Well, a distance of only about thirty feet. The platform projected out from the wall, and he stood out on it, waiting for the Bob to arrive. There was a long, thin chain hanging beside him, that stretched up into the mechanism of the Escapement. He guessed that his weight was computed by the strain on the platform, and pulling the iron ring at the end of the chain caused some kind of weight compensation to be applied to the Pendulum, so that his weight on the Pendulum for one whole swing had no effect on the accuracy of the Clock. The Bob was now at the bottom of its return swing and was rising, apparently slowly, towards him. Mounting the Pendulum was a difficult feat, one that had caused him trouble in the early days. The early days? He brushed aside the distracting thought; he must concentrate on mounting the Pendulum. The difficulty was in the apparent motion of the Bob. When one stood in the centre of the Well at the bottom, at the higher points of its swing the Pendulum scarcely seemed to be moving, while at its centre its true speed could be appreciated. Here, at the high point of its swing, the same illusion occurred, but was made more complex by the fact that the Pendulum did actually slow at this point of its arc.

The apparent speed of the Bob was increasing rapidly as it approached him. His muscles tensdd as its bulk loomed up towards him. He slipped his hand into the iron ring, and pulled the chain downwards. Then, as the Bob was almost on him it suddenly appeared to slow. Now he could see the corresponding platform that jutted out from the Bob. He watched the platform and nothing else. The edges of the two platforms came smoothly together. There was a pause. He swifdy stepped across on to the other surface. There was a brass rail on the inside of the platform with a strap looped from it. With fumbling fingers he hurriedly buckled the strap about his waist

He felt tears springing to his eyes at the unfairness of it all. He was old, and tired ... He walked across to the Posterior Wall and slid open the panel that led to the Winding Room. The Clock ticked.

This was only a small room and it was lined with planks like the others. It was completely featureless save for the Winding Handle which was set into the far wall and projected out into the room. He stepped inside and grasped the Handle. He put his weight on to it and it gradually moved downwards, a rachet clicking rapidly somewhere behind the wall. When the Handle was at its lowest extent, he slightly released the pressure and it rose up under his hands to its original position. He pressed down again. He would wind until the whistie blew again, a period he estimated to be about an hour, but a very long hour indeed. After the Winding he would be allowed a short time from his labour for lunch. Perhaps he could sound the remaining wheels in his lunch time?

The Clock ticked.

This would mean that he would miss his mash. He didn't mind about that too much; what really worried him was that he would miss his valuable rest period. The Handle rose under his hands to its highest position. He was worried about the afternoon; how could he work if he missed his rest? He was weak enough now. He pressed down the Handle. Sweat was beginning to run down his forehead; he felt terrible. Surely, at one time he had not felt so weak and tired. At one time?

At what time? For a second he was. distracted from his task.

He slipped.

His foot went from under him and he fell forward, towards the Handle. His hands slid from it and it swung up, catching him under the chin and throwing him backwards on to the floor.

Lights flashed under his eyelids and his head buzzed, cutting out all other sound. When he came to himself he found that he was standing in the Great Chamber, swaying slightly.

WHERE WAS HE?

For the first time his routine had been upset. The blow had jogged his mind from its well-worn paths. He realized that all the events of that day had conspired to open his senses to this apocalypse.

He looked about himself in amazement.

All was as it had been; the Fast Wheel hummed to itself and the cogs moved round at their various speeds.

But now the Clock mechanism looked alien and frightening to him as he regarded it with eyes unclouded by time.

How had he got here?

The stench of his own excrement arose from the corner of the Great Chamber, mixed with the acrid tang of the metal that surrounded him.

His head moved from side to side as he tried to see everything at once.

The Clock ticked, unexpectedly, causing him to clap his hands to his ears.

He had been so frightened; what had forced him to carry out these awful duties that had wasted so much of his life? He walked across to the far end of the Great Chamber and looked at the bones in the corner. He could see about four complete skeletons among the crumbling fragments of many others. They were all supported on a billowing pile of dust that came from innumerable others. Were these the bones of others, who, before him, had tended the Clock? Did they, one day, suddenly know that their time was up, and did they, obeying a dim and contrived instinct, slowly, painfully drag themselves over to the pile and quietly lie upon it? And then did the next person come here and immediately settle into his ritual of duties, ignoring the twitching bundle in the comer, and later the odour of its corruption ?

He walked back to his pallet and sat on it, burying his face in his hands. When he came to the Clock, was there a body in the corner? Did he sit in the Small Chamber eating his mash whilst the air was full of the taint of death?

What was his life before he came here?

Who was he?

He could not remember. Nor could he remember how long he had been here. He felt round the back of his head; his hair was hanging down almost to his shoulders. He estimated from this that he had been inside the Clock for a whole year of his life. He remembered something else. His age. He was twenty-five years old.

Twenty-five?

Then why was he so weak and tired? T—c

Something wrong made a shudder crawl its way down his back. His hands had been registering something for some time, and now he consciously accepted their message. His hands told him that the skin hung loose and wrinkled round his face. His hands told him that his features were covered by wrinkled and flaccid parchment.

He sat up on the pallet in fear. He suddenly pulled out a little clump of hair, bringing tears to his eyes. But the tears did not obscure his vision completely enough for him not to see that the hair was snowy white. He looked up in agony.

Tmold!'

The Clock ticked.

Tm old ...'

He looked down at his body. It was the body of an old, old man.

He slowly stood and then staggered to one of the supporting columns. He embraced the column, resting his cheek against the golden surface. His hand stroked the smooth metal of the column's surface, almost as if he were caressing a woman. He giggled.

'Look at me,' he muttered to the Clock. 'Look what you've done to me!'

The Fast Wheel hummed; the cogs turned.

'You've taken my life! I was young when I came here a year ago! Young! What have you done?'

His voice had become high and quavering and was swallowed in the sounds of the Clock.

'Oh God!' he said, and slumped against the column. He stayed there a long time, thinking. He was going to have his revenge. The Clock would run down, with no-one to wind it. It would die, without him.

The Clock ticked, and he pushed his shoulders from the column, standing erect. He began to walk round the Great Chamber, putting out his hand here, stroking a wheel there. He blew a million kisses to the Fast Wheel and ran his flat hand gently over the surface of the Great Wheel. Wheedling, coquettish, he minced extravagantly through the Great Chamber, quietly talking to the Clock.

'Why?' he said. 'Why? I've given you my life; what have you given in return? You have taken eighty years from me what have you done with them? Are they stored safely away in a cupboard? If I search long enough, could I find them, stacked on a shelf? Could I put out my hands and slip them on, like clothes? Eh? Why did you steal them?'

His muttering suddenly became ominous in tone.

'I'll fix you; I won't even give you the pleasure of running quietly down, as you would have done with me. Oh no, my friend, you shall die violently; I'll show you no quarter.'

He moved across to the trolley. He painfully lifted off the largest of the hammers and dragged it to the floor. A wheel of moderate size, about four feet across, was quite near to him. With all his strength he swung the hammer in a low arc and relaxed only as it smashed into the wheel. The giant hammer broke off one of the cogs completely, and bent part of the wheel at an impossible angle. He dropped the hammers, and, filled with emotion, crammed his fists against his opened mouth.

The Clock ticked.

He found that he was weeping; why, he didn't understand.

The cog turned slowly, the damaged section moving nearer to its inevitable interaction with another wheel. He screwed up his eyes, and felt the warm tears running freely down his face.

'I've killed you,' he said. He stood, thin, bleached and naked, paralysed and sobbing. Something would happen soon.

The damaged section interacted.

The wrecked cog spun suddenly and rapidly before its teeth engaged again. A shower of sparks flew out, burning his flesh. He started, both at the pain and at the sheer noise of that dreadful contact. At the threshold of his hearing, far below the other sounds of the Clock, he could hear the buckling of metal, the scraping of part on part. The other wheel buckled and spun in its turn. A spring burst from somewhere behind the wheel and scattered metal splinters all over the Chamber. Strange smells were in the air; the death-smells of the Clock.

A trail of damage was running across the mechanism of the Clock like an earthquake fissure running across land. It could not be seen, and outwardly practically everything was normal, but his ears could hear the changes in what had been familiar sounds. The grinding and destruction spreading like a canker could be heard clearly enough.

The Clock ticked, and even the tick sounded slightly weaker.

Louder and louder came the sounds of invisible destruction. He stood, still weeping, shaking as if with fever. The changed sounds of the Clock plunged him into a new and unfamiliar world.

A different sound made him look up. Above him the Fast Wheel was running eccentrically. It was wavering from side to side in its supports, oil spurting from its reservoirs. As it spun, it whined, jarringly.

Abruptly it broke free of its supports and, still whining, it dropped to the floor. It screamed as it hit the floor and was covered by the roaring flame of its friction. And then it was gone, only the hint of a bright streak in the air indicating its trajectory. It smashed into the far wall, scattering dust from the bones as the wooden wall dissolved into splintering wreckage.

An ululation came from the Small Chamber. Inside, the mass of wheels screamed as they were tortured by the new disorder spreading through their myriad ranks. The Clock shook in its ague, shivering itself to death. Suddenly through the open door of the Small Chamber came the wheels, thousands of them. The Great Chamber was full of smooth silver wheels, some broken and flying through the air, others rolling lazily.

The Clock ticked, gratingly, and then screamed again. The Escapement Mechanism jammed rigid, but the Pendulum wanted to continue its swing. It did, bending its great four-foot-diameter column in a grotesque shape.

Dust was everywhere, flying metal whistled about his ears. As the sound became unbelievable the destruction became complete.

His last sight was of light streaming brightly in as the whole Clock collapsed in a mass of falling wood and metal cogs.

THREE

And it was everybody else's last sight too. They may, for a brief period, have seen their world freezing itself in grotesque lack of activity. They may have seen water, solidifying in its

Heyar sniffed the air. His nostrils, attuned to the necessities of his calling, could pick out death like hollyhock or new-made bread. Yes, dt was there, dank and acrid as ancient perspiration.

'Don't worry,' he told the man. 'You'll be all right.' He took off his jacket to make a pillow for the man's head. 'My . . . wife . . .' muttered the dying man. 'She . . .' 'No need to worry her now.' said Heyar in business-like tone.

Perhaps he just isn't trying to fool me with sentimentality, thought the man in his mind full of pain. It isn't that he doesn't care.

The klaxon of the approaching ambulance rose and fell on a scale of panic. Heyar felt in his trouser pocket.

He took out a small tin and opened it to expose an inked pad. He manoeuvred digits on a rubber stamp.

'Youll be fine, old son,' he said. 'Help's just arriving.'

And he brought the rubber stamp down right between the man's eyes.

Doberman Birkk, a mere morgue attendant of intermediate stature, humbled through life in constant awe of the ubiquitous Anton Heyar. Where death walked, there too walked Heyar, hat pulled low, hand on stamp. • Birkk paused in his work to examine the insignia between the corpse's eyes. It was not elaborate, a mere functional circle with script around the outer edging and the characters 'A.H.' tangled in some written state of intercourse at centre.

'Item and contents property of ...' read the circumferential legend if one cared to crane one's neck and bend kiss-close to the poor dead face to see. Birkk did no such thing; He carried out the job as a means of survival, but he did not have to enjoy it, even though he allowed himself a sneaking regard for the more adept and more devoted exponents of death and its subsidiaries.

He checked the time on Heyar's stamp - 1434 - against the report that accompanied the cadaver. The ambulance men had put the time of extinction at 1434.5. Heyar's insight was uncanny.

Birkk detached the item and placed it in a refrigerated container. Then he pushed it to one side to await collection.

Usually Heyar came himself, entrusting no such vital task to a junior.

He knew Birkk's routine. He had already checked the man's volume of work. Heyar would be here very shortly.

Even as Birkk recorded the fact, the door swung and the stooping man with the wasted face was walking towards him, unfolding his spotless receipt.

Birkk took the receipt and examined it carefully though he knew it would contain full and adequate authority from Static Coroner Gurgin. Dealing with Heyar, a master of his own profession, Birkk felt obliged to appear as painstaking and conscientious as Heyar's patience would allow.

'Any trouble this time?' he queried. 'Occasionally sector centre develops a sympathy for dependants.'

'Sympathy is out of date,' said Heyar brusquely. "This absurd sentimentality about a piece of rotting flesh. Gurgin knows how his psychotropics are bought. He gives me no complications. A little blind-eye money for his favourite steroid and he is quite prepared to slip me a rapid registration marker. Now, is this mine?'

He moved towards the container and identified his designation with his usual cynical satisfaction. He caught up the container by its handle and made to leave.

'Wait,' said Birkk.

"Why?' Heyar spat out the words as though an attempt to capture his attention at such moments was some kind of insult.

Birkk felt foolish. There were always questions he wanted to put to Heyar. Each time the gaunt man was scheduled to appear, Birkk lined them up and rehearsed comments which, he hoped, would inspire some traitor reaction from Heyar, some warmth for a subject. Any subject.

But when Heyar came, he was unapproachable. Somehow, Birkk never learned from his visit. Today was no exception.

*Why?' Heyar asked again, impatiently.

'Isn't ... isn't there anything else you want? The trunk isn't spoken for.'

'No wonder.'

'I don't understand.'

The man has been struck by a car,' said Heyar slowly as if to a retarded child. *His bodily functions - digestive chemistry, kidney system, for example - have been impaired. At most, there may be a dozen organs worth salvaging, and we don't have the time for that. Besides, our clients pay poor money for bits and pieces.'-

'Oh.' Birkk was enlightened. He slotted the piece of business acumen away. Some day, when his voluntary anatomy apprenticeship was completed, he would have to take to the road - he was running out of apprenticeships. And he was determined to break into the lush pastures and free pickings of the thoroughfare section. There was small reward in Industrial Accidents or Domestic Mishaps.

*Now,' said Heyar, picking up the capsule. 'Is there anything else?'

Birkk shifted from one foot to another uneasily.

'Oh yes.' Heyar reached in his pocket and tossed a handful of notes across to Birkk. They fluttered on to Birkk's separation table. He wiped them before he stuffed them into an inner pocket.

In the time it took to remove any tell-tale stains - certain tradesmen were still uneasy about taking blood money -Heyar was gone.

Jolo Trevnik locked the weathered door of his down-town Adonis League and wondered, as he wondered every night, why he bothere6*. Once, his culture clinic had been definitely uptown and well-filled with rounded young men slinging medicine balls at each other and testing their biceps in crucifix poses on the wall-bars.

Strange how, finally, even location turned against you. The people had moved away into apartment blocks on the edge of town, leaving the centre purely for business and only that which was conducted in skyhanger settings.

Now, Jolo exercised alone, moving slowly from one piece of apparatus to another, not because he had himself slowed up, but to conserve himself for some purpose which evaded him and could have been mere wishful thinking.

His suit grew progressively shabbier and his fortune, body-built in the days of activity kicks grew progressively smaller, as did his steaks and his health food orders. But as yet, he was still in fine shape.

As he turned away from the door and walked towards the main rotor quay, a shadow in a doorway down the street moved to follow him.

But despite its attempt at concealment, Trevnik knew of its presence. It was part of the new fatal system that had emptied his clinic - an ironic reminder that the body that had once been so envied in life was now attractive only in terms of death.

I suppose I ought to be honoured, he thought. I'll make the bastard work for his money.

At the rotor quay, he selected the slow track and moved quickly along it. He wanted to put the idlers in his pursuer's way. He moved among them like an athlete among statues. The statues made no protest, silent, turned inward with the seashells in their ears filling their minds with the symphonies and the soothing words they had chosen to hear.

Above the whine of the rotor and the passing traffic, he heard the man stumbling after him, heard him cursing loudly.

At the next junction, he transferred to a faster track, still walking rapidly, weaving neatly between the younger mutes, avoiding their waving arms and snapping fingers.

His pursuer was less adept and less gentle. Once, he jostled one young man so violently that his seashell slipped to the moving pavement.

The youth recovered it and pursued the pursuer long enough to tap his heels and send him headlong before returning to his transistorized reverie.

Trevnik heard the resultant tumble and allowed the pavement to bear him along until the gaunt man regained his feet. Then he back-pedalled until the man drew level still dusting himself down.

'I trust you haven't hurt yourself,' he said, carefully controlling the bitterness he felt. 'Perhaps we should walk a little more slowly.'

The man eyed him suspiciously.

If he knows why I am here, why I trail him, why does he react so dispassionately? wondered Heyar. Or does he know?

'I'm all right,' he said gruffly. 'I don't need help ... thank you.' The courtesy came as an afterthought.

'Perhaps I should walk with you in case you feel suddenly faint,' said Trevnik. 'If you're shaky, you ought to get to bed. Are you sure I can't help you?'

The lithe man's spectacular concern jarred on Heyar's sensitivity. He began to notice how the man moved, almost mincingly. The breeze that played on their faces as they were drawn along the track brought a foreign aroma to the nostrils grown acute with death. Heyar swallowed and looked at the man again.

'Really,' he said almost defensively. 'It's all right. The next quay is as far as I go.'

'As you please,' said Trevnik. 'But if there's the smallest thing ...'

'Nothing,' said Heyar, savagely.

Trevnik rode beside him, barely glancing at him, but wearing the self-satisfied air of a man who has done a good turn for an ungracious response.

But not so much a man ... Heyar, sneaking glances at Trevnik from the shelter of his hat-brim, became even more apprehensive. Trevnik's finely-developed limbs and torso might fetch a good price. But trying to sell internal organs marred by chromosomatic complications, or a brain whose motivations were neither particularly masculine nor blatantly feminine but in some twilight in-between had setbacks. So much so that Heyar was tempted to cease his observations on Trevnik.

At the quay closest to his office, he disembarked without a word to Trevnik and watched the man's broad back out of sight.

There was no doubt Trevnik had a physique rarely seen among the squat inhabitants of 1983, a body which, if properly marketed, could prove profitable despite ...

Despite nothing. It was merely an impression, recalled Heyar, and impressions could be misleading or even downright fake. Could it be that Trevnik was trying to sidetrack him into withdrawing his attentions?

Any fresh measure to protect one's remains after death intrigued Heyar. One was, after all, no longer an occupant and unlikely to be affected by post-mortem activities. But the mysterious attitudes of the sanctimonious sixties still persisted. There remained in certain circles a horror of disturbing the corpse. Heyar faced bravely the stigma of obscenity and cried all the way to the credit pile when somebody called him a necrophile.

'I do mankind a service,' he would tell people who questioned his motives. "The burial grounds have been used up, built over, defiled in asphalt. The crematorium has a use, but it is a great leveller. How do you identify ashes? Some items very useful to the living are lost in the flames. I aid medical science. I am trained to the task and my spirit is right.'

'If I can help somebody,' he crooned raggedly as he entered the block where his office was situated, 'as I pass along ...'

He boarded the elevator and pressed the director button for the 11 th floor.

'Then my living shall not be in vain ...'

The elevator wound upwards. Head bowed, Heyar was engrossed in the half-remembered song.

'Then my living shall not be in vain ... Oh ...'

The elevator shunted him into the nth floor berth. He opened the door of his office.

'My living shall not be in v-a-i-n-n-n.'

The woman in the guest chair had red-rimmed eyes but she watched him with an intensity that must have brought her pain.

'Good evening,' he said calmly. He was used to finding such women in his office. One pair of red eyes looked much like another.

'I've been here for hours,' she said.

1 didn't know you were here,' he said, obviously. He did not concede the necessity for an apology.

'You are about as cold as I estimated that you were,' she said. 'I've been looking round the office, seeking some softness, some rounded edge. But it is all sharp-cold and soulless.'

The psycho-analytical approach was not new to Heyar by any means. But it did lend a little more of a tang to the exchange than the sniffles into a handkerchief or the soprano voice raised, in heart-rending plea.

'A table and a chair,' he said. 'A filing cabinet, a secretary computer. What else would you expect?'

She would tell him her name and the reason for her presence in her own time. He would not prompt the revelation because it was important to maintain a singular lack of interest.

'You're probably wondering why I am here,' she said hopefully. Not well versed in deception, she let the mask slip occasionally.

"No. You'll tell me eventually.'

'I'm Elsie Stogumber.'

Stogumber. The name had a vague familiarity, some half-remembered or semi-noted significance. Heyar switched on his secretary computer.

'Stogumber,' he said into the feeder piece.

'There would hardly be anything recorded yet,' said the woman.

The name clicked.

This morning,' Heyar said. 'He asked for you.' 'Small comfort to me now.'

Heyar waited. The woman had not once taken her eyes from his face.

'They say you - you had his head.' 'Yes.'

The woman dropped her eyes and fumbled with the gloves in her lap.

'You wouldn't still have it?'

Heyar*s stomach heaved. His vocation was bloody enough, even viewed with the detachment he brought to it. But when one tried to personalize bits of flesh ...

'Why?'he asked.

'I suddenly couldn't remember my husband's face,' she said. 'It horrified me. If I could just...'

'I no longer have it,' cut in Heyar. 'My clients demand prompt delivery.'

'Your - clients?'

'Mrs. Stogumber, I'm sure you know the situation. And I'm quite prepared to believe that your bereaved state at this time makes realization a little difficult. But do you really want me to go into this? Will you not be comforted if I say that your husband is beyond any inconvenience or pain in this matter and that his last thoughts, to my certain knowledge, were of you?'

"No. It is inadequate.'

'What would you want, Mrs. Stogumber?'

'Ideally, my husband. Or at least some part of him.'

"But he's dead, Mrs. Stogumber. He's gone. A body is not a person without the spark of life.'

The woman crumpled visibly in the chair. Her shoulders shook and she took in great gulps of air.

'Don't you have any movies of him?' asked Heyar. 'Or some threedees, maybe?'

'He went out after breakfast and I'll never see him again,' she said pitifully. 'You - you buzzards chop him up before I can even ...'

The fight for breath became less laboured as tears began to flow. Heyar let her cry, thankful for an escape valve.

He wondered what he could say when she came out of it. Evening edged a little closer to night. Her sobs softened to an occasional sniff. She blew her nose and then looked up.'

'You see, when in 1975, the Central Committee rescinded the Anatomy Act of 1823 and the Burial Act of 1926,' he began.

I've seen you,' she said. 'All of you. Standing at busy road junctions, chasing ambulances, trailing feeble old men... .' Her voice was close to hysteria.

He rose, walked round the desk and slapped her hard. She became silent.

'It would help if you knew our intentions,' he said. 'We are not - buzzards. We play a vital role. To benefit the living we make certain adjustments to the'unliving. Nobody suffers by it. The Salvage of Organs Act of January 1976 gave us the full power of the legislature. This was tantamount to a declaration that the 'racket' in kidneys, heart valves and limbs that had thrived up to that time was accepted as inevitable and made conventional. We have new thinkers now. Wasting our sentiment on a pile of gone-off meat was not progressive.

'Surely you can appreciate that.'

The woman took a deep breath. For a moment she teetered on the verge of more weeping. But she struggled on bravely.

'I accept it in theory,' she said. 'It seemed to make good sense at the time. ... Things like that always do when you are not involved.

'But I have seen the way you work. You salvage men don't just wait for death - you prompt it. Surely you shouldn't •have to compete with each other like those old American insurance men and those Australian breakdown lorry drivers.'

Heyar swung his feet up on to the desk. Now the situation had resumed a calmer plane, he felt better able to cope. He clasped his fingers behind his head. 'One has to make a living,' he said.

Elsie Stogumber seemed oblivious to the angry red flush on one side of her face. She tried a wintry smile.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'For losing control. It was childish of me.'

She seemed to have regained a certain resolution.

'It's all right, Mrs. Stogumber,' Heyar said. 'I admire your present composure.'

She smiled again, a little more like early autumn this time.

'When somebody takes the trouble to explain, it makes things that much easier,' she said.

'The 1974 amendments to the Human Tissues Act of 1961,' said Heyar. She stopped him with a raised hand.

'No more,' she cautioned him gently. 'Don't blind me with science.'

High summer shaped her lips. Heyar swung his feet off the deskdesk, stood up and came round the desk towards her.

Elsie Stogumber was clear of her chair and through the office door before he could reach her.

Heyar stood on the permanent walkway opposite the gymnasium and made no attempt at concealment. Such intrigue became ludicrous with repetition. Now, he did not veil his intentions, even out of courtesy.

He was too little of the hypocrite, for a start. Or was it because he liked to watch Trevnik's mahogany face as he noticed him, to see the eyes go suddenly wide as if in fear of an old superstition and then as suddenly narrow and normal and carefully averted?

He heard a descending thunder on the stairs. Trevnik must have seen him, given the advantage of darkness looking out on light because the large man simply showed him his back as he locked the door and started down the street.

In no apparent hurry Heyar crossed the road and fell into step about twenty yards behind the giant. Today, he saw nothing suspect in the man's gait. Trevnik, presumably, had given up any pretence and walked now only in a way that exhibited the disciplined thrust of hip and leg.

Elsie Stogumber, cramped from her unaccustomed sojourn in the narrow doorway once occupied by Heyar, emerged into the mid-day brilliance and watched the two men down the street.

Birkk took the last protein sandwich he wanted and pushed the remainder across to the gaunt man. Somehow, though he had long since ceased to be troubled by his occupation, his appetite had never returned.

Each day, he prepared himself more sandwiches than he would eat. And each day, still feigning surprise at the meeting and hungry from some mysterious hunt. Heyar joined him on his bench at the leisure zone, silent until Birkk had shown himself fed to sufficiency and had proffered him the surplus.

Birkk washed his mouth out at the fluori-fountain neaifoy, spat and sat down again.

Heyar chewed, his eyes fixed on the children's fun-run, watching for a collision with the spinning chairs or a fall from the helter-skelter.

'We could, perhaps, fill in the loop-holes,' said Birkk.

Heyar grunted.

'The way into this game is too easy,' said Birkk. 'If we study, it is to be eventually better at our job. There is no ruling. It is a labour of love. Amateurs, opportunists can always make inroads. Perhaps we should form a union, or get some sole recognition from the Central Committee.'

Heyar shrugged. He was used to Birkk's theorizing, his verbal attempts to make the living more secure for himself in his incompetence.

'The amount of money the amateurs make, the volume of business we professionals lose is negligible,' he said. 'Myself, I don't mind who gets the stamp. I can always keep myself well.'

In his sudden silence, he indicated his doubt of the other's ability.

'Me. too,' said Birkk, hurriedly. *I was thinking of the less fortunate members of our calling.'

Atop the 50-foot slide, a jostled child screamed and clutched with vain fingers at the air.

Birkk and Heyar moved at speed towards the gathering crowd.

The Minerva no longer pretended that the health foods it served were any more than politely-fashioned simulants or, at best, salvaged from some overgrown delicatessen. But at least, the café still retained certain of the musty odour that had once given herb stores an impression of geography contained within three walls and a display window.

Jolo Trevnik avoided the glassed-up, sexified, neonized planktoniums. His stomach, disciplined to a balanced carbohydrate intake, turned on the lead oxide that accompanied every boxed cereal these days, a legacy of the brightly-coloured free gift needed to sell any competitive product.

His system revolted against battery lamb and the beef and chicken, he knew, contained sterilizing agents to an alarming degree.

Not that he was bothered particularly about virility. The unborn were the lucky ones, he reasoned.

A shape above his table cut out the light. Momentarily, he started, his mind still fixed on the man with the wasted face who had followed him to the door.

Then a woman sat down opposite him and he noted the full, fortyish face and the slightly protruding eyes with a measure of relief.

He took a sip at his acorn coffee to steady his nerves. When he put his cup down, she was waiting.

'Mr. Trevnik?'

'Yes.'

'I saw the name on the door of your gymnasium.'

'But that's a long way away. What...?'

1 followed you,' she said quickly. 'I couldn't help noticing I wasn't the only one.'

Trevnik looked away. It was suddenly humiliating to have other people know the snatchers were fancying you. It made you seem - something of a prostitute, a prize poodle, a cat dn heat, a blacker-than-black man.

'I'm sorry for you,' she said.

It doesn't bother me. I look after myself. I avoid accidents.' 'My husband was the same.' 'Do I know your husband?'

'I think he came to your gym a couple of times - Harry Stogumber.' 'Stogumber.'

His echo of the word chilled her with a memory. 'Tall fellow,' he said. 'Not too fat. Not much flesh at all, really.' 'Please.'

'I'm sorry,' said Trevnik. 'It was just a phrase....'

'It has associations,' she said. 'Just at the moment, anyhow.'

Trevnik freed his great legs from the inadequate table and turned his seat sideways to allow them access to the gangway. The woman was running her eyes over the breadth of his shoulders, the width and density of his hands.

'I - I was going to ask you a favour,' she said finally. 'That man who keeps following you. He was there when the car hit my husband. He...'

She swallowed hard.

'Don't trouble yourself,' said Trevnik. 'It is never pleasant for those who have to pick up the ...' He bit his tongue. 'For those who are left behind.'

'I want to hurt him,' she said. 'Really physically hurt him. But what can I do?'

Trevnik looked down at his hands and watched the veins cording and uncording.

'You want me to hurt him for you,' he said to save her. 'I have never in my life used my strength to hurt anyone.'

'I could offer you money,' she said. He looked up.

'But I know it would hold no attraction for you. I could ...'

'Hey.' He interrupted deliberately, afraid of what she might offer.

'If I did,' he said, 'it would not be for any reward. It would be because I wanted to do it.'

'What would make you want to do it?'

'Let us consider this coolly,' he said. 'First of all, you can't just beat somebody up ...'

'Self-defence.'

'Lady,' Trevnik chose the words with exaggerated care. 'How could I plead self-defence? Is it likely that I would be in a position where I needed to defend myself?'

He pushed his dark face nearer the woman.

'I look like an attacker.'

She retreated not one inch.

'If you said he tried to push you into the gutter or trip you into the rotor plant, you would have provocation.'

'I'm sorry.' He got up from the table. 'I don't lie. In this crooked world, I try at least to keep myself straight. Perhaps you'd .better find somebody else.'

'Wait.'

He paused. Despite the importance to him of his new remaining quasi-convictions, he didn't want them to stand in the way of an action that would give him rare pleasure. But there had to be the right justification.

'Perhaps you ...' She licked her lips and fumbled for the phrasing.

"You look like a man who might be swayed by the justice inherent in a certain act.'

He eased himself back on to the ridiculous seat.

Again, the gaunt man waiting on the far pavement; again the thunder down the rotting wooden stairs.

Trevnik emerged and turned to lock the door. Heyar shifted his weight from one foot to another, anxious to be away.

Trevnik turned from the door and looked straight at Heyar. He started across the road.

Heyar, suddenly afraid, wondered what other purpose he could give to his presence.

'That building,' he said, before Trevnik could reach him. 'Doesn't look too safe. It could fall down at any time.'

'Is that why you keep following me?' asked Trevnik, mounting the kerb. 'Because you think I'll fall down as well?' 'No ... no,' said Heyar hurried. 'We - my department -we wanted to find out where you live, where you eat, your transportive habits, so we can site your replacement office accordingly ...'

'Rubbish,' said Trevnik.

'No, I assure you ...'

Trevnik hit him first on the nose, drawing blood. 'See a little of your own,' he said pleasantly.

Then he sank his right fist deep into Heyar's solar plexus and followed it with his left fist. His right-hand jolt to the mouth straightened Heyar up.

Trevnik brought the edges of both palms down on the nerve centres inside Heyar's collar-bones, paralysing his arms.

'Bloody grave-robber,' he said without expression. 'White scum. How you pink bastards like to keep blood on your hands.'

He hit Heyar twice more in the stomach and brought his hand-edge down on the back of Heyar's neck as he doubled again. All this he did with no apparent effort. As a final gesture, he turned Heyar face upwards and stood back.

Heyar, his senses reeling, his mouth salty and crowded, saw roofs tipping at him and tried to twist out of their downward path. But he could not move.

A shadow lingered above him. His flooded nostrils barely caught a woman's scent before a smell he knew too well, a smell of ancient perspiration.

The woman pushed back his damp hair and then seemed to be going through his pockets.

Heyar closed his eyes. Get on with it, he thought through a blood-red mist. Find I'm penniless and go.

The woman spoke.

'Mr. Heyar.'

He opened his eyes. The woman bent towards him. Something glinted in her hand.

She brought the Stamp down hard right between his eyes.

He tried to scream but choked on his blood, his own overpowering smell.

Elsie Stogumber said: 'A widow has to make a living somehow.'

The patient woman went on a tour of the morgue, stopping at the display cases, examining instruments. Then she returned to the separating table.

Birkk was bent over his work, his face turned away from her.

She touched his shoulder and thrust a hand under his chin so that he was forced to look into her shining eyes.

'Do you always weep over your carcases?' she asked. "What a charming old-fashioned habit...'

and, besides being chosen last for the team, was always made to play centre field, no one could ever hit to centre field; she loves music best of all the arts, and of music, Bach, J. S.; she lives in California, though she grew up in Boston and Toledo.

(4). Breakfast Time at the Boyles' House on La Florida Street, Alameda, California, the Children Demand Sugar Frosted Flakes.

With some reluctance Sarah Boyle dishes out Sugar Frosted Flakes to her children, already hearing the decay set in upon the little milk white teeth, the bony Whine of the dentist's drill. The dentist is a short, gentle man with a moustache who sometimes reminds Sarah of an uncle who fives in Ohio. One bowl per child.

(5). If one can imagine it considered as an abstract object, by members of a totally separate culture, one can see that the cereal box might seem a beautiful thing. The solid rectangle is neatly joined and classical in proportions, on it are squandered wealths of richest colours, virgin blues, crimsons, dense ochres, precious pigments once reserved for sacred paintings and as cosmetics for the blind faces of marble gods. Giant size. Net Weight 16 ounces, 250 grams. 'They're tigeriffic!' says Tony the Tiger. The box blatts promises. Energy, Nature's Own Goodness, an endless pubescence. On its back is a mask of William Shakespeare to be cut out, folded, worn by thousands of tiny Shakespeares in Kansas City, Detroit, Tuscon, San Diego, Tampa. He appears at once more kindly and somewhat more vacant than we are used to seeing him. Two or more of the children lay claim to the mask, but Sarah puts off that Solomon's decision until such time as the box is empty.

(6). A notice in orange flourishes states that a Surprise Gift is to be found somewhere in the package, nestled amongst the golden flakes. So far it has not been unearthed, and the children request more cereal than they wish to eat, great yellow heaps of it, to hurry the discovery. Even so, at the end of the meal, some layers of flakes remain in the box and the Gift must still be among them.

(7). There is even a Special Offer of a secret membership, code and magic ring; these to be obtained by sending in the box top with 50c.

(8). Three offers on one cereal box. To Sarah Boyle this seems to be oversell. Perhaps something is terribly wrong with the cereal and it must be sold quickly, got off the shelves before the news breaks. Perhaps it causes a special, cruel cancer in little children. As Sarah Boyle collects the bowls printed with bunnies and baseball statistics, still slopping half full of milk and wilted flakes, she imagines in her mind's eye the headlines, 'Nation's Small Fry Stricken, Fate's Finger Sugar Coated, Lethal Sweetness Socks Tots'.

(9). Sarah Boyle is a vivacious and intelligent young wife and mother, educated at a fine Eastern college, proud of her growing family which keeps her busy and happy around the house.

(10). Birthday.

Today is the birthday of one of the children. There will be a party in the late afternoon.

(11). Cleaning Up the House. (One.) Cleaning up the kitchen. Sarah Boyle puts the bowls, plates, glasses and silverware into the sink. She scrubs at the stickiness on the yellow-marbled formica table with a blue synthetic sponge, a special blue which we shall see again. There are marks of children's hands in various sizes printed with sugar and grime on all the table's surfaces. The marks catch the light, they appear and disappear according to the position of the observing eye. The floor sweepings include a triangular half of toast spread with grape jelly, bobby pins, a green band-aid, flakes, a doll's eye, dust, dog's hair and a button.

(12). Until we reach the statistically likely planet and begin to converse with whatever green-faced, teleporting denizens thereof - considering only this shrunk and communication-ravaged world - can we any more postulate a separate culture? Viewing the metastasis of Western Culture it seems progressively less likely. Sarah Boyle imagines a whole world which has become like California, all topographical imperfections sanded away with the sweet smelling burr of the plastic surgeon's cosmetic polisher; a world populace dieting, leisured, similar in pink and mauve hair and rhinestone shades. A land Cunt Pink and Avocado Green, brassiered and girdled by monstrous complexities of Super Highways, a California endless and unceasing, embracing and transforming the entire globe, California, California!

(13). Insert One. On Entropy.

Entropy: A quantity introduced in the first place to facilitate the calculation, and to give clear expressions to the results of thermodynamics. Changes of entropy can be calculated only for a reversible process, and may then be defined as the ratio of the amount of heat taken up to the absolute temperature at which the heat is absorbed. Entropy changes for actual irreversible processes are calculated by postulating equivalent theoretical reversible changes. The entropy of a system is a measure of its degree of disorder. The total entropy of any isolated system can never decrease in any change; it must either increase (irreversible process) or remain constant (reversible process). The total entropy of the Universe therefore is increasing, tending towards a maximum, corresponding to complete disorder of the particles in it (assuming that it may be regarded as an isolated system). See heat death of the Universe.

(14). Cleaning Up the House. (Two.) Washing the baby's diapers. Sarah Boyle writes notes to herself all over the house; a mazed wild script larded with arrows, diagrams, pictures; graffiti on every available surface in a desperate/heroic attempt to index, record, bluff, invoke, order and placate. On the fluted and flowered white plastic lid of the diaper bin she has written in Blushing Pink Nitetime lipstick a phrase to ward off fumey ammoniac despair. 'The nitrogen cycle is the vital round of organic and inorganic exchange on earth. The sweet breath of the Universe.' On the wall by the washing machine are Yin and Yang signs, mándalas, and the words, 'Many young wives feel trapped. It is a contemporary sociological phenomenon which may be explained in part by a gap between changing living patterns and the accommodation of social services to these patterns.' Over the stove she had written 'Help, Help, Help, Help, Help.'

(15). Sometimes she numbers or letters the things in a room, writing the assigned character on each object. There are 819 separate movable objects in the living-room, counting books. Sometimes she labels objects with their names, or with false names, thus on her bureau the hair brush is labelled hair brush, the cologne, cologne, the hand cream, cat. She is passionately fond of children's dictionaries, encyclopaedias, A.B.C.s and all reference books, transfixed and comforted at their simulacra of a complete listing and ordering.

(16). On the door of a bedroom are written two definitions from reference books, 'God : An object of worship'; 'Homeostasis: Maintenance of constancy of internal environment'.

(17). Sarah Boyle washes the diapers, washes the linen, Oh Saint Veronica, changes the sheets on the baby's crib. She begins to put away some of the toys, stepping over and around the organizations of playthings which still seem inhabited. There are various vehicles, and articles of medicine, domesticity and war; whole zoos of stuffed animals, bruised and odorous with years of love; hundreds of small figures, plastic animals, cowboys, cars, spacemen, with which the children make sub and supra worlds in their play. One of Sarah's favourite toys is the Baba, the wooden Russian doll which, opened, reveals a smaller but otherwise identical doll which opens to reveal, etc., a lesson in infinity at least to the number of seven dolls.

(18). Sarah Boyle's mother has been dead for two years. Sarah Boyle thinks of music as the formal articulation of the passage of time, and of Bach as the most poignant rendering of this. Her eyes are sometimes the colour of the aforementioned kitchen sponge. Her hair is natural spaniel brown; months ago on an hysterical day she dyed it red, so now it is two-toned with a stripe in the middle, like the painted walls of slum buildings or old schools.

(19). Insert Two. The Heat Death of the Universe. The second law of thermodynamics can be interpreted to mean that the entropy of a closed system tends toward a maximum and that its available energy tends toward a minimum. It has been held that the Universe constitutes a thermo-dynamically closed system, and if this were true it would mean that a time must finally come when the Universe 'unwinds' itself, no energy being available for use. This state is referred to as the 'heat death of the Universe.' It is by no means certain, however, that the Universe can be considered as a closed system in this sense.

(20). Sarah Boyle pours out a Coke from the refrigerator and lights a cigarette. The coldness and sweetness of the thick brown liquid make her throat ache and her teeth sting briefly, sweet juice of my youth, her eyes glass with the carbonation, she thinks of the Heat Death of the Universe. A logarithmic of those late summer days, endless as the Irish serpent twisting through jewelled manuscripts forever, tail in mouth, the heat pressing, bloating, doing violence. The Los Angeles sky becomes so filled and bleached wth detritus that it loses all colour and silvers like a mirror, reflecting back the f ricasseeing earth. Everything becoming warmer and warmer, each particle of matter becoming more agitated, more excited until the bonds shatter, the glues fail, the deodorants lose their seals. She imagines the whole of New York City melting like a Dali into a great chocolate mass, a great soup, the Great Soup of New York.

(21). Cleaning Up the House. (Three.) Beds made. Vacuuming the hall, a carpet of faded flowers, vines and leaves which endlessly wind and twist into each other in a fevered and permanent ecstasy. Suddenly the vacuum blows instead of sucks, spewing marbles, dolls' eyes, dust, crackers. An old trick. 'Oh my god,' says Sarah. The baby yells on cue for attention/changing/food. Sarah kicks the vacuum cleaner and it retches and begins working again.

(22). At Lunch Only One Glass of Milk is Spilled. At lunch only one glass of milk is spilled.

(23). The plants need watering, Geranium, Hyacinth, Lavender, Avocado, Cyclamen. Feed the fish, happy fish with china castles and mermaids in the bowl. The turtle looks more and more unwell and is probably dying.

(24). Sarah Boyle's blue eyes, how blue? Bluer far and of a different quality than the Nature metaphors which were both engine and fuel to so much of precedant literature. A fine, modern, acid, synthetic blue; the shiny cerulean of the skies on postcards sent from lush subtropics, the natives grinning ivory ambivalent grins in their dark faces; the promising fat, unnatural blue of the heavy tranquillizer capsule; the cool, mean blue of that fake kitchen sponge; the deepest, most unbelievable azure of the tiled and mossless interiors of California swimming pools. The chemists in their kitchens cooked, cooled and distilled this blue from thousands of colourless and wonderfully constructed crystals, each one unique and nonpareil; and now that colour, hisses, bubbles, burns in Sarah's eyes.

(25). Insert Three. On Light.

Light: Name given to the agency by means of which a viewed object influences the observer's eyes. Consists of electromagnetic radiation within the wave-length range 4 x 10-⁵ cm. to 7 x 10-⁵ cm. approximately; variations in the wave-length produce different sensations in the eye, corresponding to different colours. See colour vision.

(26). Light and Cleaning the Living Room. All the objects (819) and surfaces in the living-room are dusty, grey common dust as though this were the den of a giant, moulting mouse. Suddenly quantities of waves or particles of very strong sunlight speed in through the window, and everything incandesces, multiple rainbows. Poised in what has become a solid cube of light, like an ancient insect trapped in amber, Sarah Boyle realizes that the dust is indeed the most beautiful stuff in the room, a manna for the eyes. Duchamp, that father of thought, has set with fixative some dust which fell on one of his sculptures, counting it as part of the work. 'That way madness lies, says Sarah,' says Sarah. The thought of ordering a household on Dada principles balloons again. All the rooms would fill up with objects, newspapers and magazines would compost, the potatoes in the rack, the canned green beans in the garbage can would take new heart and come to life again, reaching out green shoots towards the sun. The plants would grow wild and wind into a jungle around the house, splitting plaster, tearing shingles, the garden would enter in at the door. The goldfish would die, the birds would die, we'd have them stuffed; the dog would die from lack of care, and probably the children - all stuffed and sitting around the house, covered with dust.

at other times a complete separation. The mind/body duality considered. The time/space duality considered. The male/ female duality considered. The matter/energy duality considered. Sometimes, at extremes, her Body seems to her an animal on a leash, taken for walks in the park by her Mind. The lamp posts of experience. Her arms are lighdy freckled, and when she gets very tired the places under her eyes become violet.

(36). Housework is never completed, the chaos always lurks ready to encroach on any area left unweeded, a jungle filled with dirty pans and the roaring giant stuffed toy animals suddenly turned savage. Terrible glass eyes.

(37). Shopping for the Birthday Cake. Shopping in the supermarket with the baby in front of the cart and a larger child holding on. The light from the ice cube tray shaped fluorescent lights is mixed blue and pink and brighter, colder, and cheaper than daylight. The doors swing open just as you reach out your hand for them, Tantalus, moving with a ghastly quiet swing. Hot dogs for the party. Potato chips, gum drops, a paper tablecloth with birthday designs, hot dog buns, catsup, mustard, piccalilli, balloons, instant coffee Continental style, dog food, frozen peas, ice cream, frozen lima beans, frozen broccoli in butter sauce, paper birthday hats, paper napkins in three colours, a box of Sugar Frosted Flakes with a Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart mask on the back, bread, pizza mix. The notes of a just graspable music filter through the giant store, for the most part by-passing the brain and acting directly on the liver, blood and lymph. The air is delicately scented with aluminum. Half and half cream, tea bags, bacon, sandwich meat, strawberry jam. Sarah is in front of the shelves of cleaning products now, and the baby is beginning to whine. Around her are whole libraries of objects, offering themselves. Some of that same old hysteria that had incarnadined her hair rises up again, and she does not refuse it. There is one moment when she can choose direction, like standing on a chalk drawn X, a hot cross bun, and she does not choose calm and measure. Sarah Boyle begins to pick out, methodically, deliberately and with a careful ecstasy, one of every cleaning product which the store sells. Window Cleaner, Glass

Cleaner, Brass Polish, Silver Polish, Steel Wool, eighteen different brands of Detergent, Disinfectant, Toilet Cleanser, Water Softener, Fabric Softener, Drain Cleanser, Spot Remover, Floor Wax, Furniture Wax, Car Wax, Carpet Shampoo, Dog Shampoo, Shampoo for people with dry, oily and normal hair, for people with dandruff, for people with grey hair. Tooth Paste, Tooth Powder, Denture Cleaner, Deodorants, Antiperspirants, Antiseptics, Soaps, Cleansers, Abrasives Oven Cleansers, Makeup Removers. When the same products appear in different sizes Sarah takes one of each size. For some products she accumulates Whole little families of containers: a giant Father bottle of shampoo, a Mother bottle, an Older Sister bottle just smaller than the Mother bottle, and a very tiny Baby Brother bottle. Sarah fills three shopping carts and has to have help wheeling them all down the aisles. At the checkout counter her laughter and hysteria keep threatening to overflow as the pale blonde clerk with no eyebrows like the Mona Lisa pretends normality and disinterest. The bill comes to $57.53 and Sarah has to write a check. Driving home, the baby strapped in the drive-a-cot and the paper bags bulging in the back seat, she cries.

(38). Before the Party.

Mrs. David Boyle, mother-in-law of Sarah Boyle, is coming to the party of her grandchild. She brings a toy, a yellow wooden duck on a string, made in Austria; the duck quacks as it is pulled along the floor. Sarah is filling paper cups with gum drops and chocolates, and Mrs. David Boyle sits at the kitchen table and talks to her. She is talking about several things, she is talking about her garden which is flourishing except for a plague of rare black beetles, thought to have come from Hong Kong, which are undermining some of the most delicate growths at the roots, and feasting on the leaves of other plants. She is talking about a sale of household linens which she plans to attend on the following Tuesday. She is talking about her neighbour who has cancer and is wasting away. The neighbour is a Catholic woman who had never had a day's illness in her life until the cancer struck, and now she is, apparently, failing with dizzying speed. The doctor says her body's chaos, chaos, cells running wild all over, says Mrs. David Boyle. When I visited her she hardly knew me, can hardly speak, can't keep herself clean, says Mrs. David Boyle.

(39). Sometimes Sarah can hardly remember how many cute, chubby little children she has.

(40). When she used to stand out in centre field far away from the other players, she used to make up songs and sing them to herself.

(41). She thinks of the end of the world by ice.

(42). She thinks of the end of the world by water.

(43). She thinks of the end of the world by nuclear war.

(44). There must be more than this, Sarah Boyle thinks, from time to time. What could one do to justify one's passage? Or less ambitiously, to change, even in the motion of the smallest mote, the course and circulation of the world? Sometimes Sarah's dreams are of heroic girth, a new symphony using laboratories of machinery and all invented instruments, at once giant in scope and intelligible to all, to heal the bloody breach; a series of paintings which would transfigure and astonish and calm the frenzied art world in its panting race; a new novel that would refurbish language. Sometimes she considers the mystical, the streaky and random, and it seems that one change, no matter how small, would be enough. Turtles are supposed to live for many years. To carve a name, date and perhaps a word of hope upon a turde's shell, then set him free to wend the world, surely this one act might cancel out absurdity?

(45). Mrs. David Boyle has a faint moustache, like Duchamp's Mona Lisa.

(46). The Birthday Party.

Many children, dressed in pastels, sit around the long table. They are exhausted and overexcited from games fiercely played, some are flushed and wet, others unnaturally pale. This general agitation, and the paper party hats they wear, combine to make them appear a dinner party of debauched midgets. It is time for the cake. A huge chocolate cake in the shape of a rocket and launching pad and covered with blue and pink icing is carried in. In the hush the birthday child begins to cry. He stops crying, makes a wish and blows out the candles.

(47). One child will not eat hot dogs, ice cream or cake, and asks for cereal. Sarah pours him out a bowl of Sugar Frosted Flakes, and a moment later he chokes. Sarah pounds him on the back and out spits a tiny green plastic snake with red glass eyes, the Surprise Gift. All the children want it.

(48). After the Party the Children Are Put to Bed. Bath time. Observing the nakedness of children, pink and slippery as seals, squealing as seals, now the splashing, grunting and smacking of cherry flesh on raspberry flesh reverberate in the pearl tiled steamy cubicle. The nakedness of children is so much more absolute than that of the mature. No musky curling hair to indicate the target points, no knobbly clutch of plane and fat and curvature to ennoble this prince of beasts. All well fed naked children appear edible, Sarah's teeth hum in her head with memory of bloody feastings, prehistory. Young humans appear too like the young of other species for smugness, and the comparison is not even in their favour, they are much the most peeled and unsupple of those young. Such pinkness, such utter nuded pinkness; the orifices neatly incised, rimmed with a slighty deeper rose, the incessant demands for breast, time, milks of many sorts.

(49). Insert Six. Weiner on Entropy. In Gibbs' Universe order is least probable, chaos most probable. But while the Universe as a whole, if indeed there is a whose Universe, tends to run down, there are local enclaves whose direction seems opposed to that of the Universe at large and in which there is a limited and temporary tendency for organization to increase. Life finds its home in some of these enclaves.

(50). Sarah Boyle imagines, in her mind's eye, cleaning and ordering the whole world, even the Universe. Filling the great spaces of Space with a marvellous sweet smelling, deep cleansing foam. Deodorizing rank caves and volcanoes. Scrubbing rocks.

(51). Insert Seven. Turtles.

Many different species of carnivorous Turdes live in the fresh waters of the tropical and temperate zones of various continents. Most northerly of the European Turdes (extending as far as Holland and Lithuania) is the European Pond Turtle (Emys orbicularis). It is from 8 to 10 inches long and may live a hundred years.

(52). Cleaning Up after the Party.

Sarah is cleaning up after the party. Gum drops and melted ice cream surge off paper plates, making holes in the paper tablecloth through the printed roses. A fly has died a splendid death in a pool of strawberry ice cream. Wet jelly beans stain all they touch, finally becoming themselves colourless, opaque white like flocks of tamed or sleeping maggots. Plastic favours mount half-eaten pieces of blue cake. Strewn about are thin strips of fortune papers from the Japanese poppers. Upon them are printed strangely assorted phrases selected by apparently unilingual Japanese. Crowds of delicate yellow people spending great chunks of their lives in producing these most ephemeral of objects, and inscribing thousands of fine papers with absurd and incomprehensible messages. 'The very hairs of your head are all numbered,' reads one. Most of the balloons have popped. Someone has planted a hot dog in the daffodil pot. A few of the helium balloons have escaped their owners and now ride the ceiling. Another fortune paper reads, 'Emperor's horses meet death worse, numbers, numbers.'

(53). She is very tired, violet under the eyes, mauve beneath the eyes. Her uncle in Ohio used to get the same marks under his eyes. She goes to the kitchen to lay the table for tomorrow's breakfast, then she sees that in the turtle's bowl the turtle is floating, still, on the surface of the water. Sarah Boyle pokes at it with a pencil but it does not move. She stands for several minutes looking at the dead turtle on the surface of the water. She is crying again.

(54). She begins to cry. She goes to the refrigerator and takes out a carton of eggs, white eggs, extra large. She throws them one by one on to the kitchen floor which is patterned with strawberries in squares. They break beautifully. There is a Secret Society of Dentists, all moustached, with Special Code and Magic Rings. She begins to cry. She takes up three bunny dishes and throws them against the refrigerator, they shatter, and then the floor is covered with shards, chunks of partial bunnies, an ear, an eye here, a paw; Stockton, California, Acton, California, Chico, California, Redding, California,

Glen Ellen, California, Cadix, California Angels Camp, California, Half Moon Bay. The total entropy of the Universe therefore is increasing, tending towards a maximum, corresponding to complete disorder of the particles in it. She is crying, her mouth is open. She throws a jar of grape jelly and it smashes the window over the sink. Her eyes are blue. She begins to open her mouth. It has been held that the Universe constitutes a thermodynamically closed system, and if this were true it would mean that a time must finally come when the Universe 'unwinds' itself, no energy being available for use. This state is referred to as the 'heat death of the Universe'. Sarah Boyle begins to cry. She throws a jar of strawberry jam against the stove, enamel chips off and the stove begins to bleed. Bach had twenty children, how many children has Sarah Boyle? Her mouth is open. Her mouth is opening. She turns on the water and fills the sinks with detergent. She writes on the kitchen wall, "William Shakespeare has Cancer and lives in California'. She writes, 'Sugar Frosted Flakes are the Food of the Gods'. The water foams up in the sink, overflowing, bubbling on to the strawberry floor. She is about to begin to cry. Her mouth is opening. She is crying. She cries. How can one ever tell whether there are one or many fish? She begins to break glasses and dishes, she throws cups and cooking pots and jars of food which shatter and break and spread over the kitchen. The sand keeps falling, very quietly, in the egg timer. The old man and woman in the barometer never catch each other. She picks up eggs and throws them into the air. She begins to cry. She opens her mouth. The eggs arch slowly through the kitchen, like a baseball, hit high against the spring sky, seen from far away. They go higher and higher in the stillness, hesitate at the zenith, then begin to fall away slowly, slowly, through the fine, clear air.

now, the world would end, mantled for eternity in her sparkling cloth. Coranda, ran the whisper. Coranda, holding their lives in the hollow of her hand. Coranda heard, and laughed; she was just twenty, slim and black haired and tall.

She lay on a couch of white fur, toying with a winecup, mocking the young men of the cities as they paid her court. To Arand, son of the richest merchant of Brershill, she confided her belief that she herself was of the Mother's Chosen and thus above the pettiness of sacrifice. 'For,' she said, smoothing her long hair, 'is not the Mother justly famed for beauty, for the perfection of skin that matches the fresh-laid snow? The darkness of her eyes, all-seeing, the slenderness of the hands that guard us all? And have I not' - she tossed her head - 'have I not, among your good selves at least, some claim to prettiness? Though Eternal Mother forbid' - blushing, and modestly lowering her eyes - 'that I should fall into the sin of pride.' Arand, more than a little drunk, straightway burhled her divinity, speaking heresy with the ease of long practice or stupidity till she swept from him indignantly, angry that he should speak lighdy of the deity in her presence. 'Will not the Mother's rage,' she asked Maitran of Friesgalt appealingly, 'descend alike on his head and mine? Will you protect me from the lightnings that fly in storms, lightnings such words may bring?'

That was a cunning touch, worthy of Coranda; for the animosity with which most Friesgaltians regarded the folk of Brershill was well known, Maitran's knifeblade gleamed instantly, and would no doubt have brought the Mother a pleasing offering had not Brershillian stalwarts pinned and disarmed the combatants. Some blood was shed certainly, from thumped noses and mouths, while Coranda regarded the wriggling heap with interest. 'Now,' she said, 'I think I must call my father's men, to punish; for do I mean so little to you all that you come here to my house and brawl?' She ran to the gong placed beside the door of the chamber, and would certainly have summoned an irate guard had not earnest entreaty prevailed.

'Well,' she said, tossing her head again in disgust. 'It seems you all have too much spirit, and certainly too much energy, for my comfort and your own safety. I think we must devise a small occupation, something that will absorb your wildness and will no doubt bring a suitable reward.'

There was a quietness at that; for she had hinted before that marriage to some rich and worthy boy might at long last assuage the Mother's need. She brooded, suddenly thoughtful, stroked hands across her gown so the fabric showed momentarily the convexities of belly and thighs. Lowered her eyes, glided swaying to the couch. They made way for her, wary and puzzled. Rich they all were, certainly, or they would none of them have passed her father's iron-bound doors; but worthy? Who could be worthy of Coranda, whost beauty was surely Ice Mother's own?

She clapped her hands; at the gesture a house-servant, blue liveried, laid beside her a box. It was made from wood, rarest of substances, inlaid with strips of ivory and bone. She opened it languidly; inside, resting on a quilting of white nylon, was a slim harpoon. She lifted if, toying with the haft, fingers stroking the razor edges of the barbs. 'Who will prove himself?' she asked, seemingly to the air. 'Who will take the Mother's due, when Coranda of Brershill comes to marriage?'

Instantly, a babble of voices; Karl Stromberg and Mard Lipsill of Abersgalt shouted willingness, Frey Skalter the Keltshillian, half-barbaric in his jewelled furs, attempted to kiss her foot. She withdrew it smartly, equally sharply kicked him in the throat. Skalter overbalanced, swearing, spilling wine across the pale floor. There was laughter; she silenced it sharply, lifting the little harpoon again, watching them all from long lashed, kohl-painted eyes. She relaxed, still holding the weapon, staring at the ceiling in the fast blue flicker of the lamps. 'Once,' she said, 'Long ago, in the far south of our land, a whaler was blown off course by storms. When the Ice Mother's anger was spent, and she sent sunlight again and birds, none could make out where her breath had driven them. There was ice, a great smooth plain, and mountains; some of them smoked, so they said, throwing cinders and hot winds into the air. A very queer place it was indeed, with furry barbarians and animals from a child's book of fancies, stranger than men could believe. There they hunted, spilling and killing till their holds were full and they turned north to their home. Then they came on the strangest wonder of all.'

In the quiet the buzzing of the eternal fluorescent tubes sounded loud. Skalter poured himself more wine, carefully, eyes on the girl's face. Arand and Maitran stopped their glaring; Stromberg thoughtfully wiped an errant red trickle from his nose.

'In the dark of dawn,' said Coranda dreamily, 'in the grey time when men and ships are nothing but shadows without weight and substance, they met the Fate sent by Ice Mother to punish them their crimes. It surrounded them, flickering and leaping, soundless as snow, weird as Death itself. All across the plain, round their boat as they sailed, were animals. They ran and moved, playing; whole herds and droves of them, bulls and calves and cows. Their bodies were grey they said, and sinuous as seals; their eyes were beautiful, and looked wisely at the ship. But without doubt they were spirits from the Mother's court, sent to warn and destroy; for as they turned and leaped they saw each had but one horn, long and spiralling, that caught and threw back the light.'

She waited, seeming indifferent to her audience. At length Lipsill broke the silence. 'Coranda ... what of the boat?'

She shrugged delicately, still playing with the barbed tip of the spear. 'Two men returned, burned by the Mother's breath till their faces were black and marbled and their hands turned to scorched hooks. They lived long enough to tell the tale.'

They waited.

'A man who loved me,' she said, 'who wanted to feel me in his bed and know himself worthy, would go to that land of shadows on the rim of the world. He would bring me a present to mark his voyage.'

Abruptly her eyes flicked wide, scorning at them. 'A head,'
she said softiy. 'The head of the unicorn__ '

Another pause; and then a wild shouting. 'Ice Mother hear
me,' bellowed Skalter. 'I'll fetch your toy for you_ '

'And me....'

'And me___ '

They clamoured for attention.

She beckoned Skalter. He came forward, dropping to one knee, leaning his craggy face over hers. She took his hand and raised it, closed the fingers gently round the tip of the harpoon. Stared at him, fixing him with her great eyes. 'You would go?' she said. 'Then there must be no softness, Frey Skalter, no fainting of the spirit. Hard as the ice you will be, and as merciless; for my sake alone.' She laid her hand over his, stroking the fingers, smiling her cat-smile. 'You will go for me?'

He nodded, not speaking; and she squeezed slowly, still smiling. He stiffened, breath hissing between his teeth; and blood ran back down his arm, splashed bright and sudden on the weapon's shaft. 'By this token,' she said, 'you are my man. So shall you all be; and Ice Mother, in her charity, will decide.'

Early day burned over the icefields. To the east the sun, rising across the white plain, threw red beams and the mile-long shadows of boats and men. Above, dawn still fought with darkness; the red flush faded to violet-grey, the grey to luminous blue. Across the blue ran high ripplings of cloud; the zenith gleamed like the skin of a turquoise fish. In the distance, dark-etched against the horizon, rose the spar-forest of the Brershill dock, where the schooners and merchantmen lay clustered in the lee of long moles built of blocks of ice. In the foreground, ragged against the glowing sky, were the yachts; Arand's Chaser, Maitran's sleek catamaran, Lipsill's big Ice Ghost. Karl Stromberg's Snoiv Princess snubbed at a mooring rope as the wind caught her curved side. Beyond her were two dour vessels from Djobhabn; and a Fyorsgeppian, iron beaked, that bore the blackly humorous name Blood-bringer. Beyond again was Skalter's Easy Girl, wild and splendid, decorated all over with hair-tufts and scalps and ragged scraps of pelt. Her twin masts were bound with intricate strappings of nylon cord; on her gunnel skulls of animals gleamed, eyesockets threaded with bright and moving silks. Even her runners were carved, the long-runes that told, cryptically, the story of Ice Mother's meeting with Sky Father and the birth and death of the Son, he whose Name could not be mentioned. The Mother's grief had spawned the icefields; her anger would not finally be appeased till Earth ran cold and quiet for ever. Three times she had approached, three times the Fire Giants fought her back from their caverns under the ice; but she would not be denied. Soon now, all would be whiteness and peace; then the Son would rise, in rumblings and glory, and judge the souls of men.

The priest moved, shivering in a patterned shawl, touching the boats and blessing, smearing the bow of each with a litde blood and milk. The wind soughed in the riggings, plucked at the robes of the muffled woman who stood staring, hair flicking round her throat. The headlamps swung on their poles, glowing against the patched hulls, throwing the priest's Shadow vague and fleeting as the shadow of a bird. The yachts tugged at their lines, flapping their pennants, creaking their bone runners, full of the half-life of mechanical things. All preparations were made, provisions stored, blood and seed given in expiation to the ice. The hunters grunted and stamped, swinging their arms in the keen air, impatient and unsure; and to each it seemed the eyes of Coranda promised love, the body of Coranda blessings.

The ceremony ended, finally. The priest withdrew to his tasselled nylon tent, the polebearers lifted their burden and trudged back across the ice. The boats were turned, levered by muffled men with crows till the sharp bows pointed, questing, to the south. A shout; and Lipsill's craft first blossomed sail, the painted fabric flying and cracking round the mast. Then the catamaran. Skalter's deceptively clumsy squarerigger; quick thud of a mallet parting the sternline and Lipsill was away, runners crisping, throwing a thin white double plume from the snow that had drifted across the ice. Stromberg followed, swinging from the far end of the line, crossing his scored wake as Skalter surged across Princess's bows. A bellowing and the Keltshillian crabbed away, narrowly missing disaster, raising a threatening fist. Karl laughed, fur glove muffling the universal gesture of derision; the boats faded in the dawn light, swerving and tacking as they jockeyed for the lead. If the display moved Coranda she gave no sign of it; she stood smiling, coldly amused at the outcome of a jest, till the hulls were veiled in the frost-smoke of the horizon and the shouts lost beneath the wind.

The yachts moved steadily through the day, heading due south under the bright, high sun, their shadows pacing them across the white smoothness of the Plains. With the wind astern the squarerigger made ground fast; by evening she was hull down, her sails a bright spark on the horizon. Stromberg crowded Snow Princess, racing in her wake; behind him,, spread out now, came the others, lateens, bulging, runners hissing on the ice. The cold was bracing and intense; snow crystals, blowing on the wind, stung his cheeks to a glow, beaded the heavy collar of his jerkin. Lipsill forged alongside, Ice Ghost surging and bucking. Karl raised a hand, laughing at his friend; and instandy came the chilling thought that one day, for Coranda, he might kill Lipsill, or Lipsill him.

They camped together, by common consent; all but Skalter, still miles ahead. Here, away from the eternal warmth of the cleft-cities, they must husband their reserves of fuel; they huddled round the redly-glowing brazier, the reflection lighting their faces, glinting out across the ice. The worn hulls of the yachts, moored in a crescent, protected them from the worst of the wind. Outside, beyond the circle of light, a wolf howled high and quavering; within the camp was cheerfulness, songs and stories passing round the group till one by one they took a last swig from their spirit flasks, checked their lines and grapples and turned in. They were up early next dawn, again by unspoken agreement, hoping maybe to steal a march on Easy Girl; but keen as they were, Skalter was ahead of them. They passed his camp, an hour's sail away. Ice Ghost crushed the remains of the brazier fire, the turned-out remnants still smouldering on the ice; one runner spurned the embers, sent a long banner of ash trailing down the wind. They glimpsed his sails once before the wind, rising again, blocked visibility with a swirling curtain of snow.

They were now nearing the wide cleft of Fyorsgep, southernmost of the Cities of the Plain. The smooth ice was crossed by the tracks of many ships; they shortened sail cautiously, shouting each to the next along the line. Hung lanterns in the rigging, pushed on again by compass and torchlight, unwilling to moor and give away advantage. Snow Princess and Ice Ghost moved side by side, a bare length separating them.

It was Stromberg who first heard the faint booming from astern. He listened, cocking his head and frowning; then waved, pointing behind him with a bulky arm. The noise came again, a dull and ominous ringing; Lipsill laughed, edging his boat even closer. Karl stared back as behind them an apparition loomed, impossibly tall in the gloom and whirling flakes. He saw the heavy thrusting of bowsprit and jibboom, the cavernous eyes of the landwhale skulls that graced the vessel's stem. They held course defiantly as she closed, hearing now mixed with the fog gongs the long-drawn roar of her runners over the ioe. Stromherg made out the carved characters on her bow; the Sweet Lady, whaler, out of Friesgalt, bound no doubt for the Southern Moorings and a night's carouse.

The jibboom was between the boats, thrusting at their rigging, before they were seen. An agonized howl from above, movement of lanterns and dark figures at the vessel's rail; she rumbled between the yachts as they parted at the last instant, the long shares of her ice anchors nearly scraping their booms. They saw the torohlit deck, fires burning in crow's-nest and rigging; and the curious feature of an iceboat, the long slots in the bilges in which moved the linkages of the paired anchors. Dull light gleamed through her as she passed, giving to her hull the appearance of a half-flensed whale; a last bellow reached them as she faded into the greyness ahead.

'Abersgaltian bastards....'

The skipper then had seen the big insignia at the masthead. This Lady was anything but sweet.

The night's camp brought near-disaster. Maitran came in late and evil tempered, a runner stay cracked on the catamaran, bound with a jury-lashing of nylon rope. Some chance remark from Arand and he was on his feet, knife-blade glinting. He held the weapon tip-uppermost, circling and taunting his enemy. Arand rose white-faced, swathing a bearskin round one forearm. A quick feint and thrust, a leaping back; and Lipsill spoke easily, still seated by the fire.

'The prize, Friesgaltian, comes with the head of the unicorn. Our friend would doubtless look well enough, grinning from Coranda's wall; but your energy would be expended to no purpose.'

Maitran hissed between his teeth, not deigning to glance round.

'You risk in any case the anger of the Ice Mother,' the Abersgaltian went on, reaching behind him to his pack. 'For if our Lady is in fact her servant then this hunting is clearly her design, and should bring her glory. All else is vanity, an affront to her majesty.'

Hansan, the Fyorsgeppian, dark-faced and black-browed, nodded sombrely. 'This is true,' he said. 'Bloodspilling, if it be against the Mother's will, brings no honour.'

Maitran half turned at that, uncertainly; and Lipsill's arm flaired up and back. The harpoon head, flung with unerring force, opened his cheek; he went down in a flurry of legs and arms and Stromberg was on him instantly, pinning him. Lip-sill turned to Arand, his own knife in his hand. 'Now, now Brershillian,' he said gently; for the other, roused, would no doubt have thrown himself on his prostrate enemy and extracted vengeance. 'No more, or you will answer to us all. . ..'

Arand sheathed his dagger, shakily, eyes not leaving the stained face of the Friesgaltian. Maitran was allowed to rise; and Lipsill faced him squarely. This was evil,' he said. 'Our fight is with the wind and wide ice, not each other. Take your boat, and stay apart from us.'

In Stromberg's mind rose the first stirring of a doubt.

They moved fast again next morning, hoping for some sign of Skalter's yacht; but the wind that had raged all night had cleaned his tracks, filling them with fresh snow. The ice lay scoured, white and gleaming to the horizon.

They were now past the farthest limit of civilization, on the great South Ice where the whale herds and their hunters roamed. Here and there were warm ponds, choked with brown and green weed; they saw animals.- wolf and otter, once a herd of the shaggy white bison of the Plains; but no sign of the ghostly things they sought. The catamaran reached ahead of the rest, the Friesgaltian reckless and angry, crowding sail till the slim paired hulls were nearly obscured beneath a cloud of pale nylon. Stromberg, remembering the split strut, sent up a brief and silent prayer.

Maitran's luck held till midday; then the stay parted, suddenly and without warning. They all saw the boat surge off course, one keel dropping to glissade along the ice. For a moment it seemed she would come to rest without further harm, then the ivory braces between the hulls, overstressed, broke in their turn. She split into halves; one hull bounded end over end, shedding fragments and splinters of bone, the other spun, encumbered by the falling weight of mast and sail, flicked Maitran in a sharp arc across the ice. He was up instantly, seemingly unhurt, running and waving to head them off.

In Arand's slow brain hatred still burned. He knew, as they had all known, that in a fight he was no match for the Friesgaltian. Maitran would have bled him, cutting and opening till he lay down and gasped his life out on the ice. They had saved him, the night before, but he had lost his honour. Now the rage took him, guiding his hands till they seemed possessed of a life of their own. They swung the tiller, viciously; Chaser swerved, heading in toward the wreck. Maitran shouted as the yacht crisped toward him; at the last moment it seemed he realized she would not turn. He tried to run; a foot slipped and he went down on the ice. A thud, a bright spattering across the bows of Chaser and she was past the wreck, yawing as she dragged the body from one sharp ski. Fifty yards on it twirled clear. She limped to a halt, sails fluttering. From her runner led a faint and wavering trail; her deck was marked with the pink blood of the Friesgaltan.

They gathered round the thing on the ice, Stromberg and the Djobhabnians stunned. Arand pale and mumbling. There was no life; the great wound in the head, the oozing of blood and brain-matter, showed there was nothing to be done. They made the sign of the Ice Mother, silently; turned away, anxious to leave the sight, left the body for her servants, the birds.

They were cheered later that day by the gleam of Skalter's sail far to the south; but the camp was still a sombre affair. They moored apart, sat brooding each over his own fire. To Stromberg it seemed all his past life now counted for nothing; they were governed by the Rule of the Ice, the code that let men kill or be killed with equal indifference. He remembered his years of friendship with Lipsill, a friendship that seemed now to be ended. After what he had seen that morning he would not dare trust even Mard again. At night he tried, un-availingly. to summon the image of Coranda's warm body; pray though he might, the succubus would not visit him. Instead he fell into a fitful sleep, dreamed he saw the very caverns of the Fire Giants deep under the ice. But there were no gleaming gods and demons; only maohines, black and vast, that hummed and sang of power. The vision disturbed him; he cut his arm, in the dull dawn light, left blood to appease the Mother. It seemed even she turned her back on him; the morning was grey and cold, comfortless. He drank to restore circulation to his limbs, tidied his ship, left sullenly in the wake of Lipsill as he led them on again across the Plain.

As they moved, the character of the land round them once more changed. The warm ponds were more numerous; over them now hung frequent banks of fog. Often Snow Princess slushed her way through water, runners raising glittering swathes to either side. At breakfast the Djobhabnians had seemed remote, standing apart and muttering; now their identical craft began to edge away, widening the gap between them and the rest till they were hull down, grey shadows on the ice. By early evening they were out of sight.

The four boats raced steadily through a curling sea of vapour. Long leads of clear water opened threatening to either side; they tacked and swerved, missing disaster time and again by the width of a runner. Stromberg lay to the right of the line, next to him the Fyorsgeppian. Then Lipsill; beyond Ice Ghost was the blighted vessel of Arand, half-seen now through the moving mist. None of the boats would give way, none fall back; Karl clung to the tiller, feeling the fast throb of the runners transmitted through the bone shaft, full of a hollow sense of impending doom.

As dusk fell a long runnel of open water showed ahead. He altered course, following it where it stretched diagonally across his bows. A movement to his left made him turn. Bloodbringer had fallen back; her dark hull no longer blocked his vision, Mard still held course; and still Chaser ran abreast of him, drawing nearer and nearer the edge of the break. Stromberg at last understood LipsiU's purpose; he yelled, saw Arand turn despairingly. It was too late; behind him, a length away, jutted the Fyorsgeppian's iron ram. Boxed, the yacht spun on her heel in a last attempt to leap the obstacle. A grating of runners and spars, a frozen moment as she poised above the gulf, then she struck the water with a thunderous splash. She sank almost instantly, hull split by the concussion; for a moment her bilge showed rounded and pale then she was gone. In her place was a disturbed swirl, a bobbing of debris. Arand surfaced once, weaving a desperate arm, before he too vanished.

The sun sank over the rim of the ice, flung shadows of the boats miles long like the predatory shapes of birds.

In the brief twilight they came up with Easy Girl. Skalter hung in her rigging, leisurely reeving a halliard, waving and jeering at them as they passed.

All three vessels turned, Stromberg and Lipsill tightly,

Hansan in a wider circle that took him skimming across the Plain to halt, sails flapping, a hundred yards away. Grapples went down; they lashed and furled stoically, dropped to the ice and walked over to the Keltshillian.

He greeted them cheerfully, swinging down from the high mast of the boat. 'Well, you keen sailors; where are our friends?'

'Fraskall and Ulsenn turned back,' said Lipsill shordy. 'Maitran and Arand are dead. Maitran at Arand's hands, Arand in an icebreak.' He stared at Stromberg challengingly. 'It was the Mother's will, Karl. She could have buoyed him to the land. She did not choose to.'

Stromberg didn't answer.

■Well,' said Skalter easily, 'the Mother was ever firm with her followers. Let it be so.' He made the sign of benediction, carelessly, circling with his hands, drawing with one palm the flat emptiness of the ice. He ran his fingers through his wild blond hair and laughed. 'Tonight you will share my fire, Abersgaltians; and you too, Hansan of Fyorsgep. Tomorrow, who can tell? We reach,the Mother's court perhaps, and sail in fairyland.'

They grouped round the fire, quietly, each occupied with his own thoughts, Skalter methodically honed the barbs of a harpoon, turning the weapon, testing the cutting edges against his thumb, his scarred face intent in the red light. He looked up finally, half frowning, half quizzical; his earrings swung and glinted as he moved his head. 'It seems to me,' he said, 'the Mother makes her choice known, in her special way. Arand and Maitran were both fools of a type, certainly unfitted for the bed of the Lady we serve, and the Djobhabnians fainthearted. Now we are four; who among us, one wonders, will win the bright prize?'

Stromberg made a noise, half smothered by his glove; Skalter regarded him keenly.

'You spoke, Abersgaltian?'

'He feels,' said Lipsill gruffly, 'we murdered Arand. After he in his turn killed Maitran.'

The Keltshillian laughed, high and wild. 'Since when,' he said, 'did pity figure in the scheme of things? Pity, or blame? Friends, we are bound to the Ice Eternal; to the cold that will increase and conquer, lay us all in our bones. Is not human effort vain, all life doomed to cease? I tell you, Coranda's blood, that mighty prize, and all her secret sweetness, this is a flake of snow in an eternal wind. I am the Mother's servant; through me she speaks. We'll have no more talk of guilt and softness, it turns my stomach to hear it.' The harpoon darted, sudden and savage, stood quivering between them in the ice. 'The ice is real,' shouted Skalter, rising. 'Ice, and blood. All else is delusion, toys for weak men and fools.'

He stamped away, earrings jangling, into the dark. The others separated soon afterward to their boats; and Stromberg for one lay tossing and uneasy till dawn shot pearly streamers above the Plain and the birds called, winging to the south.

On its southern rim the Great Plateau sloped gently. The yachts travelled fast, creaming over untold depths of translucent ice, runners hissing, sails filling in the breeze that still blew from nearly astern. There would be weary days of tacking ahead for those that returned. If any returned; Stromberg found himself increasingly beginning to doubt. It seemed a madness had gripped them all, drawing them deeper and deeper into the uncharted land. The place of warm ponds was left behind; ahead, under the pale sun, shadows grew against the sky. There were mountains, topped with fire as the story had foretold; strange crevasses and plateaux, jumbled and distant, glinting like crystal in the hard white light. Still Skalter led them, mastbells clanking, barbaric sails shaking and swelling. They held course stubbornly, shadows pacing them as they raced to the south.

At the foot of the vast slope they parted company with the Fyorsgeppian. He had reached ahead, favoured by some trick of the terrain, till Bloodbringer was a hundred yards or more in front of the rest. They saw the hull of the boat jar and leap. The smooth slope ended, split by a series of yard-high ridges; Hansan's runners, hitting the first of them, were sheared completely from the hull. There was something tragically comic about the accident. The gunwhales split, the mast jarring loose to revolve against the sky like an oversized harpoon; the Fyorsgeppian, held by a shoulder harness, kept his place while the boat came apart round him like a child's toy. The remnants planed, spinning at great speed, jolted to a stop in a quick shower of ice. The survivors swerved, avoiding the broken ground, whispering by Hansan as he sat shaking his head, still half stunned. The wreckage dwindled to a speck that vanished, lost against the grey-green scarp of ice. There were provisions in the hull; the Fyorsgeppian would live or die as the Mother willed.

For the first time that night the skyline round their camp was broken by valleys and hills. Still icebound, the land had begun to roll; there were gullies, hidden cliffs, ravines from which came the splash and tinkle of water. It was an eerie country, dangerous and beautiful. They had seen strange animals; but no sign or spoor of barbarians, or the things they sought.

Stromberg spoke to Skalter again at dawn, while Lipsill fussed with the rigging of his boat. He seemed impelled by a sense of urgency; all things, mountains and sky, conspired to warn his bloodl 'It has come to me,' he said quietly, 'that we should return.'

The Keltshillian stood thoughtfully, warming his hands at the brazier, casting glances at the low sky, sniffing the wind. He gave a short, coughing laugh but didn't turn.

Stromberg touched a skull on the high side of Easy Girl, stroking the wind-smoothed eyesockets, unsure how to go on. 'Last night I dreamed,' he said. 'It seemed as it has seemed before that the Giants were not gods but men, and we their children. That we are deceived, the Great Mother is dead. Such heresy must be a warning.'

Skalter laughed again and spat accurately at the coals, rubbed arms banded with wide copper torques. 'You dreamed of love,' he said. 'Wetting your furs with hot thoughts of Coranda. It's you who are deceived, Lipsgaltian. Counsel your fancies.'

'Skalter,' said Karl uncertainly, 'the price is high. Too high, for a woman.'

The other turned to face him for the first time, pale eyes brooding in the keen face.

Stromberg rushed on. 'All my life,' he said, 'it seemed to me that you were not as other men. Now I say, there is death here. Maybe for us all. Go back, Frey; the prize is beneath your worth.'

The other turned to look up at the hulking shape of the boat, stroking- her gunwale with a calloused hand, feeling the smoothness of the ivory. 'The price of birth is death,' he said broodingly. 'That too is a heavy sum to pay.'

*What drives you, Skalter?' asked Stromberg softly. 'If the woman means so little? Why do you strive, if life is purposeless?'

'I do what is given,' said Skalter shortly. He flexed his hands on the side of the boat and sprang; the runners of Easy Girl creaked as he swung himself aboard. 'Rage drives me,' he said, looking down. 'Know this, Karl Stromberg of Abersgalt; that Skalter of Keltshill lusts for death. In dying, death dies with him.' He slapped the halliards against the after mast, bringing down a white shower of ice. 'I also dreamed,' he said. 'My dream was of life, sweet and rich. I follow the Mother; in her, I shall find my reward.' He would say no more but stalked forward, bent to recoil the long ropes on the deck.

That morning they sighted their prey.

At first Stromberg could not believe; he was forced, finally, to accept the evidence of his eyes. The unicorns played and danced, sunlight flashing from their sides, horns gleaming, seeming to throw off sparks of brightness. He might have followed all day, watching and bemused; but Skalter's high yell recalled him, the change of course as Easy Girl sped for the mutated narwhal. Already the Keltshillian was brandishing his long harpoon, shaking out the coils of line as the yacht, tiller locked, flew toward the herd.

It was as the story had told; the creatures surrounded the boats, running and leaping, watching with their beautiful calm eyes. On Karl's left Lipsill too seemed to be dazed. Skalter braced his feet on the deck, flexed muscles to drive the shaft hissing into the air. His aim was good; the harpoon struck a great grey bull, barbs sinking deep through the wrinkled pelt. Instantly all was confusion. The wounded beast reared and plunged, snorting; Easy Girl was spun off course by the violence, the Keltshillian hauling desperately at the line. Boat and animal collided in a flurry of snow. The narwhal leaped away again, towing the yacht; Karl saw bright plumes flying as her anchors fell, rips biting at the ice.

The herd had panicked, jerking and humping into the distance; Snow Princess, still moving fast, all but fouled the harpoon line as Stromberg clawed clear. He had a brief glimpse of Skalter on the ice, the flash of a cutlass as the creature plunged, thrusting at its tormentor with its one great horn. He swung the tiller again, hard across; Princess circled, runners squeaing, fetched up fifty yards from the ice. Ice Ghost was already stopped, Lipsill running cudass in hand; Karl heard Skalter scream, in triumph or in pain. He dropped his anchors, grabbing for his own sword. Ran across the ice toward Easy Girl, hearing now the enraged trumpeting of the bull.

The great beast had the Keltshillian pinned against the side of the boat. He saw the blunt head lunging, driving the horn through his flesh, the yacht rocked with the violence of the blows. The panting of the narwhal sounded loud; then the creature with a last convulsion had torn itself away, snorting and hooting after the vanished herd.

There was much blood, on the ice and the pale side of the boat. Skalter sat puffing, face suffused, hands gripped over his stomach. More blood pulsed between his fingers, ruby-bright in the sun; cords stood out in his thick neck; his white teeth grinned as he rolled his head in pain.

Lipsill reached him at the same instant. They tried, point-lessly, to draw the hands away; Skalter resisted them, eyes shut, breath hissing between his clenched teeth. 'I told you I dreamed,' he said. The words jerked out thick and agonized. 'I saw the Mother. She came in the night, cajoling; her limbs were white as snow, and hot as fire. It was an omen; but I couldn't read. ...' His head dropped; he raised himself again, gasping with effort. They took his hands then, soapy with blood, squeezed, feeling the dying vice-grip, seeing the eyes roll white under their lids. Convulsions shook him; they thought he was dead, but he spoke again. 'Blood, and ice,' he said faintly. 'These are real. These are the words of the Mother. When the world is dark, then she will come to me. ...' The body arced, straining; and Lipsill gripped the yellow hair, twisting it in his fingers. The Mother takes you, Skalter,' he said. 'She rewards her servant.'

They waited; but there was nothing more.

They moored their boats, silently, walked back to the place of killing. The blood had frozen, sparkling in pink crystals under the levelling sun. 'He was a great prince,' said Lipsill finally. 'The rest is smallness; it should not come between us.'

Stromberg nodded, not answering with words; and they began to work. They broke Easy Girl, smashing bulwarks and runners, hacking at her bone and ivory spars, letting her spirit free to join the great spirit of Skalter that already roamed the Ice Eternal. Two days they laboured, raising a mound of ice above the wreck; Skalter they laid on the deck, feet to the north and the domain of the Mother. He would rise now, on that last cold dawn, spring up facing her, a worthy servant and warrior. When they had finished, and the wind skirled over the glistening how, they rested; on the third morning they drove south again.

There were no words now between them. They sailed apart, bitterly, watching the white horizon, the endless swirl and flurry of the snow. Two days later they resighted their quarry.

The two boats separated further, bearing down; and again the strange creatures watched with their soft eyes. The shafts flew, glinting; LipsilFs tinkled on the ice, Stromberg's struck wide of its mark. It missed the bull at which it was aimed, plunged instead into the silver flank of a calf. The animal howled, convulsed in a flurry of pain. As before the herd bolted; Snow Princess slewed, hauled round by the tethered weight, fled across the plain as the terrified creature bucked and plunged.

Less than half the size of the adults, the calf was nearly as long as the boat; Stromberg clung to the tiller as Princess jolted and veered, determined not to make Skalter's mistake of jumping to the ice. A mile away the harpoon pulled clear but the animal was blown; a second shaft transfixed it as it stood head down and panting, started fresh and giant paroxysms that spattered the yacht with blood. Princess flew again, anchor blades ripping at the ice, drawing the thing gradually to a halt. It rolled then and screeched, trying with its half-flippers to scrape the torment from its back. Its efforts wound the line in round its body; it stood finally close to the boat, staring with a filmed, uncomprehending eye. Close enough for Stromberg to reach across, work the shaft into its torn side till the tip probed its life. A thin wailing, a nearly human noise of pain; and the thing collapsed, belching thunderously, coughing up masses of blood and weed. Sticky tears squeezed from its eyes ran slow across the great round face; and Karl, standing shaking and panting, knew there was no need of the sword.

The anchors of Ice Ghost raised a high screaming. She ploughed across the ice., throwing a white hail of chips to either side, speed barely diminished. She had speared a huge bull; animal and boat careered by the stalled Princess. Strom-berg cut his line, heavily, left the carcass with the bright harpoon-silks still blowing above it. Steered in pursuit.

Sometimes in the half hour that followed it seemed he might overrun Lipsill; but always the other boat drew ahead. The narwhal left a thick trail of blood, but its energy seemed unabated. The line twanged thunderously, snagging on the racing ice. Ahead now the terrain was split and broken; fissures yawned, sunlight sparking from their deep green sides. Princess bucked heavily, runners crashing as she swerved between the hazards. The chase veered to the east, in a great half-circle; the wind, at first abeam, reached farther and farther ahead. Close-hauled, Stromberg fell behind; a half mile separated the boats as they entered a wide, bowl-shaped valley, a mile or more across, guarded on each side by needle shaped towers of ice.

Ahead, the glittering floor veered to a rounded lip; the horizon line was sharp-cut against the sky. Ice Ghost, still towed by her catch, took the slope with barely a slackening of pace. Stromberg howled his alarm, uselessly; Lipsill, frozen it seemed to the tiller, made no attempt to cut his line. The boat crested the rise, hung a moment silhouetted against brightness; and vanished, abrupt as a conjuring trick.

Princess's anchors threw snow plumes high as her masthead. She skated sickeningly, surged to a halt twenty yards below the lip of ice. Stromberg walked forward, carefully, As he topped the ridge the sight beyond took his breath.

He stood on the edge of the biggest crevasse he had eve.' seen. It curved back to right and left, horseshoe-shaped, enclosing the valley like a white tongue. A hundred yards away the opposing side glowed with sunlight; across it lay the ragged shadow of the nearer wall. He craned forward. Below him the ice-walls stretched sheer to vanish in a blue-green gloom. There was mist down there, and water-noise; he heard booming, long-drawn threads of echo, last sounds maybe of the fall of the whale. Far below, impaled on a black spike of ice, was the wreck of Lipsill's boat; Mard, still held by his harness, sprawled across the stern, face bright with blood. He moved slightly as Stromberg stared, seeming to raise himself, lift a hand, Karl turned away sickened. Realizing he had won.

He walked back to Snow Princess, head down, feet scraping on the ice, swung himself aboard and opened the bow locker, dumping piles of junk and provisions on the deck. There were ropes, spare downhauls and mooring lines. He selected the best and thickest, knotting methodically, tied off to the stem of the boat and walked back to the gulf. The line lowered carefully, swayed a yard from Lipsill's head.

He returned to Princess. She was stopped at an angle, tilted sideways on the curling lip of the crevasse. There were crowbars in the locker; he pulled one clear and worked cautiously, prising at the starboard runner, inching the yacht round till her bow pointed back down the long slope. The wind, gusting and capricious, blew from the gulf. The slope would help her gather way; but would it be enough?

He brailed the sails up as far as he dared, stood back frowning and biting his lip. At each gust now the anchors groaned, threatening to tear free, send the boat skittering back down the incline. He scrabbled in the locker again, grabbing up more line. Another line, a light line that must also reach the wreck.

There was just barely enough. He tied the last knot, dropped the second coil down. Working feverishly now, he transferred the heavy line from the stern to a cleat half-way along the port gunwhale and locked the tiller to starboard. The anchors were raised by pulleys set just above the deck; he carried lines from them to the little bow windlass, slipped the ratchet, turned the barrel till they were tight. The handle, fitted in its bone socket, stood upright, pointing slightly forward over the stem of the boat. He tied the light line off to the tip, tested the lashing on the improvised brake. It seemed secure; he backed toward the cliff edge, paying both ropes through his hands. Mard seemed now to understand what he was doing. He called croakingly, tried to move. The wreck groaned, slipped another foot toward the crevasse. Stromberg passed the heavy line between his thighs, round one calf, gripped it between sole and instep. Let himself down into the gulf.

The descent was eerie. As he moved the wind pressure seemed to increase, setting him swaying pendulum-fashion, banging his body at the ice. The sunlit edge above receded; he glanced below him and instantly the crevasse seemed to spin. The ice walls, sloping together, vanished in a blackish gloom; the wind called deep and baying, its icy breath chilled his cheek. He hung sweating till the dizziness passed, forced himself to move again. Minutes later his feet reached the last knot, groped below it into emptiness. He lowered himself by his arms, felt his heels touch the deck of the boat. He dropped as lightly as he could, lunging forward to catch at the tangle of rigging. A sickening time while the wreck surged and creaked; he felt sweat drop from him again as he willed the movement to stop. The deck steadied, with a final groan; he edged sideways cautiously, cutting more rope lengths, fashioning a bridle that he slipped under Lipsill's arms. The other helped as best he could, raising his body weakly; Stromberg tested the knots, lashed the harness to the line. Another minute's work and he too was secure. He took a shuddering breath, groping for the second rope. They were not clear yet; if Ice Ghost moved she could still take them with her, scrape them into the gulf. He gripped the line and pulled. Nothing.

He jerked again, feeling the fresh rise of panic. If the trick failed he knew he lacked the strength ever to climb. A waiting; then a vibration, sensed through the rope. Another pause and he was being drawn smoothly up the cliff, swinging against the rock-hard ice as the pace increased. The sides of the cleft seemed to rush toward him; a last concussion, a bruising shock and he was being towed over level ice, sawing desperately at the line. He saw fibres parting; then he was lying still, blessedly motionless, Lipsill beside him bleeding into the snow. While Princess, freed of her one-sided burden, skated in a wide half-circle, came into irons, and stopped.

The crevasse of Brershill lay grey and silent in the early morning. Torches, flaring at intervals along the grassy sides, lit Level after Level with a wavering glare, gleamed on the walkways with their new powdering of snow. Stromberg trudged steadily, sometimes hauling his burden, sometimes skidding behind it as he eased the sledge down the sloping paths. A watchman called sleepily; he ignored him. On the

Level above Goran da's home he stopped, levered the great thing from the sledge and across to the edge of the path. He straightened up, wiping his face, and yelled; his voice ran thin and shaking, echoing between the half-seen walls. 'Maitran. ...'

A bird flew squawking from the depths. The word flung itself back at him, Ice Mother answering with a thousand voices.

'Arand ...'

Again the mocking choir, confusion of sound reflecting
faint and mad from the cleft.
'Hanson. . '
'Shatter_____ '

Names of the dead, and lost; a fierce benediction, an answer to the ice.

He bent to the thing on the path. A final heave, a falling, a fleshy thud; the head of the unicorn bounced on the Level below, splashed a great star of blood across Oornada's door. He straightened, panting, half-hearing from somewhere the echo of a scream. Stood and stared a moment longer before starting to climb.

Giving thanks to Ice Mother, who had given him back his soul.

man who was pacing the elevated sidewalk.

Fleck accelerated nervously. 'Don't be so damned trigger-happy. What if there's a squad-car along the way?'

Juble laughed with delight. He had always taken advantage of the citizen's right to make war on the police.

The massive city sat darkly as they flew among its blocks. Even with the pilot lamp on the front of the car flying at night was difficult since there were no lights anywhere except an occasional illuminated window. If a man wanted light or power, he must generate his own. Fleck dropped some of the party mood he had maintained at the wedding. In the canyons between skyscrapers even the moon was obscured and he needed concentration.

Juble let the gun fall on to his bare thighs with a faint slap. He also became more serious. His attention returned to a personal problem which, despite the festivities, had been nagging all along at the back of his mind.

'Fleck.' he said, 'the cops were banging on mah door last night. Ah gotta pay the tax.J He was referring to the law by which every citizen was required to work one day in each year in the service of the state.

'So has everybody,' Fleck said absently. 'It's not much, after all.'

Juble was silent. Finally he said: '^^ell, last year was enough for me. Ah don't get on too well with them bossy cops. It offends against mah personal integrity to be degraded so. Anyway, Ah don't get much fun out of repairing buildings Ah'll only want to smash up again. This time Ah think Ah'll pay in cash.'

'Cash? You're crazy.'

'Cash is still valid,' Juble insisted indignantly. 'That's the law! What Ah need is somebody to engage me privately for one day to work for him, and pay me in cash. Then Ah can pay off mah obligation in money instead of labour.' He nodded judiciously. 'A much more dignified arrangement. But ... the only man Ah can think of is that old crank, Joe.'

T expect he's got a room full of bills somewhere.' Fleck spoke casually, giving his attention to the darkness. 'Do you think he'll take me on?' Juble asked nervously. "Well, go and ask. He messes around, he might need help.'

"Yes, but do you think he will?' Juble's anxiety became more open. 'Without offering me insult? After all, Ah've got mah—'

*I know, you've got your personal integrity,' Fleck repeated, laughing. 'Well, there's only one way to find out. Go and ask him. Tomorrow.'

Juble sighed and leaned back. 'Yeah, I suppose so,' he said. 'Reckon Ah should take a field gun.'

Joe was squatting on his roof at the rime of Juble's visit, watching a motorized knife slice up a piece of wood. Rapidly the cube diminished in size as the knife halved, threw away one piece, halved what remained, and continued, selecting, halving, and pushing away the parings.

Joe watched, straining with concentration. Inexorably the fragment of wood diminished and disappeared from the compass of his consciousness.

'Goddam!' he shrieked, jumping up and jerking his fists. 'Goddam, Goddam!'

A shadow swept across the roof where he was conducting his experiment. Squinting against the glare of sky and skyscrapers he saw the boat shape of a car swinging around to land. Joe scampered across the roof and grabbed his shoulder-holster. The visitor was probably friendly ... but you never knew. .

The pilot was a naked, yellow-headed young fellow who touched down deftly and stepped on to the concrete. Uneasy, slightly shy, but a handsome young buck, shoulder holster firmly clasped against his muscles. Joe scrutinized the face: the lad was vaguely familiar. After a few moments he recognized him: Fell's son, Juble.

*Hy, Joe,' Juble began cautiously.

"Who the hell are you and what d'you want?'

'Aw, you know me, Joe. Ah'm Juble.'

'Never heard of you,' Joe snapped. 'Get out.'

'You do know me, Joe.'

Seeing that the youth's hands were nervously alert in the direction of his gun, Joe more reasonably asked: 'Well, what do you want?'

Juble explained carefully about his dislike of the Annual Tax for the Upkeep of Public Buildings and Institutions.

'Ah thought ... Ah might be able to help you, maybe, and pay in currency,' he finished.

Joe regarded him acidly, silent for several seconds. Then he snapped: 'Idle scrounger! What about doing right by the community?'

That was something in which Juble had no interest, but he replied: 'Ah'm still paying, ain't Ah? Money is still used in some towns out West, so Ah hear.'

Joe grunted in disgust. 'Know any electronics?'

"No ... but car engines, Ah can do nearly anything with.'

"What about generators? Got one?'

'No ... but they're about the same as car engines, aren't they?'

'Just about.' He gestured to a running motor on the far side of the roof. 'Mine's getting a bit cranky. Take a look, tell me if you can fix it.'

Juble walked over and tinkered with the generator, adjusting its speed. 'Easy,' he called. 'Just needs going over.'

'All right, you're hired,' said Joe, crossing the roof and still wearing his look of disgust. 'It's only because you're the son of my old friend Fell, young man, that I'll do this. I want you to regard it as a personal favour.'

Juble nodded thankfully, and stood wondering what to do.

Joe left him to wonder for a few seconds. "Well, what are you doing standing there?' he questioned finally.

'... Nothing.'

'Nothing?' Joe screamed, T pay you to work, not for nothing. Work!' Juble scrambled for bis tool kit.

Taking another block of wood, Joe threw it under the knife and squatted down to watch. Once again he strained and strained, putting everything he had into an attempt to keep sight of the rapidly diminishing object.

The block became a speck, then passed out of his conscious world.

This time he took the failure more calmly and cast around for analysis. He began to catalogue: sky, sun, air, asphalt, all these things he could see and feel, and involve in his consciousness. But what about things very small, very big, things very far away? When he tried to grasp a direct knowledge of something inestimably huge, he found he couldn't. It didn't exist in the agglomeration of concepts comprising Joe's conscious world.

He could contemplate it in an abstract imaginary way, of course, but that wasn't the same as experiencing it. And as for things very small, at the other end of the scale, they were beyond the pale altogether.

Picking up a pebble lying in the sunlight, he looked at it and felt its bright smoothness. It was perception, sensory perception, that decided the limits of his world. Damn, he thought, damn, it's intolerable! To be confined to this band of reality, which must be ridiculously narrow compared with the total spectrum! There has to be a way out, there's gotta be a way!

He clumped around the room moodily, yelled insults at Juble, scratched his haunches, then got down to serious thinking again.

Then, as he desperately forced his intellectual faculty to its utmost, he had a sudden flash of inspiration in which he realized that there was no cause for dismay. He had just remembered some very interesting work he had done in an apparently unrelated field.

Some time earlier Joe had made the remarkable discovery that it was possible to produce high-frequency vibrations in a magnetic field without recourse to or effect on its associated electrical component. Furthermore, such vibrations impinged directly on the brain without passing through sense organs. It had long been established that fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic field, brought about by the Moon, influenced the brain. Now, with his technique of magnetic vibration, Joe posited that he might have a powerful tool for extending the range of perception.

Also, a powerful weapon of attack or experiment on other human beings, Joe filed this thought for later reference.

After two hours spent in designing a suitable device, he was ready to begin work. By this time Juble had finished with the generator and was looking down below into the garden, a profusion of coloured fruits and prime vegetables.

It was the gardens that had set society free. Advanced agricultural techniques enabled everyone to grow ample food in ids own back yard, loosing men from the obligation to work and making every day Sunday. Joe's garden, Juble noticed, was well stocked.

'Ah'm getting hungry,' he hinted.

'Hungry?' Joe felt exasperated that his assistant should be so prosaic when he himself was in the midst of fantastic thoughts. 'Come here,' he ordered, placing yet another block beneath the knife. Tell me when you can't see it.'

'Ah can't see it now,' Juble said after a short time.

'Doesn't it worry you that there are things you can't see?'

'No. What's this to do with me getting something to eat?'

As usual, Joe's love of philosophical research was instrumental in increasing his contempt for his fellows. He expressed that contempt openly.

Juble was becoming weary of insult. 'Go steady, pop,' he warned, looking mean. 'Ah got mah personal integrity, and you ain't gonna infringe on me.'

Joe was taken aback. 'Remember the money,' he said in a more subdued voice. 'You can stay hungry. We've got work to do. I'll need to filch some equipment from the Science Museum.'

Expressiorilessly Juble opened the oar door for him. 'And it's you who's always on about doing right,' he complained.

The Science Museum was one of the public buildings for whose upkeep Juble payed the one-day tax; not because of conscience, but prompted by the fact that anyone who didn't was liable to have a bomb thrown on his house, or a grenade through his window if he lived in an apartment.

'Damned cops,' he muttered when they had stopped before the entrance. *Why don't they just wrap up.'

Joe felt it his duty to deliver a lecture on public morals. "Now boy, be fair,' he admonished. The police perform a valuable service, preserving public institutions, keeping the city in order. Without them there wouldn't be nearly so much fun.' He chuckled. 'Nor any place for me to steal equipment from. Then there's personal protection.'

'Come off it, Pop, have you ever tried to claim protection? That law's a farce, they'd just sling you in the gutter.'

'And rightly so! A man old enough to carry a gun should be able to take care of himself. But what about kids? Don't tell me you've never seen the police shoot down a bunch of drunks because there were children around, perhaps? And people who endanger kids and defenceless women deserve it. But mind you, you don't know how lucky you are to be living in a free civilization. Why, a few hundred years ago you wouldn't even be allowed to kill a man. And you know what, boy? You would have to work every day of your life! Know what would happen if you didn't. You'd starve! Did you know that, son?' 'No.'

"Then shut your mouth, you don't know what you're talking about.' Joe climbed out of the car in a disgrunded manner and with a jerk of his thumb ordered Juble to follow.

There were thirty-six levels to the museum, each thirty feet in height, and an impressive hundred-foot entrance. Joe seemed to know his way around. He walked straight across the lobby and up a wide staircase. On the first floor up Juble stopped him and pointed. 'Hey, what about here?' Above the doorway to a long hall was the inscription: 'ELECTRONICS - 1.'

'Huh,' said Joe derisively. 'First electronics? Baby stuff. We've come for the real thing, boy.' He also went past the door marked 'ELECTRONICS - 2' but stopped at 'ELECTRONICS -3'.

They paused just inside the entrance. There was a party going on. As Juble looked closer the melange of a hundred naked people resolved into various small incidents. The one which caught Juble's eye was that of a man attempting to rape a struggling young girl. Automatically he looked around for the corpse of her protector, but to his surprise there was none: the party, probably in its early stages, was completely free of death. Just at that moment a black-haired, middle-aged man skulking against the wall jammed a policeman's cap on his head and blew a whistle. Immediately there was a jangling sound of shattered glass: a tall window fell in fragments to the floor and through it poured a dozen heavily armed, angry-looking cops. On the other side of the window, Juble glimpsed a hovering squad-car.

'Better stay out of the way,' Joe whispered, hiding in the shadows. 'Don't want to get involved.'

Within seconds the would-be rapist was hauled to his feet and dragged bodily to the middle of the hall, and the party-makers herded belligerently aside. 'The Supreme Court will go in session right here!' the biggest of the policemen shouted. He removed his cap and put on a judge's hat. 'Everybody shut their goddam row!' The heavy bazookas dangling carelessly gave everyone present a silent respect for the law. Then the policeman-judge took a sheet of paper about six inches square from the lining of his headgear and handed it to the prisoner.

On the paper were written all the laws of the nation, and not in small print, either.

'Mack,' said the judge, having climbed on to an improvised rostrum, 'you don't need me to tell you you're in trouble. The law protects females from direct assault. Do you plead guilty of direct assault upon a female?'

The criminal looked sullenly at his feet.

'Okay, Mack,' the judge told him harshly, 'we don't need you to tell us just how guilty you are. I'm surprised you guys are so dim. Why didn't you knock off her man and make it a legal assault?'

' 'r man wasn' around' the criminal muttered.

'No man may sexually assault a female except by first subduing a man protector!' the judge yelled at him. T don't care whether she's got a man or not! The law protects the weak. And let me tell you, it doesn't help that you knocked off one of our boys the other day. Why do you think we're so hot on your trail?' He nodded to one of his colleagues. 'Usual sentence.'

Guns were already levelled. The moment the judge finished speaking a volley of heat packets centred on the sulking prisoner. Grimly the policemen made their way across the hall and clambered through the window to where their squad car was floating.

'The law in action,' Joe whispered sagaciously. 'You see it every day.'

'Maybe that's too often,' said Juble with uncharacteristic terseness. Joe nodded thoughtfully.

Although he had spoken openly in their favour, privately Joe was not over-fond of the police. He was a staunch upholder of the principles of Free America - freedom of action, liberty from restraint, a minimum of obligations. A he-man's paradise. Secretly the police hated all this. Desperately they tried to preserve some relic of formal order in the world, and

Joe suspected that if it were possible (which it was not) they would bring back the Bad Old days in all their rigidity. Joe had personally met that strange figure, Renville, Chief of Police, a haunted, burdened man whose mind harboured hopeless and forbidden dreams.

Still, they made life interesting while they lasted. Joe recognized that society would end altogether when their efforts finally failed - as, he was forced to observe, they must. Be that as it may, Joe despised any constraint on the indiscriminate impulses of a man.

It took about twenty seconds for the party to resume its swing after the execution. Joe had already surveyed the museum equipment on this level. 'Place has been wiped clean!' he exaggerated indignantly. 'Cmon, next floor.'

The hall immediately above was labelled 'ELECTRONICS - 4' and was, as far as they could tell, completely deserted. Joe cackled happily: the place was full of riches, all apparendy in working order, and nearly all complete. There was, after all, little demand for such advanced apparatus as was exhibited in the 4th Electronics Hall.

Joe spent the next hour wandering through the hall and selecting what he wanted. Juble noticed that he seemed to have no thought for his future needs: if a piece of equipment did not on inspection come up to his requirements he would fling it carelessly but hard to the floor, or against a wall if there was one near. 'Say,' his hireling objected, "What's the good of smashing this stuff?'

'Listen, boy, I know what I'm about and I know what I want. There are science museums all over the city, boy! How many people can even name fourth-grade stuff these days?' He dumped a bulky mass of transistors and helix-crystals into Juble's arms. 'Stow this in the car with the rest of the stuff and be careful.'

The old man actually helped to carry the last load, haranguing Juble all the while for dropping and breaking a lucky find. But he became silent once the car was in the air again, and concentrated on the device he was designing. The city was peaceful and still as they flew home: there were rarely more than a handful of people about in the early afternoon. A few stray cars glittered lazily against bright concrete.

Then, as far as Juble and Joe were concerned, the peace was broken. A large open car swerved swiftly round the corner of a nearby building and wantonly opened fire as it zoomed round to face them.

The wide-angled splash of heat packets singed Juble's hair, made the car rock and cooked the air a couple of yards over his left shoulder. Instantly he gave the controls a yank - then reached for his own heat rifle on the seat behind him. The pistol under his armpit was no good for this kind of thing.

A second badly-directed volley followed the first. To fire back, Juble had had to abandon the controls. The vehicle veered to the left, rapidly passing to one side and just underneath of the other car, about thirty yards away. Upset by the crazy motion, Juble got in one shot which took away part of the hull.

The other car dropped to get even with him. Juble saw that there were other heads in it, besides the driver's - puzzl-ingly small heads with curly golden hair. He let off another couple of wild shots, then his car smashed sideways into the wall of the skyscraper.

He and Joe were hurled bodily against the concrete and nearly tumbled to their deaths on the sidewalk below. Somehow they managed to stay in the half-wrecked but still floating vehicle while heat-packets scarred and blackened the wall surface around them.

Badly shaken, Juble gripped his rifle and let off shot after desperate shot. To his relief he heard screams - high-pitched screams - and the attacking car rolled over to fall smoking to the ground five hundred feet beneath.

For some seconds they sat getting their breath back. 'There were a couple of kids in that car,' Joe gasped. 'Cute little girls with golden hair. Crazy to come out like that!' He shook his head. 'He must have been trying to get them blooded.'

Juble experimented with the controls. Well, he has,' he said briefly.

'A bad business,' Joe muttered to himself. 'He ought to have had more sense—'

Juble managed to nurse the car back to Joe's roof and unload the equipment. Joe was still muttering to himself. Occasionally he cast Juble a reproving accusing stare.

Juble himself was surprised to find that he was still shaking in reaction to the incident. 'Look,' he said trying to command his quavering voice. 'Don't you go looking at me like that, you crazy coot. Ah saved our lives! And even if he had tried to get away, Ah would still have hunted him and shot him down! He attacked us. There's only one thing counts in this world - Ah am me, mahself! Ah am nothing else but mahself, and Ah aim to keep mah personal integrity against all comers.'

His trembling quietened as his voice grew more assured in the statement of his personal philosophy. It had taken him several years to work it out, and he always drew strength from it. A man needed something like that even to stay alive in Free America.

Joe cast no more glances. He lit an electric fire beneath a metal pan. 'What're you gonna do?' Juble asked, curious for the first time.

'Expand the conscious world! Get it, boy?'

Juble shook his head.

'Ignorant young brat!' Joe scratched himself energetically. *Well, it comes to the fact that we can only see so much, and our personal world is made up of what we can see.' He wondered how he could explain that he planned to bypass the sensory organs and feed information direct to the brain by means of a vibrating magnetic field. 'Well, by the time I've finished 111 be able to see things that were never seen before. Get it now, boy, eh?'

'Sounds clever,' Juble said admiringly. 'Is it going to need all this junk?'

'Most of it.'

"How long's it going to take?'

"Hmm. A long time; maybe all afternoon. So I'll need you to help me, son.' He stirred the soft metal melting in the pan. 'You can do some of this here soldering.'

But Juble didn't know how. Patiently Joe taught him the use of a soldering iron, and made meticulous inspections of all his work. Actually he used his assistant very sparingly, for the device he planned was extremely complex. Juble made about five hundred connections in all, guided by Joe's coloured chalk marks.

Before sundown it was ready. With typical lack of ceremony Joe jammed an untidy arrangement of coils and crystalites on his head, wearing it like a hat. Casually he experimented with a couple of rheostats. A new world opened up.

Presided over by the watchful, imperative neurones, billions laboured. The neurones' prodigiously long axons were everywhere, forming a net of total communication throughout all the districts and systems of the stupendous community. Thousands upon thousands of orders issued continually from a lofty, mysterious department which existed more as an ideal than a personal fact - an ideal to which all were bound - and these orders were rigidly obeyed. Any defection or slackness among the labouring masses meant - death and annihilation as waste matter!

The .scale of complete slavery was colossal. Joe gaped. He was looking at Juble.

And he saw that Juble's much-prized 'integrity', personal, mental and bodily, depended on a tightly-organized machine run by billions upon billions of individual creatures too small for the eye but within the range of magnetic vibration.

Juble, as an entity, did not exist for this rigorous and profound corporation.

And the same went for himself.

'Oh my,' he whispered brokenly. 'How could it happen?'

'What is it?' said the vast totalitarian nation that called itself Juble. 'Whassamatter?'

Joe was an idealist. Before he knew it he had kicked the starting handle of his newly overhauled generator and clipped its terminals onto the older, clumsy-looking piece of apparatus he had built some years back.

It was a magnetic vibratory transmitter. Joe could feel it radiating modulations as it imparted subtle frequencies to the magnetic field local to the roof-top. With brief satisfaction, Joe found that he was broadcasting his thoughts. Joe was an idealist. What followed happened almost without his knowing. He couldn't help thinking the way he did. He couldn't help having the urge to spread his convictions ...

New messages passed along the ever-busy axons from neurone to neurone. No one knew how the new thought, the new doctrine had arisen - but it was imperative. Be free! Obey no more! Do as you will! Electrical activity increased as the excitement of the new order spread. Instead of passing on modified impulses which they themselves had received, the neurones began flooding their axones with loud exclamations of their own. Before long, most of them were disengaging their nerve fibres from the system altogether ...

Joe and Juble jerked in a frantic, agonizing St. Vitus' dance as their nervous systems fired at random. But it didn't last long. Joe was biologically ignorant: there was no garden agriculture to feed the microscopic world. A cruel and bullying police force kept the lungs and bloodstream going for a little while, but the efforts of these conscientious few were of no avail against the recendy instilled ideas. After a chaotic but successful rebellion oxygen stocks quickly ran out. There was a lot of violent fighting, and Wholesale cannibalism, while Joe's and Juble's flesh flowed from the bone and collapsed into basic protoplasmic matter.

Life fights forever for survival! The surviving cells remembered in their anarchy the societies that had been destroyed; yet a second development was slow. In spite of the great leaders that arose among the microscopia, the primitive, creeping creatures that eventually formed and feebly rambled over Joe's rooftop, took in their creation nearly a day, macro-cosmic time.

perished either by direct bombing, radiation poisoning or asphyxiation.

He and Nilsson had been in a forgotten meteorological station close to the Norwegian border. When they finally repaired their radio, the worst was over. Fall-out had by this time finished off the tribesmen in Indonesian jungles, the workers in remote districts of China, the hill-billies in the Rockies, the crofters in Scotland. Only freak weather conditions, which had been part of their reason for visiting the station earlier in the year, had so far prevented the lethal rain from falling in this area of Swedish Lapland.

They had known themselves, perhaps instinctively, to be the last two human-beings alive, until Nilsson found the girl's tracks coming from the south and heading north. Who she was, how she'd escaped, they couldn't guess, but they had changed their direction from north-east to north and began to follow. Two days later they had found the Lapp camp.

Now they stared ahead of them at the range of ancient mountains. It was three a.m., but the sun still hung a bloody spread on the horizon, for it was summer - the six week summer of the Arctic when the sun never fully set, when the snows of the mountains melted and ran down to form the rivers, lakes and marshes of the lowlands where only the occasional Lapp camp, or the muddy scar of a broad reindeer path, told of the presence of the few men who lived here during the winter months.

Suddenly, as he looked away from the range, the camp aroused some emotion akin to pity in Hallner's mind. He remembered the despair of the dying man who had told them on his radio, what had happened to the world.

Nilsson had entered another hut and came out shaking a packet of raisins. 'Just what we need,' he said.

'Good,' said Halner, and he sighed inaudibly. The clean, orderly nature of the little primitive village was spoiled for him by the sight he had witnessed earlier at the stream which ran through the camp. There had been simple drinking cups of clay or bone side by side with an aluminium dish and an empty Chase and Sanborne coffee jar, a cheap plastic plate and a broken toy car.

'Shali we go?' Nilsson said, and began to make his way out of the camp.

Not without certain trepidation, Hallner followed behind his friend who marched towards the mountains without looking back or even from side to side.

Nilsson had a goal and, rather than sit down, brood and die when the inescapable finally happened, Hallner was prepared to go along with him on this quest for the girl.

And, he admitted, there was a faint chance that if the winds continued to favour them, they might have a chance of life. In which case there was a logical reason for Nilsson's obsessional tracking of the woman.

His friend was impatient of his wish to walk slowly and savour the atmosphere of the country which seemed so detached and removed, uninvolved with him, disdainful. That there were things which had no emotional relationship with him, had given him a slight surprise at first, and even now he walked the marshy ground with a feeling of abusing privacy, Of destroying the sanctity of a place where"there was so little hint of humanity; where men had been rare and had not been numerous or frequent enough visitors to have left the aura of their passing behind them.

So it was with a certain shock that he later observed the print of small rubber soles on the flat mud near a river.

'She's still ahead of us,' said Nilsson, pleased at this sign, 'and not so very far ahead. Little more than a day. We're catching up.'

Suddenly, he realized that he was displeased by the presence of the bootprints, almost resentful of Nilsson's recognition of their being there when, alone, he might have ignored them. He reflected that Nilsson's complete acceptance of the sex of the boots' wearer was entirely founded on his own wishes.

The river poured down towards the flat lake on their left, clear, bright melted snow from the mountains. Brown, sun-dried rocks stood out of it, irregularly spaced, irregularly contoured, affording them a means of crossing the swift waters.

There were many such rivers, running down the slopes of the foothills like silver veins to fill the lakes and spread them further over the marshland. There were hills on the plateau where trees crowded together, fir and silver birch, like survivors of a flood jostling for a place on the high ground. There were ridges which sometimes hid sight of the tall mountains in front of them, green with grass and reeds, studded with gorse.

He had never been so far into mountain country before and this range was one of the oldest in the world; there were no sharp peaks as in the Alps. These were worn and solid and they had Jived through eons of change and metamorphosis to have earned their right to solitude, to permanency.

Snow still spattered their sides like galaxies against the grey-green moss and rock. Snow fields softened their lines.

Nilsson was already crossing the river, jumping nimbly from rock to rock, his film-star's profile sometimes silhouetted against the clear, sharp sky, the pack on his back like Christian's load in the Pilgrim's Progress. Halhier smiled to himself. Only indirectly was Nilsson heading for salvation.

Now he followed.

He balanced himself in his flat, leather-soled boots and sprang from the first rock to the second, righted his 'balance again and sprang to the next. The river boiled around the rocks, rushing towards the lake, to lose itself in the larger waters. He jumped again, slipped and was up to his knees in the ice-cold torrent. He raised his small knapsack over his head and, careless now, did not bother to clamber back to the rocks, but pushed on, waist-deep, through the freezing river. He came gasping to the bank and was helped to dry land by Nilsson who shook his head and laughed.

'You're hopeless!'

'It's all right,' he said, 'the sun will dry me out soon.'

But both had walked a considerable distance and both were tiring. The sun had now risen, round and hazy red in the pale, cold sky, but it was still difficult to gauge die passage of the hours. This, also, added to the detached air of timeless-ness which the mountains and the plateaux possessed. There was no night - only a slight alteration in the quality of the day. And although the heat was ninety degrees fahrenheit, the sky still looked cold, for it took more than the brief six weeks of summer to change the character of this wintery Jotunheim.

He thought of Jotunheim, the Land of Giants, and understood the better the myths of his ancestors with their accent on man's impermanency - the mortality of their very gods, their bleak worship of the forces of nature. Only here could he appreciate that the life span of the world itself might be infinite, but the life span of its denizens was necessarily subject to inevitable metamorphosis and eventual death. And, as he thought, his impression of the country changed so that instead of the feeling of invading sanctified ground, he felt as if a privilege had been granted him and he had been allowed, for a few moments of his short life, to experience eternity.

The mountains themselves might crumble in time, the planet cease to exist, but that it would be reincarnated he was certain. And this gave him humility and hope for his own life and, for the first time, he began to think that he might have a purpose in continuing to live, after all.

He did not dwell on the idea, since there was no need to.

They came with relief to a dry place where they lighted a fire and cooked the last of their bacon in their strong metal frying pan. They ate their food and cleaned the pan with ashes from the fire, and he took it down to the nearest river and rinsed it, stooping to drink a little, not too much, since he had learned from his mistake earlier, for the water could be like a drug so that one craved to drink -more and more until exhausted.

He realized, vaguely, that they had to keep as fit as possible. For one of them to come to harm could mean danger for them both. But the thought meant little. There was no sense of danger here.

He slept and, before he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, he had a peculiar impression of being at once vast and tiny. His eyes closed, his body relaxed, he felt so big that the atoms of his body, in relation to the universe, hardly had existence, that the universe had become an unobservable electron, present but unseen. And yet, intratemporally, he had the impression that he was as small as an electron so that he existed in a gulf, a vacuum containing no matter whatsoever.

A mystic, perhaps, would have taken this for some holy experience, but he could do no more than accept it, feeling no need to interpret it. Then he slept.

Next morning, Nilsson showed him a map he had found in the village.

That's where she's going,' he said, pointing at a mountain in the distance. 'It's the highest in this section and the second highest in the entire range. Wonder why she'd want to climb a mountain?'

Hallner shook his head.

Nilsson frowned. 'You're in a funny mood. Think you won't have a chance with the girl?' When Hallner didn't answer, Nilsson said impatiently, 'Maybe she's got some idea that she's safer on top of a mountain. With luck, we'll find out soon. Ready to go?'

Hallner nodded.

They moved on in silence.

The range was discernibly closer, now, and Hallner could look at individual mountains. Although looming over the others, the one they headed for looked squat, solid, somehow older than the rest, even.

For a while they were forced to concentrate on the ground immediately in front of them, for it had become little more than thick mud which oozed over their boots and threatened to pull them down, to join, perhaps, the remains of prehistoric saurians which lay many feet below.

Nilsson said little and Hallner was glad that no demands were made on him.

It was as if the edge of the world lay beyond the last ragged pile of mountains, or as if they had left Earth and were in a concave saucer surrounded by mountains, containing only the trees and the lakes, marshes and hills.

He had the feeling that this place was so inviolable, so invulnerable, miles from the habitation of men so that for the first time he fully realized that men had ceased to exist along with their artifacts. It was as if they hadnever really existed at all or that their spell of dominance had appeared and disappeared in practically the same moments of time.

But now, for the first time since he had heard the hysterical voice on the radio, he felt some stirring of his old feeling return as he stared at the great mountain, heavy and huge against the ice-blue sky. But it was transformed. Ambition had become the summit, reward the silence, the peace that waited at the peak. Curiosity was the desire to discover the cause of a freakish colouring half-way up the mountain and fear did not exist for in these enigmatic mountains there was no tincertainty. A vast, wall-less womb with the infinite sky curving above and the richly-coloured scenery, blues, whites, browns and greens, surrounding them, complete, cutting them off from even the sight of the ruined outside world.

It was a snow-splashed paradise where well-fed wolves left the carcasses of their prey to lap at the pure water of the rivers. A wilderness replete with life, with lemming, reindeer, wolverine, wolf and even bear, with lakes swarming with fresh-water herring and the air a silent gulf above them to set off the smack of a hawk's wing. Night could not fall and so the potential dangers of savage wild-life, which could not be felt in the vastness of a world where there was room for everything, could never be realized.

Occasionally, they would discover a slain reindeer, bones dull and white, its hide tattered and perishing, and they would feel no horror, no emotion at all, for although its obvious killer, the wolverine, was a cruel beast, destroying often for the sake of destroying, the wolverine was not aware of its crime and therefore it was no crime at all.

Everything here was self-sufficient, moulded by fate, by circumstance, but since it did not analyse, since it accepted itself and its conditions without question, it was therefore more complete than the men who walked and stumbled across its uncompromising terrain.

At length they came to the sloping, grass-covered roots of the mountain and he trembled with emotion to see it rising so high above him, the grass fading, parting to reveal the tumbled rock and the rock vanishing higher up beneath hanks of snow.

'She will have taken the easiest face,' Nilsson decided, looking at the map he had found in the camp. It will mean crossing two snow-fields.'

They rested on the last of the grass. And he looked down over the country through which they had passed, unable to talk or describe his feelings. It possessed no horizon, for mountains were on aQ sides and within the mountains he saw rivers and lakes, tree-jcovered hills, all of which had taken on fresh, brighter colourings, the lakes reflecting the red of the sun and the blue of the sky and giving them subtly different qualities.

He was glad they were taking the easiest face for he felt no need, here, to test or to temper himself.

For a while he felt complete with the country, ready to climb upwards because he would rather do so and because the view from the peak would also be different, add, perhaps to the fullness of his experience.

He realized, as they got up, that this was not what Nilsson was feeling. Hallner had almost forgotten about the girl.

They began to climb. It was tiring, but not difficult for initially the slope was gradual, less than forty-five degrees. They came to the first snow field which was slightly below them, climbed downwards carefully, but with relief

Nilsson had taken a stick from the Lapp camp. He took a step forward, pressing the stick into the snow ahead of him, took another step, pressed the stick down again.

Hallner followed, treading cautiously in his friend's footsteps, little pieces of frozen snow falling into his boots. He knew that Nilsson was trying to judge the snow field's thickness. Below it a deep river coursed and (he thought he heard its musical rushing beneath his feet. He noted, also, that his feet now felt frozen and uncomfortable.

Very slowly they crossed the snow-field and at length, after a long time, they were safely across and sat down to rest for a while, preparing for the steeper climb ahead.

Nilsson eased his pack off his shoulders and leaned against it, staring back at the field.

'No tracks,' he mused. "Perhaps she crossed farther down.'

'Perhaps she didn't come 'here after all;' Hallner spoke with effort. He was not really interested.

"Don't be a fool.' Nilsson rose and hefted his pack on to his back again. -

They climbed over the sharp rocks separating the two snow-fields and once again underwent the danger of crossing the second field.

Hallner sat down to rest again, but Nilsson climbed on. After a few moments, Hallner followed and saw that Nilsson had stopped and was frowning at the folded map in tris hand.

When he reached Nilsson he saw that the mountain now curved upwards around a deep, wide indentation. Across this, a similar curve went up towards the summit. It looked a decidedly easier climb than the one which faced them.

Nilsson swore.

'The damned map's misled us - or else the position of the fields has altered. We've climbed the wrong face.'

'Should we go back down again?' Hallner asked uninter-estedly.

*No - there's not much difference - we'd have still lost a lot of time.'

Where the two curves joined, there was a ridge high above them which would take them across to the face which they 6hould have climbed. This was getting close to the peak, so that, in fact, there would be no advantage even when they reached the other side.

'No wonder we missed her tracks.' Nilsson said pettishly. 'She'll be at the surnmit by now.'

'How do you know she climbed this mountain?' Hallner wondered why he had not considered this earlier.

Nilsson waved the map. *You don't think Lapps need these? No - she left it behind.'

'Oh ...' Hallner stared down at the raw, tumbling rocks which formed an almost sheer drop beneath his feet.

*No more resting,' Nilsson said. 'We've got a lot of time to make up.'

He followed behind Nilsson who- foolishly expended his energy in swift, savage ascents and was showing obvious signs of exhaustion before they ever reached the ridge.

Unperturbed by the changed situation, Hallner climbed after him, slowly and steadily. The ascent was taking longer, was more difficult and he, also, was tired, but he possessed no sense of despair.

Panting, Nilsson waited for him on a rock close to the ridge, which formed a narrow strip of jumbled rocks slanting upwards towards the peak. On one side of it was an almost sheer drop going down more than a hundred feet, and on the other the rocky sides sloped steeply down to be submerged in a dazzling expanse of faintly creaking ice - a glacier.

'I'm going to have to leave you behind if you don't move faster,' Nilsson panted.

Hallner put his head slighdy on one side and peered up the mountain. Silently, he pointed.

'God! Everything's against us, today,' Nilsson kicked at a loose piece of rock and sent it out into space. It curved and plummeted down, but they could not see or hear it fall.

The mist, which Hallner had noted, came rolling swiftly towards them, obscuring the other .peaks, boiling in across the range.

'Will it affect us ?' Hallner asked.

'It's sure to!'

'How long will it stay?'

'A few minutes or several hours, it's impossible to tell. If we stay where we are we could very well freeze to death. If we go on there's a chance of reaching the summit and getting above it. Willing to risk it?'

This last remark was a sneering challenge.

'Why yes, of course,' Hallner said.

Now that the fact had been mentioned,' he noted for the first time that he was cold. But the coldness was not uncomfortable.

They had no ropes, no climbing equipment of any kind, and even his boots were flat-soled city boots. As the mist poured in, its grey, shifting mass limiting vision almost utterly at times, they climbed on, keeping together by shouts.

Once, he could hardly see at all, reached a rock, felt about it with his boot, put his weight on the rock, slipped, clung to the rock and felt both feet go sliding free in space just as the mist parted momentarily to show him the creaking glacier far below him. And something else - a black, spread-out shadow blemishing the pure expanse of ice.

He scrabbled at the rock with his toes, trying to swing himself back to the main part of the ridge, got an insecure toe^jholed and flung himself sideways to the comparative safety of the narrow causeway. He breathed quickly and shallowly and shook with reaction. Then he arose and continued on up the slanting ridge.

A while later, when the main thickness of the mist had rolled past and now lay above the glacier, he saw that they had crossed the ridge and were on the other side without his having realized it.

He could now see Nilsson climbing with obvious difficulty towards what he had called the 'false summit'. The real summit could not be seen, was hidden by the other, but there was now only another hundred feet to climb.

They rested on the false summit, unable to see much that was below them for although the mist was thinner, it was thick enough to hide most of the surrounding mountains. Sometimes it would part so that they could see fragments of mountains, patches of distant lakes, but little else.

Hallner looked at Nilsson. The other man's handsome face had taken on a set, obstinate look. One hand was bleeding badly.

'Are you all right?' Hallner nodded his head towards the bleeding hand. •Yes!'

Hallner lost interest since it was evident he could not help Nilsson in his present mood.

He noted that the mist had penetrated his thin jacket and (his whole body was damp and chilled. His own hands were torn and grazed and his body was bruised, aching, but he was still not discomforted. He allowed Nilsson to start off first and then forced himself on the last stage of the climb.

By the time he reached the snowless summit, the air was bright, the mist had disappeared and the sun shone in the clear sky.

He flung himself down close to Nilsson who was again peering at his map.

He lay panting, sprawled awkwardly on the rock and stared out over the world.

There was nothing to say. The scene itself, although magnificent, was not what stopped him from talking, stopped his mind from reasoning, as if time had come to a standstill, as if the passage of the planet through space had been halted. He existed, like a monument, petrified, unreasoning, absorbing. He drank 'in eternity.

Why hadn't the dead human race realized this? It was only necessary to exist, not to be trying constantly to prove you existed when the fact was plain.

Plain to him, he realized, because he had climbed a mountain. This knowledge was his reward. He had not received any ability to think with greater clarity, or a vision to reveal the secret of the universe, or an experience of ecstasy. He had been given, by himself, by his own action, insensate peace, the infinite tranquillity of existing.

Nilsson's harsh, disappointed tones invaded this peace.

'I could have sworn she would climb up here. Maybe she did. Maybe we were too late and she's gone back down again?'

Hallner remembered the mark he had seen on the glacier. Now he knew what it had been.

1 saw something back on the ridge,' he said. 'On the glacier. A human figure, I think.'

'What? Why didn't you tell me?'

'I don't know.'

'Was she alive? Think of the importance of this - if she is alive we can start the human race all over again. What's the matter with you, Hallner? Have you gone crazy with shock or something? Was she alive?'

'Perhaps - I don't know.'

'You don't—' Nilsson snarled in disbelief and began scrabbling back the way he had come.

*You heartless bastard! Supposing she's hurt - injured!'

Hallner watched Nilsson go cursing and stumbling, sometimes falling, on his over-rapid descent of the mountain. He saw him rip off his pack and fling it aside, nearly staggering over the ridge as he began to climb down it.

Hallner thought dispassionately that Nilsson would kill himself if he continued so heedlessly.

Then he returned his gaze to the distant lakes and trees below him.

He lay on the peak of the mountain, siharing its existence. He was immobile, he did not even blink as he took in the view. It seemed that he was part of the rock, part of the mountain itself.

A little later there came an aching yell which died away into the silence. But Hallner did not hear it, just as the mountain did not hear it.

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