Tomorrow Lies in Ambush

Contents

1. Call Me Dumbo

2. Repeat Performance

3. …And Isles Where Good Men Lie

4. What Time Do You Call This?

5. Communication

6. The Cosmic Cocktail Party

7. The Happiest Day of Your Life

8. The Weapons of Isher II

9. Pilot Plant

10. Telemart Three

11. Invasion of Privacy

Call Me Dumbo

The thoughts were strange, and they hurt.

My husband is called Carl—and that’s a nice name. My three little sons are called David, Aaron and John—and those are nice names. But I’m called Dumbo—and that sounds silly. It isn’t even like a real name. How did I get it in the first place?

Dumbo bustled around the cottage trying to quiet her mind with work. Morning sunlight streamed across the breakfast table, making it glow like an altar. She set out five dishes of hot porridge then went to fetch the children who were tumbling noisily in her flower garden. Once out in the peaceful, sun-filled air she felt a little better. Beyond the picket fence the grain fields which Carl tended so carefully rolled down to the river like unleashed bolts of yellow satin.

“Come for your breakfast,” she called. “And don’t trample my roses, David. You’d miss the pretty colours as much as anybody.”

“What roses?” David’s six-year-old face was flushed with exertion. “You mean these green things?” The younger boys tittered admiringly.

“Those roses,” Dumbo emphasised.

David pointed straight at the freshly opened, deep red blossoms. “You mean these green things?”

Dumbo hesitated uneasily. David was being naughty, showing off to his brothers, but he was full of confidence, compactly indomitable as only a healthy child can be. And he had said this sort of thing before. Dumbo stared at the roses, but her eyes had begun to hurt now.

“Into the house!” she commanded. “Your porridge will be cold.”

They went into the coolness of the whitewashed walls and the children scrambled up on their chairs. Carl came in from the outhouse where he kept his pets and nodded approvingly as he saw the children eat. The faded shirt stretched across his thick, powerfully sloping shoulders was already dappled with sweat.

“Have your breakfast now, darling,” Dumbo said concernedly. “You worry more about the animals than about yourself.”

“Daddy fixed the rabbit’s leg,” Aaron announced proudly.

Carl smiled at the child as he sat down and Dumbo felt a flash of jealousy. She decided to win a smile for herself, with a trick that never failed.

“Some day Daddy’s going to have a daughter to worry about—and then he’ll have no time for rabbits.”

Carl kept his head down, scooping porridge into his mouth.

“We have to have a baby girl,” Dumbo persisted, disappointed. “Isn’t that so, darling.”

Behind his rimless glasses Carl’s pale blue eyes shuttled briefly. He continued eating.

“Your Daddy,” Dumbo switched to the children, ‘just lives for the day when we’ll have our own little …’

“For Christ’s sake!” Carl’s spoon clattered into the dish and his shoulders worked beneath the straining shirt. “I’m sorry.” he said quietly. “Of course we’ve got to have a girl. Now will you please sit down and eat your own breakfast? Will you please?”

Dumbo smiled happily and took her seat. Carl had given her the reassurance she wanted. It was good to know she was loved, and yet the disturbing new thoughts thudded continuously in her head. Who ever heard of a name like Dumbo? She should be called something different. A nice womanly, motherly name. Something like … perhaps … Victor…. No, that’s a manname…. Victoria would be nice….

She finished her porridge and brought a plateful of smoking griddle cakes to the table. The children chirped excitedly. They ate in comparative silence for a while, then Dumbo felt the pressure build up again.

“Carl, darling. I don’t like being called Dumbo. It isn’t a nice name. I want to be called Victoria.”

Carl abruptly stopped chewing and looked at her with bleak, unfriendly eyes. “You didn’t take your medicine this week. Did you, Dumbo?”

“I did,” Dumbo answered quickly. “You know I never miss it.” She could not remember having seen Carl look at her like that ever before, and she was afraid.

“Don’t lie to me, Dumbo’

‘But I …’

“Into the bedroom, Dumbo.”

Carl stood up and told the boys to continue eating. He followed Dumbo into the bedroom, took the black hypodermic gun from its case and poured three drops into the chamber from Dumbo’s egg-shaped medicine bottle.

“I’m disappointed in you, Dumbo,” Carl said, his thick fingers husking audibly against each other as he primed the gun’s pressure cylinder.

For a moment Dumbo considered the almost blasphemous act of resisting her husband’s will, but Carl gave her no chance. He pinned her big soft body to the wall with his forearm and fired the hypodermic into her throat. The charge felt ice cold, stinging.

“Don’t forget it again,” Carl said, putting the gun away.

Dumbo blinked back tears. Why was Carl being so unkind? He knew she put her duty to him and the children above everything. And she never omitted her weekly shot.

Back at the table Carl ate in silence until his plate was clear. He got up, kissed the three boys and went to the door. Morning light caught his spectacles, turning the lenses into miniature suns.

“I’m going to the village after lunch,” he said to Dumbo, ‘so check the larder this morning.”

“All right, darling. We need coffee.”

“Don’t try to remember it—just check it.”

“All right, darling.”

When he had gone Dumbo began tidying the cottage, aware once more of the pain behind her eyes. The children played with the remains of the breakfast and Dumbo left well enough alone, thinking idly that she might like to go into the village in the afternoon with Carl. Finally the boys’ quiet absorption with the scraps degenerated into horseplay and Dumbo determinedly pushed them outside. It was a long time since she had been to the village, and if she got through her work early….

“Lend me your egg, Mum.” It was Aaron, the four-year-old. “I want to play with it.”

Dumbo laughed. “I have no egg, sweetie. We haven’t had eggs in the house for years.”

“That’s a big lie,” Aaron said accusingly. “You have an egg! In your bedroom. In there.”

Dumbo hardly heard. Why were there no eggs in the house? Eggs are so good for children. That settled it. She would go to the village with Carl and attend to the shopping herself. It was so long since she had been there she had almost forgotten…. Her thoughts returned to Aaron.

“That isn’t an egg, silly,” she said, ushering the child out. “That’s my medicine bottle. It just looks like an egg.”

Aaron refused to be ushered. “It is an egg. I know, ‘cause David told me. David boiled it last week, but he must have boiled it too much ‘cause it wouldn’t crack.”

“Well, that was very naughty of David,” Dumbo said, feeling faint heart-whispers of alarm. “That’s my medicine bottle and Daddy doesn’t like anyone to touch it.” She had no idea what was in the little bottle but she sensed that boiling it might do it harm. Carl stored the main supply in the coolest part of the outhouse.

Aaron looked gleefully over his shoulder. “Are you going to spank David?”

“Perhaps,” Dumbo said numbly. “I’m not sure.” She found it difficult to speak. The pain behind her eyes had grown worse and she had just realised that, although the family had lived at the cottage for many years, she had hardly ever set foot outside its neat white picket fence. And it was so long since she had been to the village she was no longer sure of the way.

Dumbo brooded over it during the morning.

The act of worrying was strange to her, but deep wells of comfort within her broad, heavy body seemed to be drying up. Under the ankle-length dress insistent perspiration swept her skin so that she walked with an unpleasant rubbery slither of thighs. Several times she was tempted to shorten a dress to a more comfortable length, but it would have made Carl angry and she already had annoyed him once that day. Her purpose in life was to give Carl love and happiness, not to annoy him.

Carl returned from the fields early carrying a scythe with a broken handle. He ate lunch quickly and, with only a perfunctory check on the pets, settled down on the back porch to repair the scythe. He worked in silence, massive shoulders bowed in what looked, to Dumbo, strangely like loneliness. In spite of the distraction of her headache she felt a pang of unhappiness. She went out and knelt beside him. Carl glanced up and his eyes were suddenly sick.

“See to the children,” he said.

“They’re asleep. The heat….”

“Then find something else to do.”

Dumbo walked away blindly and began cleaning the already clean kitchen. A few minutes later Carl came in. Dumbo turned to him hopefully.

“I’m going to the village now,” he said flatly. “Where’s the list?”

Dumbo gave him the paper and watched from the door as he went out through the front gate and walked down the path to the river. She wished things were better, that she was pregnant again, this time with the girl child Carl wanted so desperately. That would make things good again, perhaps even better than they had ever been before. Almost before she understood what was happening Dumbo found herself out through the gate, out into the unfamiliar world of brilliant yellows, and following Carl towards the village.

At first she was afraid, then her excitement became too strong. She could give the excuse that he always forgot to bring eggs and, anyway, it would be fun to go into the village and see other people again after all this time. Dumbo kept well behind Carl, now determined not to be seen too soon.

Carl turned right at the river, walked along the bank for ten minutes, crossed a ford of flat stones and climbed the steep grassy hill on the far side. Dumbo waited cautiously until Carl had vanished over the crest before she gathered up her skirts and crossed the river. Going up the hill she guessed the village must be visible from the top because Carl had often made the round trip in less than an hour. Heat and exertion in her heavy, shapeless garments made Dumbo’s head feel worse, but she was keyed up at the prospect of seeing the village, the stores, the people. She could walk round with Carl just a little while even if he was mad at her.

On the dusty crest she shielded her eyes from the sun and peered down the other side. She found herself looking at featureless grasslands which spread without interruption to the distant horizons.

There was no village.

Swaying slightly with the shock, Dumbo glimpsed the movement of Carl’s faded pink shirt as he scrambled down the hill below her. He was heading towards an object which Dumbo’s first brimming glance had missed. It was as large as five or six cottages in a line and the outlines were blurred with climbing grasses, but to Dumbo it looked like a huge cylinder of black metal lying on its side at the edge of the plain.

An inexplicable reaction made her look upwards at the sky, then she sank weakly to her knees.

Carl reached the cylinder, confidently pulled open a door and vanished into the interior. Dumbo waited for him to reappear, wondering numbly why the world had gone mad. Was she sick? Could that thing actually be a village? The heat of the blistering afternoon pressed in around her, making her head swim in a blur of marching colours. Unseen birds chittered continuously.

Some time later Carl emerged from the cylinder with a box in his arms and came up the hill towards her. An instinct warned Dumbo it was now imperative to keep out of sight. She backed through the dry grass on hands and knees then ran down the faint path to the ford. Across the river she realised there was no chance of making it to the bend before Carl reappeared on the skyline. She threw herself into a mass of orange-coloured scrub and crouched in the sudden privacy of tangled twigs and clattering leaves.

Carl came down to the ford but did not cross.

He upended the box, throwing a number of glittering objects into the water, then turned and went back over the hill towards the cylinder. The objects flashed sunlight as they bobbed away on the current. Dumbo got to her feet, thankful for the unexpected opportunity to get back to the cottage unseen, but she was curious about the contents of the box. It was, she decided, worth one further risk.

She ran downstream for a short distance for a closer look at the floating objects. They looked like little glass boxes, each of which contained a small ball of some whitish substance. Clinging to projecting roots and leaning dangerously over the bank, Dumbo managed to snatch one from the warm, sluggish water. She examined it closely. The box was oblong, about as big as her hand, and the two smaller faces were of black, opaque material. It Was too light to be glass and strangely cold to her touch.

Inside the box, floating languidly in clear fluid, was a human eye. The red cord of the optic nerve snaked around it, terminating in a tiny silver plug.

Dumbo hurled the box in the river and ran, doubled over, frantically whipping her head from side to side to fling thin nets of vomit clear of her huge, soft body.

In the grey light of morning Dumbo partially opened her eyes and smiled. This was the time she liked best, lying in the dark warmth of her bed, before the unwelcome and unstoppable invasion of identity filled the peaceful vacuum of her mind. She stirred contentedly and let her eyes open a little further.

The bedroom ceiling looked wrong.

Dumbo sat up in bed, knuckling her eyes fiercely. The ceiling was wrong. In place of the familiar white plaster was an expanse of riveted grey metal, more like part of a ship than a rural cottage. It was as though she had been moved into strange surroundings during the night but—she looked around—this was her room all all right. All the simple items of furniture were in their usual places.

She walked to the window and looked out at the front garden, but it too was wrong.

The fence was still there, but now it was made of crude stakes and wire, and inside it there were no flowers. Her roses had been replaced by formless clumps of dark green foliage. What was it David had said? You mean these green things?

Dumbo brushed tangled hair away from her face and hurried to the children’s room, fighting down a sudden dread, but they were there as always, stretched on their beds in extravagant postures of sleep. She listened at the door of Carl’s room and heard his regular breathing. Her family appeared to be safe but, as she glanced around the cottage’s central kitchen in the increasing daylight, she saw that the walls too had turned to grey metal. They had a patchy, slightly makeshift appearance.

Moving with quick, frightened steps in the crawling gloom, Dumbo went back to her own room, got into bed and pulled the sheets up to her chin. The first coherent thoughts came some time later, and with them the knowledge that the changes in her surroundings had been accompanied by changes inside her head. She found herself able to think, to remember.

I am not on Earth. I am on another world which I reached by star ship, with Carl.

I do not live in a whitewashed stone cottage. I live in a house which Carl must have built from bits of the ship.

There is no nearby community. There is only the hulk of the ship, and Carl goes there when we need supplies.

Dumbo’s mind had begun to work with a speed she found exhilarating. For years she had been trying to run in waist-high water, now she was reaching shallows, gaining speed, beginning to fly. Thought crowded upon thought, memory upon deduction.

Why did I not understand all this before? Easy—because Carl was giving me a drug.

Why do I understand it now? Easy—because David destroyed the current batch of the drug.

Why was Carl giving me the drug? I’m not sure. Could it be that… ?

Dumbo tried to pull back from the mental precipice, but she was too late.

Why the eyes in plastic boxes? In the river?

She dragged the bedclothes up over her face and lay without moving until the sun had risen and the boys were marauding noisily through the house, naked and shouting for breakfast. While she was cooking it she heard Carl begin to move around behind his door. Dumbo tensed up as he came into the kitchen but he, at least, had not changed. She watched him move about the new, drab world, half-expecting him to look right through her at any moment and reach for the hypo gun. But his pale blue eyes, behind their flakes of glass, remained disinterested and impersonal. Dumbo was relieved and somehow disappointed. After all, she was a woman—his wife. There ought to be more to it than this. They lived together and she had given him children. Mysteries and horrors did not cancel out that sort of relationship.

She set the table for breakfast, really seeing things for the first time, testing her new powers. The chairs were all of sleek weightless metal—that was because the star ship would have had chairs and they were easily portable; but the big kitchen table and cupboards were wooden and home-made. The range on which she cooked with a log fire had been fashioned from some kind of heavy machine casing, but the cups and dishes were beautifully styled in brilliant, glass-smooth plastic. In a way she did not mind the changes, except for the fact that outside the window was a garden full of dark green things. She was going to miss the roses.

“I’ve made your favourite this morning,” she said, carrying a smoking tray to the table. “Griddle cakes.”

Carl stared down at them, pressing the back of his hand to his forehead. “That’s great. That’s really great. My favourite breakfast every day—every God-damned day in life. You’re some cook, Dumbo.”

The older boys giggled appreciatively.

Dumbo opened her mouth to hit back, then realised it would have been a mistake. Carl always spoke to her like that and she never answered back. That’s why she was called Dumbo instead of … her memory baulked … could it be Victoria? Anyway, the point was that Carl acted as though he hated her, and this made the mystery of their past even deeper. Suppose the star ship had made a forced descent on an empty world, with no hope of ever being found. Further suppose she had been the only woman on board, perhaps married to one of the crew, and Carl had murdered all the others so that he could have her. It might account for the use of the memory-killing, euphoria-producing drug—but it explained nothing else.

The day was hot, sunny and uneventful.

Carl spent most of the time working in his fields. Surveying her surroundings from the front of the house Dumbo noted that the sloping grain fields had not been part of the fantasy world. She wondered if the crop was indigenous to the planet or if star ships normally carried seed as part of a survival kit. Assuming the ship had been lost, they had been lucky to alight on this perfect pastoral world—but perhaps it had not been that way at all. Carl might have abducted her and brought her here purposely, to escape from something.

Dumbo contented herself with the task of caring for the children and the house. It was, after all, woman’s work. She could lie low for another day or two and, provided the drug had had no permanent effect, simply wait for all answers to emerge from her memory. And perhaps the explanation would be sane and reasonable, and things would be wonderful again. Dumbo began to feel hopeful.

During the night she remembered her brother.

Crossing the river in daytime had been easy, but by starlight the flat stones of the ford were mere water-borne shadows of uncertain shape and position.

Dumbo slipped once and went knee-deep in water with a splash. The noise frightened her. She stared about her in the darkness, suddenly aware that this was an alien world where at night even the vegetation might be hostile. The tree’s not a tree, she remembered a stray line, when there’s nobody there on the heath.

Shivering unhappily, she stepped on to the bank and moved up the hill in the direction of the star ship.

The mental pictures of her brother had appeared abruptly. At first she had thought they might be of a husband—this tall, rangy, fair-haired youngster with the intelligent eyes—but the emotional response was wrong. She knew the way a woman felt about her man, the way she felt about Carl. There was an immediate affection and warmth here, but an indefinable sexual blankness, the drawing of a line which meant womb-sharing. The same flesh and blood. At that point the need to know more had become too urgent to resist.

From the crest of the hill the star ship was almost invisible in the darkness. As she walked down to it, dress slapping wetly on her shins, the ship’s outlines refused to be defined. It seemed to crawl on the ground, dissolve, shake like jelly, reach gleeful hands into the sky. Dumbo watched her own feet and kept walking until she was close enought for her eyes to map the hull’s contours. She had trouble finding the door but once the handle was in her hand instinct took over. The lever clicked sideways easily and the door opened towards her.

There was light inside.

Dumbo tensed to run but there was a cold stillness to the light which suggested that it always shone, even when there was nobody there to notice. She went up a narrow metal stair into a corridor which curved away for a short distance on each side, ending in featureless metal doors. The light came from a tube which ran the full length of the corridor ceiling. Two sections of it were fainter than the others, and a third had dulled to a cloudy amber.

Dumbo hesitated, then went to the right. Cold air puffed out around her as she opened the door. The large room beyond it was dimly lit and filled with rack after rack of transparent plastic boxes. Dumbo slammed the door shut but not before she had glimpsed the rows of nameless organs—glistening brown, pale blue, red-veined.

She pressed both hands to her lifting stomach and breathed deeply for a moment, snatching air.

The other door opened into a shorter transverse corridor which led to several doorways at her level and, by way of an open metal stair and catwalk, to a similar set of rooms above. Some of the doors were closed, others lay open. Dumbo looked into the nearest room—it was tiny and contained a number of long metallic objects on a stand. Rifles, she thought, feeling the vivid stains of memory flow into yet another compartment of her mind. She opened two lockers and found pistols and grenades. She touched the luminous dials of the grenades’ time fuses, frowning thoughtfully—it appeared that not all her regained memories would be pleasant.

The second room along the corridor was larger and much brighter lit than the others. In the centre of it was a long white table supported on a single, complicated pedestal. Around the walls were gleaming, incomprehensible machines and instruments, the sight of which failed to evoke any responsive wash of memory. I was a stranger here, she thought, even then. She closed the door.

None of the other rooms on the bottom level was of interest, except the one which had obviously been a combined galley and mess. The chairs were all gone—they were back at the house—but one of the cupboards still contained cups and dishes. The sight of the familiar glowing utensils in the alien surroundings gave Dumbo a vague emotional wrench.

On the upper level she chose the central room first.

Her reaction to the five massively cushioned chairs and curving instrument arrays was so strong that it caused a moment of nearly physical pain. She crossed the faintly lit room to touch the dusty seats and blank grey screens. I knew this place, she thought wonderingly, and yet it’s so … mechanical. Only a trained engineer could have been at home in this room. Could she have been a pilot? Dumbo turned her head to drink in more of the strange yet almost familiar environment, then she glanced over her shoulder.

In the shadows behind the door stood five helmeted figures.

She leapt back awkwardly, but the figures were only empty suits clipped to the wall. Their hoses and cables hung loose, and behind the faceplates was nothing but gaping blackness. Two of the suits had triangular flashes on the shoulders and name plates cemented to the chests. Dumbo went close enough to read.

The first said, SURG./CDR. CARL VAN BUYSEN. That would be Carl, Dumbo thought, moving to the next.

The second said, LT./CDR. ROBERT V. LUCAS.

Dumbo pressed both hands to her forehead. The name Lucas meant something to her—but what? This could be her brother’s suit, and if that were the case then one of the unmarked suits might have been hers. But there was something not quite right about the idea of brother and sister on the same military….

“You haven’t been taking your medicine—have you, Dumbo?”

The voice was Carl’s and it came from close behind.

Dumbo spun, arms over her face, but Carl had his hands in his pockets. He was smiling unpleasantly.

“I have been taking it,” Dumbo blurted instinctively. “You gave me a shot yourself.”

“Then you’ve been playing tricks with it. That’s bad, Dumbo, very bad.”

Dumbo experienced a new emotion—resentment. “Don’t speak to me like that. And my name isn’t Dumbo. It’s …’

“Go on,” Carl said interestedly, “I want to see how far you’ve got.”

“I don’t know. That part is harder than the rest … but it isn’t Dumbo. Don’t call me that any more.”

“Poor Dumbo!” Carl reached forward caressingly, grabbed a handful of Dumbo’s hair and twisted. His oval face was priestly with hatred. “Get back to the house,” he whispered.

Dumbo sobbed with pain. “What did you do with my brother? And the others? You killed them!”

Carl’s fingers relaxed their grip instantly. “You say that to me? You say that to … me!” He shuddered. “Carl is a giver of life. Understand that. Carl is a holy giver of life. He has never killed anything.”

“Then where’s my brother? And the others?”

“Why should I have killed anybody?”

‘Because,” Dumbo said triumphantly. “I was the only woman on the ship.”

“You!” Carl stepped back slowly, appalled.

“You wanted me to yourself.”

“You’ll pay for saying that, Dumbo.” Carl raised his fist, then relaxed it deliberately, one finger at a time. “Listen to me—you never had a brother. There was nobody on this ship but you and me. We were in the thick of a tactical emergency, so we tried to take the ship to Lark IV by ourselves. The suit you were looking at when I came in was your own.”

Dumbo looked at the stiffly leaning pressure skin with its black maw of a face and boldly stencilled nameplate.

‘But …’

“That’s right.” Carl laughed softly. “Hello, Victor!”

Somehow, incredibly, Dumbo was not angry. Almost of their own accord her hands crept down the front of her heavy dress and cradled the sagging, scarred belly. Perhaps it was too soon for a reaction, perhaps when she had recovered all her past and was able to compare it with the present….

“There had been a surprise attack in the region of Lark IV,” Carl was saying. The losses were heavy and Sector Command was screaming for medical support, so you and I tried to get through with an organ bank. We almost made it but they hit us fair and square with a warp scrambler. You know what that means, Dumbo?”

She shook her head.

“I thought not, but you did then. For months after we limped down on to this world you sat up at nights with the ship’s ten-inch scope trying to catch a glimpse of our home galaxy. You should have known better. You and I were a setting on a billion-digit combination lock and somebody had spun the wheels. Somebody with a bad memory.”

Carl pulled off his glasses and began polishing the lenses, blue eyes peering myopically into another existence.

“There we were on a completely empty world. A clean, fresh world, ideally suited for life—and there was nothing for us to do but grow old and die.” Carl’s voice grew louder. “And Carl could not allow that. It would have been a terrible wrong—because the only obstacle standing in the way of life was a few ounces of redundant male flesh.

“I had everything that was needed—the organ bank was in good condition then. The individual power cells are failing now and I’m discarding more and more units every week, but at that time I was able to produce a usable set of basic female organs and glands for you. One hypno session after the operations and a weekly shot of an LSD derivative took care of the rest.

“That’s your illustrious background. How do you like it, mother?”

Dumbo twisted the signet ring she wore on the third finger, left hand. It turned easily on bearings of perspiration, but she felt strangely untouched, strong.

“I’m sorry, Carl—you can’t punish me like that. Don’t you see? The things you have just said might have destroyed Victor Lucas, but he can never hear them. He doesn’t exist any more. I’m … Victoria Lucas.”

Carl shivered in the cool stale air. “You’re right. My logical faculty must be getting rusty. The whole idea of punishment assumes continuity of personality, and you won’t have that—not after your next shot. Are you going to walk back to the house, or do I drag you?”

Dumbo took a deep breath. “Why bother with the shots when we don’t need them? There’s no point in pretending all this has made me feel deliriously happy, but I can take things as they are, without the illusions. I ought to hate you but you did too good a job on me with those glands. I really am a woman—and I’m prepared to go on being your wife.”

Carl hit her back-handed, thick fingers hanging loose like flails.

She dropped back against one of the control chairs and hung on to it, staring up at him in dismay.

“My wife!” White coronas glowed around Carl’s eyes. “You freak!! You nothing! You think I ever touched you?”

“I don’t remember … but what then? Our children?”

“Our children!” Carl spoke eagerly, suddenly seeing the potency of the new weapon. “Three nice kids, but what a family! You for a mother, and three unknown soldiers for fathers. You looked into the organ bank for a moment, didn’t you, Dumbo? Recognise anybody?”

The words took time to reach Dumbo. When they did she stood up and moved out on to the catwalk, past Carl.

“That’s right, mother,” he whispered in her ear as she went by. He followed her down the metal stair towards the lower level. ‘But don’t take it so personally, Dumbo. There are sound genetic reasons in favour of the children having different fathers—it’s all for the good of our future community. Think instead of how lucky you are. Yes, lucky! No man could ever touch you and still keep his food down, yet, thanks to the wonders of medical science, you’ve had three children to as many different men. And you’ll go on having them until you produce the girls we need.” Carl hung on to the stair rail so that he could watch Dumbo’s face while he spoke.

“Of course, I was lucky too. A ship like this doesn’t carry frozen semen, you know. If it wasn’t for the fact that the organ bank caters for even the most drastic type of injury there would only have been me—and that really would have been a fate worse than death.

“You hear me, Dumbo? Why don’t you say something?”

Dumbo reached the lower level and passed the door to the longitudinal corridor.

“Not that way, mother.” Carl caught her shoulder from behind.

She wrenched free and ran. Carl gave a startled grunt and came after her, his footfalls speeding up as he remembered the armoury. Dumbo burst through the door, throwing herself towards the rifle rack. Carl’s hand raked down her back. She snatched one of the weapons by the barrel and swung it blindly, hoping to find Carl’s belly. He had fallen forward on to his hands and knees, and the rifle butt opened his face like a purse. He rolled on to his back, unconscious, with a bright red bubble quivering at each nostril.

Dumbo placed the rifle butt on his upturned throat and bore down with all the weight of her big, soft body.

Morning sunlight streamed across the breakfast table, making it glow like an altar.

Dumbo set out five dishes of hot porridge and went to fetch the children who were tumbling noisily outside. She hummed quietly to herself as she watched the boys eat, taking pride in the very smell of the good, simple food. As soon as she was sure the children had everything they needed she loaded a wooden tray and carried it into Carl’s room.

“Come on, darling,” she said brightly. “I know you don’t feel like eating, but you must make the effort.”

Carl sat up in the bed and touched his bandaged face. “What is this?” The words came slowly through swollen lips.

“It’s your breakfast, of course. I’ve made your favourites today. Now eat up so you’ll get well quickly.”

He stared up at Dumbo for a moment, then his face relaxed.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said wonderingly. “I thought you were going to kill me, but you must have realised you couldn’t make out here on your own.”

“Eat up, darling. Don’t let your breakfast get cold.” Dumbo fluffed up the pillows to support Carl’s back.

Carl shook his head, chuckling with relief. “Well, I’ll be damned. And you even had sense enough to go back on the shots.”

Dumbo leaned down on the bed to get her face close to his.

“Correction,” she said coldly. “I haven’t taken a shot. Not yet. I took a fresh lot of the drug from the store and primed the gun with it, but I haven’t taken the shot yet. I wanted to wait.” She glanced at the watch on her wrist.

“Wait for what?” Carl pushed the tray away. “What are you doing with my watch?”

“I waited to see your face, of course. I could have taken the shot earlier, when you were still sleeping, but I would have become Dumbo again and wouldn’t have understood what was happening. Would I?”

“Get off my bed,” Carl said thickly. “I’m getting up. Where’s the hypo gun?”

“Don’t rush, darling,” Dumbo pushed him back on to the pillows. “Let me tell you what I’ve been doing while you were asleep. First of all, I brought you here from the ship, and that took ages because I had to drag you most of the way. Then I put you to bed and fixed your face and a little while ago, while the oven was warming up, I went back to the ship and …’ she glanced at the watch again,”… listen, darling.”

Carl pushed her away savagely, using his knees. He half-rose in the bed, spilling the tray of food, then froze as the sound reached the house.

It was a distant multiple explosion.

“What was that?” His shocked eyes hunted across her face.

“That, darling, was your organ bank. I had no idea the grenades would make such a noise. I hope they haven’t worried the children. I must see how they are.” She paused at the door and looked back.

Carl was kneeling naked on the bed.

“Oh, yes,” Dumbo said. “I musn’t forget this.”

She took the hypo gun from a pocket, fired the charge into her wrist and went out to the startled boys. By the time she had washed up the breakfast things and tidied the room the walls no longer seemed like metal. She went to the window and looked out. Her roses shone redly in the peaceful morning air. It was going to be yet another perfect day.

Dumbo smiled as she watched the boys at play. She hoped the next child would be a girl because that was what Carl wanted more than anything else in the world.

And all she wanted was to be his wife.

Repeat Performance

The trouble came to a head when they picked on Milton Pryngle.

Do you remember him? In old movies he was usually the harassed, exasperated hotel clerk. He was short and dapper, with a petulant round face and an exquisite slow burn which I have always considered the equal of Edgar Kennedy’s. And when they picked on him, they had gone too far.

Perhaps I’m wrong about when this mess started. Perhaps, if I was one of those people who think deeply about causes and effects—like my projectionist, Porter Hastings—I would say it all began in my childhood. I was a fanatical moviegoer from the age of seven and before reaching high school had already decided that the only business worth considering was owning a theatre. Twenty years later I finally made it and, although I hadn’t foreseen the effects of things like colour television, was still convinced it was the best life in the world. Mine is a small suburban theatre—a stucco cube which had once been white and now is an uncertain yellow, with streaks of saffron where the gutters are particularly bad—but I make sure it’s clean inside, and my choice of repertory movies attracts a steady flow of customers. There are plenty of old films on television, but they get chopped up too much, and any connoisseur knows the only way to appreciate their flavour is in the original nostalgic atmosphere of the stalls.

Anyway, the trouble sneaked up on me a month or so ago—in disguise. I was standing beside the box office watching the mid-week crowd trickle out into the blustery darkness. Most of the faces were familiar to me, and I was nodding good-night to about every other one when C. J. Garvey shuffled past me, turned up his coat collar and disappeared through the outer door. His name probably doesn’t mean anything to you, but C. J. Garvey was a bit player in upwards of a hundred undistinguished movies, always as a kindly, world-wise pawnbroker. I doubt if he ever spoke more than three lines, but any time a script called for a kindly, world-wise pawnbroker, Garvey was automatically the man.

I was surprised to discover he was still alive, and amazed to find him going to a movie in a small-town theatre in the mid-West. The thing which really got me, however, was the magnitude of the coincidence—the main feature that night was The Fallen Rainbow and Garvey was in it, playing his usual role. Filled with a sentimental yearning to let the old guy know his movie career had not gone entirely unnoticed, I hurried out on to the front steps but there was no sign of him in the windy, rain-seeded night. I went back in and met Porter Hastings coming down the stairs from the projection room. He appeared worried.

“We had that dim-out tonight again, Jim,” he said. “That’s the third Wednesday night in a row.”

“It can’t have been serious—there weren’t any complaints.” I was in no mood for technical trivialities. “Do you know who walked out through that door just a minute ago? C. J. Garvey!”

Hastings looked unimpressed. “It’s as if there was some kind of a power drain. A real massive one which sucks all the juice out of my projectors for a few seconds.”

“Listen to what I’m saying, Port. C. J. Garvey had a bit part in The Fallen Rainbow—and he was in our audience tonight in person.”

“Was he?”

“Yes. Just think of the coincidence.”

“It doesn’t seem much of a coincidence to me. He was probably passing through town, saw that one of his old movies was showing here and stopped by to have a look at it. Straightforward cause and effect, Jim. What I’d like to know is what goes on around here on Wednesday nights to overload the power supplies like that. Our regulars will be noticing these dim-outs and getting the idea I can’t handle the job.”

I started to reassure him but just then old Mr. and Mrs. Collins came shuffling out into the lobby. They both have rheumatism and so are usually the last to leave the building before we close the doors. Sometimes, when their twinges are worse than usual, they complain a bit about draughts, or it might be smoke or someone crunching popcorn too loudly, but I don’t mind. My business is built upon people feeling as comfortable, and relaxed in the theatre as if they were at home, and the regulars are entitled to have their say about things.

“Good-night, Jim,” Mrs. Collins said. She hesitated, obviously with something on her mind, then came a little closer to me. “Have you started selling seaweed?”

“Seaweed?” I blinked. “Mrs. Collins, it’s years since I have even seen a piece of seaweed. Do people actually go around buying and selling it?”

“The edible kind they do. And if you’re going to start selling that smelly stuff in the kiosk Harry and me aren’t coming back. We can just as easy go to the Tivoli on Fourth Street, you know. Dulse you call the kind you eat.”

“Don’t worry,” I said seriously. “As long as I’m running this theatre not one piece of dulse will ever cross the threshold.” I held the door open while they hobbled through, then I turned back to Hastings but he had disappeared back up into his den. By that time the place was empty except for staff so I went into the auditorium for a final look around. There’s a sad, musty atmosphere in a movie house after everybody has gone home, but this time something extra had been added. I sniffed deeply, then shook my head. Who, I thought, would be crazy enough to bring seaweed to the movies?

That was the first Wednesday night to go slightly off key, C. J. Garvey’s night—but it wasn’t till the following one that I began to get an uneasy feeling there was something queer going on in my theatre.

It was another rainy evening and a pretty good crowd had come in to see Island Love and the main feature, The Fighting Fitzgeralds. I was standing in my favourite spot, a niche in the rear wall where I can see all of the auditorium and watch the screen at the same time, when one of the dim-outs which annoyed Hastings so much occurred. It happened near the end of the show when another of my favourite bit players, Stanley T. Mason, was on the screen. Mason never became a ‘star’ bit player—which is what I call that handful of lesser actors whose names always crop up when people who think they know a lot about old movies start to chew the fat—but he turned in quite a few gem-like performances in ‘B’ features, usually as something like an English remittance man exiled in the States. He was lecturing one of the Fighting Fitzgeralds on the value of good breeding, in his superbly reedy British accent, when the picture faded to near blackness for a good three seconds. Some of the audience were starting to get restive when the screen flickered and brightened to its former intensity. I breathed a sigh of relief and relaxed—complete shutdowns are bad for business, more because of the loss of audience confidence than the issue of a houseful of complimentary tickets.

Just then it came back. The seaweed smell, I mean. I sniffed it incredulously for a minute, then walked down the centre aisle and used my flash to see if I could catch some health food crank flagrante delicto. Everything seemed normal enough, so I went back out to the lobby to think things over. The smell seemed to cling in my nostrils, an odour of … not seaweed, I suddenly realised, but of the sea itself. At that moment the main feature ended and the crowd began to pour out, those in the vanguard blinking suspiciously at the real world outside as if something might have changed during their absence in another dimension. I stood to one side and was; bidding the regulars good-night when Porter Hastings came clattering down the projection room stairs.

“It happened again,” he said grimly.

“I know.” I nodded, keeping my gaze on the departing patrons, picking out the faces I’d known for years–Mr. and Mrs. Carberry, old Sam Keers who was so regular that he even came in the day of his wife’s funeral, short-sighted Jack Dubois who always sat in the front row, Stanley T. Mason …

“What are you going to do about it?” Hastings demanded.

“I don’t know, Port. That’s your side of …’ My voice faded away. Stanley T. Mason! I had just seen one of the actors in The Fighting Fitzgeralds walking out of my theatre from a showing of his own film.

“We can talk technicalities in the morning,” I said, moving away. “There’s somebody over there I want to see.”

“Hold on, Jim.” Hastings grabbed my arm. “This is serious. There might be a fire risk, because …’

“Later!” I broke away and shouldered through the crowd to the door, but it was too late. Mason had disappeared into the breezy darkness of the street. I went back inside to where Hastings was waiting with a hurt look on his face.

“Sorry,” I said, trying to put my thoughts in order, ‘but there’s something weird going on here, Port.” I reminded him about having seen C. J. Garvey the previous Wednesday, and was telling him about Stanley T. Mason when a fresh thought struck me. “And I’ll tell you something else. He was wearing the same clothes as in the film—one of those tweed overcoats with the big herringbone pattern you don’t see any more.”

Hastings looked unimpressed, as usual. “It’s a television stunt or something. Hidden camera, old-time actors forgotten by the millions they used to entertain. What’s worrying me is this smell of ozone around the place.”

“Ozone?”

“Yeah—allotropic oxygen. You get it floating around after there’s been a massive electrical discharge. That’s why …’

“That’s the stuff you smell at the seaside?”

“So I’m told. I’m worried about a short circuit, Jim. That power has got to be going somewhere.”

“We’ll get it sorted out somehow,” I assured him absent-mindedly. My brain was slowly getting into gear and had just come up with another brand new thought, one which gave me an inexplicable cold feeling under my belt. It’s easier to spot people when they are going into a movie house, because they enter in ones and twos. I had been in the lobby both Wednesday nights when the place was filling up, and I could swear that neither Garvey nor Mason had gone into my theatre.

But I had seen them coming out!

On the way back to my apartment that night I stopped in at Ed’s Bar for a couple of relaxers, and the first person I saw was big Bill Simpson, a reporter on the Springtown Star. I know him pretty well because when he does movie reviews for the paper he calls in at my office and borrows the promotional hand-outs. As far as I know, he never actually attends any of the films he writes about unless they happen to be science fiction or horror.

“Have a drink, Jim,” he called from his stool at the bar. “What are you looking so worried about, anyway?”

I let him buy me a Bourbon, then I bought a couple, and in between I told what had been going on. “Porter Hastings thinks somebody’s working on a television programme about has-been actors. What do you think?”

Simpson shook his head solemnly. “It’s perfectly obvious to me what’s happening, and I’m afraid it’s rather more sinister than somebody taking a candid camera movie.”

“So what is it?”

“It’s all part of a pattern, Jim. Remember that big meteorite which came down near Leesburg last month? At least, they said it was a meteorite—although nobody ever found a crater.”

“I remember it,” I said, beginning to suspect that Simpson was putting me on.

“Well, the Star carried a very strange story a couple of days later, and I think I’m the only person in the world who had the perspicacity to grasp its true significance. A farmer out that direction went out to inspect his prize hog the morning after the supposed meteorite fell, and what do you think he found in the pen?”

“I give up.”

“Two prize hogs. Absolutely identical. His wife swears the second hog was there, too, but by the time one of our boys had got out there the second hog had vanished. I wondered what had happened to this mysterious creature—then you walked in here and filled in the gaps in its life story.”

“I did?”

“Don’t you see it, Jim?” Simpson drained his glass and signalled the bartender. “That so-called meteorite was a spaceship. Some kind of alien being came out of it, a being so hideous to look at that it would have been shot on sight, but it has one very valuable defence mechanism—it can mimic the shape of any other creature it sees. Having landed in farming country, it first of all made itself into the shape of the only native it could find—a hog.

“Then it got away and came into the city where, in order to get by, it has to assume the shape of a human being. It has to study its subject carefully while adopting its shape, which presents problems, but it discovered there was enough detail in movies for it to use actors as models, and it’s nice and dark inside movie houses.

“So every week the alien comes along to your place, Jim. Perhaps to renew its memory of the human form, perhaps to select a different outward appearance so that it would be difficult to track down. In a way, I almost feel sorry for it.”

“That,” I said stonily, ‘is the greatest load of garbage I ever heard.”

A look of indignation flitted across Simpson’s round face. “Of course it is. What do you expect for one shot of cheap whisky—The War of the Worlds? Set up some decent stuff and we’ll really go to work on your problem.” An hour later, when Ed threw us off the premises, we had decided that one of my Wednesday night regulars was a night club entertainer who was working up a good impersonation act. Or that I was suffering from a very special form of DTs.

Apart from the hangover next morning, my jawing session with Bill Simpson did me a lot of good. Conscious of how ridiculous my formless fears had been, I worked efficiently for the rest of the week, got in a good day’s fishing on Sunday, and was back on the job on Monday feeling great.

Then, on Wednesday night, I saw Milton Pryngle walking out of my theatre, and that was too much.

Because I happened to know that the magnificent Pryngle had died ten years earlier.

During the following week I worried myself into the ground, using the best part of a bottle of whisky a day in the process, and by the time Wednesday came round again I was in pretty bad shape. My poor condition was partly a result of excessive liquor consumption, but mainly it was because—so help me—I was beginning to believe Bill Simpson’s first crazy theory, the one about the monster which changed shape.

Porter Hastings was no help at all. He is so unimaginative I wasn’t able to confide in him, and to make matters worse he had rung the power company on his own initiative. The result was that inspectors came snooping around checking the power circuits and muttering darkly about closing me down for a week for a complete re-wiring job. All I got in the way of real help from Hastings was confirmation that an image of Milton Pryngle had been on the screen during last Wednesday’s dim-out. This convinced me that Simpson’s alien was a reality, and that it needed power to do its changing act—power which it somehow managed to suck out of the theatre’s supplies. It also gave me the idea of setting a trap for the beast which was making such a mess of my affairs.

On Wednesday morning I went down and saw Hy Fink in the distributor’s office on First Avenue. Knowing my taste in movies pretty well, he was a little surprised when I asked if he could let me have a print of any costume production; but after much consulting of hire schedules he fished out a copy of Quo Vadis. I thanked him fervently, ignoring the way he winced when my breath hit him, and hurried away with the cans under my arm.

I went to the theatre earlier than usual and slipped upstairs to Hastings’ projection room. Hastings doesn’t like me fooling around with his gear, but I was in no state to worry unduly about his feelings. I put the first reel of Quo Vadis on the stand-by projector and fiddled around with it until a close-up of Robert Taylor in the uniform of a Roman officer was in the gate. Satisfied with my work, I went to my office, had another drink and rang the Springtown police station. It took only a few seconds to get through to Sergeant Wightman, an officer I’m on good terms with because I give him complimentaries for all the children’s matinees.

“Hello there, Jim,” he boomed in a jovial voice, doubtless imagining I was giving out more tickets.

‘Bart,” I said carefully, I’m having a bit of trouble here at the theatre.”

“Oh!” His voice immediately became wary. “What sort of trouble?”

“Well, it isn’t very serious. It’s just that most Wednesday nights this screwy character comes in for the last feature. He doesn’t actually do anything—he just sort of puts on funny clothes while the show’s running—but I’m a bit worried about him. Never know when somebody like that might go over the edge, do you?”

“Why don’t you refuse to let him in?”

“That’s the trouble—I’m not even sure what he looks like. He’s normal enough on the way in, but when he’s coming out he could be dressed differently. He might even …’ I swallowed painfully, ‘… be tricked out like a Roman centurion.”

There was a lengthy silence. “Jim,” Wightman said finally, ‘you haven’t been drinking, have you?”

I laughed. “At this time of the day? You know me better than that.”

“All right. What do you want me to do?”

“Could you have a squad car in the district from say nine o’clock till 10.45 when the crowd is leaving?”

“I suppose so,” he said doubtfully. ‘But if this guy does show up, how will I know him?”

“I told you—he’ll probably be wearing funny clothes. I have an idea that …’ I laughed again,”… he looks a bit like Robert Taylor,” When I set the phone down I was perspiring freely, and it took two more drinks to get my nerves quieted.

Porter Hastings looked surprised when I followed him upstairs to the projection room. “Don’t breathe on me,” he said. “I want to keep a clear head for the night’s work.”

“I only had a quick one—is it noticeable?”

“I wish I could figure out what’s eating you these days.” His tone left no doubt he was pretty disgusted with me. “What do you want up here, Jim?”

“Ah … it’s about the Wednesday night dim-outs.”

His eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. “What about them? I told you there’d be complaints.”

“There haven’t been any complaints as yet, and there aren’t going to be any. I’ve found out what’s causing the power drain.”

He paused in the act of hanging up his jacket. “What is it?”

“This is a little awkward for me, Port. I can’t explain it to you right now, but I know what we have to do to stop it for good.” I gestured at the stand-by projector with the reel of Quo Vadis in place.

“What the … !” Hastings scowled resentfully at the projector as he realised his domain had been invaded during his absence. “What have you been doing in here, Jim?”

I tried to smile casually. “Like I said, I can’t explain it now, but here’s what I want you to do. Have the stand-by projector warmed up and at the very first sign of a dim-out tonight cut your main lantern and switch over to the stand-by. I want this piece of film on the screen when the power starts to fade. Got it?”

“This is just crazy,” he said moodily. “What difference will that particular piece of film make?”

“For you, a lot of difference,” I promised him. ‘Because if it doesn’t come on just the way I want it—you’re fired.”

The main feature that night was Meet Me In Manhattan—a movie which had an unusually large number of bit parts for Simpson’s alien to choose from. During the supporting programme I stood in my niche at the back of the hall trying to reassure myself about the possible consequences of my plan. If the alien existed only in my fevered imagination no harm would be done; and if it was real I was doing a service for mankind by exposing it. Put like that, there was nothing to worry about, but the normally amiable dimness of the familiar hall seemed to be crawling with menace and by the time the main feature started I was too jumpy to stay in one place.

I went out to the lobby and spent some time scanning the few late arrivals. Jean Magee, who runs the box office, kept staring through her window at me, so I walked outside to check that the squad car promised by Bart Wightman was in the vicinity. There was no sign of it. I debated trying to get him on the phone, then noticed a vehicle which might have been a police cruiser parked near the end of the block. It was raining a little, as is usual on a Wednesday night, so I turned up my collar and walked towards the car, glancing back at the theatre every now and again. The incongruous architecture of the yellow cube looked more out of place than ever in the quiet street, and its neon sign fizzed fretfully in the rain, like a time bomb.

I was nearing the car when the reflections on the wet pavement and store windows dimmed abruptly. Spinning on my heel, I saw that the marquee lighting had faded out. The theatre remained in darkness for a good ten seconds, longer than on previous Wednesdays, then the lighting came on strongly again.

Suddenly scared stiff, I sprinted towards the car and saw its police markings. One of the windows rolled down and a policeman stuck his head out.

“This way,” I shouted. “This way.”

“What’s the trouble?” the officer demanded stolidly.

“I … I’ll explain later. Just then I heard running footsteps and turned to see Porter Hastings belting towards me in his shirtsleeves. I began to get a ghastly premonition.

“Jim,” he gasped. “You’ve got to get back there—all hell has broken out.”

“What do you mean?” The question was rhetorical on my part, because I suddenly knew only too well what had happened. “Did you project that piece of film as I instructed?”

“Of course, I did.” Even under stress he still found time to look indignant at his professionalism being queried.

“The exact frames which were in the gate?”

He looked guilty. “Well, you didn’t say anything about that. I ran a bit of the film to see what it was.”

“And did you wind it back to the frames I wanted?”

There was no time—and no need—for him to answer, because at that moment a wild commotion broke out farther down the street. The police officers in the car, Porter Hastings and I got a grandstand view of something which hasn’t been seen on Earth for over fifteen hundred years—a Roman legion fighting its way out of a tight corner. Their helmets, shields and short swords glinted as they formed a tight square under the marquee, ready to take on all comers. And above their heads, with an irony I was in no mood to appreciate, my neon sign spelled out the word: COLOSSEUM.

“There must be an explanation for this,” one of the policemen told me as he reached for his microphone to call headquarters, ‘and all I can say is, it had better be a good one.”

I nodded glumly. I had a good enough explanation—but I had an uneasy feeling that my Wednesday night trade was ruined for ever.

…And Isles Where Good Men Lie

Lt. Col. John Fortune spat out a piece of chocolate wrapping paper and swung round in his swivel chair. Half a million miles beyond the orbit of the Moon the cylindrical bulk of Nesster spaceship Number 1753 carried out a similar rotation….

Still spitting noisily, Fortune pushed himself up and walked heavily to the window. Half a million miles beyond the orbit of the Moon the ship made a minute course correction….

It was determined to land in Fortune’s lap.

Or that was the way it seemed as he stared out across the Icelandic airfield on which United Nations Planetary Defence Unit N186 was based. It was a cold October afternoon and over the plateau the clouds were seahorses of frozen grey steel, moving across the sky with senseless clockwork precision. In the distant centre of the field a silver tactical transport rose vertically and drifted away, the punishing roar of its multiple lift jets animating the floor under Fortune’s feet.

He had been intensely aware of Nesster ship 1753 since the moment, a week previously, the sweeping fans of the Lunar deep radar had shown it to be cruising north of the Line. He had promptly developed a suspicion that this one, this single out-of-line ship, was heading straight for his sector, and since then he had been able to feel it boring down through the sky towards him. When he walked or drove or changed position in any way he felt Number 1753 swing its blunt nose on to new bearings with the intent passion of a rifleman seeking the moment of maximum vulnerability. Which was crazy, Fortune told himself, because if anybody was going to be alarmed it ought to be the Nessters on board that ship.

Lt. Griffin, the Unit’s information officer, came in from the adjutant’s office and saluted, his neat golden head almost luminescent in the gloom. He glanced reproachfully at the top three buttons of Fortune’s trousers which Fortune had undone to ease the after-lunch pressure around his middle.

“We’re almost ready to begin, sir,” Griffin said. “We’ve got eight reporters and six cameramen.” There was the faintest possible emphasis on the last word, which was Griffin’s way of saying, smarten yourself up, slob, you’re supposed to look like a hero.

Fortune fingered his staining shirt buttons. “What is it about the public relations business,” he asked conversationally, ‘which makes it attract people who are completely hopeless in private relations?”

Griffin’s blond eyebrows moved an eighth of an inch upwards, which for him was a violent display of emotion. ‘Being purely an information officer,” he said, making a fine distinction which was lost on Fortune, “I’m not qualified to say much about public relations practitioners, but I suppose one is likely to encounter misfits in all walks of life, sir,” His gaze travelled significantly round the drab green walls of Fortune’s office then he walked out quickly.

A slob and then a misfit. Fortune pulled in his stomach angrily and did up the buttons. I must lose weight, he thought in sudden desperation, no more starch for a whole month.

From the outer office came sounds of Griffin organising his little group of local pressmen who were out to make the most of the possibility of Iceland’s first Nesster landing. The country’s first landing would be a big sensation, but the fact that the Col. Fortune would be there to handle it was an out-and-out gift—the legendary Captain Johnny back in action again after a lapse of four years, complete with piratical name and swashbuckling reputation. Yes, if it came off it would be a newsman’s dream, and Fortune wanted nothing to do with it. He had done his share of defending the planet against the invaders during that first incredible year of 1983, but there was a limit to the amount of guilt he was prepared to accept.

Griffin herded the pressmen in from the adjutant’s office. The reporters sat on the chairs which had been borrowed from other offices for the occasion and the cameramen moved to strategic corners.

“Gentlemen,” Griffin began, “I don’t think there is any need for me to introduce Lt. Col. Fortune, so we’ll get started right away. The colonel will outline the situation very briefly and afterwards you may ask any questions that occur to you.” There was a quiet murmur of assent and Fortune realised that four years of obscurity had made no difference at all to his reputation. The newsmen were impressed by him.

“The first thing I must stress,” Fortune said, ‘is that Nesster ship 1753 may not land in Iceland at all. There is, in fact, only a one-in-three chance of this happening. Preliminary computations based on reports from the Lunar radar bases indicate that the South Greenland and South Baffin Island Sectors are equally likely touchdown areas.

“The second point I want to bring out is that even if 1753 does select this sector, the chances of it putting down on top of a town or village are so small as to be negligible. I know you have all heard of towns being flattened, but it has only occurred in places like parts of Africa and Japan where the buildings were of a type which would not show up well on whatever radar system the Nessters use. A Nesster ship is huge and massive but, like any other space or aircraft, it needs a flat piece of ground on which to land. It will even avoid a properly constructed cowshed.” Fortune smiled momentarily and was answered by appreciative grins from the group.

“In any case, no matter where the ship lands, we’ll be waiting for it—and we have considerable experience in this type of work.” There were more appreciative grins and Fortune knew he was going over well, opening up in response to their admiration. Slob, misfit—and traitor.

“Why did you come to Iceland, Colonel Fortune?” The reporter from the Visir made no apology for deviating from the main subject of the conference.

“I guess I started to feel sorry for those Nessters.” There were outright laughs at that one and even Lt. Griffin smiled thinly. Fortune felt his shirt begin to stick to his shoulders with perspiration.

“The Captain Johnny series on television is said to be accurately based on your early exploits against the Nessters, Colonel. Was it really like that?”

“Well, for one thing, I don’t remember all those pretty girls.” This is just fine, Fortune thought. The ship up there has swung in closer, thousands of miles closer, and all I have done is turn into a quick-fire comedian. A five-year exposure to history was all it had taken to change him from a normal young engineering graduate to a fat sweating clown….

Looking back on it, he was not sure when he had begun to realise the truth about the Nessters. At first there had been no time to think. The big ships had begun to land at random points across the Earth and each one poured out several hundred black scaly nightmares whose bacteria-laden breath was usually enough to kill any nearby human who was not properly masked. The Nessters were unarmed—if the word could be applied to fifteen-foot-long armoured bulldozers—but they made formidable opponents, and many men became heroes. John Fortune, an infantry lieutenant doing a two-year stint with the UNO Independents, was one of the first to discover the techniques of killing Nessters. He was involved in several spectacular actions, he was photogenic, he had a romantic, buccaneering name. He was, within a matter of months, Captain Johnny—the man of the moment.

It was not until the techniques of killing became comparatively easy, comparatively safe, that he had begun to ask questions. Why did the Nesster ships land one at a time at scattered points? Why did the drive engines of each ship run wild soon after landing, forcing the Nessters to abandon their shelter regardless of how hostile conditions outside were? In fact, why was a race with the technological prowess of the Nessters making such a painful, pitiful mess of taking over an unprepared planet?

The answer, when he found it, hurt. Captain Johnny, Earth’s super-soldier, had made his name slaughtering unarmed families of immigrants.

Scientific intelligence teams had gradually uncovered the story. The big cylindrical ships displayed meteor erosion which indicated that they had been travelling for not less than six hundred years. They were fully automated—they had to be, because the generations of Nessters who had lived and died during the journey would have had no idea of how to handle them at landfall. The truth was that, in spite of being ugly, black and deadly, the Nessters were innocents walking blindly to the slaughter.

And the thing which destroyed Fortune was the discovery that the truth made no difference. The Nessters simply were … unacceptable.

“How does your wife like living in Iceland, colonel?”

“My wife likes it here very much,” Fortune said carefully, aware of a brief feather-flick of apprehension which felt strange because it had nothing to do with the Nessters. If the papers got to know about Christine there could be an explosion of publicity which could blast Fortune out of his cosy Iceland command.

He had engineered the appointment to Sector N186 because it was one of the least likely to draw Nesster landings. It was a place where he could throw another log on the fire, serve tea and close bright curtains across the windows to shut out the darkness. There had been nothing else for him to do, for Earth was not going to stop killing Nessters and the Nessters were not going to stop arriving. One ship had been landing every twenty-two hours for five years and still the caravan stretched right out beyond the Solar System, beyond the farthest reach of Earth’s deep space probes.

Estimates of how long the daily landings could continue varied considerably—the lowest figure was fifty years; the highest was in the region of twelve centuries. A few people on Earth were worried sick about the Nesster problem, but far more were putting their sons into the army. It was, as far as soldiers were concerned, a big, beautiful sellers’ market.

As the pressmen dispersed at the end of the conference Fortune opened the right-hand drawer of his desk. In it was a shallow cardboard box, presented to him every month by a confectionery company, containing several dozen chocolate soldiers wrapped in brilliant foil. Slanted across the chest of each in yellow-limned red letters was the name, Captain Johnny.

“I think it went very well, sir,” Griffin commented, returning from the adjutant’s office. “They haven’t forgotten about you.”

“Some people have good memories,” Fortune grunted ungraciously. Within the drawer, almost of its own accord, his hand moved along the top rank of chocolate soldiers, methodically snapping their necks,

At six o’clock Fortune rang his home and was answered by an unfamiliar male voice which stated the number of his phone in precise, neutrally accented English.

Suddenly Fortune felt very tired. “I want to speak to Mrs Fortune.”

“Just a moment, colonel,” the voice replied efficiently. There was a cotton-wool silence, like that caused by a hand blocking a telephone’s mouthpiece, then the sound of Christine laughing.

“Hello, darl,” she said. “What is it? I hope you aren’t going to be late for the party.”

“Purely as a matter of interest—who was that?”

“Don’t be silly, darl,” Christine said. “You remember Pavel very well. You’ve met him at lots of functions. He came early to help me with the preparations for the evening.” Fortune remembered. Pavel Efimov was a Ukrainian who ran the International Hostel which had been set up in Reykjavik for the benefit of UNO personnel associated with the Unit. His willingness to use a free afternoon helping with Christine’s party explained why she had been spending so much time at the Hostel over the last three months. Or was it the other way round?

“Ah, yes,” Fortune said. “I’ll be a little late this evening, Christine—I want to go over to Bill Geissler’s place for a while.”

“Do you have to, darl?”

“Yes, Christine. It’s quite important. Tell Peter I’ll be late and not to wait up for me.”

Christine sniffed audibly and hung up without another word. Fortune shrugged and threaded his way out through the offices of the headquarters block. A cold, dark wind slapped aimlessly at him as he walked past the greenly lit hangars and workshops of the Unit. He switched on the heater as soon as he had closed the bubble of his staff copter, relaxing in the gusts of rubber-smelling warmth until the tower cleared him for takeoff. At eight hundred feet he headed south-west across the trembling lights of Hafnarfjordr and followed the coastline for thirty miles before angling down on the familiar lights of Bill Geissler’s works shining in the rolling blackness like a scimitar.

On the ground he walked towards Geissler’s office, noting that the big gun was out of its housing and probing almost vertically into the sky, which meant Geissler Orbital Deliveries was getting ready to put a package into orbit. Geissler was the only real-life genius Fortune had ever known and he looked nothing like the part. He was a stocky little man with ridged black hair and the hard, swarthy face of a Mexican bandit. Three years before he had bought a section of land on the south-west tip of Iceland, moved in with two common law wives and an ex-naval sixteen-inch gun, set up a workshop and since then had supported his menage a trois by placing instrument capsules in orbit. He specialised in polar and near-polar orbits for a number of universities and new governments scattered across the globe.

Geissler was seated at his glass-topped desk making pencil marks on a dark grey punched tape. “Come in, John. I didn’t expect you. What’s the matter? You getting this 1753?”

“I think so, Bill. It’s a one-in-three shot, but I have a feeling about this one.”

“So have I, pal—and I’m never wrong. You’d better clear a space in your backyard for it.” He snorted and pushed the coils of punched tape away. In the workshop beyond the glass wall of the little office an electric welder briefly drenched its surroundings in needles of violent brilliance.

Fortune unbuttoned his coat and sat down. “Have you had time to … ?”

Geissler thrust out his hand like a traffic cop. “What have you forgotten, John?”

“Nothing. Oh, that! What the hell’s the use of my asking you these things when I don’t know if your answer is right?”

“Ask me anyway. You know I like the practice.”

“All right, all right. What is …’ Fortune began picking numbers at random,‘… 973827 times 426458?”

Geissler’s eyes darkened momentarily. “It’s 415,296,314,766. Try another one.”

“Can you get a message to Mars?” Fortune spoke angrily, feeling the Nesster ship drumming down an invisible wire attached to the top of his head.

Geissler looked dubious. “I could, but I hate to think what it would cost. Private research organisations—that includes me, by the way—can buy time on the Cripple Creek dish but they charge about twenty thousand kroner, say five thousand dollars, a minute at the present orbital positions, and if you want a reply the rate would be about twice that. Are you going to do what I think you’re going to do?”

Fortune nodded. “Yes. It can’t wait. I want them to run a check on our five suspects.”

“Well, even if I condense the orbital data to the limit the transmission is bound to take at least three minutes, that’s sixty thousand kroner. The reply won’t take as long, of course, but I think there will be a minimum charge for a Mars-Earth transmission, possibly another twenty thousand.” Geissler’s brown eyes narrowed in almost physical pain—he was a business man as well as a genius. “That’s big money for squirting a few electrons into the sky. If you could wait another month I think I can eliminate four of the suspects.”

“I can’t wait.”

‘But eighty thousand kroner! I know you made plenty out of the Captain Johnny thing, John, but you’re bound to go broke at this rate. All the work you’re getting me to do, and now this Mars transmission, should be financed by UNO money. I’m going to make some coffee. Think it over.”

Waiting for the coffee, Fortune thought it over. He remembered how he had felt when the theory had first been propounded that the Nesster caravan was homing on Earth by means of signals from a scout satellite. It was easy to visualise the great train of fully automatic ships nearing the Solar System, the leader dispatching an advance probe into orbit around each planet, and the probe circling Earth suddenly emitting the signal which meant, yes—this world will support life. It was exactly what had always been done by tramps who put chalk marks on the gate posts of friendly houses. So, all that was necessary was to rub out this particular chalk mark with an orbital interceptor and the tramps would stop coming to the door.

High-level action had been taken to check the theory, but there were snags—not the least of which was the fact that in 1983 the number of man-made objects tumbling round the Earth was in the region of fifty thousand. Only a fraction of these were useful satellites, the bulk being made up of bits and pieces of the vehicles which had placed them in orbit. Some of the more complicated experiments had been known to release as many as fifty sections of rocket motor casing and ejection mechanisms in one mission, which was why even by the later Sixties the number had risen well past the one thousand mark.

The profusion of sky litter had made it impossible simply to pin-point an alien satellite, so a series of capsules were thrown into distant, minutely precessive orbits to pick up possible transmissions to the Nessters. They had been given the inevitable tag, in this case PULP—for Precessive Unmanned Listening Posts. When these drew a complete blank the scout satellite theory was officially discarded and the main research effort put back into the, as yet unsuccessful, efforts to devise a deep space interceptor which could beat the meteor screens surrounding the Nesster ships.

Fortune’s pre-Army years in the unfashionable field of sub-millimetre tight beam radiation had given him a few private doubts about the efficacy of Project PULP, but there was no arguing with fifty thousand orbiting pieces of scrap metal. Then one night he had met Geissler, the prodigy, in a bar in Reykjavik….

The concept of instinctive mathematics had been new to Fortune, but according to Geissler everybody had the facility to some extent. It showed up in good gamblers as ‘luck’; it showed up in even the most mediocre chess player, who could defeat any computer ever conceived because the machine would have had to spend its time methodically checking out whole regions of moves which are perfectly logical but which the man instinctively knows are not good enough. Geissler claimed the difference between him and anybody else was purely one of degree, but he had guaranteed that with access to the Unit’s computing equipment he could find the Nesster satellite—if it existed—in a year.

And Fortune had hired him on the spot.

“Sorry there’s nothing to eat,” Geissler said, setting the coffee on his desk. “Unless you want to come over to the house and have dinner with us. Jenny and Avis would be glad of an extra man to even up the score.”

“Have one of these.” Fortune pulled out three Captain Johnny bars with sagging heads held in place by foil only.

“No thanks. Why do you eat those things all the time, John? All that weight you carry around….”

“Outside every thin man,” Fortune replied, munching comfortably, ‘there’s a fat man trying to get in. Now about this signal to Mars. We don’t need to explain what’s happening, do we? The Army objects strongly to Unit commanders who go in to research.”

“No, that part is all right. If the scout satellite theory is correct we can make two assumptions—firstly, one of our five suspects is of Nesster origin; secondly, every planet in the Solar System will have an identical satellite; in a predictable orbit corresponding to one of our five. I can send five sets of orbital elements to the Mars observatory and legitimately have them checked out—I could easily be doing some work on one of the dozens of old Mars probes.”

“Will it take long?”

“No reason why it should. The scientific colony has been established for over a year now so they might even have the information on file. No it won’t take long. I’ll call you.”

Fortune drained his coffee and stood up, buttoning his overcoat. “Sorry I can’t stay for dinner. Christine’s having one of her parties.” He laughed briefly. “I think this is Nietzche’s birthday.”

They stood for a moment at the door watching three technicians in parkas wheel a gleaming miniature rocket out of the workshop towards the gun which would blast it up into near-vacuum before its motor was ignited.

“That’s the third-cis-lunar shot this year for the University of Nicaragua,” Geissler said with satisfaction. “It’s costing them plenty too—even with off-the-shelf vehicles. I’d forgotten about Christine and Nietzche, John. It’s funny, isn’t it? You must have been a reasonable facsimile; of a superman when she married you.”

Fortune remembered, too late, that Geissler’s intuitive faculty was not merely some kind of mathematical abstraction. He slammed the smaller man’s back with a vague idea of short-circuiting the mental contact. “You don’t know what you’ve just said, Bill.”

He walked back to his staff copter, aware that more time had passed and the rendezvous with Nesster ship 1753 was closer. A sudden spasm of hunger made him grope for a chocolate bar, but his pocket was empty and the sense of disappointment was so keen that Fortune became alarmed. Let’s get this thing out into the open, he planned. My subconscious mind reasons: children eat candy, so if I eat candy I’ll be a child, and if I’m a child the Nesster problem doesn’t exist. However, my conscious mind isn’t so stupid—it knows I can’t grow down towards babyhood, so I’m going to snap out of it and be a normal adult again. That’s it settled then. I feel better already….

The only trouble was that he was still hungry and in the darkness the staff copter’s bulbous, glassy head and tapering tail suddenly resembled the shape of the primordial tadpole. Fortune accepted that he could not become a helpless, blameless baby again and yet he was strangely satisfied at the prospect of being carried upwards into the receptive convexities of the clouds.

The house was glowing like a Chinese lantern. Fortune walked up through the swarmed cars in his driveway, noticing that one of them had knocked a miniature rowan tree askew. It looked as though Christine’s party would be a success.

Using his key he got into the lobby without being noticed, went upstairs and, grunting with the effort, quickly changed out of his uniform into slacks, open-necked silk shirt and sweater. In his son’s bedroom he tiptoed around putting toys away then crouched beside the bed for a moment, looking closely into the sleeping three-year-old face with a kind of warm astonishment.

There were about twenty people having drinks in the orange-lit living room, filling the place with the aggressive yet slightly shamefaced atmosphere of a party in its early stages. His wife and Pavel Efimov were talking seriously in a corner. Christine Fortune was a tall brunette with a hard, snaky body and a knack of looking, even when fully dressed, as though she was not wearing enough clothes. She brought Fortune a drink.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said, accepting the misty glass.

Christine glanced at his casuals with traces of anger—as far as she was concerned the uniform was just about all that remained of him.

“I see you’ve changed, darl. I didn’t hear you go upstairs.”

“I’ve-still got my ident disc on—if that will help.”

“Don’t try to be funny, darl,” she replied. “You haven’t got the equipment. Now come and meet our guests.” Fortune ambled softly round the room with her, being introduced. The people were much the same as always attended Christine’s little gatherings; writers who never wrote, artists who never painted, unknown celebrities. Most of them were properly impressed at meeting Captain Johnny in the flesh and he felt a responsive change in Christine. She hugged his left arm with both of hers, proudly possessive, and in spite of everything he enjoyed the contact. When they had completed the circuit he stopped by the portable bar and poured another drink.

“Tell me,” he said quietly, ‘is there anybody here, apart from ourselves, who was born on this side of the Curtain?”

Christine laughed delightedly. “Come up to date, van Winkle. The cold war has been over for years. That’s one thing we have to thank the Nessters for—people just don’t think that way any more. How passé can one be?”

Fortune frowned into his glass, feeling himself forced into heavy dourness by her amusement. “Things don’t change so easily. If the landings were to stop tomorrow most of this lot would hop the first East-bound jet.” He took a long drink, staring over the rim at Efimov who was approaching through the orange twilight of the room.

“Good evening, colonel,” Efimov said, positioning himself close to Christine. He was as tall as Fortune, but with the flat, rangy body of a tennis champion.

“Oh, there you are, Pavel,” Christine said, leaning into him slightly. “Johnny’s worried in case I’m going to get him investigated,”

Efimov put an arm round her waist and smiled easily, challengingly. “Surely not! One has only to look at the colonel to see he is not the sort of man to become involved with the cloak and dagger.”

Fortune felt his heart begin a slow, peaceful pounding which

stirred the hair on his temples. Christine had had two previous boyfriends, both of whom had been almost pathetically grateful for Fortune’s disinterest, but this man was of a different type. I Perhaps Christine had deliberately chosen him for that reason.

“Quite right,” Fortune replied calmly, aware of Christine’s eyes. “I never thought much of the dagger as a weapon. If I had to choose from a medieval armoury I think I’d go for something like a mace.”

“Too crude and unwieldy,” Efimov commented predictably. “I’d prefer a …

‘… rapier,” Fortune finished for him. “Yes, I thought you would—it has such connotations of romance. What do you think, Christine? How would Air. Efimov look in a curly wig and wading boots?” He laughed unpleasantly, wondering why he was taking the trouble. Insulting humans was hardly likely to be regarded by Christine as an acceptable substitute for the heroic slaughtering of poison breathing monsters from another world.

Efimov’s face hardened and he changed the subject. “Did you I

hear the news about today’s landing, colonel? The ship came down in Loch Ness in Scotland, only a few miles from the position of the original landing. We had another complete victory, of course, but it was quite a coincidence, don’t you think?”

Fortune nodded, suddenly realising it had been over nine hours since his last proper meal. He looked over the array of canapes and impaled savouries on the side table then went in to the comparative silence of the kitchen and made coffee and ham sandwiches. When the coffee was ready he ignored the piles of disposable tableware in the cupboard and lifted his old-fashioned delph cup from its hook, only to have it deposit a furtive little secretion of cold water in his hand. Christine refused to wash or dry the delph properly when perfectly good throw-away dishes were available. Muttering furiously, Fortune cleaned the cup, sat down to eat then decided to check his bank account to see what the Mars transmission would do to it.

He went back into the living room, worked through the throng, crossed the lobby and entered his study. Christine and Efimov looked momentarily surprised to see him, then Efimov began to smile.

“We thought perhaps you had gone to bed, colonel. Christine tells me you never enjoy yourself much at parties.”

“What do you want, darl?” Christine said irritably. “Pavel and I were discussing his fee for this afternoon.”

“If you two young things want to be alone,” Fortune said shortly, ‘go somewhere else. I’ve work to do in here.”

Efimov continued to smile but his eyes flicked briefly in the direction of Fortune’s desk. Fortune followed his glance. The top drawer was open, the key he had left upstairs in his uniform trousers protruding from the lock. Fortune inhaled headily, aware that Christine and he had finally arrived at crisis point.

“Come on, Pavel.” Christine pulled at Efimov’s sleeve. “I need another drink.”

“Not so fast,” Fortune snapped, spinning her round by the shoulder. “What were you doing at my desk?”

Christine stared coldly at him for a moment then her familiar features flowed into strangeness. “Take your hand away,” she screamed. “You want to be told? All right, I’ll tell you, you selfish, fat, useless … I was telling Pavel how you treat me and he couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe how much of our money, my money, you’ve been paying to that horrible little Geissler. Who do you think you are, anyway? Having satellites tracked! Hiring computers! Why don’t you … ?”

Efimov drew her back a pace and stepped in front, looking at Fortune with contempt and a kind of satisfaction.

“You get out of here,” Fortune warned. “I refuse to fight for Christine. She isn’t property. But you’ve been in my desk, and that’s different.”

“You’d be foolish to descend to violence, colonel. Not after training for so long on chocolate bars.” Efimov dropped his long body into a professional-looking crouch and Fortune remembered he was a boxing instructor at the Hostel gymnasium.

Christine moved behind Efimov, heading for the door. Fortune lunged after her and saw Efimov throwing a fast, hooking left. He deliberately took the blow, smothering it in the great plaque of fat across his ribs, then he caught Efimov’s wrist with both hands and leaned back, swinging the other man like a hammer. Efimov’s feet pattered on the floor as he sped backwards into the wall. He was completely winded as he rebounded but Fortune punched him under the ribs anyway.

“What have you done?” Christine knelt beside the crumpled man.

Fortune got down and opened one of Efimov’s eyelids. He touched the eyeball and there was a violent fluttering reaction. “He’s all right,” Fortune said, wondering what happened next.

“Pavel wants me to marry him, you know. He wants me to go away with him,” Christine seemed to be talking to nobody but herself.

“Christine …’ Fortune began to speak, but the telephone on his desk rang fiercely. He picked up the handset and heard a male voice ask for him. He recognised the voice of his adjutant, Major Baillie.

“Fortune speaking,” he said flatly.

“Oh, hello sir,” Baillie replied with uncharacteristic excitement. “I thought you ought to know at the earliest possible moment. We’ve just had confirmation from UNO Northern Command. Nesster ship 1753 is definitely going to land in our sector.”

“Thanks for calling me, Brett. I’ll be right there.” Fortune set the phone down. He had been wondering what happened next. Now he knew.

The Unit swung over smoothly to a state of Red Alert, and Fortune found himself slipping instinctively into the lethal complexities of his job.

The preceding Yellow Alert had lasted three days, from the moment the Lunar radar bases had predicted that Nesster ship 1753 was going to touch down in one of the three north-west Atlantic sectors. As the great black cylinder spiralled in past the orbit of the Moon the variable factors, based on observation of all its precursors, were gradually eliminated until Northern Command knew exactly when and roughly where it would land. At that point, Sector N186—shown on ordinary maps as Iceland—was brought to full alert and preparations were made for the big kill, forty hours in the future.

Fortune’s command consisted of five hundred combatants, two hundred air and ground crew for the Unit’s fifteen vertical takeoff transports, and three hundred assorted technicians, clerks, storemen, cooks, batmen, drivers, etc. This meant that for every man who actually fought he had one in support, which was a pretty good ratio for a modern technical army. But, streamlined as the Unit’s organisation was, poising it for the hammer blow involved a great deal of work.

Fortune had been a long time on his feet when he drove back home along the road leading south to Hafnarfjordr. The early afternoon sun reached down across serried kingdoms of white cloud and sheep gleamed like pebbles scattered on the hillsides. It was a day on which Nessters simply could not be real—and yet, he reflected, on the afternoon of the following day approximately eight hundred of them would spill out of their ship right on this island. They would die, but it made them no less real. There was no alternative but to kill them, but it made the slaughter no less unpleasant. Fortune would not have to touch a single weapon, but his guilt was no less.

When he swung the big car into his drive Peter was kicking a bright pink ball in the garden, which meant Christine was still there. Fortune was relieved. He had not seen her since the debacle in his study the previous evening and half expected to find the house empty. Christine and he were not making out too well but he felt that the family unit was still important. Even the Nessters had family groups, and tried to preserve them when …

Fortune brought the heel of his hand down on the car’s horn lever, soaking himself in the blast of sound. Tomorrow was going to be bad, too bad to think about except when it was absolutely necessary, He went into the house, waving to Peter, and found Christine in the living room She was smoking a black cigarette and cleaning her typewriter with a toothbrush, brown eyes slitted with smoke and distaste.

“Peter threw his porage into it this morning,” she explained. “I don’t think he’ll ever get to like it.”

The normalcy felt good. Fortune wanted to dive into the day before yesterday and close it round him. “Did Bill Geissler call?”

“No. Was he supposed to?”

“In a way.”

“Well, he didn’t.”

Fortune stared out of the long window to where a lucky kick of Peter’s had sent the pink ball up high, spinning it lazily in the air like a soap bubble. “I’m sorry about last night….”

“Don’t apologise, please. I’ve forgotten it already.”

“Some of the papers in my desk …’

Christine raised her head and gave him a long, honest look of dislike. “I know about your desk, darling. Nobody is allowed to touch your desk.”

“People aren’t property, Christine,” he said hopelessly. “We can talk later. I’m too tired now. I’m going to bed for a few hours.” Fortune skimmed his braided cap viciously into a chair and stamped out of the room. Passing through the lobby he stopped abruptly, staring into his study at the telephone. Christine was left-handed; and it was one of his most triumphant little secrets that she never seemed to realise she set the handset down the opposite way to right-handed people. The phone was facing the wrong way now and, playing the hunch, he dialled Geissler’s number.

“For God’s sake, John, where have you been?” Geissler shouted. “Did you not get my message?”

Fortune swallowed hard. “You know what Christine’s like. She forgets things.”

“Like hell she does. Anyway, I’ve got news for you. It was suspect number four, the pure polar orbiting job. Mars has one in a perfectly corresponding orbit. They didn’t even have to check, the data was all on file up there.”

Fortune’s forehead was ice cold. “Number four! That’s one of the satellites officially ascribed to Russia, isn’t it?”

“Of course it is. It’s bound to be, but if you looked it up in the Russian records, you’d find it ascribed to the States or Britain or France….”

‘Bill, stop talking. I’ve a new proposition for you. How much to shoot it down?”

There was a long silence before Geissler spoke. His voice was gentle. “I know what you want, John, but there isn’t any need now. You can go to UNO with this….”

“That would take weeks—I’m talking about tonight.”

“It’s illegal.”

“To shoot down a Nesster satellite? Or are you not sure?”

“Sure, I’m sure.”

“Or maybe you can’t do it?”

“You needn’t try to needle me, Fatso. It won’t work. If I ever did something like this it would be for the publicity.”

There’ll be plenty of that, Fortune thought as panic geysered through his system. I’ve got to back out right now while there’s still time. “That’s more like it,” he said aloud. “Start getting things ready right now. I’ll be over as soon as I can get there.”

He set the phone down and looked up to see Christine standing in the doorway looking strangely small, defeated. “You always were impatient, John—it’s the only thing about you that hasn’t changed. You’ve been trying to eat yourself to death, but that takes too long….”

“You don’t understand this, Christine.”

“The thing I don’t understand is why—if you can’t face the action tomorrow—don’t you do something less damaging to Peter and me? Shooting yourself in the foot is the usual thing, isn’t it?”

“You’re so far away from me that words just couldn’t get there, Chris. Why can you not see it? Nessters are …’

‘… people,” Christine cut in. “Nobody can talk to you, John. You don’t communicate. Nessters are people. People aren’t property. It’s a syllogism that goes nowhere.”

Fortune moved forward and took her awkwardly by the shoulders. He drew her in and she came submissively but twisted her head away from the kiss.

“Really, darling,” she said coldly, ‘that only helps on television. I’m not going to let you go through with this, you know.”

“I know it hasn’t been working out,” he said desperately, ‘but if we ever had anything—you’ve got to give me the next few hours.”

Fortune walked away from her quickly, automatically retrieved his cap, and plunged out into the cool, impartial brightness of the afternoon. As the big car broadsided, with turbine howling, out on to the road he risked a backwards glance through the rowan trees. Christine’s yellow dress glowed dimly in the window of his study. She was standing at the telephone.

Geissler Orbital Deliveries’ main stock-in-trade was an obsolete sixteen-inch coastal defence gun which, as had always been customary for the gun-launching of research projectiles, had been smooth-bored out by an extra half inch. For some missions eight-inch diameter missiles were used, their fins fitting snugly into the gun barrel. These were centred by plastic packing pieces and a circular steel pusher plate trapped the propellant gases underneath them in the barrel, enabling muzzle velocities of over five thousand feet a second to be obtained. Other missions used full-diameter projectiles with fins which flipped out after they had cleared the barrel. In all cases the projectiles’ motors ignited near apogee, efficiently boosting the package into orbit after the denser air strata had been left behind. The system was cheap and reliable, and although accelerations of thousands of gravities were experienced techniques had been developed permitting a wide range of experiments to stand the pace.

Fortune stood uneasily in Geissler’s clinical-looking payload assembly laboratory. There were no pockets in the lint-free coverall Geissler had made him wear and with nowhere to put his hands he longed either to smoke or eat. Geissler stood beside him, similarly clad, his dark bandit’s face ploughed with worry as he watched two technicians carry out checks on the new package.

“I’m not an electronics man,” Geissler said, ‘but let’s assume that you’re right and that Project PULP simply failed to pick up transmissions from the Nesster satellite. Can you be certain that knocking it out will be enough? Perhaps each planet’s scout satellite beams either a ‘come in’ or a ‘stay out’, in which case termination of the ‘come in’ signal won’t be enough to stop the landings. The silence might be interpreted as transmitter failure or a meteor collision.”

Fortune shook his head. “In the first place, the ships are fully automated and self-contained so if they do any interpreting at all it certainly isn’t done on the basis of what happened to other ships that were years ahead in the line. It’s a simple response to the ‘come in’ signal. No signal, no response.”

“Yes, but it might not be enough to end that signal,” Geissler persisted. “Supposing, as I said, there’s a …’

“I don’t think there is a ‘stay out’ signal. It’s a question of reliability standards. Our own standards have improved tremendously in the last twenty-five years, but even now if we wanted to set up a similar scout satellite exercise we would have two signals. We couldn’t trust our own handiwork far enough to use a one-signal system in which a satellite going into orbit around an unsuitable planet simply remains quiet. The silence might be the result of a malfunctioning so we would demand a positive ‘stay out’ signal.

‘But the Nessters don’t have reliability worries, not when they can build those ships. A one-signal system is the simplest and most logical for them. They don’t…’

“I’m convinced, I’m convinced!” Geissler shouted. “Don’t wear my ear out. Anyway, it’s less than two hours to the big bang—we’ll soon have the answer.”

Fortune peered out of the window, looking through his own reflection. A sharp, tiny moon was racing high and a blustery, rain-seeded wind had sprung up.

“Don’t worry about the weather,” Geissler said. “The missile will be clear of that stuff in a couple of seconds—this is where gun launching really pays off. And talking of paying …’ The wall phone rang, he picked it up, listened in silence for a while then said, “Thank you, sweetie. I’ll tell him.” He set the phone back.

This one’s for me, Fortune told himself. Something I don’t want to happen is going to happen. He raised his eyebrows.

“That was Jenny calling from the house. She says there’s an army turbojeep pulling up to the main gate.”

Fortune went out through the laboratory’s clean-air lock into the main workshop and began unzipping the coverall. The idea was a difficult one for him to accept but, as far as the world at large was concerned, he was a deserter. It had not actually been desertion in the face of the enemy although in the special circumstances of the Nesster ‘invasion’ the point might be arguable. The puzzling thing was that they had got on to him so soon. He had quit the Unit’s headquarters at one thirty in the afternoon for a much needed sleep and had left the adjutant, Major Baillie, firmly in charge; and now—only seven hours later—an army vehicle had tracked him down to Geissler’s place.

Headquarters must have rung his home for an urgent decision and Christine had told them what she knew. Or perhaps she had taken the initiative and rung them. Both explanations were feasible and yet this vehicle drawing up ostentatiously in the night did not quite have the feel of Major Baillie about it. Baillie was a cautious man and Christine speaking to him would have put him in a delicate situation. He would have wanted to speak to Fortune by telephone or radio before ordering the arrest of a colonel—unless he had driven out personally to talk it over.

“What are you going to do, John?”

“I’m not sure. I’ll need a rifle. Your Swift will do.”

Geissler shook his head. “I’m in too far already. If I lend you one of my guns …’

Fortune pulled out a handful of bills and stuffed them into Geissler’s shirt pocket. “It isn’t your gun. I bought it from you weeks ago—now, get it!” They walked through the clutter of storage sheds and up the slight hill to where Geissler’s white bungalow looked out over the Atlantic. While Geissler went in for the rifle Fortune stood on the front steps looking at the distant line of floodlights which marked the fence. The gun site was at the end of a broad spit and the only land access to it was by a single gravel track. Geissler had strung a high steel fence from one side of the spit to the other, with a remotely-controlled gate where it intersected the track. It was half a mile from the bungalow to the gate but the sound of the waiting turbojeep’s horn was carried down on the wind, mixed with the uneasy sibilance of the surf.

Geissler came out with the rifle and thrust it into Fortune’s hand. “The scope is zeroed at three hundred yards,” Geissler said glumly. “You’ll need to aim a couple of inches low for close work.”

“I don’t expect to use it,” Fortune assured him. “It’s just insurance. All you need to think about is zeroing on that satellite.” He slung the Swift on his shoulder and walked along the moonlit track, resisting the buffeting of the wind. As he entered the amber radiance of the floodlights a tall, slightly familiar figure in grey civilian clothes got out of the vehicle’s driving seat.

It was Pavel Efimov.

Fortune’s first, wounded thought was—I needed you, Christine! Then, as his intellect reasserted itself—what the hell is going on here? He looked more closely at the green turbojeep and saw it was not one of the Unit’s fleet, but a semi-military job from the UNO hostel in Reykjavik.

“You again, Efimov? When do you start squawking, ‘Nevermore’?” Fortune made his voice sound bored, but he became aware of the buckle of the rifle sling cutting into his fingers and relaxed his grip. Time was needed, not action.

Efimov came forward, his lean face looking skeletal in the lurid brilliance, and held up a document. “I have here a copy of an injunction issued by the office of the District Magistrate. It was issued at the request of my embassy against Geissler Orbital Deliveries. It forbids the company to violate international law by launching an orbital vehicle without first filing full orbital data with the central reference authority in Berlin, and without giving eight days’ notice of the launching.”

“She told you then?”

Efimov permitted himself a faint smile. “We will leave personal relationships out of this matter, colonel. Please instruct Mr. Geissler to open the gate or I will be forced to break it down.”

Fortune shook his head. “Mr. Geissler is too busy to see anyone at the moment, but he’ll be happy to have a word with you in …’ he looked at his watch, ‘… ninety minutes from now.”

“This is a serious matter, colonel. Mr. Geissler’s business may be closed down permanently.”

“Should you not have police here to back you up?”

“They’ll be here,” Efimov announced confidently.

“What’s your interest in it, anyway, Efimov?”

“You forget, colonel, that I know exactly why this missile is being launched. The satellite concerned belongs to my country.”

“I can almost hear the balalaikas,” Fortune said, ‘but you must know as well as I do that the question of ownership is very much in debate.”

“The law is still the law,” Efimov replied, ‘regardless of who owns the satellite.” A note of something like primness had crept into his voice.

Very suddenly Fortune made an intuitive leap, understanding the other man so perfectly that for an instant he almost physically saw himself through Efimov’s eyes. “It isn’t easy with Christine—is it, Efimov? You’d never stand the pace with her, you know. She drinks jealousy the way you drink vodka. It’s because of her, isn’t it?”

“We will leave personal relationships aside, colonel. I am interested only in preventing an ill-considered action by Mr. Geissler—one which will do him a lot of harm.”

“It’s because of Christine,” Fortune elaborated. “I’ve no doubt that you really are some kind of cut-price agent—but you’re doing this because I’m Christine’s husband. You’re doing it because our little bit of quart and tierce last night didn’t work out the way you expected.”

Efimov took a deep breath and walked right up to the gate. “Are you going to get the gate opened, colonel? Or do I drive through it?”

Fortune unslung the Swift without speaking and bolted in the first cartridge.

“I don’t think you’d go as far as killing anyone, colonel.” Efimov went back to the vehicle and climbed in. A second later its turbine screamed up to maximum revolutions and gravel spattered from under the wheels as it hunched forward. Fortune sighted on the lower rim of the circular intake grille and squeezed off one shot. The vehicle bucked violently and slid to a halt as shattered blades chewed their way back through the turbine. demolishing the engine as they went. The air filled with kerosene fumes and Efimov leapt out of the cab.

“That was not very clever, colonel.” He seemed strangely unperturbed, almost pleased.

Fortune ejected the empty brass case which had caused such an astonishing amount of damage and bolted in the next round. He slapped the rifle uncertainly, wondering if he looked as stupid and childish as he felt. He had gone too far to think of turning back, and yet everything had gone subtly wrong. The line of amber lights running from nowhere to nowhere, the gate and the immobilised turbojeep made a meaningless setting for a pointless play. He lowered himself carefully on to a rain-slimed rock, ate some chocolate, and watched Efimov, who loitered contentedly on the track beyond the vehicle, occasionally kicking pebbles.

Behind Fortune, out at the end of the spit, the lights of the gun site shone brilliantly against the blackness of the ocean. There were still seventy-five minutes until the firing. As far as he could see things had reached a perfect impasse—yet Efimov looked like a man who was waiting patiently for something he expected to happen.

A few minutes later Fortune saw lights moving far back along the shore. The lights grew brighter until he made out the massive bulk of a police cruiser swaying along the track like a motor launch in rough water. Fortune assessed the new situation and his initial alarm subsided. Efimov had not been bluffing. He really had stirred up the civil police, but even if the police were armed they would still have a natural human aversion to walking through a gate defended by a madman equipped with a high-velocity rifle. And that, Fortune admitted, was exactly what he was. He lay down behind the rock, positioned his elbows comfortably and watched Efimov through the rifle sight.

The police cruiser halted fifty yards beyond the turbojeep and its lights died, the reflectors glowing redly for an instant. Efimov ran to it, climbed aboard and slammed the door after him. Fortune lay waiting, his finger tight on the trigger, but the minutes went by and nothing happened. He was beginning to relax, imagining Efimov haranguing reluctant policemen, when he noticed the cruiser’s radio mast which had been run up to its full height and was whipping gently in the wind.

Of course! The Unit’s headquarters staff had not known where he was and, up until half an hour ago, telling them would not have done much good—or harm, depending on one’s point of view. The Nesster landing was drawing near, but Fortune had left Major Baillie in full command was entitled to visit Geissler if he wanted. Any wild story of his having deserted would have produced no more than a few preliminary phone calls from the phlegmatic Baillie.

But that had been the situation half an hour ago.

Since then, Fortune had menaced Efimov with a lethal weapon, written off an official UNO vehicle, and was lying behind a rock defying the civil police to come near him. On receiving that sort of information by radio Major Baillie would be obliged to take some kind of immediate action.

All at once, Fortune could feel the crushing bulk of Nesster ship 1753 bearing down on his exposed back, and now it was very close indeed. Swearing desperately, he put the scope’s cross-hairs on the base of the radio mast. The mast was badly illuminated, he kept losing it in the darkness and his hands were numb with the cold. He fired four shots before the steel mast vanished, and he knew it had been too late anyway. His watch showed that there were still fifty minutes to go.

The sentient bulk of the cruiser remained motionless after the loss of its radio antenna. Fortune had half-expected some kind of retaliation and he lay still, feeling the ground gradually suck the heat from his body, and tried to picture the scene at the base. The rain was quite heavy and the added hazard of the powerful gusting made it a bad night for flying, but in Baillie’s shoes he would have sent a helicopter to land behind the fence. A copter would resolve the situation immediately.

At zero minus thirty a siren blew out at the end of the spit and he looked over his shoulder. The gun barrel was reared up into the night sky, which meant that the missile and propellant were safely loaded. All that remained was to wait for the proper instant to loft the glittering sculpture of the rocket into its proper element, far above the squalid human tangle which had conceived it. Christine and he were finished—that much seemed obvious, but what would he do about Peter? Was it possible that the boy might grow up with Efimov as his father? More minutes went by and he saw Efimov’s face move behind the cruiser’s windscreen. They must be getting impatient in the cruiser, Fortune thought, perhaps Baillie isn’t going to act on the radio message. It had been a long time….

He heard the copter in the distance at zero minus eighteen.

It came in from the east, travelling low, and banked sharply over the gate with its flails punishing the quivering air. Fortune waited for it to come down near him, planning how he could cause the greatest delay, but it hesitated and began to drift off in the direction of the gun. That was bad—he had expected them to come solely for him, not to stop the firing which, although illegal, was not a military matter. Perhaps they had not been able to take in the ground situation from up there in their rain-spattered bubble. Fortune got to his feet and the aircraft pulled up with almost comical abruptness then sank down on to the grass. At the same instant the police cruiser’s lights came on again and its engine roared.

There still was sufficient time for Efimov to reach the gun.

Fortune saw an officer and rifle-carrying troopers drop from the big machine. He could not fire at his own men, yet they would be on him in a matter of seconds. His numbed legs gave way as he began to run, instinctively heading away from the gun site. As he pounded through the grass he concentrated on trying to lock his knees for support at each step, but it was like a difficult party trick and at first he progressed by a grotesque combination of kneeling and running. By the time he reached the gate Fortune was moving almost normally but, swinging over the top bar, his hand slid on the smooth galvanised tubing and he felt himself go over off balance and with no hope of recovery. Falling, he caught a frozen movie frame glimpse of the police cruiser disgorging men and a fragment of unrelated audio track which sounded like a woman calling his name.

He landed face down, rose spitting blood and swung off the track, forcing his legs to reach for new ground. Behind him he heard the troopers clear the gate efficiently and tried to speed up. Efimov, coming out of nowhere, hit him with a shoulder charge from the left, and he was almost glad to go down. Then he felt the soldiers pull them apart.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” Efimov said politely. “Now if you will detain the colonel for a few minutes, I have some business with Mr. Geissler. There is not much time.”

The helmeted sergeant levelled his rifle at Efimov. “Stay where you are, friend.”

“Stand aside,” Efimov shouted incredulously. “I’ve got to get through that gate.”

“Don’t even think about it,” the sergeant advised, ‘until the major says it’s okay.” The rifle muzzle remained steady and the civil police stood back looking uncertain.

With one hand cupped over his shattered nose Fortune turned towards the gate and saw Major Baillie help a woman over. She was enveloped in an army greatcoat, but he recognised his wife. They skirted the fuming turbojeep and the cruiser then cut across the grass to join the group.

Baillie saluted Fortune smartly. “Everything all right, sir?”

Fortune nodded dumbly—everything was all wrong, completely crazy, and why was Christine there?

Efimov took the document from his overcoat pocket and waved it in Baillie’s face. “Major, you must instruct your goons to let me pass. In fact, they can probably help….”

“My goons, as you call them,” Baillie interrupted stiffly, ‘are obeying orders. Turn out your pockets.”

“You’re mad! Why should I?”

Baillie remained as imperturbable and correct as ever. ‘Because this afternoon you visited Colonel Fortune’s private residence and were seen by Mrs. Fortune removing from his telephone a recording device which you had placed there on a previous occasion for the apparent purpose of obtaining military information.”

Efimov looked ill. “All right. I admit planting the recorder, but what military secrets could I hope to get here? Did you not get my message? This man is illegally destroying a satellite belonging to …’

“Oh yes,” Baillie said affably. “I believe there was something about launching an unscheduled rocket. I’ll have the matter investigated at the earliest opportunity—probably at the beginning of the week.”

Fortune suddenly saw Baillie through new eyes. The emotionless major was unexpectedly but deliberately bending all kinds of regulations for his sake. Christine was right about me, he thought; I can’t communicate with people. Even more suddenly he remembered that Christine had come through on his side. He put his arm round her shoulders, wondering how soon the years of coldness could be bridged.

“You’ve made a hell of a mess of your face,” she said critically.

He grinned crookedly, painfully but contentedly. The communication business was not too difficult once you understood it.

Three hundred miles above the Earth’s north pole Geissler’s missile sought and found its mark.

The beautifully designed alien mechanism, which had been transmitting one millisecond pulses of intelligence every ninety-three minutes for five years, finally fell silent.

There was no disappointment on board Nesster ship 1753 as it changed course, for they had not known of the imminent landing and, in any case, had long since forgotten how they had lived before the Journey. Gently the great caravan of ships swung towards the next suitable star. The new leg of the Journey would take eight hundred years, but the Nessters were a patient race.

And they built very patient machines.

What Time Do You Call This?

Abe Short had locked his bedroom door, and was doing something he did not want anybody else to know about, when he received the worst shock of his life.

One moment he was absolutely alone—and a split-second later there was a mad scientist standing beside the tallboy, blinking at him through pebble-lensed glasses.

Although he had never seen a mad scientist before, Abe’s nimble wits enabled him to decide the little man’s profession almost immediately. The first clue was that the stranger was wearing an odd-looking metallic belt outside a shapeless tweed jacket, an adornment which lent a definite air of eccentricity to his untidy ensemble.

The second clue was the manner of his arrival. Nobody could have slipped into the bedroom by conventional means without Abe knowing about it. The little man had definitely materialised, with a popping sound and the suggestion of an electrical crackle, and Abe had even felt a gust of displaced air. Only a mad scientist would have done such a thing.

Abe set his binoculars down on the window ledge and pretended he had not been studying the movements of the guard at the bank across the avenue. Now that his system was recovering from the shock, he decided that the intruder would have to be questioned closely and precisely about his identity, motives and method of entry.

“Waddaya?” he demanded angrily. “Waddaya?”

“How interesting,” the mad scientist said. “I expected this apartment to be empty in the beta timestream. I’m astonished that anybody would pay two-fifty a month for such inferior accommodation.”

Abe sensed he had been insulted. “Lay off the accommodation. You better tell me how you got in here.”

“I was here all along …’

“You was not!”

‘… but in the alpha timestream,” the little man continued calmly. “I used the devices built into this belt to exert a chronomotive impulse in a lateral direction, and transferred myself from alpha time to beta time. The nomenclature is purely arbitrary, of course. If you would prefer it you are free to think of your timestream as alpha and mine as beta.”

Abe shook his head impatiently. “I don’t get it.”

“There is no reason why you should, but as I will be in this timestream for just a few minutes on this initial visit it can’t do any harm to let you share my triumph. My name, by the way, is Kincade.” The little man pulled a drawer a short distance out of the tallboy and sat on the edge of it. “You’re familiar with the theory of multiple probability worlds?”

“Huh?”

“It used to be thought that there were a great number of slightly divergent timestrearns generated by decision-points. You know the idea—that in another existence Columbus turned back before he discovered America, that in yet another Germany won the war, and so on. Some quite eminent thinkers held to this theory, even though it leads inescapably to the Doctrine of Infinite Redundancy—which is, of course, utter nonsense.”

“Huh?”

“Well, it follows from the theory that there is another universe identical to this one in every detail except that …’ Kincade looked around with magnified eyes,‘… the cigarette burn on the edge of this tallboy is a hundredth of an inch further to the left. Another with it further to the left again. And another with it a little smaller, or a different shape. You expend billions of universes simply catering for the billions of possible vagaries of one little cigarette burn. It doesn’t make sense, does it?”

“No.” Abe was emphatic.

“What I’ve done is to rationalise the whole theory. And I’ve proved that there are only two probability worlds, or timestreams, both generating from a single vital decision-point in our history. A little research in this timestream should reveal what this all-important event was, but that can be done on my next visit.

“Now, if you will excuse me.” Kincade moved his hand to a switch which grew out of the buckle of his gleaming belt, but he did not succeed in pressing it.

Abe darted across the room and hit him on top of the skull with the only solid object available, which in this case happened to be the binoculars. Luckily—from Abe’s point of view—they were built to a robust naval specification and were able to put Kincade to sleep in a satisfactory manner. He trussed the unconscious man with cord, then removed the metal belt from around his waist. It was heavy, warm to the touch, and throbbed with a pseudo-life of its own.

One hour later a small cigar store, half a block away from the bank, opened up for the day’s business. Abe, who was watching through the slats of his blind, saw morning sunlight flash on the store’s glass door, and he nodded contentedly.

“See that cigar store over there?” he said. “It sells cigars, all right, but that ain’t all that goes on in there. The guy who owns it just happens to run the local book. Waddaya think of that?”

Kincade, who was in the process of recovering consciousness, retched weakly.

Abe accepted this as an adequate response to a rhetorical question. “Know what’s gonna happen next? About ten minutes from now the guard on that hick bank across the avenue is gonna drift along and lay a few bets the way he does every Friday morning. And that’s when I move in to collect. Waddaya think of that, professor?”

Kincade’s lips moved this time, but no sound came out.

“I got a good car outside,” Abe continued, ‘but now I got a better getaway—thanks to you. I hope your head don’t hurt too much, professor.”

He clucked sympathetically at Kincade, and began putting on his working rig. This consisted of a hand-knitted blue sweater with a special roll neck which could be pulled right up over his face, and a shoulder holster containing a realistic toy Luger. He slipped a jacket on over it, put the metallic belt around his waist and picked up the canvas duffle bag he used for transporting large sums of money.

“What … What are you going to do?” Kincade mumbled.

“I’m gonna rob a bank.”

‘But my chronomotive device!”

“You mean this belt? That’s my getaway, professor. You was enjoying yourself with all the doubletalk a while back. The only reason you gave me all that stuff was you thought I couldn’t understand it, but I’m not dumb, professor. All I got to do is lift the money, get out of the bank, then throw this switch and I disappear into another timestream where nobody robbed the bank—so I’m not wanted. I’ll have all that bread and nobody chasing me to get it back.”

Kincade shook his head. “It may not work for you.”

“Waddaya mean?” Abe scowled at him, took a deep breath and moved the switch on the belt. He felt a curious sensation, like a mild electric shock, and Kincade disappeared. For an instant Abe thought he had been outwitted by the little man, then he noticed the bedspread was a different colour. He was in the other timestream. A sound of movement came from the other room so, without wasting any time, Abe clicked the switch to its original position, felt the strange tingling sensation, and grinned as Kincade reappeared on the room’s only chair.

“I knew it would work, professor.” He patted the belt with proprietory pride. “I’m gonna make a fortune with this gadget.”

Kincade struggled ineffectually with his bonds. “That wasn’t what I meant. Your personal world-lines may not be sufficiently divergent to enable you to capitalise on …’

“Give it up, professor—the big words don’t fool me.” Abe closed the door of his bedroom and went out into the corridor. He had spent longer than he had intended in the apartment and he would have to hurry to be ready for action as soon as the bank guard had left.

The first thing he saw on emerging into the morning sunlight was the guard’s blue uniform disappearing into the cigar store, which meant he had already lost a couple of minutes. Abe danced an impatient jig on the avenue’s central island as the traffic flow prevented him from getting across, then came the realisation that there was really no need to hurry. After all, he had the bank-robber’s ideal companion—the instant getaway.

He reached the sidewalk, strolled casually into the bank’s shady, old-fashioned porch and looked through the inner door. There were no customers in, and the four clerks behind the counter were all the sort he liked to deal with—not so young that they might be reckless, not so old that they might have crazy notions about loyalty. He pulled his collar up over his face, whipped out the toy Luger and shouldered his way through the door.

“This is a hold-up,” he announced ritually. “Fill the bag up with used bills and nobody’s gonna get hurt.” He slung his duffle over the wrought iron grille, gestured threateningly with the plastic gun and noted with approval that the clerks were anxious to be helpful. All four began cramming the bag with money, and one even went as far as going into the strong room for extra supplies.

Abe waited as long as he dared, but was prudent enough to realise that he had to get clear of the bank before jumping into the alternative timestream. Popping up in the same bank in alpha time with a sack full of loot and a gun in his hand could get him in big trouble. He might get shot before anybody noticed he had not committed a robbery.

“That’s enough,” he snapped, as forcefully as was possible through the moist wool of his collar. He took back the now-bulging duffle, walked quickly to the door and slipped out into the porch. His car was waiting across the avenue and the traffic lanes were clear. Slinging the bag over his shoulder. Abe loped across the sidewalk—just as a blue uniform appeared on his right.

“Hold it right there, fella,” the guard called in a startled voice, as he clawed for his revolver.

Goodbye, Abe thought smugly. It was nice knowing you.

He pressed the switch on the metal belt.

Something hit Abe a solid blow on the ribs, knocking him off course, and he ran straight into a concrete lamp standard. As he fell to the ground, winded, Abe realised he had made the transfer to alpha time successfully but had collided with a man already there. Both men were lying in a helpless, gasping heap outside the bank.

“You stupid …’ Abe’s voice faded away as he saw that the man he had bumped into was wearing a blue roll-neck sweater with the collar pulled up over his face, and was holding a plastic Luger in one hand and a duffle bag in the other. He had run into himself!

“You stupid …’ The other Abe’s voice faded away, too, and his eyes widened as they peered over the rim of his woollen collar.

“Hold it right there, you two,” the guard called in a startled voice from further along the avenue, as he clawed for his revolver.

Abe reached for the switch on his buckle, but the belt had ceased vibrating and a wisp of acrid smoke was curling up from it. In any case, he remembered morosely, there was a guard with a drawn gun looking for him in the timestream he had just left.

‘But where did you come from?” the other Abe demanded angrily, through the bars of his adjoining cell. “Why did you have to show up and spoil things after I spent weeks casing that bank?”

“That’s the trouble,” Abe told him. “The professor tried to warn me that my other self might be doing the same thing as I was. Our two world-lines weren’t sufficiently divergent for me to capitalise on the … whaddayacallit.” He returned his gaze to the newspaper which had been passed in to him by a friendly cop. The headlines read:

BANK ROBBERY ATTEMPT BY IDENTICAL TWINS

Recovered Money Twice As Much As Was Stolen,

Says Baffled Bank Official

“I still don’t get it,” the other Abe grumbled.

“It’s all to do with the Doctrine of Infinite Redundancy,” Abe replied. “Too deep for a crumb like you.”

He turned his face to the wall and tried to go to sleep.

Communication

There was one truly creative phase in the weekly routine of Hank Ripley’s job, and he liked to take care of it on Friday nights around nine o’clock.

By then he had three or four drinks under his belt and could feel the weekend—two days’ therapeutic idleness—opening up for him; yet he was still sufficiently in touch with his work to recall the week in detail. His skill in selecting amount and type of detail to put into his weekly report was, in Ripley’s estimation, the principal reason he remained in salaried employment. For over two years the area office in Vancouver had received, and apparently was mollified by, accounts of computer sales he was about to make, was planning to negotiate, or had just lost because of some inherent incompatibility between the Logicon 20/30 series and the customer’s specification. The reports were not entirely fictional—he never mentioned a prospect’s name unless he had actually called him—but they were designed to disguise the fact that Hank Ripley’s aptitude for selling computers was virtually nonexistent.

It was a few minutes before nine when he opened his portable typewriter and set it on the table, flanked by a pack of cigarettes and a glass of Four Roses. He was staring at the ceiling, awaiting inspiration, when the doorbell rang. No friends were expected to call, so he decided to ignore the bell—the report was too important to let slide. There were times when he felt guilty about having the worst record in the whole Canadian organisation, but consoled himself by reflecting on the amount of priceless ingenuity he put into his reports. Any bright boy in Vancouver who took the trouble to study Ripley’s file would find dozens of case histories, packed with verisimilitude, showing ways in which Logicon hardware or software could fail to meet a client’s requirements. The same bright boy might wonder why such a large number of quirkish businesses should flourish in one corner of Alberta, but the lesson was there to be learned just the same.

Ripley’s mind was gathering varicoloured threads of imagination when the bell gave another, and more prolonged, peal. Hissing with annoyance, he opened the door and found himself facing a man of about fifty who was wearing a lustrous business suit and carrying a softly gleaming briefcase. The stranger had a swarthy complexion and brown eyes with grey rings of cholesterol around the pupils.

“Mr. Ripley?” he said. “Pardon me for interrupting your evening.”

“Insurance?” Ripley pushed the door hastily. “I’m covered, and I’m busy.”

“No—I’m not an insurance salesman.”

“Oh, well, I’m a firm believer in my own religion,” Ripley lied. “I can’t be converted, so there’s no point in prolonging …’

“You don’t understand.” The stranger smiled easily. “I want to buy a computer.”

“You want …’ Ripley opened the door like an automaton and ushered the man in. Suppressing a feeling of unreality, he examined the visitor from the rear and noted how his dark suit drooped expensively at the shoulders, and the way his black hair curled slightly over his collar. Ripley had a theory that all wealthy and powerful men had black curly hair on the backs of their necks. He began to feel lucky, which was an unusual sensation for him.

“My name is Mervyn Parr,” The visitor dropped his case on to a chair and surveyed Ripley’s unimpressive apartment with a curious appearance of satisfaction.

“It’s a pleasure to …’ Ripley floundered. “Have a seat. Have a drink.”

“I never touch alcohol,” Parr said benignly, seating himself. ‘But please have one yourself.”

“No thanks.” Ripley lifted his glass as he spoke, realised what he was doing, and set it down again. He took a cigarette and puffed it into anxious life …

Parr viewed the performance indulgently. “I expect you’re wondering why I called with you like this?”

“No! No! Well … yes. I would have been delighted to call at your office and make the Logicon presentation during business hours. Not that I’m objecting, mind …’

“My office is in Red Deer.”

“Oh.” Ripley felt his luck desert him. “That’s north of Calgary, isn’t it? You should be talking to our rep for central Alberta.”

“I don’t want to talk to your rep for central Alberta, Mr. Ripley. I want to buy a computer from you.” Parr’s voice had a resonant quality which Ripley found vaguely reminiscent of something out of his childhood.

“The company doesn’t work that way.”

“The company won’t know anything about that side of things. I’m going to use a fictitious address right here in Lethbridge.”

“I see,” Ripley said glumly.

Parr laughed aloud, showing strong greyish teeth. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ripley. I’ve been a little wicked—playing cat-and-mouse with you. The fact is that I’m on the staff of the New University of Western Canada. My department needs a computer for use in a new kind of sociological survey centred on Red Deer.”

“I still don’t see why you’ve come to me.”

“It’s quite simple. You run a one-man outfit here in the south. My survey has to be conducted in absolute secrecy otherwise the results would be invalidated—trying to observe particles, you know, uncertainty principle—and if I were to deal with a big live-wire office the word would be bound to get out sooner or later. Now do you see why I’ve … we’ve chosen to deal with you?”

‘But how about after-sales service?”

“Well, Mr. Ripley, I presumed you would be willing to undertake that for me if it becomes necessary. I understand you’re a qualified maintenance man, and a private arrangement could be beneficial to both of us.” Parr glanced significantly at the shabby furniture.

“There’s the question of payment. Our accounts people …’

“Cash,” Parr said tersely.

Ripley lifted his glass and took a long drink. “Well, I don’t know …’

“Mr. Ripley!” Parr shook his head in amazement. “Do you know you must be the worst salesman in the world? If I’d approached any other Logicon representative with this proposition I’d be signing contracts by this time.”

“I’m sorry.” Ripley gave himself a mental shake—there was such a thing as being too ethical, even when a deal looked as queer as a fifty-cent watch. “It was the mention of cash.” He laughed uncertainly. “Nobody has ever mentioned paying for a computer before. It’s going to cause a flutter at head office.”

“That doesn’t matter—as long as you sit tight. Now may we discuss business?”

“You bet, Mr. Parr.” Ripley pulled his chair closer to the other man’s knees, noticing as he did so that one of Parr’s fingers was banded with white skin which suggested he usually wore a ring. “Would you like to tell me something about the amount of data to be handled, the retrieval performance expected, and so on?”

“Fine. The population of Red Deer has grown to close on 200,000, and we’ve selected it for our study because it’s a good example of what sociologists call a Second Magnitude Area in the Willis Classification System. Does that mean anything to you?”

“No. I’m afraid not.”

“Never mind—it’s an abstruse technicality. The point is that the university is going to analyse social volition and interaction in the area more thoroughly than has ever been attempted anywhere else. To do this we are going to record data on every man, woman and child in the designated region.”

“What kind of data?”

“Straightforward. Age, place of birth, height, weight, colouring, profession …’

“Height and weight?” Ripley was startled.

“Important sociological and physiological criteria, my friend. Essential too for computer recognition of individuals whose pictures may not be stored, or whose appearance may have changed.” The resonance had crept back into Parr’s voice, stirring Ripley’s subconscious.

“Just a minute,” he said. “How is this survey going to be carried out?”

Parr examined him soberly. “If the information I’m about to give you goes any further, we have no deal. Is that understood?”

“Perfectly.”

“There will be a limited number of checkpoints—probably only one at first—with facilities for automatically photographing, weighing and measuring people who pass through. The computer must recognise subjects, and on command print out all available data.”

Ripley took another swallow of Four Roses. “That’s easy enough—the tricky part is getting your 200,000 photographs.”

“We won’t have 200,000. There will be only a few thousand in the beginning. We’ll use every source to expand the store, but in the interim would it be possible—through cross-references, deduction, what-have-you—for the computer to identify people first time without a photograph?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, supposing Subject A is a young woman already known to the computer, which also has recorded the fact that her mother is five feet tall, weighs a hundred pounds and has a mole on her forehead. If Subject A passes through the checkpoint with un unknown Subject B who matches the recorded data on the mother, would the computer be able to identify Subject B, photograph her for future occasions, and print out the available data?”

“It could. Bigger programming job, that’s all.” Ripley stroked his chin. “I, see why you want to keep this thing secret. People would avoid it like the plague.”

“Precisely.”

Ripley took a deep breath and decided to risk the sale once again. “I don’t even feel happy about it myself.”

“Why? There’s nothing illegal about sociologists studying people’s movements.”

“It’s hard to say. If your checkpoint is centrally located the machine’s going to get to know just about everybody in Red Deer. The example you gave was fine—a girl accompanied by her mother—but supposing the computer starts noting businessmen out late with secretaries, and that kind of thing?”

Parr shrugged. ‘Blackmail? But you should know that data stored in a computer is more secure than in any filing cabinet.”

“I do know.”

“Then you think I might be considering a little blackmail?” Parr did not seem offended.

“No. Any information you got wouldn’t be very hot, certainly not valuable enough to pay your costs.” Ripley lit another cigarette, wondering how Vancouver would react if they heard him hinting that a cash customer was crooked. “It’s just …’

“It’s just the idea of a computerised Big Brother spying on the life of a city, isn’t it, Mr. Ripley? Believe me—my colleagues have studied all the ethical implications, but we’re proposing a new kind of analysis of urban behaviour and the benefits outweigh any theoretical invasion of privacy.” Parr smiled his grey smile. ‘Besides this is only 1982.”

“Hah! Very good, Mr. Parr.” Ripley tried to laugh, but he had just identified the practised resonance in the other man’s voice. Mervyn Parr spoke more like a minister than a lecturer. There was no reason why he could not be a lay preacher as well as an academic, but Ripley’s sense of unease deepened. He dispelled it by reaching for his presentation case, and by considering the wording of his new report. The circumstances of the sale would have to be changed, though. It would read better if he had closed the deal with Parr after a week of dedicated hard-selling.

“For the application you have in mind,” he said in his best computer expert’s voice, “I recommend you consider the Logicon 30. I’ll need to make a full analysis of your proposed system, of course, but I’m positive the 30 Model would offer you the …’

Parr held up a well-manicured hand, with its white ghost of a ring. “How much?”

‘Basic—sixty thousand.” Ripley swallowed noisily. He should have started at the bottom of the range with the Logicon 20 and tried to work upwards.

“Done!” Parr reached for his briefcase, and clicked it open.

Inside were bulky wads of used high-denomination bills. The wads looked thicker than normal, because of the way each bill appeared to have at one time been folded into a tight square and opened out again, but it seemed that the case held enough money to buy more computers than Ripley had sold in his entire career.

On Monday morning Ripley drove to the bank and deposited sixty thousand dollars in the rarely-used company account, then went on to his office. The weather was better than usual for late September and the only hint of approaching Fall was in the ochreous tinge of the grass in the park. He put his car in the busy parking lot at the side of the building, went into the cool brown cave of the entrance hall and reached his third-floor office without seeing another person. He felt as though he lived in a ghost town.

In the cramped stillness of his office he picked up the phone, buttoned Logicon Incorporated’s Vancouver number and got through to Sara Peart, secretary to the Western Region sales manager.

“Hi, Sara,” he said brightly. “This is Hank.”

“Hank who?”

“Hank Ripley. In Lethbridge. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten the name.”

“I wasn’t sure if you still worked for us, that’s all.”

“Sharp as ever, Sara, sharp as ever. Is the old man in?”

“You sure you want to disturb him on a Monday morning?”

“I’m not going to disturb him. I just want to find out if he can let me have a Model 30 off the shelf, in a hurry.”

“You mean you’ve sold one?” Sara sounded more incredulous than was strictly necessary, and Ripley began throttling the cord that carried her voice.

“Of course I’ve sold one.” He kept cool. “Didn’t you read my latest report? I mailed it Friday night.”

“I never was much of a science fiction buff.”

Before Ripley could attempt an answer the phone clicked, and he was through to Boyd Devereaux.

“Nice to hear from you again, Hank—sometimes I think you neglect us a little out here on the coast.”

With a thrill of almost superstitious dread, Ripley recognised that Devereaux was doing his coolly menacing bit. “Good morning, Boyd. I’ve closed a cash deal for a Logicon 30,” he said quickly, wishing he had caught his boss in his jovial tyrant incarnation. “Can you let me have one out of inventory right away?”

“A cash deal?” Devereaux said after a slight pause.

“Yes. The money’s in the company account as of half an hour ago.”

“Well, that’s just great, my boy—I knew I was right in defending you at the last few regional sales conferences.”

“Thanks, Boyd.” Ripley squirmed, marvelling at Devereaux’s skill in making a pat on the back feel like a karate blow.

“Who’s the customer? I don’t remember seeing anything …’

“Mervyn Parr—I mentioned him in my last report. As a matter of fact, Boyd, I’ve been working on this man for quite a few weeks now, but it was such an off-beat way-out hunch that I didn’t like to list him as a genuine prospect till I was sure.” Sweating freely under the strain of creative labour. Ripley went on to sketch in a picture of an idiosyncratic oil baron whose hobby was higher mathematics, and who had been interested in buying his own computer through meeting Ripley at an exclusive cocktail party. When he had finished there was a ruminative silence on the line and he wondered if he had overdone it with the invention of the party.

“Hank, my boy, this is great,” Devereaux said at last. “Do you know what I’m going to do?”

“Uh—no, Boyd. I don’t.”

“I’m going to see that you get a bit of recognition. Young Julian Roxby, our PR chief, tells me he is on the look-out for a good feature on the prairie provinces for the Logicon Review. I’m going to get him to send a reporter and a cameraman across to Lethbridge and give this sale of yours a real splash. We’ll get you and this man Parr together; a shot of the Model 30 in his ranch-style living room …’

“We can’t do that,” Ripley neighed frantically. “Sorry, Boyd. Strictly no publicity—Mr. Parr insists.”

“That’s not so good, Hank.”

“It can’t be helped. Mr. Parr is very publicity-shy. Almost a recluse, you might say. Why, he even wants to take delivery of the unit himself, from my office here, so that nobody’ll see our truck going to his place.”

“Are you sure his hobby is mathematics?” Devereaux demanded suspiciously.

“Well, I can’t imagine him doing anything very immoral with a Model 30. Hah! Unless he gets up to some trick with the high-speed print-out.” Ripley laughed dustily then remembered, too late, that Devereaux was running for office in the Social Credit government and had a strong Puritanical streak.

“I find myself wondering just how effective our product orientation course was in your case, Hank,” Devereaux said coldly. “Now I want you to speak to your friend Mr. Parr, and get his agreement for full internal and external publicity. Have you got that?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

When Ripley finally got off the phone he felt as though he had completed a full day’s work—and the morning had only just begun.

The computer was delivered to the office early on Wednesday, and Parr rang to enquire about it an hour later. He sounded agreeably surprised at the promptness of the delivery, but hung up before he could be tackled about publicity for the sale. Ripley walked round and round the slick grey-and-white plastic cube of the crate in an agony of decision. Devereaux had sounded determined; Parr had sounded even more determined—and Hank Ripley was caught squarely between them. He began to feel it-would have been better had he never spoiled his record of failure.

It was almost lunchtime when the office door opened and Parr came in wearing a different but equally expensive dark suit. He showed his grey teeth in satisfaction when he saw the crate.

“Good morning, Mr. Parr,” Ripley said heartily. “Well, there she is—the most compact middle-range computer in the world.”

“Don’t start selling it to me now.” Parr spoke tersely, with none of the rueful friendliness he had shown on their first meeting. “You’ve provided a full set of operating instructions?”

“Of course. There shouldn’t be any difficulty in …’

“Help me get it down to the van.”

“Sure—but there’s just one thing …’

“Well?” Parr’s cholesterol-rimmed eyes were distinctly impatient.

“It’s about publicity for the deal. Logicon has a firm policy about these things.”

Parr sighed. “Refund my money in cash, please. My department doesn’t want any traceable credit transactions.”

“I … It isn’t really a firm policy. I just thought I should mention it.” Ripley began to perspire.

“Help me get this crate down to the van.” Parr made the request in exactly the same tone of voice as before, signifying his contempt.

“Glad to.” Ripley decided he had done all that Logicon could expect of him. He began pushing the plastic cube, which moved fairly easily on its runners, and Parr hovered around guiding it through doorways to the elevator. The ring finger of his right hand was still banded with white. At street level they slid the crate out to a blue Dodge van which had the words “Rockalta Transport Hire’ on the sides, and stowed it in the back. When the doors were closed on the computer, Parr signed the delivery receipts without speaking and turned away.

“It’s been a pleasure to do business with you, Mr. Parr.” Ripley’s sarcasm seemed to go unnoticed, and he went back into the foyer swallowing his resentment. He paused at the inner door and looked back. Parr had just got into the driving seat and was doing something with his hands, one of them performing a screwing movement over the other. The van had moved off into the traffic stream before Ripley realised Parr had been putting on a ring. He went back up to his office, thinking hard about Mr. Mervyn Parr. The business with the ring had aroused his curiosity. What reason could Parr have for not wanting Ripley to see it? And, while questions were being asked, why did an academic dress like a highly successful businessman and speak like a preacher? On impulse, Ripley looked up the number of the New University of Western Canada and rang its Department of Sociology. Ten minutes later he had talked to almost as many people and had established that the department had nobody called Parr on either its administrative or lecturing staff.

After a moment’s thought, he rang the Rockalta Transport Hire Company and was answered by a bored female voice. “Lethbridge Police Department,” he said brusquely. “Lieutenant Beasley Osgood of the traffic branch speaking.”

“What can I do for you, Lieutenant?” The voice sounded less bored.

“There’s been a hit-and-run accident at the west end on the McLeod highway. One of the witnesses says a blue Dodge with the name of your outfit was involved.”

“Oh, my! That’s just dreadful.” The voice had become animated.

“Yeah. Well, we’re still checking the story out. Can you let me have the names and addresses of people who rented blue ’81 Dodge vans lately?”

“You bet!” There was a rattling of paper, mingled with excited whispers, and Ripley consoled himself with the thought that he had at least brightened up an otherwise dull day for somebody. “You’re certain it was an ’81 Dodge, Lieutenant?”

“The witness seemed pretty definite about that.”

“We have only one of last year’s models out at the moment—so that’s a help, isn’t it?”

“A great help—can you give me the man’s name and address?”

“Of course. People renting from us for the first time always have to show their licences and insurance. That van was rented this morning to a Mr. Melvyn Parminter of … let me see … 4408 Champlain Avenue, Red Deer, Alberta.”

“I see—and when’s it due back?”

“Oh, it isn’t due back. Not with Mr. Parminter in it, I mean. It’s to be dropped at our Red Deer depot tomorrow.”

“Thanks.” Ripley rang off and sat heaving nervously for a moment at the success of his playacting. When the schoolboy amusement had subsided to occasional flutters in his chest he leaned back and considered what he had gained. He now had what was probably Parr’s real name and address, but very little more. He had no idea, for instance, why Parr/Parminter should secretly buy a computer and turn it into an electronic busybody capable of spying on a whole city.

Saturday morning was sharp and clear, filled with the special aureate radiance which—Ripley had often noticed—the sun could emit only on days when there was no work to do. After breakfast he sat around for almost an hour, pretending he was not going to make the longish drive north to Red Deer, then went down to the parking lot and got into his car. Even when sitting behind the wheel he found it difficult to admit he was going to spend a whole day of his adult life playing detective and was expecting, furthermore, to enjoy it. He smoked a cigarette, waited another few minutes, cleaned his fingernails, and drove off with studied carelessness.

Once on the road, and away from the divining gaze of the neighbours to whom his bacherlorhood seemed to be an affront, he shed his self-consciousness. The route took him west to Fort McLeod and from there he followed the McLeod Trail up through prairies where the cattle shared the ground with patient, unattended oil pumps. He reached Red Deer by noon, ate sparingly at a diner and ascertained that Champlain Avenue was the core of a plush residential development on the north side. Twenty minutes later he was parked close to the tree-screened cube of pastel stucco which was Melvyn Parminter’s home.

Six hours later he was still parked there, had seen no signs of life, and was rapidly losing enthusiasm. He had got out of the car several times but had not dared to slip through the entrance gates of Parminter’s miniature but beautifully tailored estate. Now he was tired, bored, hungry and—to make things worse—had just thought of a perfectly good explanation for Parminter’s behaviour. Supposing he was in some highly competitive business in which a new application for a computer would give him an edge on the opposition? The dictates of commercial security could make a person behave as oddly as a criminal or an enemy agent.

Ripley decided to wait another ten minutes before going home. He was nearing the end of the third ten-minute spell when a Continental saloon, resplendent in polychromatic grey, wafted through the wrought iron gates and dwindled silently into the distance. Parminter was at the wheel. Ripley, taken by surprise, started his engine and drove off in pursuit. The ground-hugging shape of the Continental was deceptively fast, and he had to swoop down the quiet avenue at dangerous speed to catch up with it. He got within two hundred yards and concentrated on following the big vehicle across the city and out to the south side. Finally it swept into a tree-lined street in one of the oldest parts of town, and turned into the driveway of a large frame house situated well back from the street.

Ripley stopped his car and got out. Darkness was coming down rapidly, the air smelled of dusty foliage and genteel decay, and suddenly he felt a cold disquiet at the thought of meddling in Parminter’s private affairs instead of being back home for the Saturday night poker session. He hesitated for a moment, then his eyes distinguished a sign set just inside the opening where Parminter’s car had vanished. The street was deserted, but he glanced all around before approaching the gently creaking sign. It was fretted out in the shape of an open book and said:

“RED DEER TEMPLE OF THE VITAL SPIRIT’

“Pastor: M. Parmley’

Ripley looked at the gloomy old house—it looked exactly as he had always visualised a crackpot spiritualist temple—and back to the gold Gothic lettering on the varnished board. Was Pastor M. Parmley another manifestation of Mervyn Parr/Melvyn Parminter? And if so why should he want a computer set up to … ? Ripley abruptly remembered the cash with which the computer had been bought—each bill crinkled as if it had been folded into a tiny square. A startling idea flickered across his mind like a will o’ the wisp. It was an unpleasant thought, and if his guess was correct he wanted nothing more to do with Pastor Parmley. Ripley shivered slightly in the near-darkness as he noticed that one of the tall shrubs close to the sign was shaped like a human being. He was turning away when the shrub spoke to him.

“What a shame,” it said. “Must you leave so soon?”

“Mr. Parry,” Ripley yelped. “How nice to … I mean, I was just passing by …’

“Of course, of course—and now that you’re here you must come in for a proper visit.”

“Some other time, perhaps.” Ripley turned with the intention of walking away very quickly, but suddenly a thick forearm was clamped around his throat and his left arm was twisted up behind his back.

“Don’t make me twist your arm,” Parminter whispered.

“That’s a good one,” Ripley said, wondering how long his shoulder joint was going to hold out. “What do you think you’re doing? Look—I just happened to be in Red Deer for the day, and …’

“And you spent it sitting outside my house.” Parminter forced Ripley to walk up the black tunnel of the driveway.

“Oh. How did you catch on?”

“I was expecting you. The Rockalta people rang my home to find out if I’d damaged their van, and there was only one person who could have given them that story about a hit-and-run accident. It was quite clever.”

“Thank you.”

“Yes—I misjudged you, Mr. Ripley. I wonder how much you’ve guessed.”

“The lot, I think.” The pain in Ripley’s arm discouraged him from playing dumb.

“Too bad—for you, I mean. I won’t be able to let you run around loose.”

“Don’t try anything with me,” Ripley warned. He was striving for a convincing threat when they reached the entrance of the big house. The door was ajar. Parminter thrust Ripley through it and turned on a light to reveal a large, heavily furnished lobby.

“As a matter of fact, you’ve arrived at quite a good time,” Parminter said with a kind of menacing geniality. “I haven’t switched the entire system on yet, and I’ll appreciate the opinion of someone more knowledgeable about computers than I.”

“Go and …’ Ripley’s arm clicked audibly as the pressure on it was increased. “What do you want me to do?”

“That’s better.” Parminter let Ripley go and dusted his hands. He was wearing a massive gold ring which—like his sign—was in the shape of an open book and engraved with symbols. “The door’s locked, so don’t try to run.”

“Me run?” Ripley massaged his arm.

“Jump up and down,” Parminter commanded. Ripley gave a half-hearted leap and felt the floor move slightly beneath him. “You’re standing on a weighbridge which reads your weight to within four ounces. And over here is the camera.” Parminter walked to an ornate mirror and tapped it. “One way, of course.”

“I see. Where’s the Logicon itself?”

‘Back here.” Parminter opened a door on the right and led the way into a room in which the computer sat near one wall. Its slick styling looked shockingly unfamiliar against the old-fashioned embossed wallpaper. The faded carpet had been cut back from it and a slim bunch of cables ran up to the machine through a chiselled hole in the floorboards.

“Looks all right, so far,” Ripley commented. “What’s this?” He pointed at a small camera positioned close to the computer’s print-out.

“Closed-circuit television monitor. Follow me.” Parminter went back into the lobby and entered another room. It was large and high-ceilinged, the walls completely covered by dark green velvet drapes. A long pedestal table surrounded by chairs occupied the centre of the room. The chair at the head of the table was so heavy and intricately gilded as to be almost a throne. Directly in front of it a sphere of polished crystal sat on the table in an ebony cradle carved like a pair of cupped hands. Parminter sat down in the huge chair, touched something beneath the table and a glow of greenish light appeared in the crystal.

“What do you think of it?” Parminter spoke with proprietary pride as he leaned back.

Ripley peered into the depths of the polished sphere and saw a distorted image of the computer print-out. “Neat. Very neat.”

I think so,” Parminter agreed. “There’s a fortune to be made in the spiritualist world if one goes about it the right way—but it’s a chancy business. There’s a ghastly story about one of my colleagues who told his audience he could draw on all the wisdom of the ages to answer any question, and was made to look a fool when some smart alec asked him to name the capital of North Dakota.

“With the help of your little machine he could have answered the question, but that’s not the type of information a practising spiritualist needs. The point of the story is that nobody ever asks a medium something that could just as easily be looked up in a reference book.”

“How long do you think you can keep me here?” Ripley’s fears for his own well-being were beginning to reassert themselves.

“The data a professional medium needs are more personal, more individual. When a middle-aged widow walks in here I can try to do a cold reading on her and win her confidence, but people are becoming too materialistic and sceptical to be hooked easily.

“From now on, when that widow walks in—knowing she has never seen me in her life, knowing she came only on the spur of the moment because a friend asked her—the computer gives me her name. More important, it gives me the name of her dear departed, his age, his former business, the names of other dead relatives, and so on. I look up at her, before she has a chance to speak, and I say ‘Hello, Mary—I have a message for you from Wilbur’. Can you imagine the impact?”

“I’ve never heard anything so immoral in all my life. How long are you planning to keep me here?”

“Nothing immoral about it! Ordinary mediums give people hope—I’ll be able to give them certainty.”

“Sell them certainty, you mean.”

“It’s impossible to set a price on the happiness I shall dispense to the old and the lonely and the bereaved. Besides, I’m a businessman. I’ve been working towards this for years, ploughing back the profits, denying myself the pleasure of spending all those surreptitiously folded bills the marks leave in my collecting box. Apart from the cost of the computer and other equipment, have you any idea how much it cost me to build a set of memory tapes? I’ve had dozens of people working for me coding the contents of directories, slaving in the public records offices, carrying out fake market surveys …’

“I guess you’ll get your money back in the end,” Ripley said acidly. “Is spiritualism nothing but a complete confidence trick?”

“What do you think? When you’re dead, you’re dead—and that’s the way it ought to be.” Parminter returned eagerly to his main theme. ‘But don’t class me as an ordinary confidence man, Mr. Ripley—I’m a pioneer. I’ve built something that never existed before—a computer model of the human relationships that give a city its corporate identity. Family ties, geographically created friendships and enmities, business connections … everybody in this area is part of a vast intangible matrix … and I have it right here on tape.” Parminter’s eyes were luminous. He reached below the table and there came a series of faint clicks which suggested he was activating the computer.

Ripley was convinced of the deadly necessity to get away. He began backing off slowly, and at the same time tried to keep Parminter’s mind engrossed in his creation. “The crystal ball doesn’t quite fit in, does it? I thought that was a fortune-teller’s gimmick.”

Parminter chuckled hoarsely. “Not only seers use them—the ball is supposed to be the focus for all kinds of special powers—besides, do you think Mary’s going to worry about that when I give her the message from Wilbur?”

“It still doesn’t look right to me.” Ripley reached the door as he spoke and tension made his voice a nervous squawk which caused Parminter to turn his head. The big man launched himself from the chair with frightening speed. Ripley turned and ran, but had taken only one stride when two massive hands closed round his neck from behind and pulled him back into the room. He struggled vainly against the other man’s superior strength.

“Im sorry about this,” Parminter said with incongruous gentleness, ‘but no miserable little snoop is going to ruin my plans at this stage of the game.”

“I won’t talk,” Ripley husked.

“Or blackmail me either?” Parminter increased his pressure. He was not compressing Ripley’s windpipe, but his thick fingers had closed major bloodvessels. Black dots rimmed with prismatic colour began to march across Ripley’s vision. He looked around for something he might use as a weapon … nothing in sight … couldn’t even call for help … nobody to hear him anyway … nobody except those people sitting at the table…

People at the table?

Behind him Parminter gave a startled gasp and suddenly Ripley was free. He fell to his knees, breathing noisily while his eyes took in the group at the table. There were about a dozen men and women, some of them in distinctly antiquated dress, all of them looking slightly smeared and blurred round the edges, like images projected on to flurry cotton.

“No! Oh, no!” Parminter sank to his knees beside Ripley. “It can’t be.” He pressed his knuckles to trembling lips and shook his head dogmatically.

One of the men at the table pointed at Parminter. “Join us,” he said in a wintry voice, ‘there are things we wish to know.”

“Go away,” Parminter moaned. “You don’t exist.”

‘But, my friend …’ The blurred man stood up, rippling like a figure in a three-dimensional plastic picture, and came towards Parminter and Ripley. His eyes were dark holes into another continuum. Parminter scrabbled away from him, got to his feet and ran. The front door of the house slammed behind him. Ripley and the insubstantial man faced each other.

“You,” the man said. “You know how to operate the machine?”

“I … yes.” Ripley formed the words by consciously directing his tongue and lips.

“That is good. Please be seated at the head of the table.”

Ripley stood up and walked mechanically to the big chair. A dozen vaporous faces regarded him as he sat down, and he noticed they were all expectant rather than menacing. He began to feel more at ease as the first dim understanding of the situation came to him.

“This is a great moment,” the spokesman for the group said. “Communication between the two planes of existence has always been difficult and uncertain. The few genuine mediums still alive are so … inefficient that it is hardly worth one’s while bothering with them. It is impossible for us to materialise for more than a minute or two and,” a note of petulance crept into his voice, ‘you’ve no idea how frustrating it is to make the effort only to find oneself expected to deal with an elderly lady in some kind of fainting fit.”

The blurry features became animated. ‘But now—at last—an effective system has been created, a pool of the kind of information about loved ones on the other side of the veil that we all crave. The information will be available quickly and easily, provided there is a human agent to operate the machine. You will continue to be available, won’t you?”

“I …’ Ripley was unable to speak.

“There’s good money in the spiritualism business,” the spokesman said anxiously. The other misty figures nodded emphatically. Looking around them, Ripley thought about his miserable existence as a salesman, and suddenly the decision was very easy to make, although he would still have to come to some arrangement with Parminter.

“I’ll be here as long as you want me,” he said. There was a flutter of pleasure around the assembly.

“That’s just wonderful,” the spokesman said. “And now, as I’ve been using up ectoplasm faster than the others, I claim the first question. My name is Jonathan Mercer and I used to live on the corner of Tenth and Third. I would like to know if my daughter Emily ever married that young accountant, and if cousin Jean finally got her divorce.”

Ripley put his fingers on the keyboard beneath the edge of the table and—with the look of a man who has found fulfilment—began to address the computer.

The Cosmic Cocktail Party

A highball on the human reality vector:

Urquhart, just returned from holiday, was staring nostalgically through the wall of his office at the silver of morning frost on rooftops. Beyond the grey rectangles of the administration complex he could see the brow of a wooded hill, its tints bleached by distance, and again he felt a curious sense of urgency.

A literary acquaintance had once told him it was not uncommon for people to experience vague stirrings when they looked through a window at a far-off hillside, especially if it had trees and sunlit slopes. Read The Golden Bough, the writer had said, and you’ll understand that the part of you which still worships at lost altars in the Cambodian rain forest becomes uneasy when reminded of how far you’ve strayed from your true destiny. Urquhart had dismissed the idea as pretentious nonsense, yet on this morning it seemed almost valid. Back in his first week at Belhampton he had decided to go to the hill and explore it on foot, but that had been six years ago, and he had done nothing about it. I’m squandering time as if it were money, he thought in sudden alarm. Tenpence fugit….

The mood of introspection faded as the silver bullet of the 9.00 monorail came sweeping along the spur line which connected Biosyn’s headquarters to the 1,000 kph London-Liverpool tubeway. A handful of passengers got out on to the elevated platform, among them a tall Negro in a flame-coloured tunic. Even at two hundred metres the powerful spread of the man’s shoulders was noticeable, and Urquhart felt a spasm of alarm as he half-identified the new arrival.

“Theophilus,” he said, addressing the admin computer. “Is Martin M’tobo in this country?”

There was a barely perceptible pause while Theophilus used a microwave link to interrogate the GPO computer in Greenwich. “Yes,” the terminal on the polished desk said.

“How and when did he arrive?”

“On the Meridian Thistledown flight from Losane, touching down at Chobham at 7.11 this morning.”

“You’re a fat pig,” Urquhart said bitterly.

“I’m a fat pig,” the computer agreed. “Go on—if this is one of your ridiculous test problems in two-valued logic I require to hear the other premises before printing out any Boolean truth tables.”

Ignoring the sarcasm, Urquhart extended a freckled hand and pressed a button which connected him to Bryan Philp, who was his technical director and chief of the bionics staff. The image of Philp’s close-cropped head floated at the communicator’s projection focus.

“Martin M’tobo is outside.” Urquhart kept his voice flat. “Were you aware of this?”

“No.” Philp smiled immediately, showing unusually large and white teeth, and tilted his head back so that the lenses of his spectacles became two miniature suns. His bony face was suddenly impenetrable, inhuman. It was, Urquhart knew, a defensive move and it showed the other man felt he had been remiss in not keeping a check on M’tobo’s movements.

“He arrived in England only two hours ago and must have come straight here. Unannounced. What does that suggest to you?”

Philp’s face became serious. “Well, it doesn’t suggest he merely wants to talk to the founder and illustrious leader of his nation.”

“I agree. But it does suggest he’s losing faith in Biosyn, growing suspicious.”

Philp smiled and flashed his glasses on the instant, turning himself into a genial mechanical man. “We held Crowley as best we could, but with that personality structure he was disposed to drift. Very difficult.”

“Have you an address for him now?”

“An approximate one. We can’t locate him with much more accuracy than a decimetre or so on all three co-ordinates.”

“Can you recall him before M’tobo gets through security, say within ten minutes?”

Philp looked pained. “If we could do that there’d be no problem, would there?” The image of his head jiggled up and down slightly, and Urquhart guessed he was making violent and probably obscene gestures out of camera range, but this was no time to concern himself with trivial matters of discipline.

“Mmmmph.” He drummed his fingers as he made the decision. “I’m going to let M’tobo see the Tank.”

“Is that wise?”

‘Better than letting him get the idea that Crowley’s dead. I’d like you to be there too.” Urquhart broke contact and the other man’s image dissolved into the air in swirling motes of brilliance, fugitive fireflies. He told Theophilus where he was going, then hurried out of his office and took the dropshaft to the ground floor. M’tobo’s theatrical figure was immediately discernible in the Arctic blue reception hall, his huge shoulders straining impatiently beneath the orange tunic as he headed towards the row of scanning booths which would judge his eligibility to enter the building proper. Approaching the booths from the inward side, Urquhart used his key and over-rode the security computer of one cubicle just as M’tobo was reaching it. The Negro looked mildly surprised as both doors quivered open and he saw Urquhart waiting for him with outstretched hand.

“Welcome to Biosyn, Martin,” Urquhart said cheerfully. “Why didn’t you signal you were coming and let us pick you up at the airport?”

“Thanks, John.” M’tobo’s warm dry hand closed over Urquhart’s. “I didn’t want to inconvenience you—you must be very busy just now.”

“We’re never too busy to greet an old friend,” Urquhart assured him, weighing the implication that the company’s management was experiencing difficulties.

“Thank you, but this is a business visit more than anything else. Is Colonel Crowley available?” They began walking towards the glowing green organ-pipes of the dropshafts.

“Ah … no. We’re temporarily out of contact—but why didn’t you use the microwave link to call him? It would have saved you….”

“I had a feeling he wouldn’t be available, and my business is mainly with you, John. Is it safe to speak here?”

Urquhart stopped walking. “Yes.”

“The position—in a nutshell—is that a general election is being forced on my Government, probably within two months. You’ve heard about the riots in Losane?”

“We all have.” Urquhart was enveloped in the cold unease of premonition. ‘But I assumed it was merely teachers demanding equal pay with students, or something like that. I didn’t think they were serious.”

“I assure you that they are. O’ringa’s Democratic Reform party has gathered much support in the past year, so much that we have no option but to agree to an election—an election we might lose without the active support of Colonel Crowley.”

“Active?” Urquhart laughed as he glanced up at M’tobo’s glistening chestnut face above the wall-like torso. The saffron-tinged eyes were uncomfortably intent on his own.

“Active in the political sense—which means being available at all times to speak to his people and to give his overt blessing to the Loyalist Government. That is no more than we were promised by Biosyn.”

“Of course, of course.” Urquhart glanced around him at the scattered knots of people in the reception hall. “Martin, perhaps we shouldn’t talk here. I’m going to take you down to the Tank level.”

M’tobo took an involuntary step backwards and collided with a pert secretary who was wearing one of the latest vi-bras. The impact threw the tiny impulse motors in the vi-bra out of synchronisation and the girl hurried away looking disgusted as she tried to control the wild oscillations of her bosom.

“Interesting effect, that,” Urquhart smirked desperately, but the huge man’s eyes were blank and Urquhart suddenly understood a little more of what was happening in the African state he represented. If a person of M’tobo’s education and experience had doubts and fears—what would the mass of his people be like?

M’tobo recovered his composure almost immediately. He talked about inconsequentials while Urquhart used his key to get them into the special shaft which went a hundred metres down into bedrock. The drop took a matter of seconds, then they were stepping into the Tank room. It was fifty metres square and hewn from solid rock, but each wall was covered with magnified scenes brought down from the roof in light pipes, creating the impression of being in a penthouse. Urquhart glimpsed the same wooded hill in the misty morning light, his hill, and he made up his mind to go there at the weekend. The Tank itself occupied the centre of the room, its mirrored sides stretching from floor to ceiling, and desks of varying sizes formed a line around it. Most of the desks had two or more technicians seated at them.

“Martin!” Bryan Philp, teeth and glasses screening his face with light, advanced on them. “Good to see you, good to see you!”

You ham, Urquhart thought, don’t overplay the welcome. But M’tobo’s attention was held by the Tank. He took several paces towards it and stood with his back to the others. Watching him, Urquhart remembered his own early dismay, the emotional upheavals which were a result of intellect forcing instinct to accept the impossible….

“It is so difficult for me to credit this thing,” M’tobo said. “I attended Colonel Crowley’s private funeral and cremation, and yet I have to believe he is alive in there.” He seemed subdued, slightly less Herculean, and Urquhart realised that bringing him face-to-face with the Tank had been a good tactical move. M’tobo turned to speak to Philp. “The technology involved goes far beyond my understanding, and yet I wish I could learn….”

Philp’s eyes lit with excitement. “Come into my office, Martin. I’ve got something you’ll be interested in.” He took M’tobo’s elbow and steered him into his long office which had a glass partition on one side and an old-fashioned blackboard on the other. Urquhart followed with brooding suspicions that his technical director was about to go off the rails, as he usually did when not closely confined to his own work. Philp waved M’tobo into a chair and busied himself with the controls of a 3D projector.

‘Bryan,” Urquhart whispered. “I hope you’re not going to show that animation I’ve heard about. The one you and your cretinous mechanics put together while you were supposed….”

“Hello,” said a pink cigar with fins at one end and a comicbook face at the other. It had appeared in the air close to the blackboard and was bowing grotesquely while introducing itself. “I am an intercontinental ballistic missile and, believe it or not, I am a direct ancestor of the bionics Tank in which a human personality can be synthesised and preserved indefinitely.

“Let me tell you something about a little family problem I had a long time ago. Like all other early complex computer systems I was … well, let’s face it, I was downright unreliable. My designers did their best with my individual parts, and managed to give them a reliability factor of something like 99.9993 per cent, but even this allowed me only a reasonable chance of working properly. Increasing the reliability of individual components was an engineering dead-end, because any minute gains were more than cancelled by my growing size and complexity.”

The pink cigar paused to demonstrate this process by becoming a little longer and sprouting an extra fin. M’tobo stared at it fixedly.

“You’ll roast for this,” Urquhart snarled quietly in Philp’s ear. “Our PR consultants gave strict instructions that this abortion of yours was to be destroyed. Turn it off at once!”

“And yet there is one very common type of computer which has achieved the opposite effect—this is the human brain,” the cigar continued blithely, and smiled as a greenish object resembling a boiled cauliflower appeared in the air beside it.

“It consists of ten thousand million neurons, each of which is less dependable than a transistor—and still the complete system is millions of times more reliable than any of its single parts. The brain is not perfect, mind you. Being a survival device, it is somewhat inflexible as a result of its conditioning, and, quite frankly, it is not very well adapted to handling problems in logic’

“I must agree,” the brain said in a coy feminine voice and Urquhart groaned aloud. “The problems don’t end there, either. My neurons are exactly like my friend’s electronic switches in that they have to be either on or off, with no in-between state possible—but they are very much slower in operation than switches.

“How do I overcome these drawbacks? The answer is simple—I act in parallel. Many different connections are made simultaneously, with the result that a defective biological switch is immediately outvoted, giving me high reliability. Acting in parallel also makes up for the comparative slowness of my neurons.”

“Absolutely true,” the pink cigar cut in. “With the example of the brain before them, computer designers began turning away from sequential or serial operation as far back as the Nineteen-Sixties. They investigated parallel operation systems modelled on the brain and the technique proved successful—machines capable of human-like, alogical, heuristic thinking came into being—but the biggest breakthrough of all was the development of microminiature electrochemical components.” The cauliflower-like brain abruptly vanished and was replaced by a swarm of multi-coloured specks, striped like wasps.

Urquhart made a determined effort to reach the projector’s controls, but Philp’s sharp elbow struck him painfully on the mouth. “You’re finished, Philp,” he whispered, gingerly patting his upper lip. “You leave Biosyn today.”

“Relax, John—Martin’s enjoying the show. It’s almost over anyway.” Philp flashed his outsize teeth as the cigar began to speak.

“Designers found themselves equipped with a whole new armoury of basic components—the artron, an artificial neuron with built-in logic and inhibitor gates which enabled it effectively to simulate the brain’s neuron; the neuristor, a diode which stood in for the axon, the nerve fibre which connects the neuron; the memistor, which used electrochemical phenomena to function as a memory unit.

“True artificial intelligence had finally been born—and with it the possibility that an individual human intelligence could evade the catastrophic power failure we refer to as death. This was done by sweeping the brain just before death with an ultra-fast Röntgen ray scanner, recording the electrical state of every one of its millions of components. The result was a tremendously complex programme which, when fed into the Tank, recreated the human personality in every detail.

“Thank you for listening so patiently.” The pink cigar bowed again and vanished.

Urquhart wiped the perspiration from his forehead. “How can I apologise for this childish exhibition, Martin? My colleague is obviously a frustrated washing powder salesman.”

“No need to apologise—I found it quite interesting, as a matter of fact.” M’tobo got to his feet and looked out through the glass partition towards the Tank. “I hadn’t realised the computer would be so large.”

“The matrix itself occupies only a part of the installation you see there.” Philp’s angular frame moved jerkily as he spoke. “Of course, we have almost a thousand other clients in there, but even so, Nature still has a slight edge when it comes to density. Even with the latest cyber-random, self-establishing palimpsest circuitry the best we’ve been able to achieve is five million artrons to the cubic centimetre. So Colonel Crowley’s brain is approximately twice as big as the one he had previously.”

M’tobo shook his head slowly. “Exactly whereabouts in the computer is the brain?”

Philp glanced warily at Urquhart, then switched on his smile.

“That’s the whole point,” Urquhart said. “Each client has an address—specific volume of the matrix which was assigned to him when his personality was programmed into the Tank—but circuitry of this kind is self-establishing. It is possible for a kind of osmosis to occur, for an identity to change its position.”

“When that happens you lose contact?” M’tobo’s practical mind was going to the heart of the problem.

“Well … more or less.”

“Wouldn’t it be better if you employed much smaller matrices and had only one client to each?”

“For engineering and administrative reasons, undoubtedly—but economics are involved too. We can now produce artrons for something like a penny each, but complete simulation of an adult brain calls for ten thousand million artrons. So, for artrons alone—never mind associated components—the bill for the equivalent of a man’s brain comes to a hundred million dollars.”

“M’tobo nodded glumly. “Then how can you … ?”

“More than one identity can occupy a given volume of the matrix at any time. That’s why we use the word palimpsest, although it isn’t strictly accurate—the old writing on the manuscript doesn’t have to be erased. With multiple usage of the components the cost is shared, and even a small and fairly new country like Losane is enabled to retain the services of its great men after they have died.” Urquhart stopped speaking suddenly. He had found himself selling the Biosyn plan to M’tobo all over again, which made it look as though he was unsure of himself.

“Yes. Colonel Crowley’s personality has been preserved at a greatly reduced cost.” M’tobo’s voice was growing more resonant as he became used to the proximity of the Tank. ‘But the point is that my Government is not acting out of sentiment. If the Colonel is not available to advise his supporters and lend visible support to the Loyalists, then he might as well be dead. From our point of view it would be better if he were dead, because the money we are paying to Biosyn could be used for other purposes.”

“I appreciate your feelings, Martin.” Urquhart glanced at Philp, whose teeth and glasses immediately blazed with morning light from the vicarious windows. ‘But let me assure you that this break in communications with Colonel Crowley is of a very temporary nature.”

M’tobo squared the massive cantilevers of his shoulders and began walking towards the door. “I’m glad to hear that. I’ve arranged for him to broadcast to the whole of Losane five days from now. If he is not available I will discontinue our bi-annual payments to Biosyn—and I will make my reasons for doing so very public’

Later, when the Losanian had been escorted to the monorail, Urquhart hurried back to the Tank level and found Philp sipping cofftea from a plastic bulb. Philp’s bony face showed concern.

“Five days,” Urquhart said. “Can you do it?”

“You fired me, remember?”

“You’re reinstated.”

Philp shrugged. “While you were up top we lost contact with two more clients—including Browne.”

‘Browne! But he’s …’

“I know. Eight years in the Tank and never once strayed from his input/output station. I would have sworn he was the best adjusted of the lot—but the last thing he said to us was that Crowley has shown him there is more to existence than being a kind of intellectual sponge. I tried to hold him by increasing the input voltage at his station, but he pulled that trick of Crowley’s—overloaded most of his molecular amplifiers and used the extra energy to batter his way towards the centre of the Tank. It must have been painful for him, but he got away from me.”

Urquhart sat down and stared dully at the mirrored side of the Tank. “Perhaps we should have told M’tobo the truth.”

“We may have to, eventually—but how do you convince a patriot like Martin that the founder of his country has lost interest in it, that he has found new kingdoms to conquer?”

“New kingdoms?”

Philp studied Urquhart narrowly, as if seeing him for the first time. “I’ve been wondering how to tell you this, John. Our multiple usage scheme is not a very good idea—at least, for some types of client. Crowley, for example, was a classic, damn-the-torpedoes, statesman-adventurer who—if he’d been consulted before that car crash—would probably have blown out his own brains rather than be programmed into the Tank.

“Now, our typical client is a professor emeritus whose fee was paid by a university department which was grateful to see him finally tucked away, and who probably had been existing as a pure intellect for twenty years before his death.”

“What difference does it make? Crowley’s in there now and he’ll just have to adapt.”

“That’s what you think.” Philp snorted. “If you’d been paying attention to my animation you’d know that every neuron in Crowley’s original brain has its counterpart in the Tank. Crowley was endowed with the strong will common to his kind, which from the biologist’s point of view is another way of saying there was plenty of power available locally at his neurons to amplify weak signals and trigger off following branches of neurons.

“Translated into the electrochemical context of the Tank, our Colonel Crowley has a lot of extra molecular amplifiers which give his artron networks more zip than those of our other clients.”

“What of it?”

“I’ll tell you what of it. Crowley doesn’t just converse with other clients in the normal manner—he imposes his own thought patterns on them.”

Urquhart’s sense of alarm deepened. “That sounds bad. How long has it been going on?”

“Several weeks. Ever since Crowley learned how to screen off all normal inputs and to generate his own signals. That’s what I meant about conquering new kingdoms—he has his own private universe to occupy him.”

“You mean he’s insane?”

“Not necessarily. A psychologist might say he has prevented himself from going insane.”

“This is terrible.” Urquhart began pacing the length of the office. ‘But come now, Bryan—you’re exaggerating when you say he has a private universe. Do you mean … ha-ha … he forces some of the others to swallow his own notions about the benefits of colonialism?”

“I mean he makes them ride around a desert on green-and-red dragons while he hunts them with a rifle.”

“Jehovah’s jockstrap!” Urquhart lurched drunkenly against Philp’s workdesk and the pink cigar popped into existence above his head.

“Hello,” it chirped. “I am an intercontinental ballistic missile….”

“Try to be a bit more careful,” Philp said reprovingly, setting his cofftea down and going to the desk. He touched a button and the cigar vanished, shrinking through spurious perspectives.

“You’ve made me ill,” Urquhart accused. “What is this nonsense about dragons and hunting with a rifle?”

“Crowley has created another reality, and that’s it. I occasionally get a few details from Professor Isaacs, who was one of the first that Crowley sucked into his own orbit. The information is very sparse because Crowley keeps him pretty well occupied.”

“Then Crowley is mad. If this leaks out the company’s finished. We’ve got to get a psychiatrist here in secret, in the middle of the night, and have him talk to Crowley on the general address system.”

“I thought of that. It’s no use. The GA signals we put into the matrix reach Crowley all right, but he doesn’t want to hear anything which conflicts with his fantasy existence, so he shunts them on past him. Turns a deaf ear. We all do it to a certain extent.”

Urquhart felt his lower lip begin to tremble. He walked to one of the simulated windows and stood looking out. His distant hill glowed in afternoon sunshine, looking softer and more inviting than ever before. “A friend once told me I should read The Golden Bough because it has a message for me. So I read it—and all I can remember is a ghastly passage about young men cutting off their testicles and throwing them through people’s windows.”

“Really?” Philp sounded unsympathetic. “Are you going to try it?”

“If I thought it would …’ Urquhart turned to Philp who was draining his cofftea. “You almost seem to be enjoying this, Bryan—for a man who’s facing ruin you seem rather unconcerned.”

“Ruin?” Philp grinned broadly. “It’s a little early to speak in those terms, old son. I may be able to bring Crowley back.”

Urquhart felt his jaw sag but was unable to prevent it. “Why didn’t you say so earlier?”

“Well, there’s just one thing.”

“Which is?”

“I want to be managing director of Biosyn.”

‘But I’m the managing director.”

“You’re also chairman—and one of those posts should be enough for anybody.”

Urquhart brought his jaw under control and made an attempt to square it. “I’m not going to be blackmailed.”

“The board of Bristol University are coming here next week in person to pay a visit to Professor Isaacs. I’ll see if he can get down from his dragon long enough to speak to them.”

“I’d forgotten about Isaacs.” Urquhart sat down and covered his face with his hands. “All right, Bryan—managing director it is. Now what are you going to do about Crowley?”

“Thank you, John.” Philp began striding about his office. “It’s nice to get a little promotion now and then. As for Colonel Crowley—I’ve been studying his career profile and I think the best weapon we can use against him is the cocktail party effect.”

A rum on the resultant reality vector:

The Right Hon. Harold Wilson, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, lit his pipe and puffed out a luxuriant cloud of blue smoke which billowed across the spaceship’s control room.

Vaulter looked at him with six critical eyes. “Now there’s something I’d overlooked,” he said aloud.

“You surprise me,” Mr. Wilson murmured. “At this stage? What is it?”

“The smoke you puffed out was blue, but when a human being exhales the smoke which comes out is grey—moisture in the lungs condenses on the carbon particles and changes the wave-length of the light they reflect.”

“Nobody on Earth is going to notice a thing like that,” Mr. Wilson protested hastily.

Vaulter silenced him with an upraised tentacle. “Never neglect even the minutest detail—that is the recipe for success on this type of mission. I’m going to fit a water sac in your chest cavity. Please take off your clothes.”

Mr. Wilson tapped out his pipe on a glowing control panel, leaving a small heap of ash among the switches, and began removing his tweed suit, muttering angrily all the while.

“What was that?” Vaulter said.

“Nothing, nothing.”

“I thought I heard you say something about Tory misrule.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Mr Wilson snapped. He stepped out of his underpants and stood to attention while Vaulter put a tentacle on each nipple and pushed outwards. The pale flesh split easily down the line of the plastic sternum and Vaulter went to work inside the thorax. There was a long period of silence inside the spaceship, interrupted only by the faint rattling of tools and an occasional soft chiming note from the isntrument panels. Finally Vaulter began to gather up the shining implements and fit them carefully into a case.

“You may get dressed now,” he said. “Then begin smoking again—I want to check the result. If necessary I’ll fit an atomiser to vaporise the water.”

“Surely that won’t be necessary.”

“I repeat, attention to detail is necessary. The orbiting telepathic field boosters will not give you absolute control of the population of Earth—all we can guarantee is that they will generate a firm belief in the principles of Benign Socialism. If you make a mistake and people begin to suspect your origins, dangerous conflicts will be created. These people are not yet ready for full membership of the Galactic Socialist Congress, so they must believe you are a product of their world.”

Mr. Wilson re-lit his pipe and blue smoke curled upwards from the bowl. “You think they’ll swallow reincarnation? After all, the original Harold Wilson has been dead for a hundred of their years.” He breathed out and his eyes followed the smoke which ascended from his mouth, noting with evident relief that it was a satisfactory grey.

“For your information, this technique has worked on every other Grade C world. There is a strong possibility that an element of religion will assert itself, especially as the broadcasts we’ve been monitoring make frequent references to Mr. Wilson walking on water.”

‘But those broadcasts are more than a hundred years out of date! Why couldn’t I have been modelled on a 21st Century Earth politician?”

There was a silence while Vaulter crossed two of his eye-stalks, his equivalent of a sigh of exasperation. I’m sorry, Harold—I keep forgetting that your mind programme is based almost entirely on that of the original Mr. Wilson. I’ll explain the astronomical background once more. The only GCG station in this region of the galaxy which is capable of building a being like you is 800 light years from Earth, and even our best ships take fifty years to cover that distance.

“So when our observers gathered enough data to enable them to predict the abrupt decline of the native variety of Benign Socialism it took them fifty years to warn the Congress, and it has taken another fifty years to transport you to the trouble spot. Clear?”

“I don’t feel as if I’ve been travelling that length of time.”

‘Because I didn’t activate you until a few days ago, stupid! I’m sorry, Harold. My nerves are a little strained, and I sometimes find it difficult to adjust to the many … ah … variegated forms of Benign Socialist leader that have sprung into existence across the galaxy.”

“It’s all right. Am I to assume that we’re close to Earth?”

“We’re in Earth orbit.” Vaulter flowed across to the instrument panels. “I’m tuning in to the orbiting telepathic field boosters now. The population of Earth has increased alarmingly in the last century, but luckily human brain dissipates only about ten watts so we still have ample power reserves. You will be able to blanket the entire planet with Wilsonian thinking.”

A faint smile puckered Mr. Wilson’s lips as he sucked noisily on the stem of his pipe.

Vaulter adjusted a series of verniers with a delicate tendril. “I’ll give the hook-up a final inspection at close range before you take over. Everything seems to be functioning smoothly with our transmitter network. Good! Now, I’ll just make sure that … No! No!” Vaulter hit a master switch with a convulsive movement of his puce-coloured body and rippled to the centre of the control room.

Mr. Wilson looked concerned. “What has happened?”

“The egotistical fools,” Vaulter said in a shocked whisper.

“What’s going on?”

“There has been an awkward development, I’m afraid. Earth technology has reached the level of the fairly complex computer, and they’ve been misusing the techniques to try immortalising selected individuals.”

“How does that affect me? I mean, us.”

“The computerised identities operate at vastly higher voltages than they did in the biological state and we can’t influence them. They will create huge pockets of resistance to your telepathic control.”

Mr. Wilson’s face darkened. “That’s bad.”

“There’s worse to follow. One of the identities appears to have screened out all local data inputs which normally render any sentient being insensible to telepathic probing. I made direct two-way contact with him for an instant. I’m afraid, Harold, that he may be on to us.”

Mr. Wilson’s pipe fell from his mouth and bounced on the floor, creating further little heaps of ash. “I knew it was too good to be true,” he said bitterly. “I just knew it.”

Vaulter remained motionless for a second, and when he spoke his voice was firm. “We aren’t giving up so easily. Benign Socialism deplores the use of violence, but technically speaking these individuals are already dead. I don’t think I would be violating the code of the Galactic Congress if I destroyed the computer installations at once, before any alarm can be raised.”

“I too deplore violence, naturally,” Mr. Wilson grated. ‘But I do see what you mean.”

A cognac on the computer reality vector:

Colonel Mason Crowley unsheathed his bolt rifle and climbed down from the huge dragon’s back. He had been riding hard for two days and his thigh muscles were aching from the effort of retaining his seat while Shalazzar bounded over the broken, ochreous landscapes of Tal. Now his quarry was trapped and the hunt was almost over.

“Do we rest here?” Professor Chan Isaacs, his lieutenant, wiped his face with a rag as he reined in his mount on the rocky ridge where Crowley had stopped.

Crowley pointed at the rag and issued a sharp command. “No textiles!”

‘But how do I get rid of this filthy dust?”

“You don’t—not till we reach water.”

For a moment Isaacs looked as though he might rebel, then he held out the stained scrap of red cloth and let it fall. It fluttered downwards slowly and vanished before touching the ground. The coating of saffron dust reappeared on Isaac’s round face, turning it into an Oriental mask.

“That’s better,” Crowley said, checking the fuel cell output of his rifle. “Just remember—no wool-bearing fauna, no fibrous plants, therefore no textiles.”

Isaacs looked tired. “How about artificial fibres?”

“There is no plastics industry,” Crowley reminded him. “Tal is still in an early agrarian phase of its development.”

“Then, for Christ’s sake, how can you have that fancy rifle?”

Isaacs’ angry words ripped into Crowley’s consciousness, and the distant ramparts of the Mountains of Morida swam like reflections on the surface of a lake. You’re dead, a cold grey voice told him. You’re dead, and your soul is trapped in a black box. Queen Elanos does not exist…. He took a deep shuddering breath and pointed at Isaacs, who had dismounted from his dragon.

“Isaacs,” he said harshly. “You had a fall yesterday. Your left arm is dislocated at the elbow.”

Isaacs’ face twisted in sudden pain as the dark mounds of bruises appeared on his arm. “No! There was no fall. My arm is all right.”

“Then heal it.”

Black smears of dried blood changed their shape beneath the coating of dust on the swollen arm as the wills of the two men clashed, but after a few seconds Isaacs submitted. “My arm is out of joint,” he muttered. “And it hurts like hell.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Crowley said. “We’ll put a bandage on it as soon as we’ve dealt with Browne.”

“Thank you, Colonel.”

Crowley walked to the southern side of the ridge and shaded his eyes from the lowering sun. The plateau sloped away gently for less than a kilometre, then there was a sheer drop of a thousand metres to the Cythian Plain. Browne, the rebel, was trapped somewhere in the triangular area of rocks and stunted trees, and his dragon was too exhausted to make a successful break past the hunters.

“I’ll go forward alone on foot. Queen Elanos has given me personal responsibility in this matter, and I want it ended before dark.” Crowley signalled his dragon to rest and the huge beast settled on its haunches, electric-green and magenta scales clicking as the sack-like belly flattened out on the ground.

“Good luck,” Isaacs said drily.

Ignoring him, Crowley set the bolt rifle for maximum charge and moved downwards into the triangle. He had discarded all clothing except for a breech clout of fine leather, and the heat of the rocks seared through his skin at every contact. The hunt had taken more out of him than he liked to admit, but he had the consolation of knowing that Browne must be in worse condition. Browne was tenacious, but he had no experience in this type of country which was remarkably similar to Crowley’s native Losane. Losane? Repetition of the name caused an obscure flickering pain far back in Crowley’s mind. That can’t be right. I was born in Perigore, in the castle of Rembold the Bright, and I was called to Tal from afar by Queen Elanos to defend her against …

Something moved in the rocks and scrub a hundred paces to Crowley’s right. He instinctively dropped into a crouch, and levelled the rifle as the figure of an almost naked man appeared from behind a dessicated tree. It was Browne—but unarmed, and without his dragon.

“Crowley!” The man’s voice was faint. “I want to talk to you.”

Crowley straightened up, still aiming the rifle. “Here I am, traitor, and I advise you not to try any of your tricks.”

“No tricks—I simply want to speak to you.”

“Do you acknowledge the sovereignty of Queen Elanos?”

“That’s what I want to talk about.” Browne scrambled upwards until he was face-to-face with Crowley. Sweat had traced red rivers in the dust on his face. He was about fifty years old and had the flabby build of someone who ate too much and exercised too little, but his eyes shone with an uncompromising hardness.

“Do you acknowledge our Queen?” Crowley demanded.

“Let’s consider Queen Elanos for a moment,” Browne said calmly. “I’ve been thinking about her name. E-L-A-N-O-S. Don’t you notice something peculiar there?”

“Peculiar?” Crowley’s voice shook with anger. “Peculiar?”

“Yes. Don’t you see it? Elanos is an anagram of Losane—the name of the country you carved out of Rhodesia almost single-handed in what, for lack of a better term, I call your previous life.”

“I’m warning you,” Crowley said as the distant Cythian Plain momentarily reversed its colours, split into horizontal lines and reassembled itself.

“This whole fantasy in which you have embroiled us is a reenactment of your political career, Colonel Crowley. Queen Elanos is a personification of Losane—the first fragment of Africa which, thanks to you, opted to return to Imperial rule….”

“Silence—or you die now.”

“You’re a dyed-in-the-wool Colonialist, Crowley. This Queen Elanos of yours—she looks very like a former Queen of England, right? But not Elizabeth II, because she wouldn’t suit the role. Elanos resembles Victoria, doesn’t she?”

The cloudless sky above the Kingdom of Tal turned grey and a charcoal sketch of a strangely familiar, bespectacled man’s face appeared in it for an instant, stretching from jagged horizon to zenith. A voice like the echoes of far-off thunder issued from the insubstantial grainy lips. ‘… preliminary reports indicate that an unidentified spaceship has entered Earth orbit. The immense size of the vessel suggests that it is not of human origin….”

“What was that?” Crowley said, looking upwards into the sky.

“I didn’t notice anything,” Browne replied impatiently. “And consider my name, even my personal appearance. Why do you think you cast me as a villain of the piece? George Brown was a prominent member of the British Labour Government in the last century, just at the time of the final dissolution of the old British Empire, and there’s no doubt that this coincidence of nomenclature is a major …’

Contact!

A thousand years of alien existence, a mind dedicated to the incredible proposition that association should be substituted for competition, a being which controlled vast forces, including the power to make all men think alike, a being which immediately identified Crowley as its enemy, and which was coming to …

Retreat!

“What’s happening?” Crowley felt his mouth go dry.

‘… principle of self-establishing circuitry has disproved the a priori or ‘wired-in knowledge’ theory concerning the human brain in favour of the tabula rasa or clean slate new brain,” Browne droned on pedantically. “In our present state the hitherto indefinable quality known as ‘will’ is translated into physical reality as a higher than normal proportion of molecular amplifiers, which is the only reason you are able to impress your dreamscapes on others. But this state of affairs depends …’

“Stop mouthing for a moment—didn’t you feel anything?”

“Of course not, because I too have gained control of my amplifiers and I’m withdrawing from this particular fantasy.”

“Fantasy?” Crowley looked down at the rifle, which promptly turned into a broom and then vanished. “I’m talking about the … real world. I … I … Something is happening out there, and I’m the only one who understands. I’ve got to speak to Philp or Urquhart immediately.”

Browne looked around him, almost regretfully, at the dissolving mountains and plains of the Kingdom of Tal. ‘Be careful,” he said with a strange gentleness, ‘you could be walking into a …’

Crowley lost contact with him as the complex electrical network which simulated his personality began establishing new circuits within the compliant matrix, recreating the channels of communication with the outside world.

A Hennessy on the human reality vector:

Urquhart fixed his gaze for a moment on the wooded hill and made up his mind to waste no more time—he would go there very soon, possibly tomorrow, or maybe the next day. He picked up a plastic reference copy of a computer programme from his desk and his eyes scanned the typed words.

“I still think the risk was too great, Bryan,” he said. “A being from interstellar space which was planning to destroy the Tank, then set up a puppet dictator to rule the world by thought control! And you actually fed this mush into the Tank on the general address system?”

“I did.” Philp smiled his dazzling smile.

“You told our clients they were in imminent danger of losing their lives?”

“That’s what I told them,” Philp said comfortably. “They didn’t believe me, of course. Bill Uvarov was on the current affairs query panel at the time and according to him it lit up like a Christmas tree in less than a second. I apologised to everyone and told them part of a spoof television show had been fed in by mistake. They took it all right—but I’ll be getting sarcastic comments for the next year.”

Urquhart set the programme down. “And the only one who was taken in was Colonel Crowley.”

“Well, in bionics and biology we use the term ’cocktail party effect’ to describe the brain’s ability to pick out a single voice from the hubbub of noise made by a large group all speaking at once—and Crowley hadn’t lost that facility. He was screening out all other communications, but when I tailored a fantasy especially for him he heard me immediately.

“All I had to do was concoct a dream which was even more attractive and stimulating for him than the one in which he was living. With his background and mental make-up he couldn’t resist the idea of saving the world from interstellar socialism.”

“And you’ll be able to hold him on station until after Losane’s general election?”

“Yes—now that we know what to expect. Dorman’s team has set up an inhibitory field which will stabilise the Colonel’s molecular amplifiers at a mean output and impair his ability to drift. He’ll get away eventually, but we’re fine for a year or so …’

Urquhart sighed contentedly and returned his gaze to the hill. “So we’ve nothing to worry about.”

“I’m not too sure about that—I think we’re going to have trouble with Browne. He now says Crowley’s fantasy world wasn’t such a bad place and battling his way out of it was the first taste of genuine involvement he’d had since he was Tanked. I heard him rambling on about deliberately staged contests of will to relieve the boredom. Computerised Olympics or something.”

“Nothing too alarming in that. In fact, he might have something.”

“There’s just one other thing,” Philp said, his eyes hidden behind blazing flakes of glass. “There are bound to be other elections in Losane, and—if I know Mason Crowley—when he eventually takes off into never-never land he’ll be saving the Earth from disaster every week, now that we’ve given him the idea.”

“So?”

“So how do we lure him back next time?”

The Happiest Day of Your Life

Jean Bannion held her youngest son close to her, and blinked to ease the sudden stinging in her eyes.

The eight-year-old nestled submissively into her shoulder. His forehead felt dry and cool, and his hair was filled with the smell of fresh air, reminding her of washing newly brought in from an outdoor line. She felt her lips begin to tremble.

“Look at her’, Doug Bannion said incredulously. ‘Beginning to sniff! What’d she be like if Philip was going to be away at school for years?” Looking over her as she knelt with the boy in her arms, he patted his wife on the head, looking professorial and amused. The two older boys smiled appreciatively.

“Mother is an emotional spendthrift,” said ten-year-old Boyd.

“She has a tendency towards spiritual self-immolation,” said eleven-year-old Theodore.

Jean glared at them helplessly, and they looked back at her with wise eyes full of the quality she had come to hate most since they had travelled the Royal Road—their damnable, twinkling kindness.

‘Boys!” Doug Bannion spoke sharply. “Show more respect for your mother.”

“Thanks,” Jean said without gratitude. She understood that Doug had not reprimanded his sons out of regard for her feelings, but to correct any incipient flaws which might mar their developing characters. Her arms tightened around Philip, and he began to move uneasily, reminding her that she might have been losing him in a few years anyway.

“Philip,” she whispered desperately into his cold-rimmed ear. “What did you see at the movie we went to yesterday?”

“Pinnochio.”

“Wasn’t it fun?”

“For God’s sake, Jean!” Doug Bannion separated them almost roughly. “Come on, Philip—we can’t have you being late on your one and only day at school.”

He took Philip’s hand and they walked away across the gleaming, slightly resilient floor of the Royal Road’s ice-green reception hall. Jean watched them go hand-in-hand to mingle with the groups of children and parents converging on the induction suite. Philip’s toes were trailing slightly in the way she knew so well, and she sensed—with a sudden pang of concern—that he was afraid of what lay ahead, but he did not look back at her.

“Well, there he goes,” ten-year-old Boyd said proudly. “I hope Dad brings him into the practice tomorrow—I could do with his help.”

“There’s more room in my office,” said eleven-year-old Theodore. ‘Besides, the new Fiduciary Obligations Act gets its final reading next week, and I’m going to be involved in a dozen compensation suits. So I need him more than you do.”

They both were junior partners in Doug Bannion’s law firm. Jean Bannion looked for a moment into the calm, wise faces of her children and felt afraid. She turned and walked blindly away from them, trying to prevent her features from contorting into a baby-mask of tears. All around her were groups of other parents—complacent, coolly triumphant—and the sight of them caused her control to slip even further.

Finally, she seized the only avenue of escape available. She ran into the Royal Road’s almost deserted exhibition hall, where the academy’s proud history was told in glowing three-dimensional projections and bland, mechanical whispers.

The first display consisted of two groups of words; pale green letters shimmering in the air against a background of midnight blue. As the slideway carried her past them in silence, Jean read:

“Learning by study must be won;

’twas ne’er entailed from sire to son.”

Gay

“If only Gay could see us now.”

Martinelli

The next display unit showed a solid portrait of Edward Martinelli, founder of the academy and head of the scientific research team which had perfected the cortical manipulation complex. A recording of Martinelli’s own voice, made a few months before his death, began to drone in Jean’s ear with the shocking intimacy of accurately beamed sound.

“Ever since knowledge became the principal weapon in Man’s armoury, his chief ally in his battle for survival, men have sought ways to accelerate the learning process. By the middle of the Twentieth Century, the complexity of the human condition had reached the point at which members of the professional classes were required to spend a full third of their useful lives in the unproductive data-absorption phase….”

Jean’s attention wandered from the carefully modulated words—she had heard the recording twice before and its emotionless technicalities would never have any meaning for her. The complementary means the academy employed—multi-level hypnosis, psycho-neuro drugs, electron modification of the protein pathways in the brain, multiple recordings—were unimportant to her compared with the end result.

And the result was that any child, provided he had the required level of intelligence, could have all the formal knowledge—which would have been gained in ten years of conventional high school and university—implanted in his mind in a little over two hours.

To be eligible, the child had to have an IQ of not less than 140 and a family which could afford to pay, in one lump sum, an amount roughly equal to what the ten years of traditional education would have cost. This was why the faces of the parents in the reception hall had been taut with pride. This was why even Doug Bannion—who made a profession of being phlegmatic—had been looking about him with the hard, bright eyes of one who has found fulfilment.

He had fathered three flawless sons, each with an intelligence quotient in the genius class, and had successfully steered them through the selection procedures which barred the Royal Road to so many. Few men had achieved as much; few women had had the honour of sharing such an achievement….

But why, Jean wondered, did it have to happen to me? To my children? Or why couldn’t I have had a mind like Doug’s? So that the Royal Road would bring the boys closer to me, instead of …

As the slidewalk carried her on its silent rounds, the animated displays whispered persuasively of the Royal Road’s superiority to the old, prolonged, criminally wasteful system of education. They told her of young Philip’s fantastic good luck in being born at the precise moment of time in which, supported on a pinnacle of human technology, he could earn an honours law degree in two brief hours.

But, locked up tight in her prison of despair, Jean heard nothing.

Immediately the graduation ceremony was over, Jean excused herself from Doug and the two older boys. Before they could protest, she hurried out of the auditorium and went back to the car. The sun-baked plastic of the rear seat felt uncomfortably hot through the thin material of her dress.

She lit a cigarette and sat staring across the arrayed, shimmering curvatures of the other cars until Doug and the three boys arrived. Doug slid into the driver’s seat and the boys got in beside him, laughing and struggling. Sitting in the back, Jean felt shut off from her family. She was unable to take her gaze away from Philip’s neat, burnished head. There was no outward sign of the changes that had been wrought in his brain—he looked like any other normal, healthy eight-year-old boy….

“Philip!” She blurted his name instinctively.

“What is it, Mother?” He turned his head and, hearing the emotion in her voice, Theodore and Boyd looked around as well. Three pink, almost-identical faces regarded her with calm curiosity.

“Nothing. I …’ Jean’s throat closed painfully, choking off the words.

“Jean!” Doug Bannion’s voice was harsh with exasperation as he hunched over the steering wheel. His knuckles glowed through the skin, the colour of old ivory.

“It’s all right, Dad,” ten-year-old Boyd said. “For most women, the severing of the psychological umbilical cord is a decidedly traumatic experience.”

“Don’t worry, mother,” Philip said. He patted Jean on the shoulder in an oddly adult gesture.

She brushed his hand away while the tears began to spill hotly down her cheeks, and this time there was no stopping them, for she knew—without looking at him—that the eyes of her eight-year-old son would be wise, and kind, and old.

The Weapons of Isher II

People sometimes ask how, as a relatively young man, I ever became managing editor of a planet-wide news service.

Usually I tell them the expected tale of determination, industry, dedication—and keep the real reason to myself. When it’s time to retire from the business I’ll write the whole thing up in my memoirs, but just at the moment it could make me seem pretty foolish if people learned that I got started on the road to the top because somebody took a shot at my grandfather’s mechanical duck.

The marksman who did it was pretty famous, in fact, probably the most famous Gun ever to stray into our strictly non-Duello sector of the galaxy, but the story could make me look ridiculous just the same.

It began one week when I was feeling bad about the way the job was going and decided to have a few days away from it all down at my family’s farm. Up until that time I had been running what amounted to a one-man show, gathering news for TV and sound transmissions covering half the continent. “Half the continent’ sounds good, but on a planet like Isher II—which has been described as a spherical paddy field—it meant that I was reaching about as many people as did any fair-sized parish magazine back on Earth. Still, I enjoyed the work, was collecting the full Galactic Union of Journalists rate, and had every expectation of landing an even better job in an area covering the more populous exporting centres.

Until Afton Reynolds showed up, that is.

Reynolds had been brought in from a mining world thirty parsecs away to take over when the editor for my area, Daddy Timmins, decided to retire while he still had strength to flick a fishing rod. Timmins had been letting me run the office single-handed for a couple of years and with a bit more seniority I might have been offered his job. Afton Reynolds, however, was a pusher on his way up, and the first thing he began to push on Isher II was me. Within a month of his arrival I had covered ten thousand miles on dead-end assignments, burned out my eyes on “Vital research projects’, and was—I suspect—twice reported to head office for passive resistance. To cap everything, thanks to Reynolds’ direction of my work and blue pencilling of the shaky stories I did collect, I clocked up precisely twelve seconds air time, and even that was on Friendly Night Owl’s Wee Small Hours news roundup—sound only.

As I said, I decided to go back home for a week or two.

By pushing my skimmer hard I made the three-hundred-mile trip from Wadhurst to the homestead in a round hundred minutes. I cut lift and let the skimmer nestle down into mud near the houses, then I realised something was wrong. My grandfather, my father, my two brothers and three of their children were grouped in the patio, and it wasn’t a welcoming party because nobody even noticed my arrival. They seemed to be arguing.

I got out of the skimmer, switched on my weather screen to keep off the fine drizzle we usually have on Isher II and sloshed towards the houses. Finally I was seen by the children, greeted hastily all round, then given what I thought for one wild second to be the news story of the century.

“There’s been a shooting,” grandfather Vogt said angrily. “A murder! Somebody’ll pay for this!”

He was so worked up that I nearly did believe for a moment that somebody had thought out a way to beat the electro-neuro safety catch—the built-in electronic conscience which prevents any weapon on our non-Duello world being turned on a human being, except in self-defence. Not that it made much difference to anybody—most people on Isher II hadn’t even seen a gun since the old days when the planet was being opened up.

“Just a moment, Grandad. Slow down. Who got shot? Has anybody called for a doctor?”

The three children laughed uproariously at my questions, and old Vogt gave me a withering look before splashing away into the house. It was only then I noticed he was carrying something under his arm.

“It’s his duck,” brother Jeff explained as we followed the others. “The new tenant of the old Ericsson farm put a bullet through it when it was out for a test flight.”

“A duck! But there aren’t any ducks on Isher II.” In fact there are no birds of any description on Isher II, so my astonishment was justified.

“Vogt built this one—it’s his new hobby. He started off by making a pigeon, and he says he’ll eventually work up to an eagle, then he’s going to sell them to a museum or maybe start a travelling museum of his own.” We shook our heads in wonderment just as we had been doing over Vogt’s exploits since we were children. He had been the Government’s principal scientific adviser for years and had always had a home workshop full of fascinating and weird gadgets. Force of habit set me thinking that here was a reasonable would-you-believe-it? story, then I kicked myelf for being selfish and also for forgetting that Afton Reynolds would have killed it stone dead anyway.

The combined Tilton clan had dinner that evening at the big table in my mother’s kitchen and she even had my favourite sweet—hot apple pie and brown ale. I was beginning to forget all about the Isher II News Service and my new boss when the after-dinner talk came round to Vogt’s duck.

“What speed could it do, Dad?” my father asked indulgently.

“It was doing about twenty miles an hour,” Vogt said. ‘But I was going to work up to about thirty later on in the test programme.” His face darkened behind its white moustache. “It’ll take me weeks to re-build the guidance receivers. I’m going to send the bill to Bott—he’ll pay for this!”

“Is that his name—Bott?” I asked.

“That’s it. Theophilus V. Bott,” Jeff told me. “Grandad got it from the land office this afternoon when he was getting ready to sue.” There was an explosion of laughter which I didn’t join in because the sound of the name had done something queer to my stomach. I left the table and went to the call screen in the living room.

The night attendant in the reference library at my office turned out to be Sam Griggs, a studious-looking boy who owed me a week’s salary in accumulated poker debts and was always so helpful in consequence that it wouldn’t have been worth my while to make him pay up. He blinked when he saw me.

“I thought you were vacationing.”

“I am. I just want you to settle a bet. Would you look up the name of the current Top Gun for me?”

“Don’t need to,” Sam replied. “It’s Clint Cordner.”

“Grow up, Sam,” I said patiently. “No mother ever looked down at a helpless new-born babe and said, ‘Let’s call him Clint’. I want you to look up his real name.”

Sam hurried away and came back with a stricken look on his face. “The tape says his real name is Theophilus Vernon Bott.”

“I thought it might be something like that. Thanks Sam.” I faded him out and went back into the kitchen where the tobacco jar was being handed round and whisky glasses were clinking. I couldn’t see why the galaxy’s Top Gun should be living under what amounted to an alias right in the heart of a non-Duello sector, but I could sense I was on to something several sizes too big for Afton Reynolds to squash.

I had a late breakfast then drove slowly out to the boundary of our farm and over the lime into the old Ericsson place. It wasn’t actually raining but the grey sky had come down so low that the taller treetops were nuzzling into cloud. As the skimmer cruised silently at a height of four feet I caught occasional glimpses of robots at work down the long lines of protein plants. I could have sworn that one or two of them were painted yellow in place of the pale blue which was the Ericsson farm’s identification colour. This was odd because colour coding is important in keeping check on the willing but idiotic agricultural robots.

A minute later things began to look odder still.

I passed three places where irregular areas the size of football pitches were streaked with yellow paint or dye, then one where everything was lightly covered with white snow-like flakes. When within a couple of miles of the farmhouse I began, with a certain amount of uneasiness, to keep an eye open for the Top Gun. Any weapon that Bott/Cordner might be carrying on New Lincoln would have its electronic conscience governing the trigger, but that wouldn’t prevent him from beating a trespasser over the head with it.

Suddenly I heard an indistinct, angry voice bellowing somewhere near at hand. I was just about to glide quietly towards the nearest piece of cover when I made the shocking discovery that the voice was issuing from the clouds directly over my head.

After a moment of rigid panic I slammed the emergency brake, the skimmer dropped like a stone and I saw something wing down out of the mists in the general direction of the farmhouse. Just before it disappeared from view a rifle shot sounded. The flying object veered sharply to one side, emitted black smoke, then exploded. As the mist closed in, reducing visibility to a couple of hundred yards, I saw a descending billow of whiteness as though someone had burst a flour bag over the treetops.

After three deep drags on a cigarette I left the skimmer and went forward on foot. The white stuff was still drifting down when I reached the general area of the explosion—incredibly, it turned out to be feathers. I picked one up. It was a cheaply made plastic imitation, with a badly trimmed flash all round the edges….

“You one of Hardin’s men?” The voice behind me was cold and flat, just like a Top Gun’s voice ought to be.

“No! No, I’m not,” I said hastily turning round. “As a matter of fact I’m a neighbour of yours. Jack Tilton is the name.” I recognised Cordner at once. He was a tall man in his mid-forties, with straight black hair and grey eyes which had very clear, almost fluorescent, whites to them. His belly bulged slightly over the single gun belt he wore, but Clint Cordner made it look good, like a badge of experience.

“If you’re not one of Hardin’s men, what do you want?”

“I’ve got a complaint,” I said miserably, remembering the sixty or so hardened opponents the man before me had dropped in gun battles. “My grandfather has a flying model duck which he took months to build. Somebody on this farm shot it yesterday and it’s not hard to guess …’

A look of relief washed over Cordner’s face. “So that’s what I shot—a robot duck! I don’t mind telling you, man, when I saw that puff of smoke come out I wondered what the poor crittur had been eating. Yes:, sir, I was real worried about that bird.” He began to laugh.

“It isn’t funny.”

“I guess not,” he finally got out. “I’m real sorry about shooting the duck. I’ve been blasting away at Hardin’s torpedoes for days, man, and when the duck skimmed over me I fired by instinct.”

I decided to get down to the real business of my visit. “Perhaps I should tell you that, as well as being your neighbour, I’m a reporter.”

“A reporter, huh.” Cordner picked up his rifle and scraped some mud off it. “Isher II News Service?”

I nodded, wondering how Cordner had guessed, then decided to keep at him while he was in the mood to talk. “Naturally I’m curious about why you’re on Isher II at all, Mr. Cordner.”

“Call me Clint. Have you a cigarette? Herb Talmus—that’s my manager—doesn’t allow me to smoke while I’m training.” Cordner accepted the cigarette gratefully and puffed it into life.

“Now, about your reasons for …’

Cordner began to walk and I went with him. His legs were a lot longer than mine and I had to churn mud to keep up with him. Suddenly he seemed to reach a decision, slowed down and began to talk. “Herb told me not to say a word until he had worked the story out, but I’m going to get it all off my chest because I don’t like the plan. See?”

I made little circular movements with my head, to be taken as nodding or shaking according to his preference.

“I don’t know what story Herb is cooking up,” Cordner continued, ‘but the real reason I am here is that I’m being chased by a man who’s faster than I am, and I’m scared of him. You’ve heard of Luther Hardin?”

“Isn’t he the Number Three Gun?”

Cordner shook his head. “Number Two now—he got rid of Cal Mason, the old Number Two, last week. I heard it on the radio. Shot him stone dead. There ought to be a law against that sort of thing.”

“What?” I yelped. “What about all the poor guys you’ve shot?”

Cordner looked indignant. “Me! Me! I never … Oh, I get it. Say, you’re really out of touch here, aren’t you?”

“Well, I don’t take much interest in … blood sports,” I said primly, ‘but I’ve seen …’

“I’ve never killed anybody in my whole life,” Cordner interrupted. “I know you’ve seen newscasts of me shooting a lot of men, but they were real professionals—they had medics there to patch them up afterwards. None of them was ever clinically dead for more than a minute or two.”

“I didn’t know they did that.” I was genuinely surprised. “It never shows anything like that on the …’

“Of course not,” Cordner snapped. “The people who watch you in a gun fight want to see you go down and when you’re down they like to think you stay that way. It would spoil everything if they saw you get up again. That’s why you’ve got to drop out of the game altogether if you really stop one—all those armchair gunslingers would be annoyed if you showed you were still alive after they had drilled you with their pipes or hotdogs the week before.”

‘But you said Hardin had killed Cal Mason. Is he really dead?”

Cordner nodded. “Hardin’s psychotic. A throwback to the original gunfighters—refuses to have medics and challenges men to fight without their medics. A lot of men won’t do it and they get out—that’s why Hardin came up so fast. But Cal wouldn’t back down because he was too well known. It would have dishonoured The Game. Now there’s only me between Hardin and the top.”

“This is where your plan comes in,” I guessed. “What is it?”

“It isn’t my plan,” Cordner said quickly. “Herb Talmus thought it up, though I must admit it’s pretty smart—even if it is a bit sneaky and low. The Game will be better off without a character like Hardin going round killing folk. There ought to be a law….”

“You seem pretty sure the idea will work,” I prompted.

“It’s bound to! Hardin’s ship had been orbiting up there for days now. He has called me out every couple of hours but he can’t do anything until I accept the challenge—that’s why he keeps sending down torpedoes full of yellow paint and white feathers and amplified recordings of his voice. He’s trying to needle me, but he doesn’t realise that he’s the one who’s being needled. Right now he’s so mad he can’t think straight, so Herb is going to radio my acceptance for a fight this afternoon. Get it?”

I shook my head although I was, in fact, beginning to get the general drift. I found it hard to believe that two experienced operators like Cordner and Talmus could be so dumb. Admittedly the idea of the electro-neuro safety catch was new to them, but their brains couldn’t be completely paralysed. Or could they?

“Well,” Cordner continued, “Hardin will get down here in a hurry but we’ll explain that: the fight would be illegal and would carry a murder charge for the winner unless we use the local trick guns. Hardin will be so blood crazy by that time he won’t even stop to think that …’

“That,” I cut in, ‘if a gun won’t fire except in self-defence only the slower man’s will work because he’ll be the only one who’s defending himself.”

Cordner looked surprised. “You’ve been talking to Herb already, huh?”

“It’s the craziest idea I ever heard, Clint.” I began to laugh but choked it off because Cordner’s face was going hard.

“If it’s crazy,” he said coldly, ‘why is the Isher II News Service paying fifty thousand monits just to have a camera there?”

I gaped at him. “Now I know you’re crazy! Why I wouldn’t offer you ten cents for the whole galactic rights!”

“Yeah,” Cordner sneered. “Well, Reynolds signed the contract an hour ago. Herb has the cheque in his pocket right now.”

“Don’t be so….” Suddenly I felt weak. “Who signed the contract?”

“Your boss, of course—Afton Reynolds. Say, he didn’t put you in the picture very well, did he?” Cordner looked at me, obviously with a dawning suspicion that I was some kind of incompetent office boy who had wandered in on big things by mistake.

“You mean Reynolds is here … on your farm … now?”

‘Been down here since early this morning,” Cordner affirmed. “It was pretty smart of him to find out we were here. At first we didn’t want any publicity—what with things being a bit irregular and all—but fifty thousand monits! That’s as much as we’d get in the …’

I stopped listening to Cordner as it dawned on me what had gone wrong with my once-in-a-lifetime scoop. When I made my late night call to the office reference library I should have remembered that Sam Griggs owed twice as much money to Reynolds as he did to me. And the line about needing information to settle a bet had hardly been original—with my experience I should have done better than that.

I became aware of Cordner’s voice again. “Here they are now,” he was saying. “We’ll see who’s crazy, huh!”

Afton Reynolds and Herb Talmus looked alike. Two small, neat, flashily-dressed men who seemed completely out of place on Isher’s honest brown mud. Their smiles were alike too, like those of cats who had not only licked the cream but found a few drowned mice in it.

When the four of us came together beside a clump of cloud-truncated trees Reynolds nodded to Cordner and, still grinning affably, pulled me to one side. “Hello, Jackie boy,” he said.

“I’ll kill Griggs for this,” I replied conversationally, smiling and keeping my voice low.

Reynolds didn’t even try to cover up for his helper. “Sam has the makings of a good newshound, Jackie boy. Besides, you should be glad of an older and wiser head on a thing this size.”

“How would you like your older and wiser head beat into an older and wiser pulp?”

Reynolds stopped smiling. “I’m not going to argue with you now, Tilton. I suggest you get on back to your …’

“I suggest you try to get that cheque back before it’s too late, Reynolds. Otherwise, you’ll be out of a job. The agency can’t afford to lose that sort of money through your stupidity.”

“That does it,” Reynolds snapped, abandoning the attempt to convince the others we were having a friendly boss-to-employee chat, ‘you, my friend, are fired.”

“If I were your friend,” I said with as much dignity as I could raise, “I’d deserve to be fired.” I went back home as fast as the skimmer would carry me and sent a lengthy cable to the managing editor at the world office in Carrsville. After a light lunch I sat around for a while but early in the afternoon I was skimming back to Cordner’s farm—I just had to see the gunfight on which Reynolds had spent a whole year’s story-buying funds.

Luther Hardin didn’t look much like the popular image of a fast gun. He was small and pudgy, with a pale slab-cheeked face and tiny twitching mouth. Perhaps that was his trouble, I thought, trying to find a comfortable position behind the tree where I was hiding. If Hardin had been big, handsome and tough-looking he might have been content to fight under the auspices of a team of medics.

He was completely alone at one end of the marked-off arena, while Cordner, Talmus and Reynolds formed a little group at the other. Three cameras were set up and I noticed that Reynolds was operating them himself—there might not have been the time to get a proper camera team down, but I suspected that Reynolds intended to walk into head office having wrapped up the story of the century single-handed. Also, if Cordner was planning deliberately to slow his draw as a safeguard the cameras would need careful positioning to disguise the fact.

At last Talmus and Reynolds moved off to one side and I knew the show was about to start. A few seconds later Hardin and Clint Cordner began the ritual advance down the centre of the long narrow rectangle. It would have looked better in the dust under a scorching noonday sun, but squelching muck and a fine persistent drizzle were the best that Isher II was prepared to offer—I never liked our climate more than at that moment.

Both men moved very slowly, Hardin walking quite upright, turned sideways so that the toe of his right boot never passed the heel of his left; Cordner walking square-on, but crouched forward hungrily.

My eyes began to smart and I wanted desperately to knuckle them but was afraid to try it in case of missing everything. Suddenly—no, suddenly isn’t the word for Hardin’s draw—the gun was just there in his hand, as though he had been holding it all along and I hadn’t noticed. Cordner must have been slower, but as far as I was concerned he performed his feat of “B simultaneously with Hardin.

The guns went phut!

Showers of purple sparks burst from Hardin’s and Cordner’s right hands and the guns dropped hissing into the mud. Both men danced around clumsily, nursing their arms. Hardin made little whimpering sounds like a sick pup.

When I reached the group I saw that their burns were painful-looking but not too severe. “Are your medics back at the farmhouse?”

Cordner was too dazed to answer me, but Talmus nodded as he stared at the burns in horror.

“You’d better get back there fast, Clint,” I said gently. “And take Hardin with you. It looks to me as though you’re both out of the gunfighting business for some time.” Cordner nodded humbly and Hardin’s face went whiter than ever, but neither of them moved. I think they felt worse than if they’d been shot.

Afton Reynolds looked ill. “What happened? I … I don’t get it. Both those guns were all right half an hour ago. We tried them out.”

“That’s right,” Talmus chimed in angrily. “What made them burn up? Is this some kind of trick?”

“Your crazy plan made them burn,” I told Talmus. “There are two separate electronic elements in the electro-neuro safety catch—a sensing network which picks up and amplifies the currents in a man’s brain, and a computer which interprets the impulses and decides whether any particular situation justifies jamming the trigger action. I tried to explain this to my ex-boss but he fired me before he would listen.”

“I still don’t see it,” Talmus persisted. “Hardin had his gun out first and was aiming it at Clint. It was a clear case of self-defence as far as Clint was concerned.”

“No. Clint knew he had the slower draw and therefore Hardin’s gun wouldn’t fire at him.”

‘But what happened then? If Clint had the only gun which worked Hardin would have been defending himself even though he was faster in getting his out.”

“Ah!” I said happily. ‘But we’ve just shown that Clint’s gun wouldn’t work, even though he was slower, so Hardin couldn’t have been acting in self-defence either.”

Talmus pressed his hands to his temples. ‘But that means …’

“It means you can think around in circles for ever and you won’t get any nearer a solution. That’s what happens to the computers. It burns them out.”

Talmus wasn’t very bright, but he made a quicker recovery than the others. He shrugged. “I guess that’s it then. When the story gets out both of these boys will probably be laughed out of The Game, but Clint and I have had a pretty good run. The fifty thousand we collected on this shambles will be a big help, of course.” He looked at Reynolds significantly.

Afton Reynolds moaned and came forward with his arms held out pleadingly. Talmus pushed his face out of the way and started walking back to the farmhouse, then he got another idea.

“Just a minute. The guy who invented the electro-whatcha-macallit must have been a real genius. Couldn’t he have put in a sort of safety valve? I mean, the guns don’t have to burn up like that, do they?”

“No,” I agreed. “They don’t. My grandfather Vogt was and still is a genius—of sorts. He persuaded the government that anybody who was crazy enough to duel with dangerous weapons ought to be taught a lesson. A burnt child dreads the firearm, you might say.”

Afton Reynolds gave me a strange look and uttered one very short remark. Now, I’m the first to admit that my jokes occasionally fall short of perfection, but I saw no necessity for that sort of remark.

Reynolds left the Isher II News Service a week later and, frankly, it was a relief to see him go—a man who hasn’t a sense of humour will never get anywhere in this business.

Pilot Plant

1

Afterwards, Garnett found it difficult to decide which gave him the greater shock—the aircraft or the voice.

It had been a diamond-sharp morning in early Spring, with the green expanses of the airfield curving into the distance like the sunny cricket pitches of boyhood. From the comfort of his car Garnett watched the plane which had monopolised his life for five years go through an advanced phase of its flight development programme. The two-seat interceptor shimmered across the sky high up in the south then banked into a long, shallow dive aimed at the runway. As the machine approached, with the menacing silence of transonic speed, several hares which had been sitting on the turf shifted uneasily, displaying a kind of prescience, and began to run.

“Will pull out at approximately eight gravities.” The voice of chief test pilot Bill Makin, picked up by Garnett’s special car radio, sounded remote and somehow irrelevant.

The aircraft bit down into the denser air close to the ground and the invisible force fields that were its wings suddenly attained a ghostly visibility as air-borne moisture condensed into flickering grey streamers in the shock wave. At the far end of the runway the aircraft levelled out for a second then reared up into an impossible-looking climb.

If the wing generators were to fail about now, Garnett thought, indulging himself in a moment of melodrama, twenty tons of stainless steel and ceramic fuselage would land on top of my car. I would be killed.

“Something wrong here!” Makin’s voice had gone hard. “I’m losing my wings!”

The tattered rags of grey mist which had been flapping on the invisible wings, like a Valkyrie’s cloak, abruptly vanished. Garnett watched incredulously as the massive fuselage began to sink below its anticipated flight path then, suddenly very heavy, enter a definite and irrevocable dive. Ejector charges burst the centre section open and the precious cockpit hurled itself upwards, frantically breaking the suicide pact in which the rest of the plummeting airframe was now involved.

Garnett slammed the car’s starter button with the heel of his hand but the warm engine perversely missed its cue. He glanced over his shoulder. The fuselage was somersaulting down on him, so close that he saw the seriate rivets of its belly plates. The car’s engine whirred uselessly—and then he heard the voice.

It said, “Get me out of this, Xoanon.”

Garnett had time for one instant of wonderment before he was swept away from the sunny spring morning in a bomb-burst of sound, pain and darkness.

2

The room was small but airy, and its chairs had the flawless convexities of furniture never used. Garnett’s bed was positioned where he could see, beyond the banked foliage of elm trees, the distant slopes of the Pennines.

Only very reluctantly, and over a period of weeks, had the drugs begun to release their grip on his brain. He was aware of his mind clearing from the bottom like a glass of aerated water, during which process there was a slow escalation of thought. At first he could little more than observe the rhythm of hospital routine, then he began to cope with his personal affairs and, a little later, to pick up the threads of his working life. For a while the realisation that he was owner and chief engineer of the Pryce-Garnett Aircraft Company was less important than the fact that weeks of lying in bed had given him a permanent ache in, of all the unlikely places, his heels. But gradually the knowledge ceased to be a kind of distant landmark with which to orientate himself and there came a vague feeling that it might be pleasant to get back to work. It might be pleasant, and yet there was a disturbing element somewhere….

“If you won’t drink milk I’ll simply have to put you on a course of calcium tablets.” Janice Villiers shrugged as she spoke and let her eyes wander disinterestedly around the mushroom-coloured walls of his room. She was the dietician at the discreetly expensive clinic in which he had found himself, and Garnett had the impression she had got the job by mistake. She had lush black hair, a slight cast in one eye and a kind of forthright sexiness which struck a faintly jarring note amid the pervading professional blandness.

“I don’t need milk,” he said. “My bones are as good as you’ll get.”

“It isn’t bones I’m thinking about, it’s your nerves. You must be a pretty tough little fellow to have recovered as well as you did, but your system has taken a beating. Do you want a cigarette?”

She had been quick to notice his size, or lack of it, even though he was in bed. Garnett turned his head away angrily, ignoring the offered pack. Who the hell did she think she was, making personal comments to important patients? He saw his fine-featured jockey’s face frowning at him from a mirror and sought an unrevealing way to express his anger.

“Tell me,” he said tersely, ‘do you smoke in the other patients’ rooms?”

Janice smiled and returned his stare. Her eyes were a strong, clear grey, but the slight in-turning of one of them gave her a ruefully conspiratorial look. She shook her head.

“Well, what makes you think you can get away with it in my room?” Garnett spoke coldly, but was astonished to discover that part of him was pleased with her answer.

Janice shrugged again and lit up her cigarette. “Were you afraid when you saw that plane dropping down on to your car?”

“Isn’t that an … unprofessional sort of a question?” He was working hard to elicit the normal respectful responses, but she seemed not to notice.

“Did you think you were going to die?” Her small oval face was intent.

Garnett shook his head uncertainly, remembering. Get me out of this, Xoanon. It had been a quiet, clear, perfectly normal voice—except for the fact that it had no apparent owner. He had read stories with the well-worn literary gimmick in which a man in a panic had heard screams, then realised they were coming from his own mouth, but this was rather different. He was not even the praying type, and had he been he knew of no deity by the name of Xoanon.

“Supposing you did die,” Janice persisted. “Did you ever think what you would most like to find on the other side?”

Garnett laughed incredulously. “For God’s sake! Have you been reading pamphlets on how to be an interesting conversationalist?” As on her previous visits, he finally gave up trying to establish anything other than the timeless man-woman relationship. “All right then, what would you like to find?”

“I would like,” she said, inhaling deeply and talking through the smoke with a kind of hard expertise which he found strangely annoying, ‘to waken up in a great hall with one of those vaulted green ceilings, but so big and high up that it was misty looking. And I would like to find myself in a chair facing a wise old man who was removing a kind of earphone set from my head. And I would like him to be saying, ‘Well, that was a sample of life on Sol III. If you would really like to study that planet there are a hundred thousand million of those lives to go through—or would you prefer to look at some of the other inhabited worlds of the universe?’ ;”

Garnett blinked. “That’s quite a concept—are you a writer?”

“No. I just worry about dying. I’m not cut out for it, I guess.” She smiled and brushed a speck of ash from the white linen of her uniform.

Garnett felt a pang of concern. He was fairly sure the girl was being flippant, but there was something in her face. Perhaps she really had a problem of some kind and had been speaking to him on a level of honesty which most people rarely reach. He failed to see how anyone with her stake in life could be obsessed with death, but somehow the subject kept cropping up in her conversation, and he had no idea of how to react. In the silence he became aware of barriers clanging into place between them and was amazed to discover how strongly he wanted to break through.

“Janice,” he said uneasily, using her name for the first time. “I’m getting out of this place in a few days, and … I wonder if you would have dinner with me some evening?”

She glanced up at him, apparently pleased but hesitating.

“I’ll still be on sticks,” he said quickly, feeling gauche, ‘but my hair’s growing back again where they put the plate in my skull. I won’t always have this tonsure, you know.”

Janice smiled whitely, stood up and stubbed out her cigarette. “Thank you,” she said. “It sounds nice. Let’s discuss it later.” She went out, closing the door gently.

Garnett slumped back feeling both elated and aghast. He also had a suspicion she had left at that moment simply because her illicit cigarette was finished and if it had burned out sooner she would have gone that much earlier. What, he wondered, had made him do it? And what did he think he would be able to do for her? The latest pile of blue-covered, spiral-bound reports from the works occupied his attention for some time, and then Nurse McFee came to re-make his bed. She was a motherly woman, with bright red forearms and a faintly Scots accent.

“I was speaking to the dietician,” he said casually, ‘and I …’

“Oh, she’s begun visiting you, has she?” Nurse McFee grunted fiercely as she pulled back the bed clothes. “I wondered when she would get round to you.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you must be getting better.” Nurse McFee pounded his pillows into submissive fluffiness and refused to speak again. When she had gone Garnett settled down for his afternoon doze, acknowledging sleepily that he would probably be better off if he stopped the Janice Villiers thing right then and there. He slid peacefully into unconsciousness, and sometime during the drowsy afternoon his brain, which had hesitated so long, took the final decisive step out from under the canopy of the drugs.

He awoke in a panic.

A glance at the clock showed him it was several minutes before four. He pulled the televu off the bedside table on to his lap and punched out the works number. There was a delay, during which the little screen remained blank, then the face of the operator appeared, glowing in the grey depths like a submerged pearl.

“Mr. Garnett!” The tiny face assumed perfect miniature lineaments of surprise.

“Hello, Connie,” Garnett said brusquely. “Put me through to Mr. Dermott.” He waited impatiently while the connection was being made. Ian Dermott was his general manager and had been with the organisation since its early days back in the Sixties, handling the administrative and commercial side. He was directly and solely responsible to Garnett because the Pryce-Garnett Aircraft Company was a rarity in its field in that it was privately owned. When Clifford Pryce, inventor of the generated wing, had died in 1978 he had willed the company to Garnett, along with a complicated system of legal safeguards designed to prevent him from bringing in public money by the issue of even a single debenture. Not that there had been any likelihood of fresh capital being required—the Pryce-Garnett T.6 orbital interceptor had been on the boards of the Coventry design offices then and it was an obvious winner right from the start.

The T.6’s main engine was a hydrogen-burning jet with an advanced type of ion-augmented thrust, but the aircraft’s big selling point was the Pryce generated wing—the invisible, steel-hard force field which could fan out ten metres for low-speed flight and progressively reduce in size as speed increased. At Mach 8 the wing generators; were switched off altogether, allowing the hurtling, white-hot fuselage to sustain itself by body lift alone without the impending drag of even a vestigial wing. During the research and development stages there had been delays due to the fantastic precision called for by Pryce’s design for the wing electronics. In the end the bugs had been ironed out and, as a private venture financed by profits from military orders, the company was now developing a larger generated wing system capable of supporting a civil airliner.

Which was why Garnett was in a panic.

“Hello, Tony.” Dermott’s face appeared in the screen. “What’s all this then? Why aren’t you catching up on your sleep? You’ll need it when you get back you know.”

“Hello, Ian. Sorry to interrupt you, but this is important and I want you to issue the initial paperwork right away.”

Dermott adjusted his glasses, looking puzzled. “Of course, Tony. What is it?”

“I’m cancelling the twenty-metre wing project.”

Dermott lowered his head for a few seconds, apparently staring at his hands, then he looked up coldly. “I’m sorry, Tony. You can’t do that.”

The words shocked Garnett. He had expected the other man perhaps to show surprise or resentment, but not step so completely out of line, and out of character. “I’m doing it,” he said. “In fact, I’ve done it. From the moment I informed you I was cancelling, the project was dead.”

“Tony, are you sure you’re feeling all right? You just can’t do this, you know.”

Garnett took a deep breath. “Issue an immediate stop-work order to the design, production, test, purchasing and planning staff concerned.”

“For God’s sake, Tony! Why? Just tell me why.”

‘Because it will lose money. We won’t be able to sell it. Do you want a better reason? So far we’ve sunk the best part of a million pounds into that wing—money that I’ll have to write off against research and development costs of the T.6 wing.”

‘But we were in full agreement that the big wing is just what civil aviation is waiting for.”

“It is,” Garnett agreed grimly, ‘but not with our reliability figures. Our own Air Registration Board and the American F.A.A. have always regarded a fatal accident rate of one in every hundred million flights as being a reasonable objective, although in practice they treat one in ten million flights as an acceptable figure. In more convenient terms, this is an accident rate of 1 \u215? 10{\super

\u8722?7}. It has taken us four years to achieve .92 \u215? 10{\super

\u8722?6} with the smaller T.6 wing, which is just inside military necessity standards and a whole order below civil standards. But now we are proposing to produce the twenty-metre wing, which will have a reliability about half that of the T.6 wing, not for the military but for the civil market! It doesn’t make any kind of sense.”

Dermott looked impatient. ‘But this is nothing new, Tony. All those figures have been thoroughly discussed. Gedge and the rest of the reliability team are confident that …’

“If they are very lucky,” Garnett interrupted, ‘they might make military standard in five years, civil standard in ten. By that time the R&D costs would be astronomical and we would still have to sell the first unit. The public won’t take to an invisible wing that vanishes if there’s a power failure.”

Dermott’s face suddenly smoothed into a look of relief. “So that’s it,” he said softly. “You haven’t recovered from the accident! You had me really worried. Tony, the prototype that dropped on to your car was proving a special power system—you remember the new lightweight alternator from Schuylers—and, needless to say, that is one bought-out component which we won’t …’

“What is this?” Garnett shouted incredulously, feeling his temper break. “Are you telling me that the accident has affected my mind? This decision has nothing to do with my personal experience.”

“Look at it this way, Tony. Before the accident you were one of the prime movers in the twenty-metre wing project. You over-ruled every objection. You let some of our best engineers resign because they argued against it. Now, after the accident, you want to drop the whole thing like a hot rivet. What other conclusion … ?”

“Ian!” With an effort Garnett held his voice level. “I am speaking to you now as owner of the Pryce-Garnett Aircraft Company. Right now, right this minute, you must issue those stop-work orders or give me your resignation. Which is it to be?”

“I’m damned if I’ll take this from …’ Dermott stopped talking and his face seemed to ripple in the depths of the tiny television screen. He paused for a long moment and when he resumed speaking his voice was dulled. “I’m sorry, Tony. I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that. I’ve been under somewhat of a strain. You’re quite right, of course—these decisions are yours to make and it was unforgivable of me to … I’ll issue the stop-work orders immediately.”

Garnett’s anger had gathered too much emotional momentum for him to match the other man’s abrupt change of manner. “See that you do!” He broke the televu connection, dropped the instrument on to the bedside table, then realised he was trembling and covered with perspiration. He lay back and stared at the shifting, green-toned light reflected on the ceiling from the trees outside his open window. The faint sound of children laughing was carried in on the warm air across what seemed to him like interplanetary distance. There’s a gulf, he thought irrelevantly, between those who go to work and those who go to school.

Another gulf had opened up between things as they were before the accident and things as they were now. The conversation with Ian Dermott had been little short of fantastic, but the man had made one good point. Garnett knew he was absolutely right in dropping the twenty-metre generated wing but there was no disputing the fact that once, and not so long ago, he had believed in the project whole-heartedly.

Perhaps a long serious illness always made things seem strange, but there was much to explain. The violent reaction of the normally phlegmatic Dermott, the fact that Garnett seemed to be developing a Don Quixote complex over an unhappy girl when he knew perfectly well he could not spare the time, and there was always—he realised he was falling asleep—that voice. He had never heard of anyone called Xoanon. There was a thing called a xoanon. The odd, back-of-the-dictionary word meant a primitive statue, supposed to have fallen from heaven.

As exhaustion claimed him, and the room tilted ponderously away, Garnett managed to smile. Aircraft might occasionally fall from the sky, but that was all.

3

It was simply a question of scale.

The photograph gleaming on his desk was a routine publicity shot. It had been taken by a staff cameraman and showed a newly elected works beauty queen posed against a background of the production line, in which were ranged the great incomplete machines, brooding sullenly over their inability to fly. Garnett stared down at the picture, aware that his heart had begun the swift, striding beats of excitement. This was the answer if only he could believe it.

It had taken him over a month to begin suspecting there was anything wrong with the Pryce-Garnett organisation. Another month had passed while he tried unsuccessfully to put his finger on the source of his unease, but there was almost nothing to go on.

The feeling was so faint Garnett could compare it only with the subliminal impulse of recognition he felt when being introduced to a person from his home town of Portsmouth. He had always explained the phenomenon by assuming that in living for many years in one area one was bound to glimpse practically all its inhabitants, and that their faces were filed away in the deeper reaches of memory. His suspicions about the organisation were equally vague, based on similar instinctive reactions.

He sat back in his chair, lit his pipe and stared at the opposite wall of his office through a screen of aromatic smoke. Large but infrequent drops of warm August rain struck across the windows. It was four months since the morning of the accident in which he so nearly lost his life. Afterwards he had learned that the fuselage itself had cleared the top of his car but the starboard tailplane had raked through the roof, spinning the heavy vehicle out of its way like a matchbox. Although he had lost a piece of his skull and broken both arms and one leg, everyone assured Garnett he was lucky to have come out of it alive. He agreed with them, but during the weeks of convalescence which followed his abrupt cancellation of the twenty-metre wing project he had been impatient to get back to work. As soon as it had been possible to wrest reluctant agreement from the doctors he had returned, walking at first with the aid of a stick although, when he had realised that using it made him appear a good inch shorter, he quickly managed to get around unaided.

He had returned too soon, Garnett acknowledged to himself as he drew on the sweet smoke, but in a way the past two months had been invaluable. Had he been fit enough to plunge back into the demanding complexities of his job the subtle, the very subtle, impressions of wrongness would have been swamped. As it was, he had been forced to spend his days in comparative inactivity during which, for the first time, he had been able to take a long impartial look at his own business.

He had begun by arranging with McIntyre, the head of the printing department, that a copy of everything which went through the machines would be sent to his office. The consequent flow of commercial and technical brochures, handbooks, reports and minutes had provided him with several hours of solid reading every day. Although he owned the company in its entirety Garnett had always considered himself an airframe specialist, which he had been when Pryce took him on, and had never had time to read more than a fraction of the organisation’s internal publications. The sheer quantity was astonishing—reports from the medical officer, the safety officer, the sales teams, the various project designers, the publicity officer, the production planning departments, the purchasing officer, the production centres, the personnel department. Experimental, flight test, security, wind tunnel, canteen, fire service. Wages, drawing offices, photographic, spares, transport, maintenance. Stress office, stores, analytical, reliability, tool room …

Garnett began to realise that a large number of his department heads actually enjoyed writing reports and broadcasting them, while others tended to be terse and uninformative. Also, some departments tended to function more crisply and efficiently than others. Strangely, these characteristics of individuals and groups did not remain constant—over-articulate heads might suddenly fall quiet, efficient teams appear to become sloppy, or vice versa. From the welter of paper a picture had begun to emerge, but it was like a television picture in which the lines had been shuffled into a random sequence. Much information was given or implied but he lacked the key which would enable him to systemise it. All he had to go on was a vague feeling, so formless that he dare not mention it to anyone. The only near-concrete fact was that overall company efficiency seemed to have deteriorated, but this could have been explained as a temporary fluctuation, or simply the effect of his own absence—until he had seen the photograph.

A frozen instant of time was trapped under the glossy surface of the picture, and in that unique instant half a dozen aircraft fitters had passed behind the smiling girl at whom the camera had been aimed. They were all perfectly normal men, but one was carrying a wing unit mounting plate which was too big for him. He was a small man but that was not the reason the plate appeared too large. It would have been outsize even on a tall person—it was, in fact, a plate which could only have been used on the cancelled twenty-metre wing!

The implications were so vast that Garnett refused even to consider them before making; one or two elementary checks.

“I’ll be in the Number Three drawing office,” he said as he burst through the outer office. Miss Fleet, his secretary, and her two assistants glanced up in surprise as he passed. He took the lift to the third floor of the Technical Block and went in to the co-ordinating section which occupied the rear of Number Three. The grey-coated clerks who ran the section were flustered at seeing him and stood back respectfully and yet challengingly as he hauled out master assembly drawings and register books. But Garnett knew the complex system and it took him only several minutes to establish the part number of the mounting plate and to trace its history. The plate had been schemed, stress approved and detailed early in the year, but the stop-work order had been issued before the drawings reached the shops. As far as Pryce-Garnett was concerned the mounting plate existed on paper only.

Garnett left the drawing office and walked down the stairs thoughtfully. One approach would have been to find the foreman in charge of the production centre where the component had been made and ask him what the hell he thought he was doing. This was Garnett’s first impulse, then he began to think about what was involved. There was the baffling question of motive—the company as a whole had only a distant and very faint possibility of profit from the twenty-metre wing project, so there was no point at all in individuals tinkering with it under cover. Security angle? There might have been at one time, but shortly before he died Clifford Pryce had insisted on publishing full details of his system. Pryce-Garnett had a comfortable head-start, of course, but every country in the world which had sufficiently advanced aircraft and electronics industries was travelling at full speed along the same technological highway. In any case, spies did not work in this way.

The rain had stopped by the time Garnett left the Technical Block and the air was heavy with the smell of moistened dust. He began to walk towards the main shops. There was also the question of how many individuals were involved and who they were. It was not comparable with a case of two or three shop floor personnel getting together to make and smuggle out, say, a component for a broken washing machine. The fitter who had been carrying the mounting plate would only be one link in what must be a very long chain. There would be his immediate foreman and the shop supervisor above him; someone in Supplies must have ordered in the expensive, ultra high tensile steel; someone in Stores must have received and issued it; at least two men in the jig and tool drawing office must have been involved in preparing the tooling drawings and instructions, which in turn brought in the Tool Room superintendent; someone in Accounts must have covered up as much as possible from that end, but it would be impossible to conceal it from the management for very long …

Ian Dermott!

Garnett recalled Dermott’s unexpected and completely uncharacteristic reaction on the day he had called him from the clinic to cancel the twenty-metre wing. His discovery provided an explanation for that, but it was of a sort that only necessitated further explanations. He realised he had stopped walking as his vaulting brain had robbed his body of blood, and he picked up his step again, feeling his heels stick to the warm tarmac. Beyond the saw-tooth roof of the main shop a T.6 screamed across the airfield on full boost, the red glow of recombining calcium ions trailing from its jet pipes.

Passing into the comparative darkness of the shop Garnett moved through the banks of tape-controlled sculpture milling machines which gnawed patiently into billets of gleaming alloy. Although there were eight thousand people in the company he had been able to half-identify the fitter carrying the plate in the photograph simply because he was one of the few men in the place who were not taller than Garnett. No amount of self-discipline had ever been able to prevent him being specially aware of others his own size, feeling that much in common with them and hating them for it.

He headed for the area indicated in his memory as the region in which he had previously seen the fitter, then realised he was going towards the experimental machine shop. Garnett nodded his approval of the conspirators’ choice—the experimental shop was a small and completely self-contained unit with a full range of modern tools. It was a place where unusual jobs were the order of the day and where it would be easy to conceal unauthorised work. As he neared the doors it occurred to Garnett that he ought to be more circumspect than to rush in and collar his man, but his initial astonishment was giving way to a reckless fury.

An electric truck burst its way through the heavy sheet rubber doors and Garnett walked in behind it, avoiding the noisy slap of the doors as they closed. He looked around, ignoring the curious glances of the machine operators, and recognised the small figure of the fitter seated at a wall bench with his back to the door. Garnett walked across to him and, hearing his footsteps, the fitter turned. His eyes widened as he saw Garnett and he froze on the stool, cigarette drooping from his lips.

A definite reaction, Garnett thought with satisfaction. “I want to have a word with you,” he said.

The other man’s oil-streaked face remained immobile, staring.

Garnett became impatient. “Let’s go into the office.”

Saliva gleamed at the corners of the fitter’s mouth. He rolled gently forward on to the tool-cluttered bench, mashing the burning cigarette against his face, then slipped sideways to the floor. Several of his workmates came running as Garnett caught the falling body and lowered it.

“Ring the medical department,” he ordered, ‘and carry him into the supervisor’s office.” The stocky, white-coated figure of Raine, the experimental shop super, appeared and directed the strangely difficult operation. Garnett was puzzled for a moment at the awkwardness of the grunting men doing the carrying, then he noticed the fitter’s body was still in the sitting attitude with rigid arms and legs. He stood by until a young doctor and two male nurses arrived with a stretcher. The doctor looked surprised at Garnett’s presence in the workshop but he cleared the office efficiently and began to examine the inert fitter.

Garnett felt a touch on his sleeve and looked round to see a worried-looking boy in the green overalls of a graduate apprentice. “Excuse me, sir. I’m Jack Elkin. That’s my uncle in there. Victor Elkin. Is he all right? I came round from Centre 83 when I heard he had collapsed.”

“I don’t know,” Garnett replied. “You’d better wait and speak to the doctor. He may want to question you about your uncle’s medical history.”

The boy hesitated. “Well, he isn’t an epileptic or anything like that, but he’s been working very long hours in the last couple of months—ever since the firm sent him down to Harlech on that special training course. He might be suffering from nervous exhaustion.”

Garnett frowned. “The firm sent him where?”

“Harlech, sir.”

“You mean in Wales?” Garnett felt slightly silly. “Where the Men come from?”

“Yes, sir. He never talked about it and I don’t even know the names of the others who went. I assumed it was on some kind of classified work, what with Harlech being so close to the missile ranges at Aberporth and Ty Croes.”

“Quite right,” Garnett said with a knowing briskness he did not feel. He went back into the glass box of the office, noting that Elkin’s limbs had been straightened.

The doctor stood up. “I’ll have to get him to hospital. His pulse, respiration, temperature and blood pressure are near enough normal, but he’s far down in coma. It’s as though his brain had been switched off. Did you … ?”

“Come to my office later,” Garnett interrupted. “I must go.”

He walked quickly back to the Technical Block, feeling the now-familiar exhaustion begin to grow in him like a leaden core. Back in his office he rang for Miss Fleet and she came in with notebook and pen, exuding normalcy.

“Since I’ve been in hospital,” he said, ‘has the company established an office or booked any kind of accommodation for special courses in or near Harlech?”

“You mean, where the Men come from?”

He nodded.

“Of course not, Mr. Garnett.” She dismissed the subject as being ridiculous and got down to the business of the day. “I’ve left a list of people who rang while you were out, and Mr. Moller called in from Photographic for a second.”

“Very well,” he said tiredly, reaching for his pipe. “That’s all.” As he loaded the bowl with moist yellow strands Garnett tentatively identified the emotion causing the fluttering hollowness in his chest—it was the beginnings of fear. His momentary glimpse of the other organisation hidden inside his own works had shown it to be disturbingly large, and he had a conviction Elkin’s sudden paralysis had merely been the first flexing of its muscles. Tackling Elkin direct had been not exactly a mistake—he searched for a suitable word—it had been a non-cybernetic move. The specific application of cybernetics to aircraft production control was a subject on which Garnett had written a book years before the T.6 had claimed his life, and now one of the opening paragraphs was assuming a new and nightmarish appearance of relevance to the present situation.

“An aircraft factory is a machine for producing aeroplanes and it may be disastrous to attempt to improve production by piecemeal tinkering with individual departments—one must seek out in all its ramifications, and destroy, the machine for stopping the production of aeroplanes, which lurks like a parasite within the organisation.”

Approaching Elkin had been the equivalent of tinkering with an individual department, but a good cyberneticist never grabbed a tiger by the tail, not without simultaneously taking a powerful grip of its other extremities. Garnett took a clean sheet of graph paper and began to draw a block diagram of the other organisation as he saw it. In the top square he put Ian Dermott’s name; in the bottom one Victor Elkin’s; in between he put question marks in departments he believed must be involved. It occurred to him that, except for the photograph, he had nothing to show but a very personal kind of evidence, which made the photograph an object of some value. He picked it up and scanned it closely.

s An impossibly long time dragged by before his heart resumed beating.

The beauty queen still smiled beneath the picture’s glazed surface, but none of the men behind her were carrying anything!

The obvious conclusion, the one every sane person in the world would agree on, was that Garnett had made a stupid mistake. After all, he had returned to work too soon and had been under a considerable strain. Garnett smiled wryly, almost grateful that all traces of doubt were eliminated. He took his pen, drew a new off-shoot to his diagram, and in it printed, “C. R. Moller, Chief Photographer.” Re-lighting his pipe he pulled the comforting smoke deep into his body. Chris Moller, the cadaverous ex-R.A.F. cameraman, must have realised his mistake and substituted a picture taken a few seconds earlier or later than the vital one. Again, it was hardly first-class evidence but it was good enough for Garnett. There were quite a few question marks on his diagram which had to be replaced with names, but when he finally had those identities the parasite—the machine for secretly producing aircraft parts nobody would ever buy—was going to find itself in trouble. I may be small, Garnett thought in an illogical surge of confidence, but I’ve never met anybody big enough to step on me. Impelled by the freshly released adrenalin in his blood he stood up, limped ferociously around the office, then calmed down enough to decide what he ought to do. It seemed fairly obvious.

“Next on the menu,” he muttered, ‘is a trip to Harlech.”

He picked up the televu on his private line and punched the number of the Carvill Clinic. As he waited for them to find Janice Villiers he felt the bright bubble of confidence begin to tremble. Since leaving the clinic he had had two rather unsatisfactory dinner dates with her, and a third which had been a downright fiasco. Right from the start she had talked freely about her affairs, (“Not love affairs, Tony—the qualification always sounds so excusatory!”), and the effect had been to throw him into a rage which cumulatively became uncontrollable. And yet, because he had deliberately entered her world and not she his, he had been unable to express his anger honestly and in the end had resorted to a vicious attack on her odd, epigrammatic mode of conversation.

“Talking to you,” he had said coldly, in the middle of a discourse on the incongruity of an infinitely small present sandwiched between an infinitely large past and a similar future, ‘is like standing by while somebody tears off every day on one of those ghastly calendars.” She had given him a level stare, displaying the deviation in her eye, and had smiled knowingly but sadly. After that there had been nothing—Garnett felt he had slammed a door.

“Hello, Jan.” He tried to sound casual as Janice’s face suddenly glowed in the depths of the little screen.

“Hello, Tony. How are you?”

“Quite well. I’ve been drinking my milk regularly. It … it does seem to help the nerves.” He wondered if she would find that acceptable.

“Apologies hurt me too,” she said with one of her white, perfect smiles. “What is it, Tony?”

“I’ve got to drive down to Wales tomorrow. I’ll be coming back over the weekend sometime. I wondered if you would go with me.” He waited, realising his attempt to sound like a different person had flopped, but she was kind and answered quickly, agreeing to go. When the arrangements were made and the connection broken, Garnett sat staring across his expanse of gooseberry-coloured carpet which was silvered in places by footprints. He was elated but his pleasure was tempered by the discovery of how deeply he was involved with Janice Villiers, the black-haired stranger who was two dismaying inches taller than he. On the surface he was planning a casual ‘affair’ but there was one disturbing fact the significance of which, even with his sketchy acquaintance with Freud, was obvious.

Ten minutes before, he had decided, with all the trappings of cold logic, that the next step ought to be the trip to Harlech—but this was not the case! There were half a dozen avenues of investigation open to him right here in the Pryce-Garnett works, any one of which could yield valuable information. It was not too late to call off the journey, and yet he knew he was going to go.

Hormones, he decided comfortably, are lousy cyberneticists.

4

Driving fast in Garnett’s superb, though oversized car, was a little like flying in an under-the-radar jet, and in normal circumstances he would have annihilated the distance from Coventry to Harlech in a very short time. But with the black-clad girl coiled like a whip on the seat beside him the journey was too pleasant not to prolong. He drove north to Rhyl then followed the coast road south against a sea whose clean blue horizon caused him a near-physical pain by its demands for emotional responses the adult Garnett had almost lost. He breathed deeply, trying to fill himself with the bright pastel colours of the morning air.

“Have you been to Harlech before?”

Garnett shook his head. “No. I’m looking forward to seeing it.”

“I am too. Places that have figured in songs are different somehow. There’s a kind of imminence.” Janice lit a cigarette. “You know, this trip may not help you much. It would have been better to hire a private detective.”

“Never thought of it,” Garnett said in genuine astonishment. “I suppose they really do exist.”

Janice laughed. “Of course they do! One of my best friends runs a small agency.”

Garnett tried to kill a pang of annoyance. “Interesting work, I suppose.”

“I’m sure it would only take him a matter of hours to find out which of your employees have been to Harlech. That’s the sort of thing he does all the time. Shall I give him a call?”

“Let’s see how I get on first,” Garnett said ungraciously. He had told Janice only enough to give her the impression he was on a commercial security investigation of some kind, and was beginning to wonder whether he had said too little or too much. Debating the point, he drove in silence for a while and it was then, just as he was beginning to relax, that the first cool tendrils of alarm began to reach up from the depths of his nervous system.

Filled with a kind of astonishment, Garnett instinctively slowed the car and the white road markers began arrowing beneath at a more leisurely rate. He was disturbed—his quickened pulse and breathing made that clear—but there was no discernible reason. If I were a Philip Marlowe, he thought, this feeling would be caused by the fact that I had subconsciously noted the too-frequent appearance of a certain car in the rear-view mirror, but I haven’t seen any vehicles at all for some time. Could that in itself be a wrong note? No, roads like this one would be relatively empty in late morning.

Garnett depressed his right foot again and the seat urged against his back as the car responded. Janice gave him a speculative stare through a grey voodoo mask of cigarette smoke. The machine continued its effortless, whispering progress between mountains and sea, but now Garnett could feel his alarm increase with every minute. It grew with each fresh glimpse of soaring rock faces and each new involution of the road until the psychic pressure became almost intolerable … then came a partial answer.

“Janice,” he said thoughtfully. “Do you know much about this déjà vu thing?”

“Nothing. I’ve heard it defined as the opposite of uncanniness.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, uncanniness is a feeling of strangeness in familiar circumstances, déjà vu is a feeling of familiarity in strange circumstances. Have you got that feeling now? Is that what’s the matter with you?”

Garnett nodded uncertainly. “I get the feeling I’ve been here before, and yet … Good God!”

“What is it?” Janice stubbed out her cigarette.

“I have been here before! With Clifford Pryce!”

“Problem solved,” Janice said cheerfully. “Gone the way of all para-normal phenomena.”

Garnett felt no better. The problem had been solved on one level—but how could he have forgotten? During one of his meetings in Liverpool with Pryce, while they were still discussing the terms of Garnett’s engagement, the old millionaire had decided the day was too hot for sitting indoors and insisted on going for a long drive. Garnett, drunk on visions of the new future opening before him, had not paid much attention to anything outside the car, but he should have remembered the exhilarating high-speed run down the Welsh coast. Why, at the turning point they had even lunched in Harlech! Garnett had travelled considerably and at the age of thirty-eight was beginning to realise he could not clearly remember every day of his life. He could, however, remember the high spots and they did not come any higher than the time he had been given the chance to create the T.6—so how could he have forgotten?

They reached Harlech at midday. Garnett stopped the car in the main street and sat for a moment deciding what he ought to do next. The village was a linear scatter of blocks of sunshine, shadow and stone which appeared not to have changed in the last hundred years. Where was he to start? And what was he to say? “Pardon me, is there a local establishment where men are trained to secretly manufacture aircraft components nobody would buy?”

It dawned on Garnett he had been nursing an illogical hope that the mere fact of his being in Harlech would trigger off new events which would lay all the answers out in front of him, but of course it was not going to be like that. This was a fact he had subconsciously understood all along and the sudden conscious realisation led him to his first direct thoughts about the forthcoming evening and night. It seemed too good to be true. He had never before met a girl who might have tempted him to try fitting marriage into his high-paced career, yet with Janice the question of legal entanglements did not arise. She preferred her ‘natural relationships’ and that being the case Garnett was more than happy to go along with her.

Janice patted her black hair into place. “Where are we staying, Tony? I ought to freshen up.”

“Not here. There’s a new motel at Llanbedr, about twenty minutes further down the coast. Shall I drop you there and come back?”

“No, I’ll be all right.” They got out and Garnett noticed she had not changed into flat-heeled shoes to help equalise their heights. He told himself it was because conventions about height, like all other conventions, were unimportant to her, all part of the wonderful grab-bag of goodies he was getting for nothing. After touring the village together they went into the dim coolness of an inn and ate incredibly good sandwiches of home-cured ham, washed down with heavy tankards of ale. She ate and drank with a kind of mannish gusto which he would have found disconcerting had it not fitted in so perfectly with his vision of her as his wayward child of nature, purveyor of guiltless enjoyments.

“You aren’t happy about all this, are you, Tony?”

Garnett looked up from filling his pipe. “I’m happy about us, but I’ve got … problems at the works and I probably ought to be back there doing something about them. You were quite right about the detective agency. I feel slightly lost.”

“Why do you worry so much about your work? From what you’ve told me you’ve spent: your whole life flying aeroplanes, or building them, or having them drop on your head.”

Garnett ruefully stroked the still-bristly hairs under which the stainless steel plate completed his skull. “Perhaps it’s egotism. Some people sell shoes for a living, or write in ledgers—I put those big birds up in the sky. And now they have my name on them, so I want them to be good.”

“So that your name will live on, etcetera.”

“Something like that, yes.” Garnett found himself on the defensive.

“You aren’t an egotist, Tony. You’re a solipsist.” Janice laughed without removing her cigarette, which gave her lips an unexpectedly cruel twist. “Your name won’t live on, you know. Look, you’re going to live for seventy or eighty years if you’re lucky. Supposing you were an all-round genius and you spent that time developing a longevity drug which increased your life span to a thousand years. You aren’t going to do that, but let’s suppose it anyway. Imagine then that you devoted your thousand years to studying science and became absolute master of the physical universe—which you aren’t going to do either. Suppose next that you used your fantastic powers to gather up every star in the galaxy and arrange them to spell out your name in letters a thousand light years high …’

“I sense,” Garnett put in, ‘you’re trying to get some message over to me.”

“The message is that, even after you had done all those things, still there would come a day when an intelligent being could survey the universe and find no trace of your existence.”

“It wouldn’t alter the fact that I had existed. It doesn’t matter how short a time I live—if I make something good, the fact that I did so will be just as real after a billion years as after ten minutes.”

“Horsefeathers!” Janice looked mildly surprised. “I think that’s the first time I ever said that word. The proper occasion must never have arisen before, but it did just then.”

“Same to you. Let’s get out before we have a stand-up fight.” Garnett drained his glass and they went out into the bright, impersonal infinities of the summer afternoon. He was relieved there was no need to talk as they walked, for this time he was determined nothing should go wrong between them yet he had felt himself being drawn into another row by her determined futility. At least, he thought, it provided a working explanation for the aimlessness of her personal life. Garnett found himself wishing Janice was not so blindingly attractive—born into a more homely body she might have been forced to explore the possibilities of a permanent relationship. As it was she had no shortage of philosophical fellow-travellers. Men, he admitted, like Tony Garnett.

They spent the afternoon walking in the village and its environs. Garnett’s pockets filled with pipe cleaners and boxes of matches as he worked round the local shops trying to talk to people without being conspicuous. Finally he had to give up. Almost by instinct he could put his finger on the subtlest flaw hidden behind the massed symbolism of an engineering drawing, but this village, as far as Garnett was concerned, remained simply an ordinary village.

He rolled the big car gently down the coast to Llanbedr and found the motel, which turned out to be a scattering of pink chalets on a hillside overlooking a sea-lapped airfield. Numb with excitement Garnett rented two chalets from the sports-coated proprietor, noting with satisfaction how the man gaped at Janice. The motel, he learned, had no restaurant facilities but a reasonable dinner could be had at the hotel in Llanbedr.

“My feet hurt,” Janice said as they walked up the winding path to the little single-roomed buildings. “Give me a couple of hours to get them back into shape, then I’ll be ready to eat.”

As he set the bags down inside her doorway she stepped out of her shoes and turned to him. Their first kiss was good, just as he had always known it would be; he kept his eyes open to print the few racing seconds on his memory.

“Easy, Tony, easy,” she murmured. “We’ve got lots of time.”

Garnett stepped back reluctantly and lifted his case. “We solipsists are all the same, you know. See you about eight.” His throat was dry.

In the silence of his own chalet he shaved, changed his clothes and lay tensely on the unfamiliar bed watching a pale, three-quarters moon slide across the window. Since the establishment of the permanent Lunar bases in the mid-Seventies, ten years earlier, Garnett had come to regard the moon as just another geographical location, a place he might visit someday. But tonight it was just the same old moon the poets knew, and nobody could ever walk on that.

He called on Janice at eight and found her standing at her door, smoking as usual, and wearing a white dress fastened with gold clasps giving it a faintly classical look which suited the Delian atmosphere of the lush summer evening. They walked to the hotel in Llanbedr, had several drinks, a simple dinner, and returned to the motel in the twilight. Garnett thought vaguely that they should go to her chalet but Janice stopped determinedly at his so he led her in and closed the door.

Their second kiss was much longer, even more perfect than the first and Garnett felt her lithe body drive forward against his own with a force he could barely match. It was everything he could have asked for, except for one tiny thing—the words. The words were unimportant but suddenly Garnett found himself greedy for them, needing them, and they forced themselves up from his throat.

“I love you, Janice.” He waited, and felt her arms untwine slightly. You fool, he screamed inwardly, what are you doing?

“I like you, Tony,” she said. “I like you a lot.”

It isn’t too late, he thought, she has said she likes me and maybe that’s better than love—why ruin it all now? But aloud he found himself demanding the age-old response and in a few thunderous seconds they were standing apart, arguing. The words, all the wrong ones, came too fast for him to comprehend, and Janice stuck to everything she had ever said about human relationships with a ruthless, uncompromising honesty which filled him with rage. The realisation that he would have been content for her to lie about loving him made Garnett even more furious. Finally she turned away from him, shrugged, and took a cigarette from her purse.

“If you light that thing,” he said coldly, “I’m leaving.”

Janice flicked her lighter on. “What is the saying about ultimatums? You should never issue an ultimatum because …’

Garnett snatched the cigarette from her mouth, crumpled it and shouldered his way outside, slamming the door behind him. He had taken a dozen steps in the darkness towards where he imagined his chalet to be when he remembered they had been in his chalet. Swearing incoherently he began to turn back then realised the ludicrousness would be too much for him. Once into Janice’s chalet, he ripped off his jacket and lay down on her bed, sick with dismay. He had no expectations of sleep, but the exhaustion inherited from the accident closed black arms around him within a matter of minutes and he dropped into an uneasy sleep.

The explosion came hours later.

Garnett sat up gasping in pitch darkness, so disorientated that for one panicky moment he was unable to find even his own identity. The air was still filled with reverberations from the heart-stopping blast and not far away someone had begun to scream patiently and regularly, like breathing. A shifting orange light was beginning to move across the window when Garnett got to his feet and opened the door. The light was coming from flames that were fanning up through the crazily twisted roof of the chalet where he …

Janice!

Garnett ran quickly, risking a broken ankle on the strange ground, and threw himself through the chalet’s gaping doorway, beyond which the air was almost solid with billowing mortar dust. Please Janice, he pleaded, please be all right. He found her, still in the white dress, lying face downwards beneath curling streamers of flowered wallpaper which the explosion had stripped from the walls. Sliding his hands under her, he lifted then hesitated, sickened, knowing he had no business moving a human body which felt like that. The flames increased their grip on the wreckage. Garnett clenched his teeth, stood up with the limp body in his arms and carried it out on to the grass where people in night clothes had begun to gather. He knew as he folded Janice down on the ground she was at that moment launching out across the eternity of which she had always been so afraid. Incredibly, her lips moved for a moment, so slightly that at first he thought it might be shadow movements from the fire. He put his ear to her mouth.

‘… difficult, very difficult. Late. I have it. I have it now, Xoanon. I …’ The words stopped with unmistakable finality and Garnett rolled away from her, burying his face in the grass. When he stood up again somebody had covered Janice with a yellow raincoat and the world was rocking around him, reduced to a meaningless montage of luridly-lit faces, black tree-shapes arid distant black reaches of impassive sea. The floating faces spoke to him excitedly, questioning, but he ignored them, standing beside the body until an ambulance arrived and the attendants loaded the strangely small bundle into it. The boyish-looking doctor’s eyes narrowed professionally as he looked at Garnett and suggested that he lie down, but Garnett brushed him away—for the second time that night nothing could satisfy him but ancient, formal words, this time with the police. F’accuse!

Janice’s death had not been an accident.

She died because she was sleeping in the wrong chalet, and the invisible others had made a mistake. Garnett felt he shared the responsibility—something his conscience would settle with him later—but it carried the tiniest seed of consolation in that the mistake had been bigger than the unknown organisation suspected. Until now all his evidence had been entirely negative or personal, the type of witness that would cause people’s eyes to drift away in embarrassment. But an attempt had been made on his life, the name Xoanon had been spoken again, and Janice was dead….

The police inspector who took charge was a big man with a malarial complexion and baffled brown eyes. Garnett limped up the wooden steps into the motel office behind him, aware that his legs were weakening, and sat down on a magazine-littered couch. The inspector cleared a little space in the scurf of paperwork covering the desk then set his key-ring in the middle of it, somehow conveying his anxiety to get away.

“You look pretty tired, sir. We’ll get this over as soon as we can. You can make an official statement tomorrow.”

“I’m all right,” Garnett said. “I want to make a statement now. I’m Garnett of the Pryce-Garnett Aircraft Company and I have reason to believe that tonight’s explosion was intended to kill me because …’

The inspector’s hands made little swimming movements in the cone of light from the office’s single overhead fitting and he smiled uneasily. “Forgive me, Mr. Garnett. I think you should lie down. The shock …’

“I’ve already told you I’m all right, inspector. Will you let me speak? The men who set the bomb, or whatever it was, are …’

“I’m sorry, Mr. Garnett. I’m going to ask one of my men to have the doctor see you.” The inspector stood up and moved towards the dark rectangle of the open door.

Garnett leaped to his feet and had to grab the desk for support. He tried hard to make his voice cool and reasonable. “Inspector, I’m trying to give you the facts about the bomb explosion that took place here a little while ago.”

“That’s just the point, Mr. Garnett. We have all the facts. There was no bomb—it was a meteorite.”

“A meteorite?”

“That’s right. Quite a small one apparently, but was seen for miles. We’ve had reports of it from half a dozen places up and down the coast. A rare but entirely natural occurrence, sir—so there wasn’t any bomb. Now will you see the doctor? I think you should.” The inspector went out and Garnett heard him whispering to a waiting constable.

Garnett lurched to the door and sat on the polished wooden steps, staring upwards as he waited for the doctor. The sky contained no answers. It remained impersonal, anonymous, and beyond the mountains dawn was already beginning to overpaint the fainter stars.

5

The Pryce-Garnett organisation was a ‘second generation’ aircraft firm, as distinct from the long-established giants all of which had been founded by World War I aviators. It employed a total of only eight thousand men based in factories at Liverpool and Coventry, and had been given its toe-hold in the fiercely competitive industry solely by the introduction of the Pryce generated wing. The bulk of the electronics equipment associated with the wing was still produced at Pryce’s original plant in Liverpool, but the airframe fabrication and assembly unit in Coventry had become the company’s headquarters. Most of its senior management lived close to Coventry and it was there that Garnett headed on Sunday afternoon as soon as he was freed of his obligations to the authorities at Llanbedr.

He took the shorter route across the Welsh mountains, driving as fast as he dared in view of his condition. The events surrounding Janice’s death had punished him both mentally and physically, and he was reminded how the surgeon who had patched him up after the accident had commented that he might never fully get over it. Garnett had written that off at the time as pessimism but he was beginning to understand what the man had meant.

The big car hissed occasionally as it flashed through scattered rain showers. Once or twice on the journey he glimpsed newspaper billboards on which were scrawled, MOTEL GIRL KILLED BY FIREBALL. Part of him was forced to admire how merely describing Janice as a ‘motel girl’—whatever that might be—had added just the right connotation of shady sexuality to the story. The rest of him was filled with a brooding anger which at times caused his forehead to prickle painfully with sweat and turned his heart into a pulsating pillow, threatening to explode his ribs. In a way he was almost glad of the anger because an adversary who could guide meteorites down on to pin-point targets was someone of whom he would normally have been very afraid. As it was, Garnett was going to come to grips with his enemy in the only way he knew, and was looking forward to it.

It was late afternoon when he reached Coventry and swung round the outskirts to Baginton where Ian Dermott, his general manager, lived. Observation and deduction both indicated Dermott as top man in the mysterious ‘other’ production unit, but looking at his home Garnett was impressed by its sheer normality. The big redbrick house radiated friendliness through its helmet of rain-soaked ivy and the bright lawns vapoured introspectively in the sun. He parked outside the iron gates and walked up the drive, half expecting to be challenged at every step, but the place was silent until he rang the doorbell. As he waited Garnett began to feel foolish, but Janice was dead and there were questions which had to be answered, or at least asked. What was going on at the factory? Why had Janice mentioned someone known as Xoanon in her last breath? Was she one of them? How did one set about steering a meteorite? And why … ?

The door opened. Dermott stood there in a maroon silk dressing gown and with a pair of television glasses in his hand.

“We’ve got to have a talk,” Garnett said flatly.

“Of course, Tony. It’s good to see you. Come in. How was your trip to Wales?” Dermott stood back and cheerfully ushered Garnett into the hall, smiling down at him. “I’ve been watching television alone—becoming addicted to it, I’m afraid. I was able to take it or leave it while big screens were popular but these little gadgets have hooked me.” He held up the glasses. The little eye-sized screens glowed with movement like distant bonfires and a thin wisp of music escaped from the earpiece.

Garnett stared at the familiar, amiable face. “All right, Ian. You’ve done your sane, sensible, crumpets-for-tea bit—now let’s have our talk. What the hell have you been up to?”

“Up to! What do you mean, Tony?” Dermott turned and led the way into the spacious sitting room he used as a kind of office.

“I’m going to blast this thing out into the open,” Garnett said to the other man’s back. “I’m going to kick up the biggest row this country has ever seen, whether you talk or not. This is your only chance to talk about it in private—and you know me well enough to know I mean that.”

Dermott’s shoulders sagged slightly and he turned round. His face was suddenly very pale, almost luminescent. After a long, clock-ticking pause he said, “I suppose we must make the effort.”

“Never mind making efforts. Start making sense.”

Dermott swayed slightly and when he spoke his voice was harsh. “We are, as you suspected, completing a twenty-metre wing unit.”

Garnett had known, yet hearing it shocked him. ‘But why? For God’s sake why? Who wants it?”

“The customer’s name is Xoanon. I’ve never seen him. He’s an … I suppose you’d call it an extraterrestrial.”

Garnett remained silent—this was what he had dreaded since the first slithering premonitions the night he had sat on the motel steps and stared into a hostile sky.

“Neither Xoanon nor any of his race,” Dermott continued, ‘have ever set foot on Earth. They are human, but from a world with lower gravity. Their craft is in a three-hundred kilometre orbit.”

“That’s impossible. They couldn’t get away with it. Our radar would lamp them the first time round, unless …’

Dermott nodded. “Electron absorption screens—we’ll have something like that ourselves soon.”

Futile as it was, Garnett was unable to prevent himself from arguing. ‘But why do they want an aircraft wing?”

“There is a very important reason, but it can’t be disclosed.”

A pressure was building up within Garnett’s temples. “It still doesn’t make sense. If they can’t land—how do they expect to get hold of the wing unit?”

Dermott seemed slightly surprised by the question. “We will deliver, of course. Using a T.6.” Something about the way he spoke caused a convulsive upheaval in Garnett’s subconscious but he had no time to guess what it might mean. The anger, dulled by shock, was growing in him again.

“What sort of a person are you, Dermott? What did they buy you with?”

“I wasn’t bought, Tony—any more than you were.”

“Than I was!” The room slanted momentarily, then righted itself.

“Yes, Tony. You still don’t understand, do you? They got you before any of us. The instrument they use has been hidden in the sea close to the Welsh coast for years. It seems to be a device for recording the patterns of electrical activity in a person’s brain and then transmitting it to the spacecraft. Up there they construct an analogue—don’t ask me how—and by adjusting it force the weaker electrical activity of the brain into new patterns.

“What it boils down to is, if you get close enough to the device for an initial reading to be made they can influence you from that moment on. If necessary absolute control can be exerted but usually it is enough just to nudge a person’s thinking in the desired direction—that was how the twenty-metre wing project got under way in the first place. There were only half a dozen key men involved, you and I being two of them, but you had to go and lose part of your skull. The metal plate riveted into it acted like a screen and broke your link with Xoanon. When you cancelled the project we had to go underground, which meant that a total of forty personnel had to be put under almost complete control so that they would finish the wing unit and do it in secrecy.

“It would have been much easier to kill you, of course, but Xoanon doesn’t work that way. I’m explaining all this in the hope that you can eventually be persuaded to join us again.”

Garnett shook his head, unable to speak as he struggled to assimilate all he had just heard.

“Think it over,” Dermot said. “I’ll get you a drink. You look as though you could use one.” He moved to a sideboard which glittered with cut glass and silver.

“I am thinking it over. I’m thinking about Janice Villiers. I take it Xoanon is dismissing that as an unfortunate error.”

“Errors,” Dermott said, still busy at the sideboard, ‘can be compensated for.” When he turned round again only one of his hands held a glass. The other trembled slightly under the weight of an obsolescent, but nonetheless effective, automatic pistol. “We are sorry about this, Tony, but the project is too important….”

“You wouldn’t dare fire that thing. Somebody would hear it.”

Dermott shook his head. “I’ve sent Jean and the two boys away for a week, so let me assure you I will use it, but …’

Garnett had been shifting his balance while the other man spoke. He leaped sideways and dived for the cover of the massive desk which occupied a corner of the room. Dermott’s arm jerked up, the big pistol went off like a ton of high explosive and Garnett felt himself stopped as though he had run into a wall, his chest muscles paralysed with agony. He caught the desk for support then realised the bullet had almost missed him, scribing a bloody tangent across his ribs. The discovery brought with it a surge of elation. Honour’s satisfied, he thought illogically. Ian has made his point. He’ll call it quits now and I’ll go away and stay out of his life for ever.

But Dermott lurched forward, arm outstretched stiffly and face contorted with the loathing a man always feels for an animal he has failed to dispatch at the first blow. Garnett tried desperately to move, but there was no time. Dermott pointed the automatic at his head at a range of only a few feet and fired again. As he tried to jerk his head out of the way Garnett felt himself flicked off the edge of the desk like a fly. He landed heavily on the floor behind the desk and lay motionless, wondering why he was still alive. One side of his face, including the eye, was raw with a burning pain he recognised as being caused by muzzle blast and his ear was ringing like an anvil, but where had the bullet gone? Something hard was lodged in the back of his mouth. For an instant he recalled stories of soldiers who had bullets pierce their skulls and travel all round their heads on the inside, then he realised the hard object was a tooth. The bullet had hit him high on the cheek and had passed straight out the other side, smashing his back teeth on the way. He had been lucky.

Several cautious footsteps sounded as Dermott approached.

Garnett held his breath and hoped there was enough blood distributed over his head and chest to convince Dermott a coup de grace was unnecessary. After a few seconds he heard him pick up his televu from the desk and punch out a number.

“Hello, Bill.”

“Hello, Ian. Has it happened?” Garnett recognised the voice of his chief test pilot, Bill Makin.

“Yes—he came here, as we expected. I had to take certain steps. You know what I mean.”

“I know.”

“There’ll be trouble, of course. This is as far as we can go. You’d better deliver the unit right away.”

“I thought there still were difficulties with dimensional stability.”

“Only a centimetre or so at maximum chord. It’s acceptable. Anyway, we’ve run out of time.”

“What will you do with the … ah … waste products?”

“Don’t worry about that. Just deliver the goods.”

“I’m already plotting the flight profile. See you.”

Dermott set the televu down, stood for a moment then came round the desk and grabbed a fistful of Garnett’s jacket. He screamed in terror as Garnett brought up his legs and kicked, then he went down clutching his belly. Garnett propelled himself upwards, grunting with the effort. The televu set almost flew out of his fingers as he lifted and swung, but it connected with Dermott’s head. The screaming stopped. Garnett lifted the pistol purposively, hesitated, then worked it into his belt—Dermott had just tried to murder him but he had not been responsible for his own actions. Nor was he the one responsible for what had happened to Janice.

He dragged the unconscious man all the way into the kitchen, tied his wrists with the silk dressing gown cord and locked him in a cupboard. By the time he had finished he was drenched with perspiration and was leaving bloody footprints on the floor. He cleaned himself up in the bathroom as best he could, taped a clean towel across his ribs and put patches of skin-coloured medical plastic on his cheeks. Blood from the ruptured gums kept trickling into his throat so he made two plugs of cotton and bit down on them. The whole operation took only a matter of minutes, at the end of which his image in the full-length mirror appeared almost normal. There was a certain spiky look, like that of a sick bird, but that was pretty good considering the way he felt.

Garnett carefully locked the door behind him and limped out to his car which greeted him like an old friend as he settled into the seat. He slid it meticulously through the Sunday evening traffic, not risking an encounter with the police, and reached the works in reddish evening sunlight. A patrol officer saluted as he drove through the main gates and threaded among the silent workshops on his way to the field. The square-finned shape of a T.6 crouched outside the flight shed, impassively drinking in the contents of a mustard-coloured fuel bowser. Garnett was too far from the men who moved around it to decide if they were the regular ground crew or Xoanon-controlled draftees. Scanning the line of parked vehicles he found what he wanted—the white sports car belonging to Bill Makin.

Garnett slipped into the test pilots’ building by the rear entrance, went along the corridor and stopped outside Makin’s office. There was the question of how much feedback was built into Xoanon’s control system—if the spacecraft acted as a sort of clearing house for sense impressions then every man under control might know what was happening to all the others, in which case Makin could be expecting him. He extricated the heavy weapon from his belt, thankful there had been no necessity for a quick draw, and gently opened the door. Makin was already in his silver pressure skin and was bent over his personal computer, waiting tensely. Beyond the Venetian blinds the evening sky was turning peacock green.

Garnett levelled the automatic.

“Don’t move, Bill. Don’t make a sound. You’ve got a passenger on this trip.”

Makin remained hunched over the machine, but he shook his head without turning round. “I have—but not you, Tony. The wing unit is strapped into the second seat. Even you couldn’t get in there with it.”

“I don’t think you understand—I’m not permitting delivery of the unit. You’re taking me in its place.”

“What makes you think so?”

The task of thinking up a direct verbal reply which did not sound like something out of an old film was too much for Garnett’s patience and imagination. He stepped forward and gently laid the gun muzzle against Makin’s neck, but the time for words or any other sort of reply had already passed. Makin slid down on to the floor and lay, like a doll, with both arms reaching blindly into the air. As Garnett stared down at him, remembering Elkin, the fitter who had also been ‘switched off’, the computer chimed softly and rolled out a curling tongue of grey paper. Garnett snatched it and ran his eye down the printed figures—they were a complete set of parameters defining the flight profile for a maximum altitude T.6 sortie.

A few minutes later Garnett limped out of the test pilots’ building, doing his best to imitate Makin’s careful walk. The pressure skin was several sizes too large for him but none of the ground crew seemed to notice anything wrong. Garnett discovered that the loneliness of the astronaut, the age’s solitary hero figure, began from the moment he donned his egg-shell head and silver limbs. The T.6 waited for him, its belly replete with fuel, and the late sunlight splayed across the sky, masking everything that lay beyond.

6

Garnett had never actually flown a T.6 before and the fact that he was able to consider doing so, even with his experience in the aircraft’s simulator, was a tribute to the way in which the aircraft industry had tackled one of its oldest problems. Even before the end of the era of the reciprocating engine the demands upon the pilot of the large, fast transport were nearing the theoretical maximum capacity of the human nervous system. A limiting factor had been the sheer quantity of eye movements the pilot was called upon to make as he gathered discrete information from his instrument array and processed it into control movements. The answer had lain in a new philosophy of cockpit design which ushered in the age of the black box, starting with the first autoland systems. Its culmination was the fully automated cockpit which was the most valuable part of the machine and which could be lifted bodily out of any aircraft and installed in any other type, allowing the pilot to concentrate on where he was going and not on the mechanics of getting there.

The ground crew stood around disinterestedly as Garnett walked to the aircraft and worked his way up the spring-loaded hand and toe holds to reach the open cockpit. Actually, due to the fact that the T.6 was a true self-starter, there was nothing for the crew to do once the fuelling operation was completed. Now that he was about to take its controls into his own hands Garnett was impressed as never before by the machine’s sheer power. The huge cylinder was literally nothing but an engine and fuel system, with a contrived niche on top for two men and an assortment of mountings below for weapons. It was not armed, being still in final development, but it was one of the most fantastically extravagant products of a society with the arm-bearing mentality.

As he slid into the front seat Garnett realised, with a keen sense of shock, that he disliked the T.6 and all it stood for. Thoughts like that had never crossed his mind until now but then, as Dermott had explained, an outsider had been ‘nudging’ his ideas towards a certain end. It was difficult to comprehend that the whole twenty-metre wing project had been brought into being at the instigation of an alien figure known as Xoanon. Men’s lives had been twisted to meet that end and a girl called Janice had died. Garnett felt the gnawing bitterness of regret for everything that might have been. Up there, up in the lofty three-hundred kilometre orbit, Janice’s death probably seemed an infinitesimal event, but it had been an important one in his life. Soon he would be up there himself, though, and then he was going to make Janice important to Xoanon as well. The automatic in his belt was a pretty insignificant payload for the T.6 but, properly used, it should be sufficient.

Garnett wanted to unload the crated twenty-metre wing unit but doing it might have attracted too much suspicion, so he sealed the cockpit and checked over the flight plan. It called for a takeoff at seventeen-fifty hours, gradual climb to twenty thousand metres to clear the denser air strata, and then a fully boosted ballistic-style climb to engine shutdown at 250 kilometres. This would give enough momentum for the ship to coast the remaining fifty kilometres to what presumably was rendezvous altitude. He was more than ten minutes too early and was tempted to blast off anyway then adjust the flight path to suit, but there was the danger of alerting the whole of Regional Command. The flight was bound to be illegal—Makin had not had time even to file a flight plan—but as long as he did not loiter around at medium altitudes there was little anybody could do to stop him. They were unlikely to loose one of their robotic nimrods on an unidentified aircraft flying out of the country. There was also the danger of alerting the spacecraft but he had a feeling Xoanon already knew what was going on—the precious wing unit would be his guarantee of safe conduct.

At zero minus five he flicked over a series of toggles and the great engine, which extended from the ship’s nose, under his seat and all the way back to the tail, cleared its throat and gave voice, an indefinitely prolonged explosion even at minimum power. Keeping the radio switched off to eliminate distracting queries from the tower he released the brakes and steered the T.6 out to the end of the main runway. The configuration scope showed that the machine’s invisible wings were spread to their full extent.

Poised at the end of the runway, staring into the flame-coloured feathers of the sunset, Garnett was suddenly afraid to make the flight. The feeling was something like the one which had followed Dermott’s first grazing shot across his chest. He wanted to get away, escape into normal life, not project himself into the inhuman, anti-human coldness of the three-hundred kilometre orbit. But when his chronometer said it was time to go he kicked off the brakes and let the machine do all his thinking and worrying. The sound of the engine faded out a few seconds later as the T.6 went supersonic. He barely had time to get it on to the south-easterly bearing specified in the flight plan, and check his course, when the altimeter registered twenty thousand metres. At that point he surrendered all authority to the black boxes.

The T.6’s nose lifted higher as the built-in computers, unhampered by fears or regrets, drove it up beyond the atmosphere in a clean, pure curve. Garnett grunted with pain as the ion-boost came on and the high gravities tore at his wounds. The boost worked by seeding the jet stream with calcium particles which were ionised and accelerated by an engine-driven oscillator. To prevent the aircraft building up a huge electrical potential, negative and positive ions were blasted out alternately, recombining in a long reddish flare behind the jet pipe. When the atmosphere became too tenuous for turbine efficiency the fuel flow was terminated and the T.6 continued upwards on ion propulsion alone. Finally that too was shut down and the machine coasted on to find its orbit.

Inside the cockpit Garnett felt small, lonely and cold. With the T.6 in free fall and everything switched off, except for life-sustaining equipment, there was nothing for him to do but wait. In good health and different circumstances he might have been able to enjoy his first look at the unshielded stars, great cities wheeling in the blackness, but he could think only of hot coffee, a yellow-lit book-lined room, a good chair … and rest….

The spacecraft took him swiftly and easily, before he realised what was happening.

It came from behind and Garnett only became aware of its arrival when the stars progressively vanished until only a handful shone in a circle ahead of him. The circle was filled in abruptly and he knew the T.6, large as it was, had been engulfed the way a swooping bird takes a gnat. Lights suddenly shone from above to reveal a grey metal cavern, the walls and ceiling of which were criss-crossed with frames and braces of surprisingly Earth-like design. The silence which surrounded him was gradually replaced by faint sounds and he guessed air was being pumped into the compartment. His guess was confirmed as the T.6, which had been hanging contentedly a few metres above the floor, began to wallow gently and drift to one side in the currents. At the same time the cockpit canopy turned white as a coating of frost materialised on the aircraft. Flexible metal hoses tipped with suction cups snaked put from half a dozen wall panels and the T.6 became steady, held fast.

Garnett took a deep breath. He had known from the start there would be no chance of escape after he shot Xoanon—this simply confirmed it. He opened the cockpit, stood up and launched himelf upwards with his legs. The roof was higher than he had estimated in the dim light and for several long seconds he felt vulnerable and helpless, drifting up into the interlaced structure of beams, cables and pipes. Finally he connected with a truss and worked himself through it into a reasonably secure position, feeling like a bird in the roof of a barn.

While he waited for someone to appear down below Garnett partially unzipped the pressure skin and withdrew the automatic. It was almost a certainty that the aliens knew who had delivered the wing unit so there was little point in trying anything but the the most direct tactics. Besides, with the weapon in his hands he might be in a position to find the answer to his big question—why did the builders of this tremendous ship want the wing of a relatively primitive aircraft? Why did they want it so badly they were prepared to hang in orbit for several years while their puppets carried out the construction? Why … ?

A large section of the wall slid away and Garnett found himself looking down at a group of five aliens silhouetted against powerful blue-white light which streamed into his metal cave.

They appeared to be human, as Dermott had predicted, but humans who floated assuredly in the air like fish, controlling their altitudes with little arm and leg movements which caused disproportionately large shadow plays in the mingling light rays. He had time for a few fleeting impressions—almost childishly small bodies, silt-coloured skin, wispy hair, darkly lambent eyes—then the alients were swimming towards his empty craft. As he took aim it occurred to Garnett that he had completely forgotten to allow for zero gravity conditions when he brought the automatic pistol. Under these circumstances its fierce recoil would make it less effective than a bow and arrow, but it was too late to worry about it—the aliens must not be allowed to get their hands on the wing unit. Pain arced across his chest from the recoil as he fired. The aliens tumbled in panic and dived back through the doorway while thunderous multiple reverberations battered against the metal walls. Knowing he had deliberately aimed to miss, Garnett for the first time understood that a pistol’s sound is one of the most important factors in its potency as a weapon.

He opened the faceplate of his helmet, hardly noticing the smell of the alien air. “Where is Xoanon?” he shouted. “I want Xoanon.”

The aliens remained out of sight but their shadows moved anxiously across the glittering, frosty whiteness of the trapped T.6. Garnett waited with his eyes fixed on the brilliant trapezoid of the doorway, wondering if Xoanon would dare to appear. He watched tensely, aware of his own heart beats, yet when the movement finally came it took him completely by surprise—for it was inside his helmet!

Something cold brushed against his eyebrow and, from close up, a flash of brightness stabbed into his eye.

Sobbing with fear, Garnett scrabbled frantically at the helmet with his free hand, then abruptly he held still. It had been only the tiny flip-down television screen which formed part of the suit’s communications system. The fact that it had dropped into place in front of his left eye meant someone on the alien ship had begun to broadcast on his personal frequency.

Garnett moved his eye forward to the little screen and found himself peering into a large room with pale green lighting and what appeared to be clusters of silver threads running vertically between its floor and ceiling. The room was circular and its walls were banked with what was obviously a tremendously complex instrument array. Several aliens in black coveralls appeared to be entangled in the silver strands at different heights, but as each was positioned close to groups of controls Garnett realised the threads took the place of conventional furniture.

In the centre of the room a single, almost normal, chair held a white-haired man who had one arm missing from just below the shoulder. The slight figure of an alien woman floated behind the chair but Garnett’s attention was fixed on its occupant. There was an authoritative look about the time-scarred face and intent, unflinching eyes which told him….

“You are Xoanon?”

“Yes. And you are Mr. Garnett.”

A violent shuddering fit seized Garnett and pain radiated from different centres in his body. Anything I do, he thought, had better be done soon.

“I’m going to kill you, Xoanon.” At his words several aliens high up in the silver skeins twisted away from their control panels but Xoanon dismissed them with a rapid wave ofhis single arm. He leaned forward in his chair, dark eyes like gun muzzles.

“Mr. Garnett,” he said quietly, “I have no desire to use violence against you.”

“I can understand that,” Garnett said. “Facing an armed man is rather more difficult than aiming meteorites at him from the safety of your ship.”

“That isn’t my point. If it were necessary I could kill you without leaving this chair. I could, for example, withdraw the air from your sector of the ship.”

“You could,” Garnett conceded, ‘but I have enough oxygen here for several hours. At the end of that time there would be very little left of your wing unit.”

The old man’s face became bleak. “You must not touch the unit, Mr. Garnett. We have waited too long to permit anything to happen to it now. I must advise you that several members of my crew have armed themselves and are returning to the vicinity of your aircraft. I repeat, we have no desire to use violence, but we will not allow you to damage the unit. Now let us talk more reasonably—I know you well enough to be convinced we can be friends.”

Garnett was astounded at the idea. “No, Xoanon, you don’t know me.” He suddenly became aware of the woman behind Xoanon—could she be the old man’s daughter? He had not thought of the aliens as having daughters, sons, wives.

“I know you,” the old man insisted, ‘and now we must talk before it is too late. Some of my crew are running out of patience. This ship, although large by your standards, is regarded by my people as an ordinary commercial vessel, the equivalent of one of your tramp steamers. I could lie to you about its purpose. I could say it is a mercy ship filled with enough serum to save the lives of a billion people, or that it had some other equally important role, but I give you the simple truth. It is a rather old, rather shabby freighter which a long time ago, during a routine journey, suffered a major breakdown—an explosion which destroyed essential equipment and at the same time deprived us of much of our workshop facilities.

“At that time the ship had a crew of almost two hundred, all of whom had a very natural desire to return to their home planet, so we took a number of risks,” Xoanon glanced momentarily at the stump of his arm, ‘and got our vessel as far as this planet. However, our troubles were only beginning. We were unable to land and even if we had been able to put down your high gravity would have made us almost helpless. The component we required was not available on Earth, naturally enough, nor was the means to manufacture and deliver it. No solution at all would have been possible but for the fact that our ship normally travelled to a number of ‘backwoods’ planetary systems and therefore was fitted with a standard brain-to-brain communications device. Our engineers were able to effect a number of illegal modifications to it and …’

“I don’t understand,” Garnett interrupted. “What use would an aircraft wing be to a ship this size?”

Xoanon smiled faintly. “To you it is an aircraft wing—to my engineers it is one of a system of drive thrust deflectors without which the ship cannot be manoeuvred. It is necessary to employ a force field, as you call it, because no physical deflector can exist for more than a few seconds in the drive stream.”

“I see,” Garnett said grimly. “So you took over a man called Garnett and had him order his firm to build a unit the size you needed.”

The old man shook his head. “It wasn’t that simple. The first person we took over was called Clifford Pryce….”

“Pryce ! But that means …’

“Yes, Mr. Garnett. When we reached your world it had an electronics industry of sorts, but our requirements were far beyond its capabilities, so far …’

Garnett stopped listening. There had been a movement of shadows near the doorway. Two aliens carrying what looked like weapons sped through the opening and vanished into the dimness beyond the T.6. Garnett decided to get closer to the wing unit so as to be certain of destroying it with his first shots and began working his way downwards, trying to remain in cover. At the same time his mind swung dizzily over chasms of thought opened by Xoanon’s words.

“Exactly when,” he said, ‘did you take over Pryce?”

“I have already given you that information. It was in your year 1940.”

‘But that was …’

“Several years before you were born, Mr. Garnett. At that time Clifford Pryce was a young radio engineer. It was necessary for us to guide his development so that he could ‘invent’ the force field generator. We had to steer him into aviation in order that he would not find some more obvious application than constructing aerofoil surfaces, and at the same time made him a multi-millionaire so that we could retain control of the new invention. The aircraft you refer to as the T.6 had a triple function—it gave your technicians the experience they needed to develop successfully the larger force field unit, it financed the larger unit and, most important, it …’

“It provided the means to get the unit into your hands,” Garnett finished, listening to the strangely distant sound of his own voice. He spoke automatically, all his attention centred on the task of moving downwards without swinging out into view of the two aliens. “You said you know me, Xoanon—but you don’t. You have learned nothing at all about the primitives down there if you think you have just presented a case against my killing you. Not one inhabitant of my world would hesitate in this situation. By your own admission you have twisted people’s lives, you have tampered with Earth’s very history, you have provided a new dimension in weapon building for a race which specialises in weapon building….

“And you took a human life. A very human life.” Garnett reached the metal floor and began to work his way towards the T.6, talking feverishly. “You can have the unit, Xoanon, but you must come here and collect it in person, and pay for it in person. I am close enough to the T.6 to guarantee to put a bullet into the unit unless you come through that doorway within the next five minutes.” Without warning from his stomach, Garnett found himself retching violently, each convulsion tearing the wound in his chest until his eyes blurred with tears. When he had recovered, he again noticed the wispy-haired woman behind Xoanon. She had the typical silt-coloured alien complexion, but her eyes were large and somehow disturbing.

Xoanon remained seated. ‘Before you act, Mr. Garnett, let me remind you of a few basic facts. I told you it was necessary to steer Clifford Pryce into the aircraft industry so that he would not concentrate on more obvious applications of the force field generator. Has it occurred to you that the field could make an excellent instrument of defence in, for instance, the form of a city-sized dome?”

Garnett was no longer listening. He had become the matrix for a ferocious concentration of pain, nausea, exhaustion and, above all, the sheer psychological shock of being translated from his own physical and mental universe into another in which different players played a different game to strange rules. Worlds tilted crazily beneath his feet and spun away, stars became black orbs in a continuum of blinding light. Garnett was foundering, falling, but he hung desperately to the one unalterable fact which remained to him.

“The girl,” he whispered hoarsely. “You can change all the rest, but not that—now get down here or I start blasting the unit apart.”

Xoanon rose from his chair. “You haven’t yet learned …’

“Enough!” Garnett shouted desperately. “No more talk. If you want the unit—come for it!” He dragged his suit microphone free of its socket and pushed it away from him. It twinkled briefly in the shaft of light then floated up into the dimness, and when he looked back into the screen Xoanon’s chair was empty. As he lay waiting for the old man to appear in the doorway several dark, trembling globules escaped from his helmet and drifted away on his breath. Blood, he thought. The old bastard has to get here soon….

Shadow movements disturbed the light again, then Xoanon silently appeared, holding himself upright in the shifting air by gripping the edge of the doorway. Garnett stared at him over the sights of the automatic. He looked frail and helpless—but not as helpless as Janice had been.

“I haven’t finished talking, Mr. Garnett, you …’

“I’ve finished listening,” Garnett shouted. He tightened his finger on the trigger, but there was a new flurry of activity as the alien woman ducked under Xoanon’s arm. She straightened up with a strangely clumsy movement and launched herself towards Garnett.

“Get out of the way,” he warned frantically. “You’ll get yourself killed.”

The woman caught a vertical frame and pulled herself down in front of him, disregarding the pistol.

“Take it easy, Tony,” she said gently. “You’ve been neglecting your milk again, haven’t you?”

Garnett stared up at her face. It was the colourless face of an alien woman, but those eyes….

After a long time he said, “Janice.”

She nodded and Garnett felt himself slide over the edge of reality into darkness.

The woman cradled his head in thin brown arms with a kind of reverence. “You did love me,” she whispered. “You did!”

7

Though large by Earth standards, the spaceship was in fact a rather old and rather shabby commercial vessel, the equivalent of a tramp steamer. Nor did the fact that its main drive had not been activated for forty-five Earth years make the task of getting under way any easier. There were many unforeseen difficulties in preparing for the journey and after three days it was still far from ready.

Garnett opened his eyes and found himself wrapped in a soft, warm cocoon which was anchored to the wall of a green and silver room. There was the smell of hot soup and he realised he had not eaten for a long time. He raised his head and looked around.

She was there beside him—the woman who had looked at him with Janice’s eyes. He remembered vaguely that she had been there on earlier occasions when he had wakened and fallen back into the sleep on which his body was gorging itself. Then he had been able to accept the impossible, but how—how could it be?

“Awake at last,” she said quickly, nervously. “It must have been the smell of food. The way to a man’s heart…. What disgusting anatomical details some of these sayings conjure up—or is it just my mind?”

Garnett closed his eyes and smiled peacefully. He knew Janice Villiers when he heard her.

“Are you going to sleep again, Tony? Or am I too horrible to look at?”

He took her hand. “I’m not going to sleep, so stop asking questions and provide a few answers.”

“All right, all right—don’t let the fact that you’re bigger than I am now go to your head. I can only remember part of what Xoanon told me. He said the only way they could control somebody down there was for one of them to have his own identity temporarily erased so that the new patterns could be impressed on his brain. Xoanon called it becoming a living analogue, whatever that means. He said a person they were controlling existed in two bodies at once, one up here and one down there. If anything happened to the body on Earth the identity was preserved up here—it’s a bit like astral bodies, isn’t it?”

“That means you too were under control?”

Janice shook her head. “I wasn’t—not until they discovered their mistake when they tried to kill you, then they had to act quickly. One of their women voluntarily died for me, Tony. Or, at least, her identity is in indefinitely prolonged storage—but she still had to go through it. Her name was Temnare. I’ve learned something from her.”

Garnett thought in silence. “I wasn’t under control though. If the meteorite had killed me, that would have been the end.”

“I know. Xoanon wasn’t: happy about it, but the population of the ship has grown to over three hundred and all of them will die eventually unless they get it back to their own world. The vitamin shortages caused by synthetic food are already chronic—look at my new hair! What would you do in a case where the life of one stranger was weighed against the lives of three hundred friends?”

“Well, if you put it like that…. Whose side are you on anyway?”

“I’m on their side. I’m one of them now. I can’t go back to Earth with you, Tony.”

He had known it was coming, and the decision was strangely easy. “I’m not going back to Earth either. I’m finished building aeroplanes and, from what the doctors told me, a low-gravity world is just what I need. Besides, all this hasn’t really changed anything so far as I am concerned. You might as well get ready to laugh—but I …’ He hesitated.

Janice smiled. “Go ahead and say it, Tony—some things have changed.”

Telemart Three

Four days after the honeymoon, Ted Trymble came home from golf and found his wife had been unfaithful to him. The evidence was there—right outside his front door—for all the world to see.

“Why did you do it, Maggie?” he demanded, setting his clubs down in a corner with exaggerated care. He kept his face immobile and his voice crisp, pretending to be not unduly shocked, though inwardly he was praying to hear it was all a mistake.

But Maggie smiled her calm, careless smile and shrugged, “It was just an impulse,” she said. “An irresistible impulse.”

Ted went to the window and eyed the evidence. The black Turbo-Cadillac was almost as long as the house, and its haunches gleamed in the late afternoon sun like those of a panther about to spring. So she was admitting it, just like that.

“Maggie,” he said reasonably. “Everybody gets that kind of impulse now and then, but they just have to learn to control it.”

“I can’t,” she replied blandly. “When I find something I like—I buy it.”

“I see.” Ted went into the kitchen, took a beer bulb from the the refrigerator and squirted some of the frothy liquid into his mouth. He sat down in the cool seclusion of the dining alcove to consider the matter of his wife’s dereliction. Maggie’s parents had left her a lump sum of almost $100,000, the income from which was just enough to maintain Ted and her in modest comfort for the rest of their lives. When they got engaged the agreement was that the capital would be kept intact. Ted was a personable young man and he knew he could probably have married real money; but he had exchanged his boyish hopes of someday owning a private airplane and yacht for the certitude of never having to work. And he had been prepared to stick to the bargain because marriage was, in his opinion, still a sacred covenant.

The trouble was that Maggie appeared not to share his high sense of principle—for she had just blown a noticeable fraction of their livelihood in one afternoon. A pang of anguish caused Ted’s fingers to clamp inwards on the plastic bulb, and a wavering stream of beer leaped across the kitchen. He composed himself with an effort and went back into the lounge.

“I forgive you this time, Maggie,” he said stiffly. “I guess it won’t do any harm for me to be seen in a better car, but you must promise not to do it again.”

“Of course, honey.” Maggie spoke a lack of effort which Ted found disturbing, and she went on flicking the glowing pages of a tri-di magazine.

Two days later he came in from a morning’s workout in the gymnasium to find that his fears had been well founded. Maggie was sporting a bracelet of genuine green-veined Venusian gold costing roughly ten times as much as its counterpart in Earth gold would have done.

“I promised not to buy another car,” was her defence. “This isn’t another car, is it? It doesn’t look much like a car to me.” She flirted her wrist in his face and the bracelet’s chunky links clicked like the action of a well-oiled rifle.

“It isn’t a car,” Ted agreed, ‘but it’s something we can afford even less. What about our investments?”

“This is an investment. Isn’t gold an investment?”

“Not that kind. Don’t you ever read the financial pages? Don’t you know that big nuclear powered ships have just been proved out on the Venus and Mars hauls? The cost of Venusian gold at the moment is ninety per cent freight charge, but by this time next year it’ll be as common as dirt.”

Maggie sniffed disbelievingly. “Well, I was bored sitting here by myself. Other girls’ husbands stay at home with them.”

‘Bored!” Ted was aghast. “You absolutely seem to forget that when those other guys are swanning round the house watching television and getting fat, I’m working hard to build up my health. That’s a marriage partner’s most important duty—to keep himself healthy.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Maggie whispered. “What have I done?”

Three days later, while Ted was surfing, she bought a luminous mink costing as much as the car and the bracelet put together. Ted examined the price tag then went into the kitchen, took a beer bulb in each hand and expended them in a foaming orgasm of fury. When calmness returned he went back to the lounge and greeted his wife with a numb smile.

“It has just occurred to me that I’ve been neglecting you a little, Maggie. Let’s go out tonight and see what we can do about hitting the town.”

Maggie’s eye flickered with enthusiasm as she hurried away to engage in lengthy cosmetic rituals, and that night she really did hit the town. When she was too full of assorted liquors to be aware of what was happening, Ted pushed her out through the window of their third floor bedroom.

The fall did not kill Maggie, but the damage to her lower spine was such that she was confined to a wheelchair for life. As the Trymbles’ house was tall and narrow—with a steep flight of steps at the door—Ted felt that his wife was as good as dead. She could not, at any rate, get to the expensive stores in which she would be tempted to further acts of infidelity.

With a mimimum of prompting from him she sold the car and the coat at a relatively small loss, but insisted on retaining the bracelet of green-veined Venusian gold.

“What’s the point of keeping it?” he pleaded. “I mean, you don’t even go out now.”

“It’s company for me. Something I can look at.”

‘But there must be more interesting things to look at—how about a television set?”

To Ted’s surprise, his wife showed interest in the suggestion. “If I sell the bracelet will you get me a set?”

“Of course, sweetie.”

“Any kind of a television set?”

He sensed the trap immediately, but in his mind’s eye he could see the big nuclear-powered ships speeding towards Earth with cargoes of cheaper Venusian gold, and he decided to play along. “Any kind of set you want, Maggie. You know how bad I feel about you being tied to that chair all the time.”

“That’s nice of you, honey. I’d like a Telemart Three.”

Ted swallowed unhappily. He detested television as an opiate which sapped a man’s strength of body and mind, and he even had an aversion to reading about the bewildering technical developments in the field. But he knew about the Telemart Three.

The set was ordered that day and Ted’s unhappiness increased as he watched the technicians position the eight-foot proscenium and arch at one end of the lounge. Working with blunt efficiency they ripped out the floor below the proscenium and ran a mass of cables, conduits and wave guides down to the raw materials tank they were installing in the basement. Four hours later the job was completed, and a Telemart sales exec. formally presented Maggie with a white-and-gold brochure. He then placed the remote control set in her hand with the air of an English archbishop conferring the orb and sceptre of his sovereign.

“This is your on-off switch and channel selector,” he said, addressing himself intensely to Maggie and ignoring Ted. He moved the switch and a pretty girl in a silver dress appeared on the proscenium, singing in the low voice of a French diseuse. The only way in which she could be distinguished from real flesh-and-blood was a slight tendency to glow, which made her brighter than the other people in the room.

“Oops,” the sales exec. said. “If the image is too bright you do this.” He moved a knob and the girl dimmed to normality.

“It’s wonderful,” Maggie breathed. “When do we get the commercials?”

“You shouldn’t have long to wait,” the exec. said benignly, his eyes gleaming behind their old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses. A few seconds later the silver girl finished her song and vanished, to be replaced by a handsome, tanned man in beachwear. He was reclining on a sun chair on a shockingly real area of honey-coloured sand, and in his hand was a dewy-cold bottle of Tingle-lime. Ted started involuntarily—he could actually smell sea air mingled with the keen tang of the soft drink. He examined the small orifices in the edge of the proscenium, looking for visible signs of gas being emitted, but saw nothing.

‘… why don’t you join me?” the image was saying. “Join me now!”

“Shall I?” Maggie asked excitedly.

“Only if you can use some Tingle-lime,” the exec. replied. “We urge all our clients to buy only what they really need.”

“We drink lots of Tingle-lime.”

“No we don’t,” Ted put in, but he was too late. Maggie had pressed the ‘accept’ button on her handset and a crate of a dozen king-size Tingle-limes appeared, amid a faint ozonic crackling, on the vestigial catwalk attached to the front of the proscenium. The exec. lifted the crate, carried it to Maggie’s chair and with a flourish opened one of the plastic bottles.

Maggie took it and sipped the green liquid eagerly. “It’s perfect—even better than the stuff we get at the store.”

“It ought to be. Anything you buy in a store is bound to have been on the shelves for some time, possibly months, but goods you buy through Telemart Three are created specially for you on the instant of purchase.”

“How can that be?” Ted felt he had been silent too long. “As I understand it, there has to be a crate of Tingle-lime at the broadcasting station. It gets scanned with Röntgen rays and the details of its molecular structure are broadcast on a separate channel from the one which carries the programmes and commercials. Right?”

“That’s true, but …’

“If someone presses the ‘accept’ button, the molecular blueprint coming through at that time is used to build up a replica of the transmitted object from the raw materials bank in the basement. Right?”

“Right again, but …’

“So how do we know the original crate of pop hasn’t been lying on a shelf at the station, possibly for months?”

“You know because the Telemart Corporation stands over its word as given in this brochure,” the exec. said in a hurt voice. He turned to Maggie. “I’m pleased that a Tingle-lime commercial was on when you made your first purchase because it demonstrates the superiority of the Telemart Three over all other models. Believe it or not, a carbonated drink is not an easy object to transmit. With older systems there was an appreciable loss of carbon dioxide pressure before the container was completely formed.

‘But the Telemart Three comes so close to instantaneous construction of the transmitted object that it is possible to …’

“Oh, look,” Maggie interrupted. “There’s a commercial for liqueur chocolates. It’s ages since I’ve had a liqueur chocolate.”

Ted hurried into the ground floor room in which his wife had slept since her injury and found the bracelet of Venusian gold. He had a feeling he would need to get the best possible price for it.

In spite of intensive bargaining, and even a certain amount of abject pleading, he dropped over $5,000 on the bracelet. He went to his favourite gymnasium and spent two hours trying to work the tension toxins out of his body, but all the while a gloomy certainty that he had made a major blunder was building up in him. Finally, half-way through a set of deep knee bends, he made a decision—Maggie would have to give him a sacred vow not to use the Telemart for anything beyond normal household shopping. If necessary he would even sit with her at nights until satisfied she was going to play the game.

He showered quickly and drove home in his ageing rotary-engined Pontiac. The tall narrow house was in darkness except for a dim, shifting light in the window of the lounge. Ted sprinted up the stone steps and went into the house, but he had trouble opening the lounge door. There seemed to be something heavy preventing it from moving. He got his head into the room and blinked incredulously at what he saw.

Maggie was sitting close to the proscenium, watching a noisy powerboat race, but she was almost hidden from his view by a pile of cartons and boxes, most of which had been opened. In the first seconds he picked out three new table lamps, a gilt-framed painting which looked like a Renoir, several of the recently developed four-legged turkeys in polythene skins, a salon-type hair drier, numerous hat boxes, and a de luxe Micropedia Britannica complete with reclining chair and ceiling projector.

Ted was unable to suppress a plaintive whimpering sound as he forced his way into the room. “You bitch,” he moaned. “You faithless bitch.”

“What did you say, honey?” Maggie twisted a knob on the handset and the sound of the jockeying speedboats faded away. She wheeled her chair round to face Ted and he saw the Telemart brochure was open on her knees.

“What do you think you’re doing, Maggie? They don’t give this stuff away, you know—our bank account is automatically debited every time you press that button.”

Maggie shrugged. “I’ve been enjoying myself—which makes a nice change. Ted, honey, you really should look at this brochure. You don’t have to buy just what they show you in the commercials—Telemart offers all kind of services I never dreamed …’ She stopped speaking as he picked up one of the turkeys and hurled it at the vista of boats beyond the proscenium arch. The bird passed through a red boat, hit the wall of the room and bounced back out on to the floor.

“I’m going to kill you,” Ted announced. “I’m a fair-minded man, and I don’t like the idea of killing you, but you give me no choice.”

“You’ve been drinking!”

“I’m cold sober.” He looked around the room, selected one of the new table lamps and removed its ornate shade, leaving himself with a serviceable blunt instrument.

Maggie clutched the Telemart’s handset to her bosom in a strangely protective gesture. “Don’t come near me!”

“In a way I blame myself,” Ted said sadly, hefting the base of the lamp. “I should have known you weren’t ready for the responsibilities of marriage.” He stepped over a cluster of perfume bottles and swung downwards at Maggie’s head. She twisted away from the lamp and it crunched into the back of the wheelchair, tipping it over. Maggie went sprawling among the hat boxes. Breathing heavily, Ted stood over her and raised the base with both hands, noting with one part of his mind that she was still holding the handset and was, in fact, twisting a red knob on it. Poor mindless lump, he thought as he brought the club down.

“Drop it right there, fellow,” a voice said close behind him. Ted spun and saw a hard-faced young man in a grey suit stepping down from the truncated catwalk attached to the proscenium. The stranger was holding an automatic pistol.

“Who … ?”Ted’s voice faltered as he tried to grasp the enormity of what was happening. “What is this?”

The stranger smiled unpleasantly. “You can’t have studied the section of the Telemart brochure covering our new Three Star Protection Service for clients’ lives and property.”

“Protection?”

“Yes. As soon as we get an emergency signal a trained security man who is on duty at the station is instantaneously transmitted into the home—and in this case I’d say I made it just in time.”

‘But they can’t do that!” Ted had an overpowering sense of outrage. “After a while there’d be hundreds of duplicates of you running about the city. Telemart can’t go around creating extra people—we’re overpopulated as it is.”

A shadow crossed the stranger’s face. “That’s taken care of. They deliberately programme a flaw into the haemoglobin structure of any duplicates they have to transmit. A massive embolism will kill me in a few hours. It’s a hell of a prospect.” The stranger raised his right hand and levelled the pistol.

“Just a minute,” Ted said desperately. “There must be some arrangement we can come to. I’ve got money …’

The stranger regarded him with cold, tortured eyes. “What good is money to a duplicate like me? I’ve got a short life, and all I can do is make it as gay as possible.”

He aimed the pistol right between Ted’s eyes, and pulled the trigger.

Invasion of Privacy

“I saw Granny Cummins again today,” Sammy said through a mouthful of turnip and potato.

May’s fork clattered into her plate. She turned her head away, and I could see there were tears in her eyes. In my opinion she had always been much too deeply attached to her mother, but this time I could sympathise with her—there was something about the way the kid had said it.

“Listen to me, Sammy.” I leaned across the table and gripped his shoulder. “The next time you make a dumb remark like that I’ll paddle your backside good and hard. It wasn’t funny.”

He gazed at me with all the bland defiance a seven-year-old can muster. “I wasn’t trying to be funny. I saw her.”

“Your granny’s been dead for two weeks,” I snapped, exasperated both at him and at May, who was letting the incident get too far under her skin. Her lips had begun to tremble.

“Two weeks,” Sammy repeated, savouring the words. He had just discovered sarcasm and I could tell by his eyes he was about to try some on. “If she’d only been dead two days it woulda been all right, I suppose. But not two weeks, eh?” He rammed a huge blob of creamed potato into his mouth with a flourish.

“George!” May’s brown eyes were spilling as she looked at me and the copper strands of her hair quivered with anger. “Do something to that child! Make him drop dead.”

“I can’t Smack him for that, hon,” I said reasonably. “The kid was only being logical. Remember in Decline and Fall where a saint got her head chopped off, then was supposed to get up and walk a mile or so to the burial ground, and religious writers made a great fuss about the distance she’d covered, and Gibbon said in a case like that the distance wasn’t the big thing—it was the taking of the first step? Well …’ I broke off as May fled from the table and ran upstairs. The red sunlight of an October evening glowed on her empty chair, and Sammy continued eating.

“See what you’ve done?” I rapped his blond head with my knuckles, but not sharply enough to hurt. I’m letting you off this time—for the last time—but I can’t let you go on upsetting your mother with a stupid joke. Now cut it out.”

Sammy addressed the remains of his dinner. “I wasn’t joking. I … saw … Granny … Cummins.”

“She’s been dead and buried for …’ I almost said two weeks again, but stopped as an expectant look appeared on his face. He was quite capable of reproducing the same sarcasm word for word. “How do you explain that?”

“Me?” A studied look of surprise. “I can’t explain it. I’m just telling you what I seen.”

“All right—where did you see her?”

“In the old Guthrie place, of course.”

Of course, I thought with a thrill of something like nostalgia. Where else? Every town, every district in every city, has its equivalent of the old Guthrie place. To find it, you simply stop any small boy and ask him if he knows of a haunted house where grisly murders are committed on a weekly schedule and vampires issue forth at night. I sometimes think that if no suitable building existed already the community of children would create one to answer a dark longing in their collective mind. But the building is always there—a big, empty, ramshackle place, usually screened by near-black evergreens, never put up for sale, never pulled down, always possessing a “Bal immunity to property developers. And in the small town where I live the old Guthrie house was the one which filled the bill. I hadn’t really thought about it since childhood, but it looked just the same as ever—dark, shabby and forbidding—and I should have known it would have the same associations for another generation of kids. At the mention of the house Sammy had become solemn and I almost laughed aloud as I saw myself, a quarter of a century younger, in his face.

“How could you have seen anything in there?” I decided to play along a little further as long as May was out of earshot. “It’s too far from the road.”

“I climbed through the fence.”

“Who was with you?”

“Nobody.”

“You went in alone?”

“Course I did.” Sammy tilted his head proudly and I recalled that as a seven-year-old nothing in the world would have induced me to approach that house, even in company. I looked at my son with a new respect, and the first illogical stirrings of alarm.

“I don’t want you hanging around that old place, Sammy—it could be dangerous.”

“It isn’t dangerous.” He was scornful. “They just sit there in big chairs, and never move.”

“I meant you could fall or … What?

“The old people just sit there.” Sammy pushed his empty plate away. “They’d never catch me in a hundred years even if they did see me, but I don’t let them see me, ‘cause I just take one quick look through the back window and get out of there.”

“You mean there are people living in the Guthrie place?”

“Old people. Lots of them. They just sit there in big chairs.”

I hadn’t heard anything about the house being occupied, but I began to guess what had been going on. It was big enough for conversion to a private home for old people—and to a child one silver-haired old lady could look very much like another. Perhaps Sammy preferred to believe his grandmother had moved away rather than accept the idea that she was dead and buried beneath the ground in a box.

“Then you were trespassing as well as risking …’ I lowered my voice to a whisper as May’s footsteps sounded on the stairs again. “You didn’t see your Granny Cummins, you’re not to go near the old Guthrie place again, and you’re not to upset your mother. Got that?”

Sammy nodded, but his lips were moving silently and I knew he was repeating his original statement over and over to himself. Any anger I felt was lost in a tide of affection—my entire life had been one of compromise and equivocation, and it was with gratitude I had discovered that my son had been born with enough will and sheer character for the two of us.

May came back into the room and sat down, her face wearing a slightly shamefaced expression behind the gold sequins of its freckles. “I took a tranquilliser.”

“Oh? I thought you were out of them.”

“I was, but Doctor Pitman stopped by this afternoon and let me have some more.”

“Did you call him?”

“No—he was in the neighbourhood and he looked in just to see how I was. He’s been very good since … since …’

“Since your mother died—you’ve got to get used to the idea, May.”

She nodded silently and began to gather up the dinner plates. Her own food had scarcely been touched.

“Mom?” Sammy tugged her sleeve. I tensed, waiting for him to start it all over again, but he had other’ things on his mind. His normally ruddy cheeks were pale as tallow and his forehead was beaded with perspiration. I darted from my chair barely in time to catch him as he fell sideways to the floor.

Bob Pitman had been a white-haired, apple-cheeked old gentleman when he was steering me through boyhood illnesses, and he appeared not to have aged any further in the interim. He lived alone in an unfashionably large house, still wore a conservative dark suit with a watch-chain’s gold parabola spanning the vest, played chess as much as possible and drank specially-imported non-blended Scotch. The sight of his square hands, with their ridged and slab-like fingernails, moving over Sammy’s sleeping figure comforted me even before he stood up and folded the stethoscope.

“The boy has eaten something he shouldn’t,” he said, drawing the covers up to Sammy’s chin.

‘But he’ll be all right?” May and I spoke simultaneously.

“Right as rain.”

“Thank God,” May said and sat down very suddenly. I knew she had been thinking about her mother and wondering if we were going to lose Sammy with as little warning.

“You’d better get some rest,” Dr. Pitman looked at her with kindly severity. “Young Sammy here will sleep all night, and you should follow his example. Take another of those caps I gave you this morning.”

I’d forgotten about his earlier visit. “We seem to be monopolising your time today, Doctor.”

“Just think of it as providing me with a little employment—everybody’s far too healthy these days.” He shepherded us out of Sammy’s room. “I’ll call again in the morning.”

May wasn’t quite satisfied—she was scrupulously hygienic in the kitchen and the idea that our boy had food poisoning was particularly unacceptable to her. ‘But what could Sammy have eaten, Doctor? We’ve had everything he’s had and we’re all right.”

“It’s hard to say. When he brought up his dinner did you notice anything else there? Berries? Exotic candies?”

“No. Nothing like that,” I said, ‘but they wouldn’t always be obvious, would they?” I put my arm around May’s shoulders and tried to force her to relax. She was rigid with tension and it came to me that if Sammy ever were to contract a fatal illness or be killed in an accident it would destroy her. We of the Twentieth Century have abandoned the practice of holding something in reserve when we love our children, assuming—as our ancestors would never have dared to do—that they will reach adulthood as a matter of course.

The doctor—nodding and smiling and wheezing—exuded reassurance for a couple more minutes before he left. When I took May to bed she huddled in the crook of my left arm, lonely in spite of our intimacy, and it was a long time before I was able to soothe her to sleep.

In spite of her difficulty in getting to sleep, or perhaps because of it, May failed to waken when I slipped out of the bed early next morning. I went into Sammy’s room, and knew immediately that something was wrong. His breathing was noisy and rapid as that of a pup which has been running. I went to the bed. He was unconscious, mouth wide open in the ghastly breathing, and his forehead hotter than I would have believed it possible for a human’s to be.

Fear spurted coldly in my guts as I turned and ran for the phone. I dialled Dr. Pitman’s number. While it was ringing I debated shouting upstairs to waken May, but far from being able to help Sammy she would probably have become hysterical. I decided to let her sleep as long as possible. After a seemingly interminable wait the phone clicked.

“Dr. Pitman speaking.” The voice was sleepy.

“This is George Ferguson. Sammy’s very ill. Can you get over here right away?” I babbled a description of the symptoms.

“I’ll be right there.” The sleepiness had left his voice. I hung up, opened the front door wide so that the doctor could come straight in, then went back upstairs and waited beside the bed. Sammy’s hair was plastered to his forehead and his every breath was accompanied by harsh metallic clicks in his throat. My mind became an anvil for the hammer blows of the passing seconds. Bleak eons went by before I heard Dr. Pitman’s footsteps on the stair.

He came into the room, looking uncharacteristically dishevelled, took one look at Sammy and lifted him in his arms in a cocoon of bedding.

“Pneumonia,” he said tersely. “The boy will have to be hospitalised immediately.”

Somehow I managed to speak. “Pneumonia! But you said he’d eaten something.”

“There’s no connection between this and what was wrong yesterday. There’s a lightning pneumonia on the move across the country.”

“Oh. Shall I ring for an ambulance?”

“No. I’ll drive him to the clinic myself. The streets are clear at this hour of the morning and we’ll make better time.” He carried Sammy towards the door with surprising ease.

“Wait. I’m coming with you.”

“You could help more by phoning the clinic and alerting them, George. Where’s your wife?”

“Still asleep—she doesn’t know.” I had almost forgotten about May.

He raised his eyebrows, paused briefly on the landing. “Ring the clinic first, tell them I’m coming, then waken your wife. Don’t let her get too worried, and don’t get too tensed up yourself—I’ve an emergency oxygen kit in the car, and Sammy should be all right once we get him into an intensive care unit.”

I nodded gratefully, watching my son’s blindly lolling face as he was carried down the stairs, then went to the phone and called the clinic. The people I spoke to sounded both efficient and sympathetic, and it was only a matter of seconds, before I was sprinting upstairs to waken May. She was sitting on the edge of the bed as I entered the room.

“George?” Her voice was cautious. “What’s happening?” “Sammy has pneumonia. Dr. Pitman’s driving him to the clinic now, and he’s going to be well taken care of.” I was getting dressed as I spoke, praying she would be able to take the news with some semblance of calm. She stood up quietly and began to put on clothes, moving with mechanical exactitude, and when I glimpsed her eyes I suddenly realised it would have been better had she screamed or thrown a fit. We went down to the car, shivering in the thick grey air of the October morning, and drove towards the clinic. At the end of the street I remembered I had left the front door of the house open, but didn’t turn back. I think I’d done it deliberately, hoping—with a quasi-religious irrationality—that we might be robbed and thus appease the Fates, diverting their attention from Sammy. There was little traffic on the roads but I drove at moderate speed, aware that I had virtually no powers of concentration for anything extraneous to the domestic tragedy. May sat beside me and gazed out the windows with the air of a child reluctantly returning from a long vacation.

It was with a sense of surprise that, on turning into the clinic grounds, I saw Dr. Pitman’s blue Buick sliding to a halt under the canopy of the main entrance. In my estimation he should have been a good ten minutes ahead of us. May’s fingers clawed into my thigh as she saw the white bundle being lifted out and carried into the building by a male nurse. I parked close to the entrance, heedless of painted notices telling me the space was for doctors only, and we ran into the dimness of the reception hall. There was no sign of Sammy, but Dr. Pitman was waiting for us.

“You just got here,” I accused. “What held you up?”

‘Be calm, George. Getting into a panic won’t help things in the least.” He urged us towards a row of empty chairs. “Nothing held me back—I was driving with one hand and feeding your boy oxygen with the other.”

“I’m sorry, it’s just … how is he?”

“Still breathing, and that’s the main thing. Pneumonia’s never to be taken lightly—especially this twelve-hour variety we’ve been getting lately—but there’s every reason for confidence.”

May stirred slightly at that—I think she had been expecting to hear the worst—but I had a conviction Dr. Pitman was merely trying to let us down as gently as he could. He had always had an uncompromisingly level stare, but now his gaze kept sliding away from mine. We waited a long time for news of Sammy’s condition, and on the few occasions when I caught Dr. Pitman looking directly at me his eyes were strangely like those of a man in torment.

I thought, too, that he was relieved when one of the doctors on the staff of the clinic used all his authority to persuade May it would be much better for everybody if she waited at home.

The house was lonely that evening. May had refused sedation and was sitting with the telephone, nursing it in her lap, as though it might at any minute speak with Sammy’s own voice. I made sandwiches and coffee but she wouldn’t eat, and this somehow made it impossible for me to take anything. Tiny particles of darkness came drifting at dusk, gathering in all the corners and passageways of the house, and I finally realised I would have to get out under the sky. May nodded abstractedly when I told her I was going for a short walk. I switched on all the lights in the lounge before leaving, but when I looked back from the sidewalk she had turned them off again.

Go ahead, I raged. Sit in the darkness—a lot of good that will do him.

My anger subsided when I remembered that May was at least clinging to hope; whereas I had resigned myself, betraying my own son by not daring to believe he would recover in case I’d be hurt once more. I walked quickly but aimlessly, trying to think practical thoughts about how long I’d be absent from the draughting office where I worked and if the contract I was part way through could be taken over by another man. But instead I kept seeing my boy’s face, and at times sobbed aloud to the uncomprehending quietness of suburban avenues.

I don’t know what took me in the direction of the old Guthrie place—perhaps some association between it and dark forces threatening Sammy—but there it was, looming up at the end of a short cul-de-sac, looking exactly as it had done when I was at school. The stray fingers of light reaching it from the road showed boarded-up windows, sagging gutters and unpainted boards which were silver-grey from exposure. I examined the building soberly, feeling echoes of the childhood dread it had once inspired. My theory about it having been renovated and put to use had been wrong, I realised—I’d been a victim of Sammy’s hyperactive imagination and mischievousness.

I was turning away when I noticed fresh car tracks in the gravel of the leaf-strewn drive leading up to the house. Nothing very odd about that, I thought. Curiosity could lead anybody to drive up to the old pile for a closer look, and yet …

Suddenly I could see apples in a tree at the rear of the house.

The fruit appeared as blobs of yellowish luminescence in the tree’s black silhouette, and I stared at them for several seconds wondering why the sight should fill me with unease. Then the answer came. At that distance from the street lights the apples should have been invisible, but they were glowing like dim fairy lanterns—which meant they were being illuminated from another, nearer source. This simple application of the inverse square law led me to the astonishing conclusion that there was a lighted window at the back of the Guthrie house.

On the instant, I was a small boy again. I wanted to run away, but in my adult world there was no longer any place to which I could flee—and I was curious about what was going on in the old house. There was enough corroboration of Sammy’s story to make it clear that he had seen something. But old people sitting in big chairs? I went slowly and self-consciously through the drifts of moist leaves, inhaling the toadstool smell of decay, and moved along the side of the house towards crawling blackness. It seemed impossible that there could be anybody within those flaking walls—the light must have been left burning, perhaps weeks earlier, by a careless real estate man.

I skirted a heap of rubbish and reached the back of the house. A board had been loosened on one of the downstairs windows, creating a small triangular aperture through which streamed a wan lemon radiance. I approached it quietly and looked in. The room beyond was lit by a naked bulb and contained perhaps eight armchairs, each of which was occupied by an old man or an old woman. Most were reading magazines, but one woman was knitting. My eyes took in the entire scene in a single sweep, then fastened on the awful, familiar face of the woman in the chair nearest the window.

Sammy had been right—it was the face of his dead grandmother.

That was when the nightmare really began. The frightened child within me and the adult George Ferguson both agreed they had stumbled on something monstrous, and that adrenaline-boosted flight was called for, yet—as in a nightmare—I was unable to do anything but move closer to the focus of horror. I stared at the old woman in dread. Her rawboned face, the lump beneath one ear, the very way she held her magazine—all these told me I was looking at May’s mother, Mrs. Martha Cummins, who had died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage more than two weeks earlier, and who was buried in the family plot.

Of its own accord, my right hand went snaking into the triangular opening and tapped the dusty glass. It was a timid gesture and none of the people within responded to the faint sound, but a second later one of the men raised his head briefly as he turned a page, and I recognised him. Joe Bryant, the caretaker at Sammy’s school. He had died a year ago of a heart attack.

Explanation? I couldn’t conceive one, but I had to speak to the woman who appeared to be May’s mother.

I turned away from the window and went to the black rectangle of the house’s rear door. It was locked in the normal way and further secured by a bolted-on padlock. A slick moisture on its working parts told me the padlock was in good condition. I moved further along and tried another smaller window in what could have been the kitchen. It too was boarded up, but when I pulled experimentally at the short planks the whole frame moved slightly with a pulpy sound. A more determined tug brought the entire metal window frame clear of its surround of rotting wood, creating a dark opening. The operation was noisier than I had expected, but the house remained still and I set the window down against the wall.

Part of my mind was screaming its dismay, but I used the window frame as a ladder and climbed through on to a greasy complicated surface which proved to be the top of an old-fashioned gas cooker. My cigarette lighter shed silver sparks as I flicked it on. Its transparent blue shoot of flame cast virtually no light, so I tore pages from my notebook and lit them. The kitchen was a shambles, and obviously not in use—a fact which, had I thought about it, would have increased my sense of alarm. A short corridor led from it in the general direction of the lighted room. Burning more pages, I went towards the room, freezing each time a bare floorboard groaned or a loose strip of wallpaper brushed my shoulder, and soon was able to discern a gleam of light coming from below a door. I gripped the handle firmly and, afraid to hesitate, flung the open door. The old people in the big armchairs turned their pink, lined faces towards mine. Mrs. Cummins stared at me, face lengthening with what could have been recognition or shock.

“It’s George,” I heard myself say in the distance. “What’s happening here?”

She stood up and her lips moved. “Nigi olon prittle o czanig sovisess!” On the final word the others jumped to their feet with strangely lithe movements.

“Mrs. Cummins?” I said. “Mr. Bryant?”

The old people set their magazines down, came towards the door and I saw that their feet were bare. I backed out into the corridor, shaking my head apologetically, then turned to run. Could I get out through the small kitchen window quickly enough? A hand clawed down my back. I beat it off and ran in the direction opposite to the kitchen, guided by the light spilling from the room behind me. A door loomed up on my left. I burst through into pitch darkness, slammed it, miraculously found a key in the lock and twisted it. The door quivered as something heavy thudded against the wood from the other side, and a woman’s voice began an unnerving wail—thin, high, anxious.

I groped for the light switch and turned it on, but nothing happened. Afraid to take a step forward, I stared into the blackness that pressed against my face, gradually becoming aware of a faint soupy odour and a feeling of warmth. I guessed I was in a room at the front of the house and might be able to break out if only I could find a window. The wallpaper beside the switch had felt loose. I gripped a free edge, pulled off a huge swathe and rolled it into the shape of a torch while the hammering on the door grew more frantic. The blue cone of flame from my cigarette lighter ignited the dry paper immediately. I held the torch high and got a flickering view of a large square room, a bank of electronic equipment along one wall, and a waist-high tank which occupied most of the floor space. The sweet soup smell appeared to be coming from the dark liquid in the tank. I looked into it and saw a half-submerged thing floating face upwards. It was about the size of a seven-year-old boy and the dissolving, jellied features had a resemblance to …

No!

I screamed and threw the flaming torch from me, seeking my former state of blindness. The torch landed close to a wall and trailing streamers of wallpaper caught alight. I ran around the tank to a window, wadded its mouldering drapes and smashed the glass outwards against the boards. The planking resisted the onslaught of my feet and fists for what seemed an eternity, then I was out in the cool fresh air and running, barely feeling the ground below my feet, swept along by the dark winds of night.

When I finally looked back, blocks away, the sky above the old Guthrie place was already stained, red, and clouds of angry sparks wheeled and wavered in the ascending smoke.

How does one assimilate an experience like that? There were some aspects of the nightmare which my mind was completely unable to handle as I walked homewards, accompanied by the sound of distant fire sirens. There was, for example, the hard fact that I had started a fire in which at that very instant a group of old people could be perishing—but, somehow, I felt no guilt. In its place was a conviction that it the blaze hadn’t begun by accident I would have been entitled, obliged, to start one to rid the world of something which hadn’t any right to exist. There was no element of the religious in my thinking, because the final horror in the house’s front room had dispelled the aura of the supernatural surrounding the previous events.

I had seen an array of electronic equipment—unfamiliar in type, but unmistakable—and I had seen a thing floating in a tank of heated organic-smelling fluid, a thing which resembled …

No ! Madness lay along that avenue of thought. Insupportable pain.

What else had I stumbled across? Granny Cummins was dead—but she had been sitting in the back room of a disused house, and had spoken in a tongue unlike any language I’d ever heard. Joe Bryant was dead, for a year, yet he too had been sitting under that naked bulb. My son was seriously ill in hospital, and yet …

No!

Retreating from monstrosities as yet unguessed, my mind produced an image of Dr. Pitman. He had attended Granny Cummins. He had, I was almost certain, been the Bryant’s family doctor. He had attended Sammy that morning. He had been in my home the previous day—perhaps when Sammy had come in and spoke of seeing people in the old Guthrie place. My mind then threw up another image—that of the long-barrelled .22 target pistol lying in a drawer in my den. I began to walk more quickly.

On reaching home the first impression was that May had gone out, but when I went in she was sitting in exactly the same place in the darkness of the lounge. I glanced at my watch and discovered that, incredibly, only forty minutes had passed since I had gone out. That was all the time it had taken for reality to rot and dissolve.

“May?” I spoke from the doorway. “Did the clinic call?”

A long pause. “No.”

“Don’t you want the light on?”

Another pause. “No.”

This time I didn’t mind, because the darkness concealed the fact that my clothes were smeared with dirt and blood from my damaged hands. I went upstairs, past the aching emptiness of Sammy’s room, washed in cold water, taped my knuckles and put on fresh clothes. In my den I discovered that the saw-handled target pistol was never meant for concealment, but I was able to tuck it into my belt on the left side and cover it fairly well with my jacket. Coming downstairs, I hesitated at the door of the lounge before telling May I was going out again. She nodded without speaking, without caring what I might do. If Sammy died she would die too—not physically, not clinically, but just as surely—which meant that two important lives depended on my actions of the next hour.

I went out and found the atmosphere of the night had changed to one of feverish excitement. The streets were alive with cars, pedestrians, running children, all converging on the gigantic bonfire which had appeared, gratuitously, to turn a dull evening into an event. Two blocks away to the south the old Guthrie house was an inferno which streaked the windows of the entire neighbourhood with amber and gold. Its timbers, exploding in ragged volleys, were fireworks contributing to the Fourth of July atmosphere. A group of small boys scampering past me whooped with glee, and one part of my mind acknowledged that I had made a major contribution to the childish lore of the district. Legends would be born tonight, to be passed in endless succession from the mouths of ten-year-olds to the ears of five-year-olds. The night the old Guthrie place burned down….

Dr. Pitman lived only a mile from me, and I decided it would be almost as quick and a lot less conspicuous to go on foot. I walked automatically, trying to balance the elements of reality, nightmare and carnival, and reached the doctor’s home in a little over ten minutes. His Buick was sitting in the driveway and lights were showing in the upper windows of the house. I looked around carefully—the fire was further away now and neighbours were less likely to be distracted by it—before stepping into the shadowed drive and approaching the front door. It burst open just as I was reaching the steps and Dr. Pitman came running out, still shrugging on his coat. I reached for the pistol but there was no need to bring it into view, for he stopped as soon as he saw me.

“George!” His face creased with concern. “What brings you here? Is it your boy?”

“You’ve guessed it.” I put my hand on his chest and pushed him back into the orange-lit hall.

“What is this?” He shrugged against my hand with surprising strength and I had to fight to contain him. “You’re acting a little strangely, George.”

“You made Sammy sick,” I told him. “And if you don’t make him well again I’ll kill you.”

“Hold on, George—I told you not to get overwrought.”

“I’m not overwrought.”

“It’s the strain …’

“That’s enough !” I shouted at him, almost losing control. “I know you’re making Sammy ill, and I’m going to make you stop.”

‘But why should I …?”

‘Because he was in back of the old Guthrie place and saw too much—that’s why.” I pushed harder on his chest and he took a step backwards into the hall.

“The Guthrie house! No, George, no!”

Until that moment I had been half-prepared to back down, to accept the idea that I’d gone off the rails with worry, but his face became a slack grey mask. The strength seemed to leave his body, making him smaller and older.

“Yes, the old Guthrie place.” I closed the door behind me. “What do you do there, doctor?”

“Listen, George, I can’t talk to you now—I’ve just heard there’s a fire in the district and I’ve got to go to it. My help will be needed.” Dr. Pitman drew himself up into a semblance of the authoritative figure I had once known, and tried to push past me.

“You’re too late,” I said, blocking his way. “The place went up like a torch. Your equipment’s all gone.” I paused and stared into his eyes. “They are all gone.”

“I … I don’t know what you mean.”

“The things you make. The things which look like people, but which aren’t because the original people are dead. Those are all gone, doctor—burnt up.” I was shooting wildly in the dark, but I could tell some of my words were finding a mark and I pressed on. “I was there, and I’ve seen it, and I’ll tell the whole world—so Sammy isn’t alone now. His death won’t cover up anything. Do you hear me, doctor?”

He shook his head, then walked away from me and went up the broad carpeted stair. I reached for the pistol, changed my mind and ran after him, catching him just as he reached the landing. He brushed my hands away. Using all my strength, I bundled him against the wall with my forearm pressed across his throat, determined to force the truth out of him—no matter what it might be. He twisted away, I grappled again, we overbalanced and went on a jarring rollercoaster ride down the stairs, bouncing and flailing, caroming off wall and banisters. Twice on the way down I felt, and heard, bones breaking; and had been lying on the hall floor a good ten seconds before being certain they weren’t mine.

I raised myself on one arm and looked down into Dr. Pitman’s face. His teeth were smeared with blood and for a moment I felt the beginnings of doubt. He was an old man, and supposing he genuinely hadn’t understood a word I had been saying …

“You’ve done it now, George,” he whispered. “You’ve finished us.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s one thing I want you to believe … we never harmed anybody … we’ve seen too much pain for that…’ He coughed and a transparent crimson film spanned his lips.

“What are you saying?”

“It was to be a very quiet, very gradual invasion … invasion’s the wrong word … no conquest or displacement intended … physical journey from our world virtually impossible … we observed incurably ill humans, terminal cases … built duplicates and subsituted them … that way we too could live normally, almost normally, for a while … until death returned …’

“Dr. Pitman,” I said desperately, ‘you’re not making sense.”

“I’m not real Dr. Pitman … he died many years ago … first subject in this town—a doctor is in best position for our … I was skorded—you have no word for it—transmitted into a duplicate of his body …’

The hall floor seemed to rock beneath me. “You’re saying you’re from another planet!”

“That’s right, George.”

‘But, for God’s sake, why ? Why would anybody … ?”

“Just be thankful you can’t imagine the circumstances which made such a project … desirable.” His body convulsed with sudden pain.

“I still don’t understand,” I pleaded. “Why should you duplicate the bodies of dying people if it means being locked in an old house for the rest of your life?”

“Usually it doesn’t mean that … we substitute and integrate … the dying person appears to recover … but the duplication process takes time, and sometimes the subject dies suddenly, at home, providing us with no chance to take his place … and there can be no going back …’

I froze as a brilliant golden light flooded through the hall. It was followed by the sound of wheels on gravel and I realised a car had pulled into the driveway of the house. The man I knew as Dr. Pitman closed his eyes and sighed deeply, with an awful finality.

‘But what about Sammy?” I shook the inert figure. “You’ve told me nothing about my son.”

The eyes blinked open, slowly, and in spite of the pain there I saw kindness. “It was all a mistake, George.” His voice was distant as he attempted more of the broken sentences. “I had no idea he had been around the old house … aren’t like you—we’re bad organisers … nald denbo sovisegg … sorry … I had nothing to do with his illness …’

A car door slammed outside. I wanted to run, but there was one more question which had to be asked. “I was in the old house. I saw the tank and … something … which looked like a boy. Does that mean Sammy’s dying? That you were going to replace him?”

“Sammy’s going to be all right, George … though at first I wasn’t hopeful … I haven’t known you and May as long as Dr. Pitman did, but I’m very fond of … I knew May couldn’t take the loss, so I arranged a substitution … tentatively, you understand, kleyl nurr … not needed now … Sammy will be fine …’ He tried to smile at me and blood welled up between his lips just as the doorbell rang with callous stridency.

I stared down at the tired, broken old man with—in spite of everything—a curious sense of regret. What kind of hell had he been born into originally? What conditions would prompt anybody to make the journey he had made for such meagre rewards? The bell rang again and I opened the door.

“Call for an ambulance,” I said to the stranger on the steps. “Dr. Pitman seems to have fallen down the stairs—I think he’s dying.”

It was quite late when the police cruiser finally dropped me outside my home, but the house was ablaze with light. I thanked the sergeant who had driven me from the mortuary where they had taken the body of Dr. Pitman (I couldn’t think of him by any other name) and hurried along the white concrete of the path to the door. The lights seemed to signal a change in May’s mood but I was afraid to begin hoping, in case …

“George!” May met me at the door, dressed to go out, face pale but jubilant. “Where’ve you been? I tried everywhere. The clinic called me half an hour ago. You’ve been out for hours. Sammy’s feeling better and he’s asking to see us. I brought the car out for you. Should I drive? We’re allowed in to see him, and I …’

“Slow down, May. Slow down.” I put my arms around her, feeling the taut gratification in her slim body, and made her go over the story again. She spilled it out eagerly.

Sammy’s response to drug treatment had been dramatic and now he was fully conscious and asking for his parents. The senior doctor had decided to bend regulations a little and let us in to talk with the boy for a few minutes. A starshell of happiness burst behind my eyes as May spoke, and a minute later we were on our way to the clinic. A big moon, the exact colour of a candle flame, was rising behind the rooftops, trees were stirring gently in their sleep, and the red glow from the direction of the Guthrie house had vanished. May was at the wheel, driving with zestful competence, and for the first time in hours the pressure was off me.

I relaxed into the seat and discovered I had forgotten to rid myself of the pistol which had nudged my ribs constantly the whole time I was talking to the police. It was on the side next to May so there was little chance of slipping it into the glove compartment unnoticed. Shame at having carried the weapon, plus a desire not to alarm May in any way after what she had been through, made me decide to keep it out of sight a little longer. Suddenly very tired, I closed my eyes and allowed the mental backwash of the night’s events to carry me away.

The disjointed fragments from Dr. Pitman made an unbelievable story when pieced together, yet I had seen the ghastly proof. There was something macabre about the idea of the group of alien beings, duplicates of dead people, cooped up in a dingy room in a disused house, patiently waiting to die. The memory of seeing Granny Cummins’ face again, two weeks after her funeral, was going to take a long time to fade. She, the duplicate, had recognised me, which meant that the copying technique used by the aliens was incredibly detailed, extending right down to the arrangement of the brain cells. Presumably, the only physical changes they would introduce would be improvements—if a person was dying of cancer the duplicate would be cancer-free. Ageing muscles might be strengthened—Dr. Pitman and those who had been in the house all moved with exceptional ease. But would they have been able to escape the fire? Perhaps some code of their own would not allow them to leave the house, even under peril of death, unless a place had been prepared to enable them to enter our society without raising any alarms ….

The aliens may have a code of ethics, I thought, but could I permit them to come among us unhindered? For that matter, had I any idea how far their infiltration had proceeded? I’d been told that Dr. Pitman was the first subject in this town—did that mean the invasion covered the entire state? The country? The world? There was also the question of its intensity. The dying man had said the substitution technique failed when a person’s death occurred suddenly at home, which implied the clinic was well infiltrated—but how thoroughly? Would there come a day when every old person in the world, and a proportion of younger people as well, would be substitutes?

Street lights flicking past the car pulsed redly through my closed eyelids, and fresh questions pounded in my mind to the same rhythm. Could I believe anything “Dr. Pitman’ had said about the aliens’ objectives? True, he had appeared kind, genuinely concerned about Sammy and May—but how did one interpret fecial expressions controlled by a being who may once have possessed an entirely different form? Another question came looming—and something in my subconscious cowered away from it—why, if secrecy was so vital to the aliens’ scheme, had “Dr. Pitman’ told me the whole fantastic story? Had he been manipulating me in some way I had not yet begun to understand? Once again I saw my son’s face blindly lolling as he was carried down the stairs, and a fear greater than any I had known before began to unfold its black petals.

I jerked my eyes open, unwilling to think any further.

“Poor thing—you’re tired,” May said. “You keep everything bottled up, and it takes far more out of you that way.”

I nodded. She’s mothering me, I thought. She’s happy, serene’ confident again—and it’s because our boy is getting better, Sammy’s life is her life,

May slowed the car down. “Here we are. We mustn’t stay too long—it’s very good of Dr. Milligan even to let us in at this time.”

I remembered Dr. Milligan—tall, stooped and old. Another Dr. Pitman? It came to me suddenly that I had told May nothing at all about the events of the evening, but before I could work out a suitably edited version we were getting out of the car. I decided to leave it till later. In contrast to the boisterous leaf-scented air outside the atmosphere in the clinic seemed inert, dead. The reception office was empty but a blond young doctor with an in-twisted foot limped up to us, then beckoned to a staffnurse when we gave our names. The nurse, a tall woman with mottled red forearms, ushered us into the elevator and pressed the button for the third floor.

“Samuel is making exceptional progress,” she said to May, “He’s a very strong little boy.”

“Thank you.” May nodded gratefully. “Thank you.”

I wanted to change the subject, because Sammy had never appeared particularly strong to my eyes, and the loathsome blossom of fear was fleshing its leaves within me. “How’s business been tonight?”

“Quiet, for once. Very quiet.”

“Oh. I heard there was a fire.”

“It hasn’t affected us.”

“That’s fine,” I said vaguely. If the aliens were constructed with precisely the same biological building blocks as humans their remains would appear like those of normal fire victims. There’ll be hell to pay, I told myself and desperately tried to adhere to that line of thought, but the black flower was getting bigger now, unmanageable, reaching out to swallow me. Biological building blocks—where did they come from? The dark soupy liquid in the tank—was it of synthetic or natural origin? The thing I’d seen floating in there—was it a body being constructed?

Or was it being dissolved and fed into a stockpile of organic matter?

Had I seen my son’s corpse?

Other thoughts came yammering and cavorting like demons. “Dr. Pitman’ had taken Sammy to the clinic in his own car, but he had been strangely delayed in arriving. Obviously he had taken the boy to the Guthrie place. Why? Because, according to his own dying statement, he had despaired of Sammy’s life, wanted to spare May the shock of losing her son and had arranged for a substitution—just in case. Altruistic. Unbelievably altruistic. How gullible did “Dr. Pitman’ think I was going to be? If Sammy had died naturally, or had been killed, and replaced by a being from beyond the stars I was going to make trouble for the aliens. I was going to shoot and burn and kill …

With an effort I controlled the sudden trembling in my limbs as the nurse opened the door to a small private room. The shaded light within showed Sammy sleeping peacefully in a single bed. My heart ached with the recognition of the flesh of my flesh.

“You may go in for a minute, but just a minute,” the nurse said. Her eyes lingered for a moment on May’s face and something she saw there prompted her to remain in the corridor while we went into the room. Sammy was pale but breathing easily. The skin of his forehead shone with gold borrowed from last summer’s sun. May held my arm with both hands as we stood beside the bed.

“He’s all right,” she breathed. “Oh, George—I would have died.”

At the sound of her voice Sammy’s eyelids seemed to flicker slightly, but he remained still. May began to sob, silently and effortlessly, adjusting emotional potentials.

“Take it easy, hon,” I said. “He’s all right, remember.”

“I know, but I felt it was all my fault.”

“Tour fault?”

“Yes. Yesterday at dinner he made me so angry by talking that way about my mother … I said I wanted him to drop dead.”

“That’s being silly.”

“I know, but I said it, and you should never say anything like that in case …’

“Fate isn’t so easily tempted,” I said with calm reasonableness. I had no right to assume. ‘Besides you didn’t mean it. Every parent knows that when a kid starts wearing you down you can say anything.”

Sammy’s eyes opened wide. “Mom?”

May dropped to her knees. “I’m here, Sammy. I’m here.”

“I’m sorry I made you mad.” His voice was small and drowsy.

“You didn’t make me mad, darling.” She took his hand and pressed her lips to it.

“I did. I shouldn’t have talked that way about seeing Gran.” He shifted his gaze to my face. “It was all a stupid joke like Dad said. I never saw Granny Cummins anywhere.” His eyes were bright and deliberate, holding mine.

I took a step back from the bed and the black flower, which had been poised and waiting, closed its hungry petals around me. Sammy, my Sammy, had seen the duplicate of Granny Cummins in the old Guthrie place—and no amount of punishment or bribery would have got him to back down on that point. Unlike me, my son had never compromised in his whole life.

Of its own accord, my right hand slid under my jacket and settled on the butt of the target pistol. My boy was dead and this—right here and now—was the time to begin avenging him.

But I looked down on May’s bowed, gently shaking shoulders; and all at once I understood why “Dr. Pitman’ had told me the whole story. Had the macabre scenes in the Guthrie place remained a mystery to me, had I not understood their purpose, I could never have remained silent. Eventually I would have had to go to the police, start investigations, cause trouble …

Now I knew that the very first casualty of any such action would be May—she would be destroyed, on learning the truth, as surely as if I had put a bullet through her head. My hand moved away from the butt of the pistol.

Sammy’s life, I thought, is her life.

In a way it isn’t a bad thing to be the compromising type—it makes life easier not only for yourself but for those around you. May smiles a lot now and she is very happy over the way Sammy has grown up to be a handsome, quick-minded fourteen-year-old. The discovery of a number of ‘human’ remains in the ashes of the Guthrie house was a nine-day wonder in our little town, but I doubt if May remembers it now. As I said, she smiles a lot.

I still think about my son, of course, and occasionally it occurs to me that if May were to die, say in an accident, all restraints would be removed from me. But the years are slipping by and there’s no sign of the human race coming to harm as a result of the quiet invasion. For all I know it never amounted to anything more than a local phenomenon, an experiment which didn’t quite work out. And when I look at Sammy growing up tall and straight—looking so much like his mother—it is easy to convince myself that I could have made a mistake. After all, I’m only human.