"Stick your left arm straight forward, Samm,"

said Folly.

He stretched his arm out.

"I can sense it!" cried Folly.

"Now wiggle your fingers!"

Samm wiggled them.

Finsternis said nothing, but both of them caught from his mind, riding

clear and wise beside them, a "sense of the situation." His "sense of

the situation" could be summed up in the one-word comment, which he did

not need to utter: "Foolishness!"

"It is not foolishness, Finsternis," cried Folly.

"Here are the three of us, riding empty space millions of kilometers

from nowhere. We were people once, Earth people from Old Earth itself.

It is foolish to remember what we used to be? I was a woman once. A

beautiful woman. Now I'm this this thing, bent on a mission of murder

and destruction. I used to have hands myself, real hands. Is it wrong

for me to enjoy looking at Samm's hands now and then? To think of the

past which all three of us have left behind."

Finsternis did not answer; his mind was blank to both of them. There

was nothing but space around them, not even much space dust, and the

bluish light ofLinschoten XV straight ahead.

From the third planet of that star they could occasionally hear the

cackle and gabble of the man-eaters.

Once again Folly cried to Finsternis,

"Is that so wrong, that I should enjoy looking at a hand? Samm has

well-shaped hands. I was a person once, and so were you. Did I ever

tell you that I was a beautiful woman once?"

She had been a beautiful woman once and now she was the control of a

small spaceship which fled across emptiness with two grotesque

companions.

She was now a ship only eleven meters long and shaped roughly like an

ancient dirigible. Finsternis was a perfect cube, fifty meters to the

side,

packed with machinery which could blank out a sun and contain its

planets until they froze to icy, perpetual death. Samm was a man, but

he was a man of flexible steel, two hundred meters high.

He was designed to walk on any kind of planet, with any kind of

inhabitant, with any kind of chemistry or any kind of gravity. He was

designed to bring antagonists, whomever they might be, the message of

the power of man. The power of man . . . followed by terror, followed

if necessary by death. If Samm failed, Finsternis had the further

power of blocking out the sun, Linschoten XV. If either or both

failed. Folly had the job of adjusting them so that they could win. If

they had no chance of winning, she then had the task of destroying

Finsternis and Samm, and then herself.

Their instructions were clear: "You will not, you will not under any

circumstances return.

You will not under any conditions turn back toward Earth. You are too

dangerous to come anywhere near Earth, ever again. You may live if you

wish. If you can. But you must not repeat not come back. You have

your duty. You asked for it. Now you have it. Do not come back. Your

forms fit your duty. You will do your duty."

Folly had become a tiny ship, crammed with miniaturized equipment.

Finsternis had become a cube blacker than darkness itself.

Samm had become a man, but a man different from any which had ever been

seen on Earth. He had a metal body, copied from the human form down to

the last detail. That way the enemies, whoever they might be, would be

given a terrible glimpse of the human shape, the human voice. Two

hundred meters high he stood, strong and solid enough to fly through

space with nothing but the jets on his belt.

The Instrumentality had designed all three of them. Designed them

well.

Designed them to meet the crazy menace out beyond the stars, a menace

which gave no clue to its technology or origin, but which responded to

the signal "man" with the counter-signal, "gabble cackle! eat, eat!

man, man! good to eat! cackle gabble!

eat, eat!"

That was enough.

The Instrumentality took steps. And the three of them the ship, the

cube, and the metal giant sped between the stars to conquer, to

terrorize, or to destroy the menace which lived on the third planet of

Linschoten XV. Or, if needful, to put out that particular sun.

Folly, who had become a ship, was the most volatile of the three.

She had been a beautiful woman once.

II

"You were a beautiful woman once," Samm had said, some years before.

"How did you end up becoming a ship?"

"I killed myself," said Folly.

"That's why I took this name Folly. I had a long life ahead of me, but

I killed myself and they brought me back at the last minute. When I

found out I was still alive, I volunteered for something adventurous,

dangerous. They gave me this. Well, I asked for it, didn't I?"

"You asked for it," said Samm gravely. Out in the middle of nothing,

surrounded by a tremendous lot of nowhere, courtesy was still the

lubricant which governed human relationships. The two of them observed

courtesy and kindness toward one another.

Sometimes they threw in a bit of humor, too.

Finsternis did not take part in their talk or their companionship. He

did not even verbalize his answers. He merely let them know his sense

of the situation and this time, as in all other times, his response

was

"Negative. No operation needed. Communication nonfunctional. Not

needed here. Silence, please. I kill suns. That is all I do. My

part is my business. All mine." This was communicated in a single

terrible thought, so that Folly and Samm stopped trying to bring

Finsternis into the conversations which they started up, every

subjective century or so, and continued for years at a time.

Finsternis merely moved along with them, several kilometers away, but

well within their range of awareness. But as far as company was

concerned, Finsternis might as well not have been there at all.

Samm went on with the conversation, the conversation which they had had

so many hundreds of times since the plano form ship had discharged them

"near" Linschoten XV and left them to make the rest of their way alone.

(If the menace were really a menace, and if it were intelligent, the

Instrumentality had no intention of letting an actual plano form ship

fall within the powers of a strange form of life which might well be

hypnotic in its combat capacities. Hence the ship, the cube, and the

giant were launched into normal space at high velocity, equipped with

jets to correct their courses, and left to make their own way to the

danger.) Samm said, as he always did,

"You were a beautiful woman.

Folly, but you wanted to die. Why?"

"Why do people ever want to die, Samm? It's the power in us, the

vitality which makes us want so much. Life always trembles on the edge

of disappointment. If we hadn't been vital and greedy and lustful and

yearning, if we hadn't had big thoughts and wanted bigger ones, we

would have stayed animals, like all the little things back on Earth.

It's strong life that

brings us so close to death. We can't stand the beauty of it, the

nearness of the things we want, the remoteness of the things that we

can have. You and me and Finsternis, now, we're monsters riding out

between the stars. And yet we're happier now than we were when we were

back among people. I was a beautiful woman, but there were specific

things which I wanted. I wanted them myself. I alone. For me. Only

for me.

When I couldn't have them, I wanted to die. If I had been stupider or

happier I might have lived on. But I didn't. I was me intensely me.

So here I am. I don't even know whether I have a body or not, inside

this ship. They've got me all hooked up to the sensors and the viewers

and the computers.

Sometimes I think that I may be a lovely woman still, with a real body

hidden somewhere inside this ship, waiting to step out and to be a

person again. And you, Samm, don't you want to tell me about yourself?

Samm. SAMM. That's no name for an actual person Superordinated Alien

Measuring and Mastery device. What were you before they gave you that

big body? At least you still look like a person. You're not a ship,

like me."

"My name doesn't matter, Folly, and if I told it to you, you wouldn't

know it. You never knew it."

"How wouldn't I know?" she cried.

"I've never told you my name either, so perhaps we did know each other

back on Old Earth when we were still people."

"I can tell something," said Samm, "from the shape of words, from the

ring of thoughts, even when we're not out here in nothing. You were a

lady, perhaps high-born. You were truly beautiful. You were really

important. And I I was a technician. A good one. I did my work and I

loved my family, and my wife and I were happy with every child which

the Lords gave us for adoption. But my wife died first. And after a

while my children, my wonderful boy and my two beautiful, intelligent

girls my own children, they couldn't stand me anymore. They didn't

like me. Perhaps I talked too much.

Perhaps I gave them too much advice. Perhaps I reminded them of their

mother, who was dead. I don't know. I won't ever know.

They didn't want to see me. Out of manners, they sent me cards on my

birthday. Out of sheer formal courtesy, they called on me sometimes.

Now and then one of them wanted something. Then they came to me, but

it was always just to get something. It took me a long time to figure

out, but I hadn't done anything. It wasn't what I had done or hadn't

done. They just plain didn't like me. You know the songs and the

operas and the stories, Folly, you know them all."

"Not all of them," thought Folly gently, "not all of them.

Just a few thousand."

"Did you ever see one," cried Samm, his thoughts ringing fiercely

against her mind, "did you ever see a single one about a rejected

father?

They're all about men and women, love and sex, but I can tell you that

rejection hurts even when you don't ask anything of your loved ones but

their company and their happiness and their simple genuine smiles. When

I knew that my children had no use for me, I had no use for me either.

The Instrumentality came along with this warning, and I volunteered."

"But you're all right now, Samm," said Folly gently.

"I'm a ship and you are a metal giant, but we're off doing work which

is important for all mankind. We'll have adventures together. Even

black and grumbly here," she added, meaning Finsternis, "can't keep us

from the excitement of companionship or the hope of danger. We're

doing something wonderful and important and exciting. Do you know what

I would do if I had my life again, my ordinary life with skin and

toenails and hair and things like that?"

"What?" asked Samm, knowing the answer perfectly well from the

hundreds of times they had touched on this point.

"I'd take baths. Hundreds and hundreds of them, over again.

Showers and dips in cold pools and soaks in hot bathtubs and rinses and

more showers. And I would do my hair, over and over again, thousands

of different ways. And I would put on lipstick, in the most outrageous

colors, even if nobody saw me, except for my own self looking in the

mirror. Now I can hardly remember what it used to be to be dry or wet.

I'm in this ship and I see the ship and I do not really know if I am a

person or not any more."

Samm stayed quiet, knowing what she would say next.

"Samm, what would you do?" Folly asked.

"Swim," he said.

"Then swim, Samm, swim! Swim for me in the space between the stars.

You still have a body and I don't, but I can watch you and I can sense

you swimming out here in the nothing at-all."

Samm began to swim a huge Australian crawl, dipping his face to the

edge of the water as if there were water there. The gestures made no

difference in his real motion, since they were all of them in the fast

trajectory computed for them from the point where they left the

Instrumentality's ship and started out in normal space for the star

listed as Linschoten XV.

This time, something very sudden happened, and it happened strangely.

From the dark gloomy silence of the cube, Finsternis, there came an

articulate cry, called forth in clear human speech: Stop it! Stop

moving right now. I attack.

Both Samm and Folly had instruments built into them, so they could read

space around them. The instruments, quickly scanned, showed nothing.

Yet Folly felt odd, as though something had gone very wrong in her

ship-self, which had seemed so metal, so reliable, so inalterable.

She threw a thought of inquiry at Samm and instead got another command

from Finsternis. Don't think.

III

Samm floated like a dead man in his gargantuan body.

Folly drifted like a fruit beside his hand.

At last there came words from Finsternis: "You can think now, if you

want to. You can chatter at each other again. I'm through."

Samm thought at him, and the thought-pattern was troubled and

confused.

"What happened? I felt as though the immaculate grid of space had been

pinched together in a tight fold. I felt you do something, and then

there was silence around us again."

"Talking," said Finsternis, "is not operational and it is not required

of me. But there are only three of us here, so I might as well tell

you what happened. Can you hear me, Folly?"

"Yes," she said, weakly.

"Are we on course," asked Finsternis, "for the third planet

ofLinschoten XV?"

Folly paused while checking all her instruments, which were more

complicated and refined than those carried by the other two, since she

was the maintenance unit.

"Yes," said she at last.

"We are exactly on course. I don't know what happened, if anything did

happen."

"Something happened, all right," said Finsternis, with the gratified

savagery of a person whose quick-and-cruel nature is rewarded only by

meeting and overcoming hostility in real life.

"Was it a space dragon, like they used to meet on the old, old

ships?"

"No, nothing like that," said Finsternis, communicative for once, since

this was something operational to talk about.

"It doesn't even seem to be in this space at all. Something just rises

up among us, like a volcano coming out of solid space. Something

violent and wild and alive. Do you two still have eyes?"

"Seeing devices for the ordinary light band?" asked Samm.

"Of course we do!" said Finsternis.

"I will try to fix it so that you will have a visible input."

There was a sharp pause from Finsternis.

The voice came again, with much strain.

"Do not do anything. Do not try to help me. Just watch. If it wins,

destroy me quickly. It might try to capture us and get back to Earth.

" Folly felt like telling Finsternis that this was unnecessary, since

the

first motion toward return would trigger destruction devices which had

been built into each of the three of them, beyond reach, beyond

detection, beyond awareness. When the Instrumentality said,

"Do not come back," the Instrumentality meant it.

She said nothing.

She watched Finsternis instead.

Something began to happen.

It was very odd.

Space itself seemed to rip and leak.

In the visible band, the intruder looked like a fountain of water being

thrown randomly to and fro.

But the intruder was not water.

In the visible light-band, it glowed like wild fire rising from a

shimmering column of blue ice. Here in space there was nothing to

burn, nothing to make light: she knew that Finsternis was translating

un resolvable phenomena into light.

She sensed Samm moving one of his giant fists uncontrollably, in a

helpless, childish gesture of protest.

She herself did nothing but watch, as alertly and passively as she

could.

Nevertheless, she felt wrenched. This was no material phenomenon. It

was wild unformed life, intruding out of some other proportion of

space, seeking material on which to impose its vitality, its frenzy,

its identity. She could see Finsternis as a solid black cube, darker

than mere darkness, drifting right into the column. She watched the

sides of Finsternis.

On the earlier part of the trip, since they had left the people and the

plano form ship and had been discharged in a fast trajectory toward

Linschoten XV, Finsternis' side had seemed like dull metal, slightly

burnished, so that Folly had to brush him lightly with radar to get a

clear image of him.

Now his sides had changed.

They had become as soft and thick as velvet.

The strange volcano-fountain did not seem to have much in the way of

sensing devices. It paid no attention to Samm or to herself. The dark

cube attracted it, as a shaft of sunlight might attract a baby or as

the rustle of paper might draw the attention of a kitten.

With a slight twist of its vitality and direction, the whole column of

burning, living brightness plunged upon Finsternis, plunged and burned

out and went in and was seen no more.

Finsternis' voice, clear and cheerful, sounded out to both of them.

"It's gone now."

"What happened to it?" asked Samm.

"I ate it," said Finsternis.

"You what?" cried Folly.

"I ate it," said Finsternis. He was talking more than he ever had

before.

"At least, that's the only way I can describe it. This machine they

gave me or made me into or whatever they did, it's really rather good.

It's powerful. I can feel it absorbing things, taking them in, taking

them apart, putting them away.

It's something like eating used to be when I was a person. That wild

thing attacked me, wrapped me up, devoured me. All I did was to take

it in, and now it's gone. I feel sort of full. I suppose my machines

are sorting out samples of it to send away to rendezvous points in

little rockets. I know that I have sixteen small rockets inside me,

and I can feel two of them getting ready to move. Neither one of you

could have done what I do. I was built to absorb whole suns if

necessary, break them down, freeze them down, change their molecular

structure, and shoot their vitality off in one big useless blast on the

radio spectrum. You couldn't do anything like that, Samm, even if you

do have arms and legs and a head and a voice if we ever get into an

atmosphere for you to use it in. You couldn't do what I have just

done. Folly."

"You're good," said Folly, with emphasis. But she added: "I can repair

you."

Obviously offended, Finsternis withdrew into his silence.

Samm said to Folly,

"How much further to destination?"

Said Folly promptly,

"Seventy-nine earth years, four months and three days, six hours and

two minutes, but you know how little that means out here. It could

seem like a single afternoon or it could feel to us like a thousand

lifetimes.

Time doesn't work very well for us."

"How did Earth ever find this place, anyhow?" asked Samm.

"All I know is that it was two very strong tele paths working together

on the planet Mizzer. An ex-dictator named Casher O'Neill and an

ex-Lady named Celalta. They were doing a bit of ps ionic astronomy and

suddenly this signal came in strong and clear. You know that tele

paths can catch directions very accurately. Even over immense

distances. And they can get emotions, too. But they are not very good

at actual images or things. Somebody else checked it out for them."

"M-m-m," said Samm. He had heard all this before. Out of sheer

boredom, he went back to swimming vigorously. The body might not

really be his, but it made him feel good to exercise it.

Besides, he knew that Folly watched him with pleasure great pleasure,

and a little bit of envy.

Casher O'Neill and the Lady Celalta had finished with making love. They

had lain with their bodies tired and their minds clear, relaxed. They

had stretched out on a blanket just above the big gushing spring

Three to a Given Star which was the source of the Ninth Nile. Both

tele paths they could hear a bird-couple quarreling inside a tree, the

male bird commanding the female to get out and get to work and the

female answering by dropping deeper and deeper into a fretful and

irritable sleep.

The Lady Celalta had whispered a thought to her lover and master,

Casher O

"Neill.

"To the stars?"

"The stars?" thought he with a grumble. They were both strong tele

paths He had been imprinted, in some mysterious way, with the greatest

tele path-hypnotist of all time, the Honorable Agatha Madigan. In the

Lady Celalta he had a companion worthy of his final talents, a natural

tele path who could herself reach not only all of Miner but some of the

nearer stars. When they teamed up together, as she now proposed, they

could plunge into dusty infinities of depth and bring back feelings or

images which no Go-Captain had ever found with his ship.

He sat up with a grunt of assent.

She looked at him fondly, possessively, her dark eyes alight with

alertness, happiness, and adventure.

"Can I lift?" she asked, almost timidly.

When two tele paths worked together, one cleared the vision for both of

them as far as their combined minds could reach and then the other

sprang, with enormous effort, as far and as fast as possible toward any

target which presented itself. They had found strange things,

sometimes beautiful or dramatic ones, by this method.

Casher was already drinking enormous gulps of air, filling his lungs,

holding his breath, letting go with a gasp, and then inhaling deeply

and slowly again. In this way he re oxygenated his brain very

thoroughly for the huge effort of a telepathic dive into the remote

depth of space. He did not even speak to her, nor did he tele path a

word to her; he was conserving his strength for a good jump.

He merely nodded to her.

The Lady Celalta, too, began the deep breathing, but she seemed to need

it less than did Casher.

They were both sitting up, side by side, breathing deeply.

The cool night sands of Miner were around them, the harmless gurgle of

the Ninth Nile was beside them, the bright star-cluttered sky of Miner

was above them.

Her hand reached out and took hold of his. She squeezed his hand. He

looked at her and nodded to her again.

Within his mind. Miner and its entire solar system seemed to burst

into flame with a new kind of light. The radiance of Celalta's mind

trailed off unevenly in different directions, but there, almost 2 off

the pole of

Miner's ecliptic, he felt something wild and strange, a kind of being

which he had never sensed before. Using Celalta 's mind as a base, he

let his mind dive for it.

The distance of the plunge left them both dizzy, sitting on the quiet

night sands of Miner. It seemed to both of them that the mind of man

had never reached so far before.

The reality of the phenomenon was un doubtable

There were animals all around them, the usual categories: runners,

hunters, jumpers, climbers, swimmers, hiders, and handlers. It was

some of the handlers who were intensely telepathic themselves.

The image of man created an immediate, murderous response.

"Cackle gabble, gabble cackle, man, man, man, eat them, eat them!"

Casher and Celalta were both so surprised that they let the contact go,

after making sure that they had touched a whole world full of beings,

some of them telepathic and probably civilized.

How had the beings known "man"? Why had their response been immediate?

Why anthropophagous and homicidal?

They took time, before coming completely out of the trance, to make a

careful, exact note of the direction from which the danger-brains had

shrieked their warning.

This they submitted to the Instrumentality, shortly after the

incident.

And that was how, unknown to Folly, Samm, and Finsternis, the

inhabitants on the third planet of Linschoten XV had come to the

attention of mankind.

IV

As a matter of fact, the three wanderers later on felt a vague, remote

telepathic contact which they sensed as being warmhearted and human,

and therefore did not try to track down, with their minds or their

weapons. It was O'NeiIl and Celalta, many years later by Mizzer time,

reaching to see what the Instrumentality had done about Linschoten

XV.

Folly, Samm, and Finsternis had no suspicion that the two most powerful

tele paths in the human area of the galaxy had stroked them, searched

them, felt them through, and seen things about them which the three of

them did not know about themselves or about each other.

Casher O'Neill said to the Lady Celalta,

"You got it, too?"

"A beautiful woman, encased in a little ship?"

Casher nodded.

"A redhead with skin as soft and transparent as living ivory? A woman

who was beautiful and will be beautiful again?"

"That's what I got," said the Lady Celalta.

"And the tired old man, weary of his children and weary of his own life

because his children were weary of him."

"Not so old," said Casher O'Neill.

"And isn't that a spectacular piece of machinery they put him into? A

metal giant.

It felt like something about a quarter of a kilometer high. Acidproof.

Cold-proof. Won't he be surprised when he finds that the

Instrumentality has rejuvenated his own body inside that monster?"

"He certainly will be," said the Lady Celalta happily, thinking of the

pleasant surprise which lay ahead of a man whom she would never know or

see with her own bodily eyes.

They both fell silent.

Then said the Lady Celalta,

"But the third person . . ." There was a shiver in her voice as

though she dared not ask the question.

"The third person, the one in the cube." She stopped, as though she

could neither ask nor say more.

"It was not a robot or a personality cube," said Casher O'Neill.

"It was a human being all right. But it's crazy. Could you make out,

Celalta, as to whether it was male or female?"

"No," said she,

"I couldn't tell. The other two seemed to think that it was male."

"But did you feel sure?" asked Casher.

"With that being, I felt sure of nothing. It was human, all right, but

it was stranger than any lost hominid we have ever felt around the

forgotten stars. Could you tell, Casher, whether it was young or

old?"

"No," said he.

"I felt nothing only a desperate human mind with all its guards up,

living only because of the terrible powers of the black cube, the

sun-killer in which it rode. I never sensed someone before who was a

person without characteristics. It's frightening."

"The Instrumentality are cruel sometimes," said Celalta.

"Sometimes they have to be," Casher agreed.

"But I never thought that they would do that."

"Do what?" asked Casher.

Her dark eyes looked at him. It was a different night, and a different

Nile, but the eyes were only a very little bit older and they loved him

just as much as ever. The Lady Celalta trembled as though she herself

might think that the all-powerful Instrumentality could have hidden a

microphone in the random sands. She whispered to her lover,

"You said it yourself, Casher, just a moment ago."

"Said what?" He spoke tenderly but fearlessly, his voice ringing out

over the cool night sands.

The Lady Celalta went on whispering, which was very unlike her usual

self.

"You said that the third person was 'crazy." Do you realize that you

may have spoken the actual literal truth?" Her whisper darted at him

like a snake.

At last, he whispered back,

"What did you sense? What could you guess?"

"They have sent a madman to the stars. Or a mad woman. A real

psychotic."

"Lots of pilots," said Casher, speaking more normally, "are cushioned

against loneliness with real but artificially activated psychoses. It

gets them through the real or imagined horrors of the sufferings of

space."

"I don't mean that," said Celalta, still whispering urgently and

secretly.

"I mean a real psychotic."

"But there aren't any. Not loose, that is," said Casher, stammering

with surprise at last.

"They either get cured or they are bottled up in thought-proof

satellites somewhere."

Celalta raised her voice a little, just a little, so that she no longer

whispered but spoke urgently.

"But don't you see, that's what they must have done. The

Instrumentality made a star-killer too strong for any normal mind to

guide. So the Lords got a psychotic somewhere, a real psychotic, and

sent a madman out among the stars. Otherwise we could have felt its

gender or its age."

Casher nodded in silent agreement. The air did not feel colder, but he

got gooseflesh sitting beside his beloved Celalta on the familiar

desert sands.

"You're right. You must be right. It almost makes me feel sorry for

the enemies out near Linschoten XV. Do you see nothing of them this

time? I couldn't perceive them at all."

"I did, a little," said the Lady Celalta.

"Their tele paths have caught the strange minds coming at them with a

high rate of speed. The telepathic ones are wild with excitement but

the others are just going cackle-gabble, cackle-gabble with each other,

filled with anger, hunger, and the thought of man."

"You got that much?" he said in wonder.

"My lord and my lover, I dived this time. Is it so strange that I

sensed more than you did? Your strength lifted me."

"Did you hear what the weapons called each other?"

"Something silly." He could see her knitting her brows in the bright

star shine which illuminated the desert almost the way that the Old

Original Moon lit up the nights sometimes on Manhome itself.

"It was Folly, and something like

"Superordinated Alien Measuring and Mastery machine' and something like

'darkness' in the Ancient Doyches Language."

"That's what I got, too," said Casher.

"It sounds like a weird team."

"But a powerful one, a terribly powerful one," said the Lady Celalta.

"You and I, my lover and master, have seen strange things and dangers

between the stars, even before we met each other, but we never saw

anything like this before, did we?"

"No," said he.

"Well, then," said she, "let us sleep and forget the matter as much as

we can. The Instrumentality is certainly taking care of Linschoten XV,

and we two need not bother about it."

And all that Samm, Folly, and Finsternis knew was that a light touch,

unexplained but friendly, had gone over them from the far star region

near home. Thought they, if they thought anything about it at all,

"The Instrumentality, which made us and sent us, has checked up on us

one more time."

V

A few years later, Samm and Folly were talking again while Finsternis

guarded, impenetrable, un communicating detectable only by the fierce

glow of human life which shone telepathically out of the immense cube

rode space beside them and said nothing.

Suddenly Folly cried out to Samm loudly, "I can smell them."

"Smell who?" asked Samm mildly.

"There isn't any smell out here in the nothingness of space."

"Silly," thought Folly back,

"I don't mean really smell. I mean that I can pick up their sense of

odor telepathically."

"Whose?" said Samm, being dense.

"Our enemies', of course," cried Folly.

"The man-rememberers who are not man. The cackle-gabble creatures. The

beings who remember man and hate him. They smell thick and warm and

alive to each other. Their whole world is full of smells. Their tele

paths are getting frantic now. They have even figured out that there

are three of us and they are trying to get our smells."

"And we have no smell. Not when we do not even know whether we have

human bodies or not, inside these things. Imagine this metal body of

mine smelling. If it did have a smell,"

said Samm, "it would probably be the very soft smell of working steel

and a little bit of lubricants, plus whatever odors my jets might

activate inside an atmosphere. If I know the Instrumentality, they

have made my jets smell awful to almost any kind of being. Most forms

of life think first through their noses and then figure out the rest of

experience later. After all, I was built to intimidate, to frighten,

to destroy.

The Instrumentality did not make this giant to be friendly with

anybody. You and I can be friends. Folly, because you are a little

ship

which I could hold like a cigar between my fingers, and because the

ship holds the memory of a very lovely woman. I can sense what you

once were. What you may still be, if your actual body is still inside

that boat."

"Oh, Samm!" she cried.

"Do you think I might still be alive, really alive, with a real me in a

real me, and a chance to be myself somewhere again, out here between

the stars?"

"I can't sense it plainly," said Samm.

"I've reached as much as I can through your ship with my sensors, but I

can't tell whether there's a whole woman there or not. It might be

just a memory of you dissected and laminated between a lot of plastic

sheets. I really can't tell, but sometimes I have the strangest hunch

that you are still alive, in the old ordinary way, and that I am alive

too."

"Wouldn't that be wonderful!" She almost shouted at him.

"Samm, imagine being us again, if we fulfill our mission and conquer

this planet and stay alive and settle there! I might even meet you and

" They both fell silent at the implications of being ordinary alive

again. They knew that they loved each other. Out here, in the immense

blackness of space, there was nothing they could do but streak along in

their fast trajectories and talk to each other a little bit by

telepathy.

"Samm," said Folly, and the tone of her thought showed that she was

changing a difficult subject.

"Do you think that we are the furthest out that people have ever gone?

You used to be a technician. You might know. Do you?"

"Of course I know," thought Samm promptly.

"We're not.

After all, we're still deep inside our own galaxy."

"I didn't know," said Folly contritely.

"With all those instruments, don't you know where you are?"

"Of course I know where I am, Samm. In relation to the third planet of

Linschoten XV. I even have a faint idea of the general direction in

which Old Earth must lie, and how many thousands of ages it would take

us to get home, traveling through ordinary space, if we did try to turn

around." She thought to herself but didn't add in her thought to

Samm,

"Which we can't." She thought again to him,

"But I've never studied astronomy or navigation, so I couldn't tell

whether we were at the edge of the galaxy or not."

"Nowhere near the edge," said Samm.

"We're not John Joy Tree and we're nowhere near the two-headed

elephants which weep forever in intergalactic space."

"John Joy Tree?" sang Folly; there was joy and memory in her thoughts

as she sounded the name.

"He was my idol when I was a girl. My father was a Subchief of the

Instrumentality and always promised to bring John Joy Tree to our

house. We had a country house and it was unusual and

very fine for this day and age. But Mister and Go-Captain Tree never

got around to visiting us, so there I was, a big girl with

picture-cubes of him all over my room. I liked him because he was so

much older than me, and so resolute-looking and so tender too. I had

all sorts of romantic day-dreams about him, but he never showed up and

I married the wrong man several times, and my children got given to the

wrong people, so here I am. But what's this stuff about two-headed

elephants?"

"Really?" said Samm.

"I don't see how you could hear about John Joy Tree and not know what

he did."

"I knew he flew far, far out, but I didn't know exactly what he did.

After all, I was just a child when I fell in love with his picture.

What did he do? He's dead now, I suppose, so I don't suppose it

matters."

Finsternis cut in, grimly and unexpectedly,

"John Joy Tree is not dead. He's creeping around a monstrous place on

an abandoned planet, and he is immortal and insane."

"How did you know that?" cried Samm, turning his enormous metal head

to look at the dark burnished cube which had said nothing for so many

years.

There was no further thought from Finsternis, not a ghost, not an echo

of a word.

Folly prodded him.

"It's no use trying to make that thing talk if it doesn't want to.

We've both tried, thousands of times. Tell me about the two headed

elephants. Those are the big animals with large floppy ears and the

noses that pick things up, aren't they? And they make very wise,

dependable under people out of them?"

"I don't know about the under people part, but the animals are the kind

you mention, very big indeed. When John Joy Tree got far outside our

cosmos by flying through Space3 he found an enormous procession of open

ships flying in columns where there was nothing at all. The ships were

made by nothing which man has ever even seen. We still don't know

where they came from or what made them. Each open ship had a sort of

animal, something like an elephant with four front legs and a head at

each end, and as he passed the unimaginable ships, these animals howled

at him. Howled grief and mourning. Our best guess was that the ships

were the tombs of some great race of beings and the howling elephants,

the immortal half-living mourners who guarded them."

"But how did John Joy Tree ever get back?"

"Ah, that was beautiful. If you go into Space3, you take nothing more

than your own body with you. That was the finest engineering the human

race has ever done. They designed and built a whole plano form ship

out of John Joy Tree's skin, fingernails, and hair. They had to change

his body

of Man chemistry a bit to get enough metal in him to carry the coils

and the electric circuits, but it worked. He came back. That was a

man who could skip through space like a little boy hopping on familiar

rocks. He's the only pilot who ever piloted himself back home from

outside our galaxy. I don't know whether it will be worth the time and

treasure to use space-three for intergalactic trips. After all, some

very gifted people may have already fallen through by accident. Folly.

You and Finsternis and I are people who have been built into machines.

We are not ourselves the machines. But with Tree they did it the other

way around. They made a machine out of him. And it worked. In that

one deep flight he went billions of times further than we will ever

go."

"You think you know," said Finsternis unexpectedly.

"That's what you always do. You think you know."

Folly and Samm tried to get Finsternis to talk some more, but nothing

happened. After a few more rests and talks they were ready for landing

on the third planet of Linschoten XV.

They landed.

They fought.

Blood ran on the ground. Fire scorched the valleys and boiled the

lakes. The telepathic world was full of the cackle-gabble of fright,

hatred throwing itself into suicide, fury turning into surrender, into

deep despair, into hopelessness, and at last into a strange kind of

quiet and love.

Let us not tell that story.

It can be written some other time, told by some other voice.

The beings died by thousands and tens of thousands while Finsternis sat

on a mountain-top, doing nothing. Folly wove death and destruction,

uncoded languages, drew maps, showed Samm the strong-points and the

weapons which had to be destroyed.

Part of the technology was very advanced, other parts were still

tribal. The dominant race was that of the beings who had evolved into

handlers and thinkers; it was they who were the tele paths

All hatred ceased as the haters died. Only the submissive ones lived

on.

Samm tore cities about with his bare metal hands, ripped heavy guns to

pieces while they were firing at him, picking the gunners off the gun

carriages as though they were lice, swimming oceans when he had to,

with Folly darting and hovering around or ahead of him.

Final surrender was brought by their strongest tele path a very wise

old male who had been hidden inside a deep mountain.

"You have come, people. We surrender. Some of us have always known

the truth. We are Earth-born, too. A cargo of chickens settled here

unimaginable times ago. A time-twist tore us out of our convoy and

threw us here. That's why, when we sensed you far across space, we

caught the relationship of eat-and-eaten. Only, our brave ones had it

wrong. You eat us: we don't eat you. You are the masters now. We

will serve you forever. Do you seek our death?"

"No, no," said Folly.

"We came only to avert a danger, and we have done that. Live on, and

on, but plan no war and make no weapons. Leave that to the

Instrumentality."

"Blessed is the Instrumentality, whoever that may be. We accept your

terms. We belong to you."

When this was done, the war was over.

Strange things began to happen.

Wild voices sang from within Folly and Samm, voices not their own.

Mission gone. Work finished. Go to hill with cube. Go and rejoice!

Samm and Folly hesitated. They had left Finsternis where they landed,

halfway around the planet.

The singing voices became more urgent. Go. Go. Go now. Go back to

the cube. Tell the chicken-people to plant a lawn and a grove of

trees. Go, go, go now to the good reward!

They told the tele paths what had been said to them and voyaged wearily

up out of the atmosphere and back down for a landing at the original

point of contact, a long low hill which had been planted with huge

patches of green turf and freshly transplanted trees even in the hours

in which they flew off the world and back on it again. The bird-tele

paths must have had strong and quick commands.

The singing became pure music as they landed, chorales of reward and

rejoicing, with the hint of martial marches and victory fugues woven

in.

Man, stand up, said the voices to Samm.

Samm stood on the ridge of the hill. He stood like a colossus against

the red-dawning sky. A friendly, quiet crowd of the chicken-people

fell back.

Man, put your hand to your right forehead, sang the voices.

Samm obeyed. He did not know why the voices called him "Alan."

Ellen, land, sang the rejoicing voices to Folly. Folly, herself a

little ship, landed at Samm's feet. She was bewildered with happy

confusion and a great deal of pain which did not seem to matter much.

Alan, come forth, sang the voices. Samm felt a sharp pain as his

forehead his huge metal forehead, two hundred meters above the ground

burst open and closed again. There was something pink and helpless in

his hand.

The voices commanded, Alan, put your hand gently on the ground.

of Man Samm obeyed and put his hand on the ground. The little pink

toy fell on the fresh turf. It was a tiny miniature of a man.

Ellen, stand forth, sang the voices again. The ship named Folly opened

a door and a naked young woman fell out.

Alma, wake up. The cube named Finsternis turned darker than charcoal.

Out of the dark side, there stumbled a black-haired girl.

She ran across the hill-slope to the figure named Ellen. The man body

named Alan was struggling to his feet.

The three of them stood up.

The voices spoke to them: This is our last message. You have done your

work. You are well. The boat named Folly contains tools, medicine,

and the other equipment for a human colony. The giant named Samm will

stand forever as a monument to human victory. The cube named

Finsternis will now dissolve. Alan!

Ellen! Treat Alma lovingly and well. She is now a for getty

The three naked people stood bewildered in the dawn.

Good-bye and a great high thanks from the Instrumentality.

This is a pre-coded message, effective only if you won. You have won.

Be happy. Live on!

Ellen took Alma who had been Finsternis and held her tight. The great

cube dissolved into a shapeless slag-heap. Alan, who had been Samm,

looked up at his former body dominating the skyline.

For reasons which the travelers did not understand until many years had

passed, the bird-people around them broke into ululant hymns of peace,

welcome, and joy.

"My house," said Ellen, pointing at the little ship which had spat

forth her body just minutes ago, "is now a home for all of us."

They climbed into the successful little ship which had been called

Folly. They knew, somehow, that they would find clothes and food. And

wisdom, too. They did.

VI

Ten years later, they had the proof of happiness playing in the yard

before their house a substantial building, made of stone and brick,

which the local people had built under Alan's directions. (They had

changed their whole technology in the process of learning from him, and

thanks to the efficiency and power of the telepathic priestly caste

things learned at any one spot on the planet were swiftly disseminated

to the whole group of races on the planet.) The proof of happiness

consisted of the thirty-five human children playing in the yard. Ellen

had had nine, four sets of twins

and a single. Alma had had twelve, two sets of quintuplets and a pair

of twins. The other fourteen had been bottle-grown from ova and sperm

which they found in the ship, the frozen donations of complete

strangers who had done their bit for the off world settling of the

human race. Thanks to the careful genetic coding of both the

womb-children and the bottle-children, there was a variety of types,

suitable for natural breeding over many generations to come.

Alan came to the door. He measured the time by the place where the

great shadow fell. It was hard to realize that the gigantic,

indestructible statue which loomed above them all had once been his own

self. A small glacier was beginning to form around the feet of Samm

and the night was getting cold.

"I'm bringing the children in already," said Ch-tikkik, one of the

local nurses they had hired to help with the huge brood of human

babies. She, in return, got the privilege of hatching her eggs on the

warm shelf behind the electric stove; she turned them every hour,

eagerly awaiting the time that sharp little mouths would break the

shell and human like little hands would tear an opening from which a

human like baby would emerge, oddly pretty-ugly like a gnome, and

unusual only in that it could stand upright from the moment of birth.

One little boy was arguing with Ch-tikkik. He wore a warm robe of

vegetable-fiber veins knitted to serve as a base for a feather cloak.

He was pointing out that with such a robe he could survive a blizzard

and claiming, quite justly, that he did not have to be in the house in

order to stay warm. Was that Rupert?

thought Alan.

He was about to call the child when his two wives came to the door, arm

in arm, flushed with the heat of the kitchen where they had been

cooking the two dinners together one dinner for the humans, now

numbering thirty-eight, and the other for the bird people who were

tremendously appreciative of getting cooked food, but who had odd

requirements in the recipes, such as "one quart of finely ground

granite gravel to each gallon of oatmeal, sugared to taste and served

with soybean milk."

Alan stood behind his wives and put a hand on the shoulder of each.

"It's hard to think," he said, "that a little over ten years ago, we

didn't even know that we were still people. Now look at us, a family,

and a good one.

Alma turned her face up to be kissed, and Ellen, who was less

sentimental, lifted her face to be kissed, too, so that her co-wife

would not be embarrassed at being babied separately. The two liked

each other very much. Alma came out of the cube Finsternis as a for

getty conditioned to remember nothing of her long sad psychotic life

before the Instrumentality had sent her on a wild mission among the

stars. When she had joined Alan

of Man and Ellen, she knew the words of the Old Common Tongue, but

very little else.

Ellen had had some time to teach her, to love her, and to mother her

before any of the babies were born, and the relationship between the

two of them was warm and good.

The three parents stood aside as the bird-women, wearing their

comfortable and pretty feather cloaks, herded the children into the

house. The smallest children had already been brought in from their

sunning and were being given their bottles by bird-girls who never got

tired of watching the cuteness and helplessness of the human infant.

"It'shard to think of that time at all, "said Ellen, who had been

"Folly." "I wanted beauty and fame and a perfect marriage and nobody

even told me that they didn't go together. I have had to come to the

end of the stars to get what I wanted, to be what I might become."

"And me," said Alma, who had been

"Finsternis," "I had a worse problem. I was crazy. I was afraid of

life. I didn't even know how to be a woman, a sweetheart, a female, a

mother. How could I ever guess that I needed a sister and wife, like

the one you have been, to make my life whole? Without you to show me,

Ellen, I could never have married our husband. I thought I was

carrying murder among the stars, but I was carrying my own solution as

well. Where else could I turn out to be me?"

"And I," said Alan, who had been

"Samm," "became a metal giant between the stars because my first wife

was dead and my own children forgot me and neglected me. Nobody can

say I'm not a father now. Thirty-five, and more than half of them

mine. I'll be more of a father than any other man of the human race

has ever been."

There was a change in the shadow as the enormous right arm swung

heavily toward the sky as a prelude to the sharp robotic call that

nightfall, calculated with astronomical precision, had indeed come to

the place where he stood.

The arm reached its height, pointing straight up.

"I used to do that," said Alan.

The cry came, something like a silent pistol-shot which all of them

heard, but a shot without echoes, without reverberations.

Alan looked around.

"All the children are in. Even Rupert.

Come in, my darlings, and let us have dinner together." Alma and Ellen

went ahead of him and he barred the heavy doors behind them.

This was peace and happiness; that at last was goodness. They had no

obligation but to live and to be happy. The threat and the promise of

victory were far, far behind.