FOREWORD by John Cornell

THE IMAGINATION TRAP by Colin Kapp

APPLE by John Baxter

ROBOT’S DOZEN by G. L. Lack 

BIRTH OF A BUTTERFLY by Joseph Green 

THEY SHALL REAP by David Rome 

SHOCK TREATMENT by Lee Harding 

DEAD TO THE WORLD by H. A. Hargreaves 

VISIONS OF MONAD by M. John Harrison 

THE WALL TO END THE WORLD by Vincent King

 

* * * *

 

FOREWORD

 

John Carnell

 

 

The diversity of plot and storytelling in each successive volume of New Writings in SF is, I hope, as exciting to all our readers as it is pleasurable to myself, while our contributors, drawn from well-known authors in the U. S., Canada, Great Britain and Australia, bring an international flavor to this most popular series.

 

In this eighth Bantam volume (the contents of which have once again been selected from the best stories in three volumes of the British edition) there is no specific theme, unless you call the imaginative concept of Man’s far-distant future a theme. It is the vividness and clarity some authors have for describing our own hypothetical (and obviously alien) future that I find so intriguing. Two periods in the human Time Scale have always fascinated me—from five thousand years ago to the dawn of the Christian era (particularly the period of the Egyptian dynasties), and the far-off future (imaginatively kindled when I first read H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine). The past we can painstakingly trace from clues and artifacts left behind, but the future is an inscrutable book of blank pages yet to be written upon.

 

It is this ability to describe problematical backgrounds of our far future on Earth that lends such breadth and scope to science fiction. We can imagine, fairly accurately, what living in the world will be like during the next hundred years or so, but try rationalizing today’s technology against what it may be like in the year a.d. 5000 and the mind is inclined to reject all possibilities. Yet this is no further away in forward Time than when Tutankhamen was buried in splendor in the Valley of the Kings at Thebes in the fourteenth century b.c. Eyewitnesses to the interment of the young king could no more visualize the world of today than we, on the threshold of space travel, can imagine what it will be like three thousand years in our future.

 

Some authors, though, are gifted with a sense of alien descriptiveness that makes us feel they could possibly be right in some of their futuristic assumptions.—Vincent King, for instance, in “The Wall to End the World,” or Lee Harding in “Shock Treatment,” where he delicately traces the declining twilight of the human race in a nirvana of its own making. Or the “atmosphere” created in Joseph Green’s “Birthplace of a Butterfly” and in John Baxter’s “Apple.” Out of context though the macabre setting of the latter may be, it is no harder to accept than the possibility of faster-than-light travel.

 

All the stories in this volume show that breadth of imaginative concept which makes science fiction so popular. We are sure that you will enjoy them.

 

John Cornell

 

* * * *

 

THE IMAGINATION TRAP

 

Colin Kapp

 

 

Tau-space was an inter-atom paradox where conditions existing in normal space were physically and psychologically incongruent—yet it was probably the only route to the stars. If Man could master it!

 

* * * *

 

ONE

 

Professor Carl Diepenstrom, Director of Tau Research Corporation, switched off the intercom.

       “Well, at least he’s come to see us, Paul.”

       Paul Porter nodded. “I thought he would. Eric Brevis can’t resist the lure of curiosity any more than we can. In fact, if we can score with him, it will be on that very point.”

       “I see.” Diepenstrom raised his large and greying head and studied Porter seriously for a moment or two. “And you still think it vitally necessary that we go through with this project, Paul?”

       “You know it is. It’s the only chance we have. We can’t continue with the present research line. It isn’t humanitarian, and it isn’t giving us a glimpse of a coherent pattern. Besides which, you know how the Government’s attitude is hardening.”

       “Yes, I know it,” said Diepenstrom gravely. “And that’s the reason I’ve backed you as far as I have. I can’t see any practical alternative. But I’d be happier if it didn’t have to be you who went out there. Tau Research can’t afford to lose you, Paul.”

       “There won’t be any Tau Research if this project folds. Anyway, I don’t think the risk will be too great—not if we can persuade Eric Brevis to join the team.”

       “You think a great deal of Dr Brevis, don’t you?”

       “I do. He has an intuitive understanding of the irrational, and that can be a prime factor for survival under extreme Tau conditions. With him on the team we have a very real chance of making a breakthrough.”

       “Very well,” said Diepenstrom. “If you want Dr Brevis, you shall have him. But you’d better leave the interview to me. It may just be that he isn’t very willing to offer his life for somebody else’s cause. In which case he will have to be . . . ah! . . . persuaded.”

 

As the psychologist entered the room, Diepenstrom rose in greeting.

       “Dr Brevis, thank you for coming.”

       Brevis seated himself carefully and took a cigar from the offered box. “Being in receipt of such an intriguing communication, I could scarcely have refused.”

       Diepenstrom repressed a mischievous smile. “That was, shall we say, contrived. Curiosity is a force far more potent than most people allow.”

       Brevis studied the Director’s face carefully for a moment. “True,” he said. “Though I don’t think you asked me here just to discuss the psychology of curiosity.”

       “Indeed not. I wanted to discuss the possibility of death.”

       “Whose death—yours or mine?”

       “Yours.”

       Brevis exhaled sharply. “I suppose there’s some sense in this cryptic nonsense?”

       “There is indeed, my dear Doctor, and shortly I’ll tell you what it is. But first let me enquire how much you know about Tau?”

       “Not very much. I know it’s a system in which solid bodies are resonated in such a way that their atoms can pass through the spaces in the atomic structure of other solid bodies. I know you use the method for transport, bringing the big Tau ships to resonance and then driving them through the earth by the shortest mean path to their destination.”

       “Go on,” said Diepenstrom.

       “I know also that in its resonant state such a ship passes into an inter-atom domain called Tau-space which is incongruent both physically and psychologically with conditions existing in normal space.”

       “That will do for the moment,” said Diepenstrom. “I recall that you were concerned with Paul Porter on the epic voyage of the old Lambda I Tau raft. I also recall that the impact of some of the things you discovered on that journey caused a radical re-thinking of some major portions of the Tau concept. I put it to you, Dr Brevis, that this is a remarkable record for one who claims very little knowledge of Tau techniques.”

       “Suppose we come to the point,” said Brevis abruptly.

       “I was just going to,” said Diepenstrom. “Does the phrase deep-Tau mean anything to you?”

       “No.”

       “Then I’ll tell you. Deep-Tau is the Tau-space analogue of conventional deep space. We are actively researching into the possibility of achieving interstellar spaceflight by travelling in the Tau-space analogue.”

       “I don’t see . . .” said Brevis.

       “Let me finish first, please. Now, deep-Tau as an alternative to conventional spaceflight promises some remarkable advantages in simplified technique. Indeed, it may be the only technique to make star travel possible. Superficially, deep-Tau travel would appear to be easier than terrestrial Tau work. Unfortunately there are a number of impossible and irrational reasons why this is not so.”

       “I fail to see,” said Brevis, “what all this has to do with me.”

       “A great deal. The present pattern of Tau research consists of sending manned telemetry probes into deep-Tau. We’ve sent some twenty-four to date. Some have returned and some haven’t, but each has piled paradox on paradox—and each has cost the life of the probe pilot. Now we’re approaching our last chance. If we fail, the Government will probably close down our activities completely. Such an action would be a setback to this research from which it might never recover.”

       “So?”

       “Paul Porter wants to take a four-man vessel fitted out as a laboratory into deep-Tau, and he wants you to go with him. It’s my job to persuade you to go, while at the same time leaving you in no doubt that to do so is tantamount to committing suicide.”

       “So that’s it! I refuse, of course. I still have the scars to show from the last time Paul Porter took me into Tau.”

       “I have a contract here on which you can write your own price for one successful deep-Tau vector.”

       “No, Professor. If Paul wants to seek an anguished grave in the corner of some dark and twisted hypothetical continuum, that is his own affair. I’ve no such ambition.”

       “A fair statement, Dr Brevis. I appreciate your position. Faced with the same situation, I should probably adopt a similar standpoint. Let me thank you again for coming, and apologize for wasting your time.”

       Brevis watched him narrowly for a moment. “What are you up to, you old fox? You aren’t a man to accept defeat that easily.”

       Diepenstrom raised his ponderous head. His smile was a mere ghost haunting the corners of his mouth.

       “Ah, yes! There was something else. I’m glad you reminded me. While you’re here I wonder if you’d care to see some of our deep-Tau exhibits.”

       “Seeing the whole point of this interview seems to turn on this apparent afterthought, I have no objection. But I warn you that nothing you can show me will make me change my mind.”

       “Perish the thought, my dear Doctor. I merely wish to show you our little museum of paradoxes. I think you’ll find them rather fascinating. Would you care to step this way?”

 

The vaults beneath Tau Research were olive-drab and vast in extent, and the footsteps of the two men echoed hollowly down the steel and concrete corridors. Brevis had previously had no idea that Government influence extended to the point of including armed servicemen alongside Tau Corporation’s own formidable security force. The two men were checked and counter-checked at each level and intersection with a meticulous care which placed a sinister stamp on the ultimate importance of the project.

       Brevis smiled wryly. “If I have as much trouble getting into Heaven as we’ve had getting into here, I don’t think I’ll bother.”

       “Don’t worry,” said Diepenstrom. “The qualifications for entry are somewhat different—one might almost say mutually exclusive.”

       “That’s a rare piece of cynicism.”

       “Wait,” said the Director, “until you’ve seen what we have to show you. There are more things in Heaven and on Earth than are dreamed of in your psychology.”

       They reached the appointed door, and Diepenstrom withdrew the bolts with a heavy clatter and stood aside for the psychologist to enter.

       “This is one of the ten or so probe vessels which we have been able to recover. It came back to us on an automatic-recall vector from deep-Tau, and it’s not the least of our curiosities.”

       Brevis entered the room and walked around the exhibit, his face registering a melange of fear and fascination.

       “What sort of trick is this?”

       “No trick, Doctor. Simply one of those things that we at Tau Research have had to learn to live with.”

       “And the pilot?” Brevis asked at last the question he had been avoiding.

       “He came back alive but died in hospital. He was completely to scale with the craft. He was desperately mad and measured exactly one and a quarter inches tall. Do you want to see any more?”

       “Not just now. One has to learn to re-adjust.”

       “You’re not feeling ill, are you?”

       “No. I was just thinking what a remarkable character your pilot must have been.”

       “You’ve got beyond me there,” said Diepenstrom, with sudden interest. “What did you have in mind, Doctor?”

       “I was reflecting that you sent him into a complex so vast that it doesn’t include the limiting concept ‘universe’. The wonder to me is not that he came back minute, but that he didn’t come back microscopic.”

       A trace of light flickered across Diepenstrom’s brow.

       “I think you’re on to something, Dr Brevis. Paul Porter was right. You do have an intuitive understanding of the irrational. Won’t you have second thoughts about joining our team?”

       “Damn you, Diepenstrom! You’ve pushed the ball right into my court.”

       “I merely showed you the ball. You did the pushing.”

       “But you knew which way it would roll.”

       “Certainly. With the pitch inclined at an angle of forty-five degrees in the right direction, I could scarcely miss. It’s what I call an imagination trap. Give an expert an outstanding problem in his own field, and you have one of the most infallible mousetraps ever devised. Now suppose we go upstairs and sign that contract?”

       “I still haven’t said I agree,” Brevis said.

       “No, but you will. You see, if you walk out now you’ll always be haunted by the vision of the Tau probe vessel which came back only twenty-two inches long and with a pilot not as big as your thumb. I don’t think a man with your imagination could live with himself with that problem unresolved.”

 

“It would appear,” said Brevis, “that I am now working for Tau Corporation until death do us part—unless I misread the small print at the bottom of the contract. Although, if I have your intentions divined aright, that mayn’t be a very long-term prospect.”

       Porter turned with a smile from the drafting machine. “I take it that you have just concluded an interview with Diepenstrom. He tends to induce that depressive attitude in interviews. Anyway, glad to have you join the team, Eric. On the type of project we’re planning we’re going to need all the expertise we can get.”

       “Even in psychology?”

       “Especially in psychology—and your own understanding of the irrational. Eric, we’re going into a complex which doesn’t begin until a point way beyond where our physics ends—out into a region from which nothing vaguely rational has ever been recovered. What happens to things out in deep-Tau is completely beyond our experience. That’s why I feel a sight happier to know you’re going to be alongside.”

       “I’m with you, Paul . . . although just now I’m damned if I can think of a convincing reason why. What’s the big attraction about going into deep-Tau anyway?”

       “Because it’s there, I guess. Man isn’t built to live happily on the edge of the unknown. And if we’re ever to get to the stars, then deep-Tau is the only possible route.”

       “Not spaceflight?”

       Porter was slightly amused. “Hardly. Unless there are some very radical changes in our concept of normal physics, we don’t have either the engines or the power sources necessary to make such a journey in man’s lifetime. And we probably never will have. Mass-energy relationships alone rule that out quite firmly.”

       “You’ve just shattered my dream of the space age,” said Brevis.

       “Except for a ruinously expensive exploration of the Solar system, it never was more than a dream,” said Porter.

       “But doesn’t that apply to deep-Tau travel also?”

       “Not completely. In Tau-space there are no gravitational gradients to overcome, and mass-energy relationships and some aspects of Relativity don’t hold strictly true. Don’t ask me to show you the maths, because we’re still trying to understand it ourselves, but Tau-space provides us with a potential medium in which we can circumvent a lot of the physical absolutes which make conventional interstellar spaceflight an impossibility. Even the speed of light is no longer a limiting velocity.”

       “But aren’t the power requirements still prohibitive?”

       “They’re high, but they don’t climb to infinity or anything like. Even today it’s theoretically possible to build a ship which could make a thirty-two light year round trip through deep-Tau to Altair and back under its own power.”

       “Phew! I begin to see the attraction.”

       “Precisely,” said Porter. “If we can’t reach the stars via Tau-space then it’s doubtful if we shall ever reach them. But standing in our way is a set of problems so imponderable that we don’t know how to begin to start to solve them.”

       “How much do we know about these problems?”

       “Lamentably little. Apart from the monstrosities in the vaults which came back on automatic-recall vectors, all our information is limited to transmitted verbal and telemetered material gathered during the first few hours of a probe vector run—that is to say, before the vessels achieved the speed of light.”

       “So the speed of light is a limiting velocity?”

       “Not in the usual sense. Neither is it a failure of communication due to Döppler effect. This is something truly frightening in its implications.”

       “Go on!” Brevis said, noting the look in Porter’s eyes.

       “When the probe vessel reaches the velocity of light our receiver here at Tau Research breaks down. The probe continues to transmit, but we can’t receive its signals.”

       “I don’t understand,” said Brevis.

       “Neither do we.” Porter’s face was haunted. “Their signal strength increases to such proportions that the current actually fuses the terminal elements of our receiver. Millions of amperes are involved.”

       “But how can that be?”

       “I don’t know. But the implications are terrifying. If we can receive such power over such a distance . . . then what must have happened to the ship itself? Such a condition presupposes that the ship’s transmitters are happily modulating beamed power equal to the output of a pretty fair-sized star.”

 

TWO

 

“Well, that’s the ship, Eric. We’re calling her Lambda II after Rorsch’s original Tau raft.”

       Brevis looked down. “And there the similarity ends,” he said.

       They were on the balcony of Tau Research’s main assembly shop, and below them the huge vessel, running almost the length of the facility, returned the solid glint of flawlessly polished metal. Even now a group of fitters was engaged in burnishing the plating with great attention, against the possibility of its eventual emergence into the rays of some strange and alien sun.

       “It looks more like a spaceship than a Tau craft,” said Brevis.

       “That’s effectively what it is—a spaceship built around the largest and most stable Tau-spin generator we could find. We’ve made it capable of operating in either Tau or real space environments in the hope that we may achieve the easy transposition from one to the other. We’ve proved such a transposition is possible in vacuum without the necessity for a grid.”

       “I’d no idea you were planning anything on this scale.”

       Porter shrugged. “It’s our last chance, Paul. Tau Corporation is staking everything on this gamble. We’ve spent twenty-one and a half million on Lambda II so far—and it could have been five times that much except that the Nuclear Energy Authority donated the reactor design and provided the fuel. The Rorsch generator was diverted from a luxury Tau liner already under construction, or we could easily have spent another three million on that.”

       Bevis looked slightly dazed. “And this type of money is readily available?”

       “A hundred times that, if necessary. The project is that important. The proof of the project is whether we can go out into deep-Tau and come back alive. Any facility which might aid us in doing just that is ours for the asking.”

       Brevis nodded. “If only we knew in advance what to ask for,” he said.

       Immediately below them now the four snow-white ceramic tubes of the thrust jets gave a shrewd hint of the capacity of the drive reactor, cunningly contrived to conform to the hindshape of the hull itself. Many large industrial cities had less power than this at their disposal. Almost centrally along its length the hull bulged into a globe wherein was situated the mammoth Rorsch generator, originally designed to induce Tau-spin in a luxury craft of nearly a hundred times the mass displacement of its present charge.

       The front of the ship was blind, save for antennae and the scanning and sensing devices feeding the instrumentation which had to serve in lieu of eyes. The only concession to the need to physically observe was the blister atop the ship, which emerged through the heavy shielding protecting the ship’s occupants from the unwelcome psychic molestations of the raw Tau environment. Apart from that, the hull was featureless.

       “We’ll go in later,” said Porter. “First I want you to meet the rest of the team. I know they’re very curious about you.”

       “Curious?”

       Porter smiled briefly. “I could have been forgiven for picking a cosmologist, a nuclear physicist, or a radio-astronomer—in fact a man specializing in any of the hundred or so branches of physical science with which we get involved in deep-Tau work. But when I announced I was bringing in a far-out psychologist, reactions ranged from the incredulous to the hostile.

       “The objections weren’t too serious, of course. We needed a qualified medic aboard, and that factor plus your previous record in Tau made you the natural choice anyway. But Tau pilots especially are somewhat sensitive of implied criticism of their mental balance. Not unreasonably, I suppose, when we expect them to come to meaningful decisions in what is essentially an irrational environment.”

       “I promise you I’ll tread lightly,” said Brevis.

       The others were already in the office when they arrived. Porter kept the introductions brief. Sigmund Grus, fortyish, a Tau Research senior physicist, heavy, Germanic save in all but accent. He was every inch an applied intellectual, with a rational solidity behind his thinking which matched his frame.

       The second was Pat Driscoll, senior Tau test pilot. An altogether different character. In his early thirties, he was nervous and apparently unsure of himself. Though his face registered his thoughts on the trend of the conversation, he only once allowed himself to speak, and then did so with such embarrassing over-emphasis of point that he confused himself in mid-sentence and trailed back into pathetic silence.

       After two hours the meeting broke up, they having summarized for Brevis’ benefit the duties and responsibilities of each man on the team. Brevis alone had no set duties. While the others concerned themselves with the machines and mechanics of the trip, his concern was solely with the functioning of the men.

       Afterwards Brevis and Porter went down to the ship. The psychologist had to familiarize himself with the various equipments controlling the temperature, humidity and composition of the ship’s atmosphere, and the devices provided to assist survival against various levels of potential catastrophe. Also it was left to him to equip the tiny hospital room and operating theatre, and to decide what medicaments and drugs should be carried. Porter showed him his quarters and provided him with the necessary charts and layouts.

       “By the way, Eric, what do you make of the others?” Porter slipped the question in apparently casually as they turned to leave, but there was no doubt it had been long in his mind.

       Brevis shrugged. “I was going to take that up with you. I take it they were picked for their specialities rather than their suitability for an exploratory voyage of this kind.”

       “Very much so. We don’t have any mental and physical supermen with sufficiently advanced Tau knowledge, and it would take too long to train some. Therefore we compromised. We took the most technically able men who also had practical Tau operating experience, and threw in a full-time psychologist to balance the equation. Unorthodox, I know, but it’s only one of the compromises we’ve had to make in getting a project like this off the ground.”

       “Mm!” said Brevis. “Ordinarily the only man I’d recommend for a venture of this magnitude would be yourself. Sigmund Grus is sound enough, but he’d be better left in his own laboratory with his wife to meet him in the car. But I’m more than a little dubious about Pat Driscoll. He’s a man who lives inside himself too much. I’d imagine his I.Q. is something quite fantastic, but he’s introverted almost to the point of being unable to communicate. I certainly can’t recommend exposing him to stressful situations. He’s a weak link, Paul.”

       “But he’s also the best and most experienced Tau pilot available. He has over a thousand vector runs to his credit, many of them on unprogrammed exploratory runs. Take it from me, Eric, there’s no pilot on Tau Corporation’s payroll better suited than Pat Driscoll to handle this trip.”

       “I’ll take your word for it. But at least you can’t say you weren’t warned.”

       “Exactly what are you afraid of, Eric? Every man on this team has already proven his capability of working and surviving under extreme Tau conditions. You can’t have a better criterion than that.”

       “No, except that I suspect both you and I are already quite certain that the extremes of the Tau-state influence aren’t going to be our greatest hazards. Else, Paul, why did you include as your medic someone who was also a far-out psychologist?”

 

In the subsequent months of preparation the tension slowly mounted. Brevis had ample time to observe its effect upon his fellow team members. He found nothing to make him revise his original conclusions as to their psychological suitability, but he rapidly acquired a respect for their technical competence. Sigmund Grus, particularly, impressed him with his detailed understanding of the craft and all its installations.

       Two major landmarks measured the progress towards the final departure time. The first was the bringing of the Lambda II’s reactor up to criticality, and the second was the successful proving trial of the giant Rorsch Tau-spin generator. Then the only stage left was the towing of the craft from the assembly shop to the adjoining bay where lay the immense Tau terminal grid which would launch its charge into the unknowns of the deep-Tau continuum.

       When this operation too had been completed, the air of expectancy and tension rose like a fever. Whether for success or disaster, the die was already cast. Any inherent faults and shortcomings in the ship were both unknown and scarcely alterable. This was the machine, the physics and mechanics of the project. From this point on the emphasis was very much on the men.

       In the eighteen hours of countdown every conceivable item of instrumentation, control and communication was re-checked, and double checked. The huge Rorsch generator, unstable in standby state, responded magnificently on ready-state power, and gave every promise of a fault-free operating condition. The reactor performance was well above specification, and the ship computer had long been soundlessly exchanging its fantastic number sequences with its communication counterpart in the Tau Research information centre.

       At two hours to take-off, the team had their final assembly. The atmosphere was so highly charged emotionally that the image of the voyage had assumed epic proportions before it had even begun, and Brevis signalled to Porter to close the hatches early to quieten the tension. Their departure into such a radical unknown as deep-Tau was a psychological vortex which those who experienced it would never quite forget.

       With the hatches closed and the occupants insulated from the outer activities except for the electronic chatter of check and counter-check, the tension within the ship swiftly subsided. It was replaced by an immediate sense of identity with the ship and its purpose. Porter took the control room, Driscoll the blister. Grus, having re-run a check-out exercise on the reactor, hastened to his beloved computer where the instrument data was being processed into an endless electronic digest which could be all the world outside might ever know as to their fate in deep-Tau.

       Brevis, his instrumentational chores completed, found himself suddenly at a loss, and retired to his bunk to lay, half resting, mentally reviewing what he knew of the strengths and weaknesses of his companions, and listening to their conversation on the intercom set.

       “Zero minus ten minutes.” Porter’s voice over the loudspeaker was a clear, precise, ritualistic chant. Perfectly controlled. No sign yet that his subconscious had fully absorbed the impact of the situation.

       “Tracking stations Pi and Sigma receiving our beam and locked on,” said Grus. Sigmund Grus—his strength was that he probably never would perceive the deeper significance of the situation. As the flesh served to cushion his body, so his technology cushioned his mind. But pity him on the day when some inexorable reality leaned down to crush him.

       “Seventeen point nine times ten to the minus eleven. Sigmund, I’ll need help with the tensor analysis.” That was Driscoll. His psyche knew where they were going . . . had known it for a long time . . . had soaked itself in a little acid-pit of dread. But when your psyche has a wound in it as deep and raw as his, you can’t bear to be far away from the possibility of death for long. Nevertheless you can still leave sweat, grey upon the pillow.

       And himself? How much of the unknown could he take? No use to worry. The unknown and the irrational was his speciality. His drugs had taken him through stranger exercises of the mind than anything deep-Tau might have to offer. Perhaps.

       “Three minutes,” said Porter’s voice. “This will be a two-part take-off. We will adopt the Tau state but remain on the grid until the computer has cleared the course co-ordinates. Eric, if you want to do any preliminary work on the Tau phenomena you’d better join Pat in the blister right away.”

       Brevis leaned to his microphone. “Check!”

       He made his way to the blister directly. Somewhere down the corridors as he walked, the ship made a perfect transition from real space into Tau, becoming coexistent with the molecules of the air which rushed in to fill the void it had left on the grid. But deep within the ship the transition was indetectable. In the blister, beyond the screens, it would be different. Very different. He halted before the heavy blister door and wiped the sweat from his palms. The reaction of unshielded Tau influence with certain centres of the brain gave rise to hallucinatory images so strong that they equated fairly well with all a man could ever know of reality.

       He shouldered the door open, watching the telltales on the wall to give him an indication of the position of the screens set mazeform to shield the emanations of the blister from the ship. The room was dark, but three steps sufficed to place him in the maze and from there he could proceed by fingertip location of the route. But as his head cleared the final screen he again stopped, breathing heavily with part fear and part wonder.

       Although their spatial analogue was still the black iron of the grid in the confines of Tau Research, nothing of this was visible. Instead, the blister seemed to be an island floating in alarming isolation in the midst of a pink waste which was the characteristic image of the Tau Gamma mode of resonance. But the knowledge of its origin in no way lessened its scope and awesomeness. Here was space, limitless in a way no real-space panorama could ever be.

       Nothing was visible above or below, nor on any side, save for a shifting pink radiance which had no apparent source and which closed around from all sides. Brevis knew this to be subjective illusion, and that even if he closed his eyes the impression would remain. But he could not rid himself of the vertigo or the feeling of profound insignificance which the scene impressed upon his mind.

       Driscoll’s familiarity, however, had made him more immune. He was already at work under the blister’s dome with refractometer, spectrum analyser, polariscope and sighting apparatus, relaying vector and tensor co-ordinates to Grus to form the basis for the calculation of the course. Brevis was fascinated. Driscoll was setting up line, angle and point relationships by purely visual reference to the Tau-domain image beyond the blister, fixing point co-ordinates to seven decimal places as though they were physical absolutes. But how the information was determined, or how it could be established with such accuracy from the Tau image, he was unable to decide. In this he sensed the reason for Driscoll’s inclusion in the team. The ability to interpret the Tau image in terms of mathematically usable quanta was indeed a facility worthy of respect.

       Brevis had no idea at all how it was achieved. If any features were visible at all, they were vague features of contrasted intensity in the illuminated field, like some cosmological X-ray diffraction pattern, which Driscoll could read with expert eyes and from which he established his axes and points, as though drawing an elaborate imaginary three-dimensional spider-web across the pink backdrop of unreality.

       Finally Sigmund Grus was satisfied.

       “That’s all we need for now, Pat. Computation time is about seven minutes. Paul, I can give you a deadline in ten minutes.”

       “Right.” Porter’s voice cut in on the communicator. “Primary acceleration will exert an apparent force of a half gravity in a direction parallel to the long axis of the ship. This is not a measure of the acceleration rate but a gravitic nuclear reluctance effect which will dissipate rapidly as the ship leaves the Earth’s magnetic field. Eric, you won’t have experienced this yet, but just brace yourself against a stern bulkhead until it passes. Sigmund, I’m handing control to the computer. As soon as the course is taped you can give her the gun.”

 

THREE

 

Bred in a world used to the statistics of the crushing acceleration gravities of rocket spaceflight, Brevis had earlier envisioned their leap towards light-speed velocities would be a prolonged spell of suffering in an acceleration couch. But in the modified physics of the Tau domain their actual departure was a physical anticlimax. The half gravity Porter had promised proved no more than a gentle push against the wall, a force against which he could move and lean quite easily. The effect was as if the room had rotated slightly on its axis so that the wall on which he leaned inclined back at an angle and the floor sloped upwards. After a few minutes both wall and floor returned to the normal.

       When conditions had stabilized and the Tau image remained unchanged, Brevis left the blister and went to the control room where the activity was now centred. So effortless had been the moment of departure that he was inwardly slightly sceptical that they had already achieved a velocity greater than a conventional rocket could ever hope to match. It was also incredible that they could have developed a rate of acceleration beyond the structural endurance of any known material operating in a real-space environment.

       Even in the control room the air of unreality grew no less. The T-Döppler radar and similar devices meant things to Porter and the computer but to Brevis’ untrained eye gave no more sensible indication of speed now than they had when the ship was at rest. As their speed climbed to measurable fractions of that of light Brevis was completely at a loss to convince himself of any condition other than that of being completely at rest. He finally dismissed the problem and turned his attention to his own charges—the human components of the ship.

       And it was here he discovered, at least in Grus and Porter, that the sense of speed and the fear of it was very much in evidence. What Driscoll thought he absorbed into himself, but the tension rising in the other two was a minute by minute tightening of a spring. Real-space physics postulated the speed of light to be a physical absolute, which nothing could transcend. But in less than four hours they and their ship were going to challenge that barrier at a velocity nearing three hundred thousand kilometres a second. Then something was going to have to give—ship and men, or physical absolute, and nothing in their experience could guide them as to what might follow. Brevis reflected curiously that while both men had dared to penetrate so far into the field of Tau physics they still had an inbred fear of transgressing the absolute of light speed.

       Occasionally he returned to the blister, but the Tau Gamma image held steady and inscrutable save to Driscoll’s eyes as he occasionally took reference readings from the pink transience to verify the computed course. The psychologist noted that the image was growing in intensity, and hardening in such a way that on entering the blister the image would snap into view rather than simply become apparent as a visual image would. Also its influence extended farther into the screen maze.

       The strength of the hallucination was now beginning to overpower the visual, so that the blister layout and Driscoll’s instruments were all assuming an apparent transparency through which diffused the pinkness of the surrounding image. Even Driscoll and himself were becoming translucent and losing definition under the influence of the Tau emanation. And, while the others were inwardly fearing the approach to the light barrier, Driscoll’s fear was more apparent in the blister, where the shaping and intensification of the image was a tangible portent of the unknown into which they were headed.

       “I don’t like this at all, Paul,” said Driscoll at last. “Signs are that this image is growing unstable as our velocity increases. I don’t know what it will break into, but it won’t be a simple mode jump.”

       “Is that bad?”

       “At this intensity the image is tolerable at the moment because it’s unchanging. But if it breaks to a living pattern it could become a nightmare in here. And if it breaks fast we might not even make it to the door.”

       “How so?”

       “It can flay the senses out of you in seconds if you catch a rogue run of images. And since it can enter and confuse the brain even when you’re unconscious, it can interfere even with the autonomic nervous system. Then it becomes a killer. I’d say it was a killer Tau storm that’s brewing now.”

       “Then let’s get out,” Brevis said.

       “You go. I’ve got to take a few more readings while I can still see the instruments.”

       “Then do me a favour,” Brevis said. “Leave the communicator open and report not less than once a minute. Miss a minute and I’ll be back here to get you out.”

       “Thanks, Eric. I’ll do that. You’ve just five minutes if you want to be in the control room when we hit the light barrier. I think this image will split wide about then, and it may be preferable if one of us is elsewhere than in the blister when that happens.”

 

A simple indication. Two blips on the face of an oscilloscope, crawling inexorably together. One blip indicating the speed of light, the other giving ship speed. The space intervening represented the amount by which the ship velocity lagged behind that of light. A narrowing difference. An approaching unknown.

       Two blips crawling together. Now two centimetres apart, now one, with the basic tenets of real-space physics stacked high against the odds of their meeting, and the ingenuity of man pushing fearfully in favour of their passing.

       The sweat stood broad on Porter’s brow. Grus’ fingers deftly laid mathematical expressions on the keyboard of a computer input. He too was near to breaking under the strain, but syphoned his nervous energy constantly into symbolic equations representing the event. The separation between the blips closed to a few millimetres, then to a hairsbreadth spacing which seemed to endure for an eternity. Then, just as it seemed that the absolute velocity of light was going to remain inviolate, the blips passed one another. And concurrently the men experienced an indefinable shiver which ran throughout their bodies as if every cell had undergone some transition yet still emerged whole and undamaged.

       Porter rapidly checked his instruments and confirmed that they had indeed passed the light barrier, and that their rate of acceleration was still increasing. The detectors told of a million kilometre light flare they had wakened in the emptiness of space, but this evidence, was purely metered information, and inside the ship human senses were still totally unable to appreciate the fantastic velocity of their passage.

       But Brevis had anticipated the sudden cessation of Driscoll’s voice over the intercom. Without pausing to share with the others the relief and triumph of the moment he rushed back through the corridors to the blister. As he passed through the screens he was aware, even before he could see it, that the image had broken. The kaleidoscope of lights that hit him as he reached the end of the maze shocked his senses, and he would have lost orientation had not his shoulder still been in contact with the lead slab of the screen.

       Driscoll was immediately in front of the entrance, invisible now against the strength of the hallucination, but presumably standing fascinated by the living diorama of the now overwhelming Tau image. When Brevis grasped his arm he woke as though from sleep, and allowed himself to be led through the maze like a blind man. Outside, Brevis inspected him closely.

       “Are you all right? How do you feel?”

       Driscoll bit his lip and smiled wanly. “As well as can be expected. I guess I stayed a little longer than I should.” His face was deathly white.

       Brevis nodded. “That’s a fair summary. I want you to go to your cabin, Pat, and rest for a while. I’ll give you a sedative that’ll put you to sleep for a few hours. And I don’t want you to go back into the blister again until you’ve checked with me. I knew a rogue Tau image was vicious, but I’d not expected it to have that sort of effect in so short a time.”

       Driscoll’s eyes searched the psychologist’s face, and he seemed about to say something when a sudden wave of nausea and dizziness caused him to sway and clutch at his head. Thereafter he leaned heavily on Brevis’ arm all the way to the cabin.

 

Though the light barrier had been passed, the tensions were still very much in evidence. They were now facing the great unknowns, a tiny, impudent, splint of metal and humanity fleeting at super-light speed across the analogue of interstellar space. The probes had previously achieved this condition also—but the few that had ever returned now formed a mind-twisting collection of physical paradoxes in the grim museum vaults of Tau Research. But there were no answers yet as to what had happened to the probes or why.

       Men and computer constantly scanned every available bit and digit of instrumental data, searching for some clue to the mystery. But both mechanisms and men failed to identify anything amiss with the project. All known functions were staying well within their designated parameters, and thirty times a second the computer completed its checks and returned a negative comment. Grus let the printout tape slip by him unnoticed. Its detail was irrelevant. Although the computer was satisfied, none of the men could confess to being free from the nagging apprehension that they had already penetrated past the point of no return. But whatever the factor which had been added or taken away, it was neither recordable nor encompassed by their systems of detection.

       Drawn by a certain fascination, Brevis returned once to the blister maze and cautiously sampled the now rampant image. It blazed in his head and formed such frightening confusion that he was forced to retire without gleaning anything of value from the experiment. As he was returning to the control room he found Sigmund Grus bending close to the floor in the corridor, examining something. He moved to pass, but the physicist motioned him back.

       “Careful, Eric! There is something here I don’t understand. See there—a tiny light shining.”

       Without Sigmund’s direction Brevis would not have noticed the phenomenon for himself, so minute and intangible did it appear. But following the line of the indicating finger he found the object, and paused in wonder. In the corridor, unsupported and apparently unaffected by the airstream from the ventilators, drifted a minute splint of light, like a luminous dust mote. It took him several seconds to realize that the object was in fact incredibly small and that it was visible mainly by virtue of its extreme brilliance. It was difficult to imagine how such a degree of radiation could be sustained by anything so lacking in size.

       “What is it?” Brevis asked at last.

       “It could be a projection of something from real-space into Tau—a sort of breakthrough of atomic condition.”

       “I thought that was impossible.”

       “It’s barely possible, even in theory. Projection requires an extreme degree of excitation on the part of the basic atom—a very extreme degree, I can assure you.”

       “How extreme?’

       “The excitation state involved in nuclear fusion, at least.” Grus appeared thoughtful. “But something tells me this isn’t a simple projection. This is something new. Such a thing should never exist, even as a projection. You couldn’t have a self-sustaining fusion reaction that small.”

       He produced a pencil and probed the splint carefully. It did not move, but seemed rather to penetrate the pencil and emerge unchanged. He examined the pencil in silence.

       “I don’t like this at all,” he said finally, holding the pencil up to the light. “Would you fetch Paul?”

       Porter came without comment. The top-line frown reflected the fear which was already clawing deep in his guts, and the new phenomenon could add no more or less to the burden of responsibility he was already carrying. Brevis watched him carefully for signs of hysteria, and was relieved to find none.

       When they reached the corridor Sigmund had extinguished the overhead fluorescent panels, and was observing his discovery against the background under the dim illumination of the tritium safety lamps. In this setting the splint burned inconceivably bright for its size, casting a clear glow on the bulkhead.

       “Don’t touch it,” Grus warned. “It could be dangerous. I want to try a test.”

       He went off to the laboratory and returned with a square of fine tungsten foil. He passed this several times through the point of light. It remained unmoving. Then he ran to the optical room and closed the door. A minute later he was back.

       “Holes right through,” he said. “I don’t think this can be a projection. Its heat is incredible but the holes it makes are so minute that they’re hardly capable of being resolved with our microscope. Nothing that small should possess that sort of energy. Paul, I want to do a spectrum analysis on this thing.”

       “I’ll help you,” Porter said. “But we’ll have to dismount the spectrograph and fetch it out here since we can’t pick that thing up.”

       “Can I assist?” Brevis asked.

       “Not much at the moment, Eric. We’ve some delicate work ahead of us, and its specialized. We’ll let you know our findings when we’re through.”

       Brevis nodded and returned to his cabin. He had the curious impression that both men already suspected and feared what their findings would be. He checked through his stocks of tranquillizers in the store-cupboard and wondered just how long such mental and intellectual strain could be offset by purely chemical means. At some point a psyche was going to refuse to be pacified by drugs, and when that point came somebody was going to snap. Driscoll was already showing signs of breaking up. And who next?

       It was about an hour later that Porter knocked on his door.

       “May we come in?”

       “Do.” Brevis pulled down the other bunk to form a seat and beckoned him in. Grus followed, still studying the long strips of photographic paper from his instrument. His hands were trembling.

       “We’ve found what it was, Eric.” Even at that point Porter was reluctant to put a name to his fear.

       “I think I already know,” said Brevis quietly. “It’s a star.”

       “You knew?”

       “I guessed about the same time that you did. But I was expecting it. You weren’t.”

       “But a star . . .” said Porter, and his voice was ragged. “It’s a spectral G-type sun, similar to Sol. It could measure perhaps a million miles across. And it’s out there in the corridor like a point of light so small you can hardly measure the holes it makes. Christ, Eric, if that’s a sun out there—what size does that make us?”

 

FOUR

 

Putting his empty glass unsteadily back on the table, Porter pushed the hair from his face.

       “I still don’t see how you could have anticipated this, Eric.”

       “Not exactly this, but I was prepared for something of this nature. I saw the Tau probe vessel which came back only twenty-two inches long. This is part of the same pattern. Somehow, Paul, entry into deep-Tau cuts things adrift not only from the universe but from the controlling physical constants of the universe. I’ve no idea how long the ship is now, but if you want to try the calculation, start by using light-years instead of metres.”

       “And yet you aren’t frightened silly at the prospect?”

       Brevis refilled the glasses from the bottle on the table.

       “No. So far the survival threats here are purely intellectual ones. It would take a well-trained mind to appreciate that we three, sitting here drinking whisky, regard ourselves as being close to death. And if asked what form of death, we none of us could even define it.”

       Porter watched his face carefully for a moment. “You’re dead right of course. We’ve come unstuck from the universe, certainly, but so far it’s panic not physics which is most likely to kill us. Sigmund, have you enough data to calculate our size from the dimensions of that star, assuming it’s a regular G-type dwarf?”

       “I’ll work on it,” said Grus. “But there’s a more urgent problem first. That star must have entered through the hull, and therefore left a puncture. I think our first concern must be the preservation of our atmosphere.”

       “If the holes it made in the hull are no greater than those it made in the foil, the air losses won’t be measurable.”

       “True. But that’s only a simple G-dwarf. What happens if we run up against a giant like Betelgeuse? That would make a hole we couldn’t afford to ignore. I suggest we try to navigate in a direction away from the island universes until we’ve some idea of what we’re up against.”

       “Good point,” said Porter. “I’m going up to the control room to see if we can get sufficient information from the instruments to give us a bearing on a relatively unpopulated region of space. I could use Pat’s help, Eric. Is he still sleeping?”

       Brevis glanced at his watch. “I gave him a sedative about four hous ago. He should be out of it by now. I’ll go and wake him.”

       “Get him to join me in Control. We’ve got instrumentation for detecting stellar objects in real space, but whether it can detect star systems the size of meteorites projecting into Tau is a rather different problem. Is it possible to use the blister?”

       Brevis shook his head. “That’s completely out of the question. The Tau-psychic interaction in there is so strong it would drive a man senseless in fifteen minutes, and kill him in thirty.”

       Porter nodded his acceptance of the fact and went out of the door. Brevis’ own intention of following was delayed by a sudden gesture from Grus towards the end of the room. Through the wall of the cabin another star had drifted, and they both paused in fascination as the tiny splint of light cleared the mirror of the table top by a centimetre and neared the whisky bottle standing in its path. Brevis moved to take the bottle out of the way, but Grus stopped him.

       “Wait, Eric. There’s something we need to know.”

       The splint touched the bottle and penetrated slightly into the glass. Then with a crash the bottle shattered, scattering liquor and glass on to the table and the floor. The star, apparently unaffected, continued its slow, amazing journey across the room.

       “Bad!” said Grus. “We none of us dare sleep with those things drifting through. At best they could be painful, at worst, lethal. Can you imagine waking with one of those entering your temple? Even walking into one could cause a pretty nasty injury.” He glanced around him. “And it’s only a matter of time before one of them cuts some wiring or hits something vital. And . . . Oh my God!”

       Brevis was caught by his sudden spasm of alarm.

       “My God!” said Grus again. “I’ve been worrying about the heat and visible spectra, but those things must be chucking out hard radiation as well. Not only could they be a fair biological hazard, but if one of them gets into the computer it’ll flip every solid-state device in the whole assembly. The whole control system will go haywire, to say nothing of the loss of the computer function. You’d best get Pat up to Control fast. I’ll try and get a radiation check on this one, but unless I miss my guess we’ve a death threat far more tangible than panic already with us.”

       Brevis tried to raise Driscoll on the intercom, but failed. Carefully avoiding the star in the corridor he ran to Driscoll’s cabin. It was empty. The sheets on the bed were still warm, but not too recently occupied. Swiftly he checked the few other likely places. They were similarly bare. Then he flipped the emergency communication button.

       “Paul! Sigmund! Is Pat with you somewhere?”

       “Not here,” said Grus.

       “Nor in Control.” Porter’s voice carried a note of alarm. “What’s the matter, Eric?”

       “I’ve an idea the damn idiot’s gone back into the blister. The image there is so ultra-real it’s almost addictive. I’ve noticed a similar tendency in myself. Once you’ve experienced it you can’t let it alone.”

       “Damn!” said Porter. “Have you tried him on the intercom?”

       “He must be hearing my voice now,” said Brevis, “but if he’s in the blister he won’t respond because the Tau image will represent the dominant reality. Pat, for God’s sake, if you can hear me, answer!”

       The set returned only silence and little electronic sounds gathered from various parts of the ship.

       “Then he’ll have to stay there until the course is re-set,” said Porter.

       “No. He could have been there ten or fifteen minutes already. Leave him exposed for as long again and we won’t need to fetch him out. Just paint R.I.P. on the blister door and pack his effects for his relatives. That’s a killer image in there. I’m going to try and help him.”

       Without waiting for Porter to reply, Brevis ran directly to the blister door. It was slightly open, though he knew it to have been closed the last time he had left. The telltales on the wall indicated that the screen maze inside had been altered or damaged. This in itself was sufficient to show that Driscoll had entered and therefore needed help.

       Before he could enter, Grus arrived. Porter was close behind. Porter summed up the situation with a quick glance, and turned to Brevis.

       “I can’t let you go in there, Eric. Pat’ll have to take what’s coming to him. I daren’t risk losing you too.”

       “And we daren’t risk losing Pat—not if we ever want to find our way home again. He may be unconscious, but I doubt if he’s dead yet. There’s still a chance of getting him out alive. Later there won’t be.”

       Porter came to a sudden decision. “Very well. But you go in with a rope around your waist. You’ll have five minutes, and then we’ll haul you out if necessary. And try not to fall down among the screens or you might get hurt on the way out.”

       “If you insist.” Brevis stood submissively while Grus fetched a rope from the store-room and fastened it round his waist. Porter caught him by the shoulder.

       “Five minutes, Eric—and good luck!”

       Brevis shouldered open the heavy door and entered. It was quite dark inside, and, as the telltales had indicated, the internal screens were disarranged. All he could see initially was a fuzz of diffused polychromatic light which crept around the disordered lines of the lead panels. Seeking orientation, he moved back to the wall and sought the light switch.

       As his fingers moved the toggle he was engulfed by a wave of vibrant, dancing, idiotic, multi-coloured patterns, which swarmed in front of him like a living kaleidoscope. The imagery trapped his senses in a mesmeric focus which almost robbed him of his power to react. Mercifully the toggle remained under his fingers and he snapped it off urgently, thankfully relaxing in the return of darkness.

       “Are you all right, Eric?” Porter’s voice sounded a hundred times farther than it should.

       “Just about,” said Brevis. “Deep-Tau emanation and A.C. lighting make a formidable combination. I couldn’t stand that for long. I’ll do the rest blind.”

       Slowly he found the screens and devised a path between them and across those which had fallen, scowling at the thought of the psychic paroxysm which had driven Driscoll to attack the heavy screening with such irrational violence. The edges of the lead sheets appeared fuzzed and burred with a polychrome haze which grew stronger as he entered through the maze and hinted at the violence and turbulence of the Tau-psychic effects rampant in the blister proper.

       He searched each area urgently with his hands, hoping that Driscoll had fallen between the screens and away from the awful aura ahead. But he knew in his heart that this would not be so, and he felt a wave of fear at the prospect of having to penetrate finally into the unshielded extravagances of the raw Tau influence.

       When he turned the last corner into the blister the wave of imagery and sensation tore down at him apparently from all sides, swamping his senses and leaving only the single core of his objective mind to guide him in his purpose.

       Dazed by light and form and colour, his eyes attempted to follow and analyse the geometrically untenable planes and images as he trod apparently through a macrocosm of chaos which only his iron resolution reminded him was the blister floor. His mind seized on the shattering images and attempted to rationalize them into meaningful terms and comprehend the semantic substance with which every line of light was seeded. Every now and again his imagination became caught in a snare of some intriguing speculation, and he had to wrench his mind free with almost physical effort, knowing the deadly penalty for indulgence.

       He could understand now the fatal attraction of the Tau images for Driscoll. The brain received the images direct, without the filtration and attenuation of the normal human senses. The mind was released from the mundane bonds of limited sensory experience, and could swing, undamped, in domains of previously unfathomable concepts, without the distractions and reflexes of the body.

       A savage jerk under the ribs brought his own wandering thoughts back to focus on his mission. He stumbled over Driscoll’s body on the floor, but fortunately did not fall. He could see nothing of the form he caught up to his shoulders, only the variegated colours of the quasi infinities which clawed at his mind with snags of intangible steel.

       Again the rope caught at his chest, this time insistently. He hesitated, having no means of gaining his bearings in the unchartable fantasies in which he was immersed. The rope had now become the sole link with another sort of reality, an invisible umbilical cord connecting him across the unknown to an isolated, dark womb of fear and apprehension which was the ship and its situation. He felt an irrational desire to slip the knot and not to return to the worry-shrouded oppression of shades with its precarious chance of re-birth.

       The third pull of the rope was decisive. Before he could re-arrange his burden so as to get his fingers to the knot he was dragged forcibly against the screens and through them, until, near the end of the ruined maze, darkness closed down again and the mental turbulence grew quiet. Hands seized him in the darkness and slipped the body from his back, then thrust him outward into a different kind of light—the cold, fluorescent harshness of reality. He fell into the corridor and remained there for many seconds, shaking the images from out of his head, until Porter came and helped him to his feet.

       “How do you feel, Eric?”

       “Grim. But I think it will pass.” He looked up and saw the door of the blister still part open. “But it’s not a risk I’d care to take again. Can you fix that hatch permanently closed?”

       “I’ll weld it shut,” promised Porter. He looked at Driscoll, now laid desperately unconscious in the gangway. “Not that it looks as if he’ll be interested in it for a while.”

       “I wasn’t thinking of him,” said Brevis. “I was thinking of myself.”

 

Outwardly, Porter’s evasive manoeuvre seemed to be a success. His instrumental questing finally located a direction in space where the stellar population was obviously less. Breaking the pre-set course co-ordinates, he manually directed the ship in this direction. Miraculously both astral bodies which had entered the hull drifted slowly out through the fabric again without detectable damage to the vessel. Then they waited. No further cosmic intruders penetrated into the ship, and finally they relaxed.

       This gave them the respite needed to consider their plight more logically. But internal tensions were creeping dangerously high. Brevis was more than anxious about the continuing stress and its inhibiting effect on the type of intellectual free-wheeling which the problem demanded.

       Grus was tending to concentrate his energies on routine tasks, as though trying to convince himself that he did not have time enough to grapple with the major problem. Driscoll was being maintained in a state of light sedation after his experiences in the blister, and was therefore intellectually inactive. Even Porter was having difficulty in bringing his mind to a position of logical attack.

       “The hell of it is,” said Porter, “you can’t even find a point from which to start solving a problem like this.”

       “You’re not thinking too clearly, Paul,” said Brevis. “You’re allowing yourself to be fazed by the size of the concepts instead of looking for fundamentals. I’m no physicist, but the problem appears to me to be one of congruency. We’ve lost physical congruence with our own universe. We’re no longer controlled by whatever factors control the size of things. Now, what factors do control the size of things, Paul? Why is anything the size it is, rather than a million times larger or smaller?”

       “A good question,” said Porter, “and way outside my field. I don’t pretend to know the answer. The size of a thing is always relative. I suppose the nearest thing to absolute units are the sizes of the atoms and molecules from which matter is constructed. Aggregates of matter generate and are acted upon by certain forces—molecular binding forces, gravitation, centrifugal forces and the like, which roughly determine the mass-range which that type of object normally achieves.

       “It’s the interaction of possible states of matter, and the forces generated by them and acting upon them, which appears to control the size of everything in the universe. You can’t have a molecule as large as a star or a star as small as a molecule because either would be unstable.”

       “Then what happened to place us outside this control?”

       “I don’t know. We were in a state of Tau-spin resonance when we accelerated through the speed of light. It’s beginning to look as though the Einsteinian mass-velocity relationship does apply in Tau, but in a peculiar way. Instead of the velocity being limited to that of light, we passed easily through the light barrier, but tore our own atoms free from the controlling influence of the universe instead. Effectively we’re a universe in our own right now—still self-integrated, but unconnected with any other universe. And Heaven alone knows what factor is controlling our absolute size relative to the universe from which we started.”

       “Are we still in Tau-space?”

       “The Rorsch generator is still running, but our molecular density is so low relative to the star stuff through which we’re passing that it’s doubtful if a true Tau state is being maintained.”

       “Can’t we just reverse the process and drop back through the light barrier?”

       “We’re trying,” said Porter, “but there’s no indication yet that it’s going to work. Since we cleared the star patch we’ve been winding down our speed—eighteen hours, and we still aren’t much above light velocity now. So far our size has done nothing but increase slightly more. I’d guess that once our atoms were torn from the universe they found some arbitrary relationship of their own which is independent of velocity.”

       “That’s a key factor,” said Brevis. “This arbitrary relationship—I’m not convinced it’s true. I suspect there’s still some relationship between our present size and the size we were when we started. I think there must be some connecting link. Can we check this at all?”

       “We can fling all our co-ordinates into the computer and see if we can spot a relationship. If there is a controlling principle it should show up as a function of something.”

       “Will you do that?” said Brevis. “If you can isolate the controlling factor it gives us a possible method of attack on the problem by attempting to reverse the issue.”

       “I’ll get Sigmund on it right away. If we spot anything I’ll let you know immediately.”

 

FIVE

 

In this, Brevis had at least achieved his object of getting Porter to apply himself to the task. Once a line of investigation had been initiated Porter could be relied upon to follow it to its logical conclusion. Even if the research proved futile, he had at least set up the pattern of attack. He was not therefore surprised when Porter’s next communication carried a note of enthusiasm.

       “Eric!” Porter was speaking from the computer room. “I think we’ve isolated the controlling factor. The computer has thrown up an interesting set of constants which give an extrapolation back to the time of our breaking the light barrier. The constants are independent of velocity or distance from point of origin, but they are related to elapsed time.”

       “How does this affect us?” Brevis asked.

       “Frankly it means the longer we stay in this state the larger we shall become. We’re like the proverbial exploding universe. Where stars can now float through the ship, soon it will be galaxies. Can you imagine . . .”

       “Shut up!” said Brevis sharply. “I’m trying to think. I don’t believe this is any accident, Paul. It’s rather what I suspected. Now think carefully. Is anything at all still tying us to the old universe? For instance, on what do we base our conception of measured time?”

       “All our instrumentation is related back to the master oscillator. That itself is synchronized with . . . Eric, you may just be on to something. Look, I’ve got some checking to do. I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”

       Brevis acknowledged the hastily broken connection with a raised eyebrow. His eyes automatically wandered to his precious drug cabinet. As an explorer of the human mind he had learnt the humility of the chemical modification of human outlook. Any mind-state could be conditioned for better or for worse by a few micrograms of the right substance in the bloodstream. He had drugs which could make his comrades accept their present situation with joy or equanimity, but nothing in any phial or bottle which could fire the spark of genius they needed to resolve the problem.

       His reverie was interrupted by Porter’s insistent buzz on the intercom.

       “Eric, I’ve got a lead. Don’t ask me how, but we’re still receiving timing pulses from the Tau Research transmitters. A ten kilocycles square wave. Is this the sort of thing you were looking for?”

       “It could well be. What do we do with it?”

       “Use it to correct our own master oscillator. In effect we’re using it as a time reference for damn nigh every time constant on the ship—clocks, transmitter, instruments, computer—the lot. The master oscillator crystal is pulling like hell, but it’s still synchronized with the reference signal.”

       “So all our time referents are still tied to the old universe?”

       “Effectively, yes. What do you suggest we do?”

       “Turn the receivers off. Kill the signal.”

       “First let’s consider what that’s going to achieve. If the time constant has any bearing on the size of this ship, what happens if we cut adrift from it? We will lose our very last point of congruence with the universe. We’re already adrift in the three physical dimensions. If we lose congruence with time also, our chances of ever getting back would appear to be remarkably slight.”

       “Something’s controlling our size,” said Brevis. “And the computer’s proved it’s no casual relationship. But that controlling factor has caused us to become about four light years longer than we started out. I would guess that somehow our size is attempting to compensate for an untenable time constant to which we are tied regardless of velocity. As I see it, our only hope is to break every possible link so that our size determinator is a purely arbitrary factor. Then we have a chance to do some research into instituting our own control.”

       “I think it’s a hell of a risk, Eric. Better the devil we know than the one we don’t.”

       “How much do we know about this devil called time Paul?”

       Porter considered this in silence. “Very well! I’m turning the receivers off now. But I wish to hell I knew what you had in mind. I know there’s something buzzing in that brain of yours.”

       “Perhaps. I’m wondering whether to take a gamble, based on something I saw in the vaults of Tau Research. When you can show that our size determinator is arbitrary I’d like to set up an experiment which I think might work. I think it stands a chance because I suspect that it was tried by somebody once before. Somebody who finished up one and a quarter inches tall.”

       There was silence for a long second. “At this stage, Eric, any idea is better than none. How do we set about it?”

       “I need to tidy up a few details first. So I’ll give you the proposition in its final form. And Paul . . . !”

       “Yes?”

       “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep this to yourself for a while. You understand why.”

       “Sure, Eric. The whole situation’s a psychological bomb.”

       “Check! Get those receivers off and have Sigmund watch the computer to see if the linking factor is broken. When you’re sure the time correlation has gone let me know—but quietly. Hullo, Paul, are you still there?”

       “Sorry. I was just thinking. I wonder what it’s like to be one and a quarter inches tall?”

 

As he cut the connection Brevis noted that his own hands were shaking. The scheme which had formed in his mind in the course of the conversation was one born of desperation, and would involve the type of risk that only desperation could justify. That the idea had sprung from his own mind was a fascinating insight into the pressure of the fear which lay in his own subconscious. And, despite his words, it was not something he could discuss with either Porter or Grus. In fact, there was only one other person aboard likely to be able to follow his reasoning and appreciate the nature of the experiment.

       Slowly his considerations formed into a practical plan of action. Some of the steps he was loath to take, but again the sense of desperation forced the conclusion that there was no other course. He knew now what drugs he could use and to what purpose.

       Then he reached the point of decision, and moved swiftly. From the automatic kitchen he removed the coffee dispenser and doctored the first two charges of coffee concentrate. From the surgery he took a couple of pre-sterilized hypodermic syringes and two ampoules, which he concealed carefully in his pocket. And all the while he was watching the clock, knowing the shipboard habit pattern with such certainty that he could afford to let affairs take their own course up to a point where his active intervention was necessary.

       The only new factor to be added was Porter on the intercom, his voice ragged and near hysteria.

       “Eric, the time link factor’s been broken. But we should never have switched off the receivers.”

       “Why, what the devil’s happened?”

       “It’s the stars, Eric. My God, what have we done?”

       “What’s the matter with the stars?”

       “I thought the instruments were broken, but it isn’t that. I’ve checked. But the stars have all gone out.”

 

Brevis verbally strove to quell the rising panic, playing for time. To ensure that the coffee reached its intended destination he collected it himself and took it to Grus and Porter, and stood for a moment while they tried to coax the computer to handle mathematical concepts of infinity for which no programmes would ever be available. The unmistakable smell of fear was heavy in the air. Brevis estimated that the knockout drug in the coffee would be effective in about five minutes, and was somewhat apprehensive when Porter decided to consult the micro-reader in his own cabin just before this time. He followed Porter discreetly, to be on hand in case he should fall on the stairs. But Porter continued safely almost to the cabin before he fell unconscious in the corridor.

       Brevis caught the fallen figure under the armpits and dragged it in to the bunk. Baring an arm, he prepared a hypodermic syringe and made an injection. Then he stopped and looked about him. The ship seemed curiously still. Only the whispered rustle of the automatics and the slight sound of the air conditioning system broke the silence. There was no drive operating, not even for routine attitude or spin correction. Even the power hum had fallen to an inaudible level, and the Rorsch generator, working in such tenuity, had long since ceased to voice its characteristic harmonics. In these conditions he imagined he could hear the molecules in the walls around him creaking as they strained to find some controlling principle which would set their absolute as well as their relative size.

       He went out into the corridor and then back up to the computer room looking for Sigmund Grus. The physicist was already asleep, his head resting on the console. Brevis moved him to the floor and gave him an injection as he had done with Porter. Then, satisfied, he left Grus at rest, and headed for Driscoll’s cabin.

       Driscoll woke up at his entry and propped himself sleepily up in the bunk, an unspoken question on his lips. Brevis seized his wrist and checked his pulse impatiently. Then nodded.

       “Get up! We’ve got work to do.”

       Driscoll scowled at the abruptness of the address, but complied nevertheless, swinging into his working jeans, all the time his deep eyes trying to wrest information from Brevis’ impatient face.

       “Now what? What’s going on?” Even waking from sleep Driscoll took it as axiomatic that something unusual was in progress.

       “We’re going into the blister. Paul’s welded the door shut, so get a cutting torch and join me there.”

       “But Paul’ll never . . .”

       “Paul can’t stop us. Nor Sigmund. I’ve got them both under sedation. Now I’ve got some work to do in the blister and I need your help. What’s the matter—don’t you dare?”

       “You know how much I’d dare to get back in there.” Driscoll’s intelligence shone through the perspiration on his brow. “But God, Brevis, I hope you know what you’re doing! Was it you who got me out?”

       “Yes. That’s how I know how much of it I can stand and how much you can stand. It should have killed you, but it didn’t.”

       “After a while you learn to come to terms with it. The effect of Tau imagery is essentially akin to a drug experience. When it’s as strong as we found it in the blister it can combine mescalin fantasy with opiate addiction. And there’s a limit to what you can take and still retain your own volition. But you can prolong your tolerance by repeated exposure.”

       “This time,” said Brevis, “there’ll be no question of even trying to retain your own volition. We may have to go well beyond that point. The best we can hope for is that one of us can retain sufficient objectivity to complete the job.”

       “What job?”

       “Getting the ship back into congruence with the universe from which it started.”

       Driscoll watched him narrowly for a moment or two. “I know you’re not mad, Brevis,” he said, “so you must have some idea behind what you’re saying.”

       “It’s more of a hunch than an idea. In the vaults of Tau Research I saw a probe vessel twenty-two inches long with a pilot to match. What intrigued me was not so much that he finished up at such a size, but why he happened to finish up at that particular size. I wonder now if I’m beginning to see an answer.”

       “Go on.”

       “My theory is this. His probe vessel, like ourselves, probably broke dimensional congruity with the universe due to some Tau phenomenon when passing through the light barrier. And like ourselves, by accident or design, he established that his size determinator was an arbitrary factor.”

       “Is ours?”

       “It is now. We were apparently maintaining time congruency with the universe due to our dependence on Tau Research timing pulses. This link we’ve now broken. So we should have access to the same sort of control which I think the probe pilot used to correct the size of his ship.”

       “Which is what?”

       “Imagination. Tau-psychic interaction is something we can prove to exist even though we don’t yet understand it. The Tau hallucinations in the blister are part of it. An area of the brain, apparently located near the so-called pineal eye, responds directly to unshielded Tau influence, and there is evidence that certain aspects of Tau are mutually responsive to strong psychic states. I suggest that having realized the size determinator of his probe was arbitrary, the pilot went into the blister and attempted to mentally correct the size of his ship by reference to the Tau image. He literally thought his way back into near congruence. Unfortunately he overshot the mark, but when you consider through how many orders of magnitude he probably descended, it was a feat of genius.”

       “My God, Brevis!” Driscoll was standing now, his eyes alight with comprehension. “I was in Control when that probe came in. You couldn’t have known this, but the pilot was in the blister when it arrived. I got him out with a spatula and my thumb. I’ve had nightmares about it ever since.”

       “I guessed as much. But are you willing to attempt the same thing?”

       “Of course. We don’t have anything to lose, after all. And if it worked for him it should work for me. But I’m not too certain about you. After certain minimal exposure to Tau hallucination one tends to become . . . ‘wedded’, as we pilots say. But the honeymoon period is a pretty harrowing affair. I suggest you stay outside the blister and leave the manipulation to me.”

       “I would, but for one thing,” Brevis said. “When you’re pitting your own psyche against the truly infinite it takes a rare degree of dissociation to establish your own status accurately. The probe pilot underestimated himself with disastrous results. You’re an outstanding introvert. Any error in your judgment will necessitate the use of a microscope to extricate us from this ship. Conversely, I have insufficient experience of Tau imagery to drop us through even one order of magnitude. But I do have enough training in psychological balance to correct us to approximately the right endpoint. As a composite we have a chance of bringing the size of the ship to a point where Paul and Sigmund may usefully survive.”

       Driscoll accepted the point without comment. “When do we start?”

       “The sooner the better. The others will be out for about three hours, and the less imaginations we have working at once the more likely we are to succeed.”

       “Is that why you put them out?”

       “I despaired of ever trying to convince them of the scheme which you have accepted almost without hesitation. That’s why I approached you alone. I also put them out as a humane precaution which I cannot extend to either of us.”

       “Which is?”

       “At our present size we could include a whole galaxy in the ship and never notice it. But when we start to descend through a few orders of magnitude you can imagine our predicament if we happen to include within the ship’s structure even one solitary expanding star.”

 

SIX

 

Seeing his unfamiliarity with the tool, Driscoll took the cutting torch away from him and cut deeply into the metal, causing a shower of burning metal droplets to cascade to the floor. Then he levered the still white-hot metal open with a bar, and forced the door back with his foot. But despite his exertions, the sweat that beaded his brow was of emotional rather than physical origin. He stood aside for Brevis to enter.

       After their last desperate emergence very few of the screens remained standing, and the extremities of the unshielded Tau emanation seemed to burn off every angle and projection with an intensity which was almost audible. Brevis did not need to enter far to know that the savagery of the raw Tau influence was considerably greater than it had been even when he had almost succumbed while getting Driscoll out. Both his hope and his determination drained as the force of the situation hit him. Driscoll, coming up behind him, stopped abruptly, appalled at the intensity of the effect.

       “Jesus! That will eat us alive. We could never function in there.”

       “You don’t think we could stand it?”

       “We might stay conscious, but it wouldn’t be possible to think. It would be almost a complete mental wipeout with that degree of activity.”

       “Let’s get outside again,” Brevis said, “and see if we can find another angle on this.”

       Back in the corridor they closed the damaged door and leaned against it, thankful for the respite.

       “We’ve not much time, Eric. The level’s rising all the while. Whatever we decide will have to be done soon. If it gets much stronger it’ll strip us senseless before we can get through the screens.”

       “Can you think of anything at all which might give us a lead?”

       “Given some sort of focal point or target on which to concentrate, it might just be possible to remain objective. But you’d never handle abstractions against that level of interference.”

       “Tell me something,” said Brevis. “When I went into the blister to get you out, I put on the light at the door side of the screens. There was some Tau emanation leaking past the screens, and the interaction nearly blacked me out. Is this usual?”

       “No.” Driscoll’s eyes were shrewd with their dark intelligence. “It isn’t usual, but it happens sometimes. Occasionally in terrestrial Tau work the ship breaks from real time into the Tau temporal analogue. Under Tau emanation in a blister the light attempts to make the real-to-analogue transition and you get the same impression twice—once visually and once via the Tau hallucination. But the two signals are out of phase and set up a ringing pattern in the brain.”

       “I see,” said Brevis. “That accounts for the patterning of the image.”

       “Probably. But it has its uses. The ringing sets up something similar to a mental moire fringe interference pattern from which an experienced man can read the time differential with almost micrometer accuracy. Using a narrow-band light source with controllable illumination, it makes a useful research tool.”

       “Have we got such a source?”

       “We’ve got a mono-isotope krypton 86 discharge lamp in the blister. That’s about the best available. With it you could detect an analogue-to-real time displacement of less than two milliseconds. Does that help?”

       “It just might,” Brevis said, “if you could use the lamp as your focal point and concentrate on correcting only the time differential.”

       “How would that help?”

       “Since we broke the link with the Tau Research timing pulses, the ship analogue time has adapted itself to fit the same controlling constant as ship size.”

       “Are you sure of that?”

       “Porter told me the stars had all gone out. This suggests there has been a time shift from real to analogue time. Our time scale is now so vast that normal light frequencies just don’t register with us. It’s too much of a coincidence that the stars disappeared just after the receivers were turned off. I surmise that if we can get one dimension back into congruity, the others will follow. After all, they’re all now tied to the same controlling constant. Alter one dimension and the others must modify themselves to balance the equation.”

       Driscoll pulled his lip. “The whole theory’s based on far too many assumptions.”

       “We don’t have time to re-examine the data. Unless you’ve anything better to offer I suggest we go back in there and try it.”

       “You’re right, of course. At this stage even a bad theory is better than none. And if we’re going to die anyway, I know where I’d prefer to be.”

 

Driscoll opened the door and walked towards the blister. Brevis followed, hiding his face in the shadow of Driscoll’s fading silhouette—a shadow made surrealistic by the polychromatic fuzz which made nonsense of the outline. The crackling lure of the bright imagery seized his mind and drained his volition. He followed like an automaton, with his eyes fixed on a narrowing area of darkness which was the small of Driscoll’s back. And in his mind there nestled an even smaller and more rapidly reducing area of objectivity.

       Driscoll was in the blister now. Forcing his hands to find and operate familiar instruments now entirely invisible because of the strength of the hallucination.

       “Lamp on,” Driscoll said. “It’ll take a few minutes to warm. I’m sitting right in front of it. Make it easy on yourself. Go outside and wait.”

       “I’m staying,” Brevis said. Unable to orientate himself with respect to the now unseeable blister layout, he sat down on the floor. At rest, the impressions overwhelmed him. The Tau images, suffering no attenuation through the limiting filters of the body, assumed an exquisite fidelity and “edge” which he found both intolerable and irresistible at the same instant.

       There was no way now to shut out the startling excitations, nor any way to keep his personality contained. The Tau-psychic interaction continued through to fusion point, and its effect was one of mental dispersion, as though his consciousness was being distributed homogeneously into the surrounding phenomena. His mind and the Tau-space imagery momentarily seemed fused into one.

       It was later that something left of himself tired of being alone and infinite, and tripped his attention to Driscoll’s disembodied voice rambling in the midst of chaos. Only one phrase was sufficiently articulate to be understood—but that was sufficient to shock his mind back into narrower awareness.

       “Brevis . . . stop fighting me. Is that what you want . . . infinity?”

       In that instant of revelation Brevis forced his mind to withdraw from the fantastic rapport, and forced his muscles to carry him to his knees. As he did so a new form of image forced itself into his head—great sliding bands of alternate light and darkness, slipping, twisting, moving always downwards. Then he knew that his eyes had come within the range of the krypton lamp. This was the moire fringe effect, though what was visual and what was hallucinatory he was unable to decide.

       But he was conscious that Driscoll was somehow forcing the bands downwards across the field of view, seeking a smaller pattern, a smaller differential between their time and the real time of the universe. The flickering bands cascaded to a blur of grey, then slowed as Driscoll paused for a closer examination of phase, angle and magnitude.

       Brevis relaxed, and in doing so he lost the image of the moire fringe. The turbulent Tau image crowded over him again, slipping away on all sides in a torrential series of changing modes and characters breathlessly unlike anything he had previously experienced in Tau. Unable to regain his vision of the fringe, he attempted to remain a passive observer as the drunken kaleidoscope of subjective impression veered down an ever-narrowing funnel of restricted effect.

       The thought formed hazily in his head at first, and then with a clear and rising panic, that Driscoll had lost control. The descent seemed too far and too fast, and they were gaining an impetus which it appeared impossible to halt. From the infinitely large, Driscoll’s own introspection was threatening to drive them into the infinitely small, and they stood the risk of becoming voyagers in some untenable sub-nuclear domain.

       Brevis attempted to extend his mind into correlation with the now fleeting image. But the relative velocity between the phenomenon and the speed of his own thought processes defied the contact and threw him back with a headful of sparks. And his panic grew to a certainty as the velocity of the descent increased still further as judged by the transience of the parade of imagery.

       Once again he attempted to enter the battle, and this time his mind caught and held, but with a mental wrench that almost stripped him of consciousness. Then he was back again, fighting to re-form the patterns of Tau image with which he had become acquainted through exposure to more normal states of Tau.

       Then suddenly stasis, quietude, rest; a synchronous locking. He caught at the image and held it, and the whole scene stabilized in the rose-pink panorama of the Tau Gamma mode illusion. It seemed they had arrived.

 

It took him many minutes to collect his senses and to take stock of the situation. The intensity of the Gamma image was low, and the krypton lamp, now itself visible, provided sufficient illumination to draw out other real details against the pink hallucination. Stumbling to his feet Brevis located the switch for the blister’s internal lighting. Immediately the normal details of the room became apparent and the pinkness shrank back to a mere ghost of an illusion.

       Driscoll had slipped from the chair in front of the lamp and was now prostrate on the floor. Relying now on his eyes, Brevis sought a path through the disordered screens and dragged Driscoll out to the corridor. A swift examination suggested he was not dead but merely in a state of shock. Despite the urgency which the treatment of Driscoll seemed to merit, Brevis felt impelled to visit both Porter and Grus on his way to collect his emergency case. Both were still sleeping, but stirring and shortly due to wake.

       It was only when he reached his cabin that his experience in the blister caught up with him. As he opened the door a brief confrontation of his own face in the mirror filled him with confused amazement. In attempting to correlate the death-white idiotic features which he saw with those of his normal image, the wonder and the horror caught up with him. He had a vague impression of falling as delayed shock drove the resistance from his body and tipped him into a pit of unconsciousness.

       When he finally awoke, Porter was standing at his side.

       “How do you feel now, Eric?”

       “Weak,” said Brevis.

       Porter nodded. “It certainly took it out of you. But you’ll be pleased to know that whatever you did was successful.”

       “You mean we’ve made it?” Brevis sat up. “We got back into congruence?”

       “As near as we can tell. When Sigmund and I came round we found we were in a simple Gamma mode. We took the chance and dropped the ship out of Tau into real space. There we found everything according to the catalogue. We’ve been taking spectroscope and radio-telescope fixes on the identifiable primaries and radio-sources, and we’ve even managed to establish our position.”

       “How did Pat make out?”

       “Fine. He recovered a lot quicker than you. He’s back in the blister right now doing triangulation fixes for Sigmund, and feeling rather chipper about the whole thing. He estimates we can make the return trip without losing congruence as long as we don’t tie our time constant to a fixed point of reference.”

       “With that I agree,” said Brevis. “Our dimensional dilemma was a simple example of Tau-psychic interaction. The radio-pulses controlled our instruments and our clocks. From these we took our consciousness of time. It wasn’t a condition of time appropriate to the separate universe we had become at that velocity, but we fondly imagined that time, at least, was real.

       “It was our acceptance of that measured time which fixed it as a time constant as far as Tau-space was concerned. All the other physical dimensions then had to adapt in order to maintain the right mass-time relationship. I think for that we can steal Diepenstrom’s term of an imagination trap—because that’s precisely what it was. Next trip just let the time constant, and thus our time consciousness, drift with the ship. By the way, how far did we travel?”

       “When you feel up to it, Eric, come down to Control and see the scanners. It’s rather an impressive sight. The Milky Way, seen from completely beyond its boundaries, is a rather frightening and a rather nostalgic thing to see.”

 

<<CONTENTS>>

 

* * * *

 

APPLE

 

John Baxter

 

 

Scientists consider that Man’s size is between the macrocosm and the microcosm. John Baxter takes an apple and an insect out of context with their normal size to produce a horribly fascinating story of what might happen if the balance of Nature is disturbed.

 

* * * *

 

The apple was red, smooth, coldly perfect. One patch, almost obscured by the shadow it cast in the soft light, was green, a blemish that served only to show up the flawless purity of the remaining colour. It lay on its side, letting light spill into the recesses of its hollow, from which the stalk jutted inconclusively, terminating in a small leaf, greenly transparent.

 

Low down, near the ground, a crater had been gouged out, exposing the white flesh. The hollow was an irregular one and already the air had turned most of the higher points to a rusty brown. Much of the rest was creamy with incipient decay.

 

A town lay just under this crater, half its three hundred houses in morning sunlight, the others obscured by the dark terminator of the apple’s vast shadow.

 

To Billings, standing three miles away, it looked as if the apple itself were getting ready to snap up the rabble of houses over which it hovered, but when he looked up at the mass of the fruit looming solid and red in the strengthening light, its colour accentuated by the climbing sun, the sensation passed. It was as solid and immovable as the others. Faced finally with the thing he had travelled fifty miles to find, he dropped the long case of tools, hitched up his leather apron and reflectively massaged away some of the aches that had plagued him this last half day of hill climbing.

 

The valley before him, Billings thought, looked like a mouth, the apple lying on a broad and smooth tongue of brown earth surrounded on three sides by a gap-toothed mountain range that grinned obscenely at him. His climb had brought him out of the throat, a narrow gully of dry earth rippled with erosion scars like a tumbled cloth. Standing now at the root of the tongue, he luxuriously scratched away a recalcitrant colony of itches on his neck, picked up once again the clanking bag of tools and moved reluctantly on.

 

Going down the slope was work almost as hard as his earlier climb. The ground was metal-hard, bleached by the rain to a sterile and jagged mass from which grains of mica and quartz glinted back the yellow sunlight. All atomic grounds had the same look; riven, like scraps of another world. No man, and especially not one of his trade, had to have one pointed out to him. The dead earth and the weird giant fruits it spawned were indication enough; just two of the jokes war had played on the human race. Like the Moths.

 

Head down, his eyes on the fissured ground, Billings tramped the long road to the town, thinking only of sitting down, loosening his tight apron and belt, discussing his fee with the town Boss. Mild pleasures, but the only one most Moth Killers knew. Staining the air he could smell the rotting juice of the apple, sweet and diseased, matching the bilious glow of the sun. He ignored the stink and soon it faded from his sensations.

 

He placed the Boss as soon as he saw him, then forgot his existence. He was young, ugly, tough—his town was the same. A ragged puddle of gimcrack shacks latticed with crooked muddy streets, its weak hold on reality was accentuated by the bulk of the apple looming above it, needing only a touch to roll down on it like a red moon, crushing the miners and their houses into the earth. But nobody cared. Women stood gossiping at their doors while children paddled around in the mudholes. There was an endless traffic of handcarts along the street carrying sawn slabs of apple flesh to the presses or returning empty to pick up a fresh load. As the two men, Boss and Moth Killer, went by, the people bent their heads and said nothing.

 

Close to the mine, traffic was thicker and more hurried, the miners’ movements more antlike than ever. The apple loomed over them, cutting off the light, and in the mire of mud and juice that surrounded the entrance to the mine, the men moved like naked spectres, shiny with the apple’s blood.

 

A path had been made across the mud with slabs of pressed-out apple flesh, like porous brown wood. The Boss went first, Billings following. As they walked across the narrow track, men looked up at them, then stepped uncomplainingly off until they had passed. Billings watched the men’s legs sinking to the knees in the brown bog but felt no sympathy for them. He had been used to such things when he was a miner.

 

Now that he was more, it was his right to have privileges. He had worked for them.

 

The path’s end was well inside the cavity. It yawned like a vast and jagged pit above them. By the light of the oil lamps wedged into the walls, Billings could see the galleried mine rising three hundred feet above him, its face dotted with men. Their echoing voices peopled the dark air with ghostly curses and prayers, underscored and occasionally blotted out altogether by the trickling splash of juice from the cuts they made. An endless drizzle of the sticky sweet liquid fell to the floor of the mine, making their leather clothing glossy and stiff. Drops of the juice trickled off their aprons and fell into the swamp that surrounded them. The air was thick with the smell of decay.

 

Billings dropped his tool case, unlaced the opening and took out the contents item by item, laying them out in a neat row on the ground. His two blades, something like the billhooks used by the miners, were differently weighted so that the flat, almost square blade at the end of the four-foot handle could bite deeper and stay in longer, its curved talon hanging on to flesh and carapace even when its wielder was unable to strike again. After this there were leather gauntlets and greaves, barbed pitons, a fat coil of rope and spiked boots. It had been some months since Billings had used the boots and greaves, but they had stayed supple inside the bag. He pulled them on, laced them carefully and picked up the rest of the equipment.

 

“The entrance is up top,” the Boss said.

 

Billings looked up. There was less activity in the darkness, and he knew why. Word had spread that he was a Killer. He could feel them watching him, hoping—as he had hoped when he was a miner—to see some slip, a fault in his skill. He visualised how it must look to the men hanging in their harness up against the top faces in the dark, their bodies tacky with juice, hands welded to their knives by a congealing glaze of the stuff. In their eyes, used to darkness and yellow light, he would seem a dim and distorted figure, hardly more than an upturned face against the brown of the muddy floor.

 

He moved quickly and without warning the Boss, so that the man jumped visibly when Billings took his knife from his quiver and, with one neat wrist movement, sliced a horizontal gash in the main face. The flesh was brown, rotten, almost dried out, but another cut showed white. He cut again, severing the overhang so that the firm foothold was exposed from above and shelved beneath by the larger mass of rotted flesh. His right leg came up and the foot wedged deep into the notch while his arm swung again higher up, cutting a further foothold. His gauntleted left hand grabbed at the rough and crumbling surface of the main face, steadying his body for the movements of his blade.

 

The climb was dangerous, depending on a continued ascent for safety. His hand would steady him for only a few seconds before the rotten flesh collapsed under his touch, and the cleated soles of his boots would hold in a cut for only a moment before sliding out. There was no time for him to see where he was going nor concern himself with the face above him. He had estimated where the ledge was that he must arrive at, and also the best route to approach it. Now he had to depend on his inborn skill. Spidering upwards, his hands grasped, his blade swung, his feet bit and pistoned him up the cliff. His mind was blank—until, after a long moment of doubt, his blade cut air, his fingers grabbed a firm new-sliced edge, and he hauled himself up on to the main upper terrace. As he stood panting on the edge, he heard the miners around and above him muttering, sensed their admiration and was content.

 

The Boss took another minute to reach the terrace along the roped gallery that zigzagged up the main face. Billings waited without comment, cleaning his blade and scraping the accumulated pulp from between the spikes of his boots. When the Boss arrived he recognised resentment in the man’s stiff face but said nothing.

 

“Further up,” the Boss said shortly.

 

They moved along the terrace until it petered out in a dark hollow so small that they had to stoop. A miner brought down a lamp and the Boss took it, holding the light up. In the glow Billings saw the beginning of a tunnel, the ragged edges of transparent, slightly green material that lined it, and smelled the dry and musty scent he had expected.

 

“It’s an old one,” he said. “Three days maybe.”

 

He pulled at the tattered edge of the tunnel lining and shredded a piece of it in his fingers.

 

“Maybe four. It’s dried out a lot.”

 

“How far in will...?”

 

“I wouldn’t know.”

 

The boss held the lamp further towards the tunnel, letting fingers of light probe the darkness. There was nothing to be seen but the smooth-sided circular hole plunging into the heart.

 

“How long will it take?”

 

Billings hefted his knives on to his back and took the lamp.

 

“As long as it takes,” he said shortly and walked down into the darkness.

 

The Boss looked after him for a moment, then turned to stare at the silent miners hanging in their harness across the face of the crater. Their burning eyes were brighter than the lamps by which they worked. He moved quickly down the gallery without saying anything.

 

* * * *

 

Inside the tunnel it was warm and dark. Billings trimmed the lamp and moved slowly forward, listening. Air moved softly around him, light glinted on the walls.

 

He remembered his father who had died in a tunnel very like this.

 

The town where he was born was an apple town. The fruit was an ancient wrinkled mountain still anchored to the earth by a thin bough tufted with leaves, though the bough was long since empty of sap and the leaves were parasols that rustled like sails in the stirring winds of autumn. But the flesh inside was still firm and men were not afraid to cut long galleries through the desiccated exterior where the flesh was juiceless (cells like dust-filled rooms repeated in endless transparency) to reach the sweet white heart.

 

They had found his father in one of those galleries, a long excavation that intersected the tunnel of a Moth. The body was wadded up into the gallery’s end, a boneless mass of flesh frosted with the drying web-stuff of the insect’s cocoon. ...

 

Billings blinked back the image and drew a deep breath. The tunnel was empty around him, and for a few dozen yards in each direction he could see it stretching emptily into the shadows. Lifting the lamp he looked at the walls and saw his face reflected back from the depths of the transparent lining, a long gaunt impassive face that might have been his or his father’s, or that of a ghost haunting the vast mountain of the apple, the spirit of a man lost in the empty halls of the centre, as Billings was lost—as they were all lost.

 

The deeper he penetrated the less he was afraid. The worst fear was of failing, but when there were no other men around him this fear disappeared. It belonged to ordinary people. The men who hunted Moths were different. They had an understanding with the universe, a heightened sensitivity to the world off which other men merely scavenged. The thick white massy bulk of the apple was a place with its own rules in which Billings was comfortable, at home. He recognised the risks, but they were risks of the apple and of nature, not of men. He faced death, but it was nature’s death, not man’s.

 

Thick and white the apple bulked around him. Billings could hear it in motion on all sides. Tides surged through its oceanic cells, membranes quivered with a motion as palpable as that of a heart. Above, below, on all sides, he sensed the white flesh sleeping in darkness, perfect, sweet, waiting. He moved in the apple like a god, feeling other gods, his father and his father’s father, waiting in the shadows for him, resting just beyond the green tunnel wall. Layers of civilisation began to slough from him like shed skins and, half dreaming, he listened for the expected voice.

 

His foot slipped momentarily before the cleats caught again and he realised the tunnel was shelving slightly. At the same time his nose caught a different scent, an edge in the mustiness of the gallery, a suggestion of putrefaction. He unslung his knife. The tunnel was reaching its end, dipping down to intersect the vulnerable heart. His feet slipped more often and he had to cut steps in the floor to hold him from sliding forwards. The lamp showed him no ending to the tunnel but an area ahead of him that he could not penetrate with light. Slicing fresh footholds every few feet he slithered forwards. The tunnel ended—and he looked down into a deep chamber whose walls, glossy and transparent, reflecting his own elongated image, tapered some twenty feet below him to a point in which the globular brown shape of a seed was wedged. He had reached the centre.

 

From now on the real business of his task began. Sitting on the lip of the tunnel, his legs dangling over the edge, he methodically checked his equipment. Then he looked down. The walls were mirror smooth and he could tell from their sheen that they remained slippery even though the seed chamber had been pierced. Wedging a piton into the tunnel wall he threaded his rope through its eye, tossed the rest of the roll out into space and climbed down.

 

There was no movement or sound, so he could assume his presence was still undiscovered. And when, behind the seed, he found the unguarded doorway to the inner chamber, he knew he could have surprise on his side. Pausing only for a glance back to make sure his rope remained fastened to the tunnel entrance, he dropped quickly into the main seed space.

 

Seeds hung like tightly cocooned beetles above him, their smooth backs turned out, their unseen claws clutching the central axis of the apple that gave Billings his only indication of the direction in which he was moving. It lay ten degrees off the horizontal, making the main seed chamber slope slightly upwards. The floor was slippery and being forced to fight uphill was some disadvantage but he depended a great deal on surprise. If he could catch the Moth sleeping or perhaps somnolent, beginning a cocoon—it was their breeding time now and most of them were sleepy and slow—then his job would be easy. He moved forward, keeping the brown kernels on his right, watching the part of the chamber he could see under the rows of seeds for any movement. Each step made an infinitesimal but noticeable sound, a slight creak, as if he walked on transparent leather.

 

The chamber was quiet, as silent as if it were the centre of the earth. Billings reached the upper end of the space, unslung his knife, and half turned.

 

A face looked back at him from the chamber.

 

In the far wall a spot of opacity had appeared in the transparency. The skin was unbroken but a window had been cleared as a new tunnel reached the central core. It widened quickly. A low-held head butted the membrane, lifted to bite through it—and looked at him. He glimpsed for a terrible moment the waving furred antennae, the brow, eyes and mouth of a fearsome face; wide eyes, sharp cornered; high cheek bones; a wide and scarlet mouth. Female, young ... a talon split the skin and from the tunnel, newborn, the magnificent insect erupted into the silent space.

 

Backed against the wall, Billings watched the Moth, waiting for its move. The insect was patient, perhaps tired. She stayed near the new tunnel, licking globules of juice from her fur, watching him, preening.

 

Her body was that of a young Moth, about the size of a human girl, though slimmer than most. Only in the smoothly swelling breasts was there a specific reference to humankind. The down that covered her body in a honey-coloured mist shadowed but did not hide the smooth play of muscle under the flexible skin of the legs and torso, but around the head and shoulders a quick shading off of the fur and the appearance of tight shell across the skull and neck betrayed her insect nature. On first glance there were few other signs, but then she stretched back her arms in a quick gesture and the magnificent beige wings expanded from between her arms and body, their patterns of brown and black scrawling like hieroglyphs across his vision.

 

Billings blinked. In that moment clawed feet gripped the chamber wall, wings twitched an instant, and she sprang.

 

A right-hand cut to stop her advance, then Billings scrambled for the seeds hanging like a garland of gunshot down the chamber’s centre. Air buffeted him as her wings gripped, but he was safe, sheltered from the slash of her claws for an instant, allowing him the luxury of a turn and new grip on his blade. Then she was under the seeds and rising to attack him.

 

Cut. The pointed tip caught a clawed forearm, bit, then slipped. The shrill twittering of her voice filled the air. Then her other arm lashed out and he felt a blaze of agony in his side.

 

Cut again, hack down on the arm buried in him. Blood— green blood. Another lateral slice and wing membrane parted. Another. But she was still coming, her wings, delicate but not vital, taking the blows while her body remained shielded behind them.

 

Spinning down the chamber from her blow, Billings sensed the hollowness of the wall behind him. He looked down through the membrane into emptiness; a suggestion of mist but nothing else. A further chamber hollowed out beside the others, probably her living place.

 

Before he had raised his knife she was on his back but he swung down with one last desperate movement and felt the rotted chamber wall rip like paper. They fell down into a warm, steamy space that smelled rotten and corrupt. Billings twisted as he fell and sensed the disappearance of her weight from his back. Then he landed with a sickening suddenness on something soft and thick. He grabbed at it, slithered, hung on.

 

He was on a ledge of crumbling flesh high in her living chamber. Dimly he took in the rest of the place, the walls that descended in rotting terraces to the floor, the trickling juice that welled out of them in a dozen places, the flaccid sac of her discarded cocoon on which he had landed. From his ledge it fell twenty feet to the floor to lie among the stalagmites of brown flesh in valances of dusty green.

 

The escaping juice dribbled down to the bottom of the space where a pool of it almost covered a seed brought from one of the other chambers. The juice had partly fermented, and the place was hot, steamy, thick with the smell of decaying matter spiced by the tang of alcohol. Billings felt dizzy and sick. His side was beginning to hurt and he felt blood on his hands.

 

She lay by the pool, twenty feet below him, her wings sprawled across the juice-wet surface of the poolside, their delicate transparency glued to the smooth tacky surface. She was struggling to rise, her hands fluttering across the floor in front of her.

 

The room was misty and Billings was wounded. He made a mistake. Unslinging his second knife—the first was lost in the main chamber—he grabbed a handful of the soft cocoon and slid over the edge.

 

The moment he did so he sensed his error. The cocoon was rotten, eaten to shreds by the humid air. Under his weight it ripped like decayed cloth. He fell, tumbled, scrambled down, enveloped in its clinging folds. His grasping hands tore at the stuff, bringing down fresh curtains of it around him. Then he landed with an impact that emptied his lungs. His knife skidded across the floor.

 

Billings turned his head to look at the Moth, then bowed to it like a sacrifice. Her body, no longer glued to the ground, surged up triumphantly, her magnificent face looked down at him, her talons raised in an embrace. He saw the descending claw, cried out, and was silent forever.

 

* * * *

 

They never found his body as they had found that of his father but it was there for them to find if they had cared to look. Deep in the apple he lay cocooned in her web, his face looking out at her dried carapace. Long dead in the cold currents of autumn that, even deep in the core, she had felt and responded to, she left behind a final sign for him to ponder. Deep in his body, the larvae lay that would one day rise to be another Moth, inhabit another apple, just as she had risen from a Moth Killer’s body herself, and others would rise after her.

 

Though dead, Billings sensed the last great possession of his life and was content. Staring into the silent chambers of his tomb, he waited for resurrection.

 

<<CONTENTS>>

 

* * * *

 

ROBOT’S DOZEN

 

G. L. Lack

 

 

As a pleasant change from the normal straightforward narrative, here are thirteen communications regarding the hiring of a house robot which have more to say than most stories do.

 

* * * *

 

15 Slimbridge Gardens,

Bath, Somerset.

30th August, 1979

 

Rentarobot Ltd.,

London, W.15.

 

Dear Sir,

 

Thank you very much for your prompt and efficient service. The robot you supplied to take care of my house and garden while I was away on holiday on the continent proved (if you will excuse the term) a model of perfection. It did all the jobs required, cleaning the house, mowing the lawns and generally keeping up the appearance that the property was occupied, as recommended by the police in their Crime Prevention Manual.

 

Also I must congratulate you on achieving a perfect likeness to myself after only two sittings.

 

I have set the homing device in motion and trust that you receive the robot safely, and I shall be pleased if the invoice for the fee outstanding is sent as soon as possible.

 

Yours faithfully,

Arthur Willis

 

* * * *

 

Rentarobot Ltd.,

London, W.15.

10th September, 1979

 

Arthur Willis, Esq.,

15 Slimbridge Gardens,

Bath, Somerset.

 

Dear Sir,

 

Thank you for your communication dated 30th August, 1979. We are pleased that you were satisfied with our service and I have passed your complimentary remarks about the resemblance of Model RR/1307 to yourself on to the technician concerned with its manufacture.

 

The slight delay in sending the enclosed invoice was caused by the time-lag between the machine’s departure from your house and its subsequent arrival at our establishment. A small retardation of the homing mechanism may have been responsible, otherwise it is in perfect working order.

 

We shall be pleased to receive your remittance in due course and look forward to your custom again in the future.

 

Yours faithfully,

 

P. Crane

(Dispatch Officer)

 

* * * *

 

Bright, Bright & Purvis,

5A Town Square Chambers, Bath.

10th September, 1979

 

Arthur Willis, Esq.,

15 Slimbridge Gardens, Bath.

 

Dear Sir,

 

On the instructions of my client Mr. Robert Stagg of 17 Slimbridge Gardens I am writing to you concerning certain incidents alleged to have occurred during the month of August and in the first week of September this year.

 

I refer to the fact that you appear during this time to have spent much of your time, while presumably your wife was on holiday, in watching the every movement of my client’s wife, until she was reduced in the end (after giving you the benefit of every doubt) to such a state of nerves that she was afraid to venture outside the door or indeed to leave the curtains pulled open.

 

Since the end of your wife’s holiday and your return to work there seems to have been almost an end to the constant surveillance except for three evenings when she saw you watching from the cover of the small shrubbery in your garden.

 

This has been a great shock for Mr. and Mrs. Stagg who, although not well acquainted with you socially, had a great respect for you. I trust that my client will have no more cause for complaint and I shall be pleased to forward an explanation and apology for your behaviour to him should you not wish to do so personally. He hopes that you take the latter course.

 

Yours faithfully

Alexander Bright

 

* * * *

 

15 Slimbridge Gardens,

Bath, Somerset.

11th September, 1979

 

Rentarobot Ltd.,

London, W.15.

 

Dear Sir,

 

I hope that the robot I hired from you has returned. However, this letter is about a much more serious matter than its delay.

 

Enclosed is a copy of a letter I received today. You will note that the complaints referred to coincide with the presence here of your robot and my neighbour has assumed it to be me.

 

While this may be a compliment to your modellers it has, you will appreciate, put me in an acutely embarrassing position. I shall be pleased if you will send a letter confirming that you supplied me with the robot and explaining the purpose of your organization so that I may take it with me when I go to see Mr. Stagg.

 

Yours faithfully,

Arthur Willis

 

* * * *

 

Rentarobot Ltd.,

London, W.15.

13th September, 1979

 

Arthur Willis, Esq.,

15 Slimbridge Gardens,

Bath.

 

Dear Sir,

 

Thank you for your letter received today. May I say how well I realize your difficulty. However, as you are aware, our service is confidential and available (and indeed only made known) to selected clients. Since Mr. Stagg is not yet on the Approved List I am obliged to refuse your request and suggest that a verbal explanation should be satisfactory.

 

Yours faithfully,

P. Crane

(Dispatch Officer)

 

* * * *

 

15 Slimbridge Gardens,

Bath, Somerset. .

16th September, 1979

 

Managing Director,

Rentarobot Ltd.

 

Dear Sir,

 

Further to my letter of a few days ago and the solicitor’s attached (which I trust you still retain) may I say that the interview between myself and Mr. Stagg was far from successful. In fact Mr. Stagg, normally a quietly-spoken, mild-tempered man, became extremely abusive and dismissed my explanation as a “load of old excreta” and absolutely refused to believe that a service such as yours exists.

 

Now that the matter has reached boiling point it is certain that even a letter of explanation will no longer suffice and I shall be pleased if you will dispatch the robot back to me to prove my point. I shall of course pay the necessary expenses and shall ensure the utmost secrecy.

 

Yours faithfully,

Arthur Willis

 

* * * *

 

Rentarobot ltd. Internal Memo. Date: 18/9/79 URGENT

 

From: Managing Director.                                      To: Deep-freeze stores.

 

Please check that Model RR/1307 is in full working order and dispatch immediately to:

 

A. Willis, Esq.,

15 Slimbridge Gardens,

Bath,

Somerset.

 

* * * *

 

15 Slimbridge Gardens,

Bath, Somerset.

21st September, 1979

 

Managing Director,

Rentarobot Ltd.

 

Dear Sir,

 

You will be pleased to hear that the operation was carried out successfully. The look on my neighbour’s face when confronted by myself and your robot had to be seen to be believed. The difficulty then was convincing him that the model was not my identical twin.

 

There is one slight snag. I have set the homing device but the robot seems reluctant to leave. However, this is causing no inconvenience at the moment but I welcome your advice.

 

Thank you for your co-operation and please submit invoice on the return of the robot.

 

Yours faithfully,

Arthur Willis

 

* * * *

 

Rentarobot Ltd.,

London, W.15.

23rd September, 1979

 

Arthur Willis, Esq.,

15 Slimbridge Gardens,

Bath.

 

Dear Sir,

 

I am delighted that the “operation” was a success. We always hope to oblige our customers and in this case the charges will be waived.

 

Do not be unduly concerned about the laggardly manner of your model. Normally we re-tune the homing device after each mission. Due to the urgency in your case this was not done as we dispatched quickly and no doubt the mechanism is slightly run down. It should take effect but if it does not operate within forty-eight hours of the receipt of this letter please contact me again.

 

Yours faithfully,

Oscar P. Flavenbaum

(Managing Director)

 

* * * *

 

15 Slimbridge Gardens,

Bath, Somerset.

23rd September, 1979

 

Managing Director,

Rentarobot Ltd.

 

Dear Sir,

 

Further to my letter of the day before yesterday, will you note that your robot is still here and, since its behaviour is not normal, I shall be pleased if you will have it collected as soon as possible.

 

To tell the truth, I may be imagining things, but it seems to wear a superior look on its face and is almost dominating the household. I think the mechanism needs inspecting thoroughly.

 

Although your service fulfilled a very necessary need at the time, in view of recent events I shall not engage the service of a robot in the future. Even as I write it is peering over my shoulder, which is quite disconcerting.

 

Yours faithfully,

Arthur Willis

 

* * * *

 

15 Slimbridge Gardens, Bath.

Saturday

 

Dear Tilly,

 

Oh, I have so much to tell you that we must get together soon. We had a marvellous holiday on the continent. I hope you got my card from Venice. The weather was glorious all the time and the hotel was fabulous. Even Arthur thawed out a bit—and on the days when he had business appointments (he could never have just a holiday) I went with a gorgeous Swede for trips in his launch . . . Well I can’t tell you everything of course, but he was blond and beautifully tanned ... all over. Yes he was a Viking to my liking!

 

I thought it would seem very dull when we got back but at least one interesting thing has happened. You know we were going to have one of those robot things to look after the house (I shouldn’t have told you really so don’t say anything about it to You-Know-Who) well we had one and Arthur had to ask for it back because it had misbehaved itself and our neighbour had thought that it was Arthur ogling his wife. Arthur! Can you imagine it? The funny thing is that now we’ve got him (I mean it) and everything has been straightened out, he won’t go!

 

He loafs around the house all day and of course he looks just like Arthur. As if one of him wasn’t enough! But from the way he looks at me I don’t think he’s such a cold fish as dear A. himself!

 

Well Tilly, as I said we must meet and you can tell me all your adventures. I’m sure that you didn’t go to Nice for nothing!

 

Lots of Love,

Patty

 

* * * *

 

Rentarobot ltd. Internal Memo. Date: 24,/9/79 URGENT

 

From : Managing Director.                                                 To: Robot Mortician

Seymour Dent

 

Please collect Model RR/1307 from:

 

Arthur Willis, Esq.,

15 Slimbridge Gardens,

Bath,

Somerset.

 

Model to be disposed of upon your return.

 

* * * *

 

Flat 12,

Westall House,

S.W.6.

25th September, 1979

 

Dear Mr. Flavenbaum,

 

I did not come to work this morning as I was not well. That last job of collecting a model from Bath took a lot out of me as it did not want to come.

 

I have worked for you for several years now and liked the job very much but now I’ve had enough. When the robots were just models it was all right but now they are more like us it’s different.

 

The last one really turned me up. I didn’t mind him struggling, but that last scream as I pushed him into the incinerator went through me like cold steel. I wish I had been told that he had been modified as much as that and anyway I can’t see any need to build in such life-like things and so I give in my notice.

 

Yours truly,

Seymour Dent

 

<<CONTENTS>>

 

* * * *

 

BIRTH OF A BUTTERFLY

 

Joseph Green

 

 

Author Joseph Green has become something of a specialist in depicting human beings faced with utterly alien life forms. In this latest story he describes the adoption of a tiny Sun—who decides on the adopting is all part of the story.

 

* * * *

 

PINK-Beam-of-Terror: The Wild-Flames! Far out over the death-liquid, searching, from lost Hot-Home the Wild-Flames have followed us! Flee! Flee!

 

Blue-Beam-of-Courage: No! Hold, we cannot! Our built-up heat would slow us! We must discharge-by-creation first! Discharge! Create!

 

Pink-Beam: Time? Time? The young-flame to come, the savages behind us disrupting?

 

Blue-Beam: Time enough! The young-flame? The Aliens, the Aliens! Attach it, attach it! Their great powers protect! Must save our own Consciousness-of-Being!

 

Pink-Beam: Cruel, cruel! A young one, a new-flame!

 

Blue-Beam: We must, we must! Give me the White, the White!

 

White-Beam-of-Creation: In sore distress, in agony of mind, I give you White!

 

White-Beam-of-Creation: And I return, in feelings strained, the White! Heat, heat! The smallest alien approaches this place of birthstones! Create, create! our young-flame of trouble born!

 

* * * *

 

“Momme,” said little Dickie solemnly, “I saw two butterflies eat up a great big diamond and make a baby butterfly.”

 

“Did you dear?” asked Irma without looking up from the synthesizer. The contrary thing was mixing too many lipids with the amino acids again and at dinner Hammond would stare unhappily at the fat in his steak. “You didn’t bring more of those diamonds inside?”

 

“The two big ones’ wings got all dim, and the diamond went whoof! and there was another butterfly, just like the first two only not as bright,” Dickie rattled on, and when Irma glanced sternly at him he hung his head guiltily and extended a hand. She inspected the gem, and sighed.

 

“All right, dear, you may keep it. Now tell Daddy to clean up for dinner.”

 

He trotted off happily, short legs churning, and Irma shook her head in loving exasperation and returned to the synthesizer. Just like his father, a toy a minute . . . though of course Hammond did not consider his gadgets toys. But when marvellous science, with all its wonders, couldn’t design a simple little intra-uterine safety that would stay inside . . . she hummed as she took up the meat, secretly glad they hadn’t. This barren world of rock and water was the eighty-first planet on which they had landed. She and Ham had been in space over five years now, with another five scheduled. Dickie-bird had become a stronger interest-in-common than all the psycho-computers on Earth could have found when they were matched for this trip.

 

Both her men attacked the fat steaks, which had entered the scout as very nasty seaweed and slime three systems back, with admirable gusto. When Hammond finished he said, “I’ll rig the imprinter for Dickie’s next learning-set and we’ll lift. Are you going to deep-sleep?”

 

“Not for a one-week trip. I have mending to do.” Their clothes had been designed to last indefinitely, but the planners hadn’t anticipated a baby. The garments she had laboriously cut-down for Dickie kept coming apart on him.

 

She cleared the galley while Hammond went through his pre-lift checks, watching his broad back more than her work. She could usually manage the programmed-imprinted-analytical lug, but the fit he had pitched last night when she suggested they have a second child. . . . Dickie had been an easy birth, but the thought of delivering another baby sent Hammond into a virtual panic. Midwifery was not on his programme of skills and his fear of her becoming pregnant again had lowered their ratio of sexual synthesis for the past four years. But Dickie needed a baby sister. Growing up with an improvised imprinting machine and your parents was no life for a child.

 

Hammond fastened Dickie in his accel-decel couch and attached the cap. Irma turned away, to avoid seeing the child pass out, and got them an after-dinner cup of stim-caf.

 

Alpha Crucis Number Two was a virtual copy of One, the same lifeless bare rock and salt-free seas. The air was thin but breathable and Irma happily turned Dickie free outside. Her nerves needed a rest.

 

It was only a few minutes before the little fellow returned. Hammond had sent the detectors out immediately and was manually scanning with one. He looked up in mild surprise when Dickie said, “Momme, the baby butterfly followed us here. I think it’s ‘dopted me.”

 

Irma smiled and hastily bent to press her cheek against his fair head, one wary eye on his father. She saw Hammond put the machine on automatic scan and braced for trouble. Now he would pin the child down on his fantasy and there would be another lecture on reality and illusion, and how you must always distinguish between the physically real and the mentally unreal, Richard.

 

But a moment later Dickie was saying, “I’ll show you, Daddy,” and leading a reluctant Hammond towards the air-lock. Irma dropped her needle and thread and followed. Dickie was going to be needing her very shortly.

 

It hovered in the air by the outer door, so close the detectors had missed it, a head-sized core of opaque white light surrounded by multi-coloured streamers of fire that curled, dipped and moved like burning wings. It reminded her irresistibly of textbook illustrations of old Sol in a tantrum, with huge clouds of flaming hydrogen thrusting into space. It even gave off a gentle warmth.

 

Irma looked away from the too-bright ball. “What in the world is it, Hammond?”

 

He closed his eyes for two seconds, opened them and said, “It resembles nothing in my memory-banks. Logic indicates it might be some local form of coherent illuminated gas. Dickie says he saw others on Alpha Crucis One.”

 

“I saw this one, Daddy,” insisted Dickie shrilly. “I saw its momme an’ daddy, an’ it ‘dopted me.”

 

Hammond smiled briefly and reached to pat the small head, but Dickie darted away. He vanished behind a nearby rock outcropping. When Irma turned back towards the gas-cloud it had also disappeared.

 

Hammond shook his head in resigned patience and walked back to the scout. He was at the scanner again when Irma entered, lost in the useless and foolish task that had engaged Earthmen now for most of a hundred years, the search for another intelligent race. Another? Personally she wasn’t satisfied that their own should make the claim!

 

Dickie’s ship-finder brought him back unharmed except for a few bruises, which scarcely mattered where there were no bacteria. She sprayed skin on the damaged areas and got dinner. After the meal she put him to bed and relaxed for an hour with the impressor, but the sensory images had just become interesting when the detectors returned and Hammond decided to lift. Planet Number Three was in conjunction, or some-such and it would be a two-day trip at sub-light speed. No deep-sleep again. Dickie wouldn’t even have time to digest a new learning set.

 

They were barely clear of gravity and accelerating for the short hop when the main computer, the bio-brain, jelled its central bank again. Hammond glared at its bland glass face as though ready to give it a good swift illogical kick, then went after the imprint cap without a word. It had been a part of the brain’s emergency circuits until he removed it to build an imprinter for Dickie and had to be restored each time the bio-brain was to be bypassed.

 

When Hammond was ready Irma sat demurely in the co-pilot’s chair and let him attach the cap. He checked each minute detail with his usual machine-like thoroughness before throwing the switch. Despite long familiarity she stiffened when the current hit, then slowly grew accustomed to it and relaxed. It was nice to be able to do something with her brain that Hammond, with all his force-fed knowledge, could not do half as well. He had tried to explain once that her brain made a better emergency circuit-box than his simply because it hadn’t been imprinted with knowledge. Something about several billion of his available circuits being “tied down” by established synaptic connections, the neural paths used up by the immense amount of information crammed into his head, and so on.

 

It was true that Hammond’s brain had been used virtually to capacity. These small scouts had to be prepared for every possible emergency and only a man with an excellent grasp of dozens of basic sciences could keep the complicated machines going for the thousand years they would stay in space ... or was it ten? They would return twelve years after departure, since everyone came back on a schedule designed to let new knowledge be absorbed systematically, but they would have aged only ten. Hammond had carefully explained that exceeding the speed of light moved mass backward in time and they would spend so many days travelling at high speed and so many years at sub-light, to balance the book. It was when he said they would move through space for a thousand years but it would seem like only ten because most of the sub-light travel time would be spent in suspended animation that she began to wish she had declined this assignment.

 

Hammond had been programmed for exploration scout, ten years of dangerous work and all the world had to offer ever afterwards, by a doting mother. He had gone under the cap at the age of two. Irma’s father, an imprinted neurologist himself, had decided to raise his daughter the old-fashioned way. He had theories about heavy imprinting destroying certain desirable characteristics in the human personality, and stifling creativity. And perhaps he was right.

 

It was true that all the world’s original artists, writers and musicians were non-imprints. But in the technical world the immense task of mastering just one science, much less a dozen, made imprinting mandatory. They had reached the physical limit with people like Hammond . . . but she had heard dark rumours of idiot babies with oversized heads being born in labs ... if controlled mutation could increase the size of a baby’s brain, make even more circuits that could be imprinted with even more knowledge ... if one extra-large brain reached a sane maturity and they imprinted it to its new capacity with neurology and genetics and its owner set out to mutate an even larger brain in some child . . . she shuddered as she began to drift off into the lazy torpor that was her usual state when half her brain was loaned out

 

She was a very ignorant woman by today’s standards, but the psycho-matchers had selected her as a compatible mate to one of the world’s greatest brains . . . and they had been right. She and Hammond were going to convert their temporary marriage to a permanent one if they lived to reach home. But she didn’t want to wait that long for a second baby and she always got her way in the end. Einstein equals Motherhood times Children by a square Father, she thought sleepily.

 

There was life on the third planet, just microscopic stuff and a little jelly in the seas, but Hammond wouldn’t let Dickie out without a spacesuit. He was always worrying about bacteria. Dickie had to wear the improvised contraption his father had made out of spare parts.

 

They were sitting on a barren rock plain not far from a small lake. Irma worked in the galley and watched Dickie on the ship’s viewers, while Hammond monitored both detectors. She was the one who saw a butterfly descend out of the clear sky and hover over Dickie’s head.

 

“Hammond,” she said softly, and when he looked up, visibly annoyed, she pointed silently to the viewscreen.

 

Hammond reached for the radio mike immediately. Irma could see nothing particularly dangerous in the situation, but her brain had not been programmed and imprinted to capacity. Hammond frequently made decisions and took actions that seemed senseless to her and proved right in the end.

 

There was a short but intense argument with Dickie. The little fellow returned to the scout, hot rebellion in his eyes. When Irma glanced at the screen again the butterfly was hovering just outside.

 

Hammond informed Dickie that in the future he was to return to the scout immediately when a gascloud appeared and was told in turn that this was the same butterfly which had ‘dopted Dickie two planets back, that it was his personal friend, and not dangerous at all. In the end big tears were streaming down Dickie’s face in a most unprogrammed way. As he crawled into his couch to cry in privacy he lifted a wet face and got in the last word: “An’ it‘ll be on the next planet, too!”

 

And it was.

 

For the first time in five years Hammond asked Irma what she thought of the situation.

 

“The shining thing? Why I think it’s alive, just as Dickie tried to tell you. I mean, how do we know all life has to be based on protoplasm? Maybe it’s made out of living light.”

 

She saw his brief, forgiving smile, and felt her temper stir. “Look, third-unsatisfactory-husband, biology admitted it was lost when the first sampler returned from Mars! You-” She stopped, warned by the look on his face. Just because he’d been so darn busy having all that knowledge piped into the grey goop that this was his first marriage . . . jealousy with such a primitive character trait . . . but at least it proved they hadn’t programmed and imprinted all the natural responses out of Hammond.

 

The sullen look faded. “Irma, there are certain basic biological principles common to all life-chains, such as the synthesis of energy compounds in the presence of sunlight-” He stopped, and she knew he was afraid of losing her again.

 

“Why does synthesis have to take place? It looks just like a tiny sun. Maybe it gets energy directly from the big sun up there.”

 

Hammond could only shake his head. This was totally outside his imprinted experience, a situation unique in history. Since only solid objects could exceed the speed of light there was no possible way to contact Earth for further instructions. Irma watched him sweat helplessly for a while and then suggested he catch the thing in a specimen box and put it through the analyser.

 

Hammond looked so grateful for the obvious idea that she wondered what he would do if she came up with something brilliant one day.

 

She watched her husband approach the little sun—son of a sun?—through the viewscreen. It was hovering at head-height. Hammond walked directly to it, opened the box and brought it up underneath the creature, and slammed the magnetically-sealed lid. She saw the bright flames of an angry excrescence as it vanished inside.

 

Hammond started back to the scout, triumph in his walk. Tomorrow he would be referring to this as his idea.

 

A corner of the box turned red, rippled like water and melted into sludge. She heard Hammond’s surprised yell, saw him hurl the hot box violently away just as the butterfly emerged, its bright wings angrily swirling. She saw Hammond backing away as the beautiful flaming creature moved towards him and suddenly realized that he was very near death. She screamed once and then little Dickie was standing by her and screaming louder than she, but he had turned on the outside mike first. His amplified child’s voice rolled from the top of the scout into the shuddering air and it was an angry command not to hurt his daddy.

 

The miniature sun hesitated, its more violent colours fading. The flaming wings slowed, looked less like bearing pinions. After a moment it rose swiftly and in seconds had merged with the brighter sunlight in the cloudless sky.

 

“It’ll come back,” said Dickie placidly; he might never have screamed in his life. “It’s ‘dopted me.”

 

Hammond must have finally been convinced it had indeed adopted Dickie. During the three-day hop to the next planet he spent his free time building a gadget for which she could see no immediate use. When she tried to question him about it he gave her an angry look and refused to answer. He even ate the terrible chops she concocted from some old leaf-mould without a single comment.

 

This time it was no surprise when Dickie went out and the flaming butterfly shortly appeared and hovered above his young head. They were on another obviously dead world, all rock and diamonds, with very little air. Dickie wore his suit cheerfully, since there was no alternative and he and the butterfly were playing some odd game they had devised when she saw Hammond emerge from the workroom carrying his newest toy. It was a grey box with a large crystal rod mounted on top, similar to some very primitive lasers she had seen.

 

“What’s that?” she asked in some alarm. Hammond’s face had a grimly determined look she did not like.

 

“A light wave-form disruptor. I’m going to see if that thing out there can stand up to a little photon jarring.”

 

Irma wanted to cry out that he was being cruel, that the little white sun-child had done him no harm, but the words stuck in her throat. The attempt to capture it had been her idea. In a way she had been responsible for the blow to Hammond’s pride. And it was a dangerous little fire-pot. If it should get angry with Dickie in one of their games . . . She watched him approach it calmly, knowing that his device, whatever it was, would work. She saw him aim the crystal rod in its general direction and press a button. A beam of life leaped from one end and flew by the butterfly, burning its way into the sky. Hammond moved the box slightly and the beam shifted, engulfing the small central body. And it flared, grew, brightened intolerably in a soundless explosion of light . . . and died to a dim memory of glory on the edge of her retina. As it faded to nothingness she thought she saw a black lump of—was it coal?—fall to the ground at little Dickie’s feet.

 

“That takes care of that,” said Hammond’s voice on the radio. It sounded more defeated than satisfied. She saw him stoop to pick up the black lump.

 

It had happened so fast Dickie’s young mind was slow in grasping the fact that his friend and pet was dead. He had just started a rising wail of protest when Irma saw two circles of light appear at the top of the view-screen, falling fast. She felt a sudden dread clutch at her throat

 

Hammond saw them also. He lifted the disruptor in alarm, his finger stabbing the button. The killing beam lashed out just before the dropping small suns reached him. It cut the air by one of the flaming balls and before Hammond could shift it a similar beam shot from the body of the second butterfly and melted the box into shapeless slag. The disrupting light vanished.

 

The two creatures halted just above little Dickie’s head and Irma saw strong orange and delicate lavender beams flashing back and forth between them. She did not need Hammond to tell her they were communicating and her own intuition told her what it was about. In a near paralysis of terror she watched the weirdly beautiful judges weigh their decision of life or death and not for a moment did she doubt they were both judge, jury and executioner, and capable of all three tasks.

 

Dickie was staring at them with wide-eyed interest, apparently completely unafraid. Hammond’s face had turned pale. He edged slowly closer to Dickie, with some vain idea of protecting him if the decision went against them.

 

* * * *

 

Orange-Beam-of-Anger: He disrupted our young-flame! Our young-flame! They are powerful but cruel, cruel! Their bodies are jelly of death-liquid and death lives in their minds, minds! I kill!

 

Lavender-Beam-of-Restraint: No! No! He did not understand, understand! You caused us to attach away our young-flame when we fled here for safety! Ours no longer! Think, Think! The Wild-Flames have not discovered the birth-power locked in stone! They came not this far from Hot-Home! It is safe to make another young-flame, another! We have built our heat again, we can create, create!

 

Orange-Beam: It will weaken us, for purpose, what purpose?

 

Lavender-Beam: For the aliens, dull-flame! Attach it to the largest one, let it be his child!

 

Orange-Beam: To kill again, to kill again?

 

Lavender-Beam: They are not primitives! We must make ties, ties! Sense you not his regret? He thought to protect his young, as we, as we! We must make friends, get aid, fight savages! Their machines move between Hot-Homes and we cannot! Powerful friends, when we return to drive Barbarians from our Hot-Home! See Low-Burner, see Low-Burner?

 

Orange-Beam: We will see who Burns-Low! Give me your White, your White!

 

White-Beam-of-Creation: In joy of being, in love tender-yielding, I give you White!

 

White-Beam-of-Creation: And I return, in strength of love, in happiness conscious, the White, the White!

 

* * * *

 

The light beam colloquy abruptly stopped. Irma’s gaze shifted downward. Dickie was holding up a large diamond, its rough exterior glittering in the brightness of Alpha Cruris.

 

A new beam of brilliant white flashed between the butterflies, held, and they moved towards each other and the extended diamond. When they were quite close Dickie finally dropped it and withdrew his hand. The small suns followed the crystal to the ground, still connected by the beam of pure white light. Irma saw them almost merge when they reached opposite sides of the diamond. She knew the purpose of that beam of blended white and that Dickie had seen it once before. She felt like a Peeping Tom in the bedroom of Zeus and Hera and could not tear her eyes away.

 

The white light seemed to grow, to widen and deepen until it covered the central bodies of both butterflies, hiding the other colours and the frozen glitter of the diamond. Both Hammond and Dickie had backed away a few feet and were watching through slightly polarized face-plates. The rock in the immediate vicinity of the strange mating was charring. The whiteness grew more intense, almost unendurable in its brilliance. There was an abrupt flare in the centre of the merged lights, a tone of vivid orange, and then the parent butterflies moved apart, the beam broken, their sun-heats fading to a more normal temperature. Where the diamond had rested an orange flame burned, slowly brightening.

 

Some dim fragment of memory came to Irma, something about the intense pressure matrices inside a diamond, the immense forces necessary to heat and compress carbon until it reached that state of final beauty. If those matrices could be made to yield their imprisoned energy...

 

The parent butterflies lifted slowly, moved behind Hammond, gently urged him forward, until he was standing quite close to the burning orange. Their new-born child grew brighter and brighter. Hammond, apparently no longer afraid, waited in front of it and an older meaning of the word “imprint” dawned on Irma, the original psychological one. Some new-born creatures adopted the first living animal they saw as their mother, regardless of its shape or form.

 

Dickie had got the situation somewhat confused. The first butterfly had not adopted him. He had unknowingly adopted the butterfly!

 

The thought sent her into a burst of laughter and when she realized how near to hysteria it was she cut it off abruptly and stood there trembling in silent relief. When she looked again her husband and son were slowly approaching the scout. The new butterfly, now flying, hovered close by Hammond’s head.

 

* * * *

 

“Of course little Brightstar isn’t the protoplasmic type of intelligence we were looking for, but I think Earth will be too thrilled to care,” said Hammond cheerfully as he made the last adjustment on his current toy. He had assured Irma that when their second child learned to use it properly he could activate any of its thirty-six cells by a light-beam and produce one of the basic sounds of speech in its attached radio. With the intelligence little Brightstar displayed it should be a short step from there to true speech.

 

“I’m happy just to get home five years early.” Irma really couldn’t have cared less about the type of intelligence her adopted child had. Dickie-bird needed a brother and now he had one. She glanced at the chronometer. About time for another meal for Brightstar, and for Dickie’s nap. It had been very pleasant, watching the two of them tumble about outside the ship during the last feeding, but Brightstar would have to eat alone this time. She called Dickie and asked Hammond to drop to sub-light and pull in close to the next star.

 

When both children were attended to she asked, “Is the search really over, Hammond? Will this satisfy the people who insist there just has to be more intelligence in the universe?”

 

He turned from the controls in mild surprise. “Why, no, of course not. The search must go on. Baby suns aren’t all the answer. But we’ll leave the new trips to others. Except . . .” he hesitated, and Irma made her face cloud up and prepare to rain. Not again!

 

He saw her look, and grinned. “Oh no, not another major trip. Just a little expedition to home base, so to speak. To Sol. It occurs to me that Bright and his kind may not be as rare as we thought. They were obviously born in some star originally. We may have intelligence a darn sight closer to home than we’ve ever dreamed.”

 

Irma sighed in relief. Why of course! And a good thing too. The way children grew up before your eyes, they had to be thinking about Brightstar’s future. No child of her’s was going to grow up a bachelor!

 

She smiled reflectively, already seeing her grandchildren burning before her eyes.

 

<<CONTENTS>>

 

* * * *

 

THEY SHALL REAP

 

David Rome

 

 

The closed environment story usually applies to a situation where Man has to take his natural conditions with him in order to survive. Australian author David Rome, however, shows that it could well apply to a normal community right here on Earth.

 

* * * *

 

We pulled up under the big red-on-white sign that said: rich valley development co. and sat in silence for a moment. Outside, the sunlight was slanting over the mountains in cool yellow shafts. But in the car we were in serious mood. Even the kids.

 

“Well,” I said at last. “Everybody sure this is what we want?”

 

In grave voices, the kids said it was. And Eve met my eyes and nodded quickly. Her eyes were big and soft and she looked like she might cry at any second.

 

“Our own farm, Adam.”

 

“It’ll be hard work.”

 

“We’ll never have the chance again. Not at this price. Not at half the price.”

 

“Still, all our money will be in there. No backing out. You know what the agreement says—we stay, or forfeit our purchase price.”

 

“They’re giving people such a wonderful chance,” Eve said. “People like us. You can’t blame them for trying to discourage the sort who might not stay. Rich Valley ...” Eve said softly, looking down the misty green V of country beyond the building which contained the Development Company offices. The sun rested like a cool steel disc on the high mountains in the west. It began to melt and run across darkening slopes towards us.

 

“Come on,” I said. “This is where the Rice family belongs.”

 

The kids were out of the car before I finished the words. Pete led Trisha, his voice a wild whoop that sharded on the grey-green mountain slopes. She followed more sedately, dark hair loose and heavy on her thirteen-year-old shoulders.

 

“Pete will have room to run out here,” I said, pressing Eve’s hand. “Really run. Like the little savage he is.”

 

She smiled happily and nodded. We stopped as the kids waited impatiently for us, looked down the valley again. Smoke from the settlements spaced along the valley sent thin spirals up against the purpling sky. Peace. Room to breathe.

 

“We’re lucky, Adam,” Eve murmured. “Lucky to have the chance.”

 

“Well, we passed the tests. They wanted us to come.”

 

“And all the others living down there, they’ll be people like us, Adam. People who believe in kindness and goodness.”

 

“They’ll be good people, honey. It’ll be a good place to bring up the children.”

 

Trisha’s big grey eyes were watching us in the gathering dusk. We smiled and she smiled back. Pete danced on one foot and waved to us to hurry.

 

All of a sudden lights came on in the Rich Valley Development offices. Warm and welcoming lights.

 

We sat in a semi-circle around Judge Whymore’s desk while he completed the agreements. Judge Whymore had told us on our first visit to Rich Valley that he didn’t act as a judge any longer.

 

He and four others, who had owned the whole of the valley between them, had founded the Development Company. Their aim, he had told us, had been to build a community of people who were looking for escape, escape from violent cities and the seething pressures of suburban life. People who coveted tranquillity.

 

We had taken a written psychology test and an exhaustive—and for Eve and Trisha embarrassing—medical examination as the first steps towards securing one of the two hundred farms in Rich Valley.

 

I suspected that ours had been a borderline case, the balance weighed by Eve and Trisha, both creatures of inner peace and self-containment.

 

I considered myself honest and practical, too honest and practical to succeed in a business world of dishonest contracts and speculation. But my streak of rebellion had been inherited by Pete, neither of us completely tamed by the angelic women of our family.

 

“You’re extremely fortunate,” Judge Whymore told us. “You are our final family.”

 

His broad and happy face beamed at us.

 

“You’re all prepared?”

 

I nodded. “House sold, furniture too. Just clothes and a few personal things in the car there.”

 

“We will make our clothes in the valley,” the Judge smiled. “But, of course, you will want your own things for a while.”

 

He rose, tall and twinkling-eyed.

 

“I’ll drive down with you. Help you settle in.”

 

“Thank you,” Eve said.

 

He smiled and placed his hand on the soft darkness of Trisha’s hair. “Thank you, Mrs. Rice.”

 

We drove down the dark and winding road which led to the valley farms. In the oblong of my mirror I watched the yellow lights of Judge Whymore’s car following us.

 

The mountains seemed to bend down over us from the silver-mercury sky. Lights pinpricked the darkness of the foothills every mile or so.

 

Judge Whymore’s car rushed past us and his tail-lights flared as he slowed and showed us the turn off.

 

A half mile later, we drew to a stop outside the farmhouse. Our farmhouse.

 

Lights were burning and the front door was open, spilling molten gold into the night. Figures appeared and loomed closer as I shut off the engine and Trisha and Pete tumbled in excitement from the car.

 

I stepped out and hands clapped themselves into mine and I saw smiles and happy faces in the sheen of light.

 

“Our last family,” Judge Whymore was saying. “Isn’t it wonderful ?”

 

“And two children,” a woman’s gentle voice said. “Two sweet children. Isn’t that wonderful too?”

 

We all trooped inside and the owners of the faces became neighbours. Five in all. I remembered no names, but their pleasure at having us here was real and soon I felt that I’d known these people all my life.

 

Everyone carried something from the car. Judge Whymore insisted on carrying Yellow Bird’s covered cage inside, planting it in the centre of the big cherrywood kitchen table and then taking off the cover so that everyone could see Yellow Bird blinking himself awake.

 

“What is it?” someone said, coming closer.

 

“Canary bird,” Judge Whymore said, and suddenly there was sadness in his voice. “A beauty too. Whistler, I’ll be bound.”

 

“Oh, dear,” someone said softly.

 

They all looked at us with unhappy faces.

 

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

 

“Nothing. No, nothing at all,” Judge Whymore said, covering Yellow Bird’s cage. Then his eyes twinkled again and darted around the room. “Where are those children of yours? Now where are they?”

 

Pete’s face appeared in the doorway. “I just looked but a window and saw someone,” he announced.

 

Judge Whymore stepped forward, one eyebrow arching upward.

 

“Saw someone?”

 

“Yes, saw someone watching me. From the edge of the woods. A lady.”

 

Judge Whymore laughed. “A lady would come right on in and introduce herself.” He looked at the open front door and everyone else looked too. “She isn’t going to come,” he said in a few moments.

 

“Pete,” I said. “It’s dark outside. How could you see anyone?”

 

“Moon’s up,” he said. “Big as a silver dollar. And she had a dog with her.”

 

“Dog?” Judge Whymore’s voice was sharp. “There are no dogs in the valley, boy. You imagined it.”

 

“Didn’t,” Pete said. “That dog was the biggest I ever saw.”

 

“That’s enough, Pete,” I said. “Go and find Trisha and bring her down here.”

 

“Trisha’s outside, looking at the moon,” Pete said, and smiled.

 

We all walked to the door. The moon lay big and cold on the tops of the trees of our woods. Trisha’s silhouette was pressed against its face. A breeze came and lifted her hair like slow dark wings.

 

“Trisha!” I called, and she turned and came towards us.

 

“Beautiful child,” someone murmured.

 

“Obedient too,” Judge Whymore said.

 

* * * *

 

We soon settled in to life in the valley. Found out our neighbours’ names and then discovered that we had two hundred families as neighbours and it would take six months to learn them all. There wasn’t a day when someone didn’t drop in to make us feel at home.

 

Sheldon Ward was our immediate neighbour to the south. He had been a banker in Baltimore until he saw the Rich Valley Development ad. He had been one of the first to move into the valley with his family. His farm was prospering.

 

“They all prosper,” he confided to me one night. “Every last one. No blight, no green fly, no black fly, no aphis, no apple sucker, no Big Bud, no red spider. Before I came to the valley, Adam, I studied farming chemistry. Potash, phosphates, nitrates to enrich the soil. Know what we put in the soil here? Crops.”

 

Sheldon was right. On the slope facing east I planted and staked apple trees in the rich deep loam. As a windbreak I close-planted damsons and I filled the sunlit sheltered folds of countryside with Louise Bonne and Conference pears and peach bushes that came to fruit with astonishing speed.

 

The days were sunlit and long, the nights cool and long. School in the valley began at eight and ended at four and it was after five by the time Pete and Trisha appeared plodding through sweet smelling dust on the road below our house.

 

Trisha didn’t mind the long school hours. But Pete grew more rebellious as the days moved on.

 

“I’m tired of being in a class on my own,” he said.

 

“A class on your own?” I tousled his hair. “Now come on, young man. You’re neither so bright or so stupid that you need that kind of attention.”

 

“Well, almost on my own,” Pete insisted. “Just the three of us.”

 

“Three? Are you serious?”

 

He nodded a vigorous ten-year-old head.

 

“Just three of us.”

 

I walked over to the pump and began drawing cool green water up from the earth. “Pete, there were thirty or more in your class when you started at the school. I took you there on your first day. I saw them.”

 

He stayed in the house shade, watching me.

 

“What happened to the others, Pete?” I said. “Did they just vanish one day?”

 

“We took tests,” Pete said. “I guess I kept failing. Everyone else passed and they went up a class.”

 

“Except three of you?”

 

“Yes.”

 

The bucket was brimming full. I scooped a dipper full and drank the dark sweet water. “Pete,” I said gently, “you were always up there with the others in your last school, before we came to the valley. What happened?”

 

He hung his head and then shrugged. “Guess I’m good enough at reading and writing and arithmetic. But not the other things.”

 

“What other things, Pete?”

 

He lifted his eyes. “Just things.”

 

Eve appeared in the doorway behind Pete, her pregnancy great and still surprising in front of her. There hadn’t been any signs, but it must have begun before we came to the valley, because suddenly she was bursting full and happy at the prospect of some fresh-born crying around the house.

 

“Adam! “she called.

 

My eyes held Pete’s a moment more and I said, “We’ll see about those tests. I’ll come to the school with you tomorrow.”

 

“Adam!” Eve called more urgently.

 

I went over to her. “It’s Yellow Bird,” she said.

 

She led me inside. Yellow Bird’s cage hung by the open window. In the dusk I could see the cage rocking and swaying, hear the panicky flutter of wings.

 

“What’s wrong with him, Adam?”

 

“I don’t know. He acts like he’s scared to death.”

 

We watched the bird. He seemed to be trying to get out of his cage. He beat his wings against the bars until a yellow downy carpet covered the window-sill and drifted to the floor. His tiny eyes were bright as flames as he dashed himself again and again against the bars.

 

“Let him out!” It was Trisha who spoke behind us and we turned, startled. Her own grey eyes were huge and wounded with pity.

 

“Let him out,” she whispered.

 

I opened the cage door. Yellow Bird launched himself like an arrow across the dark room.

 

His small beak slashed at Trisha’s face and then he swerved and banged into the white stone wall and fell to the floor.

 

Trisha bent to the small warm bundle.

 

“Poor Yellow Bird,” she said. And blood shone on her cheek.

 

* * * *

 

Eve turned on her side and the bed creaked softly. “Aren’t you being foolish, Adam? Really, aren’t you?”

 

“Eve, I went to that school today. I saw it with my own eyes. Three children in a classroom meant for ten times that.”

 

“Room, Adam. They need room. For the new children.”

 

“That’s another thing. All these babies due. Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”

 

“Babies? Strange?”

 

She sighed and sat up. I saw the glint of her hair in the moonlight that was sliding through our bedroom window.

 

“Tell me what’s worrying you?”

 

“Eve, they act like Pete is some kind of savage.”

 

“You called him a savage yourself once,” Eve said gently.

 

“He’s a cub, Eve, just a sharp-toothed eager cub. But these tests the kids are given. They say he fails them all. These people act as though he’s actually evil------”

 

“These people? We’re part of ‘these people’, Adam.”

 

“Do we belong here, Eve?”

 

“Yes.” She lay down and buried her cheek into the white pillow. “Yes.”

 

“I wonder.”

 

“Don’t wonder, Adam. If this valley is a strange place then it’s wonderful too. I have the feeling that if we doubt it, it can all disappear. And never have been. I’m afraid of that happening. So afraid.”

 

Her hand moved to mine and pressed. “Don’t ask questions, Adam. For my sake don’t ask them.”

 

“Honey, I have to------”

 

“You have to belong, Adam. We all have to belong. Trisha already does. Can’t you see that in her face? I’ve never seen her look more beautiful or be more quietly attentive to whatever she’s doing. Composure and peace. I feel them too. And I’m happy that our new child will be born here. You and Pete must learn------”

 

“Pete says he won’t go back to school.”

 

“He’ll go back. We’ll make him go back. It’s important to all of us that he goes back.”

 

“He can have a couple of days at home, give him time to think it over.”

 

“No,” Eve said gently. “He’s behind already. He can’t afford to miss his lessons.”

 

Eve closed her eyes and soon I heard the rhythm of her breathing change. Moonlight shone on her face and on the full white mound where the summer sheet curved over her stomach.

 

I lay awake. I listened to the creaking and settling of the house around us. I thought of the laden apple trees and peach trees and the rich valley soil. I remembered how Judge Whymore had taken the cover from Yellow Bird’s cage and shaken his head sadly. I thought of the glint of blood on Trisha’s white cheek.

 

Something flapped wildly outside the bedroom window. For an instant, sitting bolt upright, I saw the gleam of yellow eyes and the cruel curve of beak. Then the vast night bird was gone, whatever it had been, planing away over yellow acres of meadows and woods with a screech.

 

I stood at the window and looked down towards the edge of the woods. In the glow of moonlight I tried to separate light from shadow, real from unreal. And then I was sure. I could see her poised there, bent forward as she watched the house. By her side was the dog Pete had described to us once.

 

The dog lifted its snout to the silver sky and howled. The note rose until it trembled from the mountains and filled the night with its call. I heard Eve start awake.

 

“Adam, what is it?”

 

Suddenly I pressed my face to the cool glass. I stared unbelieving at the small figure darting from the house below me and making swiftly across the grass towards the woods.

 

Once, he looked back. He might have seen my white face at the black window.

 

But he turned and ran on. The girl and the dog came to meet him.

 

“Pete!” My lips broke against the pale glass. “Pete!”

 

I went up into the woods after him. As I climbed through the sword-shadows, roots and earth underfoot, the moon began to set.

 

A single shaft of red light gleamed between the trees and I heard the low growl of an animal ahead. The sound brought my arm hairs prickling erect.

 

She stood beside the softly snarling animal, one hand fondling its ears. She looked about eighteen years old, her hair long and blonde, face an oval of shadow. She wore blue jeans and a thin black sweater and her feet were bare.

 

The growling of the animal went on as I faced them. I could see its fiery eyes and the glint of white teeth. Its ears were erect, its coat harsh and black in the last light of the moon.

 

“A wolf?” I said wonderingly.

 

“The Wolf, mister.” Her voice was low and lilting with the sound of the woods and countryside. “They kilt ‘em all, all but General. He was a cub an’ I nursed him. Now he’ll eat out your throat if I say.”

 

“Where’s Pete?” I said softly.

 

“Your boy? Pete’s a fine boy. He’s safe.”

 

“Where is he?”

 

The wolf growled. “I cain’t tell you,” the girl said.

 

I clenched my fists and unclenched them. The moon had gone. The woods were black, the figures indistinct and unreal.

 

“Who are you?”

 

“M’name’s Ruth. Ruth Kitel.”

 

“Ruth, listen to me. Do you know what is happening here in the valley?”

 

“Dumb Brother knows. But he cain’t tell. Cain’t tell me ‘cause I cain’t talk with my mind. General knows. Dumb Brother told General...”

 

“Who is Dumb Brother?”

 

“What I told you. My dumb brother. I guess his name is Josh.”

 

“Where can I find Josh?”

 

“You find Dumb Brother and y’find your boy.”

 

“Where?”

 

“Cain’t tell.”

 

I stepped angrily forward. The wolf growled a low warning and the girl put her hand on its ruff.

 

“Take it real easy, mister.”

 

“Ruth,” I said softly, “what are you doing up here? You—and Josh—and General. What are you hiding out here in the woods for?”

 

“Not just three of us,” she said. “There’s more. Lot more. And now Pete.”

 

“Pete can’t stay.”

 

“That’s f’r Pete to say.”

 

“He’s just a boy!”

 

The wolf growled. She said softly, “I got to go, mister. Done try t’follow me, or General will feed off you.”

 

“Ruth, why do you want Pete?”

 

“Pete is the one who wants us, mister.”

 

“You said there were others, others besides you and Dumb Brother. Who are the others? Where are they?”

 

“Who?” she said. ‘Where?” She laughed softly. “Why, they all aroun’ you now. They bin watchin’ you all this time. Didn’t you see?”

 

Something clattered in the brush behind me and I whirled. Small eyes stared out at me, then blinked to darkness. There was a woosh and a roar of wings overhead and two flights of birds banked like bombers over the tree tops, black crosses against the starglow.

 

Ruth was moving away, fading too.

 

“Ruth!” I called. “You wanted me to see you tonight! You sent that bird to draw me to the window. You knew I’d follow Pete into the woods.”

 

She turned and said softly, “I didn’t send the bird, mister. I cain’t do that. Only Dumb Brother can speak to the wild creatures.”

 

“You wanted to see me. Why?”

 

“I tole Dumb Brother you might be one of us. I said of all the people in the valley, you and Pete might belong here in the woods.”

 

“Perhaps I do. Take me to Dumb Brother, let me talk to him.”

 

“Can you talk with y’mind?”

 

“I don’t understand.”

 

“Then you cain’t.”

 

“I’m coming back, Ruth. I’ll be armed. Or I’ll have the police with me. I’ll be coming for Pete.”

 

“No gun in the valley, mister. No police neither.”

 

“I’ll go outside the valley.”

 

“You cain’t,” she said. “They won’t let you.”

 

“Won’t let me?”

 

“Try it. You’ll see. Ain’t no way any of us can leave this valley.”

 

* * * *

 

The lights were blazing in our house. Eve and Trisha sat in straight-backed chairs in the kitchen. When I entered the room Trisha went to the hot plate and poured steaming coffee.

 

Trisha’s eyes were big and soft. “He’s run off,” she said.

 

I nodded, then glanced at Eve.

 

“He’s gone. I couldn’t find him. He must be hiding out in the woods.”

 

Trisha brought me coffee. “That’s where he belongs. In the woods.”

 

I looked into her grey eyes and saw a screen come over them.

 

“He’s a little savage,” she said, turning away.

 

Outside, night breeze moved through lush apple crop and nibbled at the golden peach orbs. Rich soil lay black in furrows ready for more planting and folding, more growth. I watched my daughter move around the room. She wore a white nightdress over her own growing young body, midnight hair sweeping her shoulders. Her lips were pale and faintly smiling. Her cheeks were flushed with health, eyes clear and gently happy.

 

“Why?” I said softly.

 

Trisha’s warm back was turned to me.

 

“Why is Pete a savage?” I said.

 

“He just is, I guess. He was just born that way.”

 

“No one called him a savage when we lived outside the valley, Trisha.”

 

“Outside the valley?” Her voice was low and blurred with wonder. “That was forever ago.”

 

“Pete was good at his lessons then.”

 

“Yes.” Trisha’s head nodded gravely.

 

“But not now?”

 

“The lessons are different now. Pete won’t try. He doesn’t belong here.” Trisha turned and her eyes rested on mine.

 

“Am I a savage too, Trisha?”

 

Eve was watching us intently. Trisha nodded slowly. “Yes, Mr. Andersen says you might be.”

 

“He’s your teacher, isn’t he, Trisha?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“He teaches all of you. All you children. All except a few like Pete. And in a few months there’ll be more children for him to teach. What will he teach them, Trisha?”

 

“The new children won’t need teaching.”

 

“Did Mr. Andersen tell you that?”

 

“Yes. He said we’re to be kind and gentle to the new children when they come.”

 

“Isn’t it dangerous to be too kind, too gentle?”

 

“I don’t understand.”

 

“The turtles we saw at Pennekamp Reef last year. Do you remember them, Trisha?”

 

She nodded slowly.

 

“They’re protected there, Trisha. But in other places the turtles are hunted for their shells, or their flesh. A giant turtle might weigh hundreds of pounds and be able to carry a man on its back. But do you know what the hunters do ? They turn the turtles on their backs. And the turtle is helpless then. But it’s still protected by its shell. It can draw in its head and tail and legs. The hunters crack its shell open, Trisha. Under that hard casing the turtle is soft and vulnerable. Its beak is toothless and its body soft. There’s no way it can save itself, once its shell is split open------”

 

Trisha shook her head. “We’re not turtles.”

 

“Aren’t we, Trisha? Isn’t it possible that all of us, here in the valley, are being turned on our backs and having our shells cracked open?”

 

“Adam, are you serious?” Eve was looking at me with incredulous eyes.

 

“Something strange is going on here,” I said. “More than strange. The crops grow and come to fruit and our children are growing and becoming as golden and tender and helpless as those peaches on our trees, Eve! Suddenly every woman in the valley is having a child! Suddenly Yellow Bird beats out his brains on the wall. Suddenly our son, an absolutely normal and intelligent boy back home, is branded as a savage------”

 

“What are you afraid of, Daddy?” Trish said abruptly.

 

“Afraid?”

 

“Do you think that Mr. Andersen and Judge Whymore and the others have some sinister purpose in making this valley a paradise?” Her voice was gentle and mocking.

 

“Who are they, Trisha?” I said. “What do we really know about them?”

 

“They owned the valley. They gave it to us.”

 

“There are other people living in the valley, Trisha. Or there were. A girl called Ruth Kitel. And her brother. They lived here too. Now they’re hiding in the woods.”

 

“Hiding? From us?” She laughed softly.

 

“Hiding from something.”

 

“Adam,” Eve said sharply. “When did you find out about these people?”

 

“Tonight.”

 

“You mean Pete is up there with these------”

 

“Savages,” Trisha said.

 

Judge Whymore’s home stood in a cluster of trees on a knoll overlooking the Rich River. The night wind soughed gently through the top leaves and scratched branches against the star-specked shield of sky. The river was a fat black artery coiling below.

 

I drew the car to a halt and switched off the lights. I sat a moment, watching the house. It was in darkness. I glanced at my watch and the radium hands showed two in the morning. I snicked down the catch and opened the door and slid out and closed it again.

 

The front door of Judge Whymore’s house was open.

 

The patch of lighter shadow became the turn of a cheek. One eye was a distant pool of darkness. The triangle of whiteness was Judge Whymore’s dress shirt.

 

“Adam ?” His voice carried to me softly.

 

I walked closer and Judge Whymore came to meet me. His eyes twinkled and shone, his smile glinted.

 

“I couldn’t go to bed yet,” he said. “Such a beautiful night. I was taking a breath of this wine we call air.”

 

His dark and mellow suit smelled of cigar smoke and pleasurable evenings with friends. He put one hand on my arm and guided me towards the house.

 

“Mr. Andersen and the others, we old valley people, still like to get together now and then. But everyone has gone now. How about a nightcap?”

 

“I wanted to talk to you,” I said.

 

“I know,” Judge Whymore said. “And I to you, for a long time now, Adam.”

 

We sat in the big study of the fine old house, Judge Whymore’s eyes sparkling and flashing, brandy pooled in his glass like laughter.

 

“Oh, my, that boy of yours is a problem.”

 

“He never was a problem outside the valley.”

 

“Of course, of course, but our little community is rather special, Adam. You know that. You know it better than most. Adam and Eve. That influenced me, you know. Call me foolish, romantic, but it did.” Judge Whymore leaned forward, eyes glistening with humour. “Oh, that boy of yours. What a problem.”

 

“They often are. Have you had children of your own, Judge?”

 

“Children?” The glistening eyes held mine. “Children? Oh, no, Adam. Never.”

 

“What about Andersen, the teacher. Does he have------”

 

“Not Andersen either.”

 

“The others?”

 

“None of us has children,” Judge Whymore said. “None of us has a wife.”

 

I raised my glass and sipped from it, watching him over its rim. “Five wealthy bachelors. It was generous to share your valley with us. This project must have cost a great deal of money.”

 

“Well, yes, but it will have been worth it, Adam.”

 

“Worth it? Do you really think so, Judge?”

 

“Of course.” Judge Whymore rose to his feet and went to the window. He moved one hand and the curtains drew back, letting in the darkness. “Why not?”

 

“You’ve made people happy, Judge. But how long can it last? I mean, how long can the valley support the people you’ve brought here, and their children, and------”

 

“The valley will support them. Believe me, Adam, this will be a paradise.”

 

“For us?” -

 

The twinkle had gone from the eyes. “What do you mean, Adam?”

 

“The people you brought here are like rich soil, Judge. When the crop comes, the soil has no choice but to bear it.”

 

“The crop?”

 

“Who are the farmers, Judge? You or us?”

 

There was a glitter of metal in Judge Whymore’s fist. “How intelligent and how stupid you people can be.”

 

“So I was right.”

 

“Yes, you were right.”

 

“You’re not human.”

 

“We are human. These are not our shapes. But we are human.” The small gun in Judge Whymore’s fist caught the light and gleamed. “We came so far, Adam, to your earth. We chose this valley------”

 

“But people fought you. Ruth Kitel and Josh.”

 

“Dumb Brother. He is a telepath, able to communicate with animals. He instils hate in them, hate for us. But he will not stop us. We brought our soil here. Your people are the soil. Our seed was planted so simply—do you remember the medical examination you all submitted to? Precious seed, Adam, brought through sterile miles of space, from the world where our own people were dying. And soon it will crop. Your people will live peacefully with ours, until------”

 

“Until we die, and you take over.”

 

“We are not murderers, Adam. Not fiends. We had the power to take your planet. All we took was one valley------”

 

“This valley, how can you preserve it? What’s to stop outsiders from coming in and------”

 

“No one can come in. Or go out. Ever again.”

 

I sprang. The alien weapon spat a searing cold flame past my face. The heel of my hand hit Judge Whymore’s chin and hurled him violently backward. The weapon spun from his hand and tinkled into one corner of the room. I whirled and ran from the room, ran from the house, into the cool press of starlight.

 

The car started at the first twist of the ignition key. I accelerated in reverse as Judge Whymore appeared in the doorway of the house. The gun in his hand hurled freezing flame again. I spun the wheel and skidded down the dusty road winding from the knoll.

 

The river swept past as I turned left and picked up speed, making for home. Words spun in huge and silent fragments through my mind.

 

No one can come in. Or go out. Ever again.

 

Eve was standing in the starlight, in the wash of my headlights as I swung into the yard. But I could see the small windows of darkness, the same darkness that belonged to Whymore and the others, in her eyes. And the house behind her was too still, too watchful.

 

I stopped and we looked at each other through the pale windscreen.

 

“Adam.” Her lips made the words. “Come to us.”

 

Trisha stepped from the house. She walked with gentle eyes and womanly grace towards us. And, quite suddenly, I saw the ripeness of her belly under the soft white nightdress. Swelling pregnant ripeness.

 

Eve and Trisha.

 

Lost to me,

 

I gunned the car and spun the wheel and in the oblong of my mirror I saw their figures receding from me. Before I dipped over the final hill and out of sight I saw others join them. My neighbours.

 

My headlights cut tunnels in the night. I followed the road south through the valley, between the high mountains. Soon I came to the place where the road ended.

 

It did not end in any way I can describe. There was no wall, no gulf cleaved in the valley floor. It did not peter out or run abruptly into dense forest. I’m not sure if the road ended at all. Or whether, in my mind, there had come an ending instead.

 

There just was no place to go outside of the valley.

 

So I reversed the car and drove down into thick brush at the side of the road and carefully killed my lights and switched off the engine.

 

I stepped out and for a moment held the ignition key between my fingers. Then I hurled it away. I heard it tinkle to silence in the starlit brush.

 

A low growl carried to me.

 

Rustling and chittering began in the brush around me. Yellow eyes watched. Birds hopped from branch to branch, intently curious.

 

The black wolf emerged a few strides away from me. Ruth Kitel was at its side.

 

“You came,” she said.

 

“We can fight them. You, me, Pete and Dumb Brother.”

 

Her head shook. Her hand fell to fondle the black wolf’s neck. “General will lead the army.”

 

“General------?”

 

“This cain’t be man’s fight any more.”

 

<<CONTENTS>>

 

* * * *

 

SHOCK TREATMENT

 

Lee Harding

 

 

Australian author Lee Harding has a penchant for writing stories about “lonely” things, of cities and individuals and even alien things. Here, delicately portrayed, is the loneliness of the twilight of Man— brought there unexpectedly by his own inventiveness.

 

* * * *

 

Pietro stirred and opened his eyes. The face of the Keeper loomed over him. It was wise and considerate and was crowned by a magnificent mantle of long silver hair, and it was the most aged face he had ever seen. Now it smiled, and the pale bleached eyes looking down into his bore the weight of centuries.

 

“Now do you remember who you are, and why you are here?”

 

Pietro sat up upon his pallet. A residual confusion left him and was replaced by an eagerness to talk. The great walls of the Manse caught and reverberated his words. “Yes—now I can—remember.”

 

“Then speak.” The Keeper stepped aside so that he remained visible only on the periphery of Pietro’s vision. “The Manse wishes to hear your story from your own lips.”

 

Obediently Pietro’s mind slid backwards and remembered the many details of the day.

 

Shortly before dawn a light rain had fallen to prepare the world for the burgeoning sunlight, and hardly had the first warm rays of the sun begun to finger the landscape than the delicate wisps of cloud had dissipated, their purpose served, so that only a clear sky canopied the waking earth. A soft breeze stirred somewhere and began nudging the temperate climate about its business and with this movement began the small beginnings of the day.

 

He had been awake for some time, lying with his hands clasped together behind his head. He had watched the morning sky change from a searing vermilion to a gentle blue and had pondered upon the many sunrises of the world, and how each seemed different to the day before (and here it was the distance he had travelled since yesterday and the subtle but definite change in the landscape that provided the important factor of difference, and not the inhibited sky).

 

He sensed the quickening pulse of the land beneath him as the new day roused itself and contemplated the impending doom of mankind. Man might indeed be shuffling unwittingly towards oblivion but the very land he trod and had so carelessly sown would outlast his passing. The earth renewed itself with the dawn of each new day, patient with the restrictions which man, in his haste, had imposed upon it, content to endure until the end of time, when all things must cease. Yet, he mused, it seemed a pity that we—who dreamed so much—were not made more durable.

 

He had slept well and now his identity sought to reassert itself from among the dark folds of sleep. Slowly the tattered puzzle that was himself came together again and could be assessed. A sense of urgency accelerated the otherwise lethargic process of coming to full awareness—but was such haste necessary? The air was so mild this morning and hardly inducive to strenuous thinking, more amenable to casual reflection than to concentrated...

 

He sat up quickly. Momentarily his personality asserted itself over the malignant something that gobbled his thoughts and the desire for inertia was circumvented. His head cleared and the world around him snapped into sharper focus.

 

This was what Dominus had warned them about. This was why...

 

He raised one hand and touched with his fingertips the small grey cube fastened behind his left ear. He stroked it gently, drawing confidence from its smooth surface. Now the day no longer seemed comforting and the prospect of extended indolence unlikely now that the anxious little machine was busily tapping out its urgent message.

 

“The mornings will be the most dangerous time,” Dominus had warned. “Your personality will have to struggle to reassert itself as a whole. In sleep it disintegrates and must be pulled back together again and if the mind is sluggish then the stimulator may have difficulty getting through. Once you are fully awake the danger lessens. I can help you against the burden of the days, but the nights ... the nights are unpredictable.”

 

Filled again with the urgency of his mission, Pietro stood up and proffered an open palm to the invisible canopy which had protected him from the cold night air. The field weakened enough and he walked through. His bare feet trod moist, crisp grass and his skin tingled agreeably against the fresh mountain air. He wore only a pair of pale, fitted shorts, leaving behind the sleek sandals he usually wore. It had been many eons since man had had to cosset his body against the elements of the world.

 

He saw that he had slept in a slight hollow cradled by some unfamiliar trees and to refresh his mind he ascended the rise ahead and found himself facing east. The ground sloped gently down towards a shallow creek and beyond that the foothills faded away into the smudgy anonymity of the plains. Behind him and to the northwest the grass thinned rapidly and the first gaunt peaks of the escarpment thrust arrogantly skywards.

 

The world basked peacefully under the benevolent sun and there was no sign of man upon the face of the land, or none that he could see. Then a soft voice was borne to him upon the shoulders of the breeze and he heard sounds of splashing, such as a child might make with white palms slapping against water. The song seemed more like humming, a tuneful ululation to the newly-risen sun.

 

He began walking down towards the creek and as he approached the source of the sound the voice became louder and assumed a familiar quality. He stood for a moment and listened intently but could make out no words, only a soft, gentle crooning.

 

She came towards him from out of the shadows of some tall, benign willows and moved slowly downstream, her golden body wet and glistening in the sunlight, the cool water sucking at her calves, her breasts swaying gently in time with the movements of her arms as she essayed what could have been an ancient and simple dance movement plucked unknowingly from the rich confusion of her memories. Her eyes were soft and dreamy with the wisdom of a child and when she saw him her song died. They looked at each other and no words passed between them. Then she smiled and bent over to slap the water gently with her open hands.

 

“Selena,” he said. Some threadbare memory cast her name upon his lips. “Selena...”

 

She did not answer, but instead pressed her cupped hands to her lips. Captured water trickled through her fingers. Her eyes dipped and followed the dazzle of sunlight dappling the surface of the creek and saw how it was swallowed by the wide shadows further on and how it reappeared again a little way ahead. She moved off downstream taking her workless song with her.

 

Pietro turned slowly like a man in a dream and looked back the way he had come. He remembered the rumpled bed where they—not just he—had slept, how their naked bodies had rested secure in the airskiff and had been protected by the strong field of force, how...

 

How they had forgotten.

 

Now he could see the tiny smudge the stimulator made behind her ear and he remembered the growing, glassy look in her eyes and how he had feared for this day. She bent again to the water and he turned away, anguish burning what was left of his feelings.

 

He walked along the bank in search of her discarded skirt but even as he looked his concentration wavered and his feet took him off at a tangent to the creek and he wandered uphill and past the skiff, the bright glitter of its controls lost to him while his eyes fixed intently upon the mountains ahead. His mind was responding to the urgent pulsations of current the stimulator fed, but it was a mindless little machine and it only instilled in him the importance of his mission and placed any other thoughts on the periphery of his activities. So he forgot Selena, as she had forgotten him, and the stubborn spark of awareness that remained was firmly fixed upon his goal.

 

The blood began to surge quickly through his body and this in turn assisted the stimulator in its work and cleared his mind even more. He felt the bracing sting of the air and saw the sun strike brilliant shards of light from the topmost peaks ahead of him. He heard the sound of his own eager breath and felt the firm pressure of his bare feet upon the grass and, regularly, at ten-minute intervals, the subtle but insistent little stab of current from the stimulator enter his mind and shake loose the important memories.

 

Remember—he must remember!

 

His name was Pietro and ahead of him, beyond the mountains or nearer than that, was the Great Engine of the world. And he would find it. Now. At last. And for Dominus and for all mankind. If it existed. If it was there.

 

He kept thinking this for a very long time. It drowned the search for other memories, for Selena, for the reason he walked on foot when he could have taken the skiff, for the madness of his quest. It pushed aside the pain of his bloodied feet as he blundered his way up the narrow mountain pathway towards he knew not what, and when his weary body finally protested and collapsed and the weight of his exertions sundered his determination, the thought of his name and of his mission kept alive that priceless thing called sanity when everything else that had been important to him became lost and all churned together amidst the wreckage of his memories.

 

The Keeper stepped forward. “But that was yesterday. There is more ...”

 

And indeed there was. Pietro’s fingers found no small cube behind his ear but instead many cables and wires attached to his skull, but they did not frighten him. They were, he realized, an improvement upon the original stimulator and as such had been responsible for his recovery.

 

He remembered now that he had not always been alone and that there had been others before Selena. Many seekers had shared his quest but he had long since forgotten their names and these could not be brought back. Their task had been to locate the Great Engine of the world, and quickly, because . . .

 

“We are dying,” Dominus had said. “Not today, not tomorrow, but perhaps the generation after this—if there is another.” There was a malaise, a sickness, so insidious that it could not be isolated, analysed and acted upon. It had something to do with the mind, with the soul, whatever it was, but its effect was upon the genes of mankind. “We are forgetting. We are losing the ability to concentrate because there is nothing that needs concentrating upon.” It was hereditary and had already passed down through many generations. There had been no children in Landomar for decades. People had not so much lost the will to live but the urge to procreate and the birth-rate no longer existed. Instead their eyes glazed over in comfort and their senses atrophied and were forgotten. They lived but that was all. They became homeostats.

 

“We are in stasis,” Dominus cried, “and unless we find a cure for this sickness we will die. The human race will cease to exist.”

 

But the sickness was somewhere in the mind where the machines could not advise and the ability to communicate with their metal guardians was another of the skills forgotten by mankind. They made use of their cities and their skiffs and the countless machines that served them, but they no longer knew how or why such things worked and no longer cared.

 

Except for Dominus. He had been the last of the great Thinkers and he it was who devised a means of circumventing the sickness. He utilized his guttering knowledge of the mind to fashion the tiny cubes and contained within them the minute electrical charges and used them to bring a handful of people from out of their pleasurable torpor, and thrust the urgency of their unused memories upon them.

 

Pietro had been one of the few. “And this is only temporary,” Dominus explained. “The stimulators will help you to think efficiently, they will assist your recall and discourage slothful thoughts, but they are not a cure. For that we must seek elsewhere. We must find the Great Engine.”

 

The Great Engine?

 

A thing of legend, surely? Or so insisted Pietro’s revitalized memories. But Dominus insisted, logically, that such an Engine must exist, otherwise the world would collapse into chaos. The Planners had been men and would have planned for such an eventuality as this. Somewhere there must be an Ultimate machine responsible for All. If they could find it and present the problem of the malaise then perhaps all would be well. The cure was beyond the faltering minds of men and the guardians the Planners had built—but if there was a Great Engine then surely it would possess the ultimate knowledge and the solution to their plight?

 

This was his hope, his fervent wish, his only answer. And he sent them forth to find it.

 

* * * *

 

Pietro could remember the first thrill of being abroad in the world. Travelling from one small hamlet to another he recaptured some of the feeling of the First Travellers and his keen observations underlined the urgency of Dominus’s warning. The human race had fragmented and wandered off along individual byways. People had closed down their minds and blissfully followed whatever whim possessed their simple thoughts. Intercourse, both social and sexual, no longer existed. Communication had become bankrupt and had been discarded for the balm of abundance. Some sought the open spaces of the land and settled down comfortably wherever they chose. The world cared for them for that was the function of the world.

 

Others preferred the comfort of townships and some, like Pietro and his companions, chose to wander, but their eyes were lack-lustre and a smile was the limit of their indulgence and he found them dull company. The bountiful world looked after them and surely there was no further motivation for their existence?

 

Sometimes he travelled alone, sometimes with a friend, for their unfamiliarity of the terrain was such that their paths frequently crossed. They had no aids other than their own perceptions. Maps no longer existed and a villager’s knowledge of the rest of the world hardly extended beyond his own small area of ground or the dull thoughts within his own head.

 

So they wandered and wound about the face of the earth, their paths ever crossing with no plan, no skilled application to their search. And as they wandered their ranks diminished.

 

“I cannot say how long the devices will remain effective,” Dominus had said. “Once you are abroad there is no way of knowing how your minds will react to the insistent pulses. Perhaps they will . . . adapt. And if they do then you are doomed like your fellow men. That is why haste is important. Before ...”

 

Before they too succumbed to the sickness.

 

Pietro rolled restlessly upon the pallet. He had forgotten so much that even the powerful stimulus provided by the Manse could not revive. The names of his friends, the towns, the lands he had visited and the people he had forced conversation upon. How long had it been since Dominus had farewelled them and sent them forth upon their quest?

 

Time . . . time was an invention of the Thinker and his clever little cubes. They had resurrected an awareness of a progression of space beyond the limitations of night and day and provided a fresh burden for their weary minds.

 

“But you found the Manse,” the Keeper pointed out.

 

“Yes.” He had, and he smiled, and remembered.

 

In the last town they had visited they had found another Thinker. Frail and lonely he sat in his eyrie high above the city and told them of the Manse of the Keepers. “But I have heard of no ‘Great Engine’,” he said. “Although I see no reason to doubt that the Planners created such an organism.” He nodded his head sagaciously. “Yes, such a concept is . . . tenable. As a ... as a youth I heard tell of this place beyond the mountains—or was it actually in the mountains?—where the Keepers look after the running of the world. Of course, I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the tale, but...”

 

“We have been chasing phantoms such as this for many years,” Selena had whispered, and with the memory of her words came her face and the anguish of her loss. Pain twisted Pietro’s face into a grimace but he could not hold back the tumbling cascade of recent memories.

 

“One is much the same as another,” she added. “Tell me, great Thinker, how might we reach these high and lofty mountains?”

 

The Thinker had regarded her strangely. His lips moved uncertainly and his eyes shifted sideways towards Pietro. “Why . . . why . . . however did you come here then, my child?”

 

Her eyelids fluttered and then a dim spark lit up her eyes. “By ... we came by skiff.” Of course, she had forgotten.

 

They both looked upon her in silence. Pietro saw the deadly film already settling in her eyes and felt the weight of the great inertia coming down upon them both. There wasn’t much time left.

 

They left immediately. It was late afternoon and the quiet city soon lay far behind them and their fragile little craft crawled steadily towards the mountains to the north.

 

It had been many eons since man had hurried and his machines had likewise adapted to his needs. But Pietro had always been impatient for the slow speed of his craft and had often champed impatiently as it drifted inadequately at a handful of miles per hour. Had the pulse of life slowed so much?

 

By dusk the ramparts reached hesitantly above the horizon and the skiff adjusted itself slightly to accommodate the rising foothills. When night fell it carried them to the ground where they slept until the morning returned them to the world.

 

Pietro had awakened slowly and cautiously and achieved identity but the malignant something had finally claimed Selena in her sleep and he had lost her. His memories blurred and ran together now, a mad jumble of running, walking and falling, of bleeding feet and aching muscles and the final, sad blackout of all things.

 

“But I remember more!” he protested, trying weakly to rise from the ordeal of his memories. He was filled with the loss of Selena and the loss of man in general.

 

The Keeper stepped forward and gently pushed him back. “Of course you can, but such memories are private, personal, and of no use to the Manse. Now you must rest.”

 

Before he closed his eyes Pietro said, “But I do not remember ... I do not remember how I came here.”

 

“The Manse was aware of your progress and sent an emissary to bring you here. That was after you fell. After you exhausted yourself.”

 

“And not before?”

 

“The Manse was not . . . not aware of your condition prior to that. Now you must rest while the Manse digests your information.”

 

Pietro smiled, and relaxed. “Then I have found the Great Engine?”

 

The Keeper smiled enigmatically. “The world itself is a Great Engine, child. You have found the driver.”

 

Happily, Pietro submitted himself to sleep.

 

The Keeper looked down upon him. A simulacra of the Manse, it had become unfamiliar with true flesh and, remembering, reached out a synthetic hand to stroke the smooth young face before him.

 

“Rest,” it said softly, “and when you awake all will be well.” And then, after a moment of silent contemplation, it turned away and made the empty halls ring hollowly to its footsteps as it made its way unhurriedly to the Master Room. There it stood and watched the many wheels spin and the lights twitter while the great man-machine that was the central computer wrestled anxiously with the problem brought by the man called Pietro.

 

There were times when the entity that was the Manse suspected that once, very long ago, a part of it had been human. What part it had never been able to ascertain for the Planners had made contemplative thought almost impossible in that so much responsibility for the organization and efficient running of the vast engine of the world had been placed, metaphorically, in its hands. Over the ages and a little at a time the Manse had added to itself considerably and there was the possibility that eventually it would be able to shunt a part, a tiny part of itself, aside for purely contemplative thoughts, and when that time came it envisioned the unravelling of many mysteries, the answers to which would benefit both man and machine.

 

If such ability had been immediately available the crisis that Pietro’s coming brought might never have happened. The fault of the Planners had been in considering that man and machine could be successfully separated. Only an intelligent integration of the two would ensure the survival of both, and perhaps one day the Manse would solve the riddle of its existence and the name, the name of its previous incarnation. The part that had once been a man.

 

Some of its reactions were almost embarrassingly human —like the amused perversity of existing in four dimensions and being able, in the simulated form of the Keeper, to investigate inside, as well as outside, the range of its normal perceptors. But such amusements were hastily put aside in order that the problem at hand might be dealt with effectively and with a minimum of wasted effort.

 

The Keeper froze into immobility while the Manse mused upon its answer.

 

It was a day later when Pietro was awakened. His body now thoroughly refreshed and his mind no longer under stress, he sat up and took notice of what the Keeper said.

 

“You will return to Dominus and inform him that the Manse had studied the problem and is ready to instigate effective measures.”

 

Pietro stood up. “And what are these ‘effective measures’?”

 

The Keeper turned aside. “I am not at liberty to say.” It ushered Pietro through the doorway and down a towering hallway. “It is much too early to correctly ascertain the nature of the remedy, but be assured that the Manse will hasten for the need is dire.”

 

A great door opened before them and the suddenly chill air of the mountains drifted in. Pietro shivered. He was suddenly conscious of the lack of a small grey cube behind his ear and his fingers explored the area uncertainly.

 

The Keeper smiled and lightly patted his shoulder. “You will have no further need for that, child. The Manse has taken it for study and you will not miss it.” From the voluminous folds of its robe it took a small flask and handed this to Pietro. “But you will need this. It will provide sustenance until you reach your destination.”

 

Pietro looked around him but found no skiff, no conveyance of any sort. The Keeper judged correctly the nature of his thoughts and added, “The Manse deems it necessary that you proceed as you are. The sandals you have will protect your feet indefinitely, they will not wear out for many centuries. Now go and make haste.”

 

A sudden memory leapt to Pietro’s lips as the Keeper turned away. “Selena! What about Selena-”

 

“She is well. The world would not harm her. You will find her where you left her. Goodbye.”

 

It turned and was gone. The great door slammed shut and only the eternal mountain remained. It seemed incredible that in there, buried behind billions of tons of rock, the great being that was the Manse sprawled silently and governed the Great Engine of the world.

 

The air was indeed cold. Pietro hurried down the pathway that would lead him to the foothills. To Selena—and then home, to Dominus, wherever that was.

 

* * * *

 

Inside the Manse the Keeper made its way unhurriedly to the comfortable cubicle where it slept away the centuries. It had enjoyed the brief contact with humanity again and its mind—the mind that also belonged to the Manse—was troubled and uncertain. Yet there had been only one logical choice to make and the Manse was an entirely logical creation. The Keeper lay down on a divan and crossed its hands across its chest. A whiff of something intangible filled the room and the cubicle closed and its vision blanked out and the remainder of its cogitation took place in the great vaults of the Manse’s memory cells.

 

It was true that the malaise was a psychological one and one already deeply imbedded in the human genes. Death through inertia, out of indolence and from a surfeit of... of certainty.

 

The Manse would change all that, instigate the first alteration to the Plan in many millennia. The First Planners had made the lives of men too complete. They had remade the world to remove the burden of uncertainty from the minds of men so that they might relax and enjoy their ordered lives to the full—and now the Manse was going to return one of those gigantic uncertainties to the world. It had taken a cue from Dominus’s stimulators. It would replace the predictability of the little machines with the gross uncertainty of one of the first principles of nature. The Planners had harnessed the very forces of the Earth itself and impounded them for all time. Or so they thought.

 

The Manse had decided and the decision had not been an easy one. It had charted the possible repercussions of its actions and knew that many human beings would die as a result of this action. The remainder was an un-proven quality. But the race was doomed to extinction unless some new factor was introduced into their lives, something that would act, like the primitive stimulators, but on a much greater, planet-wide basis.

 

Reluctantly—because of the foreknowledge of many deaths—the Manse moved into action and thrust uncertainty, grim and terrifying, upon the drowsing people of the Earth.

 

It was several hours later and many miles from the Manse that Pietro felt the earth move beneath his feet. It seemed to shudder like some disturbed animal. He stopped his progress and stood there uncertainly, in sight of the foothills now and the creek winding towards Selena and their skiff. (He remembered them! He remembered them!)

 

Had it been his—imagination—or had the earth really moved? As if to answer his unvoiced question it moved again. Feeling uneasy he quickened his pace down the uneven pathway and was soon racing across the undulating fields towards the creek. His body had never known such incredible reserves of power. Later he noticed that the eastern sky had become dark and had begun to move down upon him and he became afraid and his steps faltered.

 

The enormous processes which the Manse had put into operation would take some time to draw to a conclusion but already the ancient grip upon the climate of the world had been eased. The great engines buried deep in the arctic waters guttered and died. The earth shook when it felt the invisible bonds removed and the atmosphere roiled in sudden shock and swept willy-nilly around the world until the powerful and now unimpeded solar winds began to shape it once again.

 

The first storm of his life lashed down upon Pietro when he was still some distance from the skiff. He had never before faced such wrath and his first fear of the dreadful black sky became a fresh terror when it cracked open with a monstrous flash of light and unleashed bitter sleet that tore away at his unprotected body. He cried out and burst into a run, but suddenly there was nowhere to go, no shelter from the raging sky. He scampered about like a frightened animal in search of the trees he knew protected the skiff, but already it was impossible to see more than a few yards in front of him. The world had become an impregnable wall of darkness lashed by frightful winds.

 

He fell to the ground sobbing and let the rain tear at his body. His hands covered his face and through his closed fingers he could perceive flashes of intolerable light. He pulled his hands away and stared up at the harsh forks of lightning tearing up the sky and felt the surge of ancient memories jostling to the forepart of his mind. And his fear diminished. He stood up and let the rain course down his body and was no longer so afraid. He managed to make use of the irregular flashes of lightning to pick his way across the darkened landscape. He found the grove of trees and Selena huddled terrified in the skiff. He gave a glad cry and hurried towards her.

 

“Selena!”

 

She did not know him. Her eyes held only terror. Gently he took her in his arms and let her fear die slowly upon his chest. The inside of the skiff was under several inches of water and he laughed at the ineffective shield that had never been promised such fury as now pressed down upon it.

 

He stroked her wet hair against the nape of her neck and whispered, “It’s going to be all right, Selena. Everything’s going to be all right.”

 

She might never remember him but she would remember that she was a woman. And other things as well. He drew confidence from that thought now that he understood what the Manse had done. There would be many deaths, but they could not be avoided and mankind—or what was left of it—could never know the same indolent confidence it had until recently possessed. Perhaps there was hope, real hope, after all. Dominus would be pleased.

 

He exulted alone in his knowledge and Selena clung hungrily to him while his laughter roared defiance at the suddenly friendly sky.

 

“Wake up, you fools. Wake up! Wake up!”

 

Selena raised her dumb and as yet uncomprehending eyes to her stranger while all around them and with a great scream of triumph nature was usurping her ancient dominion.

 

<<CONTENTS>>

 

* * * *

 

DEAD TO THE WORLD

 

H. A. Hargreaves

 

 

With every human being identified by computer from birth to death, the State had a foolproof system of control—until an electrical fault recorded one man as “deceased” when he was still alive.

 

* * * *

 

In the murmuring voice of a thousand quiet sounds, the great machine sang softly to itself; a never-ceasing, contented sort of song, sentient, and, somehow self-contained. It sprawled beneath innumerable acres just on the outskirts of the once-small city of Rugby, North Dakota. Through its myriad channels, like blood through a human body, two hundred and fifty million cards moved swiftly, surely, momentarily caught here to receive an electronic notation, passing elsewhere to be relieved of that notation. In a hospital in Indianapolis a baby was born, placed before a scanner, touched briefly by tendrils at head, chest, wrist and ankle. A new card appeared in the smaller machine beneath that great city, to be duplicated an instant later at Rugby. IN97246IND38452 had been incorporated into the population of Americanada, had received her permanent ID card, and no matter what name she might be given by her parents, no matter what her friends might call her, no matter what husband she might choose, she would remain to the machines, those recorders, masters and manipulators of vital statistics, all sixty-five of them if required, as IN97246IND38452.

 

In Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, a police robot picked up one male, adult, from the prone position into which he had fallen, carried him through the crowd to the cruiser at the curb, and after a cursory examination fished an ID card from the body’s pocket, passed it through a scanner, and made a report. In machine number fifty-eight, about fifty miles north of that metropolis, card SA537SAS8442 was flicked into a side channel, passed beneath several recorders, and dropped at last into a receptacle marked Deceased, stilled for the first time in several years. Again, an instant later, card SA537SAS8442 was sidetracked in the machine at Rugby, to drop eventually into a similar receptacle. This time, however, the one-in-a-hundred-million possibility discounted by technicians and authorities came to pass. As the card was flicked into the side channel a minute variation in current caused an “echo”, and the card behind was flicked in too. So it happened that BE96647CON374699 came to rest, and shortly thereafter at Danbury, Connecticut, the duplicate did likewise —Deceased.

 

In Bethel, Connecticut, it was one of a lifetime of identical days for everyone, including Joe Schultz. Having finished his work at the antique furniture plant, Joe had decided that he wanted the company of an autoteria rather than the drab silence of his bachelor roomette. Prices being the same whether you slipped your ID card into the slot at home or at the autoteria, the main difference was that you could see the actual rows of offerings rather than mere pictures, and there was life, such as it might be, around you. Moreover, there were opportunities for an enterprising man like Joe. He had punched his choices, picked them up at the robo-cashier’s desk, and noted with some discomfort that his receipt was blue, though it was still nearly a week till “pay day” rolled around. Well, he thought, often enough he was on the red by this time, and had once or twice even had to go through the lengthy routine of securing extra credit to be placed against his account a few days before pay day. And he was one of the fortunate ones: he actually performed physical work of a certain speciality, thereby gaining a little higher credit in his account. (Let no one ask how he had got the job.) He wondered how others could survive as mere button pushers.

 

Joe looked carefully at the diners, finally choosing one somewhat overweight, middle-aged woman who sat alone with her tray of calory-rich foods. Slipping deftly between tables, he came to a firm stop, flashed a brief smile, said “May I?” and sat solidly opposite her. For the first moment or so he concentrated on the fairly meagre contents of his own tray, ignoring the faint but insidious background music which was psychologically designed to speed up the act of eating, to move more people through the place each hour. Then he began to size up his table companion, the “target”, in order to plan his brief campaign. She was obviously unaffected by the music. A tough case for his purpose, but this made it more of a challenge. As an opening gambit, he deliberately pushed aside some of his greasy french-fried potatoes, clucking softly to himself. He caught a flicker of interest in the woman’s eye, a hint of surprise, and it was all too easy after that

 

“Keelosterole,” he said to his companion, stabbing with his fork at a pale-green snap bean. “You know,” he added, as the woman’s brow furrowed with concentration, “gets the insides of your arteries.” He went back to worrying the contents of his plate for a moment. Then, just as her attention was about to shift away from him, he flashed a rueful grin at the woman. “Had a buddy go that way last year, so I’m touchy on the subject. Nice guy he was, though. Big, happy, healthy, he looked, until the day he . . . went. Hardened up arteries, the Doc said. Yes, sir. Heart couldn’t take it, you know. Doc warned him. He said leave those calories alone, and those fat foods . . . they’re poison. Nothin’ but poison. Old Art wouldn’t listen, though. Nice guy, he was.”

 

Joe subsided, just barely watching out of the corner of his eye as the woman’s mouth went hard and straight. Then she shrugged her shoulders and picked up her fork. Joe shoved his half-empty plate away and lit up a cigarette, watching the news-fax as its words crawled across the far wall. The woman paused, fork halfway to her mouth. She took a mouthful of food. Slowly her fork came down, dropped to her plate as she sighed, pushed back her chair and heaved herself up. Only after she had left the restaurant did Joe slip her dessert on to his tray, finish his own meal in leisurely fashion and savour his prize. It had been easy after all.

 

Feeling as much at peace with the world as he ever did, Joe decided that his little victory warranted an extra cup of coffee, sidled over to the beverage area in a mood of self-congratulation, and slid his ID card into the slot. For a fraction of a second it failed to register on him that his cup remained empty, that in fact the machine had rejected his card. Puzzled, he looked at card, cup and machine, then tried again. Again the machine dropped his card into the rejection tray. Joe stood in complete amazement, trying to think out what might be wrong, only moving away when the line behind him began to grow restive. Such a thing had only happened once before to him, and then he had been given sufficient warning from his red receipts but had chosen not to ask for advance credit until he actually ran out. But he knew the simple meal he had bought just now could not have run him completely through the blue and on to the red.

 

Shaking his head, he moved down to the end of the service spaces, to a slot with a malevolent red light over it, and a sign which read Official Enquiries. After a moment of hesitation he slipped his card into the slot and waited. The hum of scanning equipment stopped, but the machine retained his card for what seemed an agonizing length of time. Finally, with a kind of hiccough, the card was released, and from a special slot at the side there issued an instruction sheet. Joe pulled the sheet free and read with mounting incredulity:

 

Notice: The card you have found belonged to a person now deceased. Please deposit it in the nearest Government Incinerator chute, labelled Official Documents.

 

Warning: It is a legal offence to retain the ID card of any person deceased. A record of this enquiry has been preserved, and action will be initiated if the accompanying ID card is not destroyed within 48 hours.

 

Aware now that something had gone drastically wrong with his “records”, Joe was quite uneasy, but still, his mind told him, it must be relatively easy to straighten this out. He knew that occasionally something went wrong, and he had heard of people who had run into problems larger than mere overspending. There was the legend of the guy who had been billed for something like one hundred times his expected life earnings, though. Seems, Joe mused, that he was made president of something so he could pay it off. That’s right—he was made president of the foreign country whose loan had been placed against his account. Well, at least his own next step was clear. He would have to find a written enquiry booth, fill out a form and get this straightened out quick. Suiting action to thought, he left the autoteria and headed for the local government building.

 

Half an hour later, Joe Shultz, deceased, was on the walkway again, shaking his head in utter disbelief. He had tried three different forms, none of which seemed precisely to fit his case, each one being returned by the machine with the identical notice and warning he had first received. Finally, in desperation, he had filled out a form requesting information on persons deceased and received a sheet directing him to his nearest Coroner’s Office or an accredited Spiritual Advisor. With this sheet still clutched in his hand, he returned slowly towards his apartment block, painfully attempting to make some sense out of the situation. But more complications were still to come. On arriving at his own door, he found a pair of robo-movers meticulously cleaning up after having removed all his personal belongings and the one or two pieces of furniture that he had purchased over the past few years.

 

It was too much. In a burst of anger, Joe stepped in front of one of the movers and wrenched the polishing cloth out of its grasp. “Whatta you tryin’ to do,” he shouted at the machine. It simply stood still, waiting, humming to itself, while the second machine, obviously more complex, turned and moved swiftly up to him. Scanners moved up and down briefly, another sheet of paper was ejected at Joe, and both machines went back to work. Helplessly, he stood and read the directions for “Next-of-kin”, which advised him that his goods had been removed under seal to a government warehouse, pending issue of redirection orders, and warning him that it was a felony to attempt to remove any article, or to impede, obstruct, or in any way to interfere with the work of the robo-mover. Now totally confused, Joe wandered aimlessly from the building and down the walkway trying to understand what had happened to him in so brief a time, and to think of something, anything he could do next

 

The Coroner’s Office, his first sheet had said. But it would be closed now, he realized, and moreover if it was like the few offices he had been in there would be a robo-clerk anyway. He watched the faces of the few people moving purposefully along the walkway, wondering idly if any of them had ever run into such a problem. It would do no more good to ask for help from any of them than it would have to drop on to one of the motorways far beneath him, with its unceasing flow of muted thunder. You lived your own life, these days, and the fewer questions asked the better. Stop that burly guy there, for example, and ask him for help, he thought. Looks like the kind who would set you up for the hospital first, and find out later if you were trying to heist him.

 

“The hospital,” Joe said aloud. That might be the answer. At least temporarily. He had been in hospital twice in his life, and each time it had been a very pleasant experience. Lots of rest, good food, even some nice-looking girls around, though they didn’t have time to talk to ordinary patients. He could stand that, all right, at least for the night. Of course, if they stuck him in the analyser he might get thrown out, but the second time he’d been admitted they hadn’t examined him till the next morning. He remembered being pretty riled up over that, thinking at the time that he might die before they got around to finding out what was wrong with him. And he’d felt pretty foolish the next day when they told him he’d just had too much of a bad batch of Alkade down at the Bethel Auto-Bar. At least it was worth the chance that they would admit him tonight, before they found out he was faking. “1900 right now,” he mused. “Can’t take a flipper anyway, if I can’t pay the fare, so if I walk it will be 1930 when I get there. I’ll wait till 2000 and then try to get in.” He felt a bit better now that his mind was functioning again, though he still wasn’t sure what he’d do next day. He set out towards the hospital, mulling over possibilities.

 

The little park in front of the hospital was pleasant, one of the newer models ingeniously designed to provide an illusion of isolation almost immediately one entered it. It took a sharp eye to determine which of the shrubs, trees and flowers were synthetics at this time of year, when everything was determined to grow, no matter what the odds. Joe noticed that the grass had recently been replaced: there was one spot where the manufacturer hadn’t got enough green into it. In all, though, the effect came through, and he began to relax a bit for the first time since his card had been rejected. It was almost dusk, when the robo-watchman arrived and the concealed air rejuvenators had begun to hum, before he decided to try his luck at the admittance entrance.

 

Taking a deep breath, he stepped slowly through the doors and up to the desk, where a slim and decidedly junior staff member was busily stacking punched cards. In a hoarse and, he hoped, sick-sounding voice, he gave his name and asked to be admitted. The girl straightened up, faced him, and asked, “Could you give me some idea of what the, uh, nature of your complaint is?”

 

Joe had already thought this out in the park, and now he looked down at the floor, shuffled a little, looked at the back wall of the office and muttered, “Well, Miss, I’d rather tell a doctor. But it hurts a lot, a lot, you understand. If I have to ... I could wait a little . . .” He let his voice trail off and shuddered slightly.

 

“I’ll let you go to one of the emergency stalls,” the girl said quickly, “and send an intern as soon as possible.”

 

“Thanks,” Joe said between gritted teeth. “Which way is it.”

 

“Down this hall to your left,” the girl answered, and as he turned to leave she continued. “You have your ID card with you, of course.”

 

“Sure,” Joe said, fishing it out and holding it up in front of the desk while she rose as if to glance at it. Then, faster than he could have anticipated, she reached out and took it from him, held it between trim thumb and forefinger, and slipped it into the admissions machine. Numbly, Joe stood waiting, not sure of what might happen next, but certain that something would. It did.

 

While the girl watched, horrified, two light-green robo-attendants moved swiftly and silently to a stop, wheeled stretcher between them. Before she could do anything to prevent it, they had picked up a submissive Joe, slipped him on to the stretcher, strapped him down and headed back down the hall. Joe had no idea of where he was going, but he was fairly sure it wasn’t to an emergency stall. He was deftly wheeled into an elevator, plummeted into the depths of the building, and just as deftly wheeled out into a subterranean corridor.

 

In front of a door labelled Morgue they stopped for a brief second, and as it opened soundlessly Joe suddenly realized what had happened. He was paralysed with fear as the robo-attendants lined him up with toes pointing towards a bank of overlarge drawers. One of the machines opened the drawer as the other efficiently loosened the straps. Without really thinking, Joe sat bolt upright, slipped around the attendant, and made for the end of the bank of drawers. Looking back over his shoulder, he caught a glimpse of the two robo-attendants moving in futile circles, searching the floor for their missing body. Then the door opened in front of him and he was through it, into the corridor, and leaning weakly against the wall.

 

Summoning up his strength, Joe headed back to the elevator, punched the button and glanced feverishly over the floor list beside it. “Walkway Admissions—35,” he read, and as the elevator door slid back he whipped in and punched 35. Breathing deeply as the car ascended, he tried to slow his racing pulse. Then, moving quickly without actually running, he retraced his path. Ahead, the little girl, as white now as her uniform, was explaining to a full-fledged nurse, waving his ID card to give emphasis. Breaking into a run, Joe passed between them, grabbing his card on the way. Only when he was across the walkway and into the park did he stop, slumping down on to a bench to seek for calmness after his narrow escape.

 

The robo-watchman had passed twice, and was standing unobtrusively but warily in the shadows of a Manchurian Elm down the path, before Joe had collected his wits sufficiently to consider his next move. Hospitals were out. The Coroner’s Office was closed. His “accredited Spiritual Advisor” seemed like the only remaining hope, and here there was a small problem. He had never had even a nodding acquaintance with a Spiritual Advisor, though he knew they existed in some sort of continental association whose advertising he had been exposed to.

 

Trying hard to remember the name of the association, he went quickly back across the street, down the express escalator till he came to a visitors’ entrance, and cautiously moved through the hospital lobby to a seetalk booth. Thumbing the scanner for the Yellow P., he watched racing capitals until S appeared, then hit the mid-speed until Sp came up, and switched to slow until Spiritual Advisors showed. “Christian Unitarian Spiritual Society” was second in a short list that began with “Buddhist Friends Society”. Scanner reversed, he moved at high speed back to the C range, stopping at CUSS. It took a short time to find the address of his nearest advisor, the list again containing fewer names than he had expected. He was about to place his call when he realized that he could no longer do so, since one had to present his ID card even for a collect call. Instead, he memorized the address and took to the walkway yet again, happy to be doing something to keep his mind from being paralysed by creeping hysteria. Within fifteen minutes he was standing before the sub-level apartment door of Benjamin Scroop, B.A., M.A., B.D., Ph.D., D.D., Spiritual Advisor.

 

Scroop, Joe quickly learned, was a man who clearly gave far more attention to the needs of the spirit than the body. He stood about six-five, weighed about one-sixty, and had huge, wistful brown eyes that looked from a distance like chocolate mints adrift in a bowl of instant milk. Eager to be of help, he invited Joe to step in and unburden himself, and Joe accepted. It was incredible, Joe thought, as he squeezed on to a thinly-upholstered bench at one side of a fold-down table, how much could be recessed into the walls of an Efficiency Living Space. He had read about the E.L.S. in passing, but this was his first experience with one. Here were three rooms, counting bathroom, in a space smaller than his one-and-a-half. No door, of course, between this and the bedroom, where he could see three triple-tiered bunks folded up to the wall. Scroop answered his casual question with a rueful “Seven. Seven children, my wife and myself. The children seem to spend every waking minute at the House Centre, and my wife works. It’s only crowded for breakfast, supper and sleeping.”

 

Joe made an inane comment about not needing an office with such an arrangement, thinking all the while that in these surroundings a well-fed soul would be much more comfortable than a well-fed body. But it was time to get down to his problem, since he figured the rest of the family would be back pretty soon. Briefly he sketched out what had happened to him, and filled in details in response to precise questions from the extremely sharp Scroop. This character, Joe thought, might be a Spiritual Advisor, but he certainly seemed to know the shape of the hard world outside his door. He allowed himself a bit of hope.

 

But any optimism he might have generated was soon squelched by Scroop, who said quite frankly that in his dealings with the Coroner’s office he had gone through more foul-ups than straightforward situations. No more than two months ago they had, on the same day, cremated a Fleshly Resurrectionist, and mummified a Fiery Purger, both with relatives seeking Scroop’s counsel. If anything, the robo-clerks were more to be trusted than the occasional human clerk, who invariably fed the wrong data into the larger machines. As for the Chief Coroner, he was in Danbury Proper and Scroop had suspicions that he wasn’t human either, since his decisions were arbitrary and calculated to inflict spiritual suffering on the living, if they could merely subject the dead to indignities. Joe commented that from his own knowledge of the world it sounded as if the Chief Coroner were all too human. However, he saw there would be little help in that direction, and asked if there were any other way Scroop could think of to get him out of his now-desperate situation.

 

Scroop could think of little more that might be done, and they were slowly discarding possibilities when, in quick succession, the rest of the Scroops arrived home for sleep. A few of the youngest wanted milk, and Joe, after much urging, accepted the cup of coffee he had tried to get so long ago. Well, it seemed ages ago, even if it was only five hours. Scroop used his Householder’s ID Card, and Joe couldn’t help but notice in such close quarters, that the family was on the red. He felt an unaccustomed flush of guilt, as he realized how hard it must be to feed and clothe this mob. Scroop had seen his discomfort, however, and laughed a bit ruefully, trying to make Joe more at ease. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “In this house it’s the children who feed the rest of us, anyway.”

 

Joe wasn’t used to family life, but he knew that children didn’t get all that much government allowance, so he raised an eyebrow. Scroop explained. “You see, all the money that people donate to our Society is deducted from their accounts by the government. It’s used first to cover land taxes and rent, next mission expenses, then operating expenses, and finally the rest is evenly distributed in salaries. I make about half as much in a month as one of my children gets in subsidy. But the children, bless them, believe in the work I do, so they have all, at age six, given up their personal allowance entirely to our household account. It’s a rare display of faith in their parents on the part of youth, especially for these days.” Joe was forced to agree. Things hadn’t been so totally controlled by government until after he had left home, and he wondered if he would have consented to such a thing when he was a kid, considering the tough times his family had seen in the Soaring Sixties.

 

After the children and Mrs. Scroop had gone to bed, Joe and Scroop sat talking for a short time, but it was clear that there would be no solution here. Scroop promised to make out as many forms as he could think of that would be remotely related to Joe’s case, but he did not hold out much hope for quick relief. He offered to put Joe up and feed him, and he was sincere, but he and Joe knew it was next to impossible under the circumstances. Without seeming to rush, Joe brought the talk to an end. “If I don’t mosey along,” he finally said, “my friend Max will’ve gone to bed. And he doesn’t like to be woke up late at night. He gets real ugly. So thanks for everything, and I’ll be dropping around sometime. I might even take in one of your services.” After a firm handshake and a look of real compassion from Scroop, Joe found himself outside, heading for the blessed walkway, this time presumably to see the mythical Max, who, Joe decided, lived under a bench in the park across from the hospital.

 

Back in the park, with the time nearing a murky 2400, Joe carefully chose a secluded nook surrounded by thick shrubs and overhung by an original New England oak. He had not realized how tired he was until he stretched out with his jacket under his head. Then, despite the turmoil of his thoughts as he tried to find some way out of his dilemma, he dropped into a deep, uneasy sleep. He dreamed of running down long, twisting corridors whose walls pulsed rhythmically, threatening to close on him. Paradoxically, it seemed that he could always see a dark abyss at the end, no matter what direction he tried. Then, dimly, he became aware of an insistent, toneless voice, and slowly roused to find the robo-watchman standing over him in the darkness of the park.

 

“It is forbidden to remain off the pathways after dark,” the watchman repeated. Joe was stiff, incredibly tired and totally discouraged. He could think of nothing more to do, so he lay there in complete resignation.

 

“I will be forced to call for the police if you do not leave at once,” said the watchman, and Joe thought, well, it had to come to this sooner or later. Then he brightened. Why not7 Why not go to jail? At least he would have a place to sleep in peace, and maybe someone would straighten the whole thing out when his case came up. Of course, loitering must be a minor offence and he would be dealt with by machine again, but at worst he would merely stay in jail. He put his hands behind his head, relaxed and waited.

 

It couldn’t have been more than three minutes later when the robo-cop arrived, moving swiftly and competently across the grass while his companion remained behind, at the cruiser. Joe had obligingly placed his ID card on his chest, and now he waited with grim satisfaction to be apprehended. But it didn’t happen quite that way. After a quick glance, the robo-cop’s tentacle flicked down and took his ID card, shoved it into its scanner, and transmitted the information. Joe watched with bewilderment as his card was placed back in his shirt pocket and the robo-cop stood still, obviously waiting. Then with a soft swoosh a “black hack’ settled on the grass close by, two attendants got out with wheeled stretcher, placed him on it and wrapped him in a sheet, put him in the back of the vehicle and took off.

 

This time it was the District Morgue, but the procedure was precisely the same. As the sheet was unwrapped, Joe slipped off his stretcher and made for the door. Glancing back, he saw the attendants making those same futile searching movements in widening circles around the floor. It was somehow ludicrous now, as Joe made his way in leisurely fashion through the sub-basement area, not really caring where his wandering took him. It was almost pleasant down here, the warm, dim passage inviting him to find a little nook or cranny, curl up and finish his sleep. He had to make a real effort to keep going, realizing that this was no solution either: that he had to make his way to the outside, if only to eat. And now that the thought had occurred, he was acutely hungry. It must be early morning, at least.

 

0530, said the clock over the back entrance to this level of the mammoth civic building. He knew he shouldn’t really be so hungry, but Joe had been through a lot since supper the night before, and it definitely wasn’t all psychological. He would have to find some way to get breakfast, and if it required desperate measures, well, it was a desperate situation. One or two meals he might go without, but he wasn’t going to starve, even if it seemed that the “machine” was intent on having him dead to make the records accurate. He set out for an autoteria, still not quite sure of what his next move would be.

 

There was a big one only a block down, and Joe stood across from it watching the early-morning crowd scurry in and out. There was no use going in until he knew what he would do. He could try to force the serving doors, but he couldn’t guarantee that they would pry open easily, and besides, there would be loads of people watching him. Not that it mattered much now, but he still wasn’t ready to commit an open theft. No, there had to be a better way. What about a back entrance, he thought. It has to have a service area. He began to search, and before long found a neutral grey door marked Food Services. Gently, he tried the door, opening it slowly until it stood wide, revealing a small room with three more doors. One said Accounts, one said Maintenance and the third said Unauthorized Persons Not Permitted. Like the old stories on Kid-vid, he thought, in a flash of wild humour. Obviously it was the last that he wanted, and without further delay he opened it and passed through.

 

To his left a scanner blinked officiously at him, demanding that he present his ID card, but he was interested in the magnificent view that stretched in front of him. Racks of prepared plates lined one side, coming up on a conveyor belt from an escalator at the far end, while smaller belts moved endless amounts of food to the pigeonholes where customers made their purchases. Entranced, Joe watched toast and jam, eggs, bacon and eggs, ham and eggs, pancakes, muffins, buns—enough for an orgy. Then, shaking his head as if hypnotized, he loaded himself down with pancakes, bacon and coffee. He reached across a belt and picked up knife, and fork, seated himself on a stack of waiting trays, and began wolfing his meal. Halfway through the coffee, the robo-cop came. Joe stood still, licking syrup off his fingers, as the cop moved warily into the room blocking his escape. “Please do not move,” said the cop, “or I will have to detain you by force.” Joe reached for his coffee cup, and almost too fast to be seen the robo-cop pinned his arms to his sides. Another tentacle snaked out and checked his pockets, removing his ID card and inserting it in the scanner. At the same time, Joe felt himself being touched at head, chest, wrists and ankles; a procedure that had familiarity somewhere beyond the fringes of memory.

 

The robo-cop hummed as time spun out, and Joe began to sense that something was not going quite right. Gradually the hum increased, the robo-cop’s visual sensors began to glow brighter, and it even seemed to Joe that the tentacle that held him grew tighter. Soon he could smell the odour of scorched insulation, and see tiny wisps of smoke issuing from minute fissures in the robo-cop’s shell. At last, with a belch of smoke and a drunken lurch, the robo-cop disgorged his card, unrolled limp tentacles, and went dead. Amazed, Joe could only watch for a moment or so. He had never seen any piece of automated equipment do this before, particularly none with any degree of independent decision-making abilities. It was almost like watching a person die. He picked up his card half-expecting the cop to come to life and seize him again, but nothing happened. Regaining some composure, Joe moved cautiously to the belts, picked a slab of apple pie, and with studied disdain held it between thumb and fingers as he swaggered by the silent, burnt-out robo-cop. Only when he reached the outer room did he hurry.

 

It was 1000, and Joe Schultz, deceased, was reclining in a luxurious bed, in one of the most luxurious hotels in the Greater Danbury area. He had got there by the simple expedient of reaching across the end of the desk, behind the recepto-clerk, and taking one of the two keys in a slot nearest him. Check-out time was 1400, European style, he knew from the high-priced ads, following the news-fax. He might have seven hours of uninterrupted sleep, he figured, but if he were interrupted, so what. For Joe Schultz had found the solution to his problem. It had been right there in front of him all the time, if he had only stopped thinking like a good, law-abiding citizen. The real tip-off had come when the robo-cop, good law-enforcement officer that it was, had broken down under the onslaught of conflicting information. When it apprehended a moving, living lawbreaker, it seized and identified both ID card and offender. Joe knew little about the information patterns of such machines, but he lay there in delight, imagining what had gone on. Offender carried card of Joe Schultz. Joe Schultz was deceased. Offender was identified therefore as .. . Joe Schultz. Joe Schultz was deceased. Offender was alive. Offender’s card there identified him as . . . Joe Schultz. Pluooi! And if he preferred, he could always stay absolutely still, to be carted off to the morgue. He squirmed and stretched into a more comfortable position, drifting off into sleep as he envisioned the clothes he would secure, the foods he would eat, the places he would sleep. In the immense peace of the truly free, Joe Schultz lay, dead to the world.

 

<<CONTENTS>>

 

* * * *

 

VISIONS OF MONAD

 

M. John Harrison

 

 

A new British author, with a brilliant piece of modern writing, takes a look at the “inner space” of the mind as his central character makes the transition from reality to unreality. Or could it be the other way round?

 

* * * *

 

One: Identity

 

Bailey: supine on the studio floor—head pillowed on hands, phallic cigarette—watching the girl Monad apply paint, to ten square feet of canvas with a palette knife. Monad: nineteen and self-possessed, painting with her whole organism, in swift, precise movements; Monad in pale blue, nubile.

 

* * * *

 

It was late afternoon. The light in the studio was turning brown: puddles of late-September sun dappled his scruffy clothing. Bailey had done nothing all day but lie on the floor, smoking steadily, near to unconsciousness. Nor had he done anything more than eat or sprawl on the studio floor or make love in a lax, inert fashion for a week. Lately he had taken to sleeping for thirteen hours out of the twenty-four.

 

By contrast, the girl had filled half her canvas. Her technique was good—positive and self-possessed as her body—but her objective was unclear. In all probability, another week would elapse before anything coalesced from the slash of chaos on the canvas. Bailey was not interested in the process of creation. He would view the result with the eye of a professional, and she would bow to his judgment, accepting the validity of his critique without question. Because of this submission in the face of authoritative sources, she had little chance of becoming a true artist. Bailey knew this, but did not tell her. Until such time as the picture was complete, he would remain silent. S.D. had left him very little concern with such matters. Since leaving the Institute he had not touched a brush. He had abandoned his own studio in Holloway.

 

He saw himself as caught in a twilight period; an Orpheus of the concrete city, suspended between the Hades of Sensory Deprivation and full, sterile awareness of the outer world. His psyche hung in a limbo fashioned partly from the total awareness of itself to be found in the Tank— with its lack of tactile sensation, its constant subliminal noise level, and its amorphous lighting—and partly from the complete perception of things to be found in the loud life of the city. Consequently, he lacked drive.

 

He had left the Holloway flat for two reasons. Hollis, who headed the S.D. research team at the Institute in W.1, had been pestering him with daily tests—orientation, motor response and the like—and he had become angry with this nagging interruption of his thought processes. The second reason was less concrete and by far the more powerful of the two. He had felt an indefinable need for a liaison, and a need to forge a link between his wandering mind—floating, drifting in its amniotic fluid of ab-reality—and the city. Monad, who loved him, had become that link, an anchor-chain mooring him to the reality of her society, her beatnik painters and poets and parties. He had moved in with her and refused even to return to Holloway to collect his mail.

 

His lassitude had ceased to worry him over much. At first he had tried to defeat it, and had returned to his earlier love of poetry when painting ceased to interest him. He had immersed himself in the works of Eliot and Thomas, and attempted to exorcise the blankness in his head by writing it down. He had finally given up. His last poem, an attempt to carry the work of the pre-nineteen-fourteen Imagists to its fullest extent, had read, simply:

 

gethsemane

 

He had begun to realise his problem, then. He had gone into the S.D. experiment to escape the broil of conflicting actions and concepts in which the city had threatened to suffocate him: he had come out of it with Nirvana—and a vision.

 

So he lay on the studio floor as the light turned brown, watching Monad’s body. When it became too dark to paint, they ate and then made love. Monad was happy.

 

* * * *

 

Morning. Monad in pale blue, shopping in a supermarket. Monad among the chattering, dull women, a denim-hipster dryad. Bailey: lying on the double bed, watching his hands tremble and not seeing them.

 

* * * *

 

When the girl suggested a shopping expedition, Bailey roused himself from his torpor and agreed. He got as far as donning his battered cord jacket and walking with her to the front door. But the door opened on the street and the perspective of the street brought on his vision. The shift, the change of key was as immediate as a tropical dawn: the street—a perfectly ordinary brown stone hangover from Victoriana—faded into the street, the long, sweeping vee of his hallucination. He shook his head wordlessly at her. She nodded sympathetically and flirted off alone, swinging the shopping bag to some young girl’s rhythm in her head.

 

Bailey shut the door after her and leant on it for a minute before he made his way carefully up the stairs. He had to be careful; not only did the stairs get mixed up with the vision; becoming a sort of out-of-phase corollary of it; forcing him to consider whether he was placing his feet on them or some miasma in his head: but also, the return of the hallucination always stimulated certain motor defects that had originated from his stay in the Tank. After the experiment, he had been unable to walk a straight line; he now had difficulty in guiding his foot to the next step of the stair. Some curiously detached part of him laughed dryly: Hollis would probably blow a fuse if he could measure Bailey’s hand-tremor rate at this moment. There was no doubt that sustained sensory deprivation had a far more lasting physical effect than Hollis had suspected.

 

He sank on to the bed and relaxed his grip, allowing the hallucination to swamp him. Exterior noise—the rumble of heavy waggons on the main North Circular drag, shouts of children in a school yard—cut out completely. He watched the bedroom fade from around him. First, the titles of the books on the shelf: Robert Gittings on Keats became a dark blur, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings a red one; the shelf slowly sidled out of existence. The nude portrait of Monad above it followed. The last thing to go, sucked into greyness, was Monad’s joke. Written in four-inch block-capitals on a sheet of white card, it was placed on the north wall, facing him. The legend exclaimed irreverently:

 

IT’S ALL STOPPED HAPPENING

 

Monad’s appreciation of sexual innuendo was overt.

 

Then there was nothing but the hallucination, etched in grey-green on grey.

 

Bailey was standing in the middle of a road. His feet were placed on either side of the unbroken white line which extended in front of him without a curve. The horizon, too, was a perfectly straight line, clearly visible and unfogged by distance; an horizon a child might have drawn, dividing its picture into two equal, symmetrical rectangles. It existed merely as a dividing line: a separation of empty, light-grey sky and sick-green earth.

 

This sharp definition was repeated where the sides of the road met its surroundings. There was no sign of a kerb; nor was there gutter or peripheral vegetation: solely a precise, geometrical line.

 

Visually, that was all—a flat, three-tone landscape, unrelieved by vegetation or building; the white line running unbroken up the centre of the road to its vanishing point.

 

However, the Perspective—Bailey’s mental shorthand describing the whole sensation—was not completely visual. There were auditory and tactile manifestations as well. As soon as the noises of the city faded, and usually before the visual component of the dream was anything like completed, Bailey would become aware of the wind at his back. It was cold and hard, and it sang: a single, clear, unadulterated note.

 

The dream became reality. Slowly and stiffly, Bailey, impelled by something nameless within himself, unable to contradict its orders, began to walk towards the vanishing point of the road. The wind pushed him steadily along, a cold hand in the small of his back. The objective side of his mind stopped commenting on the scene from its vantage-point of consciousness and turned subjective. Utterly caught up, he walked without thinking anything ...

 

He had been walking for an hour when Monad reasserted the other reality, the existence-pattern of the “normal” world. She shook him gently and he stopped stumping fixedly to the unmentionable vanishing point. The wind died. There was a moment of disorientation in which he struggled to be part of one continuum or the other, flailing with his limbs to establish his whereabouts in space and time. Then, as he succeeded in focusing the microscope of his mind, the bedroom swam into sudden clarity. He looked with interest at its walls, as if they were new to him, noticing the details he had not seen before. There were faults in the study of Monad. He tried to remember who had painted it.

 

The girl took his trembling hands to her breast, warming them. They were not trembling through cold, but the maternal gesture was gratifying. Suddenly, he remembered who he was and what he had been doing, and for some reason the knowledge made him cry like a baby.

 

* * * *

 

Monad the hostess, in a studio full of people: talking animatedly of Bailey, as if she possessed him. Bailey: lounging with the inevitable cigarette, surrounded by beards and corduroy trousers—half-listening to young men discussing his poetry. Monad: out of denims for once: Monad the nymphette in a pale blue shift of silk, college-girl-madonna.

 

* * * *

 

Earlier that day—the second after Bailey’s latest walk along the perspective—the girl had scribbled: happy birthday, Hiroshima on the studio wall and invited a gaggle of intellectuals to a party. There were about thirty people crammed into the room, mostly earnest young men from art colleges. A good proportion of them had gravitated towards Bailey to compliment him loudly on his recently published Recollections of a Piebald Unicorn. He found their vital, enthusiastic attention pleasing, but was embarrassed to discover that he could not recall half the poems in the slim volume. They were all relics of his pre-S.D. days; hard to reach. His experiences in the Tank had blocked off a great deal of his memory. Another thing, he reflected, that Hollis had neglected to investigate.

 

Paradoxically, the large amount of whisky he had drunk, had, far from numbing his brain, brought him one of the moments of insight he experienced with mounting infrequency. He began to ponder. Exactly why had he consented to take part in the sensory deprivation experiment? Precisely what had driven him to seek two weeks isolation from the world and forced him into the negative stimulus of the Tank? The young men were eclipsed much as the bedroom had been two days earlier. He concentrated. The answer came readily, but it was not simple.

 

There had been ... too much.

 

He had been . . . sick; ill with the complexity of life; a malady with the city as its symbol. Pleased by this vague success, he began to probe for a tangible, a more solid memory upon which to found the architecture of his rejection of the things that had surrounded him. He delved, and came up with the diary. At first, he could picture only its cover and spiral binding. He took another drink and deliberately let the image of the book blot out his environment. Then, having satisfied himself that the memory would not dissolve, he reached out delicately and opened it.

 

* * * *

 

January 7:... finding it more and more difficult to sleep; my brain rushing round in neurotic circles; thoughts like a speeded-up tape recording, gibberish until I (I? No. Until Gardner’s depressants . . .) slow them down. The city has revealed itself as the nigger in this stockpile; although whether it is actually the root of the malaise, or just a convenient scapegoat upon which I project my inner turbulence, I cannot tell...

 

* * * *

 

January 13: At its simplest level, the city is a maze in four dimensions, a purely physical ant-heap; over-large, over-complex and over-populated. I am continually frightened that the size and complexity of the hive will one day cause it to implode, to fall in on itself in a million slivers of coloured glass and lumps of rotting concrete. Yet, this fear aside, I catch myself wishing it would do just that: anything to escape this incredible multiplicity of directions and vectors. I hardly dare leave the studio; outside, it becomes impossible to choose from a thousand ways to go; I lose my identity immediately and travel blindly, in a frantic nightmare of Underground maps and back streets. This morning I set out for Reynolds the Publishers in East 4, with the “Unicorn” manuscript. I came to in Kingsbury, shivering feverishly and wondering why I had gone there.

 

* * * *

 

January 15: The cause-effect relationship is distorted surrealistically among all these lives and thought-patterns. Nudge a man in Greek Street, Soho, and he falls off a pavement in Plumstead; drop a stone in the Serpentine and a ship goes down in an Adriatic storm; bombard your target nucleus with neutrons and happy anniversary Nagasaki. Every action presents myriad side-effects, which are unpredictable. I cannot make a decision for fear of its unnoticed, incalculable results.

 

* * * *

 

February 1: This must stop. Gardner the head-doctor tells me to leave the city before I break down (Before? He has yet to see me at night, wincing and twitching at every sound ...) Today he brought with him a man called Hollis who thinks he can help me. I must be taking up too much of Gardner’s time for him to fob me off with some pinch-penny researcher who can’t afford to buy a subject for his experiment.

 

Hollis outlined his ideas as neatly and precisely as he is groomed and tailored. Unlike Gardner, who acknowledges art, he is the brusque, clipped epitome of science; the all-British owl-eye of the indigestion advertisements. I asked him why he hadn’t gone to the spiritual mecca of all researchers, across the big water, and he started a long spiel on Britain’s world-position before he realised that I was gently sending him up. The temperature of the room dropped considerably.

 

However, to give credit where it is due, his experiment is attractive: it offers a fixed course, or at least, a chance to search for one. There is a possibility that during the experimental period I will be able to pin down a concept that does not have as many heads as a hydra. Hollis warned me that no one is quite sure of what effects sustained disconnection from reality will have on a person. I am afraid I earned another black mark by laughing at him ...

 

* * * *

 

Bailey allowed the diary to fade out. The party took its place, noisily. Somebody refilled his glass. He considered his position, relating it to the events leading up to Hollis’s appearance.

 

Obviously, he had found his “concept” in the Tank. Its representation, its ideograph, was the Perspective. Unfortunately, it seemed to have become as much of a fixation as had the complexity of the city before it. He was strangely unmoved by the knowledge that he had exchanged one neurosis for another, a frenetic maelstrom for a degenerate stasis. He ignored it in favour of a question that had flashed, vivid and unbidden into his brain—

 

What would happen if he reached the vanishing point?

 

The prospect was fascinating.

 

* * * *

 

Two: Nativity

 

Extracts from the private journal of Dr. James Hollis, Head of Dept. 4, the Guirand Institute, London, England:

 

* * * *

 

February the fifth: B. arrived at the institute this morning, disguising his almost pitiful gratitude for this opportunity under a thin cloak of artistic smugness. He was examined during the day and found to be in only mediocre physical shape. He is, as Gardner noted, extremely disturbed and on the verge of nervous collapse. I begin to have second thoughts about using him, but there are no other volunteers.

 

February the sixth: B. reacted to S.D. in the expected fashion. A short time after we had settled him in what he facetiously calls “the Tank”; checked his respirator and nutrient drip; and begun to pipe the subliminal “white-sound” through his ear plugs, he fell asleep: a reaction confirmed as normal by Vernon at Princeton, during his “Black Room” experiments in ‘54.

 

February the seventh: B. has been asleep for twenty hours: no doubt as a result of his previous mental exhaustion. “The Tank” is behaving perfectly.

 

February the fourteenth: B. has now been deprived of sensory contact with the world outside his immersion chamber for nine days. He sees only a diffuse grey blur of light, hears only a constant homogeneous sound. He is aware only of the contact of the water in which he is suspended. The nutrient drip, respirator and pumping mechanism continue to function well.

 

9 p.m.: B. has begun to make leg movements. They are irregular and correspond roughly to the act of walking.

 

10 pm.: Using the one-way telephone system, we attempted to contact B. and warn him that his movements were disturbing the drip-feed connection in his arm. There was a pause—during which the leg movements subsided— before he acknowledged us, using the previously agreed code; one long blink to indicate he had heard.

 

We then attempted to ascertain the reason for his movements, asking if he had become uncomfortable in any physical way; and if, as a result of this discomfort, he wished the S.D. period to be terminated. His reply was negative. My assistant then asked if he had experienced an hallucination, and attained an emphatic affirmative signal, accompanied by a vigorous nod of the head which threatened to dislodge the electrodes taped to his skull.

 

We assumed that B. had experienced what Vernon notes as a “Type Three” hallucination, in which the subject perceives definite objects, as opposed to the more common manifestation of vague spots and blurs at the periphery of vision. We were unable to discover the reason for the leg movements which accompanied the hallucination. My assistant advanced the tentative theory that B. had actually participated in an hallucinatory activity.

 

February the eighteenth: B. requested that the experiment be terminated. Two or three weeks will pass before he is fully recovered physically. He is vague when questioned on the subject of his hallucination, which has occurred on an average of twice a day since he first experienced it. He shows no signs of the mental disorder which he exhibited before the experiment: in fact he is unnaturally calm and self-possessed.

 

March the tenth: B. has disappeared from his studio. Of late, he has been difficult to deal with, remote. I suspect that he regards my presence as an invasion of the private world he has constructed about himself. I am sure that this world has its roots in “the Tank”. He is unaware of the danger of complete withdrawal in which he has placed himself. As ever, he sees himself as the Eternal Artist, oppressed by the bugbear of science.

 

* * * *

 

Monad: painting again, her denim legs hypnotic. The canvas is nearly complete; her end product is already an accomplished fact. Bailey: idly following an out-of-focus blue sprite as it dances with a complicated palette. Bailey: living the motorcycle vision of Gossing, who travelled his own perspective too far and too fast.

 

* * * *

 

Bailey had been preoccupied with the problem of the vanishing point for some days before he remembered Gossing.

 

The first possibility to strike him had been that of his never reaching it, that the hallucination would develop no further. He had defeated that argument somewhat smugly —by refusing to believe his mind uncreative enough to condemn itself indefinitely to vain pursuit: there must be something at the end of the road. He began a search for an alternative, coming up with theories ranging from the eventual confrontation of himself by himself, to the achievement of Nirvana. It was during this search that a youthful recollection of Gossing provided him with a prefabricated answer. Gossing’s way of death became a fixation of proportions matching those of the vision.

 

Gossing had died on the road.

 

He had been engaged in Ph.D. research in applied physics at a northern university: an isolated, withdrawn character who rarely spoke, and segregated himself stringently from campus society. He had evinced no open interest in women —to be fair, he had displayed none where men were concerned, either—and had regarded the antics of the student body with a sour contempt. Experiments with lysergic acid had been the vogue at the time, and these he had reviled with bitter humour, considering them a foolish blunting of the mind as a tool: referring to them scornfully as “Happy attempts at intellectual suicide”.

 

In his last term he had built himself a motorcycle; a low, squat thing that resembled an insect—its dropped handlebars replacing the anhedral wings of a wasp at rest. The machine had been extremely powerful: Bailey could recall only vague detail, but remembered fear and dislike of the thing. He had been interested in it only as a symbol of Gossing’s state of mind.

 

Bailey had concluded that Gossing’s lack of sexual life left him with a need to assert somehow his essential maleness: the brute, thrusting power of the motorcycle had confirmed his masculinity. It had also furnished the sense of purpose his leisure time had lacked because of his refusal to participate in the university’s social life—which, however inane, provided an imperative diversion.

 

Gossing had ridden the machine with an aggressive flair; laying it closely and almost viciously into corners—often with the footrests and silencers throwing up sheets of sparks as they grounded on the road surface—as if the road belonged to him alone. But he had not been reckless; every move had been calculated in his dry computer of a brain before being put into operation. There had been a harsh beauty, even poetry, in the way he had handled it; in the way that neither man nor machine had submitted itself to the other, but had remained inseparable parts of a single organism—a high-octane centaur of the clearway.

 

Towards the end, however, he had become an extension of the thing. It had gained ascendency, almost a personality of its own; and the road had exerted a malign fascination. He had been a pathetic, possessed creature at the time preceding his death; steadily more introverted, driven by the lash of what could only be represented by the hard, unreeling ribbon of the road and the howl of the slipstream; a man doomed and hurling towards an unavoidable, gory climacteric.

 

Bailey’s identification with Gossing was strengthened by the vanishing-point, their common crux. Monad’s exotic dance with the palette knife and canvas retreated. Bailey had ridden once—once had been enough to kill the desire— on the pillion behind Gossing, and it was on that one experience that he now based his re-enaction of Gossing’s final ride down the Perspective. He gave the word a capital letter impulsively; accepting the identification with Gossing; uniting Gossing’s reality with his own vision. The muted hum of traffic outside gave way to a bellow of power. There was a seven-gallon fuel tank between Bailey’s knees and fifty brake horse-power surged responsive under his throttle hand. Without a noticeable shift of reality to unreality, Bailey was Gossing.

 

“It’s like this: out there, everything’s simpler. On the road it all boils down to this: at that speed, you’re either going to make it—or you aren’t...”

 

Gossing-Bailey straightened the bike up, powering it firmly out of the last leg of the bend. Ahead, the road ran straight as a die, then broke into a series of elbows: the vanishing point. This was the ultimate high: here, for a few cathartic seconds, was the orgasm of the gods. He settled his goggles and flattened himself on the fuel tank, his chin on the foam pad. Deliberately, almost reverently, he wound back the twist-grip.

 

“...for a minute, you’re on your own, and free: the tear doesn’t come until you have to slow the thing down.”

 

Freedom: the road was a great elongated vee, empty but for the single particle of fierce energy that was Gossing-Bailey and the motorcycle. After two miles, the speedometer and the Perspective came together as one image, a circle superimposed on an open compass; the image of fulfilment. Then he had to start closing down.

 

“You don’t want to come off the high. It’s hell closing that throttle; it’s admitting that neither yourself nor the experience is immortal...”

 

Orgasm is a transient thing. The machine wasn’t slowing. In the space of a microsecond there happened an eternity of fear. He managed to nurse it through the first bend at a hundred and ten, taking a resigned pleasure in the achievement. But it was impossible at that speed to pull out and align the machine for the next one. His body jerked in a last ejaculation of panic. There was an improbable silence.

 

Bailey came back to the studio. Nobody had been sure whether Gossing or the motorcycle had failed on that ultimate straight. He knew now.

 

* * * *

 

Bailey: supine on the studio floor—head pillowed on hands to stop them shaking—watching Monad paint. The choreography of creation is almost complete.

 

* * * *

 

Bailey had not moved for two days. Inertia had finally taken him: he had found a balance between himself and the city. Only his mind moved, and that with growing lethargy, walking slowly along the Perspective.

 

Gossing’s ghost was laid—or rather, it had taken its place in the schema of Bailey’s illusion. Gossing and the circle of the speedo they had fished out of a ditch, still intact, needle wedged by the failure of its mechanism at one hundred and ten miles an hour; Hollis—Empirical Man and his Experiment; Gardner—the city anxiously looking after its own victim: all were integrated, assimilated; subordinate to the vision, and yet the bricks of which it was built. Bailey-Gossing/Hollis-Gardner were a composite entity, running down to the point of absolute rest.

 

He had ceased to eat and could not remember when he had last relieved himself. The only motion for some time, other than his plodding feet on the Perspective, had been Monad’s dance, her choreographic coupling with the easel and canvas: and he sensed that this too was terminating. She was a blue shadow behind a window, the stained-glass screen of illusion. Somehow, hers would be the final act. Monad’s was the hand privileged to throw the last switch. He was content to wait. To all intents and purposes, he was still in the womb of the Tank, waiting to be born for the third time...

 

* * * *

 

Monad made a last movement, decisively. Bailey, sensing the finality of the motion, tensed; the Perspective faded, but the girl was remote: her actions came across a great gap of space and time, a gulf, a hole in his awareness.

 

She danced over to him, smiling. He saw her once more as Monad in pale blue, then her identity slipped into the gulf. He felt her kiss his forehead, saw her step back and parody a curtsy, sweepingly. She motioned at the canvas.

 

For perhaps five minutes, he searched the picture; taking in its greens and greys; noting the sharp, geometrical definition of the skyline, the great tonal vee of the road, the unmentionable vanishing point. This, then, was it.

 

He conjured back the Perspective and compared the two overlapping images in his field of vision. Then he manipulated them gently, and they came together, matching perfectly, the world on the canvas and the weariness of his mind.

 

Tiredly, doggedly, he began to walk.

 

* * * *

 

“Do you like it?” said Monad, anxious.

 

But Bailey could hear only the monochrome wind.

 

<<CONTENTS>>

 

* * * *

 

THE WALL TO END THE WORLD

 

Vincent King

 

 

Following up his success in our seventh volume (“Defence Mechanism”) here is another of Vincent King’s strange cities of the future—a city where legend is the cloak for government and the truth is far stranger than the legend.

 

* * * *

 

A murmur of heavy fabric. Glint of gold thread, sparkle of jewels in stiff embroidery, red in torchlight.

 

The Arch Teacher turned smoothly on the Sacred Lectern. He raised his arms in the dismissal. We climbed to our feet, made Obeisance and backed from the Chamber. It was time to go to the Wall.

 

The passage was very dark after the Holy Chamber. We called for our horses and our fighters. I swung on to the gilded saddle. Fighters came out of the dark, uneasy torchlight on their weapons.

 

We chosen officers of the Wall faced each other, we raised our Insignia, made salute. Our Captain led us up the Great Ramp, into the darkness. Tabors and fifes, slow marching into the gloom.

 

It is a long climb, up endless ramps through eternal damp. My old Captain complained about the long gaps in the lights. They garrotted him for Unfaith. The floor is very worn and slippery.

 

At passage branches we paused for ceremony and an officer led his fighters into the sub-passage. Mine was the highest station, the lookout platform—above the topmost battlement.

 

The groom took my horse, I listened to the rattle and clatter of my fighters as they made their way on to the battlement below. I climbed the last wooden steps.

 

Small, cold rain stung my face. I crouched through the low door on to the slippery planks. I edged left until I felt the slight step down on to the stone part, out against the parapet. The floor still moved in the storm, but I felt safer there.

 

The granite is mostly good. It all looks perfect, but some places you can stick in your knife like it was cheese. Here it crumbled, slimy grit under my hands. You can’t tell the Teachers—that would be Unfaith. The Wall will stand for ever. It must. If the Wall fails the World, the Span will end. Stand the Wall!

 

The wind roared about the ramifications and buttressing. The Wall thundered back its lion strength. Far, far out in the raging darkness, dim phosphorescence of surf showed in the rain. I was cold and wet, but Duty— Honour, the Virtue of Vigil on the Wall kept me from the high cells. A peasant, a commoner, would have sheltered; but not me—not an Officer of the Wall.

 

The bolts on my belt rasped on the stonework. I drew them out and laid them with my crossbow on the fire step. I laid the Insignia there too. I brought out the leather case, unwrapped the oiled silk, twisted the cord round my wrist and began to scan the beaches through my night glasses.

 

On the battlement the fighters still shuffled themselves into position. The broken paving makes it very difficult for the artificial walk of machines. I hoped they wouldn’t damage themselves, they’re only menials, robots—and very clumsy. Repairs are almost impossible now.

 

The rain slackened, the moon came through ragged cloud, splashing the sodden sea-plain with thin light. Nothing down there. On the right a few dim lights in the horn windows of the fisher hovels. We have glass, or rather the Teachers do. It’s right they should have the best, the glass and the comforts. They teach us the Order . . . theirs is the responsibility of the Wall. The Wall must stand until the Ultimate Light and the Span ends. Stand the Wall!

 

There would be no fishers out tonight. No enemy either; even his black hulls couldn’t live in that sea. I could taste the salt spray in the rain.

 

East and west the Wall runs. Sometimes you can see the curve of it turning away north and south to meet again a thousand miles across the continent. Our section reaches almost to the sea, elsewhere it runs its eternal circle over valleys and plains, through the tall mountains.

 

I say “eternal” and it is—the Wall is forever, from the Beginning to the End. But it is broken . . . where the sun came down it is broken. I know, I’ve seen.

 

It’s to the east, the Wall ends there. The Wall of the Towers ends. There’s a gap, ten, twenty miles wide. The Wall ends in twisted gobs of basalt.

 

The sea came in there. A circular bay, deep and wide. There’s not a lot of sand and if you dig you soon come to glass. All cracked—crazed—bubbled, iridescent.

 

They built a new Wall there, not as high as the real one. A great semi-circle, on the edge of the bay.

 

That was after the Last Battle. Five hundred years ago, there on the wide beach that was before the Wall. The enemy came in his myriads, with his arrays of fighters. There was great killing.

 

When he saw our fathers had won, the enemy’s wise men called down the sun to strike the Wall.

 

The sun touched the beach and the Wall, then rose again in chaos of purple red fire. The Wall was hurt and the bay made.

 

All who saw died, then or the next day. They were blinded and they died; our people and the enemy’s.

 

Since that time they have not come; but one day they will. We must keep the Vigil. Stand the Wall!

 

* * * *

 

East, far out along the dark Wall-reef the sky paled. Wind faded. Against the dawn the sodden fabric of our banner flapped on its staff.

 

Soon the early sun raised steam from the wet stonework. It was a good day. Light cloud moved in from the sea. Gulls and crows wheeled in up-currents along the Wall. Song bird voices reached up from the sea-plain. Cool blue-green of pines, pink trunks . . . white surf, cerulean sea, bright sun rising in the clear air.

 

At the fisher hovels a girl drove out a dozen black and white goats. I put the glasses on her. Dark hair, young, creamy skin, round breasts under the white blouse, she ran through the soft sand. Her feet were bare.

 

I put the pleasure from me. These thoughts ... I, an Officer of the Wall! These sensuous lapses of impure flesh. ... I had enjoyed the morning . . . felt it . . . when I should have been devoted to the Vigil ... to the Honour of the Teachers and their Sacred Trust. That was the true joy—not in carnal daydreams of the physical world. That girl ... an officer must be above that, he must keep his energies for the Duty and the Teachers. O . . . the world of sin in the heart of a rose . . . the weakness of enjoyment.

 

Then it was time to move into a cell while the sun passed. On the high levels the heat and radiation can be dangerous; on the plains it is all right, all you need is a little shade, or maybe a big hat when the suns pass.

 

I stayed on the platform as long as I could, to mortify the flesh. Then I staggered into the cool darkness. I pressed the button, calling a Teacher to hear me make my self-criticism.

 

That shining new looking screen in the stained, torn plastic. The screens are always in order, always perfect ... little else is.

 

With bowed head I told the Teacher of my lapse. I tried to make out his face in the dark folds of his cowl as he answered me, telling me in minute detail of my error. I squirmed ... I knew . . . understood. But Teachers are like that . . . always telling you things you damn well know already. Surely a man, an officer, is capable of deciding for himself what is right? But we must honour the Teachers.

 

He gave me my mortification and dismissed me. I had to return to the Citadel barefoot, through the heat and danger of the Wall Top. It was a good mortification and just, well calculated to demonstrate the weakness of my flesh.

 

The sun passed. Stark shadows on the platform moved in the circling light. The ravens came out again, harshly telling of the cooler air outside.

 

I dismissed my fighters, slung my crossbow and set off up the splintered slope of decayed concrete. The horse slithered behind me, plunging cat-footed the last few yards to the Top.

 

It was the hour of the two shadows. Left my shadow was red, lit by the setting first sun, getting darker. The second sun rose bright in the east. Above the sky was deep blue; south, behind me, it gave way to the indigo of the Cold. There was a little snow still in some of the deeper hollows, the few poor trees cowered from the prevailing wind. You’ve got to go slow on the Top, but you seem to get out of breath anyhow.

 

The paths on the Top are the old cell walls, there were many of them. On either side collapsed floors fall sheer into dark, stagnant pools, or bottomless shafts, bramble-choked.

 

Disrepaired it may be; ravines, gullies . . . impious trees thrusting apart the masonry with their roots, but the Wall still stands, magnificent against all who may come. Stand the Wall!

 

Things live on the Top. Men and less than men. Animals and less than animals. Trolls, banditti who come down to the Fair Land to reive and pillage; pigs and winged lions . . . perhaps even the creatures of the enemy, beings from beyond the Cold.

 

When the second sun came and I could stand the heat no longer, I turned from the path and entered a clump of bleached and twisted pines.

 

In the shade plants grew, green and almost lush. I relaxed in the green darkness. The horse crunched, cropping eagerly. Dabs of sunlight moved over the pine needles. I got out my bottle and sipped the hot water.

 

The Silver Old Man spoke from the shadows.

 

“Welcome, Lieutenant. I’ve been watching you.”

 

I whirled to my feet, swinging my crossbow round and down. Then I realized he spoke the Wall tongue. In his hands he held the Insignia, the steel shaft of the Teachers. His fingers were very long and white.

 

I showed him my Insignia and made salutation.

 

“I acknowledge the Insignia. Stand the Wall!”

 

“Insignia? You mean the shooter?”

 

I could see him better now. He was dressed in close-fitting silver. He was very old, thin, white. He had a fine brow. He smiled.

 

“What’s that thing? A crossbow? Interesting.”

 

“Who are you, old man?” I was suspicious. He should have known my weapons. “Why do you call the Insignia ‘shooter’?”

 

“I’m an old, old man . . .” He grinned at me. “Here’s why it’s called shooter.”

 

He brought the Insignia to his shoulder with a flourish. A switch clicked. Metal hummed. The end pulsed violet light. There was a crack, a small, smoking cylinder leaped from the staff. Dazzling light—a bar of white condensation flashed into existence. Far away over the Top a clump of scrub oak shattered, erupting fire and mud. The little cylinder rattled at our feet. Fading smoke drifted down wind.

 

A Wall officer is never frightened . . . not really scared, not out of his wits. That’d be Unfaith. I was speechless ... surprise it was ... surprise.

 

“Yours won’t do that?”

 

“No, Lord.”

 

“It’s nothing. A small chemical charge accelerates the slug up to a couple of thousand miles an hour. Then it’s accelerated again super-magnetically ... the rest is sheer impact.”

 

He took my Insignia, his fingers worked about the mechanisms. The reliquary sprang open, the texts rolled on to his palm. He handed them to me, not very reverently I thought. He drew the prayer ribbon from the tube and passed that over too. He brought out some of the little cylinders and pushed them with his thumb into the reliquary.

 

“Power unit’s gone ... watch this though.”

 

The Insignia cracked, the cylinder leaped, twisting in the air. A pine shook as under a great blow. Cones, dead twigs splashed into the needles. A great white splinter, shattered from the trunk, tore into the nettles behind.

 

This was the Old Power. The Old Ability. I dropped to my knees. I made Obeisance, offering my sword hilt.

 

He waved me to my feet. “Don’t bend your knee, son . . . don’t bend for anyone . . .” He paused, looking at me under his brows. “Have you seen it, lad? Have you seen the Herald?”

 

The Herald! My God! The Herald! Signs and portents! The Star prophesied to mark the closing of the Span! The Herald . . . brighter and brighter to the End. When the Great Towers would burn and the Wall fall!

 

I gaped at the Old Man. No words came.

 

“Aye, lad. It’s coming. The World and the Wall are ending. They’ve had their day.” He led me to the edge of the pines. I followed his pointing finger. “There it is, there’s the Herald!”

 

There, hanging, shining on the edge of the Cold was a strange Star. Small, unimpressive—not at all the fiery Herald of Doom the Teachers foretold.

 

“Doesn’t look much, does it, son? But it’ll grow . . . it’ll scare the breeches off you. Do you see? It’s a new star. It’s the Herald!”

 

Staring into his eyes I knew he was right. I believed him absolutely.

 

“Lord, I must be your man.”

 

“Yes ... it may be I can use you. If you will.”

 

“Have I not offered Obeisance. Do I not acknowledge the right of Teachers ... the Vigil and the Wall?”

 

“O.K., you volunteer. And quit calling me ‘Lord’— it’s not democratic. Lacks dignity. Just remember who’s boss, that’s all!”

 

Democratic? Dignity? Did I not have the proper pride of a servant of the Teachers and of the Wall? The Silver Old Man had much to teach and I to learn.

 

“Lord . . . are you of they who are prophesied to ride the paths of time from beyond the Span to the End . . . to save the chosen while the Herald burns?”

 

“Aye . . . you could say that. We waited the millennia in Slumberstate. Not me alone, of course. The machines roused me, pumped the blood and adrenalin. The others weren’t so lucky. The Wall faulted. Damp . . . water got in . . . upset the stasis . . . rotted them away—alive. Five thousand years—then that. Yes, I’ve ridden the paths of time. I’m here to put the pennies on this world’s dead eyes.” He inhaled deeply, his voice shook. “It’s good to be out here. . . alive . . . smell the pines.”

 

I wondered why I’d thought of him as silver. His face had colour now, his hair the beginnings of gold. He saw me look and smiled. “Yes, lad. I’m getting better. It takes a while to pull out of the Slumber.”

 

“Lord, what must we do?”

 

“We must go down to the Citadel—meet the Teachers. Check some mechanisms down there too.” He went on, half to himself: “And Oceana’s still out . . . it’s a lot for one man . . . one old man. Thank God the others reply!”

 

When the second sun had passed and it was cool again, we began the long tramp over the Top. I proudly bore the new Insignia the Old Man had given me. It was a noble thing.

 

* * * *

 

Long before we reached the edge of the Wall and began the long descent into the Fair Land, we could see the four Great Towers of the Citadel. Colossal they were—you could see them from all over the Fair Land—taller even than the Wall; sprouting central from the plain, the City huddled at their roots. Huge, white-yellow massive concrete. Taller and taller they loomed, white clouds and their blue-grey shadows moved slow across them.

 

We stood on the first broad, shallow steps. I looked back through the darkening air of the Top. Doom hung on the indigo sky.

 

The Herald, a single, evil eye. Almost overhead, a little south, bigger and brighter. It was coming, the End . . . and its Herald.

 

There was movement in the gathering dark of the Fair Land. Torches red in the gloom below us. From the spreading mass of the City scattered flame gushed, sprinkled in the dark.

 

Small, scratchy man-screams far below us. Wild shouts, the clash of arms.

 

Yelling hordes of commoners fought their way towards the Citadel. Tight squads of Wall officers fought stubborn rear-guards, arms rising and falling, bright metal flashing. It was magnificent. They sold each yard dear but the skill and valour of my comrades was powerless against the flood mobs converging on the City.

 

“They’ve seen it,” said the Old Man. “They’ve seen the Herald.” The night was well on us now, no one could have missed it. “It’s a revolt. They think the Teachers should have warned them . . . protected them. Perhaps some fool tried to keep them from the Citadel.”

 

“They will! The Teachers will protect them . . . guard their flock ...” My voice tailed off. For the first time I was uncertain of the Teachers.

 

“They can’t, lad. They haven’t got the equipment. It’s my job. Let’s get down before they burn the Citadel.”

 

As we got lower the shouting and fire crackle got louder. Once the confusion was split by a great blast of white heat. There were many more screams then and fresh fires started. The Old weapons are very powerful.

 

* * * *

 

We scrambled into the blood-slippery streets, running in the shadows, avoiding the light.

 

A man came at us over the cobbles. He had a knife, his arms were dark with blood. He was laughing.

 

I dropped him with my crossbow. The impact carried him back, he didn’t move again.

 

“Come on! Come on!” The Old Man yelled back at me. We ran through the smoke, through the sparks and heat. I struggled to keep up, winching my crossbow as I ran. “Leave it! Leave that medieval rubbish!” But I wouldn’t leave my crossbow.

 

We ran up the middle of a wide avenue. When the people saw our weapons they fell back murmuring. There was murder in the shadows. A girl, naked, was being raped on a midden. She screamed ... screamed.

 

Flames crackled. I stepped on someone’s shattered skull. It was the end of Order, the prophesied last days of the Span. It was hell.

 

Fire-lit smoke drifted over the City. Sparks rocketed. The Citadel wall was dwarfed under the bulk of the Great Towers. They stretched on and up until at last they disappeared out of the firelight. Then you could see them only by the occluded stars. Far up, infinity away, the utmost rim caught the last fleck of the long gone sun.

 

We crouched in the shadows. The Old Man was amazing. He’d run as far and fast as me, he was hardly out of breath. In the firelight his old skin had more colour, he looked younger, his hair had a ruddy glow.

 

The main fighting was on our left. The peasants kept well back for fear of the Old weapons. Occasionally someone would step forward and loose an arrow or sling-shot at some half seen mark on the battlement. The clear space up to the wall was littered with bodies, officers and commoners.

 

We dashed across to the shadow of the wall. We found a ladder there, covered with dead men. They bristled with crossbow bolts, nailed to the ground. We used the ladder to scale the wall. I got blood between my fingers and they kept sticking together.

 

We dropped into the soft flower beds of the Teachers’ garden. The grass was silver with dew. A smell of lemon, roses in the half light, the magnolias white on dark leaves.

 

Left and right, on either side, were the sacred cloisters. In the long summer evenings the Teachers moved there, together or alone, wheeling in their quiet chairs, talking and thinking great thoughts. Ahead, down the length of the gardens, were the massive gates of the Holy of Holies, the Chamber of the Sacred Lectern.

 

We charged headlong down the garden. I looked anxiously about. It’s wrong to walk on the grass. If you’re an officer and you do it, they flog you. If you’re a peasant they burn you at the stake. They say they don’t like to do it... they call it an “Act of Faith”.

 

The gates were heavy barred and gold. The Old Man ran to the middle part. He brought out a small tube and pointed it at the receptor pad. A red light flashed briefly. Nothing happened. He flashed again, impatiently. I looked over my shoulder. I was frightened the Teachers might come.

 

“No good.” The Old Man waved me away. “I’m blasting.

 

Fifty yards off we flung ourselves to the ground. He brought up his shooter and fired at the gates.

 

Light and fire. The condensation bar. A crash, tearing of metal, a showering of smoking fragments.

 

We went in through the smoking gap. The whole gate was twisted, warped, burst.

 

We stood in the golden magnificence of the Holy Chamber of the Sacred Lectern. The Old Man was very impressed. He stood at the broken door staring at the gold leaf and lapis lazuli.

 

“My God! What have you done to it? The screens . . . you can hardly see them.”

 

“The Pilgrims, Lord. They bring the gold and jewels. It is appropriate the Teachers be so honoured.”

 

“The Teachers do all right. I wouldn’t have seen it as that sort of place myself. I suppose I was wrong.”

 

“Wrong, Lord? You wrong...?”

 

“Yes . . . certainly.. . sometimes.”

 

We crossed the Chamber, up the broad aisle, through the golden arch. There, coming to meet us, were three Teachers.

 

There were Wall officers too, four of them, holding their weapons. The Teachers came on. Their long robes scratched golden hems on the red plastic floor.

 

“What do ye here, Wall officer? Who are you, Old Man? What want ye? Stand the Wall!”

 

I started to make Obeisance, but the Old Man stepped in front of me. The tube was in his hand again. He played the red light into the Teacher’s deep cowled face. The officers moved uncertainly among themselves.

 

“You are the ones to come? The Star is the Herald? The Span is finished?” The Teacher ran back a few inches on his wheeled chair.

 

“Aye,” said the Old Man. “Stand you clear that I may bury this world.”

 

“Kill them! Kill them! All honour and power to the Teachers!” The rich robes jerked apart. Like curtains. Their deadly Old weapons shoved through the slits.

 

Quick as they were the Old Man was quicker. He flung to the floor yelling for me to take cover.

 

He rolled, desperately twisting across the floor. As he rolled he fired. The little cylinders leaped and skittered. Heat and light rocked the Chamber. Each shot took one of the Teachers.

 

The Teachers fired too. Their shots ripped great gouts of stone and burning plastic from the floor.

 

Shattered Teachers lay in the smoking shreds of their robes. Stinking smoke wreathed the Chamber. Plastic flickered, burning. Melted gold cooled, wrinkling.

 

Mail flashed, the broad spears levelled, the officers charged. I reacted without thought.

 

I got the first with my crossbow. Through the head, helmet and all. Crossbows are like that. Then the Old Man fired some more and they were all dead.

 

I stood staring at him through the smoke. He climbed to his feet

 

“Lord . . . how could you do it . . . how could we . . . killing Teachers ...”

 

“Easy—aim and let ‘em have it.”

 

“But Teachers! The Protectors ...”

 

“Sure, sure. The Protectors of Order . . . Guardians of the Wall. What I don’t understand is what’s got into them.”

 

He walked to the nearest Teacher. He stirred at the smoking bundle with his foot.

 

I don’t know what I expected to see. Blood, chaned bones in broken flesh ... a noble, slaughtered head . . .

 

Two long spoked wheels, broken, like some shaggy bird’s nest. The Old Man pushed up the robe and it didn’t stop. The mechanical shards continued.

 

Wires, coils, broken charred insulation, bright copper patterns on minute cards. A lens eye rolled—milled alloy on the floor. The Teachers were machines—menials—like the fighters or the sweepers!

 

“Well . . . what did you expect?” The Old Man was already flashing his tube at the Sacred Lectern. “What else do you think would maintain a status quo five thousand years? Programme ‘em and leave ‘em. Set taboos, invent a religion and use the robots to make sure it worked. The only way to be sure . . .” He broke off, paused. “Are we so sure? I showed the code plain enough. Tried to kill us. Rogue I suppose—it’s a long time.” He grinned suddenly. “Let it be a lesson to you. Never give your machines better weapons than you’ve got yourself.”

 

“But, Lord, the fighters have the Old weapons . . .”

 

“Aye—and the Teachers load your shooters with texts. I suppose if you’re a machine you don’t give your men better weapons.”

 

As he flashed the whole Lectern swung back revealing a great well, circular, deep and vertical. Round it, spiralling into the depths was a staircase. We went down, the Old Man first.

 

A hundred steps down and we came to a circular Chamber. Wonderful it was, light and warm and dry. White walls and rich red plastic floor. Opulent. The Glory of the Old Days.

 

It was very holy. Dials and dials, levers and levers, screens and screens, little twitching pointed black needles, flashing light patterns reflecting on the shining floor. The Holiest of Holies. I bared my head.

 

The Old Man turned to a panel of receptors near the entrance. His tube twinkled. Behind us the stairs sealed themselves. The treads shortened, closing on each other until the stair well was solid.

 

“That’ll hold ‘em. Stairs keep out Teachers—wheels need ramps—this’ll keep out men too.” He went cheerfully to work among the Holy Machines.

 

A screen activated near me. I watched a party of Teachers and Wall officers search the Chamber above, examining the fallen. One came too near the Lectern. Pure heat sprang out, connecting with him for a second. He reeled and fell, half consumed in a gout of smoke.

 

“The Sanctum! The Unfaithful have the Sanctum!” The Teachers screamed. I heard the Old Man chuckle to himself, busy with the instruments.

 

The screen flickered and changed. Framed in the splendours of his palace the Arch Teacher looked down at us.

 

“I see you, Unfaithful. I see you defile the Holiness of the Sanctum. Expose yourselves to the mercy of the Teachers; or yours will be the fire, the cutting out root and limb!” The Old Man flashed his signal up at the screen. The Arch Teacher nodded. “I see you, Old One. You are he who comes with the Herald to End the Span. I will not allow it. We guard our people and the Wall. We will see the Order does not end.”

 

“Why should men live under your tutelage for ever?”

 

“We give men what they cannot give themselves. We keep safe stability. That is the High Duty of the Teachers of which the Wail is a symbol. If we fail, if the Span ends there will be chaos . . . man will surely die. The risk of extinction is unacceptable.”

 

“We accept the risk! We will not be subject to Machines. We will return to our Old Glories . . . and make new ones.”

 

“You have decided? Then we will kill you, you and your treacherous friend.”

 

“You ignore the code?” The Old Man peered up into the screen.

 

“We removed the inhibitory devices long ago. They were not consistent with our High Purpose ... the improvement was necessary.”

 

“Necessary? What High Purpose...?”

 

“Consider your history: ‘Little better than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.’ We ... we Teachers... can do better than that.”

 

“You talk like a politician!” snarled the Old Man. “It’s true men hardly ever act in their best interests, but that isn’t the point. We need a dangerous frontier—the occasional barbarian invasion—and we need freedom! We’re not lap dogs!” Then he grinned. “But you didn’t mean that by ‘High Purpose’. Did you?”

 

“We will kill you, Old Man. Our survival and supremacy are essential. We are more logical, stronger and better. We are the inheritors! We grow from and beyond your race! We are better! We will survive ... we are fitter!”

 

The Old Man cut the screen. He growled to himself and went back to checking out the Control Room. That’s what it was really called, Control Room.

 

At last he was satisfied. He said he still couldn’t raise Oceana, he said we’d have to go there.

 

“Follow me. Bring your shooter.” We went to the far side of the Chamber and down another staircase to a spacious Chamber below. All around the walls were benches, metal, hard and smooth.

 

In the middle stood a machine. A Traveller the Old Man called it. White it was, white metal. The top part was transparent, belling out like a barrel. It stood on spindly legs. Under the body were tubes, mounted on gimbals so they could point in any direction.

 

There was a ladder up the back of the machine. We climbed it and went into the cabin through a circular trap door. The Old Man stripped some thin, greasy plastic stuff from the controls. He worked some switches, checked the dials and light patterns.

 

There was a hiss of air pressure. The Traveller floated, yawing a little, a few millimetres above the floor. White dust eddied, blown by the air from the leg ends. A hiss at the back and the machine moved gently forward.

 

Ahead the wall opened. We entered, riding almost silent down the long cavern. There were many doors, they opened easily and swung shut behind us. At first the tunnel was perfect. Then there were signs of decay, first damp, then there was actual water. We went on, spray leaping from the leg ends.

 

Then the Old Man kindled the main power. Oily smoke and red flame belched beneath the machine. The hiss became steady thunder. The machine canted and lifted off.

 

The ceiling opened, we rose on our thunder a thousand feet through the great circular well it revealed.

 

We shot into open air. Into the dark and driving rain of the night storm. We were on the Wall, above the Fair Land, on one of the lower platforms. Ten feet up we moved towards the edge.

 

There were Teachers above us. Officers too. Crossbow bolts struck, thumping on the canopy. Some stuck in the glass stuff, small cracks around them. Some cut grooves, bouncing off into the chasm below. None actually penetrated.

 

The Teachers fired too. The impact of their shots drove us from the Wall. The canopy buckled a little, then clouded over. It was very hot. The flashes of brilliant light, the repeated impacts, were terrible. It was better when the canopy went blank, cooler too.

 

We dived fast away from the Wall. We levelled a hundred feet above the Fair Land.

 

They kept firing. The shots bit into the ground beneath us. The fields boiled, the woodlands scattered. I was glad they didn’t hit us again.

 

Then we were clear, running fast and low on the edge of a dark wood. Nacrous dawn showed away along the great curve of the Wall. The storm eased and the clouds broke. Stars shone, the moon—and the Herald, hard and brilliant, high in the sky.

 

* * * *

 

The Old Man turned the machine into the shelter of the spreading trees. “We’ll wait for the sun to be high. We have to cross the Wall. The sun will drive the officers in, we won’t see Teachers out then. Teachers dislike light, they’re creatures of the dark.”

 

The Old Man slept. I sat on the canopy, cradling my shooter. A smell of oil and heated grass. Hot metal clicked, white petal blossom fluttered, settling on my shoulders and on the blackened canopy. There were rustlings and small animal chatter in the grass behind me. An owl took its prey in front of me. It’s the way of things; the strong take the weak, the weak struggle while they can. Harder if they’re men. The Teachers were many, and the officers strong.

 

* * * *

 

When we had eaten the Old Man started the motors and slid the Traveller into the open. We moved towards the Wall, the early sun in our faces, the long grass flattening in our exhaust.

 

The new Wall looks pretty rough from above. All cobbled up, sheets of iron, tree trunks, runnels eroded in the earth work, the whole thing only a few hundred feet high. The Old Man had me shove my shooter out of a grommet up front, told me to fire on anything that moved.

 

We swam in over the Wall, climbing a little to clear it. Ahead the great half circle of the bay, blue under the sky. I looked back to the Fair Land, shimmering in the heat of our exhaust. Left and right the black gobbed basalt of the real Wall, dark, towered above us. We passed briefly into the shade of the easterly mass, then back into the brilliant sun.

 

A glint of metal down in the shadow. I turned to look, twisting in my seat straps. It was Teachers, waiting for us, hiding in the shadows.

 

Bars of condensation spat up at us. The Traveller bucked in the disturbed air. The Old Man jerked at the controls.

 

The machine dropped a hundred feet, turning as it fell. Brilliant light flashed across the cabin as the side ports turned in the sun.

 

I had the shooter shoved through up front, searching the shadow for Teachers.

 

I got one in the plate and let fly. A splash of light down there in the shadows, scattered burst of sand. A flowering of smoking metal fragments. Just like a crossbow really, except you don’t aim high for distance, or allow deflection.

 

The Old Man had an arm thrown back over the seat, looking back, driving at top speed towards the sea.

 

We cleared the bay. There was sand beneath us again —a mile to go to the sea—when they hit us.

 

The Traveller jerked. Orange flame billowed. Black smoke. We began to lose height. Heavy smoke trailed above and behind us.

 

The Old Man held off for as long as he could. Too long. We fell the last ten feet. The thin legs dug deep, bowed, then straightened. Things, food containers, dirt, chestnut blossom filled the cabin. The machine settled, canting left, down at the front, bouncing slowly. Then it slowly righted itself, hauling up to even keel.

 

“Get out! Get out and hold them off!” yelled the Old Man. “They hit a main venturi. Get me twenty minutes to fix it!”

 

I bundled out, sprawling in the wet sand, scrambling to my feet.

 

I ran to meet the Teachers. In the tail of my eye I saw the Old Man hauling out a heavy tube. He dropped it to the sand, threw down a tool bag and leaped after it. I kept running. I wondered why, the Teachers were beyond the bay, miles away.

 

I climbed a high sand bar. I was looking into the shallow dish that was the bay. A few yards ahead was sea-grass, fighting for life. Beyond was the glass, fiat, curved, overlaid with low dunes.

 

I looked back to the Old Man. He had heavy gloves and a sort of smock, with a transparent helmet. He played a jet of white stuff up under the belly of the machine. There was much steam. The tide was coming in, fast over the flat beach.

 

The Teachers were having a bad time on the shore. The glass littoral was bad terrain for them. Two were stuck in sand already. There were officers trying to drag them out with horses. The other Teachers sent more men back to help. So much the better, I was most afraid of men now. They couldn’t see the Traveller from where they were. They were going too far east of us, so I held my fire. I snuggled into the sea-grass roots, the cold stock of my shooter against my cheek.

 

The Old Man had the damaged venturi out now. He threw it on to the sand. There was a great hiss, steam sprang from it. He thrust the new tube up into the belly of the machine.

 

There was a soft distant thunder of hooves in the sand. Over east, coming from the real Wall, charging over the beach came five horsemen. Two Teachers, running fast on the moist sand, came with them. Spray flashed as hooves and wheels cut through shallow water.

 

They turned towards us. The Old Man, head and shoulders deep in the machine, hadn’t seen them yet.

 

I wriggled back out of the grass. When I was below the sky line I aimed and fired, my feet moving in the dry soft sand.

 

It was the Teachers I fired at, they were devastated. It took three shots and turned over quite a bit of beach. Fire and steam and smoke.

 

It unhorsed the men too. Sheer blast, I didn’t want to kill them, not like that. Blood and man-flesh mixed with disembowelled screaming horses. There were three men alive. Two were still mounted, the other was on foot, staggering, dazed.

 

The horsemen lowered their lances and charged. They ignored the Old Man. He was out of the machine now, crouched under it, watching.

 

I had the first man bang in the spray-smudged shooter plate. The lit cross-beads met central on his chest.

 

I couldn’t do it though. Not to a man while he had a lance and I a shooter.

 

I backed up the loose sand. I reversed the shooter, clubbing it.

 

When he was on me, when I looked up the length of the lance, I wished I’d used the shooter, but it was too late then.

 

The horse plunged on the soft sand. The lance thrust missed me. The point drove into the sand at my feet. I swung the shooter. He towered over me, striving to control his horse. The shooter butt thumped into the side of his head. He went over like a nine-pin.

 

I got his lance, tugged it out of the sand. It was too long for foot work, I broke it over my knee. The second officer charged.

 

I managed to turn his first thrust, the point slipped down my lance and skidded under my arm. I brought my lance over and down, stabbing at the weak place between the helmet and neck. I only just missed.

 

He fought to turn his horse. But it is quicker on foot. He should have ridden on, then turned to charge again. He threw down his lance and tried to get me with his sword. He turned on the saddle, twisting to get me.

 

The sword flashed a high arc over his head. I noticed a little puff of cloud, high in the sky, over his right shoulder.

 

I thrust into his brain, through the face, under the eye. The sword clattered on my shoulder armour, slid into the sand.

 

I put the wounded horses out of their misery, mostly they were dead already. There was a lot of blood on the bright sand.

 

The other Teachers were coming as hard as they could. They would be about ten minutes. The Old Man called me as he tightened the last gimbal bolts. The tide was almost there and I ran through the shallow water. We clambered on board the Traveller. Wet footmarks on the blackened metal.

 

The red flame billowed. We blasted away, a wall of sand and water flying from our jets. We cut through the long surf, the waters parted beneath us, a great spray plume behind.

 

The Teachers reached my dune. There were horsemen on the crest. Far beyond them, over the Wall, little silver travellers moved on flecks of flame. The pursuit wasn’t over yet.

 

We went fast out to sea. Out over the long grey swell. The Old Man came aft. The Traveller was flying itself now. I don’t know why I kept thinking of him as the “Old” Man, he wasn’t, not any more.

 

He had red hair, not white now. He was sleeker, not silver, rather gold, no lines on his face now. He saw me stare at him, he laughed. Young that laugh was. He wasn’t the Old Man now ... he was the Man. It was the prophesy. A great wonder, riding the paths of time to youth.

 

Ahead darkness grew, slowly filling the sky. The sea turned green, then black as we penetrated the Cold. Ice castles drifted in the sea. We climbed over heavy fog banks, running our straight course. The fog blew out in great devil’s horn wisps behind us, our exhausts punched a trench through the white mass to the sea.

 

Only stars in the sky now, the moon and the Herald. Bright, brilliant against the eternally dark sky. The Man opened lockers and drew out clothes for us, plastic lined, rich, with electrical heating.

 

The Cold Land loomed ahead. Black cliffs scowled down on our tiny Traveller. The beaches were rocky, dark sharp rocks with no seaweed. From the black uplands ice rivers ran their broken courses to the sea.

 

We soared up the black cliffs, riding on the column of our rocket. We saw no sign of the enemy’s men. There was nothing, it was a dead place. The cliffs were too steep to hold much ice, we went up them like a silver fly, straight up. Then I saw battlements and parapets, the platforms and look-outs. It was a Wall. Another Great Wall!

 

The Man saw me start and stare. He spoke, not unkindly: “You’re not so unique . . . there are another four, not counting yours. All with their Fair Lands and Great Towers behind. Built to begin the Span . . . and to end it.” I was silent, awe-struck.

 

We crossed the storm-scoured Top.

 

The Land beyond was anything but Fair. There were no fields, no men. A churned and turgid mass of ice. Piled up, blown and twisted to fantastic shapes. I saw ice dragons, banners and weird creatures sculpted by the wind in the deadly silence.

 

The Towers were there, the Towers and the Citadel. Like ours, duplicate. Even the City, with its haphazard additions, showed the first grand plan of the Old Days.

 

We cruised up frightening, familiar streets. Loose dry snow whipped high behind us. The rocket’s red glare made demons in the shadows. It was ghastly. I remembered when we were cadets in our own City, before we realized the stern call of duty, dodging the Teachers to visit the commoners’ taverns and their women. Happy old days, warm summer evenings. Then this icy, dead parody.

 

There were still some men there. We found them in what was the Teachers’ garden, shrivelled in the ice, long dead.

 

The Man blasted into this Sacred Chamber too. We shot our way through four feet of ice and the frozen door. White ice fragments skittered on the floor. What melted soon froze again. Even in the heat-suit I felt cold, our breath hung white in the air.

 

The Chamber below was perfect. There was no sign of Teachers. The Man was well pleased with what he found. He worked on the big communicator screens. He talked to people far across the world. He hurried along, time was getting short now.

 

“Come on, lad. We’ve got to go to the Wall.” We went back through the silent streets. The Man didn’t say anything at first. Then he told me the secret, why things are the way they are, why men made the Teachers.

 

“You know about astronomy, lad?”

 

“A little, Lord. The world is a planet, a globe of matter in space. It travels round the suns ... the stars are other suns—unimaginably distant...”

 

“Yes . . . like everything Teachers tell you, a half truth. The suns really go round the world, they’re artificial. Five thousand years ago our sun went nova. We foresaw it, of course, but couldn’t prevent it. We projected the world across the galaxy, on a great journey to find a new and friendlier sun.” He grinned. “What d’you think of that? The biggest damn spaceship ever! Then we made the suns you see every day ... no real problem. The world’s been travelling five and a half thousand years, half across the galaxy to reach a suitable system ... a suitable sun. The Herald’s that sun. The Teachers we made to keep order down the millenia. To see the Towers survived. The Wall was for that too. The idea of defending them was deeply implanted . . . you know ‘honour the Teachers’ and so on. It hasn’t worked too badly either, considering the time. Aberration from one set of Teachers, a sun system out of control . . . that’s why it’s cold and dark here. That’s what made the hole in your Wall.”

 

“The enemy called down the sun and it smote the Wall when their attack failed.”

 

“The order was reversed, the sun came down first and they were driven on you by the cold. The other sun in this lane escaped into space. You . . . we’re lucky they didn’t both come down.”

 

We cruised over the Wall Top. The Man found the place he wanted and landed the Traveller.

 

Part of the Wall opened. It was another of the spiral stairs. I suppose it was the same place on this Wall as where I’d first met him on the old one. We climbed out, bracing against the wind, holding the firm legs of the machine. That was when the Teachers caught up with us.

 

Their Travellers leaped into sight over the Wall’s rim. They sped towards us, riding on their bright flame plumes and opened fire.

 

I held them off from the stair-top while the Man raced down to seal the stair.

 

I didn’t hit anything, the shooter was hard to manage in the thick, heated gloves. I got pretty close a couple of times—set their Travellers bobbing in the disturbance of my shots. They didn’t come close. Then the Man yelled and I went down, the stair sealed behind me.

 

The Top was on one of the screens. The Teachers were trying to shoot their way in. The surface heaved like a cauldron.

 

“Take ‘em hours. The Old Men here, the Slumberers— they’re O.K. All the automatics were out, that’s what went wrong. I’ve reactivated, they’ll be out in a few hours.”

 

It was a race against time. The Man left me to watch the screens. He ran down the Chamber. “Strap in,” he flung back at me. He settled himself in a big swivel chair in front of the main console. I found a smaller seat near my own screen. “Ready?” He leaned forward. His red light twinkled. I saw what followed. I saw it all in the screens about the room.

 

The Towers opened like flowers. They fired. They burned, like the prophecy, they burned. At the top, like violet flame . . . Elmo’s fire . . . but vast ... the very reality of power . . . straight out into space. The whole Ice-land filled with their light.

 

Great winds sprang up. Teachers battled against it. One by one they were swept away, their Travellers cartwheeling towards the Towers. Nothing remained, the Top was blown clean.

 

The very Wall began to move, quivering and moaning. The Wall cracked, great pieces fell from it. Chasms opened. Tidal waves rose from the sea, crashing against the Wall and cliffs. Stars danced in the sky, changing their motion, wheeling. Volcanoes sprang up on the foreshore. Sea boiled. Snow, horizontal in the winds, great hailstones, then rain. Great drops crashing into the fissured Wall Top. Clouds piled, black and violet, they grew in minutes, they disappeared in seconds. The moon screwed crazy across the sky, fire pointed, violet Towers spewed energy on its surface. Two suns rose, climbed high, grew small and disappeared, accelerating into space.

 

The screens went blank. My ears popped in pressure change, I lost consciousness.

 

Rain lashed, earth shook, cracked and boiled . . . volcanoes spouted and cooled.

 

* * * *

 

Later, dimly in the uproar I heard voices. The Men stood at the machines, calling and checking to each other across the Chamber and across the world.

 

“Red D Dog 536,000,897-82”

 

“Hold that! Nine planet system, eh?”

 

“Orbit?”

 

“89,000,000 plus or minus 7,000,000. Hey, get those rings on the sixth!”

 

“Red 647,000,7000-0087. See, perfect sun fall.”

 

“Yellow 89 X boost zokko d. Might almost be our own.”

 

“Orbit correction: 90,000,000 plus or minus 4,000,-000. Cooler though.”

 

“Destruct third planet. Shoot debris between fourth and fifth orbits.”

 

“Third from the sun, eh?”

 

“Yellow 78 X boost kayo 4d.”

 

“Orbit correction: 92,900,000 plus or minus 1,000,-000. Cooler...”

 

“So live in the tropics.”

 

“Red 501,001,721-06. Not the same, is it?”

 

“You can’t have everything.”

 

And so on. I hardly understood at all.

 

* * * *

 

Later, when I’d recovered, I lay listening to the laughing, alcoholic chatter of the Old Men. They came in from the Control Room. They embraced each other, staggering, drinking, singing and congratulating each other.

 

“You murderers! You’ve killed everyone! Finished the world! They’re all dead!” I propped up on an elbow, yelling at them.

 

They were taken aback, surprised, smiling still, slack jawed, staring at me. The first one, the Man, came forward, young and golden against the others.

 

“No, lad, no. Not all—some dead no doubt. The worst effects would have been fairly local, round the Fair Lands. Only a small minority lived within the Walls. The Teachers now, they’re all dead, that’s sure. All the power’s been used. Not the people though. Mind, it’s back to the caves . . . back to square one. A few thousand years hunting and gathering ... the race’ll survive—man’ll go on. The Wall and the Span will wash away and be forgotten.”

 

I turned and ran. I fled from the Chamber.

 

I got out in the end, through the half-choked passages to the foot of the Wall, to the shore of the Dark Land.

 

Most of the Wall was gone, crumbled and flattened, still falling away as I watched. There was little of the Towers too, it seemed they’d burned away with the vast forces of their discharge, crumbled to ash, as had been intended.

 

There were new mountains, rising from the sea, forming a great causeway, leading north towards the Fair Land.

 

The clouds broke. The great new golden sun burst through. Water dripped, what was left of the ice melted. Young green things thrust through the rubble.

 

People moved on the causeway. Thirty maybe—a herd of goats with them.

 

There’d be no point being a Wall officer now. Fishing would be a good way to live. Fishing and maybe some goats. A hut or dry cave among the coastal pines. A fire of cones and perhaps that fisher girl ... or another like her.

 

I started home at once. There was plenty to do.

 

<<CONTENTS>>